At just eighteen years old, Chand Ji Kher of Vessu, Anantnag, carried on his frail shoulders the weight of a world already too cruel. He was not the son of privilege, nor did he have wealth to shield him. Poverty was his inheritance, a stretch of land his only anchor, and survival his only dream. When others his age thought of studies, friendships, or the uncertain hope of youth, Chand Ji thought of how to keep his mother and sister afloat. His father, Dina Nath Kher, was gone, and with him went the stability of their home. What remained was a boy forced into manhood too soon, trading his adolescence for toil and sacrifice.

In July 1990, poverty pulled him back from Jammu to Vessu, back into a land that had become treacherous for Pandits. He came only to settle what little he had, bits of property that represented his family’s last thread of security. But Kashmir in those days offered no mercy. What awaited Chand Ji was not relief but betrayal.

On 17 July 1990, his Muslim friends, the very boys who had once shared in his laughter, perhaps broken bread in his home, called him out. There was no quarrel, no warning, no justice in their eyes. They raised their guns, pulled the trigger, and left him to bleed, his youth extinguished in a spray of bullets.

The cruelty lay not only in the act of murder but in its intimacy. Chand Ji was not a faceless victim of distant men; he was killed by those who had once been close, men whose betrayal was as sharp as the bullet that pierced him. For his mother, then 55, and his sister, 35, the grief was unbearable, not only the loss of a son and brother but the knowledge that his killers had once been trusted, once been called friends.

Chand Ji had nothing to fall back upon in life, and in death, nothing to defend himself against those who decided his identity was reason enough to kill him. His murder stripped him of more than breath; it denied him a future, denied him the dignity of ordinary struggle, and denied his family the comfort of seeing him grow into the man he deserved to become.

A poor boy, not yet free of his teenage years, was pushed into the grave by betrayal and terror. His crime was poverty, his sin was his identity as a Kashmiri Pandit, and his punishment was a brutal death.