The wounds of Kashmir's never-ending war are reflected in Arshid Malik's red, downcast eyes, in the tremble of the cigarette in his hand, in the self-inflicted knife scars gouged into his left forearm. Tormented by unrelenting memories of death and violence, he tried 13 times to end his pain with suicide, sometimes slicing open his wrists, other times swallowing fistfuls of pills, he said. “I was crying inside, but there was nobody I could talk to because everyone was grieving,” the 36-year-old said. More than two decades of brutal warfare between largely Muslim separatist insurgents and largely Indian troops in this Himalayan region have left Kashmiris exhausted, traumatized and broken. The rate of suicide, once unthinkable in this Islamic society, has gone up 26-fold, from .5 per 100,000 before the insurgency to 13 per 100,000 now, according to Dr. Arshad Hussain, a Kashmiri psychiatrist. Drug abuse is epidemic. Depression, stress and mental illness are rampant. “Directly or indirectly, everyone is suffering,” said Dr. Muzafer Khan, who runs a small rehab clinic in Srinagar. One man turned to drugs after seeing an uncle and two cousins shot in front of him; another became an addict after he was kidnapped by a pro-government militia, Khan said.
