Anxious and Cooped Up, 1.5 Million Kashmiri Children Are Still Out of School

Some have taken up knitting, and as they talk about the situation and how it affects their lives, they make woolen sweaters. Then they leave in different directions to deliver homework. They were not confident that many children would show up for exams.

Mr. Malik fears that if the schools don’t reopen soon, some children will go down the wrong path. In southern Kashmir, many boys revere the militants. They have grown up playing games in which they dress up as militants or Indian soldiers, hiding behind apple trees, firing wooden guns at each other.

“If they don’t even sit for exams,’’ Mr. Malik said of his male students, “they will end up becoming militants.”

The security forces already assume that is happening, focusing their suspicions intensely on teen boys or young men. Many have been jailed, at times hauled off without process or explanation, and that number is only increasing.

Other young people are being put to work, like Musaib Amin, 15, who now helps his grandmother in the fields, picking tomatoes. In August, one young man who should have been in college (colleges and universities are empty, too) died after he was bit by a snake while herding sheep. His bite was treatable. But his family could not call an ambulance or find the antivenin.

Aliya, the fifth grader who keeps checking on her school, hasn’t given up hope. The other day, she opened her closet and stared at her white and gray uniform. It remains crisply ironed, untouched since August.

“I miss wearing it,” she said.

She ran outside to play in the yard, by herself.