Camera: Shiv Kumar Maurya
Producer: Zijah Sherwani
Video Editor: Prajjwal Kumar
On the morning of 10 May, a splinter from a Pakistani shell that fell in north Jammu's Khairi village, pierced through a window of 47-year-old Zakir Hussain's two-bedroom house.
Zakir immediately woke his children, wife, and aunt up as they decided to move to a safer, low-lying place. They had barely walked 100 meters from the house when another shell dropped — taking Zakir's life and leaving his 15-year-old daughter injured.
Hours later, India and Pakistan announced a ceasefire to the weeklong conflict that raged along the border in the wake of India's precision strikes on terror camps in Pakistan, launched after the Pahalgam attack.
But for Zakir's family, the decision came a few hours too late.
"It was as if the sky was breathing fire. We weren't safe at home, we also weren't safe outside," Zakir's aunt Firdous Bibi recalled on 12 May.
Days after the attack, as the city tried to inch towards normalcy, The Quint's reporter Himanshi Dahiya travelled across Jammu to document stories of families that are still grappling with the devastating aftermath of intense Pakistani shelling.
Watch our video as these families narrate how they continue to bear the scars, emotional and physical, left by a conflict they never wanted.