Shops are open, traffic jams the streets, children are being taken to school. Stalls and carts laden with slightly overripe fruit are squeezed into the spaces between the giant monsoon-filled puddles dividing road from pavement. It could be any working day in any Indian city. But in this looking glass world, it’s Sunday. On most weekdays everything here will be shut. Schools, shops, restaurants, banks, everything. There will be no cars in the streets, no food to be had for love or money, not even faces visible in the windows of the apartments.

By our correspondent in Kashmir

Welcome to Srinagar, bustling capital of Kashmir. Sunday was the first respite for the people of the Kashmir valley where there has been a non-stop curfew for nine days. Actually there have been stringent curfews here for the last two months, relaxed just for the occasional few hours or day to allow people out to buy food and medical supplies.

And so on days like Sunday, medical stores, food suppliers, ATM machines, gas stations are all packed with Kashmiris rushing to stock up for the coming week. Tomorrow, and the next day and the next will see Srinagar as a ghost town again. The curfews are a response to what every Kashmiri calls the “peaceful demonstrations.” The Indian and government forces call them the protests by the “stone pelters.”

This is how it works. Every week, a “protest calendar” is published. It tells people where the next big protest is to take place. The government responds by imposing a curfew, and by manning the streets with enough uniformed and armed men and vehicles to make this whole town look like an army training camp. Then huge groups of Kashmiris defy the curfews and come out to protest. In earlier times it was just the disaffected youth who did this. These days it’s everyone – the youth, their mothers, grandmothers, little cousins – the whole family, street, village, suburb.

They have one demand, one slogan: “Go Back. India Go Back.” It’s written on the roads, painted on walls, mirrored in the fixed masks of despair on every face. And despair here is a palpable thing. It hangs in the air, in the muted voices of the people, in the hushed transactions of daily life. These are an exhausted people, drained from decades of a conflict, that has gone from bad to worse, to a little less bad, to terrible, to catastrophic.

When the protestors come out, the police try to stop them using tear gas. Then a few young people in the crowd will inevitably search for stones or bricks to throw, which in turn solicits bullets from the army and the police. Most of the people admitted to the hospitals have bullet wounds to their upper bodies and heads. There are hardly any leg shots. Most of them are under 25 and in the last two months there have been between 50 to 60 deaths. To date, not one member of the security forces has had a bullet wound.

I meet the weeping sisters of a young girl who was shot in the heart by police chasing a group of protestors. She wasn’t with them, she was just closing the curtains of her window at home. I hear the story of the seven-year-old boy stamped to death in broad daylight and in front of witnesses by police men who took umbrage when they heard him shout “Go Home.” There’s the other little boy who tells me he wants to kill the children of his neighbours because they poisoned his father, a police informer, and the teenagers who want to join the army so they can “kill them all”.

This is what a cycle of violence means here in Kashmir. The astonishing thing is that weary as the Kashmiris are of the protests, the curfews, the killing, I have yet to meet one that wants an end to the demonstrations. “All our businesses are being ruined by these months of curfew”, one owner of a transport company told me. “We have not been able to send our trucks and buses out for two months. But if these protests have to go on for the rest of our lives just to make the Indians listen, then I'm for them.”

It’s a sentiment I have heard again and again over the last days. “Every time Kashmir is silent, India turns its face away so we have to keep going with these protests and this time we will – until they kill us all.” “We don't want to die every day, bit by bit. If we have to die, let’s all die together and all at one time.”