Kashmir - You might expect a humanitarian disaster to blur the rigid Line of Control that divides Kashmir in two - but you would be quite wrong. Basharat Peer reports from Srinagar

On the morning of 8 October 2005 an earthquake struck Kashmir and northern Pakistan. It has killed around 80,000 people by now. A few days after the earthquake I spoke to Hilal, a childhood friend who works in Srinagar with a British charity. Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian- controlled Kashmir, is a city of bunkers. Armoured cars and armed soldiers in olive-green uniforms have become part of the landscape, like the pine, cedar and willow trees dotting the slopes of the mountains circling the city.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the old princely state of Kashmir. In 1987 the government in Indian-controlled Kashmir rigged a local election. Kashmiris lost the little faith they had in India and began a secessionist armed uprising with support from Pakistan. The Indian military presence in Kashmir rose to half a million; by the mid-1990s jihadi outfits from Pakistan began to dominate the rebellion. Peace talks between India and Pakistan since December 2003 have made some progress, but death remains a constant visitor. The conflict has claimed more than 60,000 lives - and that is a conservative estimate. Violent conflict between Indian soldiers and Kashmiri and Pakistani militants continued in the weeks following the earthquake, but most Kashmiris were focused on strengthening the local relief effort.

Hilal had just returned from the earthquake-hit villages and was preparing to move relief supplies there. "Nothing like this has happened here before," he said slowly. He talked about destroyed villages, injured men, and mass graves prepared by the villagers. "We need tents, blankets, food and medicine. These people have lost everything," he said, "everything." I was struck by his display of emotion, because we had both grown up with the bloody conflict in Kashmir and grown accustomed to the news of multiple deaths every day.

As the days passed I was struck, too, though not for the first time, by Indian indifference to the suffering in Kashmir. Last winter the tsunami ravaged Asian villages, towns and cities, including many in India. Indian industrialists and non-governmental organisations rushed in with huge consignments of aid. Yet, even a week after the earthquake, Kashmir seemed far from their minds. The English dailies of India talked about "compassion fatigue" after the tsunami, and preferred to highlight articles that described the destruction of Islamic militant camps in Muzaffarabad in an almost celebratory tone. It was only weeks after the earthquake, when a chorus of criticism rose from Kashmiris, that a few Indian industrial groups announced some relief measures for the earthquake victims.

In November I left New Delhi, where I work for a news magazine, and travelled home to Srinagar. One bright morning, I drove north towards the Line of Control to visit one of the worst-hit areas, the Tangdhar Valley. The road climbed towards high mountains as we crossed Kupwara, the biggest border town. We passed garrisons, checkpoints and soldiers almost every minute. Six hours and many mountains later we began our descent into the Tangdhar Valley. The road turned into a thick cloud of dust. Shabir, my driver, pointed to a mountain peak to the west and said, "My village, Baderkote, used to be there."

Around a hundred families lived in Baderkote in modest mud and stone dwellings with sloping tin roofs. Like most villagers near the Line of Control, they depended on agriculture and jobs in the state sector. Many worked as porters and labourers for the omnipresent Indian army. The emphasis on education had increased in the past few decades but Shabir had dropped out of school. Five years ago he got a car loan and began ferrying passengers between Srinagar and Tangdhar, squeezing 12 people into his taxi at £3 each. He paid back his car loan and renovated his house. "I bought a television, a fridge, a double bed, two sofas and a satellite dish. I had almost everything you find in city homes," he said with the pride of a self-made man.

He was driving to Srinagar when the earthquake struck. His parents, his wife and their three-year-old daughter were in their two-floor house at Baderkote. He drove back home. Two miles before the village the road had disappeared under a landslide. From the periphery of the village he heard wails and ran towards his house. It had ceased to exist, like most of the other houses. His parents were sitting on the ground beside their broken house; his wife was holding his daughter. The collapsing roof had broken her leg. He was taking his daughter to the nearest hospital when his aunt arrived seeking help. Her 19-year-old daughter was trapped under her house. Shabir and his aunt spent two hours removing the wreckage with their hands, and recovered her daughter's corpse.

That night the villagers gathered the 28 dead in a field near the destroyed mosque. Families sat near the bodies as night descended. A cold rain began to fall. In the morning the villagers dug graves. They had no shrouds for the dead; there were no shops left. The adults were buried in the clothes they had been wearing and the children were covered in white bedsheets.

The next morning Shabir, his wife, their daughter and some injured relatives walked back to where he had left his car. By sunset he had admitted them to an orthopaedic hospital in Srinagar. His wife kept crying. The government had announced relief measures: a tent, two blankets per family, and $900 for rebuilding a destroyed house. The sun rose and Shabir left for his taxi stand. There was a crowd of aid workers and journalists eager to reach Tangdhar. He was back on the road. "I promised my wife we would get back everything we lost," said Shabir.

We entered the Tangdhar Valley and stopped at a roadside kiosk in the village of Kandi. Remains of houses in every stage of destruction lined the road. I walked past the destroyed houses, unable to comprehend the scale of the tragedy. The weak sun fell on the tin sheets of broken roofs rising at strange angles from the debris. I was looking for a place to camp when I chanced upon two recent graves. "Those are my wife and my son," said Qadeer Khan, a tall, athletic policeman. Khan looked at the graves for a moment and pointed to the rubble of a house nearby. "That was my house. It had three floors." Two hours after the earthquake he had recovered his wife's body. His two-year-old daughter was curled up against her dead mother's chest, unhurt and alive. His nine-year-old son was dead. "I lowered them into their graves with my own hands," Khan said, staring at the palms of his hands, raised as if in prayer. Then he pointed towards a damaged, single-storeyed brick house. "It was the new house I had built with my savings. We were to move in after Eid."

The Muslim festival of Eid, Khan told me, was a silent, grieving day. Children didn't burst crackers or buy toys. Most schools had been destroyed. A teacher I met introduced me to Jameel, a frail boy with cropped hair, whom he described as his brightest student. Jameel had been studying for his high-school examination when the quake struck. He was trapped under the remnants of his house for two hours. He had to have six stitches for a head wound. Two weeks later he retrieved his books from the wreckage and applied himself to study again. "But I can't understand anything any more," he said. Darkness fell and a faint yellow light escaped from the tents and tin shelters. The air became frosty. The teacher offered me a place to stay the night; part of his house had remained standing. Like most other people I met, his worst fear was snowfall. Snowflakes whirling like dervishes from the sky would mean death this winter. He hoped the government would relocate them somewhere in Kashmir.

The border villages, where Kashmiris lived together for centuries, had witnessed a mass migration after the partition of British India in 1947. A few hundred families have migrated since 1990, after hostility between India and Pakistan rose and cross-border shelling destroyed houses and killed many. Most of them, including Shabir's older brother, found their way across the Line of Control and settled in Muzaffarabad and Rawalpindi. Letters rarely arrived; phone calls were not allowed. After the earth-quake India allowed telephone calls to Pakistan. Shabir called his brother. About a month after the earthquake India and Pakistan agreed to open the Line of Control at five places to allow divided families to meet and to send across relief supplies. At one of those openings, near his village, Shabir hoped to see his brother for the first time in ten years. Like many others, Shabir seemed to have been encouraged by the stories of great luck that were going around - such as the story of Idrees Sheikh, a man from a village adjoining Kandi who worked for Indian military intelligence. He had been arrested in Muzaffarabad and jailed for espionage but the jail collapsed in the earthquake and he escaped, walked across the Line of Control and reached home in five days.

A week later I drove to a point on the Line of Control 140 kilometres north of Srinagar - Kaman Post, an Indian military outpost overlooking a stream. Pakistani soldiers faced the Indian soldiers from the ridge on the other side. The 150-year-old Jhelum Valley road crossed the stream and connected Srinagar with Muzaffarabad, Rawalpindi and other Pakistani towns. Before the creation of the Line of Control, it was the foremost trade route for Kashmir. Last March India and Pakistan agreed to reopen the route and allow divided families to take a bus to visit each other. Kashmir celebrated. The battered wooden bridge over the stream was replaced with an iron structure, painted white, and named the Peace Bridge.

A post-earthquake relief and contact point was to open at the Peace Bridge. The earthquake had damaged the bridge and the ceremony was held in the dried-up bed of the stream. No divided families had been allowed to gather, but TV cameramen and photographers jostled for the best spot to shoot the "historic opening". Lieutenant Colonel Chirag of the Pakistani army and Colonel Rawat of the Indian army, wearing different shades of green, walked towards each other and shook hands. Civil officials from both sides followed. The cameramen wanted more pictures; the faces of Indo-Pak earthquake diplomacy obliged and posed happily with bags of relief materials. Maqsood Ahmed, a reporter with Radio Kashmir, spotted his cousin Zulfikar among the journalists on the Pakistani side. Zulfikar had migra-ted from their border home town of Uri to Muzaffarabad in 1990. Now he was a reporter from there for the Urdu service of the BBC. The cousins were seeing each other for the first time in 15 years. "Zulfi! You have shaved off your beard!" Maqsood shouted across the ten feet they were not allowed to traverse.

In the following days more such contact points were opened. I watched on television the opening of the contact point near Shabir's village. Once again, however, separated relatives were not allowed to meet. The passport office in Srinagar issued more than 3,000 application forms to people wanting to travel across the Line of Control. Outside the heavily fortified passport office building beside the famous Dal Lake in Srinagar, I met Mohiuddin Dar, a farmer from a village in northern Kashmir. He wanted help filling in the form in English. Purpose of visit: financial help to relatives. He wore a gown-like pheran patched with different kinds of cloth. "My uncle in Muzaffarabad has lost everything he had. He telephoned me thrice for help."

Dar had a one-acre paddy farm. He hadn't seen his uncle for 15 years but sold a part of his farm to raise money to help him. Dar stood in a long queue behind a counter to deposit his application form. I was not sure whether he would find his way through the bureaucracies and prickly nationalisms of India and Pakistan, and reach his uncle in Muzaffarabad before the brutal winter. In the third week of November, the Indian and Pakistani governments allowed around a hundred Kashmiris to cross the Line of Control. I hoped Dar was one of them. The crossings stopped by the first week of December.

The temperature dipped to -6 C in Kashmir and parts of the Dal Lake froze. Reports from Muzaffarabad spoke of pneumonia. Most quake-affected people have tents and food supplies but tents are no defence against the winter. Aid agencies have launched Operation Winter Race to provide shelter and warmth. Two days after Christmas I called Manzoor, a policeman I knew in quake-hit Uri. I asked about his children. "They wake up in the middle of the night from the cold," he said.

Last winter, snow destroyed some villages; local papers called it a "snow-tsunami". Manzoor believed that most of the homeless would survive if there was no snow this winter. But a week after I spoke to him his worst fear came true. Heavy snow began to fall and the roads to many quake-hit areas were blocked.

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