This paper revisits a personal tragedy in 2009, the early days of my fieldwork in Indian-occupied Kashmir – the untimely death of the son of my primary interlocutor and friend, Haider. The narratives and circuits of affect that coalesced around this event wove in specific ways Haider’s individual history with political demands made in the movement for Kashmir’s liberation from India in which many young men had lost their lives. The movement for freedom, or Azaadi, from Indian rule was launched in 1989 in the Muslim majority Kashmir Valley. The armed militancy raged on for more than a decade and was subject to violent suppression and state reprisals. In the early years of the Azaadi movement, Haider had led a Shi’i militia in the armed struggle against the Indian state. Haider left the armed movement for reasons he did not specify, became an NGO worker and was active in the civil activist network in Kashmir. He was nearly fifty years old when his twenty-three old son died suddenly and inexplicably on a visit to a popular picnic spot. The event, its humdrum setting and absolutely random quality sought explication in Haider’s sociopololitical milieu. I attend to how the death of Haider’s son was received by a set of distinct but inter-related discourses: the discursive formulations around martyrdom that pervade the political landscape of Kashmir, the practices of piety that Haider flouted by openly declaring his fondness for rum and engaging in love affairs, and the eschatological horizon opened up by the notion of ajal, the preordained time of one’s death. By moving through the conversations that encompassed both the singular event of death and more general discursive configurations, I aim to convey the ethical shifts and improvisations that are entailed in living amidst political violence and attempting to exert some degree of control over dangerous conditions. By alternatively tracking its insertion into a personal history as well as sociopolitical scripts, I hope to render a picture, albeit partial, of the ongoing life of a conflict.