The following morning, I did not start with the bakery. Instead, I started in the bathroom. I stood before the small mirror, my hand hovering over my toothbrush. For the first time in my life, I didn't see an instrument of hygiene; I saw a stick of multicolored plastic with nylon bristles, more plastic, packaged in a cardboard and plastic blister pack.

I picked it up, feeling the light, synthetic weight of it. How many of these had I used in my lifetime? One every few months, perhaps sixty or seventy already. Where were they now? They were not in the soil, transformed into nutrients. They were still toothbrushes, somewhere, sitting in a landfill or floating in the silt of the Wullar Lake, their bristles still intact, their handles still bright and defiant against the forces of decay.
I moved to the cupboard. The shampoo came in a thick plastic bottle. The soap was wrapped in a plastic-lined paper. The toothpaste tube was a complex laminate of plastic and metal that was nearly impossible to recycle. Even the sponge I used to scrub the floor was a block of synthetic foam.
"It is an intimate invasion" I muttered to myself.
I walked into the small room where my brother's young child slept. On the changing table sat a stack of disposable diapers. I picked one up. It was a marvel of engineering soft, absorbent, and almost entirely made of plastic. The outer shell, the inner lining, the absorbent polymers, the sticky tabs, it was a concentrated bomb of non-biodegradable material.
I thought about the village outskirts, where the communal waste was often dumped. I had seen the piles of used diapers there, white and bloated, sitting alongside the ancient stones. They didn't rot. They didn't disappear. They sat there for years, leaking chemicals into the groundwater, their plastic components destined to outlast the child who had worn them by centuries.
I returned to my notebook and created a new section titled The Permanent Items. This was different from the 'daily bags.' These were the items that stayed for a month, or a year, but were just as deadly when their time was up. I listed the toothbrushes, the bottles, the diapers, the synthetic clothing, the polyester blankets.
Uzma joined me, watching as I cataloged the room. You are looking at everything now, aren't you? Uzma asked.
"I have to" I said. If we only talk about bags, we miss the bigger picture. We are living in a plastic shell. Our very hygiene is dependent on a material that is killing the environment we live in. Think about the diapers, Uzma. Every child in this village uses thousands of them before they are grown. Where do they go?»
Uzma looked out the window towards the fields. They go to the grounds. They go to the edges of the roads. I see them every day when I walk to the school. The dogs tear them apart, and the plastic fluff blows into the paddy fields.
The image was visceral and disgusting. I felt a wave of nausea. The paddy fields were the lifeblood of the valley. The rice they grew there fed our families and provided our income. To think of that soil being mixed with the toxic remnants of disposable diapers and shredded plastic was to think of a slow, self-inflicted poisoning of our entire food chain.
I decided to take my investigation outside. I walked down the main road of the Mohalla, the one that led toward the larger town.
This road was the artery of the village, and it was clogged. The ditches on either side were not filled with water and wildflowers, but with a thick, multicolored sludge of plastic waste. Bottles, bags, food wrappers, and the ever-present diapers formed a carpet that choked the drainage.
I saw a group of men standing near a small bridge, talking about the upcoming rains. "The water will not flow this year" one of them said, pointing to the blockage under the bridge. "The plastic has made a dam." I joined them. "Why don't we clear it?"
The men looked at me with a mixture of pity and annoyance. "We clear it every year, and every year, it comes back in a week. It comes from upstream, from the other villages, and from our own houses. It is a tide that never goes out."
I looked over the edge of the bridge. The water was a dark, oily green, barely moving through the tangle of synthetic debris. I saw a plastic toothbrush caught in the weeds, its blue handle a jarring contrast to the natural brown of the mud. It was a symbol of their presence, a permanent mark of our passing.
I realized then that the problem was not just one of volume, but of ubiquity. Plastic had become the default material for human need. From the moment a child was born and wrapped in a disposable diaper, to the moment an adult brushed their teeth in the morning, the cycle was unbroken. It was in our routine, our habits, our very expectations of what life should look like.
I felt a sense of overwhelming scale. How could one man, or even one village, fight against a material that had woven itself into the very fabric of human existence? But then I remembered the count. Twelve items. One day. If I could change that twelve to eleven, or ten, I would be doing something.
I turned back toward my house, my mind racing. I needed to see the fields. I needed to see where the road ended and the food began. I needed to see the true cost of the intimate invasion on the land that fed them.
It little to a simple discovery that plastic has infiltrated the most personal aspects of daily life, from hygiene to childcare, leading me to quote "Plastic in the Soil, Plastic in the Soul." It is like the poisoning of the valley from cradle to the crop. The sight of waste-clogged drainage systems will soon lead us to the heart of the village's agricultural survival.

Email:--------------------saltafrasool@yahoo.com