The Count!

The first day of the count was an exercise in shock. I sat at my kitchen as the evening light began to fade, my notebook open before me. I had spent the day as a silent observer of my own life, a hawk watching for the shimmer of polythene. The results were not merely surprising but they were an indictment.
It had started with the morning routine bag. Then came the breakfast (10pm Tea Time) items from the small grocery at the corner, a second bag for the eggs and a third for the small packet of butter and shermaal. In the afternoon, my niece had returned from the market with the evening's vegetables. She had brought five separate bags - one for the potatoes, one for the greens, one for the onions, one for the greens & ginger, and a large outer bag to hold them all together. That brought the total to eight before the sun had even reached its zenith.
Later, a delivery of medicine for my father arrived, wrapped in a small, thick plastic pouch. A neighbour had dropped by with a gift of home-cooked sweets, presented in decorative but non- biodegradable plastic container. By the time I sat down to finalize my notes, the count for a single, ordinary Tuesday stood at twelve items of plastic.
Twelve! I whispered to the empty room. ln one day. For one small family.
I leaned back, the academic portion of my brain beginning to calculate the terrifying geometry of waste. If twelve was the average or even if he stayed conservative and used the number five, as he had initially guessed the math was a descent into a dark place. Five bags a day meant one hundred and fifty bags a month. One hundred and fifty bags a month meant one thousand eight hundred bags a year.
I stared at the number - 1,800. I looked at the walls of my kitchen, trying to visualize eighteen hundred plastic bags piled floor to ceiling. They would fill the room. They would overflow into the hallway. And that was just my house.
My Mohalla had nearly two hundred houses. That was three hundred and sixty thousand bags a year from just one small cluster of homes.
The weight of the calculation felt physical. I thought about the festivals- the Eids, the weddings, the local fairs. On those days, the count didn't just double; it exploded. I remembered the last wedding of Bairaj I had attended. Every guest had been given a favour in a plastic bag. The meat had been distributed in heavy-duty polythene. The sweets had been stacked in plastic-lined boxes. On a single festival day, a household could easily bring in twenty or thirty bags.
I began to write faster, my pen carving the numbers into the paper. I was no longer just a villager, i was a forensic accountant of environmental decay. I realized that the plastic wasn't just coming in; it was staying. It didn't go 'away'. There was no 'away' in a valley surrounded by mountains and fed by a single great lake. The plastic went into the pit behind the house, or it went into the stream, or it was burned in a foul-smelling heap that turned the evening air into a toxic haze.
My niece, Uzma, pursuing B.Sc, entered the kitchen, her brow furrowed as she saw the intensity of my work. She was a student at the local college, a girl who understood the power of logic but lived in the reality of the village.
What are you calculating so fiercely, Choto! she asked, setting a kettle on the stove.
"Our extinction," I replied, not looking up. Or at least, the burial of our land. Do you know how much plastic we brought into this house today? Twelve pieces. If we continue like this, we are contributing thousands of items every year to the filth in the canal.
Uzma sighed, a sound of weary agreenment. "It is everywhere". At the College, the children bring their lunches in plastic. Even their pens, their rulers, their book coversit is all the same material. But what is the alternative? The shopkeepers won't give you anything else, and the people are too busy to carry heavy baskets.
"The alternative is the death of the Wullar lake" I said, my voice rising with a sudden, sharp edge. We are trading the health of our children for the convenience of a five-minute walk. We are academic people, Uzma. We know the chemistry. We know these polymers do not break down. They just get smaller and more poisonous.
I showed her the notebook. The numbers seemed to vibrate on the page. Uzma, a brilliant student, looked at them for a long time, her expression shifting from skepticism to a quiet, dawning horror. She had seen the plastic in the fields, of course. Everyone had. It was a part of the landscape now, like the stones or the trees. But seeing it quantified, seeing the sheer volume of their personal contribution, made it impossible to ignore.
"It is a disaster" she whispered. "lt is a silent one," I corected. "Because it doesn't scream. It just sits there. It waits. It chokes the roots of the rice. It fills the stomachs of the cows. And we are the ones feeding it."
I stood up and walked to the back door, looking out into the darkness. I knew that tomorrow, the cycle would begin again. The baker would have his bags ready. The vegetable seller would reach for the yellow plastic. The world would continue to wrap itself in a synthetic skin, unaware that it was suffocating.
I felt a surge of restless energy. I couldn't just count the bags; I had to understand the full extent of the invasion. I needed to look beyond the kitchen, into the most intimate corners of our lives. If the bread was wrapped in poison, what about the things we used to clean our bodies? What about the things we used to care for our elders and our young?
The moon rose over the valley, its light reflecting off a discarded plastic bottle in the yard. It looked like a shard of fallen star, beautiful and utterly alien to the earth it rested upon. I knew that my count was just the beginning. The deeper I looked, the more I would find that the plastic was not just in our hands, but in our very veins.
The mathematical reality of domestic waste leaves me and Uzma in a state of shock as we realize the thousands of bags our household consumes. deeper investigation into the hidden plastics of the home will soon begin.

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