The sun had not yet crested the jagged peaks that guarded the valley, but the air was already thick with the scent of woodsmoke and the rhythmic clatter of life beginning anew. I stood on my small wooden porch, after Fajr prayers, watching the blue-grey mist cling to the caves of the houses in my Mohalla. It was a scene of timeless beauty, the kind that poets had praised for centuries. Yet, as I looked closer, the pastoral perfection began to fray at the edges. Tucked into the corners of the stone walls, caught in the brambles of the hawthorn bushes, and floating listlessly in the roadside gutter were the colourful, crinkling ghosts of modernity.
I watched my elderly greyed neighbour, a man who had walked these same paths for sixty years, return from the local baker. In the man's hand was a small, translucent blue bag. Inside sat a warm stack of roti, the steam from the fresh bread condensing against the thin plastic walls. It was a mundane sight, one repeated in every household across the village, thousands of times every single morning. To the neighbour, it was a matter of convenience, a clean way to carry the staple of his life. To me, it was starting to look like a shroud.
The morning light finally broke through, illuminating the village square. I stepped down from my porch, my boots crunching not just on gravel, but on the brittle remnants of yesterday's consumption. I walked toward the centre of the Mohalla, my eyes fixed on the ground. Every few steps, I saw them, the corner of a snack wrapper, the shredded remains of a shopping polythene bag, the cap of a discarded bottle, the used diaper of a baby. They were woven into the very fabric of the earth, as if the soil itself had begun to grow synthetic scales.
I reached the bakery, a small stone building where the heat of the tandoor radiated into the street. Manzoor Sahib, the baker, was a man of efficiency. He moved with practiced grace, sliding the flatbreads from the clay walls and immediately tucking them into small polythene bags. There was no pause, no thought given to the action. It was as mechanical as the rising of the sun. I stood in the queue, watching the exchange. Each customer handed over a few coins and received their bread encased in plastic.
Salam, Manzoor Sahib, said, his voice cheerful as he reached for a bag. Ten rotis today?
I hesitated. He looked at the stack of bags sitting on the counter, a shimmering pile of potential waste. “I have brought my own cloth bag, Manzoor Sahib. You can place them directly in here”
Manzoor Sahib paused, his hand hovering over the plastic. A look of mild confusion crossed his face, followed by a shrug. As you wish. It is more work for you to wash the cloth, but if you prefer it.
As I walked back toward my home, the weight of the warm bread in my cloth wrap felt different. It felt intentional. But as I looked around, I realized I was a lone island in a sea of polythene. I saw the school children walking by, each clutching a plastic-wrapped juice box or a bag of chips. I saw the women returning from the vegetable market, their arms laden with multiple bags of different colours red for tomatoes, yellow for onions, green for spinach.
The academic side of my mind began to churn. I thought about the composition of those bags of high-density polyethylene, a polymer designed to last for centuries, used for a task that lasted less than ten minutes. The journey from the bakery to the kitchen table was perhaps three hundred meters. For those three hundred meters of convenience, the earth was being asked to host a permanent guest.
I reached the edge of a small stream that ran through the village, a tributary that eventually found its way to the great Wullar Lake, Asia largest fresh water lake, perhaps due to which Bandipora carries “Aab” in its legacy. The water was clear in the centre, but along the banks, the plastic had staged a coup. It clung to the rocks like synthetic moss. It wrapped around the roots of the willow and populus trees, choking the flow. A discarded diaper, heavy with water and filth, sat lodged against a stone, its plastic outer shell glinting in the sun.
This was the crisis of the everyday. It wasn't a sudden explosion or a dramatic collapse, it was a slow, quiet suffocation. It was the accumulation of a billion small choices, each one seemingly harmless in isolation, but catastrophic in aggregate. I felt a cold knot of dread forming in my stomach. I had always considered myself an environmentally conscious man, but I realized I had been blind to the sheer scale of the intrusion.
I returned to my kitchen and sat at the grass straw mat. I placed my bread down and looked at the empty space where the plastic bag would have been. If he had taken the bag, it would currently be sitting in my bin, or perhaps tossed into the corner of the yard to be burned or buried. I thought about my family, my neighbours and the entire Mohalla. If every house took five bags a day, how long would take for the village to disappear under a mountain of crinkling film?
I took out a notebook, a simple ledger I used for household expenses. On the first blank page, I wrote a single heading – The Daily Count. I decided then that I could no longer live in a state of vague awareness. I needed the cold, hard truth of the numbers. I needed to know exactly how much of this poison I was personally responsible for bringing into my sanctuary. The air in the kitchen felt still due to early morning time, the only sound the scratching of my pen against the paper. I looked out the window and saw a plastic bag caught in the upper branches of a willow tree, flapping like a trapped bird. It was a flag of surrender, and I realized that before I could fight for the lake or the fields, I had to fight the battle at my own front door.
I begin to notice the overwhelming presence of plastic in my village and decides to start a daily count of the waste entering the home. Soon the true scale of the domestic disaster will be revealed in cold, hard numbers.
What the numbers would reveal, I did not yet know, but once counted, they would never let me look away again…

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