When Water Comes Home

From tea shops in Qazigund to the floodplains of Srinagar, Kashmiris are beginning to confront a truth: the river’s anger mirrors our own greed.

- Mohammad Amin Mir

was one of those rains that seemed endless. I was in Upper Bazar, Qazigund, ducking into a tea shop to escape the downpour. Inside, the air smelled of damp clothes and steaming nun chai. The roof was tin, and the rain struck it like a drum, steady and insistent.

We gathered at small tables, strangers bound together by weather, news updates, and unease.

Some of us kept refreshing our phones for alerts about the Jhelum swelling. Low-lying areas were already under water. Srinagar was nervous. In Jammu, too, the news of inundation had begun. Conversation circled back, again and again, to that year none of us had forgotten, 2014, when the waters rose and made muck of everything.

There were the usual exchanges of blame: the government had failed, dredging was ignored, flood channels left choked. But in the middle of that chorus, an older man with a beard streaked grey spoke in a voice that cut through the noise. He did not raise it, yet everyone heard.

“This is our doing,” he said. “We have stolen space from the river. Now it takes it back. We should leave this land ourselves. Nature is unhappy with us. Until we correct ourselves, there will be no happiness.”

The tea shop fell silent. Outside, water gushed through the bazar drains, as if agreeing with him.

I carried those words long after the rain eased. They were a reminder that floods in Kashmir are not simply calamities of climate. They are verdicts.