Kashmir's Traffic-Light Theater of Tears

At every traffic light in Srinagar, children and adults perform for coins. Charity fuels the act, and the city pays the price.

- Shazia Bhat

I first met the coin kids at the Sonwar crossing. One carried a glue-stick, another a crumpled report card. They said, “Auntie, craft project, thirty-two rupees short.”

The light turned green, I drove off, and the sentence stayed longer than the dust.

Two weeks later, I saw the same boy, with same glue-stick and project. Only the craft had changed: now it was origami.

I rolled down and asked why he was not in class. He grinned, said school ends at two, then sprinted to the next car.

The valley that once sang self-respect now hums a parallel tune: pity on sale, coins for applause.

Drive the nine kilometres from Lal Chowk to the airport and you meet the whole catalogue. Women holding glucose bottles like newborn babes, grandfathers with matching X-ray sheets, girls who recite the first surah in bell-clear Arabic, and boys selling ballpoints no one needs.

The pens cost twenty rupees. The going rate for a window knock is ten. Do the math and you see the pens are only alibis.

Last summer, some volunteers stood outside Kashmir University at dawn. By dusk, they had logged “a little over a thousand” beggars, double the count of the year before.

More than half carried Aadhaar cards with addresses in the apple heartland of the valley.

When the team offered free ride home, only two hundred climbed the bus. The rest melted into the crowd, like snow on a stove.