A Reading Room in the Hills of Kashmir

In a remote corner of Budgam, a tiny library inside a government school is slowly reviving the lost habit of reading and is becoming a guiding light for others.

- Muntashir Kifayat Hussain

It was around 1:30 in the afternoon when we arrived. The sun hung low, casting soft shadows on the green hills of Narabal, a village in Budgam district.

A few of us, academic monitors, had come to visit one of the government middle schools perched in this part of Kashmir. From the outside, the campus looked still, almost too still. For a moment, we hesitated. Was school already over?

Then we stepped closer. Through an open window, I saw something unexpected: a room full of students and teachers, all silently flipping through books. Some leaned back, lost in thought. Others followed words with a finger, lips moving slowly. Nobody spoke. Nobody checked a phone.

Twelve feet by twelve, that room may not have looked like much. But inside, it held something rare: a working school library. Not just a cupboard with textbooks or a locked trunk filled with unused novels, but an actual space for reading.

The wooden shelves were packed. Fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, poetry, short stories. Someone had even arranged the books by genre. It felt like a place built with love.

I slipped out, not wanting to disturb them. The head of the school came after me and we sat on a low bench outside under a walnut tree. I asked him, "When do the students get a break?"