Thej-Kad: When Rice Fields Sang in Kashmir

Once, summer in Kashmir arrived with song, sweat, and soil. Now, amid cranes and concrete, the old music is fading fast.

- Rayees Ahmad Kumar

Seasons in Kashmir once moved like chapters from an old book. You could tell when one ended, when another began. Not by calendars, but by colour, scent, and sound.

Summer didn’t simply arrive. It entered with a rustle, a murmur, a rhythm. And at its heart was Theij-Kad — the paddy season that turned the Valley into something lyrical.

Ask the old women in Qazigund or Shopian, and they'll remember. They'll speak of the May sun melting into the fields, of ankles sunk in cool mud, of voices rising like incense in the morning air.

Theij-Kad wasn't a task. It was a celebration. A calling. A festival disguised as farming.

The land, back then, was a theatre.

Women from neighbouring homes arrived at first light, their fists full of rice saplings. They didn’t speak much. They sang. Mehjoor's verses. Rasool Mir's laments. Lalla Ded’s prayers.

The songs weren't performed. They were lived. Bent over the flooded fields, these women stitched melodies into mud.

Children were sent as little couriers, carrying pink noon-chai in copper samavors, careful not to spill. The fields smelled of milk-tea, damp earth, and cow dung. There ‘were no machines, only muscle.