The Wheelchair Word Builder of Kashmir

In South Kashmir, a young man uses books to move beyond physical limits and make a global mark.

- Gowher Bhat

Dooru sits at the base of gentle hills in South Kashmir, a town shaped by orchards, winding lanes and the steady hum of daily life.

At the edge of this place stands a modest house with one room that wakes earlier than the rest.

Before most families begin their morning routines, a lamp is already on inside. The light falls on a young man seated in a wheelchair with a book resting across his lap.

This is Aamir Rasool Khan, a thirty-year-old proofreader and editor who has lived with a paralyzed left leg since he was twelve.

His hands move across books with ease. Reading is the first thing he does each day, and often the last.

"People think I live far from everything," he says, "but books keep my world open."

From his window he can see children running after a football in the lane below. Their voices reach him, and he smiles.

He remembers the day his leg stopped responding. The diagnosis came quickly. Nerve damage, the doctors said. His mother cried into her shawl, and his father had no words. The house felt smaller and heavier.

Then a cousin handed him a worn-out copy of Gulliver's Travels. That book changed everything.

"It felt like a hand pulling me toward something bigger," he says. "I understood that movement can begin in the mind."

School felt far, with steep paths that often turned to slush in winter and dust in summer. Aamir still made the trip, pushing his wheelchair over stones and uneven ground.