Apple: Rot and Ripe

It is October again in Kashmir. The mornings are misty. In the apple growing belts of Kashmir trucks and tractors move slowly. The men in pherans walk beside them, their faces half hidden in fog. Everywhere there is the sound of picking , grading, packing, loading, calling, bargaining of apples. The season of apples has reached its peak in Kashmir.

But just beyond the busy yards and markets, there is another sight. Along roadsides, heaps of rotten apple lie in silence. The crystal clear streams that once glittered now carry floating fruit—half-eaten, bruised, swollen. Animals sniff at them and walk away. The air that should smell of sweetness smells other way.

No one meant for this to happen. The apple growers have worked hard, as they always do. Some apples fell before they could ripen, some damaged by rain or frost, some refused by traders. The apple season is generous. And so the extra fruit ends up here, by road, on the banks of streams, left to dissolve into mud.

Standing there, watching, I feel an ache. In Kashmir, an apple is more than a fruit. It carries the memory of hands—old hands that planted, young ones that plucked. It holds a century of care. My late father used to say that an apple tree understands the person who prunes it. It listens. It remembers. To see the fruit lying wasted feels like a conversation broken in the middle.

And yet, the answer is simple. What falls can rise again. Rotten apples can return to soil. They can become food for same roots that once fed them. Compost is not decay; it is a quiet form of rebirth. The earth knows how to turn loss into life, if only we let her.

Every grower could set aside a corner of the orchard, a small pit where spoiled fruit can be gathered. It doesn’t need machines or money, only time and patience. Within weeks the waste will change. The smell will change. What was once rot will become soft, dark soil, ready to hold another season’s promise.

This is not a matter of blame. It is not the government, not the trader, not the weather. It is about remembering. Once, in our villages, nothing from the harvest went waste. Peels were fed to cattle. Seeds were dried for oil. Even the fallen fruit was spread under the trees for the birds. We knew how to live in a circle. Somewhere along the way, we began to live in a line—taking, moving forward, forgetting to return.

If each of us bends once more to the earth, picks a handful of rotten apple, and lays them gently back into the soil, that small act would speak louder than any campaign. It would say we still belong here. It would say we have not grown too proud to kneel.

I imagine the valley after a few seasons of such care. The roadsides clean. The streams clear again. Children walking to school through orchards that smell only of fruit, not rot. The birds returning to peck at the early blossoms. The farmers proud, not only of their yield but of their gentleness.

The apple trees have always known how to forgive. They bloom after frost, after storm, after neglect. They don’t demand much. A little warmth, a little compost, a little memory—that’s all. The rest they do themselves.

So let us begin. Let us not walk past the rotten heaps as if they are someone else’s problem. Let us see them as part of our own story, waiting for a different ending. Because the valley still listens. Because the soil still waits.

One apple at a time, we can heal what we have hurt.

And maybe, one October soon, when the harvest comes again, the air of Kashmir will carry only one scent—the clean, sharp sweetness of fruit, and the quiet joy of a valley that has learned to care for itself again.

Khursheed Dar is a teacher and author from Langate.