The last ember of our tradition

Somewhere between the midsummer heat and the sighing wind that weaves through the branches of weary chinars, there lingers a sound. A very old sound. Not loud. Not sharp. Just persistent enough to be remembered. The faint clink of clay against clay. The hush-hush of hands shaping wet earth. The quiet revolution of a spinning wheel that, in some forgotten corner of Kashmir, still spins.

And every year, like the return of a silent season, Ahad Kak comes.

He arrives not with announcements, not with advertisements or app alerts. He arrives with mud in his nails, stories in his sack, and the kind of dignity that cannot be taught. From Batpora Langate to our village, Pohrupeth, he comes walking—or riding a shared load carrier if his knees ache too much. Still stoop-shouldered. Still clay-smeared. Still smiling that smile that seems to know something about the earth that we’ve long forgotten.

He brings with him terracotta vessels—”gageer chilums”, “piggy banks”, “tambakhnaris”, “bowls”, cups, flowerpots, dreams. Every piece still smells of sun and ash, of fire and love. Of a life lived close to the elements.

The children, born into the glow of smartphones and plastic lunchboxes, look at him like a character from an old folktale. They laugh. They point. “Kya yeh mud ka piggy hai?” they ask. “Yeh toot jayega na?”

And yes, it will. But isn’t that the point?

But my late mother always respected him.

“There must always be an earthen pot in the kitchen,” she would say, pressing 50 rupees note into his hand like a prayer folded in cloth. “It blesses the home.” She believed, quietly and completely, in the magic of mud.

And so I too believed. I grew up in the cracks of that belief. Every summer, when Ahad Kak came, I spoke with him. First about the weather. Then about the tarricota industry of Kashmir. Then, as years passed and my mother passed with him, I spoke of memory. Of loss. Of craft. Of what it means to be the last of his kind and still continue—like a candle that insists on burning after the storm.

One evening, sitting on my veranda while the wind murmured its soft sorrows, I asked him, “Kaka, why do you still do this? Who buys these now? Why not switch, like others did?”

He looked at his own hands then. Cracked, brown, blessed. “My hands forget pain when they touch clay,” he said. “When I don’t make something for too long, my chest feels tight. As if I forgot to breathe.”

That’s when I asked him to make something different. Some flower vases, some new shapes—half tradition, half trend. I sketched them clumsily on a notebook. He studied them, chuckled softly, and said, “I will try, sir. For you.”And he did.

Next summer, he returned not just with old things but with new ones too—bolder curves, smoother edges. “They are still learning to be beautiful,” he said, stroking one with a potter’s pride.I told him I would write his story one day. That my readers should know there still exists a man who listens to the earth and makes it sing. He laughed, but there was water in his eyes—kiln-water, perhaps, or the kind that gathers in wells before a monsoon.

And so, here I am. Writing not an obituary, but an ode to a man who still lives. Who still walks. Who still creates. Who still believes.

Ahad Kak is not yet gone. He is not yet a ghost in a museum. He is alive. He still fires his kiln in the backyard of his home in Batpora Langate. Still kneads clay with a devotion that smells of shrine floors and mother’s palms. He is a living ember in the ashes of a fading craft.

The world rushes past him—plastic, steel, digital glare. But he is not bothered. He says the earth still speaks to him.

And I wonder—what would happen if he stopped listening?

Because in that quiet clay-covered man lives the last verse of a poem we’ve forgotten. A poem of patience, slowness, imperfection. A poem where things break. And that is okay.

In our rush for the unbreakable, perhaps we forgot the beauty of what breaks.

Let there always be an earthen pot in the kitchen. Let it bless our homes not just with water—but with memory. With softness. With the sound of clay clinking, gently, gently—before it is gone forever.

Khursheed Dar is a teacher and author from Langate.