Fayaz’s fight for clean field

Srinagar, May 16: As the sun dips behind the hills and the sky turns from orange to deep blue, most people in Kashmir return home from their daily routines. But in the central Kashmir’s Narbal area in a village playground, one man is just getting started.

Fayaz Ahmad, in his 40s, walks slowly across the field with a worn-out jute sack in one hand. With quiet determination, he picks up plastic bottles, chips wrappers, and torn bits of packaging—each piece of trash disappearing into his bag. He does this silently, methodically, as if it were a prayer.

“I was born and brought up in this village,” he says. “This ground means something to me.”

For the past many years, Fayaz has been coming to the local playing field every evening—not for a walk or to play, but to clean. There’s no salary, no recognition, and no organisation behind him. Just an unshakable commitment. “We have to clean our land,” he says.

His concern began when he noticed how the field where local boys played cricket was slowly turning into a dumping ground. “Plastic was everywhere,” he recalls. “I saw videos of floods and lands being destroyed, all made worse by plastic waste. I thought, if we can’t keep our own ground clean, how can we expect the world to be better.”

In a video that once circulated on local social media, someone asked him mockingly why the ground looked like it was made of plastic. He didn’t flinch. “We have to clean it,” he said. His words were simple, but they stuck.

Fayaz doesn’t belong to any group, though he says there are a few people like him across Baramulla, Srinagar, and Budgam who are doing similar work. “I don’t need a team to do what’s right,” he says. “I just come and do my bit.”

By the time boys come for evening cricket practice—around 5:30 or 6:00 p.m.—the ground is already cleared of litter. Youngsters walk in with bats and stumps, often unaware that someone has just spent time making sure they can play on a clean surface. Fayaz quietly slips away, only to return the next evening.

Some people laugh at him. Others question his motives. “People think I’m wasting time,” he says. “They say this is work for poor people. But I don’t answer them. I don’t make fun of them. I just keep cleaning.”

He shrugs, then adds, “If we don’t do this, we will keep making the same mistakes. We will regret it.”

In an age of slogans and digital petitions, Fayaz’s silent work may seem old-fashioned. But change doesn’t always arrive with noise. Sometimes, it comes in the soft scrape of a stick dragging across the ground, collecting the waste others leave behind.

And in the fading light of Narbal, as evening turns to night, one man is showing his village that true activism begins not in grand gestures, but in quiet acts of care.