Srinagar, Dec. 22 -- The post carried a simple appeal: these books need a home. Some are brittle, some torn, and a few are more than a hundred years old. Rare manuscripts and fragile texts sit waiting for a place where they can be preserved.

That such an appeal had to be made at all should unsettle us.

Beyond mountains and lakes, Kashmir is a place shaped by words. Poets, scholars and translators worked in Persian, Kashmiri, Sanskrit, Urdu and Arabic for centuries. Books lived in homes, shrines and schools.

Even over the last three decades of turmoil, families placed their faith in education. Learning was seen as honour, and books as a way forward.

But today, a private literary archive filled with out-of-print works is searching for s...