Srinagar, June 21 -- In Kashmir, rice grew on more than rain. It followed unmarked paths, shared water, and the unspoken trust of neighbours-where memory guided what maps never showed.

For centuries,kouls-the thin arteries of glacial water-ran freely between fields, over rocks, under trees, threading through a land that never needed to be told where to go. Rice farmers walked across neighbours' lands like guests, not trespassers. No fence stood in their way. No gate was locked. The land was broken into plots, but the people, somehow, weren't.

That was before the barbed wire.

In the past twenty years, the rise of apple orchards in Kashmir has come not just with profit and promise, but with enclosure. Fields once open to the sky are now ...