Mohammad Subhan Jalla toddles on the narrow walkway of his kitchen garden holding a stainless steel water sprinkler in his hand. His other arm is raised sideways to balance the weight, and his face is contorted – the corner of his lips curling up, taut blue veins flashing across his pinkish sweaty temples under the dirtied white Kashmiri skull cap. The garden is neatly divided into patches of lettuce and radish. His wife, Jana, works in a lettuce patch a few feet away. A few more feet from them and behind a line of willow trees is water.

They, in their garden inside the Dal Lake, are marooned, or should have been so ideally. But, Subhan’s garden is surrounded by other land masses – all of them called floating gardens – a misnomer as they are fixed patches of land reclaimed from the Dal and do not float. There are no floating gardens in Dal, only claustrophobic land masses.

Jalla is the legal owner of the water but his ‘floating garden’ is illegal. And so are hundreds of other gardens that dot the lake and have choked it.

Vegetables cultivated in these gardens are supplied to nearly half of the Srinagar city. Some even construct houses and shops on this land and at Jalla Mohalla, Gagribal and Kand Mohalla people have planted poplar and willow nurseries on this land.

Even now gardens like Subhan’s are reclaimed from the lake while LAWDA and police officials get paid to look the other way. The process of creating new gardens is long but efficient.

... contd.