For nine days, the lawns of the Sher-i-Kashmir International Conference Centre on the banks of Dal Lake have carried a sound Srinagar rarely hears at this scale: the rustle of pages, schoolchildren arguing over storybooks, a “Shikarathon” gliding across the water to announce that reading, for once, was the city’s biggest event. The third edition of the Chinar Book Festival closes tomorrow, July 26, and by every measure it has been one of the Valley’s finest weeks of the year.

But a festival that ends after nine days is only as valuable as what it leaves behind.

Credit belongs first to the National Book Trust and Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha’s administration, who have built this fair since its first edition into a genuine draw: more than 200 publishers, over 800 authors, artists and performers, and stalls in English, Urdu, Kashmiri, Hindi and half a dozen other languages under one roof. Deputy Commissioner Akshay Labroo’s Shikarathon and the festival’s tagline, “Mil Kar Padhenge, Mil Kar Badhenge,” Together We Read, Together We Lead, were more than slogans. They got Zainab, a seventh-grader from a government school in Srinagar visiting a book fair for the first time in her life, to walk out clutching a storybook of her own choosing.

Publishers did their part too, discounting stock and, through the Trust, giving books away free to children who could not otherwise afford them. Now the harder work shifts elsewhere. NCPUL and the NBT released 24 bilingual Gojri books and the first Rajtarangini Samvad novels this week. The question is whether these titles will sit on library shelves in Ganderbal and Kulgam a year from now or vanish once the tents come down. Schools that bussed children to SKICC for a drawing competition must ask the same of their own libraries the other 356 days of the year. And parents, the last link in this chain, carry the real responsibility: a child who bought a book on Saturday needs somewhere quiet to read it in August.

Kashmir has not always had this luxury. Decades of shutdowns and curfews closed schools for months at a stretch, and long before that, the Valley’s own publishing houses, once thriving through the Urdu and Kashmiri press of the last century, thinned out under the weight of unrest. A book festival that draws thousands to Dal Lake’s banks in 2026 is proof of how far the Valley has pulled itself back from that silence.

Article 21A guarantees every child in this country the right to education. It says nothing about the right to a library that stays open past a festival week. That gap is where Kashmir’s next chapter gets written.