Vanishing Stars

Last week, I visited my grandmother in our village, a quiet place surrounded by forests where life still moves a little slower. That evening, the sky was covered with clouds.

As we sat outside, I asked her, "Aama, what was this place like when you were my age?" She looked up for a moment and smiled. "When I was around ten, the sky was so clear that the stars lit up the whole night.

During summer, we worked in the fields after sunset because the days were too hot.

We didn't have watches back then.

We knew what time it was just by looking at the position of the stars in the sky." Then her smile slowly faded. "Now...

we can barely see them." I looked up too. For the first time, I realized that pollution doesn't only steal the air from our lungs.

It steals the stories our grandparents grew up with.

It steals the skies they learned from, worked under, and dreamed beneath. There was a time when people could tell the hour by the stars. Today, many children grow up without ever seeing a sky full of them. Some losses don't happen overnight.

They disappear so quietly that we only notice when someone who remembers whispers, "It wasn't always like this."