The day After

14 th April 2006, 24 hours after we left the valley. Around half a dozen blasts rocked valley, I guess u don’t know about it, it's OK; happens there all the time. U can't keep track of all the time the heaven is in flames, so it’s better to describe it as 'burning'.

Morning 13th April

“Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dreamI am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have beenTo sit with elders of the gentle race, this world has seldom seenThey talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed”
- Led Zepplin in Kashmir one of their most acclaimed songs

We intended to roam around in Srinagar on 14th & leave in afternoon same day, but Kashmir tired us, we decided to see Verinaag & leave the valley after taking a short cut from there. For some reasons I could hear the Led Zepplin song & was trying to understand what Robert Plant was trying to say in it?

So on 13th morning we left the modest yet comfortable rooms in the Zestha Devi temple guest house. Passing through roads which made even army men nervous at the peak of terrorism in Kashmir, we asked the way to Verinaag from the pedestrians whose face almost always showed surprise & heart warming cordiality on hearing us talk in Kashmiri.
One can sense how the people yearn for hope here, where peace deserted them long ago & the hope of peace is on the verge of leaving them up creek. The faces of old Kashmiri women which lit up after hearing me speak in Kashmiri made me realize how even something very trivial (like us, three Kashmiri Pandits in a cab, traveling to places where few would have dared to a few years ago), could fill their hope-lusting-hearts with hope.

Verinaag is ‘nag’ which is very clean (‘nag’ is the Kashmiri word for natural spiring), but I really doubt this being the basis for its nomenclature. The garden close to the spring is like any other garden in Kashmir, very beautiful. My attempt to capture a Kashmiri duck was finally successful there. Due to rains the water wasn’t at its cleanest but impressively cold nevertheless.

This was all there was from me in the trip, I didn’t realize how memorable the trip has been long after it.
All these 16 years I heard from people how the Kashmir was simply not the same as it was back then, how it has changed, turned into a chiffonier of gloom, a closet full of fear.
Truth is there is no other place on earth which could absorb so much pain & yet stick on to the mantle of being the heaven on earth the way this land has. Some things have changed though, the esoteric smiles are now accompanied with moist eyes, the tales that grandparents tell their children don’t have devils anymore, a house on road here or there looks like it has been weeping for years now, a few of the leaves dancing in the wind are stained with blood. But the flowers keep on blooming the way they have been, morning prayers at schools are sung with the same zeal, a joke on the hair style of a politician (who wears a wig and doesn’t acknowledge it) still evokes laughter, the water in the ‘nag’ is still cold in summers & warm in winters.

While I was still analyzing the Led Zepplin song I learnt something interesting; Robert Plant didn’t write the song in Kashmir he wrote it in Sahara Desert! That’s why I was wondering, Kashmir never evokes poetry out of you, it always leaves you speechless.

Evening 12th April

I was 3 years old when I first climbed the hill of ‘Shankar Acharya Temple’ in Srinagar. I probably didn’t look down when I reached the top, otherwise there is no way I could have possibly forgotten the view that it offers. So, when I was surprised at the surprise the view offered, I realized I should have looked down when I was 3, I would have spent my childhood with a much relished memory. The temple located atop a hill in the middle of the Srinagar offers a panoramic view of the whole of Srinagar, as if nature wanted someone to stand in the middle of Srinagar & admire it. Unfortunately for nature & Kashmiris the place is probably used more for surveillance than for admiration.
While we were climbing the hill, a South Indian women was complaining & thanking the Lord Shiva at the same time for always establishing himself at all the difficult places (she had either heard about or been to Amarnath). So after some time when she got tired, Lord Shiva heard her complaints & sent my Mother to help her; with a face as tired as the audience of the 8hr speech that Krishna Menon gave in UN in 1957 defending India’s Kashmir stand, she still somehow managed to express gratitude that the audience of that speech didn’t. Why does India need 8hrs to defend its Kashmir stand & 1.1 million soldiers to hold on to that is questionable, what is not is that the ‘Shankar Acharya Temple’ has been damaged, no not by vandals but by the apathy of people responsible for its maintenance.
It was now time to do what everyone who visits Kashmir( everyone not hydrophobic that is) does; take a Shikara ride in Dal. I am sure which movie it was but this is what Amitabh Bachhan once said “Why do they call it the dull lake, it is the most interesting lake I have ever seen.” Highly encroached, so very beautiful & witness to more violence than any human would have, If Kashmir is a beauty contest Dal Lake is the winner, and Gulmarg is a runner-up with a different color. Pehalgam is the favorite who lost. In fact we dropped Pehalgam from our itinerary & gave it a snub, I am not sure how she feels about it, and I guess she doesn’t care. Right after we came back, Ram had raised the flag on car dashboard again.
It was the time to visit the ‘Shakti’ sweets shop, a place whose name I had heard all through my adolescence but had hardly any memories of. It feels so good to see the places about which you have hazy memories & have formed vivid imaginations. At night we rested at the guest house at the Zestha Devi Temple, fairly good facilities & very beautiful place.

Afternoon 12th April

Himesh Reshamiya has become my favorite singer, music director & actor! Things were not like that all the time. ‘Ram’ our driver for the trip had just one cassette to play in the car stereo, & that one happened to be a collection of the latest Himesh hits!! Valley somehow makes you find a rhythm in everything, so the songs I found intolerable became the ones which were part of my i-Pod play list.
Like all men, my dad & I were confident (& wrong) about the way which leads to the ‘Nishat’ Park. And after finding the right one we found it was blockedJ. The Dal Lake boulevard was being repaired & we had driven about a kilometer into a road that leads to a signboard that tells u that the road leads to nothing but this signboard. To confirm whether signboard is serious about itself or like an Indian politician is merely being presumptuous; my dad got down & asked a worker at the repair site about the same. After the worker confirmed the way is blocked further, my dad complained about why the government could not put the board a kilometer away when the road starts, the worker said something that I can still hear. “It is good they did so. Maybe it was Allah’s wish that I get an opportunity to see you”. Every time we interacted with someone in Kashmir, we were always impressed with the courtesy & love we received. But this was too much for us to absorb. Till we reached the ‘Nishat’ Park, all three of us were in pensive mood. All three of us suddenly realized what & how much we have missed in our lives for the last 16 years outside the valley. Suddenly the pain of separation & the joy of being back there, albeit for a very brief time, became stronger than ever.
In case you can’t make out from the pictures below, Nishat is located between a hill & the Dal Lake. As such the park is just as pretty any other beautiful park at any hill station, somehow being sandwiched between a hill & a lake puts a halo around it that makes its beauty hard to beat. We met some folks with the Kashmiri tobacco pipe called ‘jajir’, so I grabbed upon the chance to capture it, although I had to convince them that this photo won’t come on TV. Again something almost trivial yet very different from the way things are outside valley. Anywhere in south Asia, TV cameras face a hard time to keep unwanted faces on street outside their frame; in the valley if you find someone brave enough to face it, you are one lucky chap. We also visited the other Srinagar parks notably ‘Harwan’ & ‘Shalimar’. Guess what ‘Harwan’ Park had trees with couples beneath them, a far cry from Al Madina Regiment’s cries of banning TV in Kashmir (since it is responsible for all ills of Kashmir). We were told about the winds of change in Kashmir, and not all of them were blowing against the west.

Morning 12th April

Heaven is the place where Gods resides, right? So, why would the valley have any paucity of them? Well it doesn’t. Kashmiri Pandits maybe a small insignificant (statistically) minority in Kashmir, but they have a fair number of pilgrims in valley. Amarnath is the most popular one of them, but for Kashmiri Pandits themselves, the numero uno of religious places is a place called ‘Kheer Bhawani’ or Tulmul. This used to be the favorite place of many Sages to meditate, due to some mystical calmness in the surroundings.
This mystical calmness was what we were headed to on the morning of 12th. The entrance to the temple looks no different to the entrance of any of the ubiquitous army bunkers/instillations you see all across the valley. All through my trip to valley, I had to try real hard to keep armed people out of frame in my photos.
Then there were things I was trying real hard to keep within the frame, but couldn’t. One of these things which even a gigapixel digital camera can’t capture is ‘Kashmiriyat’. The people distributing the ‘prasad’ (offerings to the god) at Kheer Bhawani are Muslims!! There are various concepts of secularism; Western one, where something secular is something atheistic; Indian political system one, where you ban anything offending any religion and give undue favors to people of all religions equally. Kashmiri concept is very weird given the fact that generally accepted norms of secularism are the ones discussed above. Its not mere economics that drives the phenomenon of why so many Hindu religious places in Kashmir are managed by Muslims (Amarnath is another example), it is something else. It is the underlined logic, thought & philosophy behind so many other things there. Some use a word ‘Kashmiriyat’ for it and some like Arun Shourie call it " incomparable blend of Shaivism and liberal Islam" , lets use whatever word you people are comfortable with.
I tasted the mystical calmness in all its glory; there were very few visitors to Kheer Bhawani that morning. I also had what was probably best lunch of my life, oil soaked bread called ‘lichhe’ and milkless tea called ‘Kahwa’. (Please don’t try the recipe in your kitchen, both ‘look’ & ‘are’ very different from what the description suggests).

Afternoon/Evening 11th April

Like a cyclist on Tour-de-France, our driver was highly focused on the road while driving through the arduous Srinagar-Jammu highway, but he was buoyant like a WWE wrestler while driving in the valley. He would talk to kids, their parents & people standing next to kid’s parents. He almost gave you the feeling that it was he who was the Ian Wright (of lonely planet fame, remember!!) of this journey & not me.
We decided to stay at the village of my father’s ‘matamal’ (place where you mother used to stay before marriage). It is a town called Pattan. Located in Hunziwara district it looks like a normal Kashmiri village, and it is one. Only thing not normal about it was the welcome we got once we got there. We were visiting a relative there, but my father had spent a considerable amount of time there & was identified by one of his friends of those times. Thank god I had seen red carpets of Hollywood movies on TV so I knew how to react in such situations. About 50 people were all looking at us with one desire; a chance to help us lift our luggage. The love was overwhelming for even me, who thought he has lost all ‘whelming abilities’.
The evening brought many from the village to my relative’s place, most of them were childhood friends of my dad, it hence was a chance at talking about local politics, things like who the best chief minister so far has been & why the candidate of a particular party who did not stand in the recent polls should have stood up etc. etc. It was also the time to relive the memories of the days gone by; somehow all the good memories were from years before 90’s & all the traumatic ones from period thereafter. Happiness & pain have their battles all the time, but when it comes to the arena of memories; happiness always wins. It was a good, old Kashmiri joke that ended the reunion of old friends.

Morning 11th April

Morning was here and so was the mythicalness of Bandipore & the energy to go even further. I have heard the line “my village is prettiest of them all” so many times in 70’s bollywood movies and here it is my turn to say the same, only thing is unlike Dharmendra I will also add the line “my village is heavily militarized”. I was warned by many that the real danger in Kashmir is when you become an innocent civilian caught in a grenade attack by terrorists on an Army/Paramilitary installation. The thought prevailing there was that terrorists aren’t attacking civilians these days. I felt that there are no imaginary dangers in Kashmir, a few days later some unidentified armed people attacked tourists in the valley, none of the terrorists groups took responsibility. Maybe Loch Ness monster was responsible. With these real, imaginary & complex fears with us, we took off for Gulmarg.
I believe Gulmarg is the most filmed location in the world after Wall Street & Times Square. 8 out of 10 Bollywood movies in 60’s & 70’s were shot here (don’t take this statistic very seriously, this is just to give you a general idea J). There is a reason why it is so, because Gulmarg is the Sachin Tendulkar & Amitabh Bachan of the Indian Hill Stations. A few kilometers away is Tanmarg, not exactly a hill station but an aspiring pit stop to the great Gulmarg. We decided to encourage its aspirations & halt there for a while. The place has a few shops which stock most of the things u would want to have while on course to Gulmarg. Someone whom I hadn’t met ever in life (& odds are really low that I would meet again) approached from behind and asked me in Kashmiri “Are you a Kashmiri Pandit” I replied in affirmative. “We are very ashamed of what happened in early 90’s and we really miss you here”. I am not sure if he needed to apologize because I don’t feel he was responsible for what happened (neither the larger self he wanted to represent when he said so). But the short conversation I had with him there once again made me wonder, how could a place that has so much love in the surroundings & the people surrounding them, possibly be such a tragic victim of hate.
Well tragedies fell aside and all the song & dance sequences had come to forefront as we reached Gulmarg. Of many sinful, ambitious desires I had, to play in the snow was the most intense. I did get a shot at it & also to ride one of the most advanced Gondola rides in the world for 500 rupees (11 dollars). Our sledge puller at Gulmarg like so many other people we talked to once again bad mouthed terrorists. Well there is one thing common to terrorists & Indian politicians, both are far less popular than what they think they are.
While coming back we decided to inspire Tanmarg further & decided to have lunch there in a hotel. After we asked for rice for three people, the person waiting on us (who also seemed like the manager there) told us to have one serving, see if it is not enough & then order for more. Damn he was right; we were not able to finish the first bowl of rice. A person who damages his business to ensure you don’t order more than u need. What place on earth was I ???

Evening 10th April

Triumphing over roads which seemed insurmountable, the wheels of our Taxi( an Indica V2) were put through further test by the roads that were leading to Bandipur/Kalusa. Rains had flooded the Wular Lake & that meant the roads besides the lake lost the tar & retained only the stones. U might as well drive over one big, long rock and it would feel the same. If we had any respect for the quality of roads in valley we lost it when we reached at a bridge that connects Srinagar to Bandipur district, the bridge was broken and that meant we had to take a detour which would elongate our journey by more than a couple of hours.
It was at this juncture that I tasted the concept they call ‘Kashmiriyat’. While we were taking the detour we asked a middle aged man standing besides the road whether the road to Bandipur is damaged, the reply, amazed me on one hand and was pretty much what my parents expected from a Kashmiri on the another, “Yeah the way is Ok, but it might be dark by then, why don’t you stay with us till morning’. We meet a person on the road for the first time, and he is inviting us to his house! Having stayed in a big city for many years now, this behavior would have seemed very suspicious there, but here this was the standard operating procedure!!
Bandipur now seemed more mythical than ever before, the journey seemed unending & what was an hour’s ride was now a painful innings on ‘rubber wheels take on rocks’ game. But the jovial spirits of our driver Ram & the beauty of view outside meant the pain was alleviated as soon as it emerged.
Then a place changed it all… Like the place ‘modor’ scared characters in the lord of the rings, ‘Samlar’ evoked reactions from my parents I couldn’t understand. Later they told me it used to be an area which used to be the hub of many terrorist activities & that road was ‘no-no’ even when terrorism had hardly begun. We were on that road only because the numerous diversions due to floods had forced us to. At one of the place on that road a Tata Sumo(Taxi that runs in Kashmir) stopped in front of us. The driver got down & called our driver out. For moments there was silence that couldn’t have been louder. Seconds later the driver returned, “ he said hide the flag” . Our driver Ram, had a knack of cracking jokes that were genuinely funny only in Kashmir or in other places u desperately want to laugh. His other knack was to take things head on. He had put an Indian flag on the dashboard of the car. A rare yet unnoticeable thing anywhere, but a bravado of highest degree for a taxi that runs mostly in valley. We did hide the flag, but not for long.
Finally at around 8 or 9, we did make it to Bandipur, and the myth came to and end. The army has barricaded the area where my ancestral home is, it was night time & hardly anything was visible. Somehow the magic was simply not there.