Afternoon 10th April

All through our way to the Jawahar Tunnel, we were all praying for one thing..... the rain to stop. It was raining heavily, at least it seemed like it was. And that meant that the road wasn’t getting any better soon. We passed many small towns and many more smaller ones, with our fingers crossed & minds engrossed in the fear of getting struck at some desolate place on the Jammu-Srinagar highway.
But just like cowardice, bravery rewards you once a while and this was one such occasion. When we reached the damaged portion of the road, it was getting cleared & we had to wait for mere 15minutes for the roads to get cleared. And as soon as we crossed the Banihal Tunnel, it seemed heaven had come from all the places where it could & surrounded us with itself. The weather turned sunny, valley was visible & we finally had our lunch. What followed is something I still find difficult to express. The truth is no matter how hard I try I cannot write anything that can prepare you for the beauty that the valley has.
One of the sights I remember is that of a farm full of saffron flowers, till that time it was the most beautiful thing I had seen for the last 16 years. That record was broken again & again & again in the next four days. (and by the way my father corrected me later, what I saw was not a saffron field, it was an insignificant flower whose name he was not sure about, saffron does not grow in this season & saffron fields are much more beautiful)
We reached Srinagar & had it been one big garrison it couldn’t possibly have been more densely populated by army. We stopped at a Tea stall & visited a temple besides it. I was told the temple floor used to be clean as the lobby of a five star hotel.
We left the city of temples for the village of my dreams. Bandipur, kalusa; my ancestral village was where we were headed to. It almost seemed mythical, I had heard detailed descriptions & thousands of stories regarding it, from my parents, cousins, grandparents, but I almost didn’t remember it.
As we passed through the unbelievably beautiful Kashmir villages, there was one painful observation that my parents made; the exteriors of houses seemed….depressed, tired,not the way they used to be 16 years ago. They had somehow become, just not worthy to be at the paradise on earth.