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.