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.