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.