Off we go...

It began when I was somewhere between the certainty of my future yet the unsureness of myself. I had landed a job & hadn't joined it yet, and i had more time to relax than I needed. A trip to Kashmir had been on my mind for a long time but the will to take it up came at this time only.
So three of us (my parents & me) booked a taxi in Jammu & left for the valley on the morning of. It had been raining all night & though we hoped other wise we did not expect road to be open. The Jammu-Srinagar highway is amongst the most sensitive & ferocious anywhere. Sensitive because even a rainfall of few hours can block the road, ferocious because it has definitely claimed more lives than any single terrorist of Kashmir.
Udhmapur a small town which comes after Katra & before Rambhan, is the northern headquarters of Indian Army. It is also the place where I stayed for about a year immediately after I left the valley & it is also the place where the police stopped us & told us that the road is blocked & we can’t head towards valley. The policeman, who stopped us, asked us in Hindi where we are going.
My parents & our driver wanted to take the risk & go ahead and try to be there exactly by the time road gets cleared; if we are lucky we would find the road clear by the time we reach there, if not, we might get struck there for a while(a day or two inside a taxi isn’t that bad). Police discourages such bravado & hence doesn’t let people take this journey unless the Borders Roads Organization has already cleared the road.
So we acted smart and told the policeman that we are headed to Patnitop (a hill station around 60kms from there, about 8 hours away from Kashmir & a safe distance from the place where the road was damaged). Policeman, a Kashmiri, judged us well & now changed his language & tone, asking us in Kashmiri whether we are headed to valley. We also changed the language & our stated facts & confessed we are headed there. He told us that he would let us go, but he warned us that other check post 10 kms away from there might not let us go further. So we cruised past that checkpost & the other one also! Like a piece of saffron in a wind, that is gushing with urgency only either the ‘piece of saffron’ or the wind can understand, we moved ahead.