Morning 13th April

“Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dreamI am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have beenTo sit with elders of the gentle race, this world has seldom seenThey talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed”
- Led Zepplin in Kashmir one of their most acclaimed songs

We intended to roam around in Srinagar on 14th & leave in afternoon same day, but Kashmir tired us, we decided to see Verinaag & leave the valley after taking a short cut from there. For some reasons I could hear the Led Zepplin song & was trying to understand what Robert Plant was trying to say in it?

So on 13th morning we left the modest yet comfortable rooms in the Zestha Devi temple guest house. Passing through roads which made even army men nervous at the peak of terrorism in Kashmir, we asked the way to Verinaag from the pedestrians whose face almost always showed surprise & heart warming cordiality on hearing us talk in Kashmiri.
One can sense how the people yearn for hope here, where peace deserted them long ago & the hope of peace is on the verge of leaving them up creek. The faces of old Kashmiri women which lit up after hearing me speak in Kashmiri made me realize how even something very trivial (like us, three Kashmiri Pandits in a cab, traveling to places where few would have dared to a few years ago), could fill their hope-lusting-hearts with hope.

Verinaag is ‘nag’ which is very clean (‘nag’ is the Kashmiri word for natural spiring), but I really doubt this being the basis for its nomenclature. The garden close to the spring is like any other garden in Kashmir, very beautiful. My attempt to capture a Kashmiri duck was finally successful there. Due to rains the water wasn’t at its cleanest but impressively cold nevertheless.

This was all there was from me in the trip, I didn’t realize how memorable the trip has been long after it.
All these 16 years I heard from people how the Kashmir was simply not the same as it was back then, how it has changed, turned into a chiffonier of gloom, a closet full of fear.
Truth is there is no other place on earth which could absorb so much pain & yet stick on to the mantle of being the heaven on earth the way this land has. Some things have changed though, the esoteric smiles are now accompanied with moist eyes, the tales that grandparents tell their children don’t have devils anymore, a house on road here or there looks like it has been weeping for years now, a few of the leaves dancing in the wind are stained with blood. But the flowers keep on blooming the way they have been, morning prayers at schools are sung with the same zeal, a joke on the hair style of a politician (who wears a wig and doesn’t acknowledge it) still evokes laughter, the water in the ‘nag’ is still cold in summers & warm in winters.

While I was still analyzing the Led Zepplin song I learnt something interesting; Robert Plant didn’t write the song in Kashmir he wrote it in Sahara Desert! That’s why I was wondering, Kashmir never evokes poetry out of you, it always leaves you speechless.