Kashmir: An impression

Your first sight of the mountains makes you glad that you came.
Your traveling track record can only be described as impulsive.
Where earlier on you question this impulsiveness.
You no longer do.

You wait in the heat.
It's hard to imagine that the top of the world could be warm.
But it is.
You make a mental note, not to grumble about the weather back home again.
A taxi takes you to the second best hotel there.
The first thing you notice on your way there. The soldiers.
Everywhere.
The second thing, the shabby grandeur of the hotel.
A capacity of maybe four hundred.
An occupancy of perhaps four.
It's sprawling, it's beautiful, it's old world. Charming.
It's sad.


I go out to meet my Kashmiri friend.
Pakoras and tea.
Her brothers, her cousins, they've come along.
They're georgeous. Of course they are.
They're Kashmiri.
All of them studying to be doctors, lawyers.
Secretly I suspect that this is something of a social pressure.
Well educated.
You have to be.
I roam around the city on my own in a taxi from the hotel.
The only other thing that strikes me apart from the soldiers are the children.
They also carry guns.
Toy ones.

Again, you feel a twinge, you consider it, then discard it.
This is life.

I watch the women. Very conservative and yet, they're not.
The older girls, they pull their head coverings a little more securely round their heads when they pass by people they know. Relatives, friends, people who's words carry weight.
Close to minutes later, their heads are bare again.
Subtle.

As we stop to buy famous Kashmiri sweets, little Hareen, the youngest of the cousins in all innocence asks, 'Do I look better THIS way?' wrapping her duppata elaborately round her head, 'Or THIS way?' pulling it off to show her hair and cover her chest.
The only appropriate answer and I find myself smiling as I say it. 'Both ways, darling. Both ways'.

There is fun to be had.
Lamb kabab off the side of the road, a shikara ride on Dal lake, ancient Mughal gardens, the ruins of palaces
I take in all of this. I lap it up.

You leave, I'd like to say, as quickly as you came.
Except that you can't.
Security checks at the airport in Srinagar don't seem to end.
You finally get on your plane.

Happy, sad, happy? sad?

I can't tell.