It was early May in Kashmir. It had snowed the day before we arrived, the first late-April snow in years. The tarmac was windy, and chunks of mud-fringed ice lay in the gutters around the great chinar trees. Srinagar was cold and grey; Gulmarg cold and white.
But Pahalgam was green, and blissfully sunny. Sunlight splashed colour on the cold mountains above us. As we rambled along a hilly path alongside the Lidder river, little boards informed us many times over that Chandanwari was ahead of us - and, somewhere up there, we knew, with all its mystery and icy resplendence, was Sheshnag. But for now, the crystalline air, tangy with pine, was heady enough, and we didn’t need religion. We were in Eden. We didn’t need God.
That year, tourists were coming to Pahalgam after long empty years. Pony-men looked speculatively at us as we walked up the path. They lost interest when we shrugged ruefully and said we wanted to walk; but a little Kashmiri girl befriended us. She tapped me gravely on my sleeve and offered us a kela to eat. I was touched. We had nothing to offer the girl. We took many photographs instead: such moments come rarely enough in life. I asked her age: she was eight. Her pink cheeks and bright eyes made for some pretty pictures. We slowed our pace so that her mother – who told me, in sign language with a few words scattered in between, that she had never really regained her health after her hysterectomy - could walk along with us.
As our small party walked along, the little girl walked with us, holding my hand unselfconsciously, gently touching my shirt-sleeve every now and then. I couldn’t explain to them where Mumbai was - they had never even been to Srinagar. I tried drawing a map on the ground with a stick, but it was only when my husband began to whistle “Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan” that the older woman nodded delightedly. She smiled at first, then laughed in delight, and clapped her hands; we laughed too.. When it was time for us to turn back, mother and daughter stood side by side, waving shyly, watching us as we made our way back down the road, my husband still whistling the tune that had brought us all closer for those few moments.
My husband and I had lunch at a Punjabi dhaba that afternoon, on Pahalgam’s narrow main road. The resplendently moustachioed maharaj, seated on a mud platform with the stove-pit before him, asked us many questions as we ate our hot parathas. Where were we coming from; how far away was it; was it true that Bombay was near the sea; were the parathas any good (the last question, we knew, was rhetorical).
Days after we returned to Bombay, we read about attacks in Pahalgam. People were injured; some died. The terrorists had flung grenades through the open windows of restaurants. Some tourists, they felt, brought alien and dissolute ways into the valley. I wondered whether I, with my uncovered head and loud laugh, had been one of those dissolute visitors.
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(posted in Oct 2005, when this piece won a prize in a travel writing contest)
