Bombay ka Fashion, Kashmir ka Mausam

#3 This may or may not be a travelogue

I always wanted to go to Kashmir. When I scratch my brains for the origin of this desire, I come up with vague notions held by my young self- a forbidden land, a perpetual war zone, heaven on earth. It made me equal parts intrigued and anxious, so I let this desire simmer like tea leaves for years, adding ideas from popular culture and newspapers like salt and baking soda to noon chai.

Amongst the visual medium, it was Haider and Laila Majnu which significantly influenced my impressions of the region. The tales the two movies were retelling were secondary, Kashmir was their protagonist- its politics for the former, its beauty for the latter. Vishal Bharadwaj and Sajid Ali might have their own perspectives, but from where I saw it, every emotion got heightened in Kashmir, every season saw its epitome. The loss of a father and the wait for a lover were but means to an emotional climax- the protagonist’s ascent to insanity. For though both characters were termed mad by their friends and family and diagnosed with PTSD and clinical depression respectively, they seemed to attain a higher state, above rage, revenge, love with their struggle. Their victory lay in their tragedy. Their environment reinforced their internal turmoil. Throughout their journey, the seasons of Kashmir made their voice heard - the fallen chinar leaves in the opening scene of Haider were a sign for the impending winter in the second act, Laila and Majnu’s lush green summer was the heaven they attained too soon. These intense emotions entwined themselves with my idea of Kashmir, making me crave for not just the views, but the deeper feelings.

The same ideas were cemented when I read The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, where a young privileged woman, Shalini, goes to a village in Kashmir alone in search of a man she remembers vaguely from her childhood, with the belief that he possesses answers about her recently deceased mother. There is something bewildering and audacious in her journey and the decisions she takes therein. The novel reads like a foreboding- I kept waiting for her to make an enormous mistake. Her faulty but well-intentioned actions and her interactions with the local villagers were symbolic of the outsider’s ignorance and patronising gaze, but her naivety didn’t stem my desire to make a similar trip, it fueled it further. The only way to discover a place was to travel alone, I believed, in search of answers to made up questions.

As that was not to be, I took the chance of a family trip. In its runup, I collected a few more books, spoke to local friends, consulted recent tourists, prepared exhaustive dos and don'ts and realised that tourists do not get to find answers. They come back only with souvenirs and reels. Travel, however offbeat or authentic, is limited by its very character- the presence of an ending, a return ticket. The inquisitiveness of a tourist is self-serving. By just placing himself in a different environment, he demands new perspectives, new lenses for empathy. The end goal is not to put himself in different shoes but become someone who has tried multiple shoes. At their best, tourists just observe. I decided to try that.

My first feeling after exiting the airport at Srinagar was the certainty that I would have to visit again. That knowledge made me free to take things in and leave them out for subsequent visits. Everything I noticed thereon thus was a choice. I saw the grand gable roof houses, the green peaks of mosques, the white peaks of mountains. I noticed Jhelum running alongside, almost following us, as Vishal Bharadwaj sang Jhelum dhoonde kinaara in my ears. I noticed how the Dal lake stretched and stretched, so the city found ways to exist inside of it. I noticed the depth of imagination behind the Mughal Gardens, each stepped flower bed a wonder in itself. I noticed the bright blue sky and the shapes of white clouds, and thank god I did, because they weren’t to be seen for the rest of my stay.

River Jhelum in Srinagar; Dal Lake; Pari Mahal, Srinagar

On only our second evening, we found ourselves engulfed by a thunderstorm and heavy rain. The shopkeeper of the store where we’d been eyeing embroidered purses had taken one look outside to predict a massive thunderstorm with the certainty of a crypto enthusiast. We hadn’t paid much attention, focusing instead on the choices to be made between shapes, colours and patterns of bags. (The patterns were just different kinds of flowers, but choices are choices) Drenched, with dangling shopping bags on our arms, we rushed to our vehicle, and heard the quip for the first time- ‘Bombay ka fashion aur Kashmir ka mausam, dono ka koi bharosa nahi’. Our driver’s comment was precise, a quick look at the weather dispatch for the week made it clear- grey cloudy shadows had been cast on our itinerary. We would later hear the same words repeated by people we interacted with everywhere- waiters, shopkeepers, horse riders.  Dejected, that evening I took out a beautiful hardbound edition of Walter Lawrence’s 19th century administrative handbook- The Valley of Kashmir, one of the two books on Kashmir I had borrowed from a friend and was carrying with me, and turned to the chapter on climate, finding a footnote that read as below:

“The Kashmiris are weather-wise, and do not, like the people of India, consider it presumptuous to make prophecies regarding rain. They believe in our proverb:

Red in the night the shepherds delight

Red in the morning the shepherd’s warning

Obras hetun nar, that is, the clouds have caught fire in the evening, is a sure prelude to fine weather; Nihdau, which is red in the morning, presages rain. White clouds are certain to bring heavy rain; dark clouds mean no rain or light showers.”

‘The Valley of Kashmir’ by Walker R Lawrence

I relayed the counter intuitive finding to my family, and they the next morning to our amused driver. I hadn’t realised then that the footnote wasn’t in Kashmiri. It was an extract from the First Testament in Greek. (In my defence, the two languages share a lot- in history and form) I did notice though how Lawrence made a distinction between people of Kashmir and people of India; but he hadn’t seen the twentieth century and to read into it any further would’ve been presumptuous. Anyhow, this note was the weapon in our hand that could compete with local experience. On the road, whenever we weren’t transfixed by the clear streams, the meadows, the grazing sheep and mules, the sheer weight of green, we looked at the clouds. Whenever the clouds were dark, we’d assume at least a fine morrow and a clear next day to explore; whenever it rained, we attributed it to the light clouds seen last evening. The attempt to predict the weather was a desperate but futile one to stake control over our trip, just like my ambitious but naive attempt to understand the region over a week.

I was trying to study ethnography, culture, history, economy, while also ticking off tourist checklists. I looked at every kind of tree and tasted its fruit- apples on the way to Pahalgam, peaches and cherries in orchards, fields of kesar, an entire garden name after almonds, trees that dropped pine cones in Betaab Valley, trees that had turned into cricket bats, hanging to dry in Anantnag. I became obsessed with little things- like embroidered curtains and carved wooden doors, and a bookshop that took me four days to locate. I took to language to understand a people, noticing different ways to say the same things. I realised how I barely heard local women, so when a woman with a toddler boldly asked for tobacco in a clothes shop, I took notice. I was recommended one local indie artist whose ten songs across three languages I listened to on loop, without understanding their meaning. But that album wasn’t appreciated by the locals around me when I played it. They preferred Punjabi pop.

Embroidered curtains of Kashmir; almond trees in Badaamwari, Srinagar; apple orchards near Pahalgam; Gulshan Bookstore, Srinagar

Everywhere we went, tourists filled corners. We made it impossible for each other to find a frame without a hand or a leg belonging to someone else. Thankfully, technology had enabled our phone cameras to erase the crowd in the background, so our future selves could claim more space, and therefore significance, than we occupied in the moment. Memory itself was self correcting, we now had apps to trim its edges. But what app could edit the memories of events that never occurred? Like the planned picnic in Aru Valley, where we would sit on a sheet we never carried, eat our packed breakfasts, read books while sipping on tea or coffee? Instead, we had spent our time in the valley posing with umbrellas as our props, in front of snow capped peaks eaten up by massive grey clouds and heavy mist, the mountains invisible to any discerning eye, leaving future viewers of those photographs confused whether we were on meadows or flatlands.

Aru Valley, Pahalgam

On our trip to Sonmarg, we had to make a decision- to hike all the way to Thajwas glacier, or ride horses instead. Local intelligence had suggested that walking was possible, but it was raining, a walk would be slippery, and no one else seemed to be on foot. We put on another layer of jackets, found snow boots on rent, bought new pairs of gloves, and decided to mule it. The climb was steep, muddy, slippery; the rain was light but incessant; cold wind was blowing across my face, spraying stray strands of hair from beneath the hood to in front of my eyes. I was trying to understand my horse- did he know what he was doing, when he decided to place one foot on a rock closer to the cliff instead of a muddier interior? Did his four legs give him a better balance? I realised that he wasn’t merely following other horses but his own instinct. Could I trust that instinct? I decided to speak to him. Having not attended any derby to know the fashionable names of horses, I named him a classic Charlie. ‘Charlie, go slow,’ I’d shout when I thought he was getting too confident. ‘Good boy Charlie!’ I’d add, when he got us off a tricky climb. The instructions given to us were limited- bend forward when climbing up, go backwards when climbing down. There were no instructions on how to take photographs when our hands were frozen and mobile phones in the safety of our pockets, none on how to take in the most beautiful view we’d ever see in our life when the focus was on saving it. There were no visual records of this experience, no keepsakes, unless muck on white jeans counted as memories.

Once back in Srinagar, on locating the bookstore I’d been recommended, I picked up Discourses on Kashmir, a collection of essays by Prof Manzoor Ali. There were essays on topics ranging from the origin and evolution of kanger (a hand held hearth) to the Treaty of Amritsar to the bathroom culture in Kashmir and included one on its climate titled ‘Kashmir With or Without Snow’. This last essay began by Prof Ali referencing Lawrence’s book, calling it ‘the Magnum opus on Kashmir’, and mentioned how Kashmiris even in the nineteenth century had declared that the climate was changing. They recalled how in Maharaja Gulab Singh’s time snow fell up to a man’s shoulder, but by Maharaja Ranbir Singh’s time it was only up to their knees. They lamented that the climate of Kashmir was becoming milder and more like Punjab, and Prof Ali echoed those feelings a century later.

‘Jag mein jag sa ho kar reh tu’, sings a beaten Majnu in Hafiz Hafiz, a song written by Irshad Kamil, one of my earworms, ‘sunta reh bas kuch na keh tu’. The solution was compliance, blending in silently. So much in Kashmir was preserved, like a photograph in an old album inside a trunk, unamended, just yellowing at the edges. But like its climate and music, a lot in Kashmir was becoming like the rest of the country. Was it possible to hold on to differences and identity then, or preferable to flow along with the gusts of winds, following the rain clouds? I found no answers to my made up questions. I continued listening to that indie album. A folk song was an ode to the beautiful landscape; there was a song on the idea of home, and while I still couldn't understand most of the lyrics, I could feel the passion, the rage, the resilience. The feelings I had been chasing were being channeled through music. 

The rain meanwhile continued unabashedly. It would provide us a few hours of respite early mornings when we would quickly cover our checklists. We improvised the remaining day according to the weather, either spending it indoors drinking kahwa, trying local breads like shirmal or kulcha or heading out braving and enjoying light showers. Our visit to the Martand Sun Temple left us fully drenched, but our prayers worked and the sun did come out, once we were back in our vehicle. We continued to fail to predict and in turn learnt to go with the flow, leaving missed views or experiences to our next visit.

Kahwa, Shirmal and Kulcha at Chaai Jaai, Srinagar; Martand Sun Temple, Anantanag

Towards the end of our trip we took a gondola ride in Gulmarg. Our guide claimed we were lucky because the weather was clear, snow had been interrupting the rides for the last few days. ‘Bombay ka fashion…’, he began. ‘Kashmir ka mausam,’ we finished for him, having fully experienced these words. ‘Jammu ka driver, Dillii ka aadmi, aurat ka mood..’ he went on, his list of uncertainties went on longer than others. But he wasn’t their prisoner. He moulded the fresh snow from the last three days with swift actions of his hands to make snowmen. I tried to ape him but both my skill and adeptness to low temperatures failed me. 

White clouds in the morning, red sky at dusk in Gulmarg

That last evening at dusk the sky turned red. The view was out of a children’s colouring book- ‘V’ shaped mountains, lightly rolling meadows, huts with slanting roofs dispersed, two birds in the sky and the red sun setting behind. The clouds had caught fire. Obras hetun nar. The attempt to capture that sunset had proven futile, but the journey had been a success. We were leaving the peasants happy, and ourselves too.