KASHMIR

As you leave Srinagar airport, you pass a sign saying Welcome to Paradise. Then you pass dugouts with sandbags, the occasional tank, and hundreds of camouflaged Indian army soldiers, with their weaponry on full display. This is paradise with a twist.

The November air is clean and crisp. The drive to the houseboat, on a lake on the other side of town, takes about half an hour. Apart from the military presence, the traffic is relaxed, and the contrast with Delhi stark. The houseboat has a homely, familiar feel, full of ornate, upholstered furniture. Apparently, when the British got to Kashmir, they were refused permission to build on land. So they constructed houseboats instead. Apart from a crude but invaluable iron stove plonked in the middle of the living room, it felt like a late Victorian dream. Through an open window in the next door boat I caught sight of a woman praying. The boat after hers is called the Buckingham Palace.

In spite of a few Sikh and Hindu temples, Srinagar is almost exclusively Muslim, with mosques on seemingly every corner. At dawn, the sound of prayers emanating from various mosques echoes across the lake, generating a weird and haunting sound. In town, the omnipresent religion feels like a benign presence. We were shown around the city’s main mosque, the Jamia Masjid, and seven hundred years old. Within its 370 wooden pillars, it is apparently capable of holding 37, 333 people, precisely. The mosque has a sedate feel, open on most sides to the elements. Threading your way through the pillars feels a bit like walking through a forest of oaks. In some corners, glass windows are being introduced, but Shaquil, our guide, (‘like the basketball player’), told us that in the Winter months, when the temperature plummets, people bring earthenware warming pots which they place under their coats as they pray. These pots are endemic, bulging beneath the long, heavy robe worn by both men and women. In the Winter, Shaquil said, everyone in Kashmir is pregnant.

The city streets have the inevitable Indian bustle, but its less frenetic than in the larger cities. Tourists are thin on the ground, (we didn’t see any in town). At the white Hazratbal Mosque, further away from the centre, which claims to house a hair of the prophet Mohammed’s, people openly stared at two white Westerners. In 1995, six tourists were kidnapped and four killed, part of a ten year conflict in Kashmir. The Indian government still advises against visiting, but gradually, over the last two years, tourists are making their way there. Kashmiris say that the government stance represents a continued punishment of the region.

On a visit to a carpet manufacturers, the sad-eyed owner, who claimed to represent a co-operative representing 5000 families, explained how the lack of tourist capital was helping to kill off an age-old tradition. After showing us remarkably intricate carpets, which can take up to six years to make, demonstrating the way the quality rose as the knots per inch went from 400 to 800, he said it was a dying art, with children now reluctant to follow the family tradition. Each family he represented possessed its own individual designs, handed down over the generations, but the conflict has meant that demand has dried up, and he said that many designs would soon die out as the families look to other means of making ends meet.

The strong military presence feels oppressive, but it also hints as the severity of the conflict. Standing on a bridge over the Jehlum River river, Shaquil said that for years there was a constant sound of gunfire somewhere in the city. He said that God was punishing Kashmir, observing that when he was young, you could drink from the Jhelum, but now its as polluted as any Indian river. Another man, Jimmy, told us how, in 1995, forty houses in his village were destroyed by the army. They have still not been rebuilt, and his family and fellow villagers now live in huts without electricity.

Beneath the normalcy of Srinagar’s day to day surface, there is much that needs to be done to re-create Paradise in Kashmir. The scars are still raw. Srinagar is just as cricket mad as anywhere in India, with kids playing on river banks and street corners, in spite of the cold.

Looking to understand Kashmiri attitudes, I asked Shaquil to what extent he considered himself Indian. He was evasive, but when we started to talk cricket, and I asked him if he followed the Indian team, he smiled, and said that 80 per cent of Kashmiris would be far more likely to support Pakistan than India.

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