Back to Kashmir

“ You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again” wrote travel writer Bill Bryson, in his book, The Lost Continent, Travels in Small Town America. The final part of this line looped in my mind as Go Air flight G8/807, landed in my hometown of Srinagar. I was coming home again, back to this city of my summer holidays, after 209 months.

What made me come back to Kashmir, during the peak winter season, was my boyhood dream of seeing a snowfall. Till I turned twelve, we visited Kashmir every year for one month during the summer holidays. And it did not snow in summers. In 1989 terrorism struck and it wasn’t considered safe to visit the valley anymore. Since then the perception has stayed.

As soon as I got out from the flight I was hit by a gust of cold and clean air. This is something that one does not experience in the midst of concrete that one chooses to live in. From the airport as I headed towards the hill station of Gulmarg, I realised that this was not the Srinagar I grew up in. This city like other major cities across India is in the middle of a real estate boom, with construction happening everywhere. The roads which once looked familiar wore an unfamiliar look. As we passed through the area where my grandparents used to live, I could not for all my trying locate the lane where our house used to be. The house had been long burnt down and from all the new houses that had sprung up in the locality, I wondered which one of these houses had been built on the top of ours. Had things changed beyond recognition or had I stayed away for too long?

I had been warned of the army and para military forces carrying out search operations every few kilometers. But nothing like that happened. Yes, one could see an occasional soldier standing on the street with a gun in his hand, but the bunkers constructed to fight terrorism seemed to have been largely done away with. The valley it seems is willing to give peace a chance.

After about two hours we drove into a totally white Gulmarg, covered under snow. There was just snow, snow and more snow. The greenery that this place is famous for during summers had totally gone missing except for the leaves of pine trees which could still be seen. The sunsets and the sunrises set the sky ablaze and made the snow shine. It was like seeing a post card in real life. And if we all were allowed to take just one holiday in our lives, this is the place we should be going to.

On the second day of my stay at Gulmarg, I took a Gondola (cable car) to Kongdoor. And there at 10,050 feet above the sea level I saw my first snowfall. It lasted for all of ten minutes. Shahjahan got it just right, a few millenia back when he said said, “Agar firdous bar rui-e-zameen ast, Hamin ast-o-hamin ast-o-hamin ast!" ( if there is paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here) or should I say what Paullo Coellho said in the Alchemist, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”.