Wails in the Valley

A grim reminder of the writer’s loss of home

I was taken by surprise when I got the invitation. I, as a health reporter, was invited for a weekend conference to Srinagar. Of course, I jumped at it — partly because I was dying to get away from the routine stories in the Capital and because, this was perhaps one of the rare opportunities I would have to visit the state.

But a medical conference in Kashmir? That was a bit strange. It flumoxed me, as it did everybody in office.‘‘Is it anything to do with the ceasefire lapsing?’’ a friend asked. ‘‘I wish it was,’’ I replied, ‘‘it would be so exciting!’’ As it turned out, I wasn’t wide of the mark.

‘‘What do you think?’’ asked the organiser of the event, flourishing his hands towards the lush lawns of the Grand Palace Hotel, with the mountains and the Dal lake (trimmed by the useless ‘Save Dal lake’ or ‘Love Dal lake’ signs), as its backdrop. ‘‘Now do you think it is unsafe?’’ he carried on rhetorically, ‘‘I’ve come here so many times that I decided to hold the conference here because I wanted everybody to see it.’’

Standing there, breathing the crisp summer air of Srinagar’s evening, away from the chaos of Delhi, I believed him. But only for a little while. Until my eyes took in the scores of armoured vehicles which were parked in the parking lot, until I remembered the armed guards who accompanied each and every vehicle that brought us from the airport, and until I took in the empty streets of the city even though it was only the middle of the afternoon.

I should have been the last person to have been nervous of being in a ‘volatile’ place like Kashmir. After all, I’m from the Northeast where my parents grew up and then left, perhaps to dodge a life full of ethnic attacks and death threats (which other members of the family did receive).

All this, however, had not prepared me for Kashmir. I could see where the organiser’s supreme confidence was stemming from though. When you have the chief minister’s SP (security) watching your back while you’re taking a boat-ride (which was incidentally also in the CM’s boat, bearing a red light), and a posse of armoured vehicles stopping traffic and following you on your sightseeing trips, it’s easy to turn around and say,‘‘If we can visit Kashmir, why can’t everybody else in the country?’’

J&K chief minister Farooq Abdullah was of course very keen to drive home the same point. ‘‘I’m so glad you could come and see how it is here, so that you could carry the message back home,’’he said. His song-and-dance performance lasted over three hours and the doctors were lapping it all up. But I was a difficult customer.

‘‘You should come here for the holidays,’’ they said to me. It would have been a great proposition with the brilliant weather and, of course, the natural beauty of the Valley. And, of course, all those houseboats lined up on the lake with their ‘vacant’ signs displayed far too prominently, were a shame.

But I know that I will not be able to walk on streets bereft of women and children or boisterous teenagers. I hated to see the desperation in the eyes of the shikarawallahs, who reduce their price from Rs 200 to Rs 50 per half hour without any persuasion at all, or the salesmen who tell you that they have stopped stocking pashmina shawls because there’s nobody to buy them. I hate the fact that it is not just paranoid tourists who tell you that you should not be out at night, but the locals themselves, and the helpful tip of a kind autorickshaw driver was to tell anybody who asks us our religion, that we were Muslims. And we were actually asked that when we went to visit a mosque.

That is, perhaps, the reason why I wouldn’t choose Kashmir for a holiday. It doesn’t just remind me of the pain that those in the Valley go through every day, it reminds me of the loss of my home.