Finally disgorged at Srinagar bus station in the early hours of 23 June, the two British couples were glad to be stationary at last, and gulped in the cool air. Around them brightly painted buses revved and rattled into life, while local women jostled to board them for distant towns and villages – Kupwara, Handwara, Baramulla, Pulwama – their arms overflowing with children, shopping bags and live poultry. A few of the women wore black abayas or pale-blue burqas, but most only covered their heads with scarves. ‘Good Luck’, the hand-drawn signs above the bus drivers’ cabins read. It all felt very foreign, but Keith, Julie, Paul and Cath were soon distracted by the breathtaking mountains that ringed the city, the crest of peaks clear in the crystalline early-morning light, a delicate, craggy line of snow-tipped summits meeting a sapphire sky.
However tense they felt about being in the much-talked-about hotbed of Srinagar, Paul and Cath had already decided they were going nowhere in a hurry. Over the course of the journey, Julie and Keith had talked them into staying a night or two, and as they collected their luggage from the belly of the bus, a heckling crowd of houseboat owners massed. There were so few tourists and too many berths. Soon they were surrounded by jabbering touts, who pressed laminated photos and testimonials into their hands. Eventually the British tourists plumped for the Holiday Inn, an intricately carved wooden houseboat on Dal Lake. The name raised a laugh, and the owner, a middle-aged man called Bashir, had a friendly face and promised electricity and hot water.
Bashir led them to his friend’s waiting taxi, and as they drove through the city the houseboat owner pointed out the centuries-old wooden houses owned by Pandits, the valley’s indigenous Hindu inhabitants, who claimed to trace their history back thousands of years. These days their homes were locked, deserted and collapsing, the owners having fled Kashmir as the local war had become tinged with sectarian savagery. Could they stop? Bashir said he’d explain about the Pandits later. In the old city quarter of Nowhatta they passed the minarets of Jamia Masjid, built by Sultan Sikander in the fifteenth century, one of Srinagar’s most significant mosques, that could hold thirty thousand worshippers. Was it worth visiting? Bashir said he could not stop. Now was not good. He would show them its magnificent courtyard and hall of 370 wooden pillars ‘another time’. Wrestling their way through the back streets of Maisuma to Lal Chowk, he pointed to the ancient, delicately carved fretwork of the wooden shrine to Shah-e-Hamden, which he said contained ‘the secrets of all Islam’, and which would be wonderful to visit another year, for reasons he would tell them later. Bashir was finding it difficult to disguise his nervousness at having foreigners in the car, although outside the market hawkers, mothers with young children shopping for cheap Chinese blankets, old men reading newspapers pegged outside a shop, seemed oblivious to the heavily armed Indian soldiers milling all around them.
Paul and Cath could not get over the overwhelming security presence. The place was heaving with armed men and their bullet-marked, rock-battered military vehicles. Julie too was intimidated. Everything, from the old cinema to the old post office building, from the sports stadium to Raj-era hotels and villas, had been cloaked by vast khaki nets, while beside every fortified army camp and pillbox some New Delhi-wallah had pasted yet another colossal hoarding declaring, ‘If Paradise is on Earth, it is here, it is here’. Perhaps this also related to another time.
Everyone’s mood lifted when they pulled up on Boulevard Road, with its bakeries, shikara moorings and photographic studios that had last been decorated in the sixties. To the left of them Dal Lake shimmered, and beyond, through the haze, the mountains unfurled. Bashir pointed to a houseboat 150 metres out in the water, and whistled for a shikara. One skimmed over, and they settled beneath its curtained canopy as the boatman rowed them like a Kashmir gondolier, humming a lol-gevun, a local love song. Boys dressed in jeans and Western T-shirts waved from passing skiffs. An old man in a skullcap drew up. ‘Chrysanthemums, madam?’ he asked the women. ‘Silver? Shawls?’ They found themselves smiling as they shooed him away, having finally arrived somewhere that felt gentle and evocative. Everyone was reassuringly attentive. ‘Welcome to your home!’ cried Bashir as the shikara glided to a halt at the Holiday Inn. The entire family had gathered to greet the guests. Cath and Paul were overwhelmed, and Julie and Keith thought it the most beautiful place in the world. Their eyes were drawn to the pink and purple lotus flowers that covered the water’s edge. ‘It sent tingles down your spine,’ Julie recalled.
Inside, the Holiday Inn was a confection of cut-glass chandeliers and carved walnut, with a panelled corridor leading to six spacious double bedrooms. For the next few days they would stay in style, waited on hand and foot as if they had been transported back to the time when the British fled roasting Delhi for the cooler mountainous climes, and these boats had first been built. Bashir’s unseen wife produced steaming gusturba (boiled Kashmiri meatballs), pilau rice and curd flecked with jeera. His sons carried it all to the polished dining-room table in chipped porcelain servers. At night the rooms were heated by wood-burners, the bedsheets warmed by a ‘winter wife’, the universal Kashmiri term for a hot-water bottle.
After a day, none of them wanted to leave, as life on the lake floated by. Paul and Cath lay on the boat’s decked roof, writing postcards home. ‘Dear Mum and Dad,’ Paul wrote in green ink, ‘It took us 30 hours to get here and I (oops!) we are now staying on a houseboat for £3 a night. I’m sitting on the roof of the houseboat writing this to you. Srinagar is very nice but there are political problems. It’s a bit like N. Ireland.’ For Bob and Dianne Wells back in Blackburn, the fact that their son was writing postcards seemed to be a sign that he was settling down. ‘Paul was never one to put pen to paper,’ Bob says. ‘Kashmir must have made a significant impression on him.’ While Paul and Cath lazed, Julie and Keith hired a skiff to explore the shallow lake brimming with floating allotments, exploring the broken camel-back bridges and pontoons of a Mughal Venice that had run out of luck, snapping photographs of each other to send back home: Keith taking the oars as they set out across a silvery expanse of water, Julie grinning happily in a white T-shirt, her hair bunched up, making her look years younger.
In the evenings they all met in the carpeted living room of the Holiday Inn to compare stories. On the first night Bart Imler, a solo Canadian traveller, introduced himself. He was looking to team up with another party and go trekking somewhere near Pahalgam. When Bashir overheard the discussion, a sell began, softer than chamois. He got out his oversized photo album, and started leafing through pictures of tourists waving against the striking backdrops of Sonamarg, Gulmarg and Aru, smiling foreigners sitting astride tough little mountain ponies, sooty faces around a campfire at night, trekkers with their arms around each other. There were dozens of satisfied comments in the guestbook, too: ‘Dear Bashir, we thank you and your family for being so welcoming and kind and giving us the holiday of a lifetime. We will be back soon.’
It didn’t take long for everyone to cave in. Paul and Cath would postpone Ladakh so they could all climb to the Kolahoi Glacier, a high-altitude ice sheet in the mountains above Pahalgam which Bashir described as one of south Kashmir’s must-see destinations. The expedition would take three days up and two days down, with a stop-off in the Meadow. Had they heard about the Meadow, Bashir asked, getting out more photographs. Keith and Julie recalled seeing photos of it in the Indian Embassy in Sri Lanka: a campsite where the grass was as soft as shahtoosh. Snow leopards ran wild up there, Bashir said, along with the burly Himalayan black bear, while the forests were alive with hangul stags, chiru antelopes, monal pheasants and even the odd (and very rare) blue sheep. Their guides would provide everything. They would fish for trout, fried in butter and Kashmiri almonds on a roaring fire, and tether milk and beer bottles to rocks in the rushing river to keep them cold.
Was there any danger? There were no real risks, Bashir assured them, adding that the price was extremely reasonable. He would take them