The Martlet

As dusk washed out the day, I sat stowed away in the hold of my houseboat, wrapped in a blanket and drinking cardamom tea. A muezzin’s call to prayer wafted through the window, and in my head I traced its origin from one of the many mosques on the shore. This is what I preoccupied myself with. My days in Kashmir were tranquil.

But that tranquility was a spell, and the images I saw on the television screen in front of me shattered it. Soldiers savagely beat rioters, fired tear gas. A protestor, face obscured by his bandana, grabbed a sizzling tear gas canister and hurled it back toward the line of encroaching soldiers. I wondered whether his hand was burned, and then realized that it was probably worth it for him.

Kashmir is like heaven and hell, mixed so thoroughly it becomes hard to tell the difference. If I looked out my window, I saw swathes of floating lilies and kingfishers. If I looked farther, I saw a ring of slums lining the shore. Farther than that, I could see the riots, and if I strained my ears, I could hear machine gun fire. The gunfire stopped at night, when the rioters went home and the stray dogs took over.

On May 29 a young pregnant woman named Neelofar Jan, and her sister-in-law, Aasiya Jan, left a village just south of the city I was staying in to tend their orchard. They never came home.

Neelofar’s husband, Shakeel Ahmed Ahangar, rallied his neighbours, and together they fanned out to search for the women. After several hours, they contacted the police.

At dawn, the police found the bodies of the girls a kilometre from each other on the banks of the Rambiara Nullah. Aasiya’s brother, Zahoor Ahmad, helped retrieve the bodies. He said that one was naked, while the other was partially undressed. Both, he said, looked like they had died a violent death.

A neighbour told the family that he had seen an army patrol come through the area where the girls were murdered minutes before it happened. By the time doctors had conducted a post-mortem, tension was already simmering between residents and the local police. When the doctors confirmed that the two girls had been raped and murdered by several persons, the police who were supervising the post-mortem forced the doctors to recant their statements, confiscated the bodies, and evicted the family from the hospital.

The family told everyone who would hear, and a spontaneous riot exploded around the hospital. It carried into the village, and then, town by town, like it had been wired by a demolition crew, it blew the entire Kashmir valley to pieces.

The next day, I should have left. Instead, I walked around.

One of the first things a person notices about Srinagar is that barbed wire has infested the place. It coils around the banks and government offices, under the bridges, through the parks, around the road blocks, and around everything interesting about Kashmir’s history, so I had to follow it.

First I followed it up a mountain, on the side of which I lost it in snaggles of juniper and cypress. I picked it up when it re-emerged to twine itself around a series of roadblocks, where bored soldiers were shaking down anyone who tried to pass.

When I got to them, they winked at me, waggled their heads, and I walked in without getting searched. Beyond them was Shankaracharya, a 2,000 year-old temple dedicated to the lord Shiva, and beyond that was Srinagar, laid out blinking and writhing in the valley below like some deep-sea creature stranded out of water.

Though the Hindus who built this temple are gone, pilgrims come up to visit it from the plains outside the Kashmir Valley in Jammu. They pray, and lift their children up so they can ring a bell over the incense-drenched altar that lies in the center. In the peace about the place, it’s easy to forget that Kashmir is no longer Hindu, or that this is the 21st century, and that Shankaracharya himself, the Hindu philosopher whom the place was named after, is not meditating underneath the fig tree that sits, like a banzai, on the edge of the cliff overlooking town.

Shankaracharya is a footprint, and a testament to Kashmir’s multi-cultural past. And it isn’t the only one. The city Shankaracharya stands in was itself founded by a Buddhist emperor. The name Kashmir comes from a Hindu legend.

Even Alexander the Great left his footprint in the curly-haired, toga-clad statues of Buddha that litter the countryside. So the question is, how have things become the way they are?

The television flickered again. It told me the number of injured — 56 — and then the number of dead — one, a man my age, named Nisar Ahmad Mir, who died of a brain hemorrhage after a tear gas canister slammed into his skull.

In the footage of his funeral procession, his ruined head is wrapped in a Pakistani flag and his body lies on what might be the same stretcher he died in. The mourners who carry his body all have bandanas over their mouths. When the military shows up and starts spraying them with tear gas, I find out why.

Separatist leaders have called a general strike. The Indian government has imposed a curfew. Srinagar is halted. The shops all have their metal shutters barred to the world, and rioters have barricaded themselves into their neighbourhoods with piles of old tires, rusty barrels, chunks of concrete. The only signs of life are old men drinking cardamom tea on their porches and children playing cricket in the dust. The city seems to be struggling to breathe.

The next day, I followed the trail of barbed wire up to the terraced, shade-laced gardens of Shalimar Bagh. I want to know why Kashmir has become the way it has.

Shalimar Bagh was built by the Mughal emperor Jehangir in 1641 A.D. for his beloved wife Nur Jahan, and it too is infested with barbed wire. The wire crawls like a foreign vine over the orchards, through the flowers, around the marble pillars in between which Nur Jahan would have lounged in purdah with her retinue, perhaps eating fruit.

Jehangir built Shalimar Bagh because his family was from the parched steps of Central Asia, so to them, Kashmir, with its cool alpine breezes and frigid rain was paradise. As I fingered the barbed wire, I couldn’t help but wonder if Jehangir would have been saddened that this metal now chokes his paradise. So I asked him. And there he was, glowing in front of me.

He spoke some obscure 17th century dialect of Urdu, so I couldn’t understand him, but I gathered that he was saddened by the sight. I wondered who he blames: the British, for carving up the world with imaginary lines that made sense only to them? India, for invading Kashmir? Pakistan, for sponsoring terrorism? Or how about the international community, for arming both sides with nukes? Or maybe the U.N., for all its non-binding resolutions and useless diplomacy?

Kali, with her many arms, might have done better, but early on in his tirade, Jehangir will run out of fingers to point with. I guess I should have had a vision of someone else.