![]() ![]() Even this event has triggered contempt among largely Muslim Kashmiris for their Hindu overlords, with accusations that the government’s rescue and aid response has targeted foreign tourists and high-level delegates ahead of local residents.īut despite his disdain for India, Younis is savvy enough to count the blessings that are returning to his state, in the form of Indian tourists, in the form of curious foreigners who had long sworn off this terrifyingly beautiful, dangerous parcel of land wedged into the Himalayas. More than 200 people are dead or missing, houses have been sucked into the Jhelum River, and tourist attractions have been cut off by floodwaters. Most recently, the state has been struck by a natural cruelty – the worst floods to hit the region in 50 years. ![]() Peace has come to Kashmir, but it’s a tentative, fragile peace, one that is occasionally shattered by incursions in the border regions and riots right here in the city of Srinagar. My father told me, “I grabbed you and ran”.’ ‘My father told me when I was seven months old the army came into our house and beat everyone – ladies, gents, everyone. ‘Oh, that time was terrible', he recalls. Younis was born in 1991, he tells me, at a time when 200 to 300 Kashmiris were perishing each day in conflict between the Indian military and Kashmiri separatists. Kashmiris are certainly a people who bristle at their proximity to potentially hostile states – ‘Pakistan is 175 kilometres away, China is 470 kilometres away', Younis says – the fracturing of their once-princely state into three pieces in 1947, and the inception of one of those pieces, the state now known as Jammu and Kashmir, into the ‘colonising’ nation of India (the two others are administered by Pakistan and China respectively). This place is the product of a divisive and bloody political history, one too complex for the casual observer such as myself to fully comprehend. He pauses, then says, ‘But nobody likes Kashmiris.’ It is a very beautiful place and here we have : electricity grids, land, fruits.’ Lest I’ve arrived in India’s most northerly state of Jammu and Kashmir with ill-formed ideas, young Younis swiftly apprises me of the virtues of his homeland: ‘Pakistan wants Kashmir, China wants Kashmir, India wants Kashmir. He has olive skin and sleek black hair and grey-blue eyes which are a surprise at first in this land of dark stares but which will become a soothing familiarity in the days to come. My guide’s name is Younis he’s in his twenties and he wears a stylised jacket and a pair of vivid yellow moccasins. Paradise though this place is, I’m nonetheless a rare sight for the men crowding about the airport’s entrance: for many decades western tourists have shunned this place, and my presence is a sign that something has shifted, that things might just be returning to normal. He peels his lanky frame from the fence on which he’s been leaning and lopes towards me, hand outstretched. Emerging from the terminal, I encounter a wall of indistinguishable Kashmir men, but I’m able to separate them out from my guide by the instant recognition he himself registers at the sight of the white woman dragging her bag behind her into the weak afternoon sunlight. It should come as no surprise that this place swarms with armed soldiers, but still it’s unsettling. My fellow passengers – dark-skinned and therefore spared this inconvenience – have collected theirs and are draining out of the suffocating terminal and into northern India’s thin and rarefied air. My lone bag goes round and round and round the baggage conveyor. My Indian tourist visa, securely pasted into my passport, is of no use here in Kashmir, it seems. I grope about in my bag for a pen, pin the officious form against a peeling concrete wall and spill my foreign details onto it. At Srinagar’s time-warp airport I’m apprehended by a rifle-wielding soldier and told to fill in a foreigners’ form. ![]() I feel that I’ve landed in a different country. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |