Kashmir: paradise (being) lost

Four of us longtime friends made a trip ('customised' package tour) to Kashmir with intentions of basking in nature’s pristine lap, eating delicious food, procuring a few artifacts, and chatting endlessly. Nature’s lap was not pristine. The food was rarely good, mostly nondescript, and in one instance very bad (making the two of us who ate it sick for a couple of days). We had no way of getting away with procuring ‘a few artifacts’: We had to fight off hordes of salesmen (they are all men, many of them unselfconsciously goodlooking in our estimation) before, during, and after our many, not few, purchases. We did chat endlessly, so paisa vasool there!

The winding mountain roads and the stretches of highway are frequently beset with traffic congestion and vehicular exhaust that no tourist blurb will prepare you for. Tourists in paradise spend more time and attention on the pragmatic tasks associated with tourism, such as standing in queues for hours and clinging white-knuckled to a horse’s saddle, than taking in the sights that they are in queues or on horseback for. Some of the tourism-related occupations are protected by unions: Most beauty spots do not permit ‘local sightseeing’ in private vehicles or outside cabs. And there is no public transport to speak of. You have per force to use the expensive local cabs to get around, and pay per location on the itinerary, with strict limits on how long you can spend at any location, so that you do not detain the cab driver at a place whose beauty or sales talent you are lost in for an hour or more.

For all the protection of tourist guides and transporters however, the big lacuna in tourism in Kashmir is the lack of attention paid to retaining and nurturing the cleanliness and beauty of the locales. Unlike other areas that see throngs of visitors, and have developed, and to quite an extent enforced, stringent policies on disposables and littering, Kashmir seems to have left this to the inhabitants – locals and tourists – who evidently do not care overmuch. The beauty spots are dotted with plastic litter, horse dung, and slush, and swarming with ‘guides’ and salesmen. To approach anything like the Kashmir in our minds (from the movies of the 60s and 70s), you need to tilt your eyes, and ideally also your head, up by about 30 degrees so as to be able to view only distant vistas of conifers and snow-capped mountains, and miss all the litter. For the haseen vaadiyan, you need to move to ‘faraway look’ mode from the car/lookout spot since tilting your head up will not serve. The streams are delightful (especially from a distance, and with the litter-strewn banks cropped out), as are the sun and moon, and distant patches of green and white on the mountains. Natural beauty spots cannot stay beautiful in the face of thoughtless littering, unless they are active volcanoes (which people generally refrain from littering, so they don’t count).

With the plentiful litter and the rarer burning pile of rubbish, we were naturally hesitant to try the pay-and-use toilets at every tourist location. But to our pleasant surprise, the toilets were clean, if not odourless.

On Dal Lake, one has no hope of being able to sing even one stanza of a boat song undisturbed by a salesboat that will draw up speedily and silently, presenting a pleasant salesman who will draw your attention to the far cheaper goods that he has for sale than you would come across elsewhere in your travels. Everything from so-called saffron to sarees is cheaper on Dal Lake than on land far from Srinagar. One remarkable experience we had on Dal Lake was that although it was bursting with weeds that special clean-up boats were scooping up with lacrosse-racquet like tools, and tons of organic domestic waste and sewage were being contributed by the hundreds of houseboats every minute to the lake, it was not stinky.

Guides in sharp contrast to salesmen are gruff, even rude, and very aggressive about your need for their services without which you supposedly cannot negotiate the terrain – something that is proven wrong in minutes after you engage them when you espy others who didn’t succumb to their haranguing managing quite all right guideless. An astute observation that Posh made (on this, her second trip to Kashmir) was that Kashmir seems to be popular only with Indians (we saw no more than 2-3 non-Indian tourists in all our time there), and that that might be at the root of the non-obsequious/non-unctuous/customer-unfriendly deportment of the ‘guides’. Not that Indians were able to take all the aggressive marketing in their stride – we heard many fruitless gripes about tourists being ‘milked’ and hounded, but that is where it stopped. A far cry from the customer-is-king pampering one sees of prospective and current customers in other tourism-inclined states of India. On my observation that one transporter (horse supplier) seemed impatient and angry (euphemisms for rude), his minion explained that he was neither impatient nor angry, and that this was just how they conversed. A novel argument that we heard from many guides and transporters (horse/sled suppliers) was that we had clearly spent a lot to get to Kashmir (one person even suggested that we had spent lakhs on the trip!), and we shouldn’t hesitate to spend just a few hundred more on whatever they were offering.

Everywhere we went, photographers and their aides showed us albums of tourists dressed in gaudy velvet pherans and colourful scarves with chunky (faux) silver jewellery. We did as directed on the third day of our trip, posing for group photographs and a few singles, but not availing ourselves of opportunities to pose with fluffy lambs, rabbits, or snowy pigeons, or the ubiquitous plastic flowers in baskets and empty waterpots. Maybe we will appear in an album in the future, especially as bait for groups of friends travelling together!

Practically every hotel and restaurant we went to had artificial flowers for decoration, incongruous in a place famed for lovely real flowers, and beautiful embroidered and carved flowers besides. We would appear to have visited Kashmir in a suboptimal season for flowers though – the tulips had just closed shop, the crocuses were months away, and we were not in the right zone for the lavender that we saw posters of right from the airport. What we did get to see in the gardens we visited were masses of pansies, irises, roses, snowballs, asters, and daffodils, and quite a few other brilliantly coloured flowers that we couldn’t catch the names of.

Velvet and wood-carving seem to be popular everywhere – in hotels, all over houseboats, and in shikaras too. Papier-mâché of high levels of artistry is another visual treat and generally affordable. Embroidery can be large and striking, or fine and beautiful, but does not come cheap. We stocked up on walnuts, dried fruit, some seemingly magical Kashmiri rajma (that is said to need only 5 minutes of soaking – not yet verified by us), single garlic cloves that look like apricot kernels, and the ‘sweat of stones’ (shilajit), and of course, saffron. In the non-edibles category, sarees, shawls, stoles, the softest cashmere (sweater), embroidered curtain material, and papier-mâché articles formed all our loot from Kashmir. As dutiful Indians, Kavitha and I bought cricket bats made of Kashmiri willow – one small souvenir-ish one and one usable by adults for a real game – from a factory where they were made. We were also treated (on my request) to the sight and feel of a replica of Sachin Tendulkar’s bat.

The famed Kashmiri cuisine is not easy to come by in many places, and where it is available, there is generally little besides a few mutton dishes. Fresh, local vegetarian dishes and light, everyday foods are off the table. Chilli powder is of a rich colour, but not very pungent; salt is easily in excess for health and taste; and sugar is at a healthy and close to tasteless low. The kahwa is delicious, and the desserts bland. Menus are crammed with the usual pan-Indian Punjabi/Mughlai food.

We had fresh apple juice (how could we exit Kashmir without) just outside an orchard of cute, trimmed trees with bottles of sugar water tied to some branches as artificial pollination promoters. The juice was nice, but the information that we received of ‘at least 10-15 pesticides’ to be applied to the trees, and several other chemicals as fertilisers besides was decidedly not nice.

Despite our keenness to visit, or at least view, the Hazratbal mosque, we did not. Our driver consistently assigned it low priority on our daily lists of spots we wanted to visit, and showed no enthusiasm to even drive past it, perhaps deciding for us that four Hindu women have no pressing need to view a mosque. We barely managed two of the many gardens in the city, overcoming his reluctance to drive even a few metres beyond his daily quota. We glimpsed a gurudwara on our way one day, and a board indicating the way to a temple. No churches or synagogues. The one holy spot that we well and truly visited was the Shankaracharya temple. For this, we argued with our driver, who would take us no farther than the foot of the hill that the temple was on, then with an auto driver who demanded an exorbitant amount to take us to the gate of the temple, but discharged us a third of the distance away citing a traffic jam on the hill. We then trudged up the hill, and proceeded to labour up the 250 steep steps (it seemed like more). The path to the temple was cleaner than any other place we saw in Kashmir. I cannot be sure that faith can move mountains, but I can certainly confirm that faith can move one up a mountain. I, accomplished in neither the faith nor the fitness departments, made unimpressive progress up the steps, using many of the broad ledges flanking the steps to catch my breath and sip water, giving me all the leisure to observe elderly/out of shape/juvenile/apparently unwell people, and those in uncomfortable footwear forging ahead to worship. Perhaps the strenuous climb kept the devotees disciplined, and they could express their usual selves only at the conclusion of the climb: After they got to the temple premises and shed their footwear, and photographed themselves and companions against the temple or the view of Srinagar laid out all around the base of the hill, some demonstrated an urgency in ascending the last 5-6 steps to the sanctum sanctorum, overtaking others, and sticking on in the sanctum sanctorum, prolonging their communion with the deity, even photographing the Shivalinga (expressly disallowed). When asked about the Sharada peeth in the area, the priest used an unexpected term to indicate its location – Azad Kashmir! An elderly Sikh man was selling holy(ish) Hindu books, and beads and idols at a table along the steps. All the taxi and auto drivers transporting people to and from the temple were Muslim. It was a nice tableau of some of the religious diversity in the place.

It was another story altogether with gender. There were hardly any women or girls to be seen, outdoors or even indoors in shops, hotels, and restaurants. Locals don’t loiter - female locals, that is. This is a huge red flag to me. When I see girls and women using public spaces with confidence and comfort, for gainful employment or aimless occupation, I think highly of the place on this count. When the only females I see on the streets are students hurrying to or from educational institutions, and women escorting children and groceries home, the place falls like a stone in my estimation. Kashmir is a clear non-starter in gender-egalitarianism.

A recommendation to those dreaming of a lovely vacation in Kashmir: Have a stroke of good luck, find a pro-active knowledgeable guide and places to stay and visit in offbeat locations, and use polarised glasses that cull the litter from your vistas. Or gather your friends at home or at a resort (in a non-Kashmir location) and watch a pre-disposable-plastics-era Kapoor movie set in Kashmir instead.