The Vale of Kashmir

Indian cities do sleep and driving through the dark streets of Delhi was a quick trip to the airport with almost no traffic. The roadway was clean compared to the airport road in Mumbai. I saw a star high up above the horizon and that was a good omen. I always hope for clear weather when planning to fly. Inside the terminal which was nothing elaborate but was well scrubbed, I saw attentive adult and sleepy kids, which are what you’d expect at somewhere shortly after five in the morning. While I waited to go through the hoops and jumps of check-in and security, I looked for the dhoti men. Several women out of the hundreds wore some form of the sari but it was nearly boarding time before I saw the only man, who was probably in his sixties, wearing the wrap around garment. In another generation or two except for the country people, I suspect dhotis will be worn only by politicians. Saris will last because they show off what wants to be shown and hides pretty well what the user doesn’t want you to see. Indians are slowly getting fat and the women have always been pregnant. I had a flash of insight that I’m in a nation of 1.2 billion people and I’d see a dozen times the number of pregnant women on a July day in the U.S. than I would see on the streets of India. The Indians invented the maternity dress. And while the sari is something that bothers me at seeing all this flowing garb set in a dump of a street or sitting in close proximity of whirling sprockets on the back of a “two wheeler,” some women do look like a pleasant dream as they float across the room.
There was a heavy haze across the tarmac but a blue sky overhead. I hoped to see the mountains. Train travel is great for the up-close look at a country but a view from an airplane is a magic carpet to see the overall lay of the land. The last time I flew the world was covered with cloud and I was stuck with a channel surfer who was alternating between praying and falling asleep on my shoulder. We had a full flight but in the draw of boarding passes I got a window seat.
On the flight to Jammu we cleared the haze which was thick but not endless. This covering was different than what I usually see, in that it was capped by a white layer of cloud. The sky was its normal deep blue that you rarely see standing on the ground in temperate zones or the tropics. It’s the blue seen by mountain climbers and pilots. Towns and villages lay below with their flat roofs squared but each house at an odd angle with its neighbor. Since the buildings predate in many cases the invention of city planning…or even after planning had become common, the odd angles show either that no one paid attention to the planner or instead paid off a city official who could had enforced the planner’s decision.
When we lifted above the clouds on leaving Jammu, I could see the snow capped peaks of the Himalayan foothills. It was exciting to be flying toward “the roof of the world” but even better, I would not have to think about a bus driver’s judgment as to what catches us on hilltops or coming round the next curve when we are in the right lane. We flew on beneath a deep blue sky while below lay a few clouds, mostly haze, and the beginning of the peaks. As we proceeded, I could make out something of an abyss off the left side of the plane’s direction. The mountains ran in parallel lines but between the ridges lay a blue nothingness. Whatever was down there was buried in haze. It could be the Kashmir Valley but we didn’t seem to flying into one end and then heading for Srinagar and Lake Dahl. We were flying perpendicular to that route. So if this were not the Valley of Kashmir and if each end of this rift were closed, this great valley could hold enough water to be called a sea, rather than a lake. Later upon checking the breadth it measured 35 kilometers. We droned on, the near mountains now below us, and I still could make out nothing beneath the haze but the thought occurred to me that if this weren’t the right valley, then the “Vale of Kashmir” must really be remarkable. The poetic license here with the name is Lowell Thomas’s, who over fifty years brought a Cinerama production crew into the valley and presented an introduction to Americans of a little know corner of the Earth. I could never decide whether the word was “vale” or “veil.” This part of India is predominately Moslem and was he likening the haze to a woman’s veil? However that may be unless we banked to the left, at this speed we’d be beyond the 35 kilometers and have a new set of mountain peaks to look down on.
We banked and turned left. This was the Vale of Kashmir! The veil covered the valley floor on which held a lake with a city along its shores. I could see the washes along the mountainsides but the stream beds faded beneath the haze, not connecting to another river and that river with another along the valley floor all of which lead to a lake. But then with the pressure increasing in my ears, the haze gave way and in a few minutes, not only could I see the strands of rivers both dry and flowing braiding together to make a coherent pattern, but I could see villages and settlements and then there was a city and a corner of a lake and down we came to land at Srinagar. My neck hurt from ducking my head down and looking out my little window but what I could see as we touched down was that the mountain tops were visible through the veil. Then walking across the tarmac I found myself in a crisp spring day and that I had come to a place worth the trip.
India is said to be filled with mystery but that may be another name for confusion. Shabarat’s brother was supposed to meet me but somehow we missed. Nevertheless I found cab drivers and houseboat operators who spoke pretty good English and I enjoyed tea and conversation until I finally had to hire a cab for the run into town to find a needle, the Cathay Hotel, in the haystack of several hundred places to stay…and that’s not counting houseboats. Shabarat’s best friend, Tauheed, owned the Cathay. It had been in the family for at least three generations and it was about time to upgrade. However that may be the price was right and the manager, “Ourshed,” a phonetic spelling and I seemed to hit it off so I took the room. Shabarat’s friend was away on business, I supposed and I was hungry so they showed me a nice restaurant and I got down to basics…lunch. Ishtaq, Shabarat’s brother, who had met the plane but not me, joined me at the table and we got acquainted over curry and rice. His English was good but he was distracted by the world of his nineteen years. After lunch we walked along the street bordering the lake. Both on the lakeside as well as the business side, the street had pretty good sidewalks and since the sidewalk remained uniform, I suspect, that it was built by one contractor in one period. Beyond the low wall lay the lake and houseboats beam to beam. I asked Ishtaq whether any new houseboats were being built. I thought if might be interesting to look over the operation on the ways. He said that what you see is what you get. When these were gone, there’d be no more. Labor and materials were too costly. The boats were of different ages and conditions and what the owners would do was to patch up what gives way but as Ishtaq had told me, I saw no evidence of new boats.
After a walk we returned to the hotel and within a short time Tauheed, Shabarat’s friend, joined us. He was in his late thirties, moustached, and with a receding hair line. His hair loss bothered him and he asked if I had a remedy. A hair transplant seemed too much money and trouble but then I remembered an Upjohn treatment, which interested him. He was both intense and pensive and it was he, not Ishtaq, who would show me around the lake and city. Ishtaq was busy obtaining a passport for his sister. And so the next morning, Tauheed began our tour.
What he didn’t know was that I had walked several miles in Delhi during the days before. The first stop was a Hindu temple perched on top of a sharp pointed mountain. We drove a auto rickshaw up most of the mountain but the best was saved till last. True, the remainder of the mountain could be measured in hundreds of feet but my! what an angle of climb! Tauheed told me that when he was a school boy, the teacher would “let” them climb from lake level all the way to the temple. That should have taken a little starch out of them…but probably didn’t. Tauheed climbed gracefully enough but the pilgrims who were twice his age (my age) took the ascent slower. The walk was made of stone pavement and steps. This was not dirt, roots, and rocks route but I began feeling the hike to and through the Red Fort from the day before in Delhi catching up with me.
All the time as we climbed, I could hear a fast, tongue-tripping song, coming down from above. The tape seemed to be in a loop like an eight track. Religious music normally has all the grace of an elephant mired in a mud hole. This music had real zing. I asked Tauheed about it. He confirmed that it was religious in nature. He didn’t approve. Moslems wouldn’t have music piped out of a mosque like that, he said. That for the most part is true but the call to prayer is sung. In the U.S. we have Gospel music that sounds something like an incomplete road kill. Where did this music get the zip? I asked if this were an old Hindu hymn. He said he didn’t think so. I suspect there may be a Pentecostal reformation going on in Hindu music. Music like that might find a positive reception in the U.S. I hear snatches of it now and then from my memory and this happened three or four weeks ago.
We topped out onto a terrace to get a bird’s eye view of the city and lake but there was still a pinnacle to go. The last steps were almost like climbing a ladder and then I could see the phallus inside the small, well-lighted temple. The story I got from Tauheed, a Moslem, was that a god, who would sit on this mountain top and meditate, was surprised one day by a visitor and withdrew into this three foot high, one foot in diameter, stone. Someone had poured water or oil over the stone, which made it look as if it had experienced an orgasm. The stone phallus is common in Hindu temples and shrines. It was the stone’s polish and the light reflecting off the liquid that made this one memorable.
Tauheed’s plan was to circle the lake, which was in turn encircled with gardens from the Mogul period, some were maintained; others were not. The princes enjoyed the mountain scenery, the symmetry of their gardens, and the sound of their “river of paradise” flowing arrow straight through the garden. And according to the small paintings I’ve seen, a prince was to frolic with his ladies in some shady spot while listening to songs of his musicians. Since the gardens cover many acres and can run almost a half mile long, it looked to be plenty of room to frolic. The public benefited also because they got to build and maintain the thing. On garden two or three, I found a shade tree and while I had no lady with whom to frolic, I wouldn’t have had the energy anyway. I tried to fall asleep. My legs were ready for burial. Tauheed called his sister and while they visited for a half-hour, my legs resurrected. On garden four or five, Tauheed saw his “uncle.” An “uncle” among the Kashmiri is someone who is a distant relation or in Shabarat’s case, his “uncle” was the man who owned the shop he managed. So Uncle and two other men approached and while the hugging was going on, I introduced myself to the others. One worked for the USDA in Washington and the other was a zoologist. It amazes me how a good conversation can bring me around. I asked the zoologist about some large birds I’d seen flying with the crows. Tauheed thought they were all the same species but the bigger bird had wedge shape missing from the trailing edge of his tail. The common term the doctor said was “kite.” I’d heard of them but didn’t know what I was looking at. The man from the Department of Agriculture worked on nematodes, little round worms that raise hell with potatoes in the northwest. I subjected them to my gopher hole theory that earthworms, improved varieties of grass seed, liquid compost, and water could be dumped down gopher holes and “infect the land with life.” I blush but only for a minute. They had undoubtedly met cranks before. The idea is worth a try. There would be low evaporation of water, fertility deposited where it would do the most good (right next to the roots of living grass,) no destructive effects from ultra violet rays, and mixing the earthworms into the liquid doesn’t seem to have any bad effects on the worms…and until they worked their way to the surface, they’d get neither sunburn or be harassed by birds. Sounds good on paper. It might be fun to try. We said our good byes and I was standing straighter and walking as if I had just started the day.
As we rounded the lake, we came by a mosque where the relic of a hair from the beard of the Prophet is housed. Then evening came on and it was suppertime.
Throughout the part of the East, at least the part of where I visit, there is a social system which goes like this.
“What would you like to do?”
My answer, “I would like to do ABC.”
“We can do that but before, we must do XYZ. Come we must do X.”
“I need to do A.”
“We will do A very shortly. First we must do X,” and you do X.
The ABC in this case was to send out some maps to a friend, to visit a houseboat, and to find a consenting ATM machine. I did not want to see any scenery, visit another garden….although I did want to visit the mosque where the Prophet’s whisker is kept, if we had time. I was assured that mailing out the maps would be “no problem,” a favorite description in both Kashmir and Egypt. Having spent hours in post offices while awaiting the proper alignment of the planets, I knew better. I had airline reservations for Delhi and then to Amritsar and so there was no, “when we get around to it.” I needed to do ABC. “No problem.”
The next morning Tauheed and I met and walked down to the shikars, the bumboat that would take you for a turn around the lake or out to a houseboat. Tauheed took the lake tour first. I had ABC on my mind but held off saying more. The boats are about 25 feet long, have a beam of four feet, maybe five. You flop shoeless amidships on pillows beneath a canopy, which sounds very decadent and is, thank God. I was not into to walking, climbing, even if there were a covey of PhDs at the end of the hike. The boatman sits aft on the stern, which is rather high above the water. He had a paddle with a heart shaped blade, with which he slowly stroked the water. It was quiet, once away from the road traffic, and half reclining was a restful way to look out at the world. Since I wasn’t panting or complaining and since it was quiet, I listened as Tauheed sang a song under breath. I asked him if it were a religious song. He was pious but he shook his head. “It’s a love song,” he said. Afterwards we talked to each other. We had to. There was no one else around. He would sing a song now and then and then we’d visit. We hadn’t done much of that up until now. If Ishtaq were around, they talked to each other. So we talked about family and a remedy to grow hair and other important thing of life. We traded stories of daughters; we had one apiece. And we did not talk about wives. He had his reasons; mine were that whenever the subject came up, I was questioned on why I had divorced and why I had not remarried. To be unmarried was something approaching the scandalous. Actually, relaxing on a shikar’s boat I didn’t find it all that scandalous and I wouldn’t have been there had I remarried. Life is like that. Since he was married, there was no need to go into why he hadn’t divorced. I meant to ask his thoughts on arranged marriages but maybe it was a gliding kite, not a house crow that distracted me. He told me about his inheriting the hotel. He was the third generation to own it and like most of the houseboats, it needed renovation, which he was doing a little at a time. He told me how he met Shabarat. It seems that both were casting about for another occupation and hit on AMWAY simultaneously. I asked him how it went and he said that you could make money but you had to stay on top of the operation all the time. Long hours. I’ve never met a veteran of any great length of time with AMWAY. The sales people must burn out quickly. Even though there was almost a twenty year difference between his age and Shabarat’s, he admired Shabarat for his drive and ambition. I knew from watching Shabarat how focused he could be.
Another subject I was curious about was religion. Tauheed said that Shabarat’s piety was another thing he admired about the young man. Like Islam’s forerunners, the worship of the pharos, Judaism, and Christianity, there is supposed to be an answer for all Life’s problems but Life is sloppy and doesn’t recognize the track that religion said that it would follow. What if a person with a pure heart and with pure intentions falls in love with someone on the prohibition list? Tauheed was an iron-clad Moslem. I’ve seen only one Moslem-born person who was other than a true believer and he was a nonbeliever. Nothing in between. Well, one might ask for forgiveness but when a commandment is broken, it can prove to be so much fun that you hate to give it up. I mean like killing. Now there is a real problem solver but killing makes just about everybody’s prohibition list whether being packed down from Mount Sinai or rising up out of your courthouse lawn like a mushroom after a good rain. And falling in love with the forbidden one is so positive, as it is disruptive. We talked about the strictness and certainty of Islam, not human frailties. Orwell created the term “double think.” That’s when you can imagine Adam and Eve chasing each other around a formal Garden of Eden with a snake giggling on a tree limb and picking up an old copy of National Geographic because you want to read about the discovery of Lucy. A person sometime carries his or her own dogfight within him or herself whether their world is filled with certainty or chaos. For the moment we took the discussion no farther.
And then much to my surprise, we dealt with “B!” “B” as in Boat. HB Chicago dead ahead! We slipped our shoes on for the walk from the bumboat, across the dock, to the houseboat and then again stepped out onto a carpet on the covered end deck. I could never figure out which was the bow and which was the stern. Then inside to the salon which was also carpeted and filled with fine furniture. It was “fine” because it was handmade locally, decorated beyond the 2x6 appearance of a picnic table, repaired where broken, and dusted to a polish. While I’ve seen prettier rooms, it had been a while. There was north light coming through the door. The owner showed us one of the bedrooms and I could find nothing I would complain about.
Jammu Kashmir is the northern state of India but once beyond the range, you are in Moslem India, and a jacket feels good in March and shoepacks, a fur cap, and long johns would have felt very good three months before. So this is a different India just as Hawaii or Alaska has little to do with the clichés of Manhattan and New England. The stove in every room was both comforting to see and made me a little homesick for the North.
Ajaz Khar was the manager, owner/operator and the person with whom you made arrangements. I had a dozen questions and his having been the third generation of his houseboats, he was the man with the answers.
How do you take the boats out of the water for bottom paint? You don’t. You pack the joints in the hull with grass. This grass grows out into the water and seals any openings that might occur. I didn’t understand the biology but my feet were dry. How many bedrooms on the boat? I seem to remember three so if you were a guest, you be meeting other people unless you had a party large enough to fill the Chicago. There are private bathrooms with hot water heaters. The bedrooms are dark as the sunlight coming through the windows is absorbed by the aged wooden panels, no plywood. Breakfast and supper are included and also covered is unlimited back-and-forth use of the shikars. Price per night – Rs. 3000 for one person who travels alone. That works out to about $75 a night. Ajaz will knock off 25% for long duration stays…like a month and 40% for winter. I’d bring some heavy wool socks. It gets cold but not enough ice forms to bother the growth of that grass holding the hull planking on.
Web page:www.chicagohouseboats.com,
email: chicagodallake@hotmail.com
You have to bring your own dictionary and Writer’s Market but they have 220 in the sockets in every room and internet next door in another houseboat owned by Ajaz.
Something of a nightmare awaited me for the afternoon. One of those “No problem” problems. I had loaded my pack with a few pounds that I needed to rid myself of and I bought some maps for a friend. The maps came from a local bookstore and Ishtaq and I had bought them a couple of days before. The main map was of India but I found some regional maps that I thought might be of interest to my friend. Tauheed and I had come up with a box for the trove but there was no brown paper or duct tape to strap everything together for a ride half way round the world. Kashmiris have a different answer for ‘hundred-mile-an-hour tape. They wrap a package in cloth and have it sewn shut. Then with magic marker, broad tip, you address the thing. I’d seen Shabarat go this procedure and it seemed to please the post office folks. When in Rome just let ‘em do it their way. I gave a grateful tip to the young man who stitched this mummy shroud closed. Then we can find nobody with a magic marker but my NPS Skillcraft still had a little ink. The man at the post office tells us we must go upstairs to talk to the overhead. Up and through the door and then I saw something you don’t want to see. There were five government servants bending over one printed form and all giving their opinion as to what they saw. What you want to see is a bureaucrat sitting alone at a desk piled high with paperwork. The latter means that they don’t have enough people to get the job done properly and when you approach, they’ll sign or stamp anything you hold out because they want to see the last of you. Five guys bending over the same desk reading the same form….no. It turned out that we dealt with a lady at another desk. This package didn’t rate five professionals. The first thing she had me do was cut into the shroud. It was like taking out my own stitches. Then out came my boxed calling cards, the Writer’s Market, and the maps. She got up from the desk, went to her purse, took out a piece of folded notebook paper and read, probably her own handwriting, that maps could not be sent through the mail.
I didn’t write about this but India is under a siege mentality. The Pakistanis will get you if you don’t watch out. Some theorists believe that India would have fallen apart if it had not been for the threat, real or imaginary, of Pakistan. I won’t take sides on the question. I’m just a guy looking for a place to live. But the lady politely explained that were this map intercepted by the wrong people, it could pinpoint possible targets of military interest. I politely explained that this was for an Alaskan geography teacher who would hold them up before his class and say, “India.” Then she held up the sheet of notebook paper and said that these were her orders….but if we wanted to get this shipped out by sunset, she told me, we might try DHL. I asked DHL why they could send the maps. “Oh, those are tourist maps.” Shabarat has an expression he yells on such occasions, “Incredible India!” So now I’m a half pound lighter having burned up some fat and a good deal of cash but like they say all through the East, “No problem.”
With what was left of the day, we took a three wheeler to see the mosque where they keep a hair from the Prophet’s beard. Tauheed bought some bird food for the mosque pigeons. He showed me some rice mixture with, I suspect, honey and butter. It is one of the most delicious concoctions I’ve ever eaten, and of course, I forgot the name. You can find it being sold or given away in or around mosques or Sikh temples.
The whisker is not on display and is only brought out to show to the faithful on religious holidays. I wasn’t interested in the relic but I would have liked to go inside the mosque. Prayers were going on so Tauheed and I walked around the courtyards. He explained that people prayed in the open air as much as beneath the roof of the mosque. Men prayed first, then the women prayed, and then the “eunuchs.” He said that the last group were rather shy and didn’t come often but could come if they decided to. Then he asked what I thought about eunuchs. I thought this occupation was outsourced with the end of harems but about fifteen minutes later of question and answer, I had an idea of whom he called eunuchs. These were transvestites, who rate somewhere below dogs in India. He asked me what I thought of them, which is another way of his saying that he disapproved of cross-dressers. This was a place where the simplicity of following the teachings came into play. No need to question. It states homosexuality is a sin. I’m not proselytizing so I didn’t ask whether he chose heterosexuality over homosexuality. It was his unquestioning faith that I listened to. With no question, any answer will do. And some how we’ve progressed both technologically as well as intellectually since the last ice age or is that an assumption?
After supper I needed to get my allowance. Tauheed went with me through the dark streets. There are sidewalks in Srinagar but the ATM machines were in another place and when there is no moon, you’d better take to the streets among the sweeping lights of automobiles. No problem? The first ATM machine didn’t work, neither did the second, then the third, no. About this time I realized that I was using my card that only worked during near encounters with comets and asteroids and at only a few banks in India. It was I that was the problem. That happens. Then as we made our way to another machine, my desire to stay away from traffic with the possibility of being run down from behind coming from the rear and my wanting to walk on the pavement collided. I stepped on the edge of the pavement, my foot slipped into the gutter, and down I went. I had a hard time getting up. I needed to sit. I thought I heard something break in the right side of my head. Two people came to me more quickly than Tauheed could move. One said that he was a doctor. The other had a motorcycle with its headlight burning to show that we had a problem and for the traffic to veer off. The doctor asked me if I were seeing double. He moved his finger in front of my face and I told him he waved one finger. Tauheed became a little testy and the two moved on. I appreciated their attention but his take is that they were just answering an incident with as much excitement as they could create. I listened to his argument but I still appreciated the motorcyclist and the doctor coming to my aid. And at the same time thinking that Tauheed could be right.
Then I matched card with machine and had enough cash to keep me out of jail. Nevertheless even after three or four weeks, it hurts to open my mouth to bite into a club sandwich. My arm is better and my hand has healed. Guess I need a course in walking or falling. No, I’m not taking up hang-gliding.
The next morning as I made ready to take a car to the airport, both Tauheed and Ishtaq and the hotel manager, Ourshed, came to see me off. The manager was a level head and Tauheed is fortunate to have him working for him. What came to mind was that with the misery of climbing stairs and walking miles added to the quiet of the bumboat, which led to conversation and to that you add seeing the houseboat caulked with living grass and then the post office lady with her instructions written plainly on notebook paper and add the anxiety of looking for an ATM and the fall, I had decided I really liked Tauheed. We had done a bunch and gone through a bunch and I guess that if that’s not the ingredients for friendship then it’s the pot it’s cooked in. He had all the answers except how to grow hair. I came with nothing and wonder if I’ve learned much. At least I’ve since hidden the credit card that doesn’t work. But I’m still sure of nothing. It was he who said to me, “Pray for me.” And because he became a friend, I have.
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