A Writer's World (25 page)

It was in Kashmir, late in travel and half-way through life, that I first went transcendental. Reality seems distinctly relative in that high and timeless vale, truth bends, distance is imprecise, and even the calendar seems to swing indeterminately by, week blurred into week and Friday arriving unannounced upon the heels of Sunday night.

For my first few days I stuck to the facts, but ever less tenaciously. Nobody else seemed to find it necessary. No decision seemed sacrosanct there, and life was apparently suspended in some limbo between events. I lived myself on a lake of no particular shape or exact location, linked by meandering reedy waterways to a fifteenth-century city down the valley. It took me an hour to get to town, reclining full-length in the cushioned recesses of a boat, while the paddle-man behind me sang high-pitched melodies to himself, took occasional gurgles at a water-pipe, and drank green tea with salt in it. Sometimes I stopped to make an improbable purchase – a jade bangle, a duck for dinner, a chunk of honey off the comb. Sometimes perfect strangers asked me how old my watch was, or told me
about their forthcoming examinations in elementary economics. Sometimes, having spent the whole day maundering about the city, I returned to my lake late in the evening with not the slightest recollection of anything specific having happened to me at all.

So in the end I emancipated myself, and soared unimpeded beyond actuality, seldom quite sure where I was, or when, or even sometimes who – answering all questions with abandoned fancy, never seeking a reason or providing a cause. I felt myself disembodied between the green-blue lake and the snow mountains all around, in a gentle Nirvana of my own: nowhere existed, it seemed to me, beyond the celestial vale of Kashmir, and whether the vale existed itself was a matter of individual perception.

I was not the first to enter this airy plane of sensibility. Kashmir has been having such an effect upon its visitors for at least 400 years. The Moghul emperors, who conquered it in the sixteenth century, responded to the vale with a sensual passion, embellishing it with seductive gardens and honouring it with royal dalliances. The British, who became its suzerains in the 1840s, thought it the ultimate retreat from the burdens of empire, and took its magic home with them to the strains of ‘Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar’. Today’s wandering hippies find themselves rootlessly at ease there, and Middle Americans who spend a couple of Kashmir days between Treetops and Hong Kong often feel the interlude to have been an insubstantial dream.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal. The Muslim sectarians called the Ahmadiya believe that Christ did not die upon the Cross, but was spirited away to Kashmir, the last haven of perfection: and the Moghul emperor Jehangir expressed the wish on his deathbed that Kashmir and Paradise would turn out to be, as he had always thought, one and the same place.

In my more lucid moments, I must here interject, I did not
altogether
agree with the emperor. Looked at hard and realistically, Kashmir falls short of Elysium. Situated as it is high in central Asia, north of Tibet, squeezed between Russia, China and Afghanistan, it can hardly escape the world’s contagion. Beside the golf course at Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital, one often sees the waiting white cars of the United Nations, chauffeurs patient at the wheel: and there are soldiers about always, and angry politicians, and students with grievances, and un-persuadable men of religion. Kashmir is one of the world’s perennial trouble-spots. Though its people are mostly
Muslims, it was ruled until 1947, under the aegis of the British, by a Hindu dynasty of Maharajahs: since then it has been disputed by India and Pakistan. The whole of the vale of Kashmir falls within Indian territory, but sizeable chunks of the outer state are governed by Pakistan, and legal sovereignty of the whole has never been decided. Kashmir is one of those places, deposited here and there in awkward corners of the earth, that never seem quite settled: a bazaar rumour kind of place, a UN resolution place, a place that nags the lesser headlines down the years, like a family argument never finally resolved.

Besides, in my Paradise nobody will be poor: most of the inhabitants of Kashmir are very poor indeed. My Paradise will always be merry: Kashmir is infused with a haunting melancholy. In my Paradise there will be no tourist touts, sharks or hawkers: Kashmir, for more than a century one of the great tourist destinations of the earth, boasts the most charmless touts and indefatigable hagglers in Asia. In my Paradise burgundy will flow like water. In Kashmir all but the most extravagant of Moghuls must make do with Indian Golconda, sixteen rupees a half-bottle from the vineyards of Hyderabad.

Where was I? Drifting, that’s right, all but motionless across a Kashmiri lake, preferably in a shikara, a distant relative of the gondola, canopied, low in the water, looking rather stern-heavy and propelled by that boatman with the water-pipe, squatting at the stern. From
outside
a shikara looks like a fairground novelty, brightly coloured and curtained, and generally full of gregarious Indian youths waving and crying ‘Hi!’, wrongly supposing you to be a research student in comparative ethnology from the University of South Utah.
Inside
the shikara feels a very different vehicle – like a floating capsule or divan, exquisitely cushioned, moving unguently through the water-lilies towards pleasure-gardens and picnics.

Although the vale of Kashmir is 800 miles from the sea, and surrounded on all sides by immense mountains, still its prime and symbolic element is water. The Kashmir thing is essentially a rippling, liquid kind of happening. Geologists say the whole valley was once a lake, and a string of lesser lakes ornaments it still. Srinagar stands in the middle of four, and is criss-crossed too by ancient canals, and intersected by the great river Jhelum. Boats are inescapable in the capital: boats grand or squalid, spanking or derelict; boats thatched, shingled, poled, engined; boats deep with fruit, nuts, timbers, furs, livestock; barges, and punts, and canoes, and skiffs, and elderly motor-boat taxis; above all those floating figures of the Kashmir scene, those vessels of fragrant legend, houseboats.

The Kashmir houseboat has come to be a sort of chalet-boat, or water-villa. It is often gabled, and shingle-roofed. There is a sun-deck on top, with an awning, and the poop is comfortably cushioned, and has steps down to the water. The boat is generally fitted in a Victorian mode: heavy dark furniture, baths with claw feet, antimacassars very likely, hot water bottles for sure. Each houseboat has its own kitchen-boat moored astern, and its attendant shikara alongside, and its staff of resident servants, and its own special smell of cedar-wood, curry, roses and ingrained cigar-smoke: and living upon such a vessel, moored beside the orchard-bank of Nagin Lake, or lying all among the willows of a Srinagar canal, very soon one finds reality fading. The lap of the water takes over, the quacking of the ducks in the dawn, the hazed blue smoke loitering from the cook-boat, the soft water-light, the glitter of the dewdrop in the water-lily leaf, the flick of the little fish in the clear blue water, the dim purplish presence of the mountain beyond the lake, fringed with a line of distant snow.

Time expands in such a setting, and loses its compulsion. The hours dawdle by, as the bearer brings you your coffee on the sun-deck, and the shikara man lies on his own cushions awaiting your instructions, and the peripatetic trading boats sidle into your line of vision – ‘You like to see my jewellery, madam? Any chocolates, cigarettes, shampoo? You want a very nice suede coat, sir, half the price of Savile Row? Flowers, memsahib? Haircut? Fur hat? Laundry?’ Nothing very particular occurs. A meal comes when you want it. The shikara is always there. The ducks quack. If one considers the matter carefully one finds that the sun rises and sets, and some time between tea and sundowner it does begin to get dark.

Scale, on the other hand, contracts. The focus narrows, within the frame of the Kashmir water-life. The picture gets clearer, more exact, and one finds oneself concentrating upon minutiae, like the number of leaves upon the plucked waterweed, or the twitchy movements of the kingfishers. I took Jane Austen’s novels with me to the vale of Kashmir, and perfectly with this delicate awareness of the place did her quill dramas and porcelain comedies correspond.

Sometimes, as I say, I was swishily paddled into town. Then through lily-thick channels we proceeded, willows above us, green fields and apple orchards all around, and as we approached the city the texture of life thickened about us. Barge-loads of cattle glided by to market. Infants sploshed about in half-submerged canoes. Women in trailing kerchiefs, neatly folded about the head, cooked in shanty-boats or washed their
clothes at water-steps. Solitary fishermen cast their nets in the shallows: sometimes a man paddled an empty punt along, sitting cross-legged and gnomish in the prow. We passed beneath medieval bridges trembling with traffic, and beside tall houses latticed and mysterious, and past open-fronted waterside stores where merchants sat grandly upon divans, smoking hubble-bubbles and bowing condescendingly in one’s direction. We paddled our way, like an admiral’s yacht at a review, through flotillas of houseboats, some with tourists jolly on the poop, some all dank and deserted, like funeral boats between rituals.

And presently we would find ourselves upon the muddy water of the Jhelum itself, with its parade of old bridges (Zero Bridge to Eighth Bridge) and the brown jumble of Srinagar all around. Distractedly I disembarked to loiter through the labyrinth of the bazaars, pursued by suggestions proper and profane, and seldom knowing where I was going. Though Srinagar is only seventy minutes from Delhi by daily jet, yet it is a frontier town of central Asia. Here since the start of history the caravans from Sinkiang or Kazakhstan rested on their way to India, and these tangled souks are more like Turkestan than Bengal. Here one feels close to the Uzbeks, the Kurds, the Mongols, the merchants of Tashkent or Bokhara: and often one sees exotic figures from the remotest north swinging through the streets, in goatskin cloaks and fur hats, to remind one of the grand mysteries, Pamir and Hindu Kush, which stand at the head of the valley.

Srinagar has its Westernized quarters, but strewn around and within the bends of the Jhelum, medieval Srinagar magnificently survives. No addict of the mouldering picturesque could complain about these bazaars. They possess all the classic prerequisites of oriental allure – spiced smells, impenetrable alleys, veiled women, goldsmiths, mosques, sages, dwarfs. The air of old Srinagar is heavy with suggestion, and its lanes are so crowded with shrouded and turbaned personages, so opaque with dust and smoke and vegetable particles, that invariably I lost my bearings in them, and wandering fruitlessly among the temples and the cloth merchants, over the Third Bridge and back past the tomb of Zain-el-Abdin, at last I used to clamber into a tonga, and went clip-clop back, to the flick of the whip and the smell of horse-sweat, to my patiently waiting shikara at the Dal Gate. ‘Houseboat now?’ the shikara man would murmur; and back to the lake I would be unnoticeably propelled, eating walnuts all the way.

Yet it has not been an exhilarating progress. The eye of Kashmir is a brooding, almost a baleful, eye – the eye of the shopkeeper, calculating above his
wares, the eye of the military policeman on his traffic-stand, the eye of the floating trader, peering ever and again through the houseboat window in search of victims within.

The Kashmiris are a hospitable people, but not inspiriting. They seem to be considering always the possibilities of misfortune. In the autumn especially, a lovely season in the valley, the fall of the leaf seems a personal affliction to them, and the passing of the year presses them like a fading of their own powers. Then in the chill evenings the women disappear to private quarters behind, and the men light their little baskets of charcoal, tuck them under their fustian cloaks and squat morosely in the twilight, their unshaven faces displaying a faint but telling disquiet. ‘Come in, come in,’ they murmur, ‘come and join us, you are welcome, sit down, sit down!’ – but for myself I generally evaded their sad hospitality, preferring Miss Austen’s gaiety on the poop.

Yet I was half-ashamed as I did so, for their kindness is very real, and all the truer for its reticence – a flick of the head to disclaim gratitude, a discreetly forgotten bill. There was a touching pathos, I thought, to the Kashmiri style. ‘How do you like your life?’ I asked one new acquaintance there, when we had progressed into intimacy. ‘Excellent,’ he replied with a look of inexpressible regret, ‘I love every minute of it’ – and he withdrew a cold hand from the recesses of his cloak, and waved it listlessly in the air to illustrate his enjoyment.

The vale of Kashmir is like a fourth dimension – outside the ordinary shape of things. About a hundred miles long by twenty miles wide, it is a green scoop in the Himalayan massif, hidden away among the snow-ranges.

For its ultimate aloofness the traveller must climb to the rim of the valley, to the high alpine meadows of Gulmarg or Pahalgam. There the separateness of the place achieves a disembodied quality, and the whole valley seems to be resting in some high cradle among the clouds, supported by the snow-peaks all around. You have to walk to attain this mystic detachment, away from the little chalet-hotels and bazaars of the resorts, up through the silent pine woods, along the banks of slate-grey trout streams, up through the last crude huts of the highland shepherds, beyond the tree line, over the granite scree until you stand among the snows themselves, on the rampart ridge.