India (82 page)

I would have liked in 1962, after the Amarnath journey, to dawdle for a few more days in the high Himalayas, with the Leeward team and their equipment. But Aziz hadn’t wanted that. He had hurried me back to Srinagar, for another – Muslim – religious occasion. In the Hazratbal mosque at the far end of the lake there was a famous relic, a hair of the beard of the Prophet. It was displayed once a year, and Aziz was passionate to get back for that.

He liked big religious occasions, a mingling of faith and fair and holiday; and his news now was that, like Mr Butt, he had gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca. He had gone twice. The pilgrimage took three months. The Indian government made the travel arrangements. You went first to Jeddah; and then you took taxis and buses to Mecca. There were toilets everywhere between Jeddah and Mecca. It wasn’t like Amarnath. Everything was clean in Mecca. He spoke like a man of the faith; he also spoke like a man who knew a thing or two about hotels and accommodation.

Two pilgrimages to Mecca: that meant money, leisure, success of a substantial kind. It wasn’t what I would have prophesied for
Aziz in 1962. And, really, it was extraordinary that Aziz and Mr Butt, with their different talents and natures, should have worked together in the same way for all these years. They had supported one another; Mr Butt had allowed Aziz to grow; and the business had grown beyond their imagining.

I asked Aziz about the fancy gables on the hotel.

He said, ‘A style, a style. You should see the new buildings here.’

He had a story to tell about my book. After the book came out the hotel had been called up by the Tourism Department. They said they hadn’t liked what they had read about the Leeward. They had read that hotel guests spread their clothes to dry on the Leeward’s lawn and hung clothes out of the windows. The Tourism Department didn’t like that. Aziz said he had had to tell the government man very firmly: ‘You don’t
understand
the book.’ An old fight, but clearly a fight: Aziz told the story twice.

Success; but the lake was crowded. All India was crowded, Aziz said, as though this was something people now had to live with. Forty years before, you could drink water from the lake (and I remembered people in excursion boats even in 1962 using lake water to make the special Kashmiri tea). Now, Aziz said, and Mr Butt shook his head in agreement, the flush systems of some houseboats emptied directly into the lake.

Then, abruptly – as though explaining the stillness or the flatness of the occasion, and the absence of hospitality – Aziz told me it was Ramadan. They were not supposed to talk much. They were going to break their fast at 7.10 that evening.

Aziz’s son, Nazir, went with me in the boat back to the boulevard. He said that Mr Butt had told him and other people about the time I had sat out with them in the garden and smoked the hookah. I remembered the occasion. The smoke of the coarse-chopped Kashmiri tobacco, pleasant to smell, enticing, had turned out to be fierce and gripping in the throat and the lungs, stronger than any tobacco I had tasted, the hot charcoal-and-tobacco smoke barely cooled by the water in the bowl of the hookah.

I didn’t think that anyone at the Leeward would have time for that kind of playfulness now. The mood felt different. The lake here was too built up, too busy.

From the lake and the boulevard and the boating steps there was now a late-afternoon roar. An amplified, quavering, nerve-stretching
voice was part of the roar. It was the amplified voice of a mullah in the mosque on the boulevard – new to me, that mosque, a plain small building, part of the new development, many houses deep, on the boulevard, below Shankaracharya Hill. The very plainness of the mosque seemed to speak of the urgent need of the new lake crowd.

Aziz had said, after his talk with the boatman, that I was to pay 15 rupees for the crossing. The boatman himself had smiled and had appeared amenable to whatever was decided. But it wasn’t the boatman I had to pay. It was the small, angry-eyed, angry-voiced man at the boating steps; and he absolutely insisted on 25 rupees. Nazir, who had come with me partly to protect me against this demand, was abashed. I noticed, though, that he didn’t argue with the boating-steps man; he simply offered to pay the extra rupees himself. The lake clearly had its own rules, its various territories and spheres of influence. The Leeward’s writ, and Aziz’s, didn’t run here. I paid what was asked. And then, solicitously, Nazir put me in a taxi and sent me back to the Palace Hotel.

There was more than an hour of daylight left. The view of the lake from the hotel garden beckoned me out again. I walked down to the Palace Hotel steps and took a boat for half an hour. Almost as soon as we had put out, two very small children, in a boat of their own, came alongside and threw mustard flowers into my boat. The gesture took me by surprise. I smiled, the children smiled back and asked for
baksheesh
. They were perfect little beggars: the smile, the whine, the aggression.

And then it was the turn of the salesmen. One by one they came, and besieged my boat. One man said, ‘We will do it one after the other.’ I thought he was making a joke, commenting on my situation; but he was speaking quite seriously. And they stayed with me, two on one side, three on the other, so that I was at the centre of a little flower-pattern, a daisy-pattern, of lake boats. They showed their goods in detail: saffron, stones, cheap jewelry, and all kinds of pointless things in papier mâché. The salesmen’s boats were paddled by little children. The salesmen themselves reclined on pillows and cushions, and gave an impression of following one of the lake’s more luxurious occupations. One or two were covered in blankets from the neck down; below those blankets they would have had little charcoal braziers.

*

Nazir and I went on a tour of the lake. We had hardly pushed off from the Leeward landing stage – we were still in front of the hotel – when the little begging children appeared, paddling fast, throwing sprigs of mustard flowers into our boat, and saying, in a sibilant whisper at once demure and penetrating, ‘Baksheesh, baksheesh.’ Nazir gave them one or two rupees each. He said, ‘If you don’t give them money, they won’t go away.’ He was as tender with the salesmen, allowing our boat to be delayed just long enough to give offence neither to the salesmen nor to me.

After we had passed the long row of houseboats we were in open water, and no one came near. We passed what I had remembered as the maharaja’s lake pavilion. A memory came to me of a poplar-lined causeway between the lake boulevard and the lake pavilion: there was no causeway now.

In 1962 I had had tea in the lake pavilion one day with Karan Singh and his wife. Karan Singh had a great appetite for Hindu thought, and at that tea he had talked of the ninth-century Hindu philosopher Shankaracharya, who, born in the South, had, in a short life of 32 years, walked to the four corners of India (while India was still itself, before the Mohammedan irruptions), preaching and setting up the religious foundations that still existed. The hill beside the lake where we were was named after the philosopher; Karan Singh took a personal interest in the temple at the top.

The setting for our tea was spectacular: the pavilion, the lake all around, the mountains, the poplar-lined causeway, the long drive rising between orchards and gardens to the palace. I asked who had designed it all. I was expecting to hear the name of an architect. Karan Singh, looking around, simply said, ‘Daddy.’

That had fixed the moment for me. But now there was no royal causeway, no tall poplars, only openness, a breeze picking up strength across the water, and blowing our boat against the rough poles and the slack, rusting strands of barbed wire around the pavilion island, where the buildings looked damp and closed, awaiting summer and people.

Nazir and the boat-boy between them poled and pulled the boat around the pavilion island. The lake was still choppy; but it became calm beyond a causeway laid with a big black pipe that took drinking water to the city. In the distance was the Hazratbal mosque. It had a white dome and minaret, and that whiteness
stood out against the brown-black cluster of two-storey and three-storey houses.

The dome and minaret were new. Hazratbal had been a plain mosque. There had been riots one year in Srinagar when the famous Hazratbal relic, the hair of the beard of the Prophet, disappeared. I asked Nazir about it.

He said, ‘It was found in Srinagar, in a private house.’ (I was told later by someone else that a well-connected woman, who had fallen ill, had expressed a wish to see the relic, and it had been brought to her.)

Nazir, talking of this and that, said that he was corresponding with an English girl who had stayed at the Leeward. They wrote once a month.

He said, with unexpected seriousness, and without prompting from me, ‘It’s in God’s hand whether I marry a Kashmiri or a foreign girl. Only God knows the future.’ And that mention of God was serious, not idiomatic. Kashmiri girls, Nazir said, were nice, but foreign girls were more ‘experienced’ – and I didn’t ask what he meant by that.

I asked him about religion. He said he went to the mosque every day. He went alone for half an hour or so, to pray for ‘everybody’. On Fridays he went for two and a half hours, to pray with everybody else. He had been religious ever since he was ten.

We saw fishermen, scattered, still, almost emblematic against the open bright water, standing or lying on their low boats. We moved slowly towards them, coasting in the calm water after each paddle stroke: it was a wonderful moment of quiet just minutes away from the hubbub around the houseboats and boating steps of the boulevard.

One fisherman cast a small net where he had previously laid bait – a tin can marked the spot. The fisherman, having cast his net, used a long pronged stick, held within the net, to stir up the fish hiding in the reeds and ferns. As the fish rose they were caught within the weighted net; the net was hauled aboard, and the fish caught were kept in a covered, water-filled section of the boat’s hull. Two other men were spearing fish: holding a spear, each man crouching a little way beyond the edge of his flat boat, with a dark cloth thrown over his head, the better to see through the water to the fish below. So for minutes they crouched, looking like small
unmoving bundles at the edge of a boat, until they attempted to spear a fish, the spear held still until that moment of thrust.

From the openness we moved to the gardens, fixed or floating. The fixed gardens were planted at their edges with willows, whose roots made a cage that kept the soil from being washed away. Just a few hundred yards away from the tourist lake, and as though no middle way was possible, was this old agricultural life of the lake people: weeds and ferns being twirled loose from their lake-bed roots by means of a curved stick, and lifted dripping, mixed with black lake mud, into the flat-bottomed boats, and then taken to fertilize the gardens, where weeds and mud and water were shovelled off all in one with broad wooden shovels.

Women squatted and worked in spinach beds, and children worked with them, as children worked with adults everywhere in the lake, in gardens and on boats. Between the strips of gardens the algae-covered water lanes were lined with low-hanging willows. The houses were of timber and pale-red brick. People washed themselves on one side of a narrow plot; and on the other side young girls used the water to wash pots and pans. Some men, meeting among reeds, stayed in their boats and talked, as they might have done on a street. Some men and boys fished with rod and line. A boat passed with a cottage-cheese seller. Slowly – women and girls paddling their own boats, women and girls more visible here, among the gardens – we came back to the busy highways of the lake, behind the houseboats.

We passed a settlement among willows, rough houses of dusty red brick set in timber frames. A one-roomed shop-stall, with a platform a few feet above the water, had a large picture of the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran (of whom it was said in Iran, by his enemies, that he was really Indian and Kashmiri).

Nazir said in a whisper, speaking with something like awe and nervousness and distance, as though he was speaking of people who were very strange, ‘All this is Shia.’

Aziz had spoken in that way of Shias in 1962. He had spoken of them as people different from himself; once he had even said that Shias were not Muslims. I had barely understood then what he had meant. One afternoon, not really knowing what I was being taken to see, knowing only that it was a Shia occasion, I had gone by boat with some hotel people to see the Mohurram procession in the old town. I had remembered the occasion as a series of medieval
pictures: remembering especially the pale, half-covered faces of secluded women, framed in small timber-framed upper windows, looking down at the bloody scene of self-flagellation below.

It had been hard for me, emerging from the soft lake world of willow-hung waterways and lotus and vegetable gardens, to believe what I had so suddenly come upon: bloodied bodies, blood-soaked clothes, chains, whips tipped with knives and razor blades, the exalted, deficient faces of the celebrants, and their almost arrogant demeanour. They pushed people out of their way. I was ready to believe, what I was told then, that much of the blood on display was really animal blood. I hadn’t understood the religious-historical charge of the occasion, the undying grief it sought to express. I had only been alarmed by it, and glad to get away from it, glad to return to myself and what I knew.

Nazir said he had been told by his father that I had complained about the Shia drumming during Mohurram. And I felt now that the distance with which Nazir (and his father before him) had spoken of the Shias had contained some wonder that the apparently peaceable lake people we were paddling by had this other, ecstatic side.

It had become cloudy. Clouds came down over the mountains to one side of the lake. A strong breeze began to blow just as we were coming out of a water lane to the open water at the back of the houseboats and the Leeward Hotel. It began to blow us back, and dislodged the awning of our boat. This wind also kicked up the dark-red or russet underside of the flat round lotus leaves, revealing where – among the reeds and the tall grass and the litter around houseboats and service boats – the lotus were. I had been looking for the lotus. The pink flowers came out in June and July; I remembered them as one of the glories of the lake. But the lotus was also a crop here: even in the wind a man in a boat could be seen collecting lotus roots, using a special rod or tool for breaking them off under water and pulling them into his boat – endless, this loading and unloading of boats.