India (83 page)

Becalmed, having trouble with our awning, we were ‘boarded’ by two begging children, throwing mustard flowers, keeping their boat glued to ours, and asking for baksheesh.

Nazir drove them away. It was the first time I had heard him raise his voice; and they respected his voice. He explained, ‘They’re a bad family.’

Perhaps in some way they had broken the code of the lake. They were thin-faced and very small, starvelings of the lake (like so many others), yet with something predatory and disturbing in the thin-armed frenzy with which, indifferent to wind and rain, having spotted us, they had paddled towards us.

The long row of big tourist houseboats gave us shelter. We moved in their lee, beside the railed timber walk that appeared to link them all. And then, the wind having dropped, we turned into the main river lane, back into the clutter of shops and sheds on stilts or stone walls, service boats with walls of old corrugated iron, timber and corrugated-iron structures on sodden bits of black, nearly bare earth: J & K Unique Stores, Manufacturers of Kashmir Arts and Crafts; a grocery shop; a butcher’s stall with cases of bottled soft drinks on the wooden platform in front; the New Pandit Shawl House and the Mir Arts Emporium facing the Leeward’s own handicrafts emporium and corner grocery shop; and, side by side on one narrow service boat moored to its own little island, a fur and leather-goods shop, a grocery, and the Sunshine Haircutting Saloon.

And, in this area, what could be heard when the rain stopped, what became noticeable, was the roar of human talk from many directions, as in a covered market, regularly pierced by the cries of children.

It was said that there were now 2000 houseboats in the lake. Every houseboat needed a service boat, or an attached garden. And what people said was that the lake, by which everyone in lake and city lived, the lake which drew the tourists, and was not very large, was shrinking.

The rain returned in the afternoon. Clouds hid the mountains and the lake misted over. The Palace Hotel felt unaired and desolate. There were few visitors; the tourist season was not starting well. The hotel staff, formally dressed, outnumbering the visitors, were subdued; the formality of their dress added to the gloom. The Harlequin Bar was empty; it was serving no liquor. It was a big bar, and there was no crowd now to hide its shabbiness: the carpet, or carpet-like material, that was tacked to the front of the counter was ragged in places.

A secessionist Muslim group had been setting off bombs in
public places in the city. The group had also made a number of demands. It wanted no alcohol in the state; it wanted Friday and not Sunday to be the day of rest; and it wanted non-Kashmiri residents expelled. The hotel people, while they waited for the authorities to take action, had met among themselves and decided to avoid trouble. That was why the Harlequin Bar of the Palace served no alcohol, and why – until some Japanese visitors insisted – not even beer was served at dinner in the dining-room.

In the afternoon, in all the rain, a Muslim holy man, a
pir
, turned up at the hotel, and it woke the place up. The pir was a very small, very thin, dark man, with something like a crew cut. He was in his sixties. He wore a dark-grey gown which came down to a few inches above his frail-looking ankles, and he was barefooted. He came to the hotel in a three-wheel motor-scooter, and when he got out he was carrying a telescopic umbrella. Six cars, full of people, were following his scooter. The pir appeared to be in a rage. He began to shout as he got to the desk. Shouting, waving his umbrella, seizing the arm of a foreign woman tourist, letting her go, he raged down the corridor, knocking down or hitting things in his way.

The staff didn’t object. The holy man’s curse was to be feared. Equally, his blessing was to be sought. He behaved as he did because he was holy, and because, as someone told me, he was ‘in direct line’ with God. His movements and his moods couldn’t be predicted; but clearly, at this moment, during this extraordinary visit to the Palace Hotel, he was in a state of high inspiration. That was why the six cars were following him. With all the risks, people were anxious to get in his way. A waiter told me that if you had the chance, if you were lucky enough, to sit in front of the pir, you didn’t have to tell him of your problems. He knew about your problems right away; and – always if you were lucky – he began to talk about them.

And then he was gone, with his gown and umbrella, and in his scooter, and the cars chased after him, leaving the hotel staff to return to themselves.

At 7.11 – one minute later than the day before – the mullahs’ calls from the mosques around the lake announced that the sun had set, and believers could break their day-long Ramadan fast.

Religion, faith: there seemed to be no end to it, no end to its
demands. It was like part of the nerves of the over-populated, over-protected valley.

While the maharajas ruled, Hindu sentiment had been protected in the valley. The killing of a cow, for instance, was a criminal offence, punishable by ‘rigorous imprisonment’. The portraits of the maharajas, Karan Singh’s ancestors, were still there on the main staircase of the building, beyond the main dining-room.

Some of the worn carpets in the hotel now had been in the palace in 1962. They had been specially woven; there had been some talk about them one evening. On a subsequent evening the burning head of a guest’s cigarette had fallen on a carpet we had talked about and created a scorch spot. Karan Singh had not flinched, had not expressed, by a hesitation in speech, or a glance, that he was concerned or had even noticed.

His family had ruled for more than a century here; his princely ways were instinctive. It was also interesting for me to see how rulers managed more everyday things. We went to the cinema in Srinagar one evening. We went late and left early, before the lights came up; and then we raced back to the palace. I asked Karan Singh’s wife one day whether they stopped at foodstalls, roast sweet-corn stalls, for instance, at sweet-corn time. She said they did; and their practice was to pay more than was asked – leaving me wondering even now whether, with that tradition, the ruler was asked less than his subject, or more.

I wanted to get a shawl, and I asked Aziz and Mr Butt to help me. I went to the Leeward one morning, and for form’s sake – with Nazir standing with me – I looked through the stock of the hotel shop. There was nothing there that I wanted, and then – to wait for Mr Butt’s real shawl-man – Nazir took me to the Leeward’s sitting room. They had all wanted me to see this sitting room; they were proud of it. It was a big room in bright colours on the upper floor; it had tall sliding glass windows; and it overlooked the busy water-lanes in front of the hotel. There was a photograph of the Golden Temple – perhaps this was a political gesture of some sort on somebody’s part. There was also a bleached picture of a Kashmiri girl. The girl was famous in legend, Nazir said; she was poor, a peasant girl, but by her singing she had won a king’s heart.

Aziz came up to the sitting room. He ordered tea, and had a cup
with me when it came. Tea was permissible in Ramadan in certain conditions: Mr Butt, for instance, who was not well, could have tea. Aziz had brought some photographs of himself in Mecca: cheerful, relishing the pious adventure. What a taste he had for life!

I asked him, ‘Aziz, do you remember how often I went to the maharaja’s in 1962?’

After 27 years, he knew precisely. He said, ‘You went to have dinner three times. One time you went for tea.’

Then I thought to ask him what I had never asked in all the months we had been together. Where had he been born? He said here, on the lake. His father had been a Kashmiri, and his grandfather too; he was a pure Kashmiri. His father had been in business. A little shop. Up to 15 years ago, he said, people in Kashmir were poor. Now people were better off; now people were ‘good’, though – as both he and Nazir agreed – there were so many more of them. But that, Aziz said, speaking now as a man who had travelled, was also the problem of Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi.

I wondered why in 1962 I had asked Aziz so little about himself. Shyness, perhaps; a wish not to intrude; but also perhaps derived from the idea of the writer that I had inherited: the idea of the writer as a man with an internal life, a man drawing it all out of his own entrails, magically reading the externals of things.

Aziz went down, and shortly afterwards I saw the shawl-merchant’s boat pull up at the Leeward’s landing stage. The merchant came up alone. His loose baggy trousers, of thin brown cotton, were tucked into thick woollen socks pulled up high. He was a man of middle age, slender, sharp-featured and impressive. With his black, kinky-curled fur cap (like Mr Butt’s), his black shoes and his black Indian-style jacket, long-skirted, hooked at the top (the top hook was visible), he looked Central Asian rather than Kashmiri. His name was Sharif.

Two lake boys brought up his small tin trunk, carrying it like a palanquin. He took off his shoes, spread a sheet on the carpet of the Leeward’s sitting room, below the tall sliding glass windows, kneeled down, took out some embroidered tunics and laid them aside, and then, reverentially, took out the small bundle of his better-quality shawls, wrapped in white cotton. I had absolute faith in Mr Butt’s management of this affair; and Mr Sharif’s reverence for his goods confirmed what I felt. His stuff was good, thin, light,
very warm, suggesting, at certain angles, a kind of ripple in the weaving. He took off his fur cap, showed the needle stuck into the crown, and said – pointing to his somewhat inflamed eyes – that he was more than a seller. He was a maker of shawls.

He wanted 8,600 rupees. I asked for a better price. He said 8,500, and he was firm. I asked Nazir to go and call Mr Butt. Nazir dutifully began going down the steps. On the landing (overlooking the water my bedroom had looked out on: now stagnant, with all the new building and boats, and attracting bottles and wrapping and other litter) Nazir stopped and called me. He wanted to know where I was – how serious I was. He said that Mr Butt knew Mr Sharif very well, and had told Mr Sharif to show me good pieces and give me a good price.

Aziz reappeared. We left Mr Sharif upstairs, and went down to the office. Nazir brought down the shawl I had liked. Aziz felt it and said he would guarantee it for two years: it was what Mr Sharif had said. Mr Butt came, walking in from the front garden. And then Mr Sharif himself came down the steps. So there was a general meeting in the office around the milk-chocolate-brown shawl.

Aziz said 8,500 was too much. Mr Sharif disagreed. Aziz said I wasn’t a three-day tourist. Saying nothing, Mr Sharif left the office, and walked down the marble-floored verandah to the hotel shop. I thought he had been offended in some way.

But Nazir said, ‘He’s going to pray.’

Mr Sharif got a mat from the shop, set it down on the white marble verandah just outside the office, and, while it rained, began to bow and pray. In the office we continued to debate the issue.

Mr Butt said that Mr Sharif was a good man. They had gone to Mecca together. Nazir said that Mr Sharif led the prayers in the mosque. He was not only a man of authority, but also a man of his word.

And Mr Sharif bowed and prayed, the rain pattering on the white marble just inches away from him.

Aziz said, ‘Offer 7,500.’

That was how it was settled. The offer was apparently made and accepted without further reference to me. Mr Sharif finished his prayers, rolled up the mat, took the mat back to the shop, came back to the office, picked up an Urdu newspaper that was a couple of weeks old, began to read from it to Mr Butt (whose spectacle lenses were very thick now). Slowly, after he had finished his
reading, he folded the finger-ring shawl; and then, with a similar deliberation, he wrapped the folded shawl in a sheet of the Urdu newspaper he had been reading.

While this was going on, Aziz showed me a third photograph of his trip to Mecca, and I asked Mr Butt what I had never asked him in all the months in 1962. What had he done before starting the Leeward? He said he had been a contractor; he had started the hotel in 1959, with five rooms. Thirty years later, the hotel had 45 rooms.

Much money had come to the valley; many people had risen; there was a whole new educated generation. But a good deal of that improvement had been swallowed up by the growth in the population.

The new wealth showed in the new middle-class building on the north shore of the lake, and on the lower slope of the hill with the Hari Parbat fort. At the same time, behind the houseboats, the stultifying old lake life went on (picturesque in sunlight, less so in the wet and the cold after the rain); and the lake was now more populous. More boys than ever shouted and competed for custom at the boating steps. The effect, though the setting was quite different, was like that of the Muslim ghetto of the old bazaar area of Lucknow.

An older style of life, again, seemed to go on in the centre of the old city, where small covered boats choked the canals, where the brick and timber shops were as I had remembered them, and where very quickly after rain the streets became dusty – with the dust from dried mud. At the rim of that old city, though, there were many important-looking new buildings, among them the university and a government building connected with animal husbandry. But then again, in the villages beyond this, as though the two styles of life were quite separate, was the immemorial world of rice-planting.

In small flooded fields people worked with their hands alone or with wooden ploughs. The houses were basic, brown-red brick between timber uprights, on two or more floors. The pitched roofs of corrugated iron were open at the gable ends, and in this space (and sometimes in a dormer window in the roof) were stored firewood, straw or fodder, or grain. Water ran down the hillsides
in many channels; willow and poplar cast cold shadows; and boulders and tree-branches made crude and crooked fences in wet yards. And here as elsewhere wood and brick and the clothes of people were the colour of mud.

Even with this wretched-looking village life – people sitting on the platform-floor of open one-room shops, wrapped in grey-brown blankets or gunny sacks – there were the signs of big public works, as though a great effort was needed to support even that style of life, to provide electricity, to build a road, to offer some kind of transport. And always, the children: very small, in smiling groups, outnumbering the adults. The abiding memory was of the children.