Amir Khusrau once wrote that if paradise ever descended to earth, it chose to do so in Kashmir. I first met that “paradise” not on a mountain slope but in a banned schoolbook, ‘Kashmir: A Wounded Paradise’, slipped to me by a Kashmiri classmate like contraband homework. Somewhere between Khusrau’s heaven and that banned book, the valley settled in me as a question — at once postcard and scar.
Decades later, flying back with my 12 year old son, we stepped into a corridor of scanners and security queues. One old truth still held: in Kashmir, your phone doesn’t really arrive unless it’s on post paid. My loyal prepaid turned into a sleek, obedient brick on touchdown, abandoning me to something at once unnerving and oddly cleansing: the radical relief of being fully present.
In 1998, I came as a young actor in a folk TV series, fresh from my law entrance exam and still convinced my life would unfold in courtrooms, not conflict zones. Ambassador cars with red beacons cut through tense roads, checkpoints broke every journey, and “shooting” meant cameras and Kalashnikovs in the same breath. In Budgam, in full Kashmiri costume, I watched village children with impossibly rosy cheeks, pherans and lambs drifting through our frames, but their nails told another story. The next day I lined them up and clipped each nail, one by one — an almost absurdly intimate act of care in a landscape of weapons and whispers, and somewhere between the second and third child I realised I was doing what the state so often forgot: tending to the small, human things.
My memories of Kashmir reach back to 1979, when I returned from my father’s diplomatic posting in Europe and first met Dal Lake from the deck of a houseboat, a tiny, overdressed child in a checked skirt and cowboy hat on still water; afterwards, my mother bought me a wooden houseboat toy with pink cellophane windows. I held it the way some children hold faith, until it vanished, as important childhood objects do, into that parallel universe where beloved things retire without notice.
This time, drifting on a shikara with my son, a young salesman, Irfan, paddled up with wooden curios and the urgency of someone who knows winters outlast tourists. There it was: my houseboat’s twin, pink cellophane windows and all. For a moment, time folded; it was as if four year old me had left it on the lake’s edge and Dal had kept watch for 46 years. When I finally set the boat in my son’s hands and his face lit up, a long private circle closed.
The houseboat we checked into belonged to the Shabnam group, a family run line of carved wooden boats with a name straight out of a 1970s’ film. Next door, things went gloriously off script: ‘New Buckingham’, ‘Texas’, and, somehow, ‘Moustache’, like a seating plan for a very confused international summit. Inside, shoes stopped at the threshold; carved walnut panels glowed around a central bukhar echoing Bukhari, built to raise not just the temperature but the mood.
Step off the water and another script begins. Traditional kandurs, with their wood fired ovens, still shape Srinagar’s mornings, but now French style bakeries rival anything in the metros. At Le Delice, a bright, buttery universe, Farooq, a history graduate, slid across croissants and, between bites, brisk lessons on Kashmir’s past-treaties over tarts in a valley already swollen with history.
Kashmir’s hospitality is measured not only in rooms and views, but in what arrives at your table. At Shamiyana, a restaurant on the banks of Dal, one evening’s kebabs were so good they made me reconsider every kebab related decision I had ever made in my life. Mid epiphany, I gestured too hard and poured a glass of hot kahwa onto my son’s sweatpants; he yelped, the trousers survived, and now I may have the only child who smells of saffron and cardamom thanks to his mother’s enthusiasm for tea.
My visit to Kashmir began with an invitation to deliver a TEDx talk at NIT Srinagar, where I was to speak on ‘Collisions of Change’. My days were stitched together by people who quietly took responsibility for us. Tariq, the driver assigned to me, adopted the role of elder brother, checking on my comfort with an easy, unshowy protectiveness. Professor Mir’s hospitality went far beyond academic protocol. His wife, Dr Kauser, invited us home for lunch; my son tackled the spread with the focused seriousness he usually reserves for video games.
The students at NIT took it upon themselves to shepherd me around campus with utmost care. At some point they quietly graduated me from “Madam” to “Didi” — a promotion that filled me with disproportionate joy, because in the secret hierarchy of ageing, anything is better than “Aunty”. They decided I looked cold and pressed a radio sized heater into my hands, pure weaponised kindness. I fully meant to return it. Instead, it breezed through airport security and now lives by my bed in another state, humming away like a pocket Kashmiri FM channel that only plays warmth.
All of this plays out against a backdrop that never quite recedes, killings and bomb blasts that send fresh waves of fear through the valley, topple tourist bookings and shake livelihoods. Each time, Kashmiris must haul themselves out from under someone else’s headlines. Increasingly, they speak less in the old India-Pakistan binaries and more of peace and jobs.
Amid those shadows, other stories burn low and bright. There is Ghazanfur, a schoolboy for whom Kashmiri poetry feels like a birthright, his small voice carrying verses with a steadiness that makes grown ups fall briefly silent. There is Javed, shot in the spine in 1997 and given months to live, who answered by living for decades and building a school for disabled children. And there is Owais Yaqoob, the MMA fighter who drags the word “fighter” away from militancy and into sport, turning anger into footwork, discipline and rule bound chokeholds under bright lights.
Love also keeps quietly arguing with history. My cousin Kajal, whose family fled PoK’s Mirpur in Partition’s chaos, married a Kashmiri Muslim and, to everyone’s surprise, the sky stayed firmly in place. My friend Sonu, from a Punjabi family, spent years insisting she’d only marry her Kashmiri beau with her parents’ blessing; when they finally agreed, they didn’t just tolerate him, they folded him in. Their children now cheerfully debate whether they’re more Kashmiri or Punjabi. And then there is my friend, real estate developer Nazim, who began as an online follower once sent me a purple pheran. On this trip, he came to hear me speak and later took us all out for a long wazwan, rice, meat and conversation arriving in generous waves. Sitting there in his gift, surrounded by young engineers who now called me Didi, I realised how many quiet bridges had already formed while the visible ones were still being argued over.
That pheran now holds, for me, a small constellation of coals: my son clutching the wooden houseboat with pink windows, the students whose heater hums beside my bed, the baker pressing warm bread into my hands at dawn, the poet child lifting verses like a torch, the friend who first sat in the audience and then broke bread with us. In the end, paradise feels less like a perfect landscape and more like embers tended under a pheran — small, hidden, fiercely guarded, kept alive only because someone refuses to let the warmth go out.
— The writer is a lawyer and anthropological archaeologist. She is also the founding-director and founding president of the Himalayan Institute of Cultural & Heritage Studies (HICHS), and Himalayan Conservation & Preservation Society (US). Follow her on: Instagram @thehichs and www.hichs.org/www.hcpsusa.org
