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Beaming from an Hindu world in Rajasthan, where bells bellow out of temples, into a world of mosques and muezzins calling the faithful is an easy nine hours in India – first eight on a train and then the rest in a plane. This new world, the Kashmir region in the Northern tip of India, is indeed Allah’s paradise on earth as the Kashmiris call it.
In the bosom of Srinagar, one of the main cities of Kashmir, the Dal Lake rests peacefully with its many pine houseboats and stretches to anchor itself to the many mosques and calls for prayer in the city. Mostly dark haired with a slight touch of brown on their skin, the residents of its houseboats – the Kashmiris -, just like the ones in Srinagar, remind me of Kurds, Arabs, Iranians and Turcs rather than Indians. Their language, Kashmiri, carries some traces of Arabic, and there is an abrupt switch from the Hindu greeting namaste to selamun aleykum.
‘And our tea is totally different, too,’ says Saban, the keeper of my houseboat on Dal Lake. Kashmiris add cardamom to their strong green tea whereas other people in parts of India I have been to seem to be happy with tea without cardamom.
‘Cennet, cennet,’ Saban sighs as he rows his shikara, a gondolla-like boat, from our houseboat in the middle of the lake back to the coast of Srinagar. Cennet, paradise in Kashmiri, is indeed the Dal Lake – below, above and over.
A jungle of fury plants below, usually in aquariums at homes, hardly gives Saban’s heart-shaped paddle any space in the lake. How giant water lilies and several other aquatic plants find space below to root themselves is quite puzzling. In such a busy jungle of plants, several shikaras of bright colors easily row back and forth, some ‘strolling’ leisurely, some selling drinks, snacks, flowers or Kodak films, and some transferring tourists from the shore of Srinagar to the several houseboats on the lake. If eyes can take themselves off the plants and the shikaras, they can also feast themselves on the sunset and sunrise the lake hosts over its surface and the Himalaya range, with a blue sky guarded by eagles and seagulls, forming its back stage.
‘Roads are the nerves of the city – keep them clean,’ we read on the roads of Srinagar, now having been transeferred from our small shikara to a large rental jeep. However, contrary to the signs, some of the roads are ‘littered’ – with stones and rocks. The driver of our jeep taking us to different Mughal gardens of the city has to constantly try to discover other ‘nerves’ which won’t make us as nervous and which would be ‘free’ of rocks and stones used by Kashmiris to throw at the Indian police.
The situation in Kashmir of India is not as bad as it was seven years ago. This beautiful area, together with its other identical half in Pakistan under the name Azad Kashmir, has been allowed to breath freely for a while. The cease fire is still in effect between Pakistan and India over this disputed region, which was autonomous under a Hindu maharaja till 1947 when the two countries inspired to make it a permanent ‘jewel’ of their own but instead shattered it into two making it ‘the most dangerous place in the world’ as I remember it being declared on international news in late 1990s.
Even though calm now, every inch of Hindu Kashmir is still ‘loaded’ with Indian army making sure that those in favor of an independent Kashmir preserve their dreams only in their hearts. International calls in the area at night are not allowed either. Perhaps those who are not in favor of the cease fire might call someone in Azad Kashmir of Pakistan to reunite two Kashmirs and proclaim independence, or even worse, one of the countries might declare war on the other at night to regain the part they lost in 1947, and noone would be able to use the phone lines to inform the world about it.
‘We want an independent Kashmir,’ says Saban, who has a long nose with a distinct high bridge, like most of the Moslems of Kashmir I meet. I once again mentally list the differences I have noted between Kashmiris and Indians I met in other parts of India: the facial features, language, culture and religion.
The Himalayas pull my thoughts away, at least for a while, from the political situation in Kashmir and from my houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar to hike its breathtaking presence. At nights, I stay with a Kashmiri gypsy family nested in the skirts of the mighty mountains.The Kashmiri gypsies are Moslems, too, and do not look Indian either.
29-year-old Serifa, the mother of the gypsy family, with her 18-year-old daughter Gulfam, prepares roti, the Indian bread, or shot, as it is called in Kashmiri, over the fire in their stone house. As I bite into my soft and warm roti, I think about the general feeling toward Moslems in the world – especially lately. Such gentle and positive people Kashmiri Moslems seem. A ready smile on their faces, Kashmiris’ usually honey-colored curious and innocent eyes under their dark black hair warm up hearts, reminding one how we human-beings might be so prone to generalizing people of different cultures and religions and therefore creating hatred among us.
Every other Kashmiri or Kashmiri gypsy I meet, including the male gender, while hiking or riding my horse in the Himalayas greet me with openness. The male gender of Moslems, this time also Kashmiri, do not shy away from keeping direct eye contact with me, having open conversations or giving me a smile with a hearty selamun aleykum. Their women, even though their heads mostly covered by beautiful colorful scarfs, still have the choice of not wearing it, and at home or outside, they interact with men. They might, however, not have the freedom to chose their husband but neither do the men.
‘I got married to my husband when I was 12, and he was 13,’ tells me Serifa, with a soft giggle. They had no choice – their marriage was arranged.
Serifa, now a mother of four children, takes a nap every day under the warm sun on a rock by the edge of a hill shadowed by tall mountains of pine trees. I think about her when hiking in the mountains patrolled by baboons and covered by walnut, apple, pear trees and marijuana plants. Serifa seems to be a ‘free’ Moslem woman – even though I do not know what goes on behind the walls of her house or her heart. But I feel that she might not the freedom of too many choices we Western women usually have to make – what to buy today from stores, which dress to put on each day, what kind of vacation to take each summer. All Serifa needs to think about is how she has to feed her children and animals daily and how best she is going to ‘warm’ her life from one season to another in the highlands of Kashmir, where the temperatures fall below 0 in winter. These are Serifa’s main worries.
Climbing up Tiger Face, the top of a Himalayan mountain of about 5,000m and tracing the same route back down almost every day with his two horses is how Imtiaz, another Kashmiri gypsy and a Moslem, makes his living in Kashmir. He is one of the many gypsies of Kashmir like Serifa and her family who are now settled down, making enough money taking tourists to trek in different parts of Kashmir and Jammu, another Northern region of India.
Imtiaz is 20-years-old and has never gone to school. He knows every other tree, stone, rock and route on this mountain which takes about five hours to climb up and down.
“I speak Urdu, Kashmiri and Gujhuri – the gypsy language,’ he says and proudly adds English as his 4th language to his list.
’My horses are my life,’ Imtiaz tells me as he allows Lalu and Balu on the top of the mountain go free grazing. The 4-year-old Lalu is my favorite; she is of henna color – that is why Imtiaz calls her Lalu, meaning ‘red’. As we climb the mountain earlier that day sometimes on horses and sometimes on foot, I am worried about the horses. What if they break a leg or somehow slip down the steep mountain? What would Imtiaz do without them? How would he earn his living?
’Don’t worry, chicken curry,’ Imtiaz jokes and comforts me, as relaxed as many other Kashmiris I have met.
‘They do not easily get hurt.’
On top of the mountain where there are usually tigers during winter, I enjoy the the view of Himalayan mountains opposite us and the tall pine trees down below, as does Imtiaz – probably almost every time he is up here.
‘It is lovely,’ he says, proudly.
I think about the 20-year-old people in my own country Northern Cyprus. They are usually university students at this age and do not have to work like Imtiaz and might even be given a car by their parents to drive to school every day.
Imtiaz does not know about the young people of my country. And he probably will never do. How about the young from Cyprus? Will they ever find out about Imtiaz and the other young Moslem gypsies of Kashmir who have to earn their living from a mountain?
‘Don’t worry, chicken curry,’ Saban jokes, just like the Kashmiri gypsy Imtiaz, as he invites me to share his nargila when I am back at the houseboat in Srinagar.
‘We need to be relaxed in Kashmir – life is not always easy,’ adds Saban, leading my mind back to revisit the gypsy Serifa and Imtiaz’s lives in the mountains – very romantic to Westerners but not a joke to themselves.
Relaxed the school children of about 13 are too; I remember them playing in the Mughal Garden of Nishat Bagh in Srinagar, lush green decorated with all kinds of colorful roses and chinar trees, the emblem of Kashmir. Even though the interaction of male and female kids might be restricted in some other Moslem countries, these ones comfortably play with each other, throwing water at each other and their teachers from one of the many garden fountains. They are very relaxed as they do not have to think about what most of their parents might be currently worried about – making the ends meet in a country where more than 30% of the people might earn 1 US Dollar each day.
‘I work on this houseboat for twenty-four hours each day,’ Saban brings my thoughts back to the houseboat as he looks, through the window, at the lights of the shikaras smoothly gliding on the lake. ‘And I get to see my family in a nearby village perhaps two or three times a year.’
As we enjoy the nargila, my eyes catch the several frames of prayers in Arabic script hanging on the walls of our houseboat. The curves of the strokes of Arabic feel ‘silky’ on my visual senses as does the taste of the smoke of nargila rolling down my throat.
‘Kashmir’, I whisper to myself, with the smoke I exhale. Even that sounds ‘silky’ – the land of saffron, the land of cashmere, the cennet of Allah. Definitely more so than the lives of Kashmiris…
Copyright © 2007 Sezgi Yalin
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