Arrival
.
A voice on the intercom wakes Priyanka: Please make sure your seat back is upright and the folding tray stowed…. The plane has started its descent into Srinagar.
How long did I sleep? She looks at her watch. They left Delhi more than an hour ago, and she slept almost the whole duration of the flight. Failing to suppress a yawn, she covers her mouth. The friendly flight attendant who gave her a glass of water right after boarding smiles at her. She gestures toward the window shade, which is more than half way down. Priyanka nods, pushes the shade up and fastens her seatbelt. She covers her face with both palms and waits for a yawn that’s building up. She’s so tired she could go right back to sleep and not wake till tomorrow morning. Her mouth feels dry. Another glass of water would’ve helped, but she doesn’t want to bother the crew members who’re now busy with the pre-landing safety checks.
She yawns again, then moves her palms over her face a couple of times, clockwise, each palm caressing its side of the face. It’s a habit she’s inherited from her mother, among many other things. She runs her fingers through the hair, smooths it down, then turns to the man sitting next to her. Tushar Bose, a freelance photographer from Delhi. He’s going to be with her on this assignment.
“I was out like a light, sorry,” she says with an embarrassed smile, hoping she didn’t snore, which she knows she does when she’s too tired. Her mother was the first one to confirm that, at a time when Priyanka was still quite young. Later, others—roommates, friends, even a boyfriend.
“You needed the rest,” Tushar says lifting his eyes from the book in his hands. “If I’d done an 18-hour flight yesterday, it would’ve taken the fire brigade to wake me now.”
She laughs, a part of her wondering what the next few days are going to be like. What it’ll be like to work with him, being with him the whole time she’s in Kashmir. They met only a few hours ago when he came to the hotel to pick her up. “I’ll wait for you at the lobby,” he’d said on the phone. “I look like a photographer—you can’t miss me.” He was right. Longish, uncombed, prematurely graying hair, steel-rimmed glasses, a brown corduroy shirt, untucked, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes. Yeah, sure, she’d thought when she spotted him, although none of the photographers she knows looks like that. A backpack and two camera bags were in front of him on the floor. They chatted a bit on their way to the airport, and then after security check while waiting for boarding call. He talked about his experience with two of her colleagues from The Post, Mike Dawson and Bert Rosinski, whom he knew and had worked with. He talked about the stories he’d done with them.
The pilot’s voice comes over the intercom: Cabin crew, prepare for landing.
The plane banks. Priyanka looks down at the vast green mountain slopes below her. Turning her head right, she sees bright blue patches of the sky out the windows on the other side. Small smudges of white against a deep blue on all the windows she can see, like a row of tv screens in an electronic store playing the same channel. Then blobs of sunlight, a quick procession of them, on the other side as the plane turns again.
It was Bert who’d put her on to Tushar, saying he didn’t know anyone better suited for the job. “He knows how India works both in the high places and on the street,” Bert had said. “And he’s as tough as they come.”
A few rows ahead a child begins to scream. Almost immediately, another one starts somewhere behind them. Poor kids, Priyanka thinks, yawning to relieve the pressure in her own ears. The tin roofs of the houses below are shining like solar panels. Kashmir! She remembers the way her mother used to pronounce the word with that ultra-short vowel sound. It followed the first letter so closely as to almost sit on top of it, pushing it down to the shortest possible syllable length, the K sounding as if its arms had been cut in half. “Kashmir,” she says under her breath, trying to sound as much like her mother as she can. Kashmir!
“Your first trip, right?” Tushar asks as he puts the book in his backpack.
“Yes,” she says, thinking, and how long I’ve had to wait for it!
But she doesn’t say that, or anything else, her focus now shifted to how rapidly space is giving way under her feet, and her body stiffening to fight the hollowness in her stomach. She grips the armrests tightly, hoping Tushar won’t notice. It happens to her every time she flies—every damn time—even though she’s been flying all her life, ever since she was a child. This tight clutch of fear in her gut when a plane gets ready to land. She never found a cure for it in all these years, nor a slightly more elegant way of coping with it.
More children have started to scream but they sound like they’re somewhere else, like crying children in another part of her neighborhood back in Brooklyn.
After landing, as the stream of passengers walking toward the terminal building briefly widens and thins, Tushar narrows his eyes against the bright sun and says, “Bert said you’re Kashmiri, but Sonis are Punjabi, aren’t they?”
Priyanka smiles, nodding. In front of her, a woman with a crying child in one arm struggles with her trolley. She offers to pull the suitcase for her. The woman shakes her head, distractedly thanking Priyanka. The child looks at her and stops crying for a moment. They hear the sound of a small plane coming closer.
“Yes, Sonis are Punjabi,” she says to Tushar, “unless their mothers are from Kashmir.” She smiles. “My mother was from here. She was a proud pandit, although she hardly lived in Kashmir. My grandparents left Srinagar when she was eleven.”
Close to the arrival lounge, the crowd of passengers thickens again. “Want to hear this story,” Tushar whispers as they shuffle through a narrow gate flanked by soldiers.
There are soldiers everywhere. Priyanka has never seen so many gun-toting men in uniform at an airport before. She throws quick, cautious glances at them, none of whom looks like they’re from Kashmir, unlike the passengers, most of whom are Kashmiri as far as she can tell. The contrast, the strangeness of it, reminds her of an argument she recently had with Bert, who claimed there’s one armed soldier for every 20 civilians in Kashmir. They were sitting in his office, talking about her upcoming trip. “What a crock of shit!” she’d blurted in response. “There’s statistics to prove that, though,” he’d said calmly. “That’s anti-Indian propaganda in the garb of statistics!” If it was Mike, who’s more opinionated than Bert, and less patient, it would’ve led to a heated debate. Bert had changed the subject, and she’d apologized, feeling genuinely sorry for her overreaction. But Bert being Bert, he said he loved her zest. “It shows how you feel about the whole thing,” he said. “That’s why we’re sending you and not anybody else.”
Hello, hello, hello! A uniformed man lunges at a middle-aged passenger hurrying toward baggage claim. He grabs the man by the arm and roughly pulls him aside. Just then, a matronly voice announces the final boarding call for a flight to Chennai. Priyanka remembers the feeling she had dismissing Bert’s claim as just bogus, politically-biased statistics. She remembers the sudden rush of blood, and the surprised look on Bert’s soft, benign face. This is the final boarding call…, the voice repeats. “Welcome to Kashmir,” Tushar says. She thanks him, not sure exactly how he meant that, if there was a hint of irony there—if it was triggered by what they saw happening just now.
As she finishes registering her details at the foreigners’ registration office, a young man in a gray suit walks up to them. He smiles at Priyanka and holds out his hand to Tushar. “Hello,” he says. From the look on Tushar’s face she can tell it’s not—what’s the name? Muzaffar, Muzaffar Matta, who is supposed to receive them. It’s not him. “First time in Srinagar?” the man asks. Tushar says no, shaking hands with an uncertain look on his face. “Do you have a hotel reservation?” the man asks with a polite smile. “Is anyone coming to pick you up? If not, I can give you a ride.” His gentle voice delivers the words hurriedly. “Thanks, but my friend will be here any minute,” Tushar says. “No problem,” the man says. “If you need any help, let me know.” He hands Tushar a card. “I’m not a businessman. I go to college in Delhi. But we have a houseboat here. Family business. Times are bad, so I’m just trying to help my father.” Tushar thanks him, the man smiles with a nod and walks away.
“One of the luckier ones,” Tushar says softly, looking at the card before slipping it into his shirt pocket. “I’ve heard of houseboat owners driving auto-rickshaws now. That’s how wicked things have become.”
Outside the airport, the place looks drab and cheerless. A small number of cars and vans in the parking area, a few people getting on and off them. Priyanka spots the man who was manhandled by the security person a few minutes ago. A duffle bag slung over his shoulder, he’s rolling a big, film-wrapped suitcase toward a shabby white car. Weighed down by his luggage, the man looks older than Priyanka thought. Sixty-seven? she guesses now. Sixty-eight? “Where’s our friend?” Tushar says, putting his bags on the ground and stretching his back. He twists his upper body from side to side, his eyes scanning the place for Muzaffar. The sun has gone behind the clouds and it feels much cooler than when they got off the plane. “Cold, isn’t it?” he says, zipping up his jacket. Priyanka nods, closing her ears to the deafening roar of an airplane getting ready for takeoff.
She thinks of her father, the funny, loudmouthed and iconoclastic Dr. Soni of Sandymount, Dublin, and wonders what he’d make of this place if he were here now. “Cashmere (that’s how he called Kashmir, no daylight allowed between the wool and the place) is stupidly fetishized and overrated,” he’d say. He wanted to come here only because his wife was from here, and she was mad about her birthplace; he didn’t think much of Kashmir himself. “There are many places in India that are equally nice,” he’d say. “Punjab, Kerala, Nagaland!” He believed half of the subcontinent’s problems would be solved if people got rid of their “Cashmere fetish”. “I mean the place, not the wool,” he’d say, laughing.
***
“Kashmir is not just a pretty place, Dad,” she’d argued the last time she saw him. “It’s strategically important.”
It was the year before last, the first week of July, her second visit of the year. The frequency of her trips to Dublin had increased, from once or twice a year to every four months, since her mother’s death two years earlier. The old man hadn’t been keeping well since his wife’s passing.
It was wet and cold, and the hydrangeas in their neighborhood were a riot of pink, purple, and blue. That Friday, the day before she left, it hadn’t rained since the early afternoon and the two of them had gone out for a post-dinner walk on the Strand. He had his stick in the right hand and his left arm hooked around her right elbow. He stopped to watch a boy and a girl on an air walker, each with both of their feet on a tread, swinging back and forth and laughing their heads off. He chuckled and said, “They didn’t have these crazy things when you were small!” She was happy he’d forgotten about their conversation about Kashmir. She’d brought it up only to let him know about her department’s tentative plans of sending her there. Nothing had been finalized yet; Bert had just told her about the likelihood of such an assignment, and she couldn’t not let her father know that.
In a vast tidepool in front of them, the orange-blue sky swaddled in mountains of clouds met the thin sliver of sand separating it from the one above. They were seated in a bench not far from where the two kids were swinging themselves on the air walker. “As for Cashmere,” her father said after a long pause, slightly out of breath, “the belief…that it is strategically important…is an extension of the fetish.”
***
The white car drives away, exposing a puddle of rainwater and mud. A man in black clothes and white sneakers jumps over the puddle, hurrying toward them. “There he is,” Tushar smiles. A balding, 40-something man of medium height. Slightly overweight, he looks more like a businessman than a school teacher, which Tushar said he is. One of the first things Priyanka had asked Tushar was if he had reliable contacts in Srinagar, and he’d mentioned Muzaffar, saying he was the older brother of a good friend of his. He said he also had a few professional friends in Srinagar but wouldn’t even let them know he was going there. “On assignments like this, I wouldn’t go within a mile of any of them,” he’d said. “Muzaffar is both low-profile and well-connected, so we’ll be in safe hands!”
Safe hands. Safety. For whatever reason, the issue of safety, or the possible lack of it on an assignment like this in Kashmir, wasn’t among her major concerns when she was getting ready for the trip. And that in spite of the political facts of this place, which she was aware of as well as any journalist worth their salt, especially someone covering South Asia. Maybe it was the excitement of being able to finally make the trip, the chance of getting to set foot in a place so cherished by her mother, who never managed to come back and see it as an adult. It was a personal pilgrimage Priyanka was about to make on her behalf, and the joy and anticipation of that had overshadowed any concern for safety. But it changed the moment she got off the plane. She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but there was something in the air—something about the way things looked inside the airport that made her feel…well, if not quite alarmed, not very comfortable either. The swarm of security personnel didn’t help matters, nor did the treatment of the poor passenger, who didn’t appear to say anything in protest. The optics were odd, unsettling. They seemed to have driven home a message her well-wishing colleagues couldn’t. Be safe, Priya, each one of them said when they said goodbye, and she’d smiled and said she would be, not realizing then, as she does now, that it would take both effort and luck to be safe here. And that there’s no guarantee.
“Che chuke kashur bolaan?” Muzaffar puts his car into gear, his eyes staring at Priyanka out of the rear-view mirror.
She understands the words: do you speak Kashmiri? And she has just enough Kashmiri in her to say she doesn’t. “Me chune kashur tagane,” she says, smiling at the eyes in the mirror.
“That sounds very good,” Muzaffar says, maneuvering the car around a pothole to exit the parking area.
“Thanks, but those are the only words I know. Maybe a few more, but not enough. My mother tried to teach me when I was small, but I was so bad she gave up.”
The old regret revisits Priyanka. Why didn’t she ever learn the language? A formal course in Kashmiri might have been difficult to find when she was in college, but a private tutor? That couldn’t have been so difficult? Why didn’t she look for one when she found out about the assignment? A year’s worth of private training would’ve gotten her quite far—far enough, surely, to not have to hopelessly resort to the I-don’t-speak-Kashmiri routine every time someone asked the question!
It’s started to rain. The view out of the car window is a nondescript blur. Muzaffar’s question and her answer to it have exposed a sore gap in her sense of readiness for the assignment. That she’s Kashmiri, at least half Kashmiri—how can she bring that to bear on her job? Where’s the practical relevance of that identity? How come she didn’t think about it before? Why didn’t Bert or Mike bring it up? Me chune kashur tagane. Why not? Why the hell not? You had all the time in the world, Priyanka Soni!
Bits of Tushar’s conversation with Muzaffar make their way into her ear. They’re talking about how easy it was to recognize each other despite not having met in years. Muzaffar says something about the Kashmiris based in Delhi or elsewhere being the only people who come here these days. And politicians. “And you know how politicians look!” he says. “Mao suits in the winter and Jawahar jackets and white kurta-pajamas the rest of the year, right?” Tushar laughs. So spotting them in the crowd was not at all difficult for Muzaffar, and Tushar says something like Muzaffar looking like a slightly older version of himself.
Tall, bare trees line the street. Behind the trees, brick walls topped with barbed wire partly hide houses with slanting tin roofs. It looks like a residential area. Men with one sleeve of their phiran dangling limp are milling around shops and street corners, looking at passing cars. Priyanka knows enough about Kashmir to know they’re not amputees. She remembers the photograph of Anil Uncle, her mother’s cousin, whom she called Boijaan, standing in front of the door to her grandfather’s house, and her mother telling her, “The left hand is inside his phiran, holding the kangri close to his body. See the bump here? That’s the kangri, with hot coals in it.” She’d asked her mother if Anil Uncle didn’t have enough money to buy sweaters and jackets. Her mother had laughed. The house in front of which that picture was taken is no longer there. It lay vacant for some time after the last of its occupants had fled Srinagar, then it was burned down by an anti-pandit mob. Her mother’s beloved Boijaan had died long before any of those things happened.
The rain stops as abruptly as it started. Every few hundred meters there are sandbagged machine gun positions with soldiers standing with guns at the ready.
“There was a crackdown at the city center last night,” Muzaffar says to Tushar.
“Any casualties?”
“Not sure. But many were taken into custody. Which is always the case. The least you can expect from an army raid.” Muzaffar drives in silence for some time as Tushar and Priyanka look out of the windows. They’re passing through a crowded shopping area. “It happens all the time,” he continues. “The army arrives, cordons off the area and orders all men and boys to come out of their houses. Then they line them up on the road and harass them and beat them up. And if you protest, you’ve had it. They’ll take you away. And there’s no telling what can happen to you. It’s always like that.”
“And you can get picked up even if you don’t say a thing,” Tushar says.
“Like I did.”
“You? Really? How?”
“Didn’t Tariq tell you?”
“No! When did it happen?”
“A year ago.” Muzaffar chuckles, as if he’s about to tell an amusing story. “Tariq was in Delhi. One morning they came and dragged me and my father out of the house. They let my father go and put me in a van with four others and took me to a detention center. I was there for seventeen days. For no reason! And got beaten up every day. They had some information about a militant hiding in our neighborhood. ‘Do you know so and so?’ ‘Does so and so have any link with so and so?’ ‘Where were you on such and such day?’ ‘What were you doing?’ Same questions every day. And the same treatment. But it could’ve been worse. I was lucky they let me go.”
The car stops at an intersection, music blaring out of vehicles on the next lane. The sun is out. Shop windows along their side of the street glint in the sunlight. In a small roadside park, there are children running after one another. No soldiers in sight, at least Priyanka cannot see any, which makes the place look like it could be in any northern town in India. Like Dehradun, or Mussoorie, both places she’s been to and remembers well.
“It all looks quite normal here, doesn’t it?” she says to Muzaffar.
“Wait till it gets dark,” he says.
They cross a bridge over a narrow canal clogged with rundown houseboats. Priyanka wonders if people live in any of them. The car turns left, past a bus stop on the edge of a busy bazaar, and then right.
“This is where the lake starts,” Muzaffar says.
A narrow stretch of water runs along the street before opening out into the lake. The Dal. Priyanka has known it all her life without ever seeing it, except in family photographs and films. The lake, and the rim of mountains beyond it. How long she’s had to wait for this! She looks at the shikaras ferrying people, and the houseboats huddled together with signs reading VACANT hanging from their façades.
Muzaffar slows the car, bringing it to a stop for an opportunity to turn right. They’re in front of a hotel named Lake View.
“This is the one, right?” Tushar says.
Muzaffar nods as he drives into the parking area to the right of the building.
A crow sitting on a signboard next to the hotel’s entrance begins to caw as they get out of the car and approach the door. It flies away when they get closer. Welcome, say the partly-faded green and yellow letters of the board, which is askew with traces of bird poop on the wooden frame.
Priyanka isn’t sure if this is how she pictured her arrival here—the airport, the car ride, then this hotel by the lake, which looks like it has seen better days. But the lake—it is exactly how she imagined it to be.
***
Muzaffar has left. His words keep ringing in her ears: Wait till it gets dark.
She imagines night falling on the lake, the moonlit mountains mirrored in the water, along with the houseboats, and the shikaras. And the moon itself. The way her mother used to describe the lake, the way it looked on full-moon nights back in her childhood. The thought of being so close to it for a whole week, that every day she can stand here looking at that vast mirror, letting her eyes rest there, or letting them glide and sail and go as far as they will, begins to fill her with an unknown thrill. She feels a rush of goosebumps down the sides of her body, then hears the sound of two young men hauling their luggage up the steps.
The crow has returned to its perch on the board. It sits there facing them, and cawing. Tushar holds the door open for Priyanka. As she passes him to enter the lobby, he says to her, almost whispering, “It may not be the best address in town, but it’s hardly the worst.”
“Yes,” she says, not knowing what else to say.
