Another valley of flowers

When you look at maps printed in India, there is a growth off on the top left. It is shaped like a cauliflower perched on the upside down triangle of India. Gulmarg (powder to the people) is 60 km southwest of Srinagar in the Kashmir valley. Srinagar itself looked dirty and grey, full of half-melted ponds of plastic and mud.

The slopes to the west of Gulmarg are steep and treeless, and off to the east the land drops away then rises into another range and on into Tibet. The Kashmir Valley is on a different axis from the Himalayas, which form a ridge from east to west between India and the north. In Gulmarg it was hard to tell which direction was which. The sun sets steep and cold. The mist rises from the river beds at the slightest provocation and the clouds dance up and down the tree line like notes on a musical score.

It would have been enough just to hear the snow crunching underfoot, the sound of properly cold. The new snowfall added to the six feet of snow pack. One lamppost was still functioning with its lightbulb peaking up at ankle level. As we waited to rent our equipment, we asked if any avalanches had occurred. ‘Sure, look behind you, there’s one right now.’ said one Australian. I am a dangerously incompetent skier. I hadn’t slept for days. I secretly hoped they would close the slopes and we could jump in snow banks and then come inside to drink sweet tea and tell stories.

Instead of teaching me how to shift my weight between skies so as not to cross my tips, we spent the first morning learning how to locate avalanche beacons on fallen comrades. They said the average depth you are buried is 4 m, and it sets like concrete after 30 min. They said the best thing to do in an avalanche is to get going really fast and aim for a ridge, and at that point I tuned out. Later that morning I hit a tree, albeit in slow motion. I lost my cool, and cursed the mountain. The second day, after a sleep, I fought myself out of riverbeds and around buried sheds. I didn’t even notice the unpadded gondola pillars where I was hitting the moguls. I should have noticed the wires, barbed and electric, under and over my erratic path.

The old Kashmiri men were doing much better. They wore one piece snow suits that must have been from the eighties or earlier. They sat on benches and smoked cigarettes as the Canadians, Australians, and Russians passed. Some pull toboggans that they offer to tourists for Rs. 100, uphill. When the tourists have gone indoors, they take themselves for yelling races down the bunny slopes. There were as many Kashmiris skiing as tourists, as far as I could tell. Kashmiri boys crashed into each other on the slopes. One village between Gulmarg and the road head, was 3000 years old. Kashmiri as a language sounds nothing like I’ve heard before. It was at times like Portuguese, like Arabic, or Hindi. The guides and Indian visitors spoke Urdu, and the local people spoke Kashmiri amongst themselves. The son of our guesthouse owner told me that he speaks five languages, none of which is English. Kashmiri, Urdu, Pahari, Pashtun, and Arabic. When I asked where Pakistan was, he pointed west and said, ‘this range, then the next range, then…’ ‘Pakistan!’ I said. ‘No, Kashmir’ he replied.

It is a land under military occupation even before you arrive. At the Delhi airport, we had to identify our bags before getting on the plane. They check boarding passes getting off the plane to make sure we were the same people who had got on. Soldiers were stationed around the plane in a circle, 20 m apart, guns pointing out at the camouflage bunkers. The soldiers were Sikhs from the Panjab and darker people from the south. Clearly the British left not a few things behind in their erstwhile colonial empire. Our passports were checked twice in 60 km as boys with guns strung out on the chilly road.

That weekend, people were mostly bitter about the funding for the National Winter Games, taking place in Gulmarg just after we left. Rs. 6 – 8 crores were allocated to the games, but general consensus was that this money was going to government officials’ homes in Delhi and Mumbai. The state government didn’t want the fighting to end, they said, because they could perpetually ask Delhi for money in the name of security. The militants didn’t want to win or lose, as they’d lose their only reason for existence. At home men told of fighting not 20 km away. They smoked hash as their children made tea, and said that if they left Gulmarg and the presence of foreigners they would be killed.

On the last night we sat by the Bukhara and a police officer asked us how to set up a home for women and children orphaned by the fighting. We had bargained a room down from Rs 2000 to 300, drinking tea amiably with a crowd of men, waiting for them to call their friends whom, they assured us, would say such a thing was impossible. The room had no running water, and the bed was planks at multiple heights and distances from each other. But at the end they wouldn’t let us pay for our tea; there were worse places to be. They also wouldn’t look me in the eyes after I completed the arrangements for the room and food in Hindi. At the end of the day, entirely exhausted, I was content to slip into the gender roles, order more tea, and let my friend do the talking about politics.

Legal aliens

When you arrive at the Ministy of Home Affairs in Delhi, the man in khaki in the road points you in a direction. It sounds like you’re supposed to get a card, but he points towards a tea stall. At the table beside the tea stall a man stands handing out cards with numbers on it. Good so far. Inside the reception room, they are on 70, as displayed by the electronic board on the wall. Very good sign. When I ask for a form, they tell me to wait for my number. I’d like to fill out the form while I’m waiting, I say. Sit down, they tell me. No one in the room rises to my defence, and I sit relatively out of the way. The man who was giving out number cards sits beside me, and drinks some tea. A distraught European lady comes in, and asks for a visa form. They point her back outside and tell her to get a number. No one rises to her defence either, so I try my luck again with the form. I had only found out about the Ministry of Home Affairs requirements and responsibilities by waiting in line one chilly morning at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. The Tibetans monks were pleasant, the Afghans were very well behaved, and the Russians cut in front and passed up wads of cash. The staff yelled at the Tibetans and ignored the Pakistanis.

When my number comes up, I sign a book with my purpose, give my number card, and get a larger slip of paper. There is a photocopier in the ground floor of the building, underneath the hanging strips of chips bags. Truly superlative! The sign for the visa facilitation office points towards an open courtyard, where broken chairs are abandoned under dripping spigots. Two men drinking tea respond very slowly and point back out where I came from. I wondered if they had also broken my phone at the office, hung up on me, and cut the internet cable off Dubai to make it impossible to get any information over the past week. Upstairs in the visa office a man sitting under precarious piles of paper pointed me towards another desk, unoccupied, where I would get forms. The lady who showed up with the forms told me to go to counter 7, and pointed to the men and their leaning towers. Their desks were numbered 3, 4, 5, and 6. After a few hours of waiting, one man wrote something calmly on a new slip of paper and told me to come back at 5:30 for my letter. No local objection. Unbelievably good news. By this point my head was thrumming with anxiety. I was scared and dazed, paying attention to each passing task, short of temper and ready to be attacked. When 5:30 came and went, and a room full of people hadn’t received letters, I was ready to get deported.

The American states took the next chunk of my life, but in mocking detail. I gathered the next bouquet of papers and started on my taxes. Some are physical slips that were mailed to me in India, some are scans of papers that are hopefully in Toronto, some are my estimations of what may have been mailed to New York, if the dog hasn’t eaten it. Somehow New York State wants many, many rupees from me. Enough to hire someone for a year as a driver. Enough to buy 5600 bags of street popcorn, which would fill… something big. This could be less, they tell me online, if only I were eligible for the soybean oil fluid transformation credit. Or were a member of a registered New York State militia. It could also be more complicated; one customer in the FAQs started, ‘I met and married my husband in prison…’ It could also be not as serious as it seems. At the end of it all, a bureaucrat validated the newspaper eight or nine times before he got the stamp to work to let me remain in India. Battling for legal status is absurd sometimes.