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.