We came upon Srinagar in the Himalayas, through a winding mid-November ride from the Punjab to Kashmir stretching up towards the snow, yet another world. When would war come? Would Kashmir be the focal point? Anxiety about travelling onwards and worry about what war would mean to us had dragged our spirits down since leaving Amritsar. There were some on the bus who wanted to get to Delhi as soon as possible and push on to destinations beyond India.
However, Srinagar was on the itinerary and that was where we found ourselves. We left the vehicle with our luggage and peered into the autumn night air and the enveloping scent of woodsmoke. We passed by pale, soft lights, and a distant tide of murmuring voices as we approached the Dal Lake to take up residence in one of the houseboats moored upon the banks. It was a night where time had no meaning, where the distance between humanity, water and the cold breeze disappeared and merged into an ecstatic strange dream. Even now the smell of woodsmoke in the dark of night when I am out in the cold returns me to that place and that time.
Please burn my body on a pile of wood and throw my ashes into water.
The lake revealed itself in the morning with autumn trees mirrored in stillness; sellers of fruit, vegetables, and stuff for tourists, slid by like ghosts on the glassy water on their shallow, narrow boats, and their voices echoing beyond the trees up to the vast snow-capped mountains beyond. On the houseboat we were shown the visitors’ book signed by George Harrison just five years before, when he stayed by the Lake to learn from the guru of the sitar, Ravi Shankar. I was also delighted to see, lying enticingly on an uncluttered table, the spectacular album cover of the Incredible String Band’s ‘The 5000 Sprits or the Layers of the Onion’.
We rode on scrawny, tough mules up into the snow lapped mountains. Later we took a slow rowed boat journey along the lake fringed with golden brown leaved trees; all sound absorbed and subsumed into the surroundings. No engines, no drills, no aeroplanes, no cars, nothing but people, birds, the wind, the cold – another time, another life. It is so easy to vaunt the progress of man, and to dismiss as sentimental rubbish and nostalgic musings of a romantic the questioning of modernity – our brave new world.
It is indeed impossible to recreate the past, for the past is a dead land full of misconstruction. However, to deny the past and its play in the present is to enter a fool’s paradise shorn of complexity and housed in mirrors of distortion. Can you see what is? Are your perceptions real? Are you aware of how your actions of today create the path to tomorrow? How can you be so sure?
As the rumbles of war took us from this place so close to the Pakistan border and essential focus point for conflict resulting from that archetypal bureaucratic blunder by the British in partitioning India, we moved to the blackouts of Delhi. Occasionally, a siren would wail as preparations for the experience of attacks by warplanes and bombers was becoming more of a reality. There were anti-aircraft guns surrounded by sandbags and operated by helmeted men in camouflage uniforms placed strategically around the city.
How is it that I, like so many people in the past and the future, fell in love with India? Was it that naïve, romantic streak trying to escape cruel reality? It couldn’t be for there is more daily evidence of ‘cruel reality’ as you travel round India than in many other places in the world. It is there in front of you; on the streets; in the villages; in the fields; not much is hidden, but when this ‘reality’ is revealed, there can be horrors that shock to the core.
Delhi is where we parted company; at the YMCA in the centre of the city where taxi drivers sidled up to us to offer a variety of services one of which was a ride in the car. An early morning city of tennis players on the nearby courts and the sad, silent ragged creatures that stirred from their nocturnal homes on the street. We had been together for almost three months, finding a closeness, a travelling community. But then, once we had stopped, the communal ceased and individual purpose took over.
Accident of birth is all that is needed in this stiff framework of inequality. To be male instead of female; to be white instead of black, brown, or yellow; to have a home; to have food; to have a good chance of survival. We were the lucky ones, the privilege afforded by where and to whom we were born. We knew that in this there was held a responsibility.
We had arrived in a country so totally different from the one we had left. But, because we had come overland and had experienced gradual culture and environmental change, we had been able to assimilate this transformation and connect with both land and humanity. To travel like this is the very antithesis to air-travel – to be picked up in one country and dumped in another. It takes a while to catch up with yourself.
My only connection with my family was through letters. The company running the trip set up designated Post Restante places, which were post offices that held any post for us to pick up on the way. Generally, we were able to get post about every two weeks. My mother had written weekly to my brothers and me when we were at boarding school. She kept this up so that there was always a letter for me to collect – I wrote home more sporadically. We never communicated by phone.
As a parent, I have been incredibly grateful for the ability to communicate with my children as they have travelled to many places, and lived for a lengthy time in other parts of the world. However, when the communication ceases for a time, anxiety can so easily surface. When I made this trip to India it was really a case of there being ‘no news is good news’.
Our ancestors walked, went by horseback, camel, oxcart, open to the elements, in discomfort, slow, but in deep connection with their surroundings. Even travelling by bus, we had to stop frequently; we had to interact with the people we met on the way; the roads were often poorly maintained, narrow and winding; mostly we travelled slowly.
Maybe the wheel will turn, and we will have to travel slowly again.
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