I feel that I’ve landed in a different country. At Srinagar’s time-warp airport I’m apprehended by a rifle-wielding soldier and told to fill in a foreigners’ form. I grope about in my bag for a pen, pin the officious form against a peeling concrete wall and spill my foreign details onto it. My Indian tourist visa, securely pasted into my passport, is of no use here in Kashmir, it seems. My lone bag goes round and round and round the baggage conveyor. My fellow passengers – dark-skinned and therefore spared this inconvenience – have collected theirs and are draining out of the suffocating terminal and into northern India’s thin and rarefied air.
It should come as no surprise that this place swarms with armed soldiers, but still it’s unsettling. Emerging from the terminal, I encounter a wall of indistinguishable Kashmir men, but I’m able to separate them out from my guide by the instant recognition he himself registers at the sight of the white woman dragging her bag behind her into the weak afternoon sunlight. He peels his lanky frame from the fence on which he’s been leaning and lopes towards me, hand outstretched.
‘Welcome to paradise', he says.
Paradise though this place is, I’m nonetheless a rare sight for the men crowding about the airport’s entrance: for many decades western tourists have shunned this place, and my presence is a sign that something has shifted, that things might just be returning to normal.
My guide’s name is Younis; he’s in his twenties and he wears a stylised jacket and a pair of vivid yellow moccasins. He has olive skin and sleek black hair and grey-blue eyes which are a surprise at first in this land of dark stares but which will become a soothing familiarity in the days to come.
Lest I’ve arrived in India’s most northerly state of Jammu and Kashmir with ill-formed ideas, young Younis swiftly apprises me of the virtues of his homeland: ‘Pakistan wants Kashmir, China wants Kashmir, India wants Kashmir. It is a very beautiful place and here we have [so much]: electricity grids, land, fruits.’
He pauses, then says, ‘But nobody likes Kashmiris.’
This place is the product of a divisive and bloody political history, one too complex for the casual observer such as myself to fully comprehend. Kashmiris are certainly a people who bristle at their proximity to potentially hostile states – ‘Pakistan is 175 kilometres away,