Hari Singh hummed and hawed and eventually decided, two months after independence (and not without some heavy pressure from Nehru), that his state would stay a part of India.
The outrage of the new Pakistan government was predictable. After all, their country was set up as a homeland for Muslims and indeed the letter ‘K’ in its name stands for Kashmir. (The ‘P’ is for Punjab, the ‘A’ for Afghania (a romantic synonym for the North-West Frontier), the ‘S’ for Sind and the ‘Stan’ is an abbreviation of Baluchistan.)
Some Pathans took the law into their own hands and moved into Kashmir, taking over an area which has since become known as Azad (Free) Kashmir. Indian troops moved in to counter them and the long cycle of violence began.
In 1949 a ceasefire came into force, one of whose conditions was that a plebiscite should be held for the inhabitants of all Kashmir to decide on their future. It’s never happened. Instead, this spectacularly lovely land has become the arena in which all the fear and loathing between Pakistan and India has come to a head. Thousands of soldiers face one another across a Line of Control. By the late 1990s the potential of the Kashmir dispute escalated from destructive to catastrophic as the Pakistanis confirmed that, like India, they now had the power to wage a nuclear conflict.
The houseboats that can still be found clinging to the shores of the lake are symbols of the days when Kashmir was not the problem, but a hideaway from all the problems elsewhere. If you can forget the roadblocks and the army patrols, the magic spell remains.
Among reasons to be thankful for being on Dal Lake this morning is the ban on outboard motors, which keeps the mood of the place as reflective as its still waters. There’s time to take in the passing scene, admire majestic chinnar trees on the shoreline, the white walls and domes of an impressive waterside mosque and, alongside it, a run of multi-windowed three- or four-storey wood and brick houses that would not be out of place in a Baltic seaport.
For hundreds of years the lake has been farmed by the Mihrbari people, market gardeners living on islands only accessible by boat. Thirty-five thousand of them still live on the water, farming lotus beds for food, cattle feed and the famed Kashmiri honey that comes from their pink flowers. Willow and poplar trees on the islands are cut for thatching and building materials, vegetables are cultivated in hydroponic gardens set among compressed bulrushes and all commerce is conducted from boat to boat in a floating market that starts at daybreak every morning. Suppliers from the city bring their barges down and bargain for turnips, potatoes, spinach, pumpkins, shallots, big fat radishes, aubergines, mint and okra.
We’re here within an hour of dawn and the market is in full swing. Several boatloads of flower sellers, pushing through the jam make a beeline for us (we are, apart from an Israeli couple, the only people resembling tourists here today). It doesn’t stop at buying flowers. This merely spurs them on to sell you seeds as well. The more you resist the more they like it.
‘I have blue sunflower seeds.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I have lotus seeds.’
‘I’ve bought some already.’
‘What lotus seeds you have bought?’
‘Blue.’
‘I have six-colour lotus seeds. And wild orchid and wild tulip.’
‘I have no money.’
‘You buy and send me the money.’
At this point one would normally wind up the window and roar off as fast as possible, but as we’re both in paddle boats there is no prospect of a quick getaway and either you drift along together for several miles or, as I did, you buy six-colour lotus seeds for all your friends. These disappeared mysteriously into a hotel wastepaper basket about a week later.
It’s still only breakfast time as I get back to the houseboat moored on the western shore of the lake, which will be our home for the next couple of days. Mr Butt, the owner of Butt’s Clermont Houseboats, is worrying away at a table laid out in what was an old Mughal garden, believed to have been built by the Emperor Akbar and called the Garden of the Morning Breeze. Soon we’re chomping on eggs, pancakes, thick toasted bread, honey and Kashmiri tea, a fragrant alternative to the straight cuppa, made with saffron and almonds.
Mr Butt circles nervously. He is a man of immense enthusiasm, very responsive to compliments and given to hugging the bearer of them with delight. On the other hand, the slightest thing that goes wrong produces intense anguish and much shouting at the staff. There seems to be no middle ground between euphoric happiness and utter despair.
This makes him an anxious but attentive host and even before I’d checked in he was proudly showing off the signed photographs of previous guests that adorn the walls of his office. They range from Lord Louis Mountbatten, the man who partitioned India and Pakistan, to George Harrison, who stayed here in 1966 to learn the sitar from his friend and guru Ravi Shankar. I ask which boat George had stayed in and a small cloud passes over Mr Butt’s beaming features.
Later I could see why. It lies in a side channel, half submerged with water. Mr Butt couldn’t afford to keep it afloat.
Newspaper cuttings are displayed alongside the photos: recommendations from the Washington Post and the New York Times and a flattering inclusion, together with such high-tone places as the Regent in Hong Kong and the Lowell, New York, in Charles Michener’s ‘Hotels You Won’t Want to Leave’. These clippings are now yellowing and curled at the edges and there is none much later than the early 90s. When the troubles in Kashmir escalated, the press reviews turned to scare stories and the only foreign visitors were journalists covering the conflict.
Mr Butt admits there were times when he was near to tears. Staff he’d known all his working life had to be laid off, and at the nadir of his fortunes the army commandeered his property and set up camp in the Garden of the Morning Breeze. Things improved briefly from 1995 to 1999 but any hope of a steady recovery is stymied by every fresh atrocity, every fresh confrontation.
I can only feel grateful to this cheerful, distracted man for keeping going, for his boats are neither functional nor cheap to run. Mine is very splendid, with elaborately carved woodwork inside and out, a carpeted sitting room with very fine crewel-work embroidery and a grand dining room with cedar panelling, chandeliers, cut glass and an oval rosewood dining table.
This evening the skies darken, the lake empties of boats and after a brief and eerie period of silence and total calm the heavens open and there’s nothing to do but sit tight and watch the rain splashing in great glassy drops on the water lily beds that surround the boats.
If anything, Dal Lake is even more beautiful in the rain.
Day Forty One : Srinagar
The storm rumbles on through the night and as the growls of retreating thunder merge with the cries of the muezzin I reach for my torch (there has been no mains power since the rain began). It’s five o’clock, but I feel wide awake. I dreamt very vividly last night. Super-charged dreams, as if the electricity in the air had given them an extra intensity. I saw my father very clearly and I rushed up and hugged him, something I never did when he was alive, and heard myself say ‘Hello Dad!’ except it wasn’t my voice at all but the voice of my son.
An hour later dawn is breaking and we’re driving out onto the wet and windswept streets of Srinagar. The night-time curfew has only just ended and the streets are empty save for foot patrols and packs of stray dogs. Srinagar must have been a handsome city once. There are still many tall, steeply gabled, half-timber, half-brick buildings, a few onion domes and a magnificent mosque with roofs, turrets and spires with echoes of Russia and lands to the north.