Innocuous life in a web of stringent, necessary security.
BLOG: Across the Border
By Sujeet Rajan
SRINAGAR: My wife and I sat on the lawn at a café, perched on a hillock at the lovely Chashm-e-Shahi garden, sipped tea. We were the only ones at the outside dining area. We watched visitors below walk on narrow paths, beds of flowers on terraces surrounded by ramps of spring water, the looming green canopied Zabarwan mountains catching the rays of an early afternoon June sun.
Four bearded Kashmiri youth, maybe in their late teens or early twenties, clambered from one side of the hillock, came to our table. One of them took the menu, glanced at it, threw it down in disdain. Another spooned some sugar from a bowl, put it in his mouth. They didn’t look at us. We continued to sip tea, remained silent.
The four of them then went to the café. They got an earful from the only waiter there, who saw what happened. He said angrily, in Hindi.
“Kashmiri hoke, mehmaan ke saath maloom nahin hain kaise pesh aate hain?” (You are Kashmiris, you don’t know how to behave with guests?)
“Hum bhi mehmaan hain,” (We are also guests) one of them retorted.
They turned back. One of them came to our table, took a spoonful of sugar, sprinkled it on the ground. They walked away. My wife looked at me, shook her head. I gave a wry smile. The waiter came, apologized. “School jaate nahin hain ladke,” (these boys don’t go to school), he said, brow furrowed.
That act of aggression was a small rebellion; anger at ‘Indians.’ The four days my wife and I spent in Kashmir two months ago – with our two sons staying with their grandparents in Delhi – were a revelation of what we had read and heard of: the omnipresent army and police monitoring of movement on the streets, long security checks at almost every junction, piled up sandbags with machine gun-toting men in battle gear, the frequent pulling up of vehicles for random inspections, trucks with armed men ready to go, the hilltops all around outposts of the army and paramilitary forces – from where occasionally gunfire could be faintly heard as they practiced on ranges, lights glowed softly at night; the Valley a virtual fortress.
We never felt threatened during our trip, not even during that incident at Chashm-e-Shahi, not when walking down the downtown main shopping area, Lal Chowk, when some people spat close to where we walked, several men glared at us. Not by a shopkeeper, who shouted angrily: “Mehnga hain to hain. Zyaada paise kamaayange, kam nahin (if it’s expensive, it’s so, I want to make more money, not less), when I tried to haggle, told him that my wife liked the kurti on the display outside, asked if he could reduce the price. Maybe too many tourists had haggled with him. We said thank you and left, bought a kurti at another shop.
There were too many men in uniform around for us to feel more than mildly perturbed; on the contrary felt guilty at times, as if we were also part of a powerful infallible entity in the midst of shackled residents.
I was not new to this kind of overwhelming security and resultant venom by some of the locals, in India. In the nineties, on visits and assignments, I had seen similar military presence on the roads of Jammu, and in Punjab, in Chandigarh and Amritsar. Once, at a bar in Shillong, where I had gone with a group of journalists, one of us took a napkin without asking permission from a table near us, and a local had come snarling at us. We managed to placate him and his group of friends, however, from hitting us, drank with them, commiserated on the vanishing greens of the forests in town.
Of course, in Srinagar, the glares of men and the spitting could have been because my wife wore a long skirt and a top, arms bared, head uncovered. But there were also the shopkeepers who went out of their way to be courteous and nice, including the ones on shikaras, who sold metal jewelry to her, in the middle of Dal Lake. The ageing waiter at the popular restaurant Ahdoo’s at Lal Chowk was genuinely polite, hovered over us, made small talk, gave a huge smile when we told him the mutton curry was excellent.
But there was also the realization that everywhere we went, from the driver of our car – who was savvy and diplomatic in his talk but let his guard down a couple of times, referred to us as “Aap to India se ho,” (you are from India), despite telling him we had come from Delhi, to the autorickshaw wallahs, to merchants and the ordinary folks on streets I spoke to, the locals identified themselves as Kashmiri. Not as Indian. Visitors, I gleaned, are Indian. Caucasians and others from overseas: foreigners.
I didn’t get shocked by the almost stubborn pride of the Kashmiris.
I was more shocked by the filthy and rundown toilet at the Srinagar international airport – worse than perhaps most railway stations in India, at the crowded airport, and even more crowded flight counters where you jockey for space and shout for attention, and at the multiple security checks, including making travelers identify their own baggage and load it onto trailers at the luggage boarding area outside the main airport building, an area where chaos reigns. Some travelers get desperate as they wait for their luggage to come, separated from their family who are inside, children screaming in confined spaces. It would have seemed a quaint practice in a village forgotten by time, but this is the most popular tourist destination in India, or at least happened to be, before violence has again racked the region in recent weeks.
Shocking also was the service meted out by the Vivanta by Taj hotel where we stayed. The mediocre service is the result perhaps of lack of experienced hospitality talent, forced as it is to probably hire from only local population.
At almost Rs. 20,000 a night, it is as expensive as the other Vivantas in metro cities, but an inexperienced and crude staff made it almost like a budget hotel. We realized how new the hotel really was – it was built less than a year ago, when taking an auto from downtown Srinagar, I told the driver to go a liquor shop a few kilometers away, and then drop us at the Taj (a same bottle of Chardonnay at the store cost Rs. 1,100, to the Rs. 10,000 at the Taj), and found ourselves soon enough being dropped back in the middle of Lal Chowk, at a hotel called the Taj. The driver looked puzzled when we told him to take us to the other Taj, but understood when we told him it was on top of a hill.
Apart from the fact that Indian food can be only had in one’s room, with a Chinese restaurant having inadequate space serving as the only main eatery on the premises, and a tiny bar which most Bangaloreans would scoff at, most staff seemed ill at ease to the luxury hospitality industry.
Room service was pathetic. The highlights: a bellboy took half an hour to arrive despite three calls to the staff at the front desk, to take our bags to the lobby for checkout. A boor of an assistant manager there almost made us miss our return flight –refusing to take the same credit card that had been used to book the room a month ago. He told us with great relish that he had worked for Capital One earlier, when a card from the same company I used got declined. The company had noticed overseas activity and put a stop to all transactions, pending a call from me. The manager refused my request to make a call to the credit card company. I finally paid with a debit card. Citibank charged me a $30 fee for the transaction, a charge I could have avoided paying with a credit card.
To the Taj’s credit, however, the room we got had a stunning panoramic view: on the ground floor, with a private front patio and garden terrace, perched on top of Kralsangri hill, it overlooked the Dal Lake, flanked by the Zabarwan mountains on the other sides, the houses of the Valley nestled against its foothills.
We don’t wake up at 4 a.m. anymore as we did in Srinagar to the cacophony of muezzin calls from mosques all across the Valley. But I cringe some mornings thinking of the even more stringent security that must have been implemented after recent riots and violence tarnished Kashmir. I dread to think how many more Kashmiris are going to be alienated from the fabric of India. What the strident calls of a double-dealing Nawaz Sharif for a ‘resolution’ to Kashmir, to save a disintegrating Pakistan, would do to the strong resolution of India’s forces and politicians to implement order in the Valley.
But the sad truth is, without the Indian paramilitary forces and police monitoring it, Kashmir would not be safe for people like my wife and me to travel there, not be safe for most of the locals too, to live there.
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Bazaar).
1 Comment
Glad I read this. Too many revealations. I was planning to book Taj Vivanta for our upcoming anniversary. I am not sure anymore. And I can feel your pain of alienating our own. Intractable mess for now. It takes decades to change hearts, and perceptions.