India: A Million Mutinies Now

  Aziz had said, after his talk with the boatman, that I was to pay 15 rupees for the crossing. The boatman himself had smiled and had appeared amenable to whatever was decided. But it wasn’t the boatman I had to pay. It was the small, angry-eyed, angry-voiced man at the boating steps; and he absolutely insisted on 25 rupees. Nazir, who had come with me partly to protect me against this demand, was abashed. I noticed, though, that he didn’t argue with the boating-steps man; he simply offered to pay the extra rupees himself. The lake clearly had its own rules, its various territories and spheres of influence. The Leeward’s writ, and Aziz’s, didn’t run here. I paid what was asked. And then, solicitously, Nazir put me in a taxi and sent me back to the Palace Hotel.

  There was more than an hour of daylight left. The view of the lake from the hotel garden beckoned me out again. I walked down to the Palace Hotel steps and took a boat for half an hour. Almost as soon as we had put out, two very small children, in a boat of their own, came alongside and threw mustard flowers into my boat. The gesture took me by surprise. I smiled, the children smiled back and asked for baksheesh. They were perfect little beggars: the smile, the whine, the aggression.

  And then it was the turn of the salesmen. One by one they came, and besieged my boat. One man said, ‘We will do it one after the other.’ I thought he was making a joke, commenting on my situation; but he was speaking quite seriously. And they stayed with me, two on one side, three on the other, so that I was at the centre of a little flower-pattern, a daisy-pattern, of lake boats. They showed their goods in detail: saffron, stones, cheap jewelry, and all kinds of pointless things in papier mâché. The salesmen’s boats were paddled by little children. The salesmen themselves reclined on pillows and cushions, and gave an impression of following one of the lake’s more luxurious occupations. One or two were covered in blankets from the neck down; below those blankets they would have had little charcoal braziers.

  *

  Nazir and I went on a tour of the lake. We had hardly pushed off from the Leeward landing stage – we were still in front of the hotel – when the little begging children appeared, paddling fast, throwing sprigs of mustard flowers into our boat, and saying, in a sibilant whisper at once demure and penetrating, ‘Baksheesh, baksheesh.’ Nazir gave them one or two rupees each. He said, ‘If you don’t give them money, they won’t go away.’ He was as tender with the salesmen, allowing our boat to be delayed just long enough to give offence neither to the salesmen nor to me.

  After we had passed the long row of houseboats we were in open water, and no one came near. We passed what I had remembered as the maharaja’s lake pavilion. A memory came to me of a poplar-lined causeway between the lake boulevard and the lake pavilion: there was no causeway now.

  In 1962 I had had tea in the lake pavilion one day with Karan Singh and his wife. Karan Singh had a great appetite for Hindu thought, and at that tea he had talked of the ninth-century Hindu philosopher Shankaracharya, who, born in the South, had, in a short life of 32 years, walked to the four corners of India (while India was still itself, before the Mohammedan irruptions), preaching and setting up the religious foundations that still existed. The hill beside the lake where we were was named after the philosopher; Karan Singh took a personal interest in the temple at the top.

  The setting for our tea was spectacular: the pavilion, the lake all around, the mountains, the poplar-lined causeway, the long drive rising between orchards and gardens to the palace. I asked who had designed it all. I was expecting to hear the name of an architect. Karan Singh, looking around, simply said, ‘Daddy.’

  That had fixed the moment for me. But now there was no royal causeway, no tall poplars, only openness, a breeze picking up strength across the water, and blowing our boat against the rough poles and the slack, rusting strands of barbed wire around the pavilion island, where the buildings looked damp and closed, awaiting summer and people.

  Nazir and the boat-boy between them poled and pulled the boat around the pavilion island. The lake was still choppy; but it became calm beyond a causeway laid with a big black pipe that took drinking water to the city. In the distance was the Hazratbal mosque. It had a white dome and minaret, and that whiteness stood out against the brown-black cluster of two-storey and three-storey houses.

  The dome and minaret were new. Hazratbal had been a plain mosque. There had been riots one year in Srinagar when the famous Hazratbal relic, the hair of the beard of the Prophet, disappeared. I asked Nazir about it.

  He said, ‘It was found in Srinagar, in a private house.’ (I was told later by someone else that a well-connected woman, who had fallen ill, had expressed a wish to see the relic, and it had been brought to her.)

  Nazir, talking of this and that, said that he was corresponding with an English girl who had stayed at the Leeward. They wrote once a month.

  He said, with unexpected seriousness, and without prompting from me, ‘It’s in God’s hand whether I marry a Kashmiri or a foreign girl. Only God knows the future.’ And that mention of God was serious, not idiomatic. Kashmiri girls, Nazir said, were nice, but foreign girls were more ‘experienced’ – and I didn’t ask what he meant by that.

  I asked him about religion. He said he went to the mosque every day. He went alone for half an hour or so, to pray for ‘everybody’. On Fridays he went for two and a half hours, to pray with everybody else. He had been religious ever since he was ten.

  We saw fishermen, scattered, still, almost emblematic against the open bright water, standing or lying on their low boats. We moved slowly towards them, coasting in the calm water after each paddle stroke: it was a wonderful moment of quiet just minutes away from the hubbub around the houseboats and boating steps of the boulevard.

  One fisherman cast a small net where he had previously laid bait – a tin can marked the spot. The fisherman, having cast his net, used a long pronged stick, held within the net, to stir up the fish hiding in the reeds and ferns. As the fish rose they were caught within the weighted net; the net was hauled aboard, and the fish caught were kept in a covered, water-filled section of the boat’s hull. Two other men were spearing fish: holding a spear, each man crouching a little way beyond the edge of his flat boat, with a dark cloth thrown over his head, the better to see through the water to the fish below. So for minutes they crouched, looking like small unmoving bundles at the edge of a boat, until they attempted to spear a fish, the spear held still until that moment of thrust.

  From the openness we moved to the gardens, fixed or floating. The fixed gardens were planted at their edges with willows, whose roots made a cage that kept the soil from being washed away. Just a few hundred yards away from the tourist lake, and as though no middle way was possible, was this old agricultural life of the lake people: weeds and ferns being twirled loose from their lake-bed roots by means of a curved stick, and lifted dripping, mixed with black lake mud, into the flat-bottomed boats, and then taken to fertilize the gardens, where weeds and mud and water were shovelled off all in one with broad wooden shovels.

  Women squatted and worked in spinach beds, and children worked with them, as children worked with adults everywhere in the lake, in gardens and on boats. Between the strips of gardens the algae-covered water lanes were lined with low-hanging willows. The houses were of timber and pale-red brick. People washed themselves on one side of a narrow plot; and on the other side young girls used the water to wash pots and pans. Some men, meeting among reeds, stayed in their boats and talked, as they might have done on a street. Some men and boys fished with rod and line. A boat passed with a cottage-cheese seller. Slowly – women and girls paddling their own boats, women and girls more visible here, among the gardens – we came back to the busy highways of the lake, behind the houseboats.

  We passed a settlement among willows, rough houses of dusty red brick set in timber frames. A one-roomed shop-stall, with a platform a few feet above the water, had a large picture of the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran (of whom it was said in Iran, by his enemies, that he was
really Indian and Kashmiri).

  Nazir said in a whisper, speaking with something like awe and nervousness and distance, as though he was speaking of people who were very strange, ‘All this is Shia.’

  Aziz had spoken in that way of Shias in 1962. He had spoken of them as people different from himself; once he had even said that Shias were not Muslims. I had barely understood then what he had meant. One afternoon, not really knowing what I was being taken to see, knowing only that it was a Shia occasion, I had gone by boat with some hotel people to see the Mohurram procession in the old town. I had remembered the occasion as a series of medieval pictures: remembering especially the pale, half-covered faces of secluded women, framed in small timber-framed upper windows, looking down at the bloody scene of self-flagellation below.

  It had been hard for me, emerging from the soft lake world of willow-hung waterways and lotus and vegetable gardens, to believe what I had so suddenly come upon: bloodied bodies, blood-soaked clothes, chains, whips tipped with knives and razor blades, the exalted, deficient faces of the celebrants, and their almost arrogant demeanour. They pushed people out of their way. I was ready to believe, what I was told then, that much of the blood on display was really animal blood. I hadn’t understood the religious-historical charge of the occasion, the undying grief it sought to express. I had only been alarmed by it, and glad to get away from it, glad to return to myself and what I knew.

  Nazir said he had been told by his father that I had complained about the Shia drumming during Mohurram. And I felt now that the distance with which Nazir (and his father before him) had spoken of the Shias had contained some wonder that the apparently peaceable lake people we were paddling by had this other, ecstatic side.

  It had become cloudy. Clouds came down over the mountains to one side of the lake. A strong breeze began to blow just as we were coming out of a water lane to the open water at the back of the houseboats and the Leeward Hotel. It began to blow us back, and dislodged the awning of our boat. This wind also kicked up the dark-red or russet underside of the flat round lotus leaves, revealing where – among the reeds and the tall grass and the litter around houseboats and service boats – the lotus were. I had been looking for the lotus. The pink flowers came out in June and July; I remembered them as one of the glories of the lake. But the lotus was also a crop here: even in the wind a man in a boat could be seen collecting lotus roots, using a special rod or tool for breaking them off under water and pulling them into his boat – endless, this loading and unloading of boats.

  Becalmed, having trouble with our awning, we were ‘boarded’ by two begging children, throwing mustard flowers, keeping their boat glued to ours, and asking for baksheesh.

  Nazir drove them away. It was the first time I had heard him raise his voice; and they respected his voice. He explained, ‘They’re a bad family.’

  Perhaps in some way they had broken the code of the lake. They were thin-faced and very small, starvelings of the lake (like so many others), yet with something predatory and disturbing in the thin-armed frenzy with which, indifferent to wind and rain, having spotted us, they had paddled towards us.

  The long row of big tourist houseboats gave us shelter. We moved in their lee, beside the railed timber walk that appeared to link them all. And then, the wind having dropped, we turned into the main river lane, back into the clutter of shops and sheds on stilts or stone walls, service boats with walls of old corrugated iron, timber and corrugated-iron structures on sodden bits of black, nearly bare earth: J & K Unique Stores, Manufacturers of Kashmir Arts and Crafts; a grocery shop; a butcher’s stall with cases of bottled soft drinks on the wooden platform in front; the New Pandit Shawl House and the Mir Arts Emporium facing the Leeward’s own handicrafts emporium and corner grocery shop; and, side by side on one narrow service boat moored to its own little island, a fur and leather-goods shop, a grocery, and the Sunshine Haircutting Saloon.

  And, in this area, what could be heard when the rain stopped, what became noticeable, was the roar of human talk from many directions, as in a covered market, regularly pierced by the cries of children.

  It was said that there were now 2000 houseboats in the lake. Every houseboat needed a service boat, or an attached garden. And what people said was that the lake, by which everyone in lake and city lived, the lake which drew the tourists, and was not very large, was shrinking.

  The rain returned in the afternoon. Clouds hid the mountains and the lake misted over. The Palace Hotel felt unaired and desolate. There were few visitors; the tourist season was not starting well. The hotel staff, formally dressed, outnumbering the visitors, were subdued; the formality of their dress added to the gloom. The Harlequin Bar was empty; it was serving no liquor. It was a big bar, and there was no crowd now to hide its shabbiness: the carpet, or carpet-like material, that was tacked to the front of the counter was ragged in places.

  A secessionist Muslim group had been setting off bombs in public places in the city. The group had also made a number of demands. It wanted no alcohol in the state; it wanted Friday and not Sunday to be the day of rest; and it wanted non-Kashmiri residents expelled. The hotel people, while they waited for the authorities to take action, had met among themselves and decided to avoid trouble. That was why the Harlequin Bar of the Palace served no alcohol, and why – until some Japanese visitors insisted – not even beer was served at dinner in the dining-room.

  In the afternoon, in all the rain, a Muslim holy man, a pir, turned up at the hotel, and it woke the place up. The pir was a very small, very thin, dark man, with something like a crew cut. He was in his sixties. He wore a dark-grey gown which came down to a few inches above his frail-looking ankles, and he was barefooted. He came to the hotel in a three-wheel motor-scooter, and when he got out he was carrying a telescopic umbrella. Six cars, full of people, were following his scooter. The pir appeared to be in a rage. He began to shout as he got to the desk. Shouting, waving his umbrella, seizing the arm of a foreign woman tourist, letting her go, he raged down the corridor, knocking down or hitting things in his way.

  The staff didn’t object. The holy man’s curse was to be feared. Equally, his blessing was to be sought. He behaved as he did because he was holy, and because, as someone told me, he was ‘in direct line’ with God. His movements and his moods couldn’t be predicted; but clearly, at this moment, during this extraordinary visit to the Palace Hotel, he was in a state of high inspiration. That was why the six cars were following him. With all the risks, people were anxious to get in his way. A waiter told me that if you had the chance, if you were lucky enough, to sit in front of the pir, you didn’t have to tell him of your problems. He knew about your problems right away; and – always if you were lucky – he began to talk about them.

  And then he was gone, with his gown and umbrella, and in his scooter, and the cars chased after him, leaving the hotel staff to return to themselves.

  At 7.11 – one minute later than the day before – the mullahs’ calls from the mosques around the lake announced that the sun had set, and believers could break their day-long Ramadan fast.

  Religion, faith: there seemed to be no end to it, no end to its demands. It was like part of the nerves of the over-populated, over-protected valley.

  While the maharajas ruled, Hindu sentiment had been protected in the valley. The killing of a cow, for instance, was a criminal offence, punishable by ‘rigorous imprisonment’. The portraits of the maharajas, Karan Singh’s ancestors, were still there on the main staircase of the building, beyond the main dining-room.

  Some of the worn carpets in the hotel now had been in the palace in 1962. They had been specially woven; there had been some talk about them one evening. On a subsequent evening the burning head of a guest’s cigarette had fallen on a carpet we had talked about and created a scorch spot. Karan Singh had not flinched, had not expressed, by a hesitation in speech, or a glance, that he was concerned or had even noticed.

  His family had ruled for more than a century here
; his princely ways were instinctive. It was also interesting for me to see how rulers managed more everyday things. We went to the cinema in Srinagar one evening. We went late and left early, before the lights came up; and then we raced back to the palace. I asked Karan Singh’s wife one day whether they stopped at foodstalls, roast sweet-corn stalls, for instance, at sweet-corn time. She said they did; and their practice was to pay more than was asked – leaving me wondering even now whether, with that tradition, the ruler was asked less than his subject, or more.

  I wanted to get a shawl, and I asked Aziz and Mr Butt to help me. I went to the Leeward one morning, and for form’s sake – with Nazir standing with me – I looked through the stock of the hotel shop. There was nothing there that I wanted, and then – to wait for Mr Butt’s real shawl-man – Nazir took me to the Leeward’s sitting room. They had all wanted me to see this sitting room; they were proud of it. It was a big room in bright colours on the upper floor; it had tall sliding glass windows; and it overlooked the busy water-lanes in front of the hotel. There was a photograph of the Golden Temple – perhaps this was a political gesture of some sort on somebody’s part. There was also a bleached picture of a Kashmiri girl. The girl was famous in legend, Nazir said; she was poor, a peasant girl, but by her singing she had won a king’s heart.

  Aziz came up to the sitting room. He ordered tea, and had a cup with me when it came. Tea was permissible in Ramadan in certain conditions: Mr Butt, for instance, who was not well, could have tea. Aziz had brought some photographs of himself in Mecca: cheerful, relishing the pious adventure. What a taste he had for life!