Nundkol lake at 11,000 ft. (Photos: Shamik Bag)It’s all downhill from here on. From the top, you can see the ridge of the hill gently trailing into the approaching forest of Himalayan blue pine and cedar. The green cover, as a parting gift from this gorgeous land at the end of our week in the wild, feels convivial. Another couple of hours of calm, and then it’ll be the jerky return to the punishing world of diesel fumes, screaming horns, screeching tyres, swearing drivers and beseeching hustlers of trekkers and tourists. Our familiar chaos, I ruminate.
It’ll be back to the Kashmir of shrill primetime news and woeful newspaper headlines. To a world held hostage by bullets, pellets, stone pelters, bunkers and concertina wires. Where people are fighting people — for their people, on behalf of people, caught in the crossfire, living to fight, fighting to live and die.
Fellow trekmate and first-time trekker Rajat grumbled about large trekking teams en route. He spent hours behind his camera tripod. Maybe, other trekkers complain about our presence, too, I consoled him. This week-long trek last summer, starting from the Sonamarg region, weaving past the high-altitude alpine lakes of Vishansar, Kishansar, Gadsar, Satsar, Gangabal and Nundkol, reaching 13,800 ft before culminating at the temple town of Naranag, was our conspiracy, too. After spending three weeks in the summer of 2017 almost entirely holed up in the capital city of Srinagar as a journalist-researcher amid news of shootouts, hartals, curfews and prohibitory orders, this trek was my plot to trade reality for the surreal.
Over the week, we crossed mountains taken over by sheep. Nomadic Bakarwal herders, with their dreaded Bakarwal watch dogs, kept an eye on the flock from a corner. For an average of two trekkers, a horse carried their load of tents, ration, utensils, gears and bags. For our team of eight, including four support staff, we had four horses. The bigger trekking teams had horse strengths in 20s and 30s. During each day’s trek, the horses started a couple of hours after the trekkers and reached the next campsite an hour ahead; indeed, their passing us on the trail invariably seemed like a ceremonial parade of bells, grunts and foot stomps. On two occasions, I had managed to keep up with the horses and their Gujjar tenders; followed the sounds from cassette players and radios, strapped on to horses, playing soulful Gujjri love songs. At night, chained inside our tents, the grunts, occasional neighing and horse-bell chimes would lull us to sleep.
My trail of musing is broken by a sudden commotion — a horse has slipped down a slope. We rush to find it screaming wildly in a thin treble, stuck under the fallen trunk of a tree after having slipped off a narrow path. The helpless owner was gesticulating for help. Three of us chip in. Two of us pull back the tree trunk, while the others try to prise out the trembling body of the horse. The horseman takes the load — sacks of ration and gas cylinders on either side — off the horse. Without its load, the horse seems to enjoy lying around. A gentle whipping and the horse is back on its feet, still trembling. For a few minutes, its owner strokes the horse’s side and decides to carry one of the sacks himself. I smile at the tender moment shared between man and animal. Away from the “news”, Kashmir seemed large-hearted — with space for all.
That came together when our Bengali-majority team, including Rajat, becomes friendly with a group from Kerala — helped by passwords like fish, football and CPM. At Gangbal’s 11,500 ft, we indulge in a game of football; the two teams made up of Kashmiris, Ladakhis, Malayalis, Bengalis, Biharis, Punjabis, an Englishman, a Thai and a person from Taipei — a world coalesced without differences, a little breathlessly though, while the snowfields atop the looming Mt Harmukh gloriously changed colour with the melting sun.
A horse with its front legs hobbled in the foreground at the campsite in the river valley of Nichnai.The trek was akin to walking into the pages of all the effusive sketches and quotations that have bedecked Kashmir over the ages. Kalhana, the 12th century Kashmiri poet and writer of the historical chronicle, Rajatarangini, wrote, “things that even in heaven are difficult to find are common there”. Just the sight of a Kashmiri pool moved Jehangir to comment, “So clear the water that the grains of sand at the bottom could be counted at midnight by a blind man.”
Literary paeans to the bewitching land are aplenty. From the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore’s epic poem Lalla Rookh (1817), to the 17th century European traveller Francois Bernier’s description of it as “the paradise of the Indies”, where “the whole kingdom wears the appearance of a fertile and highly cultivated garden”. To borrow from Amir Khusrau’s couplet: Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast, Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast (If there is heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here), one is plain gobsmacked by Kashmir’s beauty even before the last dhaba and electricity pole disappear beyond a bend or the signal has deserted the mobile phone. Even before we reach the first of those lush meadows, its green graced by a million little yellow flowers, Rajat predictably exclaims that we’ve walked into a Windows screensaver.
But it’s from our four horses that I learn a lesson in love and bonding. Every day, after they reach the campsite and the load is taken off their backs, the front legs of two of the horses are tied while the other two horses are left totally unfettered, to be hobbled the next day. It seemed sad that the horses would on alternate days have their front legs tethered, limiting their movement while grazing — a graceful and mighty animal reduced to a haplessly comic hop. Bewildered, I ask Basheer, one of the horsemen. The horses have grown up together and are partners, he says. “If one is tethered, the other won’t run away. Warna dono hi bhagega (Else, both will run away).”
On the penultimate day of our trek, when we take a rest day at the Gangabal campsite, Basheer and the other horseman, out of compassion for their wards, leave all four animals untethered. Of course, they run away.
Through the day, Basheer and the other horseman run around looking for the horses, returning in the afternoon to borrow my raincoat when it starts drizzling. They search high and low among the panoramic vistas of north Kashmir. Around evening, Mudassar joins the search party. Soon, in the distance I smile on spotting the silhouettes of the gallivanting horse-couples, returning to the camp after a daylong illicit rendezvous, drenched in the rain.
Shamik Bag is a Kolkata-based writer. This article appeared in the print edition with the headline ‘Beyond the headlines’
