[Reader-list] Naipaul's Kashmir and Mine-II

[abir bazaz]

...
It was a year before I could return again, by bus this time, in June 1995. I had changed, but the Valley had not: I had the familiar, eerie ineffably sad sensation I had felt too many times before, in Kathmandu, in Haiti, in Milwaukee, of coming home to a place I was only passing through. There was the Valley stretched before me, green and yellow and sky blue, as we came down into it from the Pir Panjal range. There in turn were the mountains immutable as ever in the distance as we rode along the straight, flat National Highway toward the town, poplars and rice fields on either side. And at last we were in Srinagar, and I was in first a motor rickshaw, then a shikara, then finally I had arrived at the houseboat and among the friends I felt I now knew so well. It was almost as though a long year dense with work and adventure and loss had not intervened. 

Haji and his servant welcomed me effusively with hugs and protestations of having waited anxiously these many months for me to return. The houseboat had the pleasant dry woody smell I remembered, though a few small changes bespoke the passage of time. There were new cushions on the balcony and new upholstery on the couches in the front room. This particular family had not suffered too badly this past year. The birds that had nested inside Haji's house were gone: the women had objected to the mess, and Haji's son had prevailed on him to keep them out for the sake of domestic tranquillity. The chicken whose life my companion had sentimentally saved the year before at Lidderwat, Lucky, was nowhere to be seen; she may not have been so lucky in the end. I didn't have the heart to ask. Nor did I want to visit Mr Bhat and Aziz again; I decided to leave them in peace to get on with their lives. Mr Bhat's health had greatly improved, I was told. The mullahs still moaned their haunting prayers at dusk, and the sunset across the lake was as unbearably beautiful as before. 

At the end of An Area of Darkness, Naipaul writes of India "slipping away" from him. Hav
 seeing it once again, realising not only with the mind but in the gut that life and death had been going on in my absence, I tried and failed to retrieve my earlier two visits from personal memory. Where does the time go? As I write, with my return to Kashmir now similarly irretrievable, I need no literary critic to explain to me the meaning of Naipaul's final sentence: "I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again." 

One evening near the end of my last stay in Kashmir, I sat alone for a while on a wooden pier and watched the world go by on the lake between me and the typically stunning sunset. It came to me to what an extent my experience had hinged, very much for the better, on the kindness and friendship of one particular family and their relatives and close friends (the two categories not always easily distinguishable). Haji's citified elder son was back from Delhi, preparing to take a rare group of clients on a long trek, and other young relatives were about. Suddenly, I found myself on the verge of tears. But I challenged myself not to indulge in the sadness of leaving a place, pleasurable though I knew that to be. "Tears were running down his cheeks," writes Naipaul of his 1962 parting with Aziz. "Even at that moment I could not be sure that he had ever been mine." It was a Kashmiri trait, I now knew, to be finally inaccessible: I was to have a disturbing similar experience the morning I bade farewell to Haji. I wanted to say something that would last, that would insure my attachment to him through the next separation. He was polite as ever but distracted, perhaps thinking of his own worries. 

I would move on, I realised that evening on the pier, and life and death would go on in Kashmir as before. This was their life; it was only a slice of my varied, attenuated experience. I had no right to claim Kashmir, to feel sure that it was mine. I was not suffering and dying, I was not losing my livelihood. On the contrary, as a journalist I was quite literally ma
fering. And in more important ways, I had been given more than I deserved or felt I could repay. Maybe the best I could do was to say, with a faith truer and more confident than I could have mustered a year earlier: We'll meet again, enshallah.