Every Day We Disappear

by Angela Long

  “This is my tenth visit to Mother India,” the traveller said. “Don’t worry, she grows on you.”

  I took a bite of a banana pancake, hoping the oil of oregano I’d taken as parasite protection would save me from its uncooked centre.

  “The Metro isn’t far from here. Brand spanking new. Great way to get into town.” He explained how to get to the subway. I secretly hoped he’d offer to go with me. I looked around the crowded dining room at the other tourists sitting in groups of two or three, laughing over cups of honey-lemon-ginger tea, reading the pages of their guidebooks with relish.

  But after three days of subways, autorickshaws, Ambassador cabs, and cycle- rickshaws, Mother India still hadn’t grown on me. I’d never been anywhere dirtier, noisier, more chaotic. There were no lines on the road. “We talk with our horns!” an autorickshaw driver bragged. I’d never seen such poverty: women begging with what looked like dead babies in their arms, whole families living in tarp shacks on traffic islands, children, maybe three years old, rummaging through piles of garbage and excrement for plastic bottles to salvage. Everywhere I looked lay the potential for heartbreak. So I stopped looking. I kept my head down.

  It was like I’d flown to the end of the world; this was what would become of us when all the systems we held dear came toppling down. I’d stood in the centre of a roundabout, stranded until it was clear to cross. I’d watched the chaos swirl around and around, somehow none of it colliding with a sacred cow. I’d waited for it all to explode or implode or even just stop for a moment and take a breath. But it hadn’t. “A functioning anarchy,” was how a friend with a penchant for politics had described it with admiration.

  The travel agent called out into the alley again, and this time another young boy appeared with a stack of round stainless steel containers. “Lunch time,” the travel agent said. He must have noted the surprise on my face. “Anything you want in India, any time, it’s yours. Like magic.”

  “If you have money,” I said.

  “Well, that is never a worry for you westerners.”

  I felt like telling him I was not one of those westerners. Money was always a worry. I remembered standing in line at a natural foods store in Vancouver just last year, with just enough to buy an onion and a head of garlic. I’d watched the woman in front of me with envy as she unloaded a cart filled with organic foodstuffs: yellow-fleshed mini watermelons, discs of soft unripened cheese decorated with pressed flowers. I’d slept for a month on a camping mattress on my apartment’s splintery hardwood floor until I graduated to a futon mattress on the floor, imagining my neighbours in their multi-million dollar renos sleeping on 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. But when I looked around me here, I knew the travel agent was right. Just the fact I had a passport and could afford a flight ticket was enough to place me in the category of extreme privilege.

  We ate dal and chapatis and the questions began: “Where are you from?” “Are you married?” “Do you have children?” “Do you have brothers? Why did they leave you alone?”

  After lunch, the rickshaw tour, and the bonus cappuccino at a swank café (where mating couples meet in secret, the travel agent joked), I prepared to meet my doom at his apartment.

  But his sister was there, waiting with her husband and three children and a feast they’d prepared in my honour. We sat on cushions. We ate curries laced with plump raisins and cashews. We drank apricot juice and Kashmiri chai. Soon the sun set red and fiery in the polluted skies of Delhi. Soon we moved the cushions and rolled out the mattresses. We slept side by side. We farted and snored and dreamed together until it was time to wake up and send me off to the airport.

  At four in the morning, the city was already awake. Cows wandered from one garbage heap to another, rickshaw-wallahs lit incense for their dashboard gods. I was already sweating. The travel agent flagged down an Ambassador cab and paid my fare. I realized I still didn’t know his name.

  “You have Delhi family now,” he said and gave me his business card. “Any problem, anywhere in India, you call.”

  The Woodcarver

  The women came every morning, perched on the prows of wooden boats with colourful scarves tied around their heads. They dipped long oars into the lake and glided towards the marsh. I opened the shutters of my room and watched them disappear into the reeds, calling to one another like songbirds. They collected lotus leaves to feed the cows, to keep the milk sweet. I heard the slap of giant leaves on water as they shook mud from the roots.

  The sun breached the mountains. Javed would be here soon with my breakfast and I still wasn’t dressed. I was the only guest staying on The Mughal-E-Azam Houseboat, the only person who had stayed there in quite some time. Tourism had waned since insurgents kidnapped six western hikers in 1995 and one of them was found beheaded with the words “Al Faran” carved into his chest. But the turmoil in Kashmir had begun long before. India and Pakistan had been fighting for control of Kashmir since 1947. From 1989 to 2004, most of the state was closed to visitors due to violent unrest, and the Canadian government regularly issued an advisory to avoid all travel to the former “tropical Switzerland of Asia” that was plagued by grenade attacks, landmines, and bombings. The Indian government had designated Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim state in a predominantly Hindu nation, a “disturbed area.” But the travel agent in Delhi had assured me not to worry.

  “Governments like to exaggerate,” he’d said. “My brother will meet you at the airport. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

  Javed was the eldest son of the Shalla family, the fourth-generation owners of the Mughal-E-Azam. He’d spent all of his thirty-five years on this lake and had learned to speak several languages fluently during the days when Kashmir was touted as “Paradise on Earth.” Those were the days when waterways were the only roadways, and shakira floated past gardens filled with musk melon and water chestnuts, carrying mulberries and saffron from the surrounding villages, and a people who had lived this way, nestled in the Vale of Kashmir, for centuries.

  “When the British Raj came and saw Kashmir, they wanted it,” said Javed. “But it wasn’t for sale. They weren’t allowed to buy the land.”

  But they could buy the houseboats. They filled them with crystal chandeliers and sterling silver tea services, then sold them back to the original owners when it was time to leave India. Javed showed me letters from former guests – staff of the British High Commission, poets he told me were famous, Bollywood stars.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asked, pointing at a signature. I shook my head, running my finger along the scrawls of name after name.

  You wouldn’t have known from the condition of the Mughal-E-Azam that tourists were rare. The chandeliers sparkled, the mahogany tabletops gleamed. Every morning Javed delivered my breakfast on a silver tray: a boiled egg, toast, marmalade, a pot of cardamom tea. His mother, whom I’d yet to meet, prepared these in a bungalow on the tiny island to which the boat was moored.

  I heard Javed lower the gangplank and slide open the houseboat door, then the clatter of china in the dining room. I would have preferred to eat on the veranda and look at Dal Lake through the ornately carved screens of walnut. But Javed insisted I eat in the dining room, sitting at a table for ten with my feet on the finely woven Kashmiri carpet. He sat in the corner of the room and watched me, ready to attend to my every need. He rarely smiled.

  I sat down and took a sip of tea. The slap of lotus leaves on water drifted in through the windows.

  “Is it sweet enough?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “What are your plans today?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. Every day for the past week Javed had suggested various tours of local sights: the Mughal gardens, a cable car ride to the peaks of Gulmarg.

  I spread marmalade on my toast. Javed watched from his chair. The women glided past the window, boats piled high with leaves.

  �
��Today is the first day of Ramadan,” he said.

  “Does that mean you’re fasting?”

  “Of course,” he said, and stood to collect my dishes.

  Later I sat on the velvet-cushioned bench on the veranda while the sun edged its way around the lake, and I admired the carved wooden screens. Every day I saw something new hidden in their design: the wings of a bird, the petals of a flower. Javed appeared on the gangplank with a silver tray laden with tea and cookies. He sat on the other cushioned bench and stared out at the water.

  “Is it sweet enough?” he asked.

  I nodded, then opened my book and read, hoping he’d get the hint.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  I held up the book: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, by Mahatma Gandhi.

  “What’s it about?”

  “India,” I answered. “The independence of India.”

  He continued to stare out at the water. A kingfisher dove into its calm surface.

  “I never learned how to read,” he said.

  The sun rounded the houseboat, and I shifted to face it head-on as I told Javed what I’d read of Gandhi’s early life.

  “Do you know who did these carvings?” he asked when I paused. He bent to refill my cup. “I did,” he said. “During the war.”

  “Did you do the ones inside too?”

  “All of them,” he said. “It was a long war.”

  I asked to look at the other woodcarvings again, with the artist by my side. We walked through the entire houseboat. The chair legs, the mirror frames, even the carved ceiling panels, were all his handiwork.

  “The schools were closed down. There was nothing else to do,” he explained. I ran my finger along a tendril of a vine. “I was too young to fight,” he said. “And so I carved.”

  The Carpet Seller

  The bus started its engine. A young man wearing the long woolen cape typical of Kashmiris slid into the seat beside me.

  “My name is Amir,” he said. “A pleasure to meet you.” He was delighted we were both headed towards the same final destination, Leh, a two-day journey up the Zojila Pass and through the Indus Valley. There he would join his uncle to close up the family carpet shop for the season.

  “Did you know Kashmiris weave the best carpets in the world?” he asked.

  I smiled politely, bracing myself for the sales pitch, but Amir just looked out the window.

  I watched as the streets of Srinagar were transformed from a warren of fruit stalls and butcher shops into a city under siege: machine gun emplacements, barbed wire, camouflage netting. Indian army commandos fanned out to man the posts.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Amir said, “they never shoot the tourists.”

  We waited as last-minute passengers loaded their cargo onto the roof of the bus: large burlap sacks of rice, boxes secured with string, forty-gallon tins of mustard oil. The roof shook with the impact. Amir unfolded the Srinagar Times.

  “Do you mind if I read?” he asked.

  On the front page, I noticed a photo of a burnt-out car surrounded by graceful Arabic script. “What happened?”

  He flipped to the next page. “Shanti, shanti.”

  I shifted on the ripped green vinyl, trying to get comfortable on the converted school bus that would soon transport us along one of the most dangerous roads in the world. Not only did its one-laned, mostly unpaved track snake through the heights of the Himalayas, but it hugged the disputed Pakistani-Indian border, otherwise known as the Line of Control. Shellings and hijackings were regular occurrences. But of course, I’d skipped that part of the Lonely Planet and knew none of that at the time.

  This was the only available route to Leh – or so I’d been told – and the fabled Himalayan Kingdom of Ladakh, a land of benevolent Buddhists perched on a high-desert plateau ringed by snow-capped peaks. A land, I hoped, of peace and quiet.

  “What do you do in your country?” Amir asked.

  I hesitated. Just a few weeks ago I was a waitress with a creative writing degree working at a restaurant called Fiddlehead Joe’s. “I’m a writer,” I answered, to simplify things.

  “A journalist?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Dangerous job,” he said and returned to the newspaper.

  I glanced over to see a photo of a man with a gunny sack over his head tied at the neck with a rope. I started to feel nervous. I scanned the faces of the passengers on the bus to discover I was the only woman. But none of the men seemed to pay me any heed. They were all too busy reading.

  The driver started the bus. “Ladakh! Ladakh!” he yelled one last time into clouds of diesel fumes.

  It wasn’t long before we began to climb the Himalayas at much too sharp an angle. We cut through cliff faces and avalanche zones. We shot down mountain passes, across washouts. There were no guardrails or brake checks or runaway truck lanes. Instead, hand-painted signs decorated rock faces and errant boulders: “If you’re married to speed, divorce her”; “After whisky driving risky”; “Keep your nerves on the curves.”

  We passed road work crews – men mixing tar in cauldrons atop giant smoky fires, women swinging pickaxes, breaking apart boulders with loud clangs. Children carried buckets of rocks on their heads.

  “They are from Bihar,” Amir told me. “The poorest people of India, but the hardest workers.”

  At the base of every gorge, remnants of unlucky vehicles glinted in the sunlight. There were times when we teetered on the outermost edge of the road, waiting for military convoys to pass. I watched as rocks fell, gathering speed as they tumbled into oblivion.

  We passed through village after village. Checkpoint after checkpoint. I grew accustomed to the soldiers dotting the landscape every few hundred feet. They stood in the middle of alpine meadows, in pastures among the sheep. The Kashmiris went about their business, oblivious, it seemed, to the guns draped so casually across the soldiers’ chests.

  As the bus limped to the top of a pass, I looked back towards the landscape we’d traversed. There was nothing but wave after wave of mountain peak. I looked ahead to mountains soaring higher than I’d imagined. It was the kind of scene that made me feel like there was nowhere else I’d rather be than right here, right now. On this bus.

  Maybe the altitude was making me giddy. Or maybe it was the villages – the half-timbered houses with fretwork eaves, the women wearing headscarves selling bags of apricot kernels and almonds. Maybe it was Amir, the way he bartered on my behalf with the vendors, how he insisted on buying chai for me at every rest stop. Maybe it was the way he accompanied me to the checkpoints where soldiers in their India-issue uniforms recorded my passport details inside canvas tents. How he stood there, watching them carefully with a protective look in his eye.

  The irony – that after several weeks in India I’d finally begun to relax on one of the most dangerous roads on the planet – didn’t escape me. Every bump and jolt of the bus jerked me back to life. And then we stopped.

  The other bus passengers didn’t seem surprised when, shortly after sunset, the driver turned off the ignition in Kargil and closed his eyes. Amir folded up his paper, and gathered his other belongings.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “We stop here,” he said. “It’s too dangerous to drive at night.”

  Where would I go? My Lonely Planet guidebook was inside my backpack that was lashed to the roof of the bus. I couldn’t see anything around the bus station but cement buildings in various states of construction, and a couple of those banana-yellow phone booths where I’d once managed to call my mother in front of two amused-looking teenage boys.

  “Follow me,” said Amir. “I know a hotel.”

  This is what he’s been waiting for, I thought. Now whatever he’d been planning since Srinagar would unfold. But what
unfolded was a mattress on a metal-framed cot in a female dorm. I was glad the room was lit by dim bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. I followed the lead of the other women when I used the communal bathroom – taking a deep breath, and rolling up my pant legs.

  Amir checked to make sure I was okay.

  “Tomorrow morning, 4:30 a.m.,” he said. Before India, that had sounded early. But now I knew that by four o’clock in the morning, hundreds of millions of Indians would be starting their days as a matter of course. If you weren’t up by that hour, something was wrong with you.

  When we reached the top of the final pass the next day, the driver cut the engine. We coasted into the Indus. The sound of an immense landscape swooshed through the windows. We picked up speed, until alpine meadow blurred into high-desert plateau, until nothing behind remained.

  We arrived in Leh. Amir shook my hand. I prepared myself for the warnings of my guidebook – friendly companions suddenly recommending tours where a commission awaited them, or demanding a guide fee.

  Amir waited by the taxi stand until he found a driver to take me to the Oriental Guest House and paid him in advance. I offered rupees; Amir declined them.

  “Thank you for visiting Kashmir,” he said. “Will you promise to write about us one day?”

  In the bright light of the high desert plateau, I noticed his worn shoes, his duffel bag with torn strap. I watched from the window of the taxi as he walked down a narrow alley, his woolen cape disappearing into the shadows.

  The Long-term Guests

  At five o’clock in the morning, the snow-covered peaks of the Zanskar Range still glowed in the moonlight. Solomon led the way. Carmen and I followed close behind, hesitant to leave Leh’s Oriental Guest House in the cold and dark of an October morning. We moved slowly beneath backpacks filled with souvenirs of these lands: antique Tibetan textiles, dried apricots, turquoise pendants.