Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure

by Sarah Macdonald

  It’s only a week since Javed planted the seed of desire in me to see Kashmir and Jonathan has been called here to do a story on the latest cease-fire and peace initiative in the state. I’ve tagged along because I’m sick of being left alone to fry in Delhi and I sense an opportunity to do some freelance stories on Kashmir. It’s now been more than eight months since I’ve worked; my leave pay has run dry, my paranoia about losing my career has raised its ugly head and once again I feel I’m losing my sense of identity. For ten years my work has largely defined who I am and while I’m keen to be more than my job, old habits die hard.

  Jonathan is glad to have my company but Mukhtar is a bit jealous that I’m here. Again and again in the car he asks Jonathan, ‘You still need me, don’t you, brother?’

  ‘Yes, Mookie, I need you and so does Sarah.’

  Mukhtar beams. He loves Jonathan dearly, especially since the day they were caught in the crossfire of a Pakistan-Indian conflict at Kargil last year and Jonathan gave him his flak jacket. When Mukhtar tells me this, I’m not impressed. In fact I’m growing more sombre by the minute. Kashmir looks closed and fearful.

  We drive along roads lined with cute chalet homes that all seem dourly shut up behind barricaded doors and boarded-up windows. At crossroad checkpoints the fat barrels of machine guns peek over sandbags. On the outskirts of the city a sign boasts, ‘WELCOME TO PARADISE’. And another underneath pleads, ‘PLEASE DO NOT BE URINATING HERE’.

  Indeed the people of Kashmir have been pissed on from a great height for many years – by the British who sold their state to a Hindu king for a paltry sum, by India’s army and by Pakistan’s militants. These nuclear neighbours have fought two wars over this Muslim-dominated territory that is split between them. The disputed Himalayan border here is the highest battlefield on earth. The toll has been devastating. More than thirty-five thousand people have died here over the last ten years, that’s nine a day. Yet for some reason, no-one wants to abandon the fantasy bequeathed by the poet Fir Das: ‘If there is paradise on earth, then this is it, this is it, this is it.’

  As I nervously take in the submachine guns, shuttered shops, abandoned homes and barricaded buildings, my heart begins to pound with, ‘This is shit, this is shit, this is shit.’

  But Mukhtar is enraptured; his eyes devotionally caress his town and the distant mountains and he sings sonnets of praise.

  ‘Jonathan, my brother, have you ever seen such green fields, such a majestic mountain, such sky of blue?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s kind of like Switzerland,’ Jonathan teases. Mukhtar nods.

  ‘Ah, yes, but brother, these mountains are real.’

  Jonathan laughs, while I try to look astounded instead of scared. We cross a canal clogged with weeds, foamy with pollution and black with grime to stop at a modern military checkpoint. Waved on by soldiers, we halt at an ancient wall, a gate opens and our car is surrounded. We are pulled out, sprinkled with red flowers and garlanded with orange leis. Mr Bhat’s houseboat workers are welcoming their first guests in months. The boss stands tall and pale, bar a large mole on his face. He claps his hands and hugs us both as long lost friends. The staff constantly fall over each other in competition to take our bags and show us around.

  Tiny, worn and worried, gentle Lassa, the boatman, has worked here since he was seven. As Jonathan and Mukhtar discuss their schedule, Lassa takes me on a tour of the photos of the people he has served. He remembers George Harrison playing sitar on the lawn, Norman Rockefeller calling for more pancakes, Ravi Shankur drumming, and the ‘beautiful songs of John Fountain’.

  ‘John Fountain?’

  ‘Yes, John Fountain, very nice.’

  Lassa nods energetically. I must look confused.

  ‘John Fountain was great singer, don’t you know her?’

  He points to a photo of Joan Fontaine.

  The most famous recent visitor is Peter Jennings from ABC America; journalists are practically the only people who visit Kashmir now. George Harrison’s boat is sinking low in the muck, Rockefeller’s is partially submerged, the photos are faded and the articles that rave about this place are yellowed and curled.

  Our houseboat is floating faded glory, featuring a carved wooden deck, a den with paisley cushions, an enormous dining table, a huge chandelier, a king-sized bed, and a tiny pink bathroom. It smells strongly of sandalwood, mothballs and dust. And it creaks and rocks on a breathtakingly beautiful field of lotuses. Towering green stems stretch to flowers as large as a giant’s outstretched hand with petals the colour of pearl kissed by pink; giant leaves shaped like elephant ears sit flat and green on the dark waters and, below the surface, pods bulge with peanut-shaped seeds. Bouncy frogs, bright blue kingfishers and tiny terns dance from leaf to leaf. Stilt legged, knobbly-kneed herons place their feet as gingerly as ladies trying to step across a puddle.

  I eat the lotus landscape as dusk drips down. Beyond the lake, the jagged line of the snow-capped mountains softens and merges into a mauve sky; the water darkens to purple and then black. The lotuses bend and bow to the setting sun, neatly folding their huge petals and giant leaves inwards as if to hug themselves warm. Lights twinkle from across the lake and I feel the unfamiliar rise of a goose-bump on my skin. The first touch of cool is as delicious as the moist misty clean air that fills my scarred lungs. The Muslim call to prayer wafts down from the nearby mosque, swifts swoop for mosquitoes and a dark canoe floats past, a small girl squatting on the bow plops a paddle and nets into the water.

  Kashmir begins to cast its spell on me.

  We are jolted out of bed before the sun; the call to prayer harsher, more insistent and less romantic at four-thirty than at dusk. But it’s perfect timing for a boat ride, and Lassa is super keen to earn his first cash in six months. He knocks on the door and waits, silent and small in the dark of his boat, as we emerge into a cool new day.

  As Jonathan films a sequence for his story, I lie down on the big red cushions of a beautiful blue gondola with a canopy of flowered cotton. Lassa hacks the thick tangle of lotus roots with his oar and the leathery leaves groan as they set us free; drops of dew move like mercury on those we don’t disturb. As we glide across the glassy silver waters, the sky grows purple, orange and pink. I wake with the warmth and stretch with the lotuses, together we grow tall and wide to greet the light. Egrets walk from leaf to leaf, dogs bark from the bank and the ghats start echoing with the sounds of material being slapped clean.

  Lassa brews green Kashmir tea with cinnamon, cardamom and crushed almonds, and breaks warm fresh flat bread. We munch as we pass canoes of giggling girls and cheeky boys in bright white school uniforms and old men on their way to market. Gardens bob on the surface of the water – plants grow in big bowls of matted bulrushes that float gently above their long roots. Strong-faced women squat on flat wooden canoes cutting red tomatoes, orange pumpkins and giant zucchinis for harvest. We disturb a family of ducks and then there’s silence, bar the plop of the paddle, the buzz of dragonflies and Lassa’s soft singing. I doze in languid bliss, as if we are in a heavenly realm.

  We come back to earth on the other side of an ancient rotting wooden bridge. The weeping willows part to reveal a floating market of boats so close that we could walk from one to the other without getting wet. There’s a noisy jumble of wood on wood and shout on yell and a strong smell of river reed, mint and the other wares for sale: lotus roots, cucumbers, beans, flowers, saffron, woollen shawls and timber. Men squat on the tips of the overloaded low boats arguing ferociously about price and weighing produce with ancient measuring scales. Occasionally there’s a yell and a laugh and a thrown potato whizzes past our heads to plonk into the dark waters. Leathery old faces with no teeth split open as we give the Muslim greeting, ‘Assalum alaikum’ – may peace be with you.

  ‘Alaikum assalam,’ they wish back.

  But peace is anything but with these people.

  I spend the day helping Jonathan film a story of a valley shattered. In a lunatic asylum four
lank bodies and dead faces share one bed and Prozac is handed out like a lolly. In shuttered streets Hindu temples are boarded up and homes have been abandoned. The Hazratbal mosque, that holds a hair of Mohammed, is sandbagged; the ancient Mogul fort is occupied by the military; the gardens are closed and the marketplace is sombre, shut by dusk for an unofficial curfew. Srinagar is jumpy, and now so am I. Standing on a bridge filming Jonathan’s piece to camera I turn to see a glint of light – a soldier in a sandbagged bunker is pointing his gun at us. I freeze and, for a moment, forget to breathe. I feel fear in waves and see scared people in small pieces. Furrowed foreheads flash above sandbags, eyes peek through veils, cheeks clench behind beards and fingers loop tight to triggers.

  Life here is also in pieces. We interview politicians and bureaucrats, police and journalists, militants and soldiers, and all talk of life before and after militancy. Before 1989 there were tourists, film crews, famous musicians, trekkers, cherries, jobs and complete families. Now rows of houseboats called ‘Noah’s Ark’, ‘Heavenly Tiger’, ‘New Australia’ and ‘Sydney’ slide low into the waters, rotting and empty. Shawl shops are dusty and deserted. Young men are sent south to make money or sent skyward by death. In 1989 the peaceful push for an independent state ended and militancy began. Most people we meet want Kashmir to be an Asian Switzerland; an independent peaceful state. But few seem to blame the separatist militants for the violence. They talk of terrible atrocities by the Indian army – custodial deaths, shooting of suspects, torture, bribery, thieving, corruption and prostitution. Terrorist bombings are dismissed as ‘Indian setups’, and shootings as political conspiracies.

  I spend a day in Srinagar listening to rumour, suspicion, conspiracy theories and gossip, and only once do I find anyone who wants to verify a rumour they’ve heard. It’s a weaver I’m interviewing for a story on shahtoosh (beautiful fine shawls worth around ten thousand dollars each but now illegal because of the risk of extinction to the chiru – a kind of antelope – that provides the fibre). He leans close and whispers, ‘Is it true you western women live with a man, really live with a man, before marriage?’

  I shift my biggest ring to my left ring finger and say a slow, hesitant ‘Yeeees, sometimes.’

  All the weavers in the shop then clap and smile happily, excited that sinful women will wear their weaving work. But when I try to scotch rumours that Hindus eat steak, or that the government is banning shahtoosh to punish the Kashmiri weavers, they refuse to engage.

  We think differently, these Muslims and I. I have been raised in a culture of skepticism, but they see my requirement for proof as a burden on my back. The eldest weaver shakes his finger at my constant questions.

  ‘You western people are all science, all fact, all show me. You don’t even believe in God anymore because you think we came from a monkey.’

  The weavers chorus a cackle, as if evolution is one of the funniest things they’ve ever heard. Business banter is dismissed and our talk turns to higher truths.

  ‘You are Christian woman?’ a young lime-eyed weaver across the room asks me, head cocked.

  ‘Yeeeeeees,’ I reply hesitantly again (I’ve given up explaining atheism in India, it’s rarely understood or respected).

  The man and his friends murmur.

  ‘You are like us, you are of the book,’ one states while his father claps. ‘Your Jesus is good man, he came to Kashmir here, he is buried here, so we respect you, and Jesus and you are our honoured guests.’

  ‘He came here? He’s buried here?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, all great saints come here, this is Kashmir, holy place. But Jesus is not the best. Mohammed, peace be upon Him, is the greatest and latest prophet.’

  Back at the houseboat I find a Koran in the bedside bible drawer and start reading in the soft light of dusk. Raised in an Australian society that, in the main, seems to believe Islam is a barbaric religion that treats women dreadfully, I’m actually amazed at how familiar the holy book seems. Mohammed’s teachings are revealed to him by the archangel Gabriel and contain references to the stories of Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Isaac, Ishmael, Mary and Jesus; stories that I have read in some form or just absorbed over my Australian childhood. Like the Old Testament, the Koran is repetitive, at times contradictory and frequently scary. The all-powerful Allah seems at times loving, sometimes severe, and there’s much mention of Satan and Judgement Day. Yet I’m comforted by the familiarity of its teachings, its code for truthful living, and the mercy and goodness of a prophet who shows the way to the divine. Islam is not so alien as I’d believed, and after eight months of living in a country where life and religion are so intertwined I’m less harsh in judging the faith of others. I now feel being an extreme atheist is as arrogant as being an extreme fundamentalist.

  The prophet of Islam – Mohammed – was born in CE 570 and in his twenties he began to be visited by the archangel Gabriel. The divine messages Mohammed received are contained in the Koran; they advocate Muslims surrender to the will of the one true God and strictly adhere to Allah’s laws which cover all aspects of daily living from marriage, to banking to conduct.

  I hunt for the passages on women and dress codes, but I find only that Mohammed urges women to guard their modesty. I also read that the Koran advises men they shouldn’t wear tight clothes across their genitals. I can’t help but note there’s still a lot of stretch denim in town.

  I am choosing to cover up more and more in India – it’s now been seven months since my legs have seen the light of day and I always wear a dupatta shawl across my breasts. But to me, the salwar kamiz is not a religious duty or even a free choice; it’s a resentful surrender. The north Indian men on the streets stare so hard and are so sleazy that I often feel like I’ve somehow starred in a porn film without knowing it. In Muslim Kashmir they seem to look a lot less, but they still stare. Why should I have to cover up because men are weak and cannot control their eyes? I try to discuss this with some of the women I meet in Kashmir; most women don’t wear the veil here, preferring the headscarf, but nonetheless the bounds of female modesty are strict and clear. All agree with me to some degree that the dress code and male attitudes are unfair, but they are pragmatists not idealists and they accept responsibility for male desire. The most common refrain is, ‘Men should change, sister, but we all know they never will, so we protect our modesty for them, for us and for Allah.’

  As with Christianity, Islam is interpreted differently across the world and varies to some degree from culture to culture. With the exception of Kashmir’s mostly imported Islamic extremists, Indian Islam has a unique style that shows the faith can be adaptable and accepting of difference. It has to be, for India’s one hundred and fifty million Muslims are living in a land of idols, the likes of which were smashed in Mecca. There are idols beside the road, on street corners, at the root of trees, in homes, in offices and in paddocks and some are even washed, dressed, fed and paraded before being put to bed at night. This must be confronting for people who don’t believe God should be depicted in any form, but by and large Muslims seem to get on well with their Hindu brethren.

  However, horrific exceptions loom large. When the British pulled out of India in 1947 they divided the country into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. As people moved sides en masse, the new nations were stained with the blood of a million. In Kashmir, the Partition was complicated: the Hindu ruler dithered and decided to go to India, Pakistan invaded the state and the border between the two countries has been in dispute ever since. Indians and Pakistanis – neighbours who were once compatriots – now dislike and distrust each other. Of course the dispute over Kashmir is about land as much as religion, but straight out religious Hindu–Muslim violence occasionally flares in other parts of India as well. In 1992 a Hindu fundamentalist mob destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri mosque at Ayodhya, triggering religious riots in which more than two thousand Indians were killed, most of them Muslim. And there’s always a level of political tension caused
by the fact that the current Indian government is dominated by a hard-line Hindu party, the BJP, that’s been linked to groups involved with the mosque’s destruction. But violent flare-ups are not as common as peaceful lives lived side by side. Hindus are supposed to accept all paths to God and Muslims are aware of their minority status.

  But a friend of Vivek’s, Asaf, once told me it isn’t just fear of the majority and the government that keeps India’s Muslims tolerant, it’s a unique Islamic attitude. One day his two little girls were bowing deep in prayer to his Hindu wife’s statue of the elephant god Ganesh. His Muslim mother screamed at them to stop. They turned to her saying, ‘It’s all right, Noni, we are reciting the Koran to him.’

  ‘Such good girls,’ said Grandma as she walked off happily.

  Asaf believes such tolerance and togetherness stem from Indian Muslims’ strong tradition of Sufism. Sufis are Muslims who rely less on the strict rules of the Koran and instead try to conduct a more personal ecstatic relationship with God through music, song and poetry.

  Here in Kashmir, though, Sufism is struggling.

  Shopping for shawls, I have the required tea and the required chat about cricket with a handsome tall young shopkeeper with dull green eyes. He quietly tells me he’s a Sufi and that he wishes he could organise a singing night for me.

  ‘You have never heard such rapture, such ecstasy. When I sing and hear that music, I am with God.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it.’

  He shakes his head sadly. ‘So would I.’

  Sufi gigs are too dangerous at the moment. As is being a Sufi. The shopkeeper hangs his head as he softly says he was once bashed by extremists for not being at the afternoon prayers in the mosque. He adds that two women wearing jeans were shot in the legs last year and that two without headscarves had acid thrown on them. The young Sufi says Kashmir’s Muslims aren’t extremists but they’re making use of imported fundamentalists from Pakistan to help them get rid of the ‘Indian occupation’.