The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  Wani was one of the youngest leaders of Hizbul Mujahideen. The group had become a bewildering menace to the Indian Army, which issued a million-rupee ($15,000) bounty for Wani in 2015. That same year, the Army was suspected of murdering his older brother, a 25-year-old economics student and lab technician named Khalid. The government claimed he’d gone to visit Burhan in the forests and was killed by gunfire, but according to the boys’ father, Muzaffar, when Khalid’s body was returned to the family, there were no bullet wounds. “His skull was crushed and all thirty-two of his teeth were broken,” Muzaffar told me. “He was tortured to death by police.” In December 2016, the state government offered four lakh rupees ($6,000) to the Wani family in compensation for Khalid’s death.

  The clashes between protesters and police began in Tral, but soon spread throughout Kashmir. By nightfall, thousands more had turned out. “Indian dogs go back!” they shouted. In Anantnag, police began shooting live bullets. Aijaz Ahmad Thakur, a 29-year-old father of two, was one of the first to be hit. His cousin found his body later that evening, the stomach torn open.

  A dozen people died in a few hours that night, and the protests continued into the next day. The government imposed a curfew and sent in more troops, but the protesters didn’t let up. Photographs of people maimed by shotgun pellets appeared in the local papers; the one to go viral was of Insha Malik, a 14-year-old who was hit while looking out the window of her home. Her face was so riddled with shot that it looked as though she had a bloody case of chicken pox.

  In Srinagar, I met a 31-year-old ophthalmologist named Raashid Maqbool Wani, who said he worked 24-hour shifts for four straight days after Burhan Wani died. He told me that his hospital normally receives about 5 patients a week. In the wake of Wani’s death, 60 to 80 people came through the doors each day. Gurneys were converted into operating tables, waiting rooms into emergency wards.

  One patient was a boy who had been shot in the face in the district of Kupwara. His eyes were wide open, the retinas detached. Clots of blood clouded his pupils. “He said something I’ll never forget,” Raashid told me later. “He said, ‘It’s okay, doctor, I don’t need my eyes to see what’s happening.’”

  That night, when I returned home, the hotel owner told me to leave Srinagar. “What is there left to see?” he asked when I passed him in the lobby. I told him I was waiting for the train to start running again. He rolled his eyes. The government had suspended service indefinitely.

  The train still wasn’t running two weeks later. I decided to take a car 150 miles south to Katra, in Jammu. It was the closest station still operating. Around midnight, a car came to pick me up. “Be safe,” the hotel owner said, shaking my hand. He instructed me to call him when I arrived—and to give him a good rating on TripAdvisor.

  My driver, a 20-year-old named Sajad Farooq, said he’d been protesting by day and driving tourists by night; he hadn’t slept in three days. He threw his first rock at the Indian Army when he was 16 years old, after seeing a soldier shoot and kill his cousin. “I would die protesting,” he said. “I’d die for Kashmir.”

  We drove through the night, past charred vehicles and tanks. Everywhere, shop windows were smashed. Stones and barbed wire were strewn across the ground. Wani’s name was written across walls on the outskirts of Srinagar. BURHAN OUR HERO. BURHAN STILL ALIVE. Farooq told me a slogan was being spoken at funerals that hadn’t been heard since the ’90s: Tere khoon se inqilab aayega—“Your blood will bring forth the revolution!”

  We drove along Highway 44, speeding past signs for Pampore, Awantipora, Bijbehara, Anantnag—stops that would remain closed for the next five months. A few hours later, we approached a sea of glowing red brake lights. We’d reached the Chenani–Nashri tunnel, a barrel of concrete cutting through six miles of mountain, connecting the Kashmir Valley to Jammu, the southwestern region of the state. It is the longest tunnel in India. Farooq sped up as the traffic subsided, and his music seemed to get louder. Orange tunnel lights streaked by overhead. A few minutes later, a massive Indian flag greeted us from the other side. Cars gently swerved off the highway, stopping at a nighttime market with glowing stalls that sold magnolia flowers, perfumed incense sticks, jewelry, and tea. Children walked around barefoot, tapping on car windows to sell scarves and nuts.

  The mountains that divide Jammu from the Kashmir Valley are partly responsible for the contrast in their identities. “Jammu and Kashmir was not part of British India and was ruled by the maharaja. Hence, it was not part of the political mobilization that took place in the rest of India during the nationalist movement,” Partha Chatterjee, an anthropologist at Columbia University, later told me. “After the maharaja joined the Indian Union in 1947, the Kashmir Valley, separated by the mountains, was for a long time very poorly connected with the rest of India, unlike Jammu.”

  The discrepancy became apparent as dawn broke, revealing pastel-colored temples and well-manicured parks. There were large Indian flags on every corner and the words “Jai Hind”—“Long live India!”—painted across fading hotel signs. As we drove past a mile-long Army base in Udhampur, the propaganda signs read WE DON’T STOP WHEN WE’RE TIRED, WE STOP WHEN WE’RE DONE! EVEN IN REST, PLANNING FOR THE NEXT, the text juxtaposed with a photo of a leaping cheetah.

  Deep in Jammu’s remote Reasi district is the future home of the Chenab Bridge. When work on the crossing began in 2004, Indian engineers blasted a road into the side of the mountains, only to discover a tiny village, called Sarmega, directly in their path. The residents were suddenly living side by side with cement trucks and 50 of India’s top engineers.

  During a tour of the site, I met a geological engineer named Santosh Maharaj. I asked him when he thought the project would be completed. “When? If,” he said, laughing. “Don’t write that down.”

  Around us, steel beams poked out of the soft ground. It was unclear whether they’d been there for 12 years or 2 months; everything looked half-started. From above, I watched a group of construction workers share a cigarette as they dangled their legs off a girder protruding from the mountain. In the canteen, a concrete bunker, an engineer pulled out his phone to show me a video of the project. The camera panned over a rendering of the finished bridge, moving through the fog as a voice declared: “The Chenab Bridge will be as strong as its foundations.” We attempted to drive down to those foundations, but when it began to rain, Maharaj ordered the driver to turn around. It wasn’t safe, he said as the ground melted into a red stream beneath us.

  Back in his office, Maharaj showed me samples taken from the site. The mountains here are made up of more than 20 different types of rock, including limestone, slate, dolomite, sandstone, and shale. “The whole train will pass through these,” he said. The composition of the mountains, along with the steep slopes and the threat of rockslides, presents a daunting challenge.

  Maharaj’s friend Naresh Sharma, another engineer, cut in. “Some people said the geology is not suitable to make that bridge. Concerning this point, this is actually the most suitable location for building the bridge.” He added that the government had delayed the project because of safety concerns. “But now we have a green signal.”

  A horn blasted, and a truck arrived to pick up a handful of construction workers in the rain. I’d spoken to several earlier that morning as they walked to work from Sarmega, swinging tin lunch pails. One had told me that a few years ago, four people died when a crane broke, dropping them a thousand feet to the floor of the gorge below. Despite the danger, most workers were paid between $100 and $200 per month to work 12-hour shifts.

  The head of the project, Surajit Choudhury, came by. He’d been working on the bridge since construction began. “This bridge is a very good project,” he said as we sat in his windowless office. He assured me that they’d finish in five years or so. “This rail line will bring the Kashmiris into the mainstream of this Indian culture.”

  By car, the Katra railway station is about an hour and a half south of the Chenab crossing. Comp
leted in 2014, it is the newest station on the line. Inside, I found thousands of Indian pilgrims stranded en route to Kashmir. Down here, Wani was not a martyr but a terrorist, and azadi was a Pakistani myth. I stood in line to buy a ticket to Jammu Tawi, the last stop on the southbound rail. A young man named Mukul, who sold clothes in New Delhi, told me that Kashmir was beautiful. He hoped to visit the valley “as soon as they kill all the terrorists.”

  On the train, I mentioned Wani’s death to an older man named Vikas Singh. He grew agitated. “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” he said.

  I pointed out that most Kashmiris with whom I had spoken said they didn’t feel that they were an integral part of India. Many wanted Kashmir to become a separate country.

  “There are only two to three people who want to get separated from India,” he replied. “Ninety percent of people are against getting separated.”

  The maroon late-afternoon light faded as our train crawled toward the city of Jammu. Outside, cracked red soil marked the paths of what once had been marshy streams. When we arrived, the temperature had yet to fall much below a hundred degrees. I set out from the station for Nagrota, a town that is home to many Kashmiri Pandits—Hindus who fled the valley in the ’90s after they became targets of a new wave of Muslim insurgency. Over the course of a decade, thousands of Pandits were killed, threatened, or forced to flee their homes, many of which remain abandoned on the outskirts of Srinagar.

  I met Kanwal Pandita, a government worker, in his home. We sat cross-legged while his wife brought out plates of honey-coated sweets. Pandita had been working in Kashmir when a mob attacked the camp he lived in with other Pandits. According to him, the crowd pelted stones at their windows for hours, until Army officers showed up. He and 80 other Pandits fled by car that night.

  “Treatment is not good there,” he said. “Pandits are like bonded laborers and slaves. We have no freedom of expression, no freedom of state, no freedom to pursue our religion. They want to convert us to Islam, which is not possible.” He added that the Army was doing a “great job” in Kashmir.

  Like Pandita, many Pandits still regard the Kashmir Valley as their homeland. Hanging on his bedroom wall was a photo of his family smiling from a houseboat on Dal Lake, the sunlight glistening on the water. After touring their house, my hands sticky from the sweets, I paused by the door. “We would never support an independent state,” Pandita said. “Kashmiris have no claim on Kashmir. We’re all Indians. We will die as Indians.”

  The next morning, I boarded the train to New Delhi and headed for home. Twelve hours later, the familiar scent of pollution, car fumes, and dust entered the train. I leaned out the window and watched the lights glitter over the City of Dreams, as it is called.

  It was past midnight, but the station was bustling with people: families from northern villages, Sikhs, businessmen, South Indians—but not a single Kashmiri.

  I stepped out of the station and pushed my way through the crowd fighting to flag down three-wheeled rickshaws.

  “Where you coming from?” my driver asked as we sped away from the station.

  “Kashmir,” I said.

  “Terrorists.”

  DAVID FETTLING

  Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar

  from Longreads

  Now what I remember most about him is what he said about the Rohingya: that they were troublemakers, not really citizens of his country, undeserving of sympathy, that he hated them. He had said it standing under a banyan tree, and I had noticed, again, his dress: he was wearing a longyi, a Burmese sarong, and with it, new-looking, Western hiking boots. His longyi’s knot was tied impeccably. His boots appeared to me to not quite fit him.

  But I spent three days and walked 50 kilometers with him before he said this. Through a trekking agency I’d arranged to meet him in Kalaw, in hill country in central Myanmar, and took an overnight bus there from Yangon. The bus was ultramodern, air-conditioned, and near-empty. Arriving at dawn, I disembarked into cold air and a fog that obscured the tops of pine trees. I found the café where we were to meet, ordered a tea. Every few minutes a man sidled up to me and asked if I needed a guide. When I said I had one already they looked not merely disappointed but resentful; slinking away, I saw them lingering on the café’s margins.

  This was a year ago, so Myanmar was still in vogue: after decades of oppressive military government and isolation internationally, it had begun to “open” and appeared to be moving toward democratization. A perception of the country as a dramatic “good-news story”—a newly liberated populace, pursuing long-denied opportunities—was drawing increasing international interest. I badly wanted to see Myanmar and Kalaw through this lens; but those sullen, hands-in-pockets would-be guides kept straying into my field of vision.

  He arrived 15 minutes late. He looked extremely young: early 20s, I guessed. He introduced himself as Thomas—I blinked, asked him to repeat it. Thomas was at once exuberantly friendly and palpably nervous: as he met me he profusely apologized. “I’m sorry, sir”—I never got him to stop calling me sir—“I am running late. I still have to get some things from the supermarket. I am running late, I am sorry. I think maybe you will write this on TripAdvisor.” I told him it was no problem, and we walked two streets over, not to a supermarket but to a small, dowdy grocery store. Thomas disappeared; I waited outside. Next door was an internet café. Young men played computer games, their faces near-expressionless. The fog was clearing to a powder-blue sky, yet I felt a sense of anticlimax: this, apparently, was Myanmar’s transformation in actuality. Thomas reappeared; walking quickly, he continued to apologize. “I am sorry about this,” he said, into the chilly blue morning. “I am sorry about this.”

  We walked toward the hills. Rapidly the streets became less busy. Small houses sat amid ferns. Then, the trekker’s worst nightmare: I felt something awry in my bowels.

  The crisis was immediate. I told Thomas, who spoke Burmese to an elderly couple sitting on their porch. I was led to a wooden shed behind their house: there, the apocalypse duly took place. Back outside, I found a bowl of water and bottle of soap. I soaped my hands, washed them in the bowl; then, gazing at the soapsuds unmoving in the water, I knew I’d done the wrong thing. There was no drainage mechanism: clearly you were supposed to wash your hands some other way. I had defiled the water. Thomas had accepted a tea, and the three of them were sitting without speaking, the couple calm in this disruption to what looked like a familiar, well-honed daily routine. I said nothing about the suds. We walked on.

  My mood had changed. That gleaming, empty bus, those furtive, loitering would-be guides, the expressionless cybercafé teens, my guide’s inexplicable anxiety, my own failing bowels, the floating soapsuds—everything seemed to go together, somehow; there was something not quite right about the entire morning, something fundamentally off-kilter. Thomas and I resumed walking. “I’m sorry,” Thomas said, again. “I’m sorry.”

  Thomas turned onto a dirt track. We walked through a glade of pine trees, then into a more open country of tawny-yellow grass. Soon we were climbing, following a ridgeline; green valleys appeared below us.

  Thomas talked compulsively. He probably had instructions—making conversation was a way of making happy guests. Yet I had a sense he also genuinely wanted to make a connection with me. There was something in his tone when he questioned me that suggested he acutely wanted to hear the answers, and something in the way he told me things that suggested he wanted me to hear what he had to say. I wanted to chat, too, but my bowels had made me less talkative than normal.

  “This is your first trip to Myanmar?”

  “It is.”

  “Oh: great.” That turned out to be a recurring expression of his, at permanent odds with his nervousness.

  Thomas had a smartphone, a Samsung, and he often flicked and swiped on it as he spoke. I looked again at his longyi-and-hiking-boot combination. I noticed that, young as Thomas appeared, he had several white hairs.

  “I’ve
been a guide for one year.”

  “It must be exciting living in Myanmar now,” I said, trying to return to my preferred way of thinking about the country. “Democracy, reform—many new opportunities for people, right?” Thomas nodded, but I saw him frowning just slightly. I asked, “What did you do before you were a guide?”

  “I worked in Mandalay, in a factory that mixed cement bricks.”

  “And you want to be a guide for a while, or move on to something else?”

  “Actually, I am studying law. But I haven’t been able to pass yet.” He didn’t elaborate. I knew entire universities had been shut down for long periods under military rule. I told him to keep studying, then wondered if that was helpful or even applicable advice.

  “I want to get married,” Thomas said—he had a girlfriend—“but, she told me, ‘not enough money.’” So he was trying to get as much guiding work, as many treks, as possible. I wondered if this explained his anxiety: a fretful determination to ace every trip, the success of which he was measuring constantly. I asked how he and his girlfriend met. “In our village,” he replied, with a tone that suggested this was rather a dumb question, that it was self-evident people would meet in their own village. Below in the valley, an old man slowly walked across a rice field. “Not enough money,” Thomas repeated, “not enough money.” I said everything would work out, then pondered again whether that was a useful thing to say.

  “Yes,” Thomas said. “But so much time will have passed. We will be old. We will not be young. I think it’s better to be married when you’re young.” Tall clumps of bamboo lined our path; on one leaf, a butterfly opened and closed its yellow-and-red wings. I told him that in the West, people typically got married when they were much older than he was. But he only nodded, as if that fact, while interesting, had no relevance to him.