It is a wonderful feeling to bump into things again after almost forgetting them entirely, things that you once cherished and talked about at length whenever and wherever possible.
By Younis Ahmad Kaloo
I returned home from Delhi after a gap of about two-and-a-half months. Delhi is where I work, and Kashmir is where I was born and raised. Other than a trip to Gujarat with a delegation from my college representing Jammu and Kashmir at the Vibrant Gujarat 2014 National Education Summit, I had never set foot outside Kashmir before. It was only after I wrote the final semester exams of my master’s degree (I did not wait for the results) that I moved to Delhi with a friend of mine to practice journalism. How long it took me to eventually get there and what other jobs I had to do before is a story for another write-up.
It had been two days since my arrival in Kashmir, and I hadn’t yet sat down to read or write anything. I decided to grab a book from the many neatly arranged by my younger sister in my absence on an almirah shelf. I could almost see all the titles on their backbones. The first title I came across was The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi by William C. Chittick. I pulled it out immediately. No sooner had I grabbed one than the book next to it caught my attention.
It was a memoir by Stephen Hawking titled ‘My Brief History’. I had read it before, almost a decade ago. Most of the things I remembered from the book once were now forgotten, except for one thing that Stephen Hawking once visited Kashmir and stayed in a houseboat. I also had a hunch that I must have either scribbled something on the page or folded its corner to mark where this information lay.
As I opened the book and turned its pages (it is just 127 pages), I found the underlined word Kashmir I had written on top of page 31 while I was reading the book for the first time. I had also underlined many sentences in which Stephen talked about his visit to Kashmir.
“The rest of the family went to India for a year, but I had to stay behind to do A-levels and university entrance exams. I stayed with the family of Dr John Humphrey, a colleague of my father’s at the National Institute for Medical Research, at their house in the Mill Hill. The house had a basement that contained steam engines and other models made by John Humphrey’s father, and I spent much of my time there. In the summer holidays I went to India to join the rest of the family, who were living in a house rented from a former chief minister of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh who had been disgraced from corruption. My father refused to eat Indian food during his time there, so he hired an ex-British Indian Army cook and bearer to prepare and serve English food. I would have preferred something more exciting.
“We went to Kashmir and rented a houseboat on the lake in Srinagar. We went in the monsoon, and the road that the Indian Army had built over the mountains was washed away in some places (the normal route led across the ceasefire line to Pakistan). Our car, which we had brought from England, couldn’t cope with more than three inches of water, so we had to be towed by a Sikh truck driver,” read the text on pages 30 and 31.”
It is a wonderful feeling to bump into things again after almost forgetting them entirely, things that you once cherished and talked about at length whenever and wherever possible.
Well, my five-day leave period will be over by this Friday, and the only place I have visited so far is Dal Lake.
Younis Ahmad Kaloo is a short story writer from Kashmir. He is a batch 14 (2021-2023) Gandhi Fellow. Previously, Younis was a Delhi-based Correspondent at FORCE Newsmagazine, a monthly magazine on national security and aerospace, where he extensively wrote on paramilitary forces and latest defence technologies. Younis is the author of Jiji: the trials and tribulations of Parveena Ahangar (Hawakal Publishers 2020). He holds a master’s degree in Convergent Journalism with a specialisation in Narrative Journalism from the Central University of Kashmir.
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