Long Road to Paradise

Srinagar saw its first snowfall yesterday and a picture of people walking in the snow against the backdrop of the picturesque Zamran mountains has been carried on the front pages of both TOI and HT today. Looking at the pictures early morning transported me back to that Christmas Eve when I was finally able to visit Srinagar after almost 15 years.
I may have made bitching about my job my part-time profession, but there are some things I would never have been able to do without it - and visiting Srinagar was definitely my most memorable experience as a reporter (even though I never filed a story after the trip).
Four of us set out on a rather ill-organised trip arranged by the J&K government to the city of my origin on Christmas Eve. The Delhi sky was thick with fog that day and the flight was delayed by almost four hours. I was anxious- except for a brief two-day trip that my parents undertook in 1999, without telling any of us, no one from my family had dared go back to Srinagar since 1989.
The flight finally took off in the afternoon and we reached Srinagar in the evening. Getting down on the tarmac itself gave me an absolutely electric feeling. Now all I wanted was it to snow. Soon we were on our way to Sonmarg, which is a level below Gulmarg. As we moved through the city, I tried hard to recall memories from what seemed another era, when we would all come down to Srinagar for our summer vacation and spend a month there. Staring at those half-burnt houses, I wondered which one of them had once belonged to us.
But fifteen years is a long time. Was this the road which led to my house? Was this the lane which we used to go down to take those matadors? Is this the route which we took to the Mughal Gardens? Unfortuantely, there was no one to answer my queries. How I wished dad had come along!
At Sonmarg, my wish finally came true. As we got down to change vehicles to begin the long climb up the winding road to Gulmarg, it started snowing. I promptly put on my gloves and jumped into the snow like a little girl, much to the embarrassment of the others. Despite wearing several layers of clothing and a six-feet long overcoat, I was completely frozen. As it was getting dark, my snow-adventure had to be cut short.
Halfway through the climb, our vehicle almost skidded into the ravine. We stopped and tried to get out of the car. Unfortunately, sports shoes are no good in such weather. We kept falling and slipping on the snow. Finally, we made our way away from the edge of the road. The driver struggled with the vehicle for a along time before declaring that we could go no further. He had forgotten to put chains around the tyres and without the chains, we would slip into the ravine within seconds.
Stranded on that mountain road, halfway between Sonmarg and Gulmarg, a thought occurred to me. May be I was destined to die in Kashmir. Gulmarg was still a couple of kilometres away and it had taken us 10 minutes to just cover the width of the road. Our driver left us there with all our luggage and went off. Using all my rudimentary Kashmiri skills, I tried to get somebody to take us up to Gulmarg. But all these years of terrorism have made Kashmiris a suspicious lot. Everybody refused. The four of us tried to walk but in a situation where one just doesn't know where the ground beneath all that snow is, we made slow progress. Without any cellphones and with everybody around looking at us supcisiously, we just didn't know what to do, except drag our suitases and ourselves in the snow.
Suddenly, a car with an official who had earlier refused to help us and gone down the road to Sonmarg about 15 minutes back, returned and offered to take us to Gulmarg. I was, afterall, not going to die on Christmas Eve.
Gulmarg seemed straight out of a pictrure postcard. There was just snow, snow and more snow. And even though from a distance it's an awesome sight, trying to walk in it, is absolutely not. We trudged up to our hotel on a hilltop and quickly changed for the official dinner. We inched our way down to the ski slopes where the skiiers were ready for take-off. Each one with a flaming torch in his hand, whizzed past us, down the slope and into the dark Gulmarg night. Looking at those tiny dots of light in the vast emptiness of the snow-clad expanse seemed just surreal.
Soon, it was tiem to head back to our hotel where I requested the waiter to get me some Kahwa and sheermal (sweet kashmiri bread). Sitting back in my room, enjoying the combined warmth of the coal bukharis and the electric blankets, I stared at the pine trees outside. No cellphones. No landlines either with the entire region being cut off due to some fault. No TV. Just snow all around and some wonderfully hot kahwa and sheermal in my hands. So what if I almost died on my way up there, I truly did experience paradise on earth that day.