The apex of the mountain was drenched in brilliant, heavenly, light. Spikes of thin light impaled the snow in a bristling, moving line. I assumed that the heat had displaced the snow from the hip of the time chiselled mountain. All across my line of sight, the tips of the mountain range stuck up like a row of thorns. Swaddled around them were necklaces of powdered snow.
I’m an adventurer, an explorer, a rambler,a scout. I’m simply a discoverer to be precise. I find the thrill of my life in mountains, in hiking, climbing and travelling. At a very young age, passionately restless, and in desperate need of adventure, I quit my job at an insurance company to travel with a couple of guys I smoked pot with, scandalizing my family. There’s nothing in this entire world that makes me more charged and flushed than the pleasurable drug of adventure. I had travelled across half the globe and fate had brought me to beautiful Kashmir that winter. The place was beautiful. Simple as that, beautiful.
Sauntering along the paths, and travelling far, I stopped by a turquoise-blue stream that wound its merry way through the forest. Babbling and burbling, it sprung over the limestone rocks in its way. Pebbles whisked about in the under wash like pieces of glitter. Streams are the liquid soul of the mountains and forest and this one was glowing. Chords of golf life speared down from above, bathing its surface in gold. It was glinting with little sparkles, like a thousand diamonds blessed with an inner fire. A galaxy of dragonflies fizzed through the beams of light, wings a-glitter in the sun.
I kept waking along with my camera the whole day, savouring the lure of the enchanting heaven on earth . It was night by this time and I was in alone in a far away area. I saw a small house. A typical Kashmiri house made of wood and mud/sand which helped them to retain heat and save them from destruction in case of earth quake. I knocked on the door and an elderly man with powder white hair and aged, blood flecked eyes opened it. He took me in.
The abandoned house shuddered on the hill, wishing the morning light would come all the sooner to warm its weary walls. It felt so alone, so empty. How long had it been since it heard the laughter of a human being? How long had it been since it felt the coolness of fresh paint or contained the fragrance of Sunday dinner? The oldest residents of that abandoned house were the spiders. Many generations had laced the walls with cobwebs of intricately local beauty, though now even they lay in dusty rags. It had been three decades, I assume, since a footstep had echoed within those walls, since the dust had been disturbed and the ghosts awoken.
I told the old man everything about myself and about what I wanted to do and achieve in life. He understood English so well. He simply heard and smiled and said nothing. Then suddenly his eyes began to sparkle and he started narrating to me a story of his friend from his youth who was as ambitious as I am. His friend named Kamran Ahmed, was a strong, tall, big and handsome young man from Srinagar. He was rough, robust, silent and sensitive. Stayed to himself and yet an ordinary man. Women used to flock to him due to the mystique that surrounded his persona. He wanted to become a pilot and join airforce. Universe, the old man said, is not required to be in harmony with human ambition. His friend’s father was in the army and his family was most supportive and loving of his dream. He kept telling me stories about his friend and then stopped. Just like that, he stopped. That warm old man served me with yakhni and Kashmiri chai.
The next morning I bid the old man farewell and departed for where life would take me next. That old man was gentle with kindness flooding thorough his eyes but he was very quiet. It wasn’t long before I left his house that I heard the news of a massive massacre. I reused back to the old man’s house. I don’t know what it was that gravitated me but I simply couldn’t resist the temptation to storm back to that ancient house. I travelled a few house and reaching back to the hill where it was. The house was empty. The neighbours told me that he was killed too. I went inside into his bedroom to find a diary.
It was the diary of Kamran Ahmed. In it was written about the ambition. The ambition to move beyond the perimeters of restrictions and boundaries and societal norms. That man had a loving family who died during the events following the 1947 partition. In 1948, it said, Pakistani ‘tribesmen’ and Indian invaders killed together thousands of people talking away mothers, fathers, brothers, and partners. A plebiscite, the diary said, was promised but it never happened. Kamran had lost his father and his mother that very year. After 1948, once again in 1965, Pakistan and India fought a border war along India’s western border and along the line of control in Kashmir. That very year, Kamran, who was still enduring the loss of his family while still pursuing his dream in a melancholic and sick society, lost his one lover. That was the breaking point for him. He gave up. He lost it. He surrounded to the will of fate. Since then he has been living a dejected and quite life feeling nothing but regret. In 1980s, there was a state level election in this Indian occupied portion of Kashmir and evidence of fraud led to dispute and civilian killing once again. What else was about to come he questioned!
His last words in the diary were more questions. Questions about those doleful lonely dead days when his insiders were screaming. Those mournful floods of helpless tears that flowed out of his eyes seeing his innocent brothers die every single day.What was this for? Why did they have to go through that pain? What lessons was God trying to reach them and why? What did the authorities want? What was that hysteria and suffering for? Why didn’t they have the right to follow their dream? Why didn’t they have the right to hope? Why didn’t they have a voice? What were the authorities doing? What was going to be the end? Why was every body around him giving up and shattering his/her dreams? What was their mistake? Why did anyone who try to rise above the sickness resulted in being killed? Why was this beautiful place suffering from the ugly disease?
And finally, will there ever be an end to this before it’s too late?
