The Goats of Wrath

I had nothing to do on Sunday - no meetings, no appointments, no plans. Thus decided to go on a little hike up the nearest and biggest hill in Srinagar city, which has on top a 5th-century AD Hindu temple. Lonely Planet and the web both indicated there’s a trail near a temple so I went off in search of it. After deploying broken Urdu with some J&K Police and probably offending a Hindu holy man (I just wanted directions, not to look at his temple) I found the trail. I’d been expecting, well, a kind of pleasant sloping forest trail to put my mind and lungs at ease, and to give a light workout to my still-scabbed leg.

Instead, I got about 45 minutes of significantly vertical rock and dirt. After scrambling up the first disastrous up-hill I was already breathing heavy and sweaty; I haven’t really done any exercise since the late unpleasantness with a Colombo wall. To make matters worse, the trail I wanted to follow was blocked by a team of feeding goats (photo of them in a cemetary below me):

Which raised in my mind all sorts of questions - how do goats respond to humans? Are those even goats, or are they some kind of sheep? Whatever they are, they have little horns on their heads - are those used for goring unsuspecting passers-by? Do they kick? If I continue down this path will I die a horrible goat/sheep/whatever-induced death alone in a distant land, with nothing to mark my passing but the decaying remnants of an LL Bean shoulder bag?

So, I went out of my way to avoid said goats, instead clambering up a much-steeper alternate trail. The view became really increasingly gorgeous. My old digital camera doesn’t do detail from a distance well at all, nor can it handle bright sunny days (or, for that matter, grim overcast days), but these photos give a sense of the view of Srinagar and the Valley:

It was pretty spectacular, even if Mr. Camera doesn’t quite do justice. Also, while climbing I heard one of the calls to prayer floating up from the Valley. Very cool feeling; I got some audio (turn up the volume):

This is the temple at the top of the hill:

Once I stumbled and crawled my way up to the top, what was I met with but hundreds of steps to actually get to the temple. No pictures allowed, but a very serene and gorgeous setting.

I headed back down, with my lungs feeling fine if tired, and my leg at least not insanely bleeding. En route, I got passed by nimble-footed Indians and then stumbled across some kind of high stakes dice game - I guess the place to gamble is on an inaccessible hill path! Lots of hundred-rupee notes flying around. And of course, more goats:

Just looking for a little excitement

1) I haven’t seen any protests since I got here. I heard one very loud and close during an interview but it was over well before I wandered outside. Today as I wandered into town I heard some chanting and in the distance walking towards me was a group of men with a banner. Oh-ho, I thought, maybe it’s some separatists or radical factions or angry government employees or something. Finally a break from drinking too much caffeine with reporters and watching bad movies on satellite TV. So I reached into my bag and pulled out my camera, sidling up behind a line of police officers to shield my imperialist infidel white ass from any rage while angling for a head-on shot.

And then I saw the banner. Was it for the hardline Hurriyat (G) or the moderate Hurriyat (M)?? The Jamaat? The Tehrik? Hmm, well no, not exactly. It was the “ALL JK UNEMPLOYED FOREST GRADUATES” demanding that the Chief Minister give them Forest Department jobs, chanting “we want justice!” while bemusedly being directed into the local police station. Sigh, so much for that.

2) I won’t pretend I have a large readership for this blog. But I enjoy it and have regular readers. And I realize that I get the most feedback of some sort when I follow these guidelines from Theroux’s Pillars of Hercules book (p. 302):

“The most tedious travel book in my opinion is the one in which the author is being vague about having a wonderful time. All that jauntiness seems like boasting to me, and dishonest boasting too, since the writers must be hiding so much misery. We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.”

Straight outta Calgary: Being the Canadian fourth estate

So in Delhi and Colombo I’ve taken to pretending to be a Canadian journalist when asked by rickshaw-wallahs and taxi drivers. Canada is a pretty unobjectionable place, avoiding the “oh US very good! Very rich!” or “US very bad - George Bush terrible!” reactions in favor of an occasional “my cousin lives in Toronto” or “oh how nice.” To avoid prostitution/massage suggestions, I’m also engaged to be married (December, in Ottawa - I’m soooo nervous but also really excited because I’m totally in love, and thus, no, despite your generous rates and exotic specific suggestions about services rendered, I will have to pass).

And now in Kashmir I’m being taken for a reporter. Took a longish ride up to the local university today, and my driver immediately said “you are a correspondent?” I guess my scuffed shoes, habit of having whispered conversations in the coffeeshop, dirty laptop bag, once-decent but now worn and faded business casual clothes, and general air of bemused disorganization do it. Not the dirty hippie tourist wandering the edgy edge of India saying “oh my God this place is sooo spiritual; it’s like such a shame about the war and stuff” nor do I have the respectability of an actual businessman. So, press it is. And if I didn’t hate calling people on the telephone so much, that might just be a fun job.

Unfortunately, I’m also deep in JST (Journalist Standard Time), in which reporters I’m supposed to meet forget I exist, repeatedly re-schedule, or have to dash off to the nearest protest, shooting, or secretive happy hour (since liquor is looked down on in the Muslim Valley). I owe them hugely and they’ve been incredibly helpful, but my daily life does tend to consist of waiting around my hotel room for phone calls (for militancy reasons my cell phone service doesn’t work here) and reminding people that I exist while watching satellite TV and eating falafel from one of Srinagar’s two coffeeshops. Plus, I get rained on, almost run over by garishly-painted buses, and offered “Western style tailoring” and cups of coffee by a local tailor who seems ready to up the ante on my bluffing - he claims to have been to Calgary and know many Canadians. I also ponder buying books in Urdu that I think are about politics, but since my Urdu is terrible I worry I’ll be dropping 10 bucks on a cookbook aimed at Srinagar suburban housewives or a translation of the latest Danielle Steel novel.

When at the university I had a classic South Asian experience, in which I had to go to the Public Relations Officer, tortuously explain to him that I already had an appointment and just need to get through the checkpoint, watch him painstakingly dip bread into tea while explaining to me that the USA should be doing more for Kashmir (linked to a discussion of what, in his opinion, real human beings are in re: compassion and fellow-feeling), observed his minions do things like find mints in his desk drawers for him, and then had him hitch a ride through campus with us on his way to watch some cleric give a speech (during business hours of course). He also stole my pen.

Travel Thoughts & The Buffet in Dixie

1) I bravely braved the hotel buffet for dinner the other night. I generally haven’t had to do the eating-alone-in-a-hotel thing this last year – in Belfast I had an apartment, and in Delhi and Colombo have been in paying guest/guesthouse situations that are more friendly. But I took my book and stared through the waiter when he offered the obligatory stutter and look of disappointment when I said “just one,” and had myself a seat. The food was serviceable if over-priced – some OK Indian, with so-so Chinese (of a sort). Not good, not bad, just hotel food.

While very far from the “elderly French-speaking waiter in empty hotel while Phnom Penh burns” archetype of a Le Carre or Graham Greene novel, it was still kind of strange. A singer sat with an electronic keyboard playing the music on background, which occasionally awkwardly cut out. The crowd in my hotel appears to be 95% mainland Indian, in town for tourism, especially package tours (perhaps I’m a bit bitter because I am always woken up early by dozens of Indian families mobilizing to join their tour bus or jeep – screaming, running, doors slamming, TVs blaring, all at ungodly hours prior to 8 am).

The thing is that they’re in a hotel with armed guards at the entrances and security force camps on both sides, in a region where lots of people don’t particularly want to be part of their country. Regardless one’s views of the issue, that adds an odd element to otherwise-standard tourism. The buses roll through town with their Gujarat or Punjab license plates, the flights come in from Delhi and Mumbai, all surrounded by 600,000 security forces. It’s like Northerners going on massive package tours of the South as the Confederacy was in its death throes or something. Weird vibe. Though not as actively, death-defyingly painful as my Delhi buffet experience.

2) I’m reading Paul Theroux’s The Pillars of Hercules – Theoux is one of my favorite travel writers, and compulsively readable in his observation, sarcasm, and adventurousness. But reading travel books always reminds me of how timid a traveler I am. He sets off to the middle of nowhere without any idea of where he’ll spend the night, bounces around on obscure buses and ferries driven by an at-best-vague itinerary, strikes up random conversations with peculiar people in bizarre places, and pulls out insights even in the midst of wandering his way though disorder, disorganization, and confusion. Whereas I endlessly pore over maps ahead of time, put together folders with relevant print-outs and contact numbers, can’t stand the idea of showing up in a new city without knowing where I’ll stay, draw up lists of what to pack, am faintly terrified of the idea of hopping on buses to random hinterlands, and rather actively avoid starting conversations with strangers in strange lands. This is the only area of my life where I’m highly organized.

Once I decide to go somewhere and then get there, I walk all over and really try to familiarize myself with it in detail, but even daytrips out remain something of a challenge – getting transportation and figuring out where to eat and how much I should be paying and dealing with unexpected inconveniences and hassles and not looking like an idiot tourist and wondering if I’ll be able to communicate and wondering if it’s worth it and wishing I had a travel companion or two. This all gets overlaid with my discomfort with unanticipated confrontation or confusion, plus some serious risk aversion – I can live with mixing it up with autorickshaw-wallahs in Delhi because I know the place, but what about in Allahabad or Gulmarg or Batticoloa? I can handle this kind of expedition in Italy or the UK just fine, but in future I need to step it up in the subcontinent.

Belfast on the Jhelum

My hotel lies equidistant between Dal Lake and the city center, Lal Chowk. Quite different worlds. Expecting another sunny day, on Sunday I loaded up on sunscreen, but it turned out to be a dark, hazy, nasty day of smoke and fumes. I was in search of the Press Colony, which led me into the main commercial district of town. This is Lal Chowk, the city centre and occasional site of grenade and IED attacks:

Note armored police van:

It was apparently a market day, so the dusty streets of stagnant water were full of vendors selling shoes and clothes ad every other imaginable thing:

Dusty back alleys:

Along the river Jhelum, looking east towards Ladakh and eventually China:

Barbed garden:

Efforts by the CRPF to win hearts and minds. Not convinced that bus stop patronage is really the way to go:

Srinagar’s downtown is like a mix of my previous field sites – Belfast’s gritty urbanism, Colombo’s garrison-city, Delhi’s dirt and chaos. I was the only white person on my 1.5 hour walk and definitely got stared at a hell of a lot, though it’s a relatively tourist-y area as Srinagar goes. Sunglasses, long strides, and being careful not to do things like bump into veiled women all help avoid awkwardness, but I certainly felt conspicuous. 

Fort Lake Tahoe

On Saturday I went off wandering to the tourist haven of Srinagar – Dal Lake, which is dotted by houseboats, shikara ferry boats, and food/souvenir vendors. Dal Lake is Srinagar’s main draw, circled by green hills and the home to a variety of floating gardens. A beautiful sunny day, leading to some serious sunburn – I look like a tomato with thinning hair and glasses (appetizing, I know). Soon that’ll revert to aggressively bright pale, of course.

Anyways, it was a highly pleasant walk. I got lots of business propositions for houseboats (basically little floating hotels), shikara rides, and even some money-changing but all fairly light-hearted. Some people said hello to me in English, others stared at me, most placidly ignored me. This is the bit of town approaching the lake:

Views of houseboats and such:



They seem to dredge up seaweed or something like it from the lake; I managed to get splattered by seaweed water as they were hurling it over the side:

Despite this scenic and colorful atmosphere there’s nevertheless a big security presence. Every couple of dozen meters are small groups of security forces, as well as at major intersections. A number of hotels right on the lake were taken over to be army and paramilitary barracks. On the far right you can see camouflaged walls, a small bunker, and a paramilitary outside – that’s one edge of a hotel being used by a CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force, the Centre’s main internal security paramilitary) battalion as its barracks:

A military helicopter makes its presence known against the azure sky:

Saturday night, a journalist I know took me to a barbecue which was fun and very interesting. Driving back around 11:30 was an experience – almost completely deserted streets other than road crews, security personnel, and the very occasional little clump of teenaged men standing at street corners. Not quite Lake Tahoe. 

Paging Colonel Kurtz; or, Why Fieldwork is F#*$&ing Awesome

Friday was a very long day. Dusty, tortuous ride to the Delhi domestic airport, then delayed flight departure. Already a sense that things aren’t quite the same as flying elsewhere – once you check in your luggage you later have to go out onto the tarmac to identify it in person before it will be loaded on the plane. The flight was fine, though loaded with kicking and shrieking children. Lots of Indian tourists go to J & K these days; I was sitting next to a friendly upper-middle class family from Mumbai on a package tour. We first flew over the flat plains of Punjab, but then hit the mountains, and spectacular isn’t the right word for them – it’s like seeing the roof of heaven. Shockingly close at hand on one side, China, on the other Pakistan, below, the green Kashmir Valley.

Landing, you notice the blotchy green-and-yellow camouflaged aircraft hangers and the police walk along with the unloading passengers. Foreigners have to register their presence, and so I did (I was the only foreigner on the flight). The hotel car was there, and we bounced our way into town. After Sri Lanka I’m totally used to a heavy armed presence, but it was still noticeable. More light armor than they have in Colombo; small APCs used by the Central paramilitaries in particular. My hotel is fine – very nice lobby, biz center, coffeeshop, bar, and restaurants, an outdoor swimming pool, wifi, and even in-house mini-movie theatre, but rooms so-so. But I’m paying what I would for a mediocre Holiday Inn, so I’ll happily take it!

After a bit of settling in, I called a friend of a friend who’d promised to show me around. And show me around he and his friend did, from the home of various government agencies to good tea spots to the Old City. I had a real “Apocalypse Now” moment driving along next to the gorgeous, sun-specked Dal Lake with Hindi music blasting on our speakers – as a regular Army convoy rolled by and a military helicopter circled the lake, the headquarters of XV Corps to our back and a Mughal garden to our front. Like I noticed in Assam, when the Indian Army rolls it’s damn damn scary, with truck-mounted heavy machine guns and faces wrapped in camo masks. It’s an incomparably better army than the Sri Lankan one, so it’s no surprise it’s even more intimidating. This is a far end of the lake:

After tea on the lake, we made a loop around, on the way seeing things like the Hazratbal Mosque (home to riots and militants sporadically over the last 5 decades), the grave of Sheikh Abdullah, the Jama Masjid powerbase of the Mirwaiz of Srinagar, sundry scenic boats, and the way the Central Reserve Police Force has embedded itself into the very nature of the urban landscape. This must be what Belfast was like in the 1970s or 1980s, enmeshed in street corner bunkers and barbed wire.

My friends took me to a very atmospheric area in the Old City where we stood on a bridge for awhile and talked architecture. The Muslim architecture doesn’t generally look Mughal; more influenced by Buddhism and Central Asia:

We also got a lot of surprised stares and looks while standing there – they don’t see many gangly white folks in that part of town I guess, a theme that continued as we drove on through the narrow, winding streets, dotted by women in veils and cages of chickens and horse-drawn carriages, this time with Sufi Persian music playing and the early evening call to prayer echoing in the air. We drove down one particularly smoky street - according to one of my guides, earlier in the day there had been a clash between rock-throwing civilians and the police, and the smoke was the remnants of the tear gas used to disperse the crowd. Not sure if tear gas is what my lungs need, but c’est la vie.

Finally we went to a delicious little barbecue place. I believe I may be the only white American political scientist to have eaten mutton kabob in Srinagar’s Old City after dark during the post-1989 period (not, admittedly, a much sought-after title!). And then I fell asleep after watching a standard array of Bollywood music videos (some of them shockingly salacious; no cultural conservatism here), BBC World News, and cricket.

Umm. . . .

So maybe coming back to the Burgh won’t be quite as unrelieved a health joy as I thought:

“Pittsburgh has spent years trying to live down its once-deserved “Smoky City” image, but a new American Lung Association report saying it has overtaken Los Angeles for having the sootiest air in the nation won’t help.

According to the association’s annual national report card on air pollution that’s being released today, the five-county Pittsburgh metropolitan area has the worst 24-hour soot levels and the second-worst annual soot level, behind Los Angeles.”

In fairness:

“Guillermo Cole, an Allegheny County Health Department spokesman, said Pittsburgh doesn’t deserve the ranking, which hangs on high soot readings in the Monongahela River Valley caused by emissions from U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works.

“Where the soot levels are high in the Clairton area, we’re concerned. But it’s a localized issue and the problem area is very small,” said Mr. Cole”

Or not:

“Kevin Stewart, director of environmental health for the American Lung Association of Pennsylvania, said he understands Pittsburgh’s frustration with the No. 1 ranking, but even if the Liberty-Clairton area is removed from the calculations, the metropolitan area would still rank 16th worst out of 222 metropolitan areas covered in the report.”

Maybe I wasn’t just allergic to my dog all those years! Mr. Inhaler is coming home with me. . . .

No full stops in India

So I head to Srinagar on Friday, and when I return on the 13th will basically only have 1.5 days in Delhi before heading State-side. Which means I’m almost done with India for quite awhile, and sorely in need of a full-body refit - new glass frames (currently chipped, sweat-stained, rickety, and prone to falling apart at the slightest provocation), new clothes (shirts are stained, pants have holes, it’s a bad scene), maybe new lungs. In recent weeks I’ve bid farewell to both some of the skin in my shin and some worms I apparently picked up somewhere. But I feel decent now; other than an occasional sensation of tightness in my throat that I suspect is a mild side effect of one my drugs (I can swallow just fine), my leg continues healing and my breathing is OK.

My imminent departure makes little things seem slightly more interesting and immediate. This morning I went off in search of an auto to take me to a nearby neighborhood. But being morning rush hour all the passing autos were full. Finally one pulled up without anyone in the backseat, and I thought “voila!” But in fact I soon saw that the entire footspace and much of the area behind the backseat were full of flowers and plants the auto was transporting. The driver was heading to the same market as me to deliver his flowers, but to ride I had to basically lay sideways on the seat, one leg propped up on the crossbar separating me and the driver, and the left foot awkwardly clinging to the very edge of the rickshaw floor. But the alternative was more wandering around polluted Delhi by foot.

So off we went, bouncing and jarring and hurtling through the crowded roads, under a dull brown hazy smoggy sky. Every time we hit a hard bump, an array of bright orange flower garlands, a potted plant, my laptop, and I threatened to fly out into the traffic. Along the roadside children wandered, Hindi ads dotted the walls, cows reclined, and people engaged in every imaginable activity, from begging to vending to reading the paper to cooking to washing clothes to supervising work. The urban landscape ranged from massive new construction projects to rickety buses to shanties to condo blocks, all framed by the endless honking of horns and roaring of engines. A circus meets a blast furnace meets a living room meets an interstate highway. There’s not much you can do but take it all in with bemusement (well, pray that the buses don’t kill you, I guess). After India, the States are going to seem soooo sedate!

Kashmir: good for my health (?!!)

Ok I’m supposed to be let out later today. Assuming no relapse into asthmatic fits, on Friday the 2nd I’ll leave for Srinagar, come back to Delhi May 13, and leave back home May 15. So we’ve learned that pre-monsoon Delhi summer ain’t a place I should be; I hope the next 5 days go OK - even more sitting around AC-ed coffeeshops than usual, then into the polluted-but-not-as-polluted arms of Srinagar and my apparently-fancy hotel. Will this basically be a vacation? Yes.

And the war in Sri Lanka is now getting very bad - a bus bomb killed at least two dozen people near Colombo, while the government has launched an intense but thus far failed offensive in the north:

“Sri Lanka’s hopes of a quick victory over Tamil separatists looked shattered Thursday after Tamil rebels inflicted the heaviest losses on security forces since pulling out of a truce, analysts said.

Just a day before the major battle on the Jaffna peninsula where security sources estimated 127 soldiers were killed or missing and a further 400 wounded, the military announced an amnesty for deserters.

Despite opening three separate fronts in the north, the military had been unable to make a serious dent in rebel defences. Security forces deployed their maximum power with war planes, multi-barrel rockets and heavy armour.”

So, somehow, Kashmir (and perhaps even more oddly, Belfast) appear to be my healthiest field sites! You don’t hear that every day. . . .