chartandwaters

(Dear Mark, thank you for your support. I was trying to give people breathers between my long blogs. What does Venantius mean? And now here is a very very long blog.)

There's a sign on Jamia Masjid, a famous mosque in Srinigar, that says you can't go in if you're "naked," meaning not fully covered, "by Order of the Secretary". I know everyone else knows who the Secretary is, but how, how are tourists supposed to know? This is my endless gripe with tourists hotspots that are also war-ravaged powderkegs: frequent oversights and errors of omission.

Given how many people find Kashmir heaven on earth, I actually imagined a feeling of escape might be conjurable amid the devastation. I didn't feel in need of an escape, but I thought one might be available. Maybe if I'd needed a vacation more I'd have suspended the necessary disbelief in order to enjoy myself here. But I am finding the contrast between the tone the Kashmiris desperately hope to set--joyful, serene glee--and the reality of poverty and oppression heartbreaking on an almost minute to minute basis.

The frequent oversights and errors of omission aren't limited to the tourist industry--they're culture-wide, the symptoms of poverty and desperation and depression and many things I don't understand. Of course there's the low funds, and especially funds poorly or corruptly spent; I'm told India gives enormous aid to Kashmir each year, and that Kashmir has been somehow rated the second most corrupt state in India. There's the depression of a community used to living in desperation. For instance: The sitting room in the Dabloos' houseboat is completely beautiful. The walls are 18th century wood panels in the British tradition, perfectly preserved. The floor is covered with a deep red, spotless fabric, some kind of woolly acrylic knit embossed with a diamond pattern. The coffee tables are the walnut Kashmir is famous for expertly carved to look rippled around the edges. When I first saw the room there were three vases of fresh flowers in different colors, which were especially touching because this room is rarely used. There are polished wood-framed chairs, a couch and a settee covered in deep red plush. And on each couch and chair are little round raw silk pillows that are very, very dirty. And the whimsical fabric lampshades are unwhimsically off-kilter, a problem a hammer could fix.

It's as if the people have for too long had to squint their eyes to avoid seeing the disaster too clearly. I met a shopkeeper the other day who goes by the name of Crocodile. This may be because his teeth are so white and big. He also has big eyes and big eyelids that open and close dramatically. I feel bad for him because in a place where everyone is charging the tourists fake rates Crocodile is an unalluring nickname. Over a please-purchase-something chai he told me the Kashmiris are no longer thinking clearly after the years of war. "Depressed", I said, and he nodded his head adamantly and lowered his big eyelids, "Depressed, yes, that's the word, depressed."

(The Kashmiris are a dramatic people--the Italians of Asia, a British woman told me--and very expressive with their face and hands. Frequently I think they're arguing when they're not, but they argue a lot. Their language has thick guttural sounds and that rolling r that makes every word sound dramatic, and for some reason I haven't checked when they say English words like "milk" and film" they say mil-ik and fil-im, which also gives the impression that each word deserves more time, for them, rather than less.)

Then there are the joyful, playful colors of what appear to be a naturally artistic people, including giddy, often mysterious slogans hand-painted on the sides of rickshaws and the backs of trucks. ("Wait for Signal, Don't Break My Heart;" "You and me nice 2 members," "Beauty is a flower which wrinkles will devour." --"Wait for Signal" means wait for the truck to tell you to pass though no one does it.) You can contrast this, if you must, with the unsuppressed desperation in people's selling practices. So many whole shops will spend hours with you, just you, offer you chai, breads, answer any question you have, invite you to their homes, despite your repeat protests, in the hope of a purchase. The place is teeming with tourists, but tourism isn't anywhere near what it needs to be for these shops to thrive.

By the way, I desperately want people to come to Kashmir. A popular phrase here, particularly as you are leaving a shop empty-handed, is "As you like, as you like." So come, please come. You can suspend disbelief or don't, as you like.

Meanwhile, everyone is scrabbling for your money while asserting their complete honesty. Some of them are being completely honest (I think). Frequently it seems as if they're trying to be honest, and to convince themselves of same, while lying, although my new acquaintance Habib, a former tout (see below), put it to me more interestingly: "When I lived here, I would say, honesty is the best policy, but I didn't know what it meant." He agreed with me that people can't--or maybe feel that they can't--fully permit themselves to wonder whether they're being honest or not, they need your money too badly.

I should say that there are actually lots of people with money here. There's a developed, newer part of town called Lal Chowk where people don't look so hungry or desperate. I was startled to meet someone the other day who was perfectly relaxed--turns out he has a business in gold that's doing fine. There are some nice residential areas. There are people who make good profit in the government or in drugs. The town is very proud of its university, which has an excellent reputation in India. And in a weird turn, I met a couple who explained that the houseboats are pretty well-moneyed; when I looked shocked, they said I clearly hadn't travelled India much, meaning that by comparison the houseboats were doing fine. Sure there was the bad 10-year-stretch after the violence escalated in '89, but we're coming out of that. (I've heard some put the bad stretch at 10 years, some at 15, some 18.)

The tradition of having a houseboat is so strong that for those in the business there is very rarely movement to do anything that might make better money, such as selling a $70,000 houseboat and investing the money in three more lucrative businesses. You see many people with massive determination, cunning, ambition, charisma, and streetsmarts focus all of it like a laserbeam on housing their families and getting their travel agency cum import-export cum houseboat business really happening. The houseboat tradition is rooted in part in a deep pride in being self-employed, not servile, and self-sufficient. A woman also argued that it's rooted in the fact that many men don't want their women to witness Delhi, Bangalore, or any of the other big cities, so if the men have shops elsewhere, they have to keep two households.

The commitment to families, extended families, and the many friends who become like family, is very appealing to me. But one man noted with dismay, "Their whole world is from the front of the houseboat to the back." I was relieved to hear him say this as it confirmed my own impression: For instance, the kids receive little in the way of teaching or lessons at home; they are played with constantly but no adult cracks a book, or teaches a new game, or gives any kinds of lessons, although some of the adults can read. (Of course there's nothing about any of this that isn't true of people in other cultures, or that is true of all Kashmiri.) When people are not working they sit on the dock and just stare, or else they watch TV. They complain that they don't know languages well enough to lure in tourists, but they don't spend the good amount of free time they have practicing. There doesn't seem to be a vision of forward motion--I guess it's the commitment to "progress" that I'm missing.

This man told a story of a professor who was trying to show his students how much more there is to the world. He filled a jar with big rocks and asked them if the jar was full. Yes, they said. So he added a bunch of smaller pebbles and asked them again. Yes, they said. So he filled it with sand and asked again. Then coffee. The man said that the Kashmiri people only know a life of big stones; they don't realize, don't involve themselves with the many intricacies and complexities of the world. He also thought the lack of ambition was largely laziness and a lack of creativity; but isn't laziness usually another word for fear or for hopelessness?

But adhering to tradition is a typical quality of people who have been through hard times, isn't it--sticking with what they know, staying together. Nor is there easy access to anything outside of Kashmir--visas, for one; and many complain that in order to get a job in any other part of India you would have to pay for it. The history of Kashmir--going back hundreds of years--is mostly a history of oppression, and oppression nearly always creates a feeling of helplessness even once it's ended (fyi).

A government employee I met today--his department provides subsidies to foster business--said that the government tried to foster a technology sector at the end of the 80s but it was no go, the competition from Japan being too great; they've realized now the real business is in tourism, pashmina shawls, all the stuff everyone appears to be doing too much of. Whatever's driving these businesses, when you look at the rows and rows of people doing the exact same things it looks like virtual suicide.

The government employee said they may also start guiding students toward computer programming and software engineering soon. FYI, Tasleema had never seen or heard of an Ipod (rolling her finger over the round touch-dial--whatever it's called--"This is magic, eh?" and in a sign that she is a good daughter, "Now I get back to my laundry.") The town also appears to have been saved from McDonald's, which feels like some sort of horrible consolation prize.

Now, here's something that the man would say has to do with knowing only the big rocks. Rafiq says that if you are not dressed well here, people will say your father does not take care of you, so everyone takes care to dress very nicely and wear gold (a dowry thing) although they may have to borrow for, say, cataract surgery. The Dabloos and all the people I've met typically do their laundry meticulously and press their clothes so they look extremely presentable. Today I watched one of them doing her morning laundry. She put soap on a hard-bristled brush and scrubbed hard on each of the clothes one by one (which explained why my brandnew scarf suddenly looked so worn out). Then I saw that she rinsed the clothes IN THE LAKE. Eight full feet from the toilet, which empties, as I've noted, into the lake.

So this is disgusting. And so that I was extremely happy to meet a certain couple this afternoon. I was taking a shikara to look for a certain houseboat, couldn't find it and decided to just randomly visit some. The second one I visited was called "The New Texas". The owner was of course not as impressed as I was that I had lived in Texas and here I was in The New Texas. But the owner's son, Habib, is a Kashmiri man who, as a tout, had married an English woman 15 years ago, and they are both staying here with their son Adam just for the summer. Habib is working on many amazing Kashmiri projects, including an effort to clean up Dal Lake by developing sanitation systems for each of the houseboats. He's calling the project DL2035, testimony to his impression that the Lake, Srinigar's shining star, is being polluted with such vigor that it won't survive past 2035 if no one acts fast.

It turns out that the garbage man who comes in a shikara in the mornings only comes to the row of houseboats facing the road, about 300, so that the lake will look clean from the road. There's an entire back row of, say, another 300 tourist houseboats as well as many more residential boats. (Some 10,000 people live on the lake.) The garbage collector's job is mandated by the government and used to be free. But now he's started to come every other day or every third day and asks for money each time.

Habib's wife, Hillary, is a doctor who offers services for free while she's here and provides check-ups at the local orphanage. She sympathized, unsurprised, with my shock at the laundry-washing and offered other disgusting examples of this disconnect between cleanliness and hygiene. Hillary also said she was recently asked, "Is she really a doctor? She isn't wearing any gold."

Habib took me with him on a visit he had to make to the government official, who said I could take a tour on Monday of some of the government schools that are teaching children skills and crafts.

I've been leaving out anything about the violence. I've been told a few of the thousands of stories of brutal abuse by the Indian army, who accused my friends of being terrorists and then beat them. The army lines the streets here as most of you know--every street, it appears. I heard someone call it "reassuring", but am more likely to believe the locals here, that any current violence is staged by the army. Someone today told me that the freedom-fighters' violence clearly stopped after 9/11, he thinks because the US was funding them but realized--ding!--that these were the same terrorists who had attacked us. He said an Indian newspaper had discovered that each freedom fighter was getting 50,000 rupees a month--about $1200--which amounted--for all the freedom fighters combined--to $13,000,000 a week. The newspaper conjectured that no one has this kind of money besides the U.S. After 9/11, freedom fighters were out looking for work.

The tea served everywhere here and offered to you usually within minutes in shops, cafes and homes is milky chai--always served with milk and either salted (yeh, it's weird) or sugared as you like. Rafiq remembers when his family lived only on "rice with salt...and tea"--he leaned forward to get the English out--"with no milk."

P.S. Read this blog at your own risk. It turns out Rashid only told me hocking loogeys into the lake was "okay here" to avoid embarrassment at how frequently he does it. Although Mr. Dabloo also does it (louder than I've ever heard anyone) it's not officially polite.