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Two kilometres into the main stretch of highway that runs from Srinagar to Baramulla, you see the fields of rice paddy. They give the Valley of Kashmir a richly-textured yellow glow that contrasts with the apple orchards, the sturdy chinars with their heavy canopies, the tall poplars and the groves of willow. It may be the altitude, perhaps it is the northern latitude or even the water of the Valley — fed by mountain springs—but the sparkling yellow tint of the rice tillers as they near harvest time is unlike the colour of ripening paddy anywhere else.
Baramulla lay some 60 kilometres to the north-west, and that was to be our first stop. I was in Jammu and Kashmir to visit the community rehabilitation work that has been done, with admirable perseverance and commitment, by the Welthungerhilfe and the Centre for Environment Education Himalaya, an Indo-German non-governmental partnership that has worked tirelessly in this region ever since the 2005 earthquake.
Every now and then we passed a local bus, its windows and grille-work festooned with the most extraordinary collection of lights, reflectors, tassels and decorations. They take their vehicular cosmetics seriously in these parts, and during the winter months, when snowdrifts routinely block the roads, the sight of a cheery bus must do wonders for the villagers’ morale. “At times during winter, we’ve driven in the mountains on roads cleared of 20 feet of snow! There’s a lot of snow here, but not at this time, don’t worry,” Riyaz reassured me. It’s a skill that takes much patient learning and a good deal of confidence in both chassis and the internal combustion engine, to drive in a Himalayan winter.
And presently we entered the town of Baramulla, whose neighbourhoods ornament both banks of the Jhelum. Low hills surround the town and the poplars seem even taller in this part of the Valley than near Srinagar. This is an old settlement, and from here the roads branch off towards Sopore (Kashmir’s ‘apple town’), Uri and Kupwara. Refreshed by a pair of small, sweet apples and a cup of tea, our party now doubled, we climbed back into the jeep for the next leg — into the mountains.
Already, the lie of the land was changing. No longer so numerous were the mighty chinars and stately poplars. Here and there I could discern still village houses built of deodar-wood — the framework of the houses is altogether of wood, only between the double plank-walls the spaces are filled in with stones, sometimes laid loose and sometimes cemented (in eras gone by, they used mud) and such old houses, where they do exist, have low gabled roofs with the corrugated sheets so typical of Indian hill-stations having long since replaced the original shingle.
The ranges of the Pir Panjal, which form the southern boundary of the wide Valley of Kashmir, were now dim in the evening haze. To the north and in the direction of our travel, lay the west-to-east spine of the Great Himalayan Range and although their monumental peaks were still many tens of kilometres distant, the road disappeared up past the clefts and gullies of their lesser bulwarks. We had till now passed through a few army traffic control posts, for north-western Kashmir is a militarily sensitive zone. From here on, as we ascended, the checkpoints were more stringent, the questioning polite but probing.
We came to the top of Sadhna Pass, also known as Nastachun. In another era, we would have here been entering the domain of the Bomba Rajas, who had long ruled Karnah. At 3,500 metres in the Himalayan evening, the stars glittered with a freshness and clarity utterly bewitching to plainspeople, and Aijaz led us to take a small celebratory drink — in our cupped hands — of cold, mineral-rich water from a chashma (spring) that emerges from the top of the pass. Now we had entered Karnah, and cautiously descended the switchbacks and negotiated the gradient down to Tangdhar, the name for both the little settlement and the stream that runs through this sublime valley.
Much further away, I could see slow moving knots of girls and boys, their white uniforms standing out against the natural colours of the Tangdhar valley. They were going to their classes, the best sign possible that the schools I had travelled so far to visit were serving these mountain communities well.
Photos and text By Rahul Goswami
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