It has taken me a long time to get over Srinagar.  Even though we crossed the Himalayas and moved from the green  Sind Valley to the arid lunar-scape of Ladakh, I still found myself thinking about Srinagar.  Srinagar is a very Moslem place.  It was (and still is) Ramadan, and the muezzin called across the river every morning.  There is a kind of intensity and urgency to the place; our hosts want to engage with us, to talk politics, fundamentalism, what is was like to go through the last 18 years when thousands died.  They want to engage.

In a piece in an old Granta on India, James Buchan writes of his visit to Srinagar in 1997.  The place he finds is a shadow of its former self.  It is an occupied territory.

Srinagar, the chief town of Kashmir with about half a million inhabitants, sits at the western end of the lake.  It was always a place quite unlike any other, Old British guidebooks compare it with Venice – and the valley with the Southern Tyrol, but to paddle through its canals at sundown between rotten wooden buildings and sagging houseboats aground in the filthy mud is to feel far from Italy.  The mosques have corrugated-iron roofs and canopied minarets that might have been designed in Iran but fabricated in Tibet…This phantasmagoric city, an unimaginable mixture of Istafan, Lhasa, Sunningdale and the Underworld, which seemed to me on earlier visits to be suspended for ever in its particularity, has altered out of recognition.  No doubt all famous cities should be imagined in their ruin.

That was long ago.  Stability has returned, and the place is full of shikaras ferrying Indians from the South  around the lake to escape the terrible heat. The Indians stop in the middle and don bright red and green costumes to have their picture taken, presumably in some kind of re-enactment of the days of the Maharajah. We see an odd boat of pale Germans off to buy pashminas.

There are still plenty of police around.  More than we have ever seen in our lives. They have large guns and moustaches.

Boats pull up at our houseboat to sell us jewellery, to hem our clothes, to show us old postcards.  The man selling postcards has been doing this since he was a child.  I press him for more old photos.  He returns the next day.

It is beautiful on the lake, but it is a bracketed beauty, inherited from the long history of the lake as an image.  It is a surface beauty.  I have to work hard to ignore the rubbish floating in the lake, the plastic bottles and empty crisp packets.  I try not to worry about the thick green weed choking the water, or about the lack of environmental consciousness of all and sundry.  I have a mild bout of stomach cramps.

Our boat is old and in desperate need of being dragged into the 21 century.  Our hosts are attentive, ever-present.  They have brought their lovely mother in to cook, thinking that we need English food (which I call Pashmiri cuisine, a strange mixture of 1950s Pommie and Kashmiri).  We tell them we like Indian food, Kashmiri food.

There are no coffee shops.  We buy a beer from a fallen Kashmiri, who everyone knows sells all kinds of illicit wares.  Later we hear he was arrested.

From Leh we read in the paper that thousands of fish have died in the Lake.  A mysterious death, the newspaper says, but there are no real mysteries when you see the choked wetland and the dubious waste management.

Srinagar is recovering, but it needs to be challenged by visitors who ask for more of this place; more of its rich and diverse openness to influence.  Less of the same, more of the different.

Josephine