Pahalgam after the terror attack: Why tourists are returning to Kashmir’s most beautiful hill station
“Stare out the window. I will play you my list of old Hindi songs even if you do not understand it,” he says, already a tad overfamiliar.As we leave the summer capital city’s polluted streets behind, the roads begin resembling poet Agha Shahid Ali’s Postcard from Kashmir. The lines from my Class 6 text book: “This is home. And this the closest I’ll ever be to home. When I return, the colours won’t be so brilliant, the Jhelum’s waters so clean, so ultramarine. My love so overexposed,” echo out of the blue. My lungs adjust to the crisp air from the sturdy grey mountains speckled with snow. There are acres of apple trees, and chinars with trunks thick as walls.“I’m a poet too, you know,” Aishaq says, prattling off lines in Urdu that sound like dense couplets. I nod the ‘super’ sign to him. “Leave it, you won’t understand,” he says, and then stops where the river Lidder appears. “We are getting close,” he adds.
Discussion (0)