THE sandbag barricades huddle in the shade of the chinar trees and children play hide and seek around them. The streets of Srinagar are crowded with people, queuing up for fresh bread, drinking tea, shopping for apples; and, amongst the phiranclad people, green uniforms are quite visible everywhere. We see an occasional 'foreign' tourist—a precious and much needed commodity here.
"Life is returning to normal—but very slowly. Only when many more foreign tourists come here will things be better for everyone," says Altaf, an artist from Kashmir. He is one of the artists in our group and we are on our way to Pahalgam to participate in an art camp organised by the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art and Culture. Our bus moves slowly behind a convoy of army trucks, three-wheeler scooters and apple carts. We have a police van following us but that is just for 'formality's sake', explains our host from the Academy.
Our bus rattles through vast saffron fields where the precious crop is ready to sprout next month and the farmers ignore our bus, friendly waves and trailing police escort. They are used to security-conscious city people. The bus slows down at Anantnag and we see blue-eyed, unshaven young men strolling down the market with guns. "They are friendly militants," says someone and we wonder if we should wave at them or salute them.
There is hardly any traffic on the road to Pahalgam except for a few local buses but these gaily-painted ancient vehicles are loaded with people, chicken and red apples. It gets dark quite suddenly just when the pine forests start and we sit somewhat anxiously on the edge of our seats and one devout artist from Delhi begins to chant a prayer. Fortunately, the militants, if there were any lurking in the forests along the way, remain friendly and soon we are safely at Pahalgam, where there is steaming hot kahva tea and walnut sweets waiting for us. "It is nice to hear people's voices here once more. For six years there have been hardly any visitors here except at the Yatra time," says Abdul, a waiter at the tourist hut.
We are woken up early in the morning by querulous Goldfinches. There is fresh snow on the mountain peaks and we can hear the Lidder river rushing past below. The colours mix slowly in the cold air but we begin to paint at once. The CRPF security men, posted all over Pahalgam, watch us from far,their guns gleaming in the sunlight. But as the days pass and our paintings are nearly finished, they sit with us like good friends and one young man even gives me advice on my colour composition. "I am from Baramulla district. We have seen a lot of bad days, bloodshed, deaths in the last few years but God is going to improve everything in Kashmir Valley now," he says, echoing the words of the Kashmiri artists and art students at the camp.
"We have been through bad times, like the dark ages, but now it is spring once more and time to forget. We have not painted at all for six years, not spoken to people from outside Kashmir. Who can think of art when you are afraid of a knock on your door, suspicious of even talking to friends," says a young art student who is working on a series of woodcuts on life in Kashmir during those days.
Despite the slight air of anxiety which everyone here feels, life seems to be returning to normal judging from the small crowds of tourists at Pahalgam on a Sunday morning. "But not like old days," notes the pony guide. "See, all the big shops are still shut. Pahalgam used to be a star tourist town. But they will come back. The houseboats in Srinagar already have many tourists and Gulmarg too was crowded this summer. The sky is clearing. You must tell everyone to come here. My pony needs work."
The last six years are times no one wants to remember and everyone talks about the days before the militancy in nostalgic tones. Manu and Madhvi Parekh, Jatin Das and Shamshad remember the art camps they attended in Kashmir a decade ago as they paint and Veer Munshi tries to forget his home which was burnt down and paints a serene green meadow. Yusuf, from Bhopal, and I paint chinar leaves while Jann, a Kashmiri artist, portrays Mother Teresa in a spirit of hope. Suman Gupta from Jammu, Nimrat Handa and Pramod Ganpaty from Delhi see a new spring in Kashmir in their paintings. On the last day when we display our paintings the securitymen click their guns in approval but they do not fire in the air because in Kashmir—a paradise on earth—guns will hopefully be silent now.
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