There is a small town in the Kashmir Valley, located in the district called Anantnag by some, Islamabad by others. The air is clean and sharp, coming fresh off the mountains. There is the perpetual sound of flowing water, small streams running to meet a river. On a day that was not quite summer and not quite fall, a shadow of a soldier fell across a wall of a house that had not been lived in for years.

It was only one of a number of abandoned houses in the town, all huddled together, as if their closeness to each other could make up for their emptiness within. At some point during the decades of fighting that has raged in the Valley, the owners of these houses, Hindus all, had fled to a life of unbelonging somewhere else. Soldiers lived in a camp there among those houses, guarding an emptiness and a temple surrounded by barbed wire, while the weeds grew and memories died. A Kashmiri friend of mine, seeing a photograph of the place, was stunned into uncharacteristic silence. When he spoke, it was with words that caught in his throat, “My closest friend and I played there, by that stream. That is his house. I don’t know where he is now, where his family has gone.”

But there is always more to a story than an empty house and more to a man than just his uniform. Even a photograph that shows just a shadow on the wall captures the aching loneliness, and a twist of unusual tales. Across the Valley, some distance from Anantnag, is a tourist resort called Sonamarg where a large gateway tells you that the Army welcomes your visit. It is a place of glaciers slowly retreating, leaving behind stones chewed into rubble through the centuries. The soil is thin, providing sustenance to grass, a few twisted trees, and nothing more. Nomads come and go on short stocky ponies, so the Army’s presence seems overlarge, impossible to ignore.

Sitting at a roadside tea stall, I was approached by a soldier who wanted to know where I came from. When I mentioned Delhi, where I had driven from, it did not seem to satisfy him. He asked again, “But where are you from?” The last word lingered, questing.

Unsure, but moved by his insistence, I said, “Gorakhpur,” naming my father’s city in the State of Uttar Pradesh. His sudden smile transformed his face with childlike joy as he declared to his colleagues, “I told you so.”

Turning back to me he said, “I, too, am from Uttar Pradesh, and we even had somebody from Gorakhpur in our regiment until last month.” He suddenly burst into a spate of confidences and advice on how best to travel, and what to say so that I wouldn’t get caught behind the slow-moving Army convoys. “Stay with us,” he offered, presenting the one home he had, a tent in the mountains, to somebody from his own land.

Travelling through Kashmir, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers and paramilitary personnel are deployed, I have been approached so many times by shy, homesick men who have told me that they were from UP, and did I know their town?

And in that little town in Anantnag, among those abandoned houses, there is one where a Hindu family still lived when I went to meet them in 2005, just after the municipal elections had taken place after more than two decades. The patriarch, an old man who moved with less ease in his old age as his joints stiffened and protested, was still fiery with pride. He glanced with good-natured scorn at the soldiers grinning shyly, “Do you think that it is they who keep me safe? No, it is my neighbours, who know me, who have known me all my life. It is among them, and because of them, that I am safe.”

He was Kashmiri, he belonged. He confidently claimed the love of his neighbours, Muslims all, who approached the Army camp nervously, if they approached it at all. He had some reason to, having been elected by them to represent the town. In no election, in India or the wider world, had I ever run across this anomaly of minorities being over-represented in elections, usually they are under-represented, but in the Kashmir Valley Hindus and Sikhs, representing less than a few percent of the population were elected far beyond their proportion during that municipal election. Maybe the old man was right, maybe it was love, of a sort. I do not know.

And that shadow upon that house was just that, a passing moment, as the soldier ached for a home he had left, and the house ached for those that have left it, in a day that was not quite summer, not quite fall, in a place I have as yet to understand.

( >@OmairTAhmad )

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