Door Number 8: Lucky to Have Gone When We Did: A Trip by Bus to Kashmir and Ladakh (Part Two)

Houseboats on Dal Lake

2. Srinagar, Kashmir, India

Visiting late September 1980, we found Srinagar to be a handsome town in a beautiful setting up against (then snowless) mountains and impressive Dal Lake. From our hotel, we looked onto enormous chenar trees, giant hawk-like birds called kites, and long lines of sheets hanging out to dry. The old part of town revealed wooden buildings with tin roofs, men in shops smoking hubble-bubble pipes, and girls coming out of a handicraft school taking felt rugs called numdhas home to embroider.

There, too, stood the old English residence, a fine wooden mansion that now housed the Kashmiri Government Arts Emporium with splendid gardens and a grand lawn where, I imagined, English ladies in big hats once enjoyed outdoor tea parties. Two stuffed white tigers stood in the entry-way. Besides a section just for honey, there were rooms with embroidered shawls, papier-mâché items, wood carvings, woven carpets, and more felt numdhas.

A typical farm house

Cauliflower

Everywhere, leaves were turning color. Apple trees, poplars, willows. Many rice fields were already harvested. Ropes of drying chilies hung from the eaves of houses.

Rice boat on the Chenab River

In the oldest part of the city, we found the Friday Mosque made of wood around a central courtyard--the original structure using more than three hundred 200-foot-high cedars for support, or so we were informed by a man who went on to say that it had been built in 1400 by Buddhist and Hindu converts who didn't know how to build a mosque. Regardless, it was quite striking and well attended.

As well, we found the Rozabal Mosque with its unique tale. I'd recently purchased a book called Jesus Died in Kashmir by A. Faber-Kaiser. His thesis (based on an ancient text found in Ladakh) was that after the crucifixion, which he survived, Jesus returned to India where he'd already spent "the lost years" studying the Brahmanic teachings. This time he took Mary and his brother Thomas with him. Mary, the author said, died at what is now Murree in Pakistan, her sepulcher now called Mai Mari da Asthan or "Resting Place of Mother Mary." Jesus went to Kashmir, the author concluded, because he said it was in fact The Land of Milk and Honey where the Ten Lost Tribes had ended up. And he took the name Yuza Asaf which meant "Leader of the Healed Lepers." Next to the tomb, we found a stone carving of the feet of the man buried within showing crucifixion wounds. (I might add that the people there and in Islam in general consider Jesus one of their prophets.)

Rozabal Mosque outside Srinagar

Then there were the prized Mughal gardens dating from the 17th century.

Nishat Bhag designed in 1633.

Dal Lake and the Valley from another garden, Chashmi Shahi.

Nishat Bhag. Gardeners came up to give me flowers for my hair expecting baksheesh in return.

Shalimar Gardens built by Jahangir for his wife in 1619.

View of the mountains from Shalimar Gardens

A ride in a shikara--a little wooden boat with a canopy, propelled by a man who sat in back poling or paddling--gave us a view of Dal Lake where we plied the narrow waterways and passed row upon row of houseboats and floating gardens with water lilies raised by farmers. Hawkers approached in their shikaras selling apples, cold drinks, woolen shawls, saffron.