Best Spring Seats 2

                                                   “Now in Injias sunny clime,
                                                    Where I used to spend my time...”
                                                           Rudyard Kipling, Gunga Din



In the sun that rose on mountain pine forests, somewhere in the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal range, I began my romance with India, starting with the Kashmiri road signs.

‘Darling I like you, But not so fast... I am curvaceous, Take it slow...This isn’t a rally, Enjoy the valley...After whiskey, Driving risky...Don’t be silly, In the hilly... Peep peep, Don’t Sleep...Drive fast, And test your recovery... Be Mr. Late, not Late Mr.’

Passing orchards of apples, cherries, and walnuts, led us further into the vale of pashmina shawls and silk carpets, gems and saffron, and rogan josh lamb and spiced tea.
Except for the fatigue, we arrived in a princely state, to the city of floating gardens, lakes and houseboats. A cab took us along a park-lined boulevard, to Srinagar’s ten-mile long jewel in the crown, Dal Lake.
Across the blue water were rows of stationary ornamented houseboats of different sizes, but all with rectangular signs above the open decks at their stepped entrances. Sandwiched along from the awnings and umbrellas of the Rolex, the Yuvraj, between the Sansouci and the New Australia, was a much smaller houseboat. Water lilies and lotuses grew out front. An oarsman, standing on the far stern of his canopied spade-bottomed shikara, waved to us from the near lakeshore, standing on the tip of a dragonfly tail. We boarded under the sign of his small vessel. Best Spring Seats, it said. He paddled his craft across the short expanse to the thin white-haired Hanji man with an embroidered Kashmiri hat, leaning over the wooden porch.
“Welcome to the New Cherrystone. I am the owner, Jimmy.” He said, helping us onboard. Jimmy had deer eyes and a camel nose. A younger version emerged from the interior, with a tray of cinnamon and cardamom chai.
“And this is Rashid, my fourth son of seven.” We made our own introductions, and sat for tea inside the decorative gables and carved balustrades of the verandah. Shikaras slid along the Himalayan panorama, between spicy sips of paradise.
The Maharaja of Kashmir had forbidden foreigners from owning land, but the British got around this by building cedar houseboats. The first, constructed in 1888, was named Victory. A thousand more floating palaces followed. One of them was where Ravi Shankar taught George Harrison to play the sitar.
Rashid showed us through the dining room and carpeted lounge to intricately wood-paneled bedrooms. Julie took the one opposite. Ours had stained glass ventilators, Victorian dressers and other Raj furniture, and a broken ceiling fan over twin beds. Robyn pushed them together. I got the fan working, spinning with a quiet clack-clack-clack. Cold showers gave way to warm hospitality, served on china, from tureens and large platters. After dinner we reclined in the lounge easy chairs and on sofas, reading under the standing floor lamps. As we fell asleep in ‘a little piece of England afloat,’ it occurred to me that there might have been a bit something extra in the chapatis.
We awoke to roosters in India. The shikara commerce was thick outside the breakfast nook. Oarsmen called out their wares as they paddled by. ‘Flowwwwwers...Vegetaables...Maasaaala...’ Arrived and left with a Doppler effect, followed by vendors we had no idea even existed. ‘Ruubies...Hashshiish...Cofffiins...’
“Coffins?” Julie asked of Rashid.
“Why not coffins?” He answered. Why not, indeed.
Best Spring Seats arrived, to take us to the bank, a carpet factory, to watch a room of children hand tying tight silk knots, the emporium, and the Indian Airlines office, where we secured seats, eighteen to twenty positions down on the waiting list, to Leh, in Ladakh.
In the afternoon we visited the 14th century mosque, and returned to the New Cherrystone, for curried vegetables, and later, to play music on the verandah as the sun slid slowly into the lake. Rashid’s flute carried us far out onto the water.
Jimmy had an early English breakfast waiting for us in the nook, before dawn. I learned how to paddle a shikara, down the narrow black channel waterways, breaking the lush green-carpeted vegetation on the lake.
We arrived at a jostling jam of hardwood hulls, some canopied and some open to the powdered sky, but all full of vegetables and the clamor of negotiation. The Sunday floating market was a feast of color. Rupee bills danced over gunnels, in exchange for ripe tomatoes, tan-pink lotus root bundles, and green corn husks and cucumbers, groaning off adjacent boat bottoms. There were chrysanthemums and roses and blue Himalayan poppies. Tea flasks were handed to friends in pherans, the Kashmiri blanket with sleeves, keeping the purveyors warm. Just before seven, as the sunrays began their surface shimmer on the water, it was all over, and we returned to the New Cherrystone, with our fresh groceries and experience. Other vendors came to us through the day, on their shikaras.
‘Saphiiires...Saphiiires...’ Came aboard. He would make me a ring.
Next morning we were paddled us all the way to the inspiration for Shah Jahan’s namesake garden in Lahore. They had existed in one form or another since Pravarsena II built his cottage on the lake fifteen hundred years earlier. He named it Shalimar, ‘Abode of Love’ in Sanskrit. Crossing the difficult snowy passes of the Pir Panjal on elephants in 1619, Mughal emperor Jahangir turned the thirty one acres into a masterpiece, for his wife, Nur Jahan. Her name meant ‘Light of the World.’ In 1983 I arrived with Destiny, on Best Spring Seats. Here, from three chinar sycamore and flower-lined shallow terraces, smooth sheeted waterfalls flowed out of an endless line of central trough fountains, and into wide canals. Calm reflections were broken only by the stepping stones across their streams. At the high top of the first terrace was the famous Persian inscription, Gar Firdaus rōy-e zamin ast, hamin ast-o hamin ast-o hamin ast. If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.
Best Spring Seats took us home via a papier-mâché factory. We bought two boxes. The something I had thought was in the chapatis the previous two nights, was even more evident at dinner that evening. Robyn and I admitted our love. In chapati, veritas.
Gradually, Rashid’s camel nose for finding the aesthetic weaknesses and wallets of his guests was producing commissions. We had purchased papier-mâché, embroidered Kashmiri raw leather jackets, and sapphire and silver jewelry. On our final day in Srinagar, I almost bought an intricately carved walnut jewelry box, but it was too expensive. Rashid’s disappointment was written all over his deer eyes. We were welcomed as family, mailing our postcards at the Lal Chowk Post Office, and posed with the entire staff for a group photo. Our favored status continued at the Indian Airlines office, where we discovered our lottery windfall of three air tickets to Ladakh for the following morning. On our way back to the houseboat, we drove past the Crescent Intensive Urgent Heart Unit Cardiac Care Unit. The sign was bigger than the hut it adorned.
After dinner at the New Cherrystone, Julie announced her affliction with bloody diarrhea. It would be something I promised to attend to next day, after we landed in Leh.
Early next morning, Best Spring Seats took us across the lilies and the lotus, to a black and yellow motorized rickshaw, to a winding bus ride, to the airport. We walked across the tarmac, and climbed the stairs of the 737, to hard third world candies and soft first world seats, and the long taxi takeoff to Little Tibet.
Srinagar dropped away below and behind us. The 737 hesitated at the wall of snow-splattered Himalaya. The throw of the penetration dice into the ‘Land of High Passes’ was rigged equally for failure and fortune. Half the flights to Ladakh had to turn back. Once committed to a landing, the pilot had no second chance. But this was a good day. We glided beside the sun, dancing on sharpened pinnacles. Engine cowlings gulped for air.
Far below the hypoxic views of aloe green river valley filigree, the brown ribbon squiggle of the treacherous NH 1D pony track we would need to return on, tried to keep up. Somewhere on the azure edge of space, we crossed the Shangri-La point of no return, spiraled down three times, and began a final descent onto the incongruous Nazca line of Leh’s Kushok Bakula Rimpochee Airport.
It had cost twenty-five dollars for the thirty-minute flight to Moonland. The landing thud applause was a religious commemoration.



                                  “Kashmir, the rest is worthless.”
                                        Jahangir, asked his most cherished deathbed desire.