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A Sikh cycle-rickshaw driver handed me a line that first day in Delhi about how I'd better check in with a "government tourist office", at which he would be happy to stop on the way to the hotel I had named. Well, it turned out, after the young Kashmiri at the "tourist office" helpfully made a phone call, there was no room at the inn I had in mind, but there was this other place, just three hundred rupees a night. As these things sometimes turn out, the Kashmiri and I quickly became good friends.

He wasted no time priming my pocketbook. Where did I want to go? Agra? Jaipur? Rajasthan? He could help me. I really didn't know, I said; right now I thought I'd better rest. I would come back tomorrow. He pressed me: Why not decide right now? No better time than the present! I'd better leave a deposit: sometimes these buses fill up, you know. I was to watch him put the same hard sell on many another helpless foreigner and, later, I took some little pleasure from secretly knowing I was on his side. I took greater pleasure still from peremptorily rejecting the ingratiating advances of all the numberless other Kashmiris on Connaught Place and in Paharganj, where they sidled up with whispered promises of "free information", as if that were something illicit.
"Hello. You want bus ticket train ticket flight ticket? You want go Kashmir?"
"No! Get away from me!"
Actually, yes, I said that first day: I did want to go to Kashmir.
It just so happened, as a matter of fact, that he knew an excellent houseboat.But there was a particular place I wanted to stay, I said. Not a houseboat. A hotel.
Might he inquire which hotel?
"Hotel Leeward." I had a special reason for wanting to meet the proprietor, I said.
"Mister Butt."
My skin crawled. He was real!"
No one stays at hotels like the Leeward, explained my new friend; they were only for Indians. Foreign visitors stayed on houseboats. The houseboats were the whole reason people went to Kashmir. And he just so happened to know an excellent one.
So I booked a few days on his houseboat, and the rest is history.

My awareness of Kashmir had begun a few months earlier, with the siege of the Hazratbal mosque in late 1993. But, truth be told, it was the lure of literary history, far more than the troubles or the fame of the houseboats, that first enticed me to the Dal Lake. Until Hazratbal, my knowledge of Kashmir had been limited entirely to what I had learned incidentally from a certain book.
"It was my eye that had changed," writes V.S. Naipaul in An Area of Darkness, and this too is what happened, eventually, to me. Through the unavoidable alchemy of writing Naipaul had, at once as it were, exorcised his own Indian illusions and conjured new ones for at least one reader, for me to dispel in my turn. I had had to create my own virtual versions of his settings (as he himself writes in The Enigma of Arrival of doing to Dickens). The Dal Lake and Gulmarg and Amarnath were in my mind Naipaul's territory.

An Area of Darkness is not a shapely book. It is jerry-built from three ill-fitting parts, ninety pages of superbly direct narration set in Kashmir sandwiched between more general musings on India at large. But the book is a classic, and the Kashmir section is distinguished by a precision of depiction rarely equalled even elsewhere in Naipaul. Notably in evidence is his superb ear for spoken language; he captures the odd Kashmiri pronunciation touriasm, for instance (though nowhere in his account does the reader encounter the more common plural countable noun, touristes). After all that has been lost beyond recovery in that beautiful valley since 1989, one feels almost justified in suggesting that the greatest of the many virtues of Naipaul's book is simply that he witnessed and recorded Kashmir at a moment now utterly irretrievable.

The view from the small plane as it descended reminded me of Colorado Springs: mountains rising abruptly from an expansive floor -- in Colorado it was the Great Plains that stretched east to the Mississippi River -- though here the peaks were farther away and higher. In the airport building I was made to fill out a form. Under OCCUPATION I wrote "writer"; best to be above board, I thought (wrongly). As I waited at the baggage conveyor a uniformed man, an Indian soldier, approached wearing a look of mild alarm.
"Your occupation is writer?"
"Yes."
"What magazine you work for?"
"I write books."
His look changed to one of relief. "You write 'Books' here."
Little did he know I planned to write a book about Kashmir.

Not everyone takes to Kashmiris, but I did. I was befriended during my time of discovery by an old man to whom I owe a great deal, whom I must call simply Haji. He was habitually gracious and hospitable in what I later came to realise was a characteristically Muslim way, and well connected, with his ear to the ground. He had a strong personality, a presence, and I wish I felt at liberty to describe him physically. He had seen a lot of history in his own valley, but the great adventure of his life had been (what else?) the Haj, when he and his wife had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was a great lover of the hookah, or "hubble-bubble", which he said was the English word. "I think smoking is your very favourite thing to do," I once said to him. He grinned in that way of his. "Whenever I go on a trip," he declared, "wheresoever I may go, first thing I always take with me is" -- he paused as he liked to do, for dramatic effect -- "my hubble-bubble."

I pressed Haji to introduce me to Mr Butt and one morning, I in high excitement and he wondering what was the big deal, we went in his shikara or lake boat. There, as we rounded a bend among houseboats and trees, was the Hotel Leeward, big and white with the Tibetan-looking pitched roof, the three-story new building of Naipaul's second visit, dominating its little lake neighbourhood.
"I don't think the Leeward will open again," said Haji.
"Those hotels were only open when there was a rush, all these Indian touristes. That rush I don't think will come back."

We docked and walked through a back yard to a room off a narrow corridor. The room was dark and unadorned, and lying on his side on a mattress on the floor beneath blankets, a cloth cap on his head for warmth, was Haji Mohammed Sidiq Bhat (so spelled, as I learned). Though he was lying down he seemed very tall, and Haji confirmed later that he was taller than I, taller than six feet, and very thin. He did not look well.

Several men sat around in a companionable semicircle; there was a hookah and the room was smoky. We sat down. Haji and a plump man wearing a fur cap exchanged words in Kashmiri. The plump man smiled.
"V.S. Naipaul," he said.
"You see, they already know how you know about them!" cried Haji happily.
The man was Aziz, of whom Naipaul had written memorably. He seemed to enjoy the notoriety. Naipaul had arrived unannounced in 1989, he told me. He had not written ahead. But yes, he had recognized him immediately. Naipaul and his wife had stayed four and a half months in 1962, and in 1989 Naipaul had returned without his wife but with some other people and had stayed three or four days, at the Palace. Naipaul was an "Anglo-Indian", and his wife was German or American or something like that. Somebody went to fetch Aziz's son, Nazir. As we waited Aziz told me, unprompted, the story he had told Naipaul about the Tourism Department's complaint against An Area of Darkness; apparently it was still on his mind. Nazir now ran the medical supply shop on the corner of the island. After some minutes he came and sat down and asked me a few polite questions: Did I like Kashmir? What had I seen? Then it was decided that he would show me the hotel. When we got up to leave, Mr Bhat, who had not spoken, smiled -- he did not seem fully lucid -- sat up and shook my hand firmly. Then, at my behest, the three sat together for a photograph.

Aziz was jolly, the kind of man one could like instantly. He shook my hand heartily again in the corridor. "You send photo," he said. "And write in your book."
With Nazir I walked through the empty hotel, to a room on the second floor with a double view of the lake and the mountains, like the view Naipaul had enjoyed.
"Mr Naipaul loved the scenery," remembered Nazir.
He was a quiet, diffident young man, self-contained, seemingly shy. I asked if he had read about himself in India: A Million Mutinies Now. Naipaul had sent them a copy, he said (he didn't say if he had read it), but someone had borrowed it and not returned it. He said this casually, without resentment or any other feeling, simply as a fact. Sometimes these seemed the two emotional possibilities for Kashmiris: fierce anger or hysteria, and complete indifference. Naipaul had written that Nazir was studying accountancy. "Accountancy is good for doing any business, isn't it?" I remarked. He smiled. "Yes," he agreed. "It is needful whatever you do. Very needful." Naipaul had been wrong to write that he had never been outside the Valley, I learned. Nazir had gone yearly, he told me, to Delhi and Bombay to solicit business from travel agents. But not since 1989.

I asked about the awkward moment at the end of Naipaul's visit. He hadn't wanted money, he insisted, a little fiercely as though he really earnestly wanted to make the point. He had spent time with Naipaul for "friendship".
Haji then gave a sermonette on Kashmiri hospitality. "Not like you stay in hotel in Delhi or Bombay, where they take your money and forget about you," he said with casual, customary disgust. "If you stayed Hotel Leeward, Mr Butt would send you Christmas card. And he would make you send him Christmas card."
"I respect him like my father," said Nazir, still speaking of Naipaul.
He pointed across the courtyard at a window near the sitting room where Naipaul had bought a Kashmiri shawl from Mr Sharif, a friend of Mr Bhat's. He wanted me to see the bullet hole made on June 20, 1990, by Indian troops responding to a rocket attack by militants.
"I don't think Mr Butt will be alive when you come back," said Haji later, as we floated away in the shikara.

Though they were little more than politely welcoming and I made no lasting connection, meeting Mr Butt and Aziz and Aziz's son helped me to see them as what they are: human beings with lives and worries of their own, outside any book. Paradoxically, I gained a new appreciation for what Naipaul had done. No longer was An Area of Darkness mere literature; now, to me, it was a depiction of something true, a true story.

Credits

• Written by : Ethan Casey, Editor - BlueEar.com
• Photographs : Ramananda Sengupta of Outlook India