My Father and Nirvana in London

“Nirvana”, my father said decidedly to my daughter in a London cab when she questioned his decision to visit temples in South India after the Kerala floods that created five million internal refugees.

“Baba, you won’t find Nirvana in a temple,” she said. “It’s somewhere in your heart.”

We found a bit of it one thousand feet above Srinagar in the Zabarwan Mountain, in the ancient (built in 200 BC and again in the 9th century) Shiva Shankaracharya Temple.

Climbing 243 steps we entered the stone temple awestruck by its aura carrying the prayers, laments, and longings of humans through centuries. Or is this it, I thought at dawn in Srinagar, sitting on a swing under a vast ancient Chinar Oak tree. Then, past roses, dewy, deep shaded, fragrant, into an apple orchard so abundant that guests were encouraged to pick all they wanted. I felt like Eve, picking apples, dropping several into my shawl, sitting on the cold grass, biting into the crisp fruit, looking up at the mist beyond the pine-covered Himalayan slope.

Last week we were there, on one of the 50 Himalayan Mountains.

“Cowards die a thousand deaths,” my father said when I refused flatly to get into the cable car. I got on. It shuddered and swung along and up the valley, up, up 14,000 feet above sea level.

We were looking down, in the autumn sunshine, at herds of sheep along the valley, dazzling fields of marigolds, wild mountain flowers, streams. The guide said with tourism down they make do with little. ‘We grow and dry fruit, women spend hours embroidering pashmina shawls made with lambswool, men go blind weaving centuries old patterns in carpets from a hidden code, others create paper mache art.’ Finally, the cable car stopped at a plateau opening to a whipping cold wind, daubs of snow panoramic sight of majestic rugged snow-capped mountains. “There”, my father said, pointing ahead, “is the Pakistani border. There, the Chinese border.”

He trekked here for months when he was in the army.

Coming down I reflected how blood is shed often and freely in this valley that which Emperor Jahangir once called heaven on earth. Over 700,000 troops defend this state from insurgency within, and without.

Kashmiris backed by Pakistan have never stopped wanting independence from India since 1947.

They have driven out Hindu Kashmiri Pandits destroying their homes and temples, a sore point for India.

On the way home, we saw schoolchildren put their fists in the air, shouting ‘aazadi’ freedom. The man selling us dried fruit and saffron grown here told us he has known nothing else but an army-occupied State, with a massacre in 1990 of 50 unarmed protesters, daily curfews, buildings and army and insurgents shooting and blowing one another up.

Back in the city every turn our driver took to the hotel was blocked with barbed wire. Every few yards, we saw the green uniforms holding machine guns in front of crowded marketplaces; in the masjids around the city, guns: the Mughal garden, guns, by the lake, guns.

It was Moharram, the Shia celebration where Shia men dressed in black flagellated themselves drawing their own blood swinging knives about their body while armed forced looked on. I thought of our tame Trini Hosay in St James, (more like a float than this serious occasion) grateful for the lack of religious pedants in our country.

On our last evening, we four took a ride in the sunset in a shikara (a small decorated boat) on Dal lake lined by houseboats. We were the first customers for our boatmen suffering from the tourist warnings against visiting Kashmir. As the water pink lotuses bloomed we heard a chorus of azaan, the call of prayer on the lake in the sunset, from mosques around the city. A man on a boat said his namaaz and we heard a familiar bhajan from another.

“Religion should be a private matter of the heart,” said the young boatman. I thought of brutality then, how even when people like us in Trinidad and the Kashmiris face it every day, people find grace. It was in the Muslim taxi driver who held my father’s slippers up the temple steps; in the young hands proffered to my mother to help her up steps, in a thousand daily kindnesses.

‘How are you so gentle?’ I asked the young boatman, ‘despite this bloodshed?’ “It’s in our blood,” he said, “For centuries we’ve been brought up to be hospitable to strangers, kind to the elderly. We will battle but for our dignity.”

When we got off the boat we all felt something akin to grief at leaving Kashmir with my father saying what we were all thinking, that his Trini granddaughter was right, that Nirvana/peace/heaven/enlightenment is in our hearts.