Between the lines
Where geography ends and history begins
Beyond borders The Shamsbari range
If on earth there be a paradise, tis’ on a horseback it lies.’ Hardly. I am doing all I can to keep myself upright on a saddle-less horse as I negotiate the road home from the Line of Control at Tithwal. It’s dusk and the pony-track is illumined by only two Maglite torches. My family rides ahead while behind me walks a young Army captain so smitten by Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that I can hear him recite it on a star-spangled night. We pass Sharif, our driver, still trying to fix the Scorpio’s tyre that was torn to shreds on our onward journey and I hear pine trees rustle in the breeze and smell the sharp twang of wood fire.
My innate cynicism has restrained many a hare-brained scheme. But the Army wife in me gives in and I agree to be driven in kamikaze conditions by Sharif, to the border town of Tangdar, in Kupwara. It’s supposed to be ‘all quiet on the Western front’. “But the front is never quiet,” the alarmist in me whispers, “it would no longer be the front if it were.”
And then there’s Sharif who subscribes to the karma school of driving.
The road from Baramulla, via Handwara, Kupwara, the picturesque forests and gushing brooks of Trehgam and Choukibal is strewn with the mangled wrecks of vehicles that challenged these narrow, pot-holed mountain roads. Pratap Post glazes over in the mist and I’m furiously rolling the beads of my rosary. My mobile phone dies out and I gaze stoically at the stark, rocky defiles of the Shamsbari range.
The landscape is cold yet undeniably beautiful — fast-melting ice blocks turn into slushy streams and bridges and culverts almost seem to fall away as we pass. Signboards by the Border Roads Organisation reading “Be Gentle on My…More
