Last time when I left Kashmir for Delhi after staying for nearly a month, I was carrying no postcard images of the serene Dal Lake, the bewitching meadows of Gulmarg, the whooshing springs of Prang with me.
It was August; the valley was deep into the abyss of chaos. Kashmir was in the throes of an unimaginable crisis.
The Amarnath row had acted as a trigger to shut down the door of normalcy once again --- the door with a gleam of hope peeping in, which had opened after two decades.
It was in August this year that I landed at the Srinagar airport to be welcomed by burning tyres, curfewed streets dotted with dogs, and tense discussions inside houses.
There wasn't a moment inside our homes, inside all homes, when people discussed mundane, everyday things - the size of new refrigerators, plasma TVs, characters of soap operas and their dresses, the changing season, pollution in Dal lake.
Normalcy was dead.
{{/usCountry}}Normalcy was dead.
{{/usCountry}}There was not one normal day in Srinagar during my stay there when I would witness traffic at Lal Chowk moving with its original pace. Procession after procession, death after death, curfew after curfew. Srinagar was a ghost town.
I could see long shadows of gun toting soldiers, huge rectangular shadows of coffins filling streets. There was nothing else on the streets. Nothing.
The day I left for Delhi, I had to procure a curfew pass to secure my safe passage to the airport from my uncle's home, where I was stuck for weeks together due to curfew.
As we begin our journey across the state, there is a sense of excitement and a deeper sense of concern for the place and the people I have grown in and grown with. It might be bleak apparently, but the hope of a better tomorrow keeps me afloat.
Read more about people and places in this blog called .303 BULLET in the coming days.