The Magic of Shalimar

 

There was a time when we used to live around the Mughal garden in Shalimar. At one end of the garden was my parents' rented accommodation, and at the other end lived my maternal grand-uncle. Those were the times when childhood was ripe, rushing towards adulthood. In my childhood memories, certain events have been etched into me like a deeply engraved inscription on stone. The feeling of Shalimar is alive and fresh, and its visuals are locked in my soulful spaces with all innocence and no embroidery.

I carried milk from my maternal uncle's home, and for that I had to travel from one corner of the garden to another. I can now feel those walls of the Mughal Garden. They were old stone walls, darkened by the dampness of the night. Green fungus had settled upon them, almost glowing against the stone. I would walk beside them, a small child moving through a path that seemed enormous. Its front gate faces the famous Dal Lake.

While I carried that pot through the rough patches behind the garden, inside the garden there was a different setting. Its murmuring and flowing water passionately oozed out of fountains, sprinkling droplets randomly on tourists and flowers. The voice of tourists, the laughter of the people, and an occasional visual of a moving boat wading through Dal waters, gently creating ripples, gentle splashing and gurgling. Then there were vendors, bangle sellers, and a few selling ice creams and a rare coffee shop.   

I remember standing near an ice‑cream vendor during the summers, looking at the ice creams. I wanted one. I don’t remember which one. I don’t remember its colour or its flavour. I only remember wanting it. For a moment, everything seemed to gather around that strong desire to eat ice cream. The garden, the people, the water, the strange faces — and then my eyes would mysteriously move towards the endless Dal. Suddenly, I became conscious of carrying a pot of milk home. I rushed parallel to a boat carrying tourists. Their voices dissolved into the distance. Someone might have been adjusting a hat. Someone might have been laughing. Someone might simply have been sitting and looking at the water. The Dal slowly disappeared, and I reached the other corner of the garden where my parents lived.

The garden carried a sense of freedom, and the people in and around it seemed free. They walked through Shalimar streets that had flowers and fruits under the shade of chinars. And I wanted to know what that freedom felt like. I was only eight or nine. I could not have explained the feeling then. I did not know the words for longing, freedom, limitation or desire. I only knew that there was something on the other side of my childhood that I wanted to reach.

The Dal made that feeling stronger. Its water reflected the garden, the sky, the boats and the lights. To me, it was not merely water. It was a universe. I wanted to swim in it and fish in it. Sometimes I wanted to jump into it and feel its waters on my skin. But I knew I couldn’t. So I stood at the edge of my childhood and looked into an endless possibility of life.

We had come from Tral, from a rural landscape that was green and beautiful but carried another atmosphere. Life there was slower, a little less movement than I saw in Shalimar. And there was fear. The Kashmir of those years was not ambient. But Shalimar felt different. Here, I could walk. Tourists came, people laughed, and there were ice-cream vendors and roadside sellers. Here, the fountains continued to run. Here, the Dal carried its boats quietly across the darkness. For a child coming from that other landscape, Shalimar felt almost fearless. Perhaps that is why those nights became so deeply engraved in me. I was walking between two worlds without knowing that I was doing so. Behind me was the world I had come from. Before me was the world I wanted to know. And somewhere between the two was a little boy walking alone with a milk pot in his hands.

Sometimes I wonder about that boy. What was he wearing? What was his hairstyle? What was going through his mind as he looked at the tourists? Did he feel lonely? How much money did he have in his pocket? Did he want a friend walking beside him? Did he wonder why those people seemed so free? Did he imagine that one day he would become one of them as someone who could walk through these streets without the invisible boundaries that surrounded him?

I don’t know! Memory is strange. It preserves a feeling but loses the evidence. It forgets the exact ice cream but remembers the hunger for it. It forgets the clothes but remembers the child who wore them. Today, when I think of the Shalimar, I know things that the child did not know. I know that water can become murky. I know that landscapes carry histories. I know that places that appear peaceful can contain tensions beneath their beauty. But I do not want to take that knowledge back into my childhood. I want to leave the Shalimar garden exactly as that child saw it.

Shalimar was pure, enormous, reflective and full of possibility. I want to leave the tourists walking freely. I want to leave the boat crossing the lake. I want to leave the man selling ice cream. I want to leave the fountains running. I want to leave the damp green fungus on the stone walls. I want to leave that little boy standing there, looking at everything with an appetite he could not yet name.

Perhaps that was the real magic of Shalimar. It was not simply the garden. It was not the Dal. It was not the tourists, the fountains, the boats or the ice cream. It was the world that all these things created inside a child’s mind. A world that seemed larger than life. A world in which freedom could be seen on a stranger’s face. A world in which a boat crossing dark water could become an event. A world in which an ice cream could become a desire powerful enough to remember thirty years later. And perhaps that is why I am still returning there….

As Agha Shahid says, "We will meet at the banks of Dal and they surrender the keys..."