Back in Leh!

Taken from a wee blog I had going in 2015

Well, this is awkward…

Seems I am back in Leh 25 days earlier than planned (even though this is temporary)! As you all know, I was in Kargil to be sent to map schools around the area. Sadly because the government of Jammu and Kashmir deemed the summer to be too hot, a 7-day summer vacation was announced, because everyone knows that the heat of the summer manages to vanish after a single week. Ironically enough, Ladakh, during this period, was dutifully graced by a multitude of cloudbursts and chilly days. But since the geographical minority of Jammu and Kashmir feels hot, ALL of Jammu and Kashmir must feel hot (sort of another reason why Ladakh SHOULD be made a separate state). Therefore, schools were shut for a week and because I’m currently in the school business, I was temporarily unemployed in Kargil. It just so turns out that Kargil City is fairly uninteresting, so the best alternative was to come back to Leh and wait out this apparent heat wave that is currently scouring the snowy mountaintops of Ladakh. So let me recount my week in the city of Kargil.

After a fairly interesting cab ride from Leh to Kargil that included being dragged through a conversation about how difficult it is to translate shudh Hindi into English and stopping every 2 kilometres because our hard-core-bargaining-cabbie happened to be the most popular guy in Ladakh, we finally reached the city of Kargil under the blanket of darkness. Upon entering Kargil City, you actually descend down the mountain into the main city. And because this was the night, all the lights were on and, my god, did Kargil look beautiful. All we saw were these twinkling lights, reflecting those above in the night sky, spread over the entire bowl of a valley below. My first thought was, “Damn, Kargil is big!” Only later did I find out that what I actually saw was an amalgamation of 4 to 5 separate towns and villages. In reality, Kargil City is really small. Pathetically small, in fact, and I’ll go on to tell you why.

The tiny city of Kargil is essentially spread out on the sides of a single two-laned street. Unlike the city of Leh, which had tourism causing massive expansion and development, Kargil looked like a proper backward town but that in itself had its own charm. I was relieved to get out of a city where every house was a guest house and every shop had terrible puns (that I recounted in my previous post). White touristy faces were swapped with brown Indian-y faces and I was actually shocked to find out that Kargil, unlike Leh, had a local population larger than the tourist population (which was practically non-existent). There is also something beautiful about a place that hasn’t abandoned its culture for the sake of attracting tourists and that is what I most appreciated in Kargil. A lot of people stuck to their traditional garb and they didn’t all have an eye for making a quick buck. Julley was swapped with Salam-al-e-Kum which was a pleasant change given that the Kargilli greeting wasn’t commercialised, yet. The people were incredibly warm and had a thing for two-handed hand shakes which was cool because two is always better than one (except with dictators). However, this did manage to have its drawbacks as well.

A lack of tourism meant… well… a lack of tourists. This made Kargillis unaccustomed to outsiders and being there really made ME feel like an outsider. I really couldn’t pinpoint why! I mean my name IS Khashiff and I was working very hard on my beard game! I visually blended in extremely well but it may have been my demeanour because I do this thing in the middle of conversations that are held in a language I don’t quite understand – I look confused. I’m jesting of course but the fact of the matter was that despite the concerted efforts of my Kargilli co-workers, I couldn’t help but feel like a fish out of water. Furthermore, if I may speak candidly in my own blog, Kargil City is the most boring city one can ever venture in. Some cities require weeks to explore while others, a day. But not Kargil… oh no, not this majestically small city. This city could be explored in three hours flat. No monuments of interest, no interesting walks to go on within the city (remember the city is only a street long). There was one museum which was about the Silk Route (Kargil was central to this trading route) but obviously that had to be closed because the proprietor was taking his job seriously by being in the market. But we stole some fresh apricots from the trees on the museums land to exact revenge, so all debts were leveraged.

But don’t let this discourage you from visiting Kargil (the district that is). Recently, Kargil district has been under renovation especially with respect to monuments and areas of interest because the district just realised how profitable tourism is (who would have thought!). There are ruins of ancient forts or khars as well as multiple statues around the district that Kargillis, for some reason, can’t stop yapping about. There is also a place called Hardass which I’d personally like to visit, out of academic curiosity of course. Kargil District is also the place which is intrinsically linked with the Baltistani region which was cut in half by Pakistani invaders. Villages also claim to house Aryans that were left behind by Alexander the Great for some reason. However, if you were left behind by someone associated with greatness, that really should not be your claim to fame at all. Funnily enough, foreigners used to come to these very villages to preserve the great white-skin-blue-eyes bloodline but that was soon stopped after regulations were passed against these intimate relations (even though attempts to preserve the Aryan bloodline should have been stopped in 1945…). Also Apricots.

Back to Kargil City. Despite my initial description of its blandness, it does have pockets of taste here and there. Kargil was previously known to me as the place-in-which-a-bull-charged-at-me-uphill but now its quirks have given it a whole new characteristic in my head. I managed to find the single gynecologist in the area who operated in an cabin that suspiciously looked like a Punjabi Dhaba and kept long hours of 9 – 10am and 4 – 6pm. You read correctly – Punjabi Dhaba and 3 hours. The great Ayatollahs – Khomeni and Khameni – have their posters littering the streets. In fact their beard styles are a massive hit amongst the older folk in Kargil. Food, like the Ayatollahs’ beards, is also phenomenal. There is a small road that is full of kebab vendors that make your mouth water from hunger and your eyes water from happiness. This place has also has food ranging from highly tame (sausage-resembling-wheat-roles) to highly adventurous (read the next post… if you dare to find out). Lastly, this place has terrible winters where it snows heavily and the temperature regularly freezes peoples’ raastafarian ne-nes off at a mind-boggling -30°C. However, this does not stop them from having an unhealthy obsession with ice cream. There are carts EVERYWHERE and it even propagates crime! Ice-cream addiction, as I have observed, has resulted in vanilla AND chocolate ice-cream theft amongst children between 8 and 12. This unhealthy obsession would be understandable if the summers were hot but they really aren’t! Bombay winters are hotter than the summers in Kargil. But that’s just another detail to go into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

Kargil managed to give me a plethora of experiences along with contrasting emotions during my stay in the city. More will come about my mapping sessions there as well as my adventurous eating spree. But for now, Kargil will be a home to me once again for a night after which I shall journey into the Zanskar Valley for more mapping for around a month (unless the spoilt brats of the J&K Government start sweating again).