Midnight Special

The high heels I'd worn to dinner sounded totally daft clicking loudly over silent stones, skipping over a drain here, a gutter there, past packs of snarling street dogs whom we coasted carefully by in single file, never, but never, looking directly at them. The only people about were the sentries in odd corners, concealed behind tarpaulins or crumbling walls. We'd know them only when pinioned suddenly in a strong, lingering beam that meant business and, at least four times, demanded to know ours. Our lark had turned uncomfortably scary.

But even through this eerie experience, Srinagar's beauty shone through. Fateh uski thi. A city worth fighting for, worth saving and savouring, for its moonbright loop of the Jhelum, its quaint wooden river houses built shoulder-to-shoulder, with lovely carved projecting balconies, its fascinating medieval-modern air. The soaring walls of its splendid Jama Masjid sang thrillingly of Samarkand even to my shattered Tambrahm nerves.