After grudgingly stuffing a small billfold of baksheesh into Bashir’s shirt pocket, I climbed into the white jeep and closed the door. I was the last passenger to arrive, so I was given the passenger seat, a crumbling cushion sitting on a wobbly pedestal. Behind were several Kashmiri families piled high in their shabby seats. Some sat on their luggage. I felt their eyes on me immediately, but in India you quickly grow used to that. I stuffed my backpack under my feet and tried to get comfortable. For the next eleven hours, this jeep would drive through the Kashmir Valley, from Srinigar to the city of Jammu, the “winter capital” of Kashmir.

As we left Srinigar and made our way into the hills, the beauty of the Kashmir Valley started to reveal itself. A crystal-blue river slithered between the snowy peaks. Our jeep wheezed its way up a series of short hills, following the endless convoy of goods carrier trucks, veering close enough to the road’s edge to offer stunning vistas of the terraced farmers fields below. Monkeys prowled the roadside, watching us carefully with an unnerving simian vigilance.

Of course, Indian Army personnel stood at the roadside every fifty metres or so, making sure I couldn’t take pictures.

The road sloped at unfathomable angles, hugging the mountainside meekly, as if it could at any moment grow tired and release its grasp. On the sharper curves, I could stick my head out the window and look straight down and assess our probability of survival should the wraithlike, chain-smoking driver of this jeep attempt too daring of a pass, and that probability was usually zero. There was no room for error whatsoever. One hasty jerk of the wheel, or tumbling boulder from above, or wandering monkey…

In Canada we take certain road-safety privileges for granted. There aren’t many cliffhanger roads like this one, for one thing. Nor many avalanche zones. Also, our roads have guardrails and proper paving, our cars equipped with ABS brakes and expensive tires. The rules of the road are different, too, as is the psyche of the driver. One does not, for example, even think to overtake the truck ahead by doing a blind-as-a-bat pass around a sharp bend while the weight of his shabby jeep with bald tires leans ominously over the edge of a 2,000m cliff. But in the Himalayas, they do this. And on an eleven-hour trip, they do this hundreds of times in a single day.

The Indian approach to road safety in the Kashmir Valley, as practiced by the Border Roads Organisation, is to pepper the mountain roads with slogans advising drivers to take it easy, drive carefully, and so on, and to make sure that each slogan is expressed as a clever riddle or rhyme. For example:

• Mountains give pleasure, but only if you drive with leisure
• It’s not a rally, enjoy the valley
• There’s no race, arrive with grace

And my personal favourite:

• Better Mr. Late than Late Mr.!

After a few hours, my grip on the oh-shit bar loosened. Surely the driver makes this route every day, and he’s still breathing, though barely from the sounds of things. We stopped for lunch at a roadside cafe on a downward slope, the kind of place that every travel guide says stay away because you’ll get sick. But the locals crowded into the place and began shouting their orders to the young men tending the saucepans, so I gave it a try, and the food —fried dal and chapati—was delicious. I ate some strange Indian potato chips, and then we got back in the jeep. Somehow, I fell asleep for several hours, perhaps to assure that my death would be painless, but when I woke we were still hugging the cliff’s edge and dodging gravel trucks. Behind me, the Kashmiri eyes still warmed the back of my neck.

Arriving in Jammu was like entering the heart of one of those post-apocalyptic sci-fi outlaw towns, where motorcycle gangs prowl the streets, robbing and looting and shouting, and there is junk and garbage strewn everywhere, and half the city is on fire. The din of rickshaw horns and shouted Hindi blasted my eardrums. The jeep driver unceremoniously kicked us out at a roadside rickshaw stand, where I was besieged from all sides. Beggars pawed at my pantleg. I found a guy who could take me to Diamond Hotel, a place enthusiastically recommended by Lonely Planet, and quickly got in his rickshaw.

The Diamond Hotel staff showed me the rooms. They were horrible. Easily the worst hotel I’d ever seen. Brown stains on the walls and bedclothes, tattered pillows, bed like a slab of concrete, and a window that didn’t close. “Head and shoulders above the competition,” said LP. I’ll take it.

I sat on the bed and turned on the noisy fan. An exhausting day. I felt like a shower. I stripped, walked into the bathroom and turned on the water. Nothing. Tried flushing the toilet. Nothing. At least the lights worked. I’d been in India for about nine days now, and none of those days were good. It was true what everyone had told me, what people in Istanbul and Bulgaria and Vienna had told me: that India was a tremendously difficult place to travel in, and that you’d better lower your expectations all the way to nothing.

Tomorrow, another bus ride through the mountains, another day of breathing, smelling, rubbing shoulders against this crazy country.

Day One
Early next morning, the tout picked me up in a taxi at my hotel in Paharganj. For an astoundingly low price, he had arranged for me a plane ticket from Delhi to the city of Srinagar, which sits in the north of the Indian territory of Kashmir. He told me all about it in the taxi.

“It’s so beautiful, my home. The lake, so beautiful. When I go home, I go fishing, I bring my children. You will love it. Kashmir is best place in India. Kashmiri people so good, so much love. That’s all I want in life, to live there with my family.”

His bubbling about Kashmir went on for quite some time, and though it grew repetitive, his eagerness to please calmed me, as in these early hours of the morning the fears and doubts of last night had not faded, and continued to churn. I still couldn’t understand how I’d been brought to say Yes to this, and there would be no relaxing until I was sure they weren’t leading me, the hapless tourist, like a lamb to the slaughter.

We pulled up to the departure gate. The tout gave me a big hug, and reminded me that his family expected me and was lovely and that Kashmir was lovely and that I should call him if there were any problems. He seemed about to cry. I said goodbye and tried visibly to stoke some enthusiasm about what was coming my way.

The Delhi domestic airport was predictably chaotic. I boarded the Air Deccan plane after a convoluted luggage check-in, and sat next to a young Muslim woman in near-total burqa (she had lowered the veil for the flight). We chatted, and while we chatted there was a commotion under the plane, noises and shouting, and twenty minutes later there was an announcement that they were unloading all the luggage onto the tarmac and that every passenger would have to go outside, identify his luggage, and put it back on the plane himself. A reminder that I was not going to Orlando, Halifax, or Frankfurt, but the heart of Kashmir, and in that area of the world some people have been known to blow things up from time to time.

The woman turned out to be a Ph.D in Genetics, and was heading home to Srinigar to visit her daughter “for the first time”. Meaning that, immediately after giving birth her daughter was taken from her and put in the care of her (the woman’s) mother for a period of one year, while the woman took the first flight back to Delhi to continue working, without seeing the kid once. Maternity leave is apparently for wimps.

At the Srinagar airport, a man named Bashir was waiting for me. This was the tout’s father. He looked just like the tout except with grey hair, a penetrating gaze, and the effortlessly cunning smile of a Cheshire Cat. We got in a taxi and left, barely exchanging a word.

My first impression of Srinagar was that it looked like any other place, except with hundreds of armed Indian Army personnel, razor wire, sandbagged sentry huts, and checkpoints. There was a man holding a semi-automatic weapon on every street corner. I did not see tanks rolling down the boulevard, but it would be no surprise to see tanks rolling down the boulevard.

The funny part was that all the military stuff—people, vehicles, even buildings—was needlessly decked out in camouflage, as if some gun-toting Indian walking the streets of downtown Srinagar was going to hide by blending in with the shrubbery somehow. Or that a two-storey watchtower covered in razor wire would hide itself behind the bazaars and houseboats to throw the militants off the scent. But I do not question the affairs of military personnel, at least not to their faces.

Bashir brought me on a short “shikara” (boat taxi) ride to his houseboat on Dal Lake. The place was lovely. The boat itself was docked next to a small house on the shore, crawling with children, some belonging to the family and some visiting from the neighbourhood. Three ladies sat on the floor and waved to me from a knee-high window. Bashir showed me my room, with its sumptuous king-size bed, bathroom w/ hot water, etc. They made me some delicious tea which was called Kashmiri tea, and I spent the day lolling about on the roof, hanging out with the kids, and relaxing. It was suprisingly perfect.

With every passing minute my doubts drifted into the recesses of my mind, a faint and distant echo, only their memory remaining.

Day Two
The night was cold, and I buried myself in blankets to keep warm. After rousing myself awake, I took a breakfast of a kind of English muffin thing that they called Kashmiri bread, an omelette of some kind, and more Kashmiri tea. Bashir made it known that if I wanted any kind of food or drink at any time, he would tell the three ladies to make it for me. As far as I could tell, the three ladies never left the kitchen, and whenever I looked over to their little window they gave me a wave and a smile.

Bashir took me on a little walking tour of the city. Srinagar is a Muslim town, so there is not much to see besides mosques and assorted Islamica. The place seemed like a Middle Eastern city, the kind you see on the news, with all the dirt roads, men in white robes and kufis, political slogans, crumbling minarets, etc. On the walls were badly-Photoshopped posters depicting Kashmiri martyrs. But the mosques were spectacular. They had a somber simplicity, a starkness that imposed far more than ornamentation could. Some also had spectacularly gaudy paint jobs, and others, very amusing signage.

What impressed me most was the prayer. Muslim prayer in Srinagar seems to be a kind of free-form affair, where as long as you are bestowing the proper degree of adulation upon the shrine at which you are praying, it’s all good. In the first mosque I saw terrified old ladies backing out the front door on their knees, lips quivering, kissing every post and banister-knob. In the second, shawl-clad men sitting cross-legged on the bare floor and giving a kind of low-pitched, ululating prayer in perfect unison. In the third, a man sitting facing the wall, crying, chanting, and rocking back and forth. They seemed to be experiencing such a deep feeling upon stepping inside the mosque, a kind of rapturous dementia, all the body’s energy employed in the task of worship and adulation. I found it puzzling and sad, but also beautiful, beyond reason, as if electricity were being channeled straight into their souls.

That night, Bashir and I shared a bottle of whiskey, and watched a Bollywood action movie with truly awful fight scenes.

Day Three
It’s hard to fill the day on the houseboat. The chief problem is that I’m in the middle of the lake, so I can’t head out into town without either Bashir or the oldest son, Raja, taking me there on a shikara. And if they take me somewhere they want to come along. My prefered method of exploring a new place is by aimless wandering (hence this blog’s title) and not by visiting a set of carefully curated map-points. But I don’t know what I’ll do today. Maybe Bashir has something planned.

At breakfast, I saw my first “tout shikara”: a guy paddled up to the boat and tried to sell me cigarettes, mineral water, and “Kashmiri apple juice”. Bashir smiled.

After breakfast Bashir sits me down in the living room and pulls out a few photo albums. Take a look, he says. Here are the trekking spots in the area. You can go mountain climbing here, or parasailing, anything you want. I’m going to sign you up for one of these, he says. You figure out which one you want and I’ll sign you up.

His demeanour seemed different, more serious and imposing. Instead of laughing and smiling he spoke in monotone, with an unnerving confidence. I felt the familiar tingle of doubt.

So, he wants to sell me a trek. First of all, how much? This is India, and in India if you want to buy something, anything, you first ask how much it costs. And then you close off all possible avenues the salesmen might take—hidden charges, commission, the ubiquitous baksheesh (tip or bribe)—for raising that cost without your consent. Then, and only then, do you say Yes.

Bashir informed me, with his Cheshire-grin, that the cost of a four-day trek in the nearby mountains was 35,000 rupees. Something like 180 dollars a day. For walking. This was beyond absurd; it was criminal. I could probably live in India for a whole month on 180 dollars, with a bed and a hot shower and everything.

So, thanks but no thanks.

He offered me a few more packages. How about this two-day trek for 18,000 rupees? Or this four-hour boat trip for 4,000? Ridiculous prices. He said, you think about it, I’ll ask you later. But there was no thinking needed; it was a ripoff, plain and simple.

I spent the afternoon watching Indian television, which is something of a marvel. I especially love the commercials, which are far more clever, daring, and unabashedly Indian than they have any right to be. One commercial depicts a scenario where the ancient Hindu-Muslim conflicts of India come to a peaceful end by the Maharaja’s announcement that everyone gets their very own mobile phone number. Nearly every commercial stars Shah Rukh Khan, and there is often a cricket theme. India’s love for cricket goes a little too far sometimes: in one commercial, a blue cricket ball lands in the center of a maxi-pad and dissolves into liquid, to demonstrate its absorbency. Another, a hostage-taking scenario on grainy surveillance video where if the assailant doesn’t get a 24-hour cricket network with up-to-the-minute scores, statistics, and highlights, somebody’s gonna get it.

But I could not concentrate. Since that meeting with Bashir, the attitude on the boat had changed. Every time he walked past, he shot me a smile that said “I’m gonna get you.” My doubts were back in full churn, and avoided the subject of trekking whenever he brought it up, saying that I needed more time to think about it.

“As you like,” he said.

Day Four
The main industry, maybe the only industry, in Srinagar is tourism. Since the outbreak of separatist violence towards the Indian Army in the 1990s, the tourist industry has dried up totally. On Dal Lake sit as many as 1,600 houseboats—each with catchy names, some clever, some derivative (such as “The Taj Mahal”, and next door “The New Taj Mahal”)—and most of them are devoid of visitors. The lucky few that snag a tourist for a week or so are, thus, hoping to get as much out of them as possible. Likewise, the Kashmiri handicraft, carpet, textile, and saffron industries rely heavily on tourism, and their presence on the waters of Dal Lake is like that of an invasive species, crawling into every empty space. The houseboat owners and merchants often work together to expose tourists to as much product as possible.

At breakfast a guy wandered onto the houseboat and told me he’d bring his shawls and rugs over tonight for me to take a look. I looked at Bashir. He nodded to the man.

“Yes, he would like very much,” he said.

It took me a couple of days on the houseboat to realize it was getting lonely. I was the only tourist. Every single day Bashir would say they had other tourists on their way from Delhi. “We have a South African guy, really wants to do some trekking. He should be here tomorrow.”

And then under his breath: “Or the day after…”

I knew this to be a complete fiction. There was no South African, or Dutch, or American on his way. He was hoping to get me excited for trekking, so excited that I’d gladly fork over enough cash to feed his family for the next three months.

Today Bashir wanted to take me on a little tour of the lake. Sure, I said. He made a show of calling a shikara over to our boat, and we got in. We made the short trip over to one of the islands, and as we paddled along, more tout-shikaras came up next to ours, selling shawls and saffron and cigarettes.

Kashmir was really starting to piss me off.

He took me to a couple of nice spots on the lake, and to the Mughal Gardens, and then he produced a picnic basket with our lunch inside. This boat tour was a professional affair, a little too organized to be Bashir’s whim. It then occurred to me that the tour was none other than the 4,000-rupee ripoff that he had suggested to me the other day. But there was no price mentioned, not even any talk of paying for anything. Oh, I’ll just take you on a little boat trip, he says! Fancy that! Was he going to say tomorrow that he’d just take me for a little walk in the woods, lasting about four days?

I was very angry. Sure, I said yes to it, but he wasn’t exactly upfront. I kept quiet, for if I started to get quarrelsome, things could take a turn. This was Kashmir. My position on their houseboat was that of a hostage, and these people depended on me utterly for their livelihood. I’ve heard of much worse things happening to houseboat guests than the loss of a few hundred bucks.

Since that lunch my mood towards Bashir changed completely: I was now taking a stance of complete and total resistance to his advances. I would say yes to nothing. If need be, I would sit in my room for the next two days, and then leave, and if I had to sneak out of this houseboat at four in the morning, or swim to the shore, then let’s have it.

Later, we sat down for dinner. After the first few days the family started inviting me into the house for meals, and I sat on the floor with them. The Indians eat with their hands, and even pass food to each other with their hands. Someone says pass the rice, the other makes a rice-ball with his fingers and then hands it to him. Thankfully they let me have a spoon, and I imagined bitterly that they’d charge me a per-spoonful usage fee. The grownups spoke in Urdu amongst themselves, while the children watched the tourist eat.

Despite all the extortion, I grew fond of Bashir’s family. The three ladies never left the floor of the kitchen except when they to do other menial chores, like scrubbing the floorboards of the deck, or hanging laundry. The men sat nearby, watching them toil, not deigning to lift a finger in assistance. I felt bad for these ladies, but the smiles never left their faces.

(I later discovered that in the room behind the kitchen sat a nargile, a tall water pipe, and the ladies would lean out the door every so often and take a haul. No wonder they were so happy.)

That night, Bashir and I shared some more whiskey. He asked me to play rummy, a game I’d never played. So he taught me, we played a few games, and then Bashir insisted we play for money. No, just for fun, I said. A few more games. OK, now for money? I knew where this was heading, so I said, sure, but we’ll play for only a few rupees a game. That didn’t satisfy him, but too bad, I said. Predictably, all of a sudden he became this amazing rummy player. He won nine games out of ten, and then got all offended that I stopped playing.

His policy towards me was that of cash maximization. If he could find a way to get a few rupees here, a few there, he would. That night he asked me, good and drunk, once and for all, which trek did I want? And I told him, I don’t want any trek. Not for 35,000 rupees, not for 15,000, not for 10,000. Nothing.

I expected him to fly off the handle at this, but he didn’t. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and said:

“As you like. But now you have to pay for the whiskey from the other night.”

Day Five
I paid for five days up-front back in Delhi, and today was my last day. Now Bashir was trying desperately to get me to stay the weekend. Ramazan, the Muslim month-long fast, was ending, and they called the weekend of ensuing festivities “Christmas”. Yes, Christmas.

That day, the Kashmiri sales squad was out in full force. Did you want some Kashmiri shawls today, sir? Please just look? How about some Kashmiri saffron? Would I like some more Kashmiri honey with my Kashmiri bread? Everything in this place is “Kashmiri”, as if they think half the world was invented here. They are like little programmed Kashmiri robots. Perhaps this is the fate of a tormented people, used by larger forces as a pawn in ways beyond its control or comprehension, seeking nothing but a simple and tranquil independence—but all I cared about on this day was my independence from Kashmir.

I passed the day in silence, keeping away from everybody. The oldest child knocked on my door wanting a wrestling match. I indulged him for a while by bodyslamming him on the bed a few times, but then kicked him out and shut the door. I packed my things and prepared for the quickest getaway possible.

Bashir brought over his account book and asked me to fill out the comments, watching over my shoulder as I wrote (so I would not leave negative comments, I suppose). He tried to sell me some more things. I said no, no, no. He was starting to give up on me. But not before finding one more way to get money out of me.

“I can’t wait for my baksheesh,” he said excitedly. Ahh, there’s that word again, baksheesh. He was demanding a tip from me outright? I couldn’t believe it. Then again, this is India. Without thinking, I shot back:

“Get ready for your five rupee baksheesh.”

He smiled in a way that said, you’d better not even think about not giving me good baksheesh. But he only said:

“As you like.”

Epilogue
The next morning, I had breakfast with the family. I sat on the floor against the wall of the kitchen, with the entire family—children and grownups alike—sitting around me in a semi-circle, watching me eat. When I finished my Kashmiri bread with Kashmiri honey and Kashmiri tea, I stood up, and in that moment, in a way most fitting to end this week of endless badgering, trickery, and deception, everyone in the family smiled, held out their hand and demanded some baksheesh.

By day three in Delhi, fatigue was setting in. My world was split in two: into the relative tranquility of my hotel room and attached café, and the steaming, stifling mess of city around me. In here, I could read, watch TV, or just sit for a while. Out there I had to avoid getting clipped by passing auto-rickshaws, bitten by dogs, pawed at by cripples, and blinded by the heat and pollution. To go sightseeing, or walking, or exploring the city involved being out there, and not a single fibre in my body wanted to go out there. I needed to get out of Delhi.

I took a mercifully brief walk to the New Delhi train station to pick up a ticket to Amritsar, departing for 6 AM the next morning. The touts were in full sprout that day, with the singsong refrain of “hello my friend!” ringing in my ears repeatedly, almost rhythmically, as I walked.

India’s touts are legendary in the backpacker world, owing to the utter lack of timidity by the Indians to do or say anything for a few rupees, no matter how absurd, shameless, or sad. You might feel it a cruel fate, but you’d have to be made of stone not to laugh; desperate as these Indians may be, it would be barbaric to let actual human concern interfere with plain amusement. Everyone on the India backpacker circuit has stories: warnings of riots or fire near your hotel (so he can take you to another one), offers of taxi rides in a car with only three wheels (parked strategically to obscure this fact) or no brakes (a fact discovered only when the driver enters a parking lot and circles to a halt), and so on. As I approached the station, a tout approached me, and as we both stared at the thousands of people there—people at every information counter, platform, and ticket booth, and even sleeping on the floor—he told me that the train station was closed and that I’d better go with him. I thanked him for the laugh.

On the way back, one tout said hello and for some reason I decided to say hello back. The Main Bazaar is a confusing place, and I was looking for a shop that would sell me a plug adapter for India, and thought to ask this fellow. There was nothing unusual about this tout. He was a beefy guy with short hair, without moustache (in India this is rare enough to help distinguish people). He led me to a shop, without talking, and I bought an adapter from a guy for 30 rupees, and then I went back to my hotel, which happened to be next to his shop. Would I like to come in for a chai (tea)?

I said yes. I felt confident enough in my tout-repelling abilities to amuse myself for a little while by hanging out with a local. If he wants to sell me something, I’ll just say no and that will be that. After all, tomorrow morning I was off to Amritsar.

It turns out he’s from Kashmir. This fact put me on guard immediately, because the Main Bazaar is full of people selling vacation packages in Kashmir. While I have a great desire to visit Kashmir—in fact, my trip to Amritsar is the first step on my journey up to the north which will end in that same Kashmir, or at least, I think so—I didn’t want to buy an arranged tour package of any kind. I’m a low-budget traveller who can make his own fun, thank you.

He insisted on showing me pictures of his home and his family in Kashmir, and I thumbed through his albums uninterestedly. “Very nice,” I say. “Looks good. Nice lake.” He puts the albums away for a while and we talk about other things. His shop was a small crafts shop, selling necklaces and shawls and pipes for all that Kashmiri hashish, but he wasn’t selling me anything. I kept looking at the door.

His nephew was there too, and we played a game of chess (I won). The chai was good and sweet. Nothing much happened. They seemed like very decent people, fully aware that there’s no reason for a tourist like me to trust some guy chatting him up on the street, but I haven’t got much to say to them, having only been in India three days, and not really enjoying Delhi much. Out of the blue, the tout says: “Come to my house for dinner tonight!”

And off goes every bell in my head, every flashing sign that says “GET AWAY”, every siren and whirring red light. I did not fear for my safety, but more for the inevitable post-dinner conversation where he would sit me down in front of a series of informational brochures about trekking trips in Kashmir and parasailing expeditions in the Himalayas, with a contract and a thick black pen with which I’m supposed to sign away my dignity.

I said no thanks. And he said, no problem, I understand.

“Forget about business. Fuck money. Money ruins everything,” he said. It sure does, buddy.

But hey, wouldn’t you like to do some sightseeing in Delhi today? It’s your last day here after all. Earlier in our conversation I may have proffered the fact (can’t remember) that I would indeed like to see some things in Delhi, like the Lotus Temple, and some other stuff. He suggested that the nephew take me to some of these spots, since he knows Delhi and will get a “local” rate on auto-rickshaws (true). Sure, I said. That would be fine.

The first rickshaw ride was very long, maybe even one hour, and cost 80 rupees (2 dollars). It was to the Lotus Temple, the principal shrine of the Bahai faith, which I had never heard of. It was lovely, and the nephew was a very agreeable fellow, and we got along very well. His uncle is just selling stuff, he said, but he’s a good dude. And I agreed, he was a good dude, I just didn’t want to buy what he was selling.

After the Lotus Temple, he took me to a fascinating Muslim shrine somewhere in the heart of Delhi, in a neighbourhood that looked nothing like the Delhi I knew. It had the noise and the dirt and the beggars, yes, but this was a Muslim part of town, and it looked like a different country altogether. We wandered into a sea of white robes, into the depths of this strange tomb full of quivering, prostrating, crying Muslims. Bony children sat in front of their Ramazan meals, unable to eat them until dusk.

A tout followed us around for a while and then asked for 120 rupees for being our “tour guide”, and I told him to go piss up a rope.

My guide insisted on bringing me to the nearby mosque for the upcoming prayer. We left our shoes in an enormous heap, walked underground, washed our feet in a square pool, and then joined the prayer line in a bare, carpeted room. He didn’t tell me how to pray in a mosque, but I knew how it worked from my time in Turkey. Mostly I just copied what he did, and afterward, he said I was doing it all wrong.

We went back to the shop. I was so delighted by what I had seen that afternoon, and was so trusting of the tout’s nephew that I decided, okay, I’ll have dinner with you guys tonight.

Their apartment was nothing more than a single room with no furniture except a TV and fridge. They shared a kitchen and bathroom with the adjoining units of their apartment building, and one other small guest room with a Muslim shrine taking up half the space of the room. Their entire living space was smaller than my parents’ kitchen, and my parents’ kitchen ain’t big. But they had cable.

The nephew prepared a lovely, Kashmiri-style chicken curry and rice. We sat on the floor and watched cricket and ate: the tout, his nephew, his nephew’s friend, and me. They gave me a half-frozen Kingfisher and I shared it with them. Mostly, they talked amongst themselves in Urdu the whole time.

After we put the plates away, the tout said, okay, now we talk business.

He knew I was a tough customer, so he wanted only to book me on his houseboat, bobbing blissfully on lovely Lake Dal in Srinigar. It’s like a luxury hotel, he said. Showed me pictures. Yes, it was lovely. He gave me all his contact info and also that of his nephew, and they were legit. There was no obligation to do any mountain treks, any arranged tourist crap. Just go and hang out for a couple days, and then leave if you don’t like it, no questions asked.

Lonely Planet says: “Under no circumstances should you book a houseboat outside of Kashmir.” They had a point. After all, what way was there to verify what I was buying? What if his “houseboat” was a lean-to made of particle board and had a cut-out hole in the floor for a toilet? He showed me pictures but you know how pictures go; everyone always shows you their best one.

I was hesitant, but at the same time, I liked these people. Not just because they offered me food and sightseeing. They were genuine and decent. We got along splendidly. I just didn’t want to buy anything from them.

My defense was to pepper him with question after question. Tough ones. And he answered them well, very well indeed. He understood my reservations, but had a good and convincing answer for each of them. Not some half-assed Indian answer. This taxi didn’t have three wheels and no brakes. And after I’d exhausted every ounce of my ammunition, I waved the white flag and said, okay, I’ll stay for a couple days on your houseboat. I can’t say why. I had grown to trust this guy and his family, and had actual feelings for them, and in the glow of the moment I insisted on going along with the feeling, letting events play out as they may, so that my faith in humanity could be either confirmed or shattered to bits. So I said Yes.

But one last question… what am I supposed to do with my ticket to Amritsar? His reply: I’ll give you a refund for that ticket myself, and handed me the money right there. And that made me feel much better.

And the next day I was off to Kashmir.