Finding Srinagar’s geography of peace

Srinagar is a city in unrelieved ferment. It has no normal routine, living in hard-won gasps of normalcy, hour-to-hour or, at best, week-to-week. The raging guns may be muted now, but 20 years since the violence began anew, this picturesque summer capital of Kashmir remains a troubled place. The city's life cycle begins on Friday, as soon as the booming loudspeakers of the Grand Mosque in downtown Nowhatta Chowk go silent, after the weekly afternoon prayer. Suddenly, crowds of angry youths flood out of the nearby lanes; armed with stones and broken bricks, they take on the police and Central Reserve Police Force personnel. Almost instantly, this old quarter of the city closes down. By evening, the trouble has already radiated outwards.

The people of Srinagar consider themselves lucky if the situation calms down by the end of the day – with a few injuries on both sides, of course. But a death of any kind wreaks havoc. It sets off a fresh wave of protests, even a shutdown or two, which extends over the rest of the week. The result is more killings, more protests. The cycle goes on. If stone-peltings cease, the strikes take over, sometimes a full, uninterrupted week of them with barely a shop open or a passenger vehicle plying the roads. Recovering from the mayhem of the past two decades, Srinagar is struggling to find its moorings, all the while continuing to live amid the echoes of the immediate past and the call of an uncertain future. It is not that change has not visited the city, but the transformations have primarily been of a physical nature.