Living in Kashmir: A Year of People, Places and Memories
The two incidents below both happened in that same year to other Australian officers. As each Australian military observer returned home after his year of service, another arrived to replace him.
The Tree at the Cliff's Edge
Mountain roads in Kashmir were not for the faint-hearted. Narrow, precipitous, and hugging the sides of terrain that seemed indifferent to human passage, they demanded both concentration and a certain fatalistic acceptance of whatever lay around the next bend.
Another of the Australian contingent, we shall call him DC, found himself one day being conveyed along one of these vertiginous tracks in a jeep. The scenery, one imagines, was spectacular. The experience was about to become more so.
Without warning, the back wheels of the jeep slid sideways over the cliff edge. DC was thrown clear of the vehicle and, in the manner of a man whose luck was holding by the most slender of threads, landed in a tree partway down the slope. It was not so very far below the road, but far enough.
He gathered his thoughts, assessed that he was in one piece, and began the scramble back up to the road. From there, he could see the jeep still teetering at the cliff's edge, its driver desperately spinning the wheels in a frantic attempt to haul it back onto solid ground.
Just as he managed to regain his footing on the road, the jeep was flung over the edge of the cliff.
DC crept to the rim of the cliff and peered down, bracing himself for the worst, fearing for the life of the driver, imagining the terrible sight that might await him.
There, in precisely the same tree where DC himself had so recently been deposited, sat the driver. Alive. Uninjured. His pride as a UN driver, one would suggest, had not survived quite so intact. The jeep was long gone.
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The Wrong Landing
There is something quietly dispiriting about arriving somewhere entirely different from where one intended to be. Such was the fate of another Australian observer, we shall call him AB, as he completed the long, wearying journey from Australia to what was meant to be his new home for the coming year.
It had not been an easy decision, leaving his wife and young children behind in Australia. Kashmir was no place for small children, the living conditions demanding, and the posting itself with long absences on field stations, carried its own particular uncertainties. So AB had said his farewells and embarked on the considerable journey alone, sustained no doubt by the knowledge that a friendly UN face would be waiting to greet him at Srinagar airport.
The plane landed. AB gathered his luggage and made his way into the terminal, scanning the arrivals area with reasonable expectation.
No one from the UN was there.
He waited. He looked again. He ventured outside into the unfamiliar air and, with a certain careful tone, asked a bystander for directions to UN Headquarters.
“No, Sahib” came the reply. “There is no UN Headquarters here.”
The aircraft had been diverted. AB was standing not in Srinagar but in Chandigarh, more than five hundred and fifty kilometres from where he was supposed to be.
One imagines a long moment of silence.
It was, as these things go, nobody's fault in particular, simply one of those maddening inconveniences that travel occasionally inflicts. But as an introduction to a year's posting in Kashmir, it was not the most auspicious of beginnings.
