Tonight the boulevard is crowded. There's traffic. Cars, big, beastly SUVs bursting with passengers, motorbikes, a few trucks, bicycles, vans, and mini-buses: enough of such anyway for a policeman to stop his vehicle and yell at my friend for double-parking.
On the pavement under the poplars men labour over charcoal grills; their children dart across the road to clients with plates of kebabs, rotis, and rose-coloured, yogurt-laced Kashmiri chutney; a girl about 20 walks by in -- God forbid -- jeans, her head uncovered; another, older, caught in the traffic, blares the horn from the driver's seat of an economy car; a dark, thin youth, who lives with 14 others from Bihar in a room in downtown Srinagar, sells coconut slices from a steel tray he holds aloft and says he has been coming here for three years and makes twice the money he did back home; and all along the waterfront businesses are open.
Most of the hotels occupied by security forces for years on the Dal are open to tourists. Open also are the Queen's Lap, Monalisa, Young Monalisa, Young Fairy Queen, Neil Armstrong, and hundreds of other such interestingly-named houseboats built for vacationing British administrators in the days of the Raj.
The Dal is Wi-Fi, the first lake to provide wireless connectivity in the world, or so says the promotional literature. There is a shopping complex on the boulevard, and scores of vegetarian restaurants for the pilgrims to the Amarnath caves in the neighbouring Anantnag district; tonight, mostly they make up the crowd here, scores of Hindu pilgrims from Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh and Delhi and Maharashtra who, in the last three years, have taken to stopping by in the capital city for an evening or two.
Image: A Kashmiri Radio Jockey at the console at Srinagar's first private radio station. Photograph: Rouf Bhat/AFP/Getty Images
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