The houseboat I'm staying on is moored within view of the main road and causeway separating our quieter and more serene Nageen lake from the more noisy and touristy Dal Lake, and which links the downtown area to the relatively new, large, and main Mosque a few miles further up the lake. I had received a tour on a shikara (small covered skiff paddled by one or two persons not unlike a gondola) in the "floating gardens" of Dal Lake (which are more like an overgrown lilly pad and weed swamp without the mosquitoes, and with some more stable islands on which fishermen have built houses, than gardens... apparently the "gardens" are in bloom during July and August so I suppose I missed the full picture of paradise) the day before by a wonderfully polite, quiet, small (but strong) elderly Muslim gentleman who took me as far as the Mosque where we go out and wandered through the neighboring markets.
The morning of Eid I watched a constant parade of overloaded cars, buses (short ones with roof racks and ladders on which riders can sit or hang onto), motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, and bicycles carrying worshippers flow towards the sound of the calling. By late morning I was wishing I could go and see the spectacle but I really didn't know how... I was expecting to join Bashir and his family for the celebratory lunch later and so I wasn't sure if I should go. Fortunately Bashir thought I should see the event and so he sent Shakeel to come fetch and escort me to the Mosque. We went out to the road, past the kids playing Cricket in the dusty field, flagged down a bus, and literally jumped aboard while it was still moving, albeit slowly.
Thousands were already there and the streets neighboring the Mosque were filled so we had to stop and walk the remainder of the way with everyone else. The roads were jambed with traffic and carts, and beggars with various ailments, hungers, disfigurements, and dismemberment lined the way. According to Shakeel most of the beggars are not Kashmiri... the government gives some kind of monthly stipend to these people and so they often spend summers in the north and then migrate south for the winter.
As a side note, Shakeel mentioned that the majority of Kashmiri are Muslim, both Sunni and Shiite, and that the majority of these are Shiite. After the end of prayers and on our way home we were walking along with the crowds and Shakeel stopped to listen to a group of men who were talking about a Shiite man in the crowd who had been beaten by the police (who apparently were Sunni) but that the Shiite crowd had stopped the beating. Shakeel tells me that Kashmir doesn't have the same violence as in Iraq between Shiite and Sunni... they have different Mosques but "they pray to the same prophet and read the same Koran".
The Mosque itself is a traditional form , with a fairly squat onion shaped dome and an adjacent minaret tower. This newer Mosque had a large courtyard and grassy area between the building and the lakefront stone wharf. Worshippers covered the entire area in the thousands (Bashir claims 500,000 prayed there that day but I saw less than 10,000, I think... not sure how you go about counting exactly or telling the difference for that matter) with the women separated from the men by a large walkway leading to the entrance. I walked along the way between them but didn't dare go inside. The women, including the girls, were spectacular... they had dressed in their best robes flowing and emanating vibrant colors of pink and yellow and orange and blue and their feet were decorated with jewelled sandals or heels. The little girls wore similar clothing but often theirs had more sequins and they carried little purses and wore heels that looked a little too big for their feet. The younger girls' hair is almost always cut in a bob that gives them a boyish look and, without their dresses, makes it hard sometimes to tell them from the boys at first glance.
I felt fairly emotional experiencing this crowd and I'm not entirely sure why... lack of sleep, foreign country, stressful travel; perhaps. But actually when I look deeper at it I see people being true to their beliefs in a communal and peaceful manner and I think that's what finds its way to my heart. Never having had, nor any belief in, formal religion I find most religious rituals and expressions personally void of meaning, although I do intellectually understand that others find immense solace and comfort and rich experience and knowledge in the practices. However, this mass expression of community and practice, regardless of my unknowing experience of the religious aspects, feels more universal and connective instead of isolating and divisive. The day before, on a small island in the lake just in front and within direct view of the Mosque, on the shikara tour with my elderly guide, and where there was a small pavilion set up for picknicking among a couple of military tents, a scattering of sandbag bunkers among the trees and with a few soldiers in varying states of undress, I met and spoke with a very nice middle aged man on a day holiday with his two children, a boy 7 and a girl perhaps 6, and his smaller 4 year old nephew. The man was a bank manager and I learned that his wife was a teacher in the primary schools. I think we started by talking about America, then Americans, followed seemingly inevitably by Bush, and then the holiday, and I asked if he was Muslim, which he was, and then he asked if I was Christian. I said no, that I was "nothing" with a bit of a side-to-side hand gesture and immediately his face lit up with a smile. He quickly asserted that he felt all people were just that, human, and that all religion was simply a false division... that in truth we're all the same.
After prayer ended at noon, Shakeel and I struggled through the crowds and traffic surrounding the Mosque and through the neighboring markets displaying fruit, clothing, pastry, teas, and plastic toys before walking the whole way back to the houseboat.
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