Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,

my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold

the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest

I’ll ever be to home. When I return,

the colors won’t be so brilliant,

the Jhelum’s waters so clean,

so ultramarine. My love

so overexposed.

These free verses about losing home and overexposed love are by Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), the beloved Kashmiri-American poet. Among several other US institutions, Ali taught creative writing to graduate students at New York University. A few decades later, in a different millennium, I, yet another Kashmiri, find myself teaching climate-related Risk in Built and Natural Environments to graduate students at the same place of learning. Ali introduced the ghazal to the US audience. To celebrate the publication of The Veiled Suite, NYU’s Creative Writing Program featured readings from Ali’s work in February 2009. I like to believe, perhaps as a poetic licence for a melancholy metaphor, that both Ali and I, in different and similar ways, have evoked the imagery of Himalayan waters in our lectures, warning students of the risks of overexposure and the calamity of homes lost.

***

Iqbal Ahmed is a British-Kashmiri writer. (He is also my uncle.) In his twenties, three decades ago, he was compelled by circumstances to leave his home in the Himalayas in the hope of finding another one elsewhere. He has lived in London – the erstwhile seat of the British Empire – ever since, travelling extensively across Great Britain and Europe. He documents in his writing all that he astutely observes during his journeys. His previous body of work – five books, which can be considered an informal pentalogy – primarily resides at the intersection of cities and travel (the stage), immigrant experience (the characters), and loss of home (the tragedy). It always comes with a generous measure of cultural, historical, architectural, and art education. In these first five books, the personal and political, on the contrary, were consciously sparse and mostly implied. That meant whenever such revelations arrived, the reader took note.

His sixth and latest book, The Snows of Kashmir, is somewhat of a departure from those traditions.  The book is certainly travel writing, but it is not about immigrants in the usual sense. It attempts to capture displacement and dispossession in one’s own homeland. As the book’s blurb states, it is a journey in reverse. Here, in these ten new chapters, the narrator’s own history takes centre stage. And in doing so, we are also introduced to the myriad realities of the places he visits. We begin in Srinagar, head to Gurgaon, then to Delhi, travelling to Kargil, Leh, Nubra, take a detour to Chandigarh, visit Jammu, and then back to Srinagar. Ahmed flexes his observational muscle – you see the kaleidoscope of compiled details.

Take away the layer of those profuse references – mostly revelatory but sometimes distracting – and you will see the story of the writer’s homecoming. It is the journey of a man born and brought up in the mountains, who had to leave his natural habitat, heading back. It seems like a Proustian search to regain lost time – to strengthen the weakened ties, and make sense of the new realities of the old places one knew growing up.

Der Mensch kann tun, was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen, was er will.

Arthur Schopenhauer, guided by his philosophical pessimism, declared the hopeless determinism of our desires and drives, even though we may have some control over our actions. In this sense, Ahmed is an incontrovertible, irredeemable, unapologetic writer – all his energies, engagements and obsessions seem to revolve around a singular urge to express himself in the written word. This has been simultaneously the source of joy and strife. A source of both burgeoning and sour social relationships. The kind of books Ahmed writes and attempts to write, will either end up becoming canonical exhibits of what Théophile Gautier called l’art pour l’art or in this attention economy, they will repeatedly fall short of the requisite recognition and topicality that puts many authors’ names on the shelves of airport bookshops.

From one perspective, you see an artist’s unwavering devotion to his art form. From another, more pedestrian perspective, you see a litany of poor judgments in search of an elusive, perhaps misguided ideal. Milan Kundera claimed, “I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods.” Ahmed religiously pursues such stylistic adamance. Dal Lake will continue to be referenced as Lake Dal. And a bike would often be called a pushbike. And publishing his books himself with elegantly designed jackets would stay preferable over the seemingly gaudy covers of paying commercial publishers. But Ahmed echoes Robert Graves’s sentiment: while there is no money in poetry, there is no poetry in money, either.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? – Van Gogh