SRINAGAR, India — Sitting on the lawn of a restored maharajah's palace amid the reddening leaves of massive maples, sipping saffron tea laced with cinnamon, one gets lost in the meditative meandering of gondolas on the lake.
The shops of Srinagar are filled with the sweet smell of almond cookies and ripe red apples. Thousands of copper pots hang in the windows, and cheerful gap-toothed men hawk the soft pashmina shawls now de rigueur among Western women.
Then the sun starts to set behind the lush Zabarwan hills, and the welcoming smiles begin to fade. Kashmiris quickly head home, looking over their shoulders and bolting their doors.
Darkness falls, and one sees why these Himalayan foothills are considered the most dangerous place in the world: Shadowy bombers and gunmen haunt the Kashmir Valley, laying the fuse that could light the world's first nuclear war.
The families in the houseboats that line the shores of Dal Lake secure their shutters. Indian soldiers hunker down behind their sandbags, dark eyes and AK-47s peering through barbed-wire windows, scanning the streets in anticipation of the next bomb or grenade.
Mothers of teenage boys stand on street corners, wringing their hands, scouring the dusk for the silhouettes of their sons, praying they have not joined the thousands of young men thought to be dead, arrested or gone to join the armies of Islam.
The sign in front of the Srinagar tourism office that said "Welcome to Happy Valley" is gone.
"Everything has gone. Peace has gone, honor has gone, human values have gone," says Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a leading Kashmiri politician who hands a foreign visitor a chronology of the attempts on his life when she enters his house, which has been fortified against shelling.
"There is nothing left here except fear," Geelani laments.
President Clinton said as much during his visit in March, when he described one of the most beautiful and bountiful jewels in the Indian crown as "the most dangerous place in the world right now."
Kashmir today is also a place where old certainties are no longer clear. The attraction of joining Pakistan is no longer universally shared as the South Asian neighbor sinks deeper into political and economic disarray under a military regime and strict Islamic law.
Muslim militants have turned down India's latest cease-fire offer, but the leading coalition of separatist parties in Srinagar has welcomed New Delhi's gesture. Other influential voices that once espoused Pakistan's cause are reconsidering.
