Kashmir hit them like a dream you're not sure you're having.
They took a shared taxi from Jammu — a Sumo packed with eight people, a rooster in a cage, and someone's grandmother who kept offering everyone dried apricots. The journey took seven hours through the Jawahar Tunnel and into the valley, and when they emerged on the other side, the world changed so completely that Arjun felt like he'd crossed into a different country.
The mountains weren't just mountains. They were walls of the earth, rising so high and so close that you had to tilt your head all the way back to find the sky. The trees weren't just trees — they were chinars, with leaves the size of your hand, some already turning gold and amber at the edges, as if autumn had started painting and hadn't finished.
They found a houseboat on Dal Lake. Not one of the fancy tourist ones with carved wood and velvet curtains, but a modest one — an old doonga run by a man named Bashir Chacha who charged eight hundred rupees a night and served them kahwa every evening without being asked.
The houseboat had two rooms. Small, simple, with windows that opened directly onto the water. At night, you could hear the lake lapping against the wood, a sound so gentle it felt like the earth breathing.
The first morning, Meera was up before dawn. Arjun found her on the front deck, camera ready, waiting for the light.
"Sit with me," she said without turning around.
He sat. The lake was a mirror — perfectly still, reflecting the mountains and the sky so precisely that it was impossible to tell which was real and which was reflection. A shikara boat glided past in complete silence, its vendor arranging flowers in the predawn dark.
The sun came up behind the mountains. First a glow, then a line of gold, then a slow flood of light that turned the water into liquid amber. Meera shot forty-three photographs in eleven minutes. Arjun counted.
But then she put the camera down and did the thing he loved — she just looked. And in her face, lit by the first light of a Kashmir morning, he saw something so raw and unprotected that it made his chest ache.
"She's here," Meera whispered. "Maa. I can feel her."
Arjun said nothing. He reached over and took her hand. This time, it wasn't the 2 AM vestibule grip — tentative, almost accidental. This was deliberate. His hand closed around hers and stayed.
She didn't pull away.
They spent five days in Srinagar. Five days that would later feel like five months, because time, in Kashmir, doesn't work like it does in the rest of the world. It stretches and compresses, accordion-like, giving you both too much and not enough.
Meera photographed everything her mother had written about in her journal — the Mughal Gardens at Nishat Bagh with their terraced fountains. The interior of the Hazratbal Shrine, where the light filtered through latticed screens and fell on the marble floor in geometric patterns that looked like prayers made visible. The floating vegetable market on the lake where vendors sold tomatoes and lotus stems from shikaras that bumped against each other like friendly animals.
Arjun drew. He filled page after page of the brown notebook — not just landscapes, but details. The wrinkled hands of a saffron picker. The pattern of cracks in a centuries-old walnut wood door. The way Meera's dupatta caught the wind on the third terrace of Nishat Bagh.
