White floral patterns, geometric prints and jacquard fabrics create chic visual impressions, while styles with our gauze cotton fabric, breezy linens and knit tanks feel decadent to the touch. Just like the sunlight plays with colors and shadows, our blouses and shirts play with texture. Especially when our Foxcroft designers creatively interpret the crisp, clean look into styles like stunning white tunics, tailored fitted shirts and airy linens. Where do you rank in our tribe of worldly readers? Answer these questions to get a sense.The classic white shirt never goes out of style. And even, perhaps, a return at some point to the queues that Mehta had spoken of so movingly. But I’ll also never forget the fact that our very visit to his shop – and the thousands who were flying in every day – seemed to speak for better prospects. I’ll never forget the sadness in Jagdish Mehta’s eyes. Yet what he meets, very often, are locals caught inside a day-to-day predicament that seems difficult to see past. The tourist tends to drop down from the heavens, bringing his hopes and the freshness of his eyes. I travel in part to see what can never be caught on YouTube or in headlines, and the proprietor’s silence, his turning away, reminded of why it’s so urgent to meet cultures in the flesh. Most of all, I found myself lulled into the gentle, seductive rhythm of life on the lake, paddling past kingfishers when I wanted to buy snacks from a grocery store on stilts amid the lotus ponds.īut when I returned home it was Jagdish Mehta that I remembered, if only because he spoke for so many other souls I’d met in places like Lhasa and Havana and Pyongyang. I encountered many beautiful things in Kashmir: the wooden mosques at the centre of Srinagar, pointed out by a South Indian who had lost her heart to them the call to prayer interlace from a thousand mosques every evening at dusk the celebrated Mughal gardens. Mahatta Photo Studio had been in the family since his grandfather founded it in 1915. “We have a picture here of a queue of 40 or 50 Englishmen waiting to come in to have their photographs developed,” he went on. He pointed out ancient photos of Kashmiris in formal dress and showed us black-and-white images printed on silver gelatine paper.
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He whipped a black hood off a stand-up wooden camera, its 1938 receipt from Glasgow neatly tucked into its sides. “I’m so happy someone is interested in these things,” said the elegant proprietor, Jagdish Mehta, his spotless white tunic matching his thatch of white hair, and his language as formally beautiful as a Tennyson poem.
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Then we climbed an unlit set of stairs in the same block, and found ourselves in a dusty room full of sepia-tinted photos of Kashmir, from the days of the 1930s novel Lost Horizon, and decades-old Brownie cameras from the Raj. We stepped into Asia Crafts next door, where silver-tongued Kashmiris unrolled carpets that seemed to change colour every time they were turned upside-down.
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We stopped to take a look at Suffering Moses, a store that had been dazzling visitors with its papier-mâché boxes since a century before my mother first visited, in 1941. The moment that upended me came one sunny morning, near the centre of Srinagar, when Bealby led me around the colourful and aromatic shops along The Bund. Yet no good trip plays out in only one key.
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Yet instead of avoiding the place that had cut his life in two, Bealby became the first foreigner to lead a tour group back to Kashmir, 16 years or so later, and now returns again and again. My British tour guide on the trip, Jonny Bealby, had come to Srinagar 25 years before and gone through the traveller’s ultimate nightmare: he awoke one morning in a houseboat named for dreams to find that his 25-year-old girlfriend of five years was dead by his side, reportedly the victim of an overnight asthma attack. That summer, 36 flights were touching down in Srinagar each day, bringing 1.3 million Indians, often on pilgrimage, to a jewelled valley that has long enchanted Mughals, British officers and backpackers.Įverywhere I turned, there were stories of rebirth.
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The Japanese, German and British governments had all recently lifted their travel advisories against visiting the area, and although more than half a million Indian soldiers remained – and more than 70,000 people had lost their lives in Indo-Pakistani violence there since 1989 – all official talk was of the future. When I stepped off the plane in Srinagar two years ago, I was eager to celebrate Kashmir’s attempts to revive itself after more than 20 years of brutal civil war.