Srinagar is a city in unrelieved ferment. It has no normal routine, living in hard-won gasps of normalcy, hour-to-hour or, at best, week-to-week. The raging guns may be muted now, but 20 years since the violence began anew, this picturesque summer capital of Kashmir remains a troubled place. The city's life cycle begins on Friday, as soon as the booming loudspeakers of the Grand Mosque in downtown Nowhatta Chowk go silent, after the weekly afternoon prayer. Suddenly, crowds of angry youths flood out of the nearby lanes; armed with stones and broken bricks, they take on the police and Central Reserve Police Force personnel. Almost instantly, this old quarter of the city closes down. By evening, the trouble has already radiated outwards.
The people of Srinagar consider themselves lucky if the situation calms down by the end of the day – with a few injuries on both sides, of course. But a death of any kind wreaks havoc. It sets off a fresh wave of protests, even a shutdown or two, which extends over the rest of the week. The result is more killings, more protests. The cycle goes on. If stone-peltings cease, the strikes take over, sometimes a full, uninterrupted week of them with barely a shop open or a passenger vehicle plying the roads. Recovering from the mayhem of the past two decades, Srinagar is struggling to find its moorings, all the while continuing to live amid the echoes of the immediate past and the call of an uncertain future. It is not that change has not visited the city, but the transformations have primarily been of a physical nature.
Today, there are dozens of large shopping complexes sprouting up, as if born out of a pent-up urge to break out of the mass decay of the crumbling old structures. Along the major streets of Residency Road, a brand-new facade over the pre-existing shopping complexes has lent a new gloss to the city. Some larger changes have also been made, such as the remaking of a large portion of the Jhelum embankment into a chinar tree-shaded riverside park. This facelift has somewhat restored the famous boulevard along the river to its past colonial glory. The Bund, as the boulevard is locally called, is a famous Jhelum-side feature of the city, a darling of tourists. The mooring site of the Kashmir Valley's first houseboats, in its heyday it was considered the Oriental challenge to Venice. Indeed, even Muhammad Ali Jinnah kept his houseboat here during his visit to Srinagar in 1936. For many years, well into the 1970s, the Bund enjoyed the privileged status as the starting point for visiting dignitaries' boat rides. But the militancy was eventually to render the Bund out of bounds for the people as well as the government, leaving houseboat owners and nearby dwellers free to encroach on it.
With the situation in recent times normalising somewhat, however, the government has since 2005 been restoring the Bund to some of its old glory. Today, the shanties on the banks of the Jhelum have been razed, revealing an uninhibited view of the ancient river, and triggering nostalgia for many. In many ways, the renovation drive is a search for the vintage Srinagar – for a time when all was serene. Some call this a bid for the restoration of the once-familiar geography of peace. There have been other changes, too. A portion of Eidgah, the Valley's largest prayer ground, close to Martyr's Graveyard, has also been turned into a park, as has the old almond garden on the banks of Dal Lake. Similarly, Ghulam Nabi Azad, in his imagined role as a Mughal emperor, also built a tulip garden in the foothills of the Zabarwan hills during his three-year term as chief minister, which ended in 2008.