TROUT, AFTER TROUBLED TIMES

That’s changing. In the last two years, the department of fisheries has issued more fishing permits than in the preceding two decades—1,223 in 2006 and 1,323 in 2007. Last year, 324 visitors from countries like Germany, Russia, Japan, Britain, Canada, Holland, UAE and Oman came to fish for trout in Lidder and Aru streams in Pahalgam, Naranag in Sindh area and Naristan in Pulwama.
I remember Gautam Wahi, a pilot with Kingfisher Airlines who went fishing in Wangath last week, telling me, “I would say that Kashmir provides the best fishing experience anywhere in India. And when it comes to trout fishing, it is the only place”.

It’s been another half-hour of patience and I sense a tug at the hook. No, it’s a tentative strike, dismisses the expert Haider. A small fish. The wait gets longer but no less interesting. It’s a dappled day, bathed alternately in light and shade. Looking up at Haider, the banks, the woods, and the vast spring sky, I feel part of the harmony that stretches all around.
For me, and many other Kashmiris who had watched the Valley’s many charms wilt in bloodshed, this is a homecoming to nature. As the violence wanes, the pine forests don’t turn silent witnesses of gunbattles in the dead of the night; nor do starving militants and soldiers bomb the streams and sprinkle bleaching powder in them to kill the delicious trout. There is little that comes between you and the horizon.
The fact is not lost on Haider. He too wants his share of normalcy, his anglers. “In the last two years, many foreigners came up here. There were more than a hundred domestic anglers,” says Haider as he helps me cast the fly rod. “I made good money after many years”. 

Before militancy struck the state in 1989, Kashmir was the angling capital of India. In the 1950s, the state had 10 trout fishing beats where around 1,000 anglers would fish every year. In 1988, the number of anglers was around 10,000. Today, the state has 175 beats. And the state’s tourism and fisheries departments are hoping for a quantum leap in the footfall.
At the head office of the fisheries department in Srinagar, there is excitement and the continuous buzz of the telephone. “We are getting calls from all over India. People are raring to come,” says deputy-director Farooq Ahmad Sheikh. There are plans to place advertisements in national and international newspapers; the tourism department has brought out a brochure on angling.

The government has set up lodges and huts along almost all of the trout beats. Except Pahalgam in south Kashmir, where good hotels are available, anglers have to put up in government lodges or camp near the streams. In the six months of the angling season, from April to September, the streams, officials say, can host around 30,000 anglers. Trout tourism is big money for the state. Much of the expectations are optimistic, of course.
The reality is that the US and European countries still issue adverse advisories on Kashmir and violence still smoulders in the state. “An element of uncertainty remains a hurdle,” admits Sheikh.

Waiting for the trickle of visitors to turn into a gushing stream is Muhammad Hanif Qureshi, the owner of the lone fishing tackle shop set up in 1880 on the Bund in Srinagar, who loaned us a rod for our little expedition and directed us to Sindh. Inside his 36-foot-wide shop is Kashmir’s 100-year-old angling lore. On the wall are photographs of Hanif’s customers—the who’s who of India from the pre-Partition days and later: the Governor-General and Viceroy of India, the Second Marquess of Linlithgow, Commander-in-Chief of India  General Sir Claude JE Auchinleck, field marshal Sir Philip W Chetwode, Prince of Berar Walashan Nawab Mir Sir Himayat Ali Khan Bahadur, Maharaja Rana Bahadur of Jhalawar, Sanjay Gandhi, Raj Kapoor and other VIPs.

The mottled trout teasing my patience is, however, not native to the state. Royal decree brought it here. Around the turn of the 19th century, Kashmir’s kings developed a taste for fishing, inspired in part by the rising influx of senior British functionaries and the tourists who bemoaned the absence of sport fish in Valley’s freshwater streams. From 1890 to 1905, a series of consignments of trout eggs were brought from Europe to Kashmir and released in the waters of the Valley. The experiments failed many times before finally coming through.

My experiments are by now running out of steam. For the angler, waiting for the trout is being riveted to the hook. Everything seems to be a build-up to a revelation, a joint exercise in conception, hinged on a wild tug at the hook. Two hours and it hasn’t come. Or has it?
I can feel slight tentative twitches, then a strong, heavy tug. Soon, a wild thrashing in the water. Flying and flailing up in the air and landing on the shore is a longish brown trout mottled with red and brown spots. Haider is the happiest, leaping to unhook the fish. I am preening by now.
As we move upstream, it gets more difficult. We seek small puddles of relative calm, ignoring the thunderous spray of the long shallow stretches. At the end of the day, we haven’t made much of a score, one barely-one-pound brown trout in five hours. But thick clouds are gathering over the hills and it’s time for us to go home.
I think of the officials at the fisheries department and their hope that 2008 will see the return of the good old days, the return of the anglers who will enter the depths of this beautiful valley in search of the rainbow and the brown trout. Possible?
Haider doesn’t have the answer but he grins back a goodbye at his disappointing pupil. He, for one, is happy to resume a gillie’s life, by a silvery stream in Paradise.