The great red sandstone forts at Delhi and Agra both lie on the banks of the River Yamuna. At Agra, the riverside battlements offer a splendid vista across the huge waters winding among the blank sandy banks to the distant Taj Mahal. In the Red Fort at Delhi, you are hardly aware the river is there. From place to place India's attitude to water varies so.
Its availability seems to be taken for granted. Which is strange in a nation which receives little rain outside the monsoon. Perhaps the government has been particularly efficient in digging wells. In the countryside, irrigated fields are ablaze with a rich, dark verdancy. In the towns, public gardens are watered endlessly. Especially in Delhi, where the extensive lawns around India Gate and Parliament building are maintained as lushly as any Home Counties gardener could wish. And in the old part of the town, people who live on the streets take turns to bathe at their local standpipe, holding a cloth around themselves like coy holidaymakers changing on a Cornish beach. As they wash themselves in the running water, they make no effort to be frugal. Perhaps such profligacy with free water is the one luxury they can afford.
Rivers have helped shape much of the sub-continent: the Indus gave the land its name, and the Ganges remains a holy symbol. But it is the lakes that are special in India, partly because of their rarity. One of the main attractions of other-worldly Kashmir is its dreaming lakes, typified by Srinagar's Dal Lake. The contrast between the flat dull land of the Indian plains, and this mobile film of water mirroring the encircling mountains and the soft blue of the sky could hardly be greater.
The tranquillity that water engenders has even moved some to create new lakes. The Pichola Lake at Udaipur is a masterpiece of this kind. In its present form, the lake now reaches out to the surrounding soft-contoured hills, like Lake Dal on a more intimate scale. It provides the perfect setting for the palace which occupies Jagniwas island. And its example spurred others to create Lake Fateh Sagar behind it, whose waters answer the complex of lake and reflected land with a further reflection of the whole design like some huge artifice of mirrors.
But the grand ensemble of Udaipur is an exception; Indian architects have mostly been content to use water as a just another decorative element, like an occasional semi-precious stone set as an inlay among the main expanse of marble. For example, the deserted palace at Fatehpur Sikri has a number of small pools with decorative bridges. But water here is no more central to the overall design than the courtyard-sized chessboard nearby, or the small palace built for games of hide-and-seek. For real architectural sensitivity to the magic of water, you must travel to Agra.
The Itmad-ud-Daulah is a modest tomb for the grandfather of the Lady of the Taj. A narrow pool leads the eye naturally to the exquisite pietra dura of the mausoleum, as delicate as lace. The Taj Mahal takes the same idea but realises it on the grandest scale. The long watercourse points like a gleaming arrow to the distant tomb. A marble wraith, it stands silhouetted against the sky, brooding over the slow, silent Yamuna below.
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The Kashmir railhead lies at Jammu, some 600 km and 15 hours by train from Delhi. The journey along the only road from Jammu to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, takes another 12 hours. Two thirds of that is uphill.
As the road winds its way round mountain after mountain, leaving the narrow valley floors further and further behind, the landscape gradually changes. Trees give way to low shrubs, then barren scrubland. With each hairpin twist of the snaking road, the landscape to the south folds itself, pleating the horizon with soft-contoured hills. The road peaks at 3000 metres, then begins a partial descent.
The dusty valleys are exchanged for a deep gorge: below lies the huge River Cherab. From this height, its surface is deceptively still and jade-like. The conjunction of placid glistening water with ranks of mountains shouldering each other into the distance looks like nothing so much as the Lake District - writ five times larger.
As the road follows the Cherab upstream, the gorge gives way to a narrow valley, with fertile land edging the river. Small villages are visible among the neatly-parcelled fields with their low mud walls. To conserve valuable space, some houses hug sheer rock faces shrouded in shadow like a colony of bats. Thin, sill-like terraces are carved into the steep concave bowl of the mountainside to eke out the arable land yet further.
The road turns off, following a tributary; its valley rises and narrows to nothing. The land begins to spread out before the final wall of mountain tops. The Jawarhar tunnel under them is long, dark and damp - a last rite of passage before entering the light and spacious Vale of Kashmir itself. As you emerge from the tunnel, and turn a couple of corners, the whole valley is spread out before you with the clarity of a map.
It is ringed by majestic mountain peaks which block out the world. To the west is Afghanistan, to the north Uzbekistan, and to the east, the Himalayas. The Vale itself lies at over 1500m, and is about 100 km long by 20 km wide. It is flat and abundantly fertile.
To understand and appreciate Kashmir, its position as an impossible kingdom must be grasped. This is best done by arriving slowly overland. As each metre in height and kilometre in distance is dearly won, and each hour paid out in the journey, so the true co-ordinates of Kashmir are fixed within you.
In contrast, departure should be a swift and effortless escape that allows the essence of the Vale to carried away intact. A flight is ideal. As you rise out of Srinagar airport, the valley contracts to a giant's footprint. Like the old land it is, creases run over its smooth surface. To the north, the great snow-capped peak of Nanga Parbat gleams like a fang; to the east, the Himalayas lie like hundreds of huge, jagged flints. Set amidst this frozen sea of raging peaks, the calm and peace of the Kashmir valley is all the more miraculous. It can be no coincidence that an anagram of Srinagar is Sangri-ra.
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Night transforms India. By day, the land bakes under a dusty pitiless sun, and the cities are a constantly jarring clash of opposing sights and sounds. Darkness descends like some ancient balm poured over the sores and wounds of the day. The heat is moderated; the air becomes Zephyrous, neither hot nor cold. The harsh contrasts of the streets mellow and mingle as the shadows lengthen, reach out and coalesce. Most importantly, the mad frenetic din, the horns and the trucks and the banshee shouts, all is tamed and harmonised into the soft equable noise of human babble.
Delhi in particular is magical by night. Without the harsh light, the city's constant and overpowering sense of distances is lost. The weak electric bulbs in the shops cast small circles of illumination which further reduce the scale. Only Connaught Place retains a sense of wide open space.
But even that is tamed. What by day is a huge bowl of empty sky becomes at night a hall whose roof is hung with velvet drapes. Around its inner circle, the shops which hung back diffidently in the deep shadows of the colonnade are now glistening like tiny candles on a grand iced cake. Across their lights, twin currents of people swirl in opposite directions, spilling out onto the almost deserted road.
The outer circle is even more animated. Hundreds of tiny shops have burst into life: one is selling car seat covers, another has typewriters hired out for use there by the hour; another boasts a single small photocopying machine; many others sell brightly coloured cloths or provisions or one of the many monochrome cooked dishes. Laid out on the street are second-hand books or some of the multitude of indigenous and foreign magazines. It is one of the great Joys of India that neither here, amidst the huge throngs of bustling shoppers, nor in the quiet roads radiating out from Connaught Place, or indeed in any of the other cities of the north-west, do you ever feel threatened. The night in India is totally benevolent.
That same carefree sense of certain safety exists in Kashmir. More so perhaps among this happy and graceful people. But the night itself has a very different quality, and none of the plain's enveloping sense of a warm, almost maternal embrace.
The Kashmiri night is stern. During the day, the sunshine streaks through the thin air with a direct and surprising strength. But the instant that the sun sinks behind the rim of the encircling mountains, it is as if some great brazier had been extinguished, plunging this other-worldly land into the dark and deep cold like a bad wizard's spell in a fairy-tale.
But there are compensations. Not only is the next day's light and heat all the more welcome, but the cold of the valley is of such a clean and bracing kind it is hard to harbour a grudge against it. Besides, it is the occasion of one of Kashmir's richest pleasures: to sit on a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar, the boards creaking around you, as a blazing log fire in the room's stove throws out a wet and almost loving heat, together with the unforgettable odours of gently choking woodsmoke.
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The divided modern states of India and Pakistan were born out of the age-old tensions between Hindu and Muslim. The latter did not relish being a minority in a country ruled by the former. But whatever the political realities, the balance of spiritual power surely lay the other way.
Hinduism does not proselytise: since caste cannot be altered during this life, only by it, nothing can be done for those whose previous lives condemned them to be re-born outside Hinduism, and hence outside all castes. It is a religion of temporal stasis. For the Muslim, on the other hand, there is the siren call of the jihad, the holy war to defend the faith and convert the infidels - against their will if need be. It is the epitome of spiritual dynamism.
The same extroversion is manifest in their religious architecture, faith made stone. Everywhere the Muslims went, they built mosques. Not just one, but several, preferably greater than ever before. Paradise was to be won by action. Hindus often veered the other way, towards the abnegation manifest in Buddhism; you must desire nothing, strive for nothing, do nothing. Which is hardly conducive to piling up ever-higher stones.
And so it is that Hinduism remains a dominant yet invisible religion, while the departed Moghuls have left their indelible stamp on northern India in a string of massive forts and soaring mosques, Together these represent the twin aspects of their warlike faith. Delhi itself has fine examples of both. The Red Fort stands rock-like at the corner of the old city, its huge red walls an unarguable statement of imperial and religious intent. A little across from it is the Jami Masjid, the main mosque of the town. Open to the skies and to Allah, it can hold 25,000 souls and is the largest in India.
Unlike Delhi, which now lies in the Hindu heartlands, Kashmir has remained staunchly Muslim. Geography apart, perhaps this is not surprising. Nowhere else in India does the muezzin's call to prayer carry as distinctly as through that thin mountain air. In Srinagar, the frail reedy cry can be heard for miles as it floats across the still Dal Lake.
Like all the greatest artists, the Moghul architects of the mosques took the circumscribing restrictions of their faith regarding ornamentation and form and made it the springboard for inspiration. Particularly in their intimate monuments to the dead. The tombs are austere in their geometric patternings, stern and formal in their inlaid quotations from the Koran. Yet their perfect proportions and simplicity are moving for any faith.
Of no building is this more true than of the Taj Mahal. Too often it is regarded simply as beautiful architecture, or as a postcard symbol of India. But as well as a personal testament to the unassuageable grief of the Emperor Shah Jahan at the death of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, it needs to be understood as a religious monument. To enter, you must remove your shoes as well as your cultural prejudices. It forms a fitting memorial to the Moghuls' enduring passion for architecture, and the apotheosis of their legacy to India.
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The most notable thing about smells in India is that there are so few of them. Westerners pre-conceptions about third-world countries might lead them to expect a rich melange of noisome smells constantly assaulting the nose, just as the hectic collage of sights and sounds will hit the eyes and ears. But there is no equivalent cacophony of odours.
It is certainly possible to find smells, hunting them out like exotic truffles. But the best smells are those which ambush you in unlikely places, striking your consciousness like the sound of a tiny distant bell.
For instance, there is the incense. Not from the temples, of which there are few in northern India, nor from the mosques which are open to the sky and smell only of the what the wind carries. This incense is from the slow-burning sticks found on stalls in the markets everywhere. Its purpose is purely functional: to ward off the flies from the food. But far more than any smell of cooking it remains as the defining smell of the bazaars. Its cloying richness seems particularly appropriate for the huge, sprawling congregation of shouting people, garish colours and endless, fecund confusion.
More elusive is the smell of the old forts and palaces. A rare conjunction of conditions is needed to catch it, just as if it were some marvellous nocturnal bird, seen only by autumn moonlight in leap years. The rooms where it can be found must be dark and secluded from the sun; they must be high yet draughtless; and their peace must be broken by intrusive visitors only rarely. If these three requirements are met, as at the deserted palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, you can catch a whiff of the rarefied exhalation of old stone. It is cold and dank and a very ancient smell, the smell of history.
The third smell is perhaps the hardest to recognise, because it is at once so subtle and so trivial. It is ubiquitous, but easiest to detect towards twilight. A high vantage point helps to spot it. There you can watch it form over the whole city, and colour the air itself.
It is the smoke from domestic fires. Sitting atop a minaret of the Jami Masjid in Delhi, you can see the city wreathed in its mists and vapours. As dusk falls, the smell seems to concentrate itself as the more workaday odours pack up and go home. It is less a smell than a small sensation at the back of the throat, a slight acidity.
The Kashmir valley offers the experience in its purest form. From the high vantage point of the Shankaracharya Hill behind Srinagar, you can watch the rich woodsmoke curl out of the chimneys on the houseboats and houses. As the lower air thickens, the view turns into some crazy industrial landscape, with tall wiry silver birches for smokestacks. Walking back down into the city you lose sight of the thin pall of smoke in the darkening air, but gain, step by step, its gently choking smell. It smells of the fire which awaits you on your houseboat. It smells of home, as it does for everyone in India. Which is why it is so hard for the westerner to detect, and so worth detecting.
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