The houseboats on the Dal are named for hope. Young Bride. New Palace. Prince of Kashmir. Ours was called Evening Star, and by the time I knew it the gold letters had flaked to the wood beneath, so it read only Evenin, which felt more honest anyway.
My father rented rooms to tourists who came for a week and left believing they had touched the real Kashmir. Nadia cleaned the linen and cooked for them and belonged, like me, to the water more than the land. We were both fifteen the summer the German couple stayed a month and left the girl a paperback in a language none of us could read.
We could not read it, so we invented it. Every evening on the back deck, feet in the cold lake, we would open the book at random and take turns telling each other what it said. She was better at it than me. In her version the story was always about two people on a boat, always about staying, never once about the German couple's real lives, whatever those were. In my version the people on the boat were us, though I never said so, and she pretended not to notice, though she always was.
The lake at dusk turns the colour of the inside of a shell. The shikaras go home. The lotus closes. And for one hour the whole valley belongs to whoever is willing to sit still and want something quietly.
Her family arranged her marriage the following spring, to a good man in a town I have never seen. She sent word through her mother that she was well, that the town had no lake, that she missed the smell of the water in the morning. She did not mention the book. She did not need to.
I still have it. I never learned the language. I could, now; there are ways. But I understood something the year I turned thirty and the German girl's paperback fell open in my hands to a page soft with lake damp. If I learned to read it, it would only say what German novels say. Weather. A city. Some stranger's ordinary grief.
Untranslated, it says the only thing I want it to. That two children once sat on the deck of a boat called Evenin and made up a whole world in which no one ever had to leave, and that for the length of one summer, in the only language that ever mattered, it was completely and unbearably true.