Editor’s note: This week we bring you an excerpt from ‘The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise’ by Pico Iyer—the brilliant travel writer known for his luminous and near-spiritual prose. Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Iyer brings together a lifetime of journeys to upend our ideas of utopia—as he explores how we can make peace with suffering. Check out the book on Penguin Random House—or buy it here. Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House India. 

Kashmir: On the Lake

I made my way along the Bund, the riverside walkway where memsahibs had sauntered even in my parents’ youth; finding they were not permitted to buy houses on land, the British began fashioning their own private vision of paradise on the water. Houseboats came up across Dal and Nageen Lakes, re-creating the drawing rooms of Kent, heavy with antimacassars and Grandmother’s oak-solid furniture. 

A home in the colonies allowed them to remake themselves and to take on airs they’d never have gotten away with among neighbors who could read them; here, they could dream up a version of home that had never begun to exist in the country they’d left behind. Even now, much of India has this feeling of a fictional, dressed-up England created by displaced Brits glad to be far from the land they knew. A local Jeeves can solve every one of Bertie’s problems in a tropical afternoon.

For centuries, in fact, Kashmir had seemed an answer to many of the world’s divisions. It was from here that the ecumenical emperor Ashoka, three hundred years before the death of Christ, had sent Buddhist teachers across Asia to pass on the value of seeing the interdependence of every living thing. It was here, in the sixteenth century, that the emperor Akbar had claimed his “private garden,” the area’s 777 flowering jewel boxes suggesting the more enduring beauties that await the blessed in heaven.

Every summer, huge convoys trundled up from Delhi, four hundred miles away, bearing the emperor, his court, many of Delhi’s merchants and at least one hundred thousand horsemen and thirty thousand porters, to what had long been seen as an arboretum for the gods. Even now, the four great gardens around Srinagar—not least Shalimar, its name appearing on perfume bottles and a Royal Navy ship—were gentle places for boys to sit under three-hundred-year-old sycamores while excited visitors from Ahmedabad or Delhi got themselves up in seventeenth-century Kashmiri costumes for photographs.

“The genius of picnic seems to rule the whole shore of the Dal,” a nineteenth-century British journalist had observed, and the people from damp England all around him lost their hearts, much as the Moguls had done, to the irises and lupines and wild roses across Kashmir in the spring, the purple saffron fields in September. Local merchants grew famous for spinning magic carpets and jewels tailored to a visitor’s dreams and when I was at college, Dal Lake became one of those storied rest stops along the modern Silk Road, sung of by Led Zeppelin and associated with the Magic Bus.

You could stay on a houseboat for a fistful of dollars every day (two meals included); the woman across the lake sold honey in saffron and almond and apple flavors (and, if you knew how to ask, spiced with marijuana and opium, too). You could forget the passage of time on floating hotels whose names preserved a grandfather’s dream: Duke of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth, St. James Palace and even The Best Prince of Vale.

A Tibetan prince in the sixteenth century had written to his father (who lived, the son thought, in an earthly paradise called “Shambala”), to evoke Kashmir as a land with “more than three million towns, all filled with houses made of jewels, surrounded by walls of crystal.” Its shops sold “emeralds and rubies,” he wrote; among its streets filled with singing citizens, “beautiful women with dark blue eyes and lovely figures send you seductive glances.”

One day, driving along lanes of poplars as the late light slanted down through the trees, I recalled how even Shah Jahan, cherished for his creation of the Taj Mahal, had constructed a black marble pavilion here, in the Shalimar Gardens, on which was inscribed, in Persian, “If there be a Paradise on earth, it is this, it is this.”