“It was so beautiful, the water so clear, the sky so bright and the mountains so silvery… It’s definitely going to be my core memory.”This is a lanky 14-year-old from Chandigarh raving about his short trip to Pahalgam. Just a weekend that bowled over this young globetrotter. His mother was more measured. “It was very scenic, but there was something eerie about the place.” Both knew about the April 2025 Pahalgam massacre. The boy’s view was unburdened by history. Hers was not.In 2004, when the BJP was riding its India Shining campaign and Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a big hit among Kashmiris, Srinagar felt like a city under siege. The Indian Express had travelled to the Valley in the run-up to the parliamentary polls. Muscular bulletproof vans and armed CRPF men dominated its streets. As the sun dipped, you kept your van lights on so the soldiers could see you.Yet, inside homes, over steaming cups of kahwa, some young people spoke of a different future, of a rail link to Jammu, of sending children to the “mainland” for education. A young doctor at the crowded Lal Ded maternity hospital — women in Jammu-Kashmir enjoy 50% quota in MBBS seats — wistfully spoke of peace. A carpet dealer confided, “I want to see my son play national cricket. It’s not possible here.”However, not everyone welcomed such talk. A few years later, on a train to Udhampur from Ambala, a Kashmiri teacher reading a Jeffrey Archer novel looked up and said the railway would “violate the purity of the Valley”. It was another assault on its culture.Those days, a fair number of students from Punjab’s border districts, especially Amritsar and Gurdaspur, came to the Valley for their Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) degree. For many of them, a teaching job as a “master” meant a steady income and the chance to continue farming. That job was worth the risks posed by insurgency. And they came back safe.In the Valley, the grief over lives lost, the Army’s cordon-and-search operations, and the deep us-versus-them feelings were never far. In an Anantnag village, schoolgirls told me they wanted to join the police because they were tired of being “schooled” by militants who would descend on their village at will. At another village, a young man, eyes burning with tears, asked: “What about our ‘shaheed’ (martyrs)? What did they die for?”A different KashmirStory continues below this adMuch water has flowed down the Jhelum since then. The abrogation of Article 370 still rankles. But the everyday texture of life has shifted. The Vande Bharat from Jammu to Srinagar, inaugurated this May, has turned what was once a long, uncertain journey into less than five hours of travel. The rail project itself — an old dream conceived in the late 19th century under Dogra ruler Maharaja Pratap Singh — finally materialised after nearly three decades of construction through some of the world’s most difficult terrain. It boasts 36 tunnels, 943 bridges, including the Chenab Bridge that is the highest railway arch bridge in the world, and the Anji Khad bridge, India’s first cable-supported railway bridge soaring 331 meters above the Anji River.Tourist arrivals, which had climbed to nearly 98 lakh in the Kashmir division and 2.36 crore across J&K in 2024, collapsed after the Pahalgam attack. They are climbing again. The Jammu-Srinagar train regularly runs at near-full occupancy. Srinagar, once deserted after dark, now has more than 200 cafés, up from a handful less than a decade ago. A multiplex opened in 2022, ending an over two-decade absence of cinema.The deeper tensions remain. The heated debate over full statehood and the restoration of Article 370 continues. The Lieutenant Governor still holds significant authority over the bureaucracy and police under the Union Territory framework. AFSPA remains in force and security is less intrusive but still omnipresent. There are reports of land frauds, delimitation rows, fuzzy electoral rolls, and the harrowing problem of drugs. It brings to mind the touristy Vietnamese T-shirts with the slogan, “Same, same but different.”Roger Mac Ginty, the peace and conflict scholar who developed the idea of “everyday peace”, has written about how ordinary routines and small joys can quietly blunt the sharp edges of conflict. In Kashmir, history hasn’t disappeared, but ordinary life has begun to compete with it.Story continues below this adA dermatologist from the Valley who works in Chandigarh, however, cautioned, “Nothing in the Valley is as it seems. There is a lot of politics.”My own core memory of the Valley is quite mundane: a well-lit largish cyber cafe (as they were called then) up a flight of solid wooden stairs near Lal Chowk, where I had gone to key in news reports among men hunched over computers.I was midway through the second story, my colleague downstairs for tea, when I noticed the silence. I looked up to find the café empty, computers still glowing, a wallet left where its owner had sat, and a stunning chinar tree framed against silver mountains in the distance. Later, I learnt that everyone had left for Friday prayers. There was nothing eerie about it. It was a simple pause, and the beauty of the Valley came rushing in.(Manraj Grewal Sharma is National Editor, North, The Indian Express)