Where the hawks flew

August 1995: Enrico Arosio, a journalist for the Milan office of L'Espresso, is browsing the newspapers when his eye catches a headline: "Kashmir, Hostage Beheaded." The unfortunate man was Hans-Christian Ostrø, a 27-year-old Norwegian kidnapped along with four other Westerners by Islamic separatist guerrillas in Kashmir, who have been fighting the Indian government for decades for control of the region. This gruesome news, however, shocks Arosio for a personal reason: he and his wife, Miki, had been in the same areas where Ostrø was killed two years earlier, in August 1993. The coincidence rekindles in Enrico Arosio a series of partly repressed emotions, a collection of sensations, memories. That trip to Kashmir had begun as a vacation, a ten-day break from the world, an imaginary return to the Himalayas, a place he had already touched upon years before. However, upon arriving at Delhi airport, when it was time to board their flight to their destination, Arosio and his wife realized they were heading straight into the center of a civil war. On one side were Muslim separatists backed by Pakistan; on the other, the Indian army, which had hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the region.

Arosio, recalling those alienating days as a "tourist" in the midst of a conflict, feels the need to write down his memories. He jots down a few chapters, considers continuing the work, then abandons it. Only after thirty years do those accounts fully resurface and flow into the slim volume Baci dal Kashmir (Ibis, 2026, €15.00, 176 pages) , the story of a personal experience that straddles the fine line between reportage, memoir, and travel narrative.

In Kashmir, Arosio and his wife experience firsthand what it means to live in a militarily occupied territory: checkpoints, obsessive controls, perpetually high tension. They realize they're living in a suspended state, while violence seems poised to explode at any moment. They also face unexpected risks when the driver taking them on a hike is stopped by the mujahideen, Islamic guerrillas. At the same time, they realize that life around them goes on, that human beings always manage to adapt, and, above all, that nature continues its flow, almost indifferent to the madness of war: the mountains maintain their majesty, clouds cross the sky, and falcons soar above the houseboat where the two protagonists spend their nights.

Kisses from Kashmir conveys all this without ever yielding to the temptation to write a sort of war reportage. His remains an intimate narrative, faithful to the lived, private dimension, yet capable of conveying the sense of disorientation of someone who finds himself, almost by mistake, within history. A disorientation, we dare say, of a fortunate Westerner of the late twentieth century, of someone for whom war was something distant, almost abstract, and scandalous, given that our continent was just emerging from fifty years of almost absolute peace. A disorientation we envy and long for in these all-too-dark times of ours.

And it is precisely this disorientation that adds value to the book. Arosio observes, without having had time to prepare for what he will encounter. He has preconceptions—he prefers Hindu Indians to Islamic guerrillas, perhaps a legacy of the 1968 culture that so loved India—but he hasn't had time to strengthen them. This gives him an almost naive perspective, certainly sincere not only in recounting what he sees, but also in expressing his own inadequacies in dealing with what is unfolding around him. What emerges is a story in which individual experience intertwines with one of the most complex areas of the contemporary geopolitical landscape, without ever overlapping with it, but rather allowing it to filter through the eyes of those who pass through it. The feeling that remains after reading Arosio's pages is what Tiziano Terzani was able to convey in his reports: the sensation of having listened to the voice of someone who, before being a professional and journalist, is a man among other men.