Justine Hardy

This is a story about goat hair, gathered from herds that graze among the high-altitude monasteries of Little Tibet, woven in villages near the Kashmiri border with Pakistan, and sold to the ladies-who-lunch of London's Notting Hill. It is also the story of a beautiful valley with some ugly secrets. A journalist based in India, Justine Hardy started trading pashmina shawls as a way of raising money to support an education programme in some of Delhi's slum areas. In setting up the company she spent time living among the market dyers in the polluted inner city of Delhi, in villages in the fighting zones of Kashmir, on the lakes beyond Srinagar, and in and out of design houses and the scented drawing-rooms of wealthy London. In Delhi the money from the shawls was turned into primary education for beggar children; in Kashmir, over the flight of the pashmina looms, stories began to be told of the hundreds of children who disappear each year, perhaps into terrorist camps where they are trained to become killers. Goat is an unusual story of shawls and missing children, of cappuccino bars in London and hostages in Kashmir.

A Story of Kashmir & Notting Hill

Goat

Mohammed Dar and his three brothers were born in a boat on a lake in Kashmir, a place of exquisite beauty that was to become a war zone and nuclear flashpoint. This Himalayan valley of water, mist and mountains was once one of India's greatest tourist draws. In 1989 it exploded into insurgency. Kashmir became a rallying cry for jihadi movements all over the region and Pakistan's backing of the conflict triggered, in part, its own Islamist crisis. Mohammed Dar and his family found themselves living inside a new and foreign world of violence. Justine Hardy has stayed with the Dar family for many years, reporting on the conflict. She tells their story of living through the destruction of their adored homeland. Through their eyes we see the rise of religious fundamentalism and intolerance, the ethnic cleansing of the Hindu population of the valley, and the recruitment of a generation to jihad. And, amid the fighting, families continue to try and educate their children, find work, and protect their physical and mental well-being, while attempting to build some kind of future beyond the annihilation of their old way of life. In The Valley of Mist is an extraordinary story of family survival, at the heart of a conflict within and beyond the Muslim world.

Kashmir's long war: one family's extraordinary story

In the Valley of Mist

Justine

Kashmir's Long War : One Family's Extraordinary Story

Roman

Haus der Wunder

Life on a Delhi Daily

Scoop-wallah

On a houseboat moored on Nagin Lake in the Valley of Kashmir, Gracie Singh, an aging Yorkshirewoman, has been living out her widowhood since the death of her Indian husband, fashioning herself a new family with two Kashmiri women, Suriya and her daughter Lila, who tend to her in her dotage. Reprint.

The Wonder House

Justine Hardy

About

Books

Join the club