Photos by Mehlum Sadriwala

“One of the things that struck me most, other than the obvious beauty of the place, was how friendly the locals were,” says Mehlum Sadriwala as he showed the photos he had taken of Azad Kashmir — often dubbed ‘heaven on earth’ because of its breathtaking natural landscape. “Even random people I passed by on the street would say ‘hello’ when they would pass by,” he related.

Sadriwala recently went on a trip to Sharda and Keran and stopped over in Muzaffarabad. With a local guide and a camera in his hands, he documented both the place and its people. “I was told by a man not to photograph their woman,” he laughs, “that’s why I hardly have any picture of women. I could photograph little girls, but not women. In fact, the man told me that if another man refuses to let me photograph him, he will personally come forward and make sure that I get the photograph!”

He stopped by in Muzaffarabad — the capital of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and visited a local shrine there. Muzaffarabad takes its name after a chief of the Bomba dynasty called Sultan Muzaffar Khan.

A breath-taking spot at an altitude of 1,981metre, Sharda — reportedly named after a legendary princess — is shadowed by two mountain peaks called Shardi and Nardi. The entire hillside is covered in trees and a spring flows through the area as well. Sadriwala visited these places around Eid so most of the area residents were out in their best clothes, tailors under pressure to deliver newly-stitched clothes and even a boy who had gotten his hair cut for Eid — and didn’t like the end result!

He also travelled to Keran, a small area at an altitude of 1,524m, on the bank of the River Neelum. Other than the beauty of its natural landscape, Keran is famous for the fact that you can see Indian-held Kashmir on the other side of the river bank. It also makes a visitor to the area realise that although life is connected no matter what side of the river you are from, political borders keep them apart.

That was made painfully obvious to Sadriwala when he met an old man who told him that his family lived on the other side of the river but because they were in Indian-held Kashmir, he found it difficult to see them. In fact, he hadn’t been able to see them for the past 15 years. There is a small military bridge that connects both sides, and it is heavily patrolled by both Pakistani and Indian soldiers.