JAVEED SHAH

MOST ROMANTIC MEAL
The Floating Market
DAL LAKE, KASHMIR
By Alex Perry

Posted Monday, November 15, 2004; 21:00 HKT
The candle-lit dinner is one of the great romantic clichés of our time. Nobody will deny that such an event can be delightful, but don't you ever yearn to depart from the comfortable formula of strolling minstrels, roses for ladies and waiters in white gloves?

For a romantic meal that will bewitch your beloved with its originality and verve, follow these simple rules instead. Take your special friend to a war zone—specifically, Indian-administered Kashmir. Stay at one of Ghulam Butt's magnificent Claremont houseboats, which are strung along the southwestern shores of Dal Lake on the outskirts of Srinagar. Then hire a boatman to take you and your partner in a shikara—a sort of subcontinental gondola—for the dreamlike dawn ride to the morning market. Huddle together under wool blankets on a bed of cushions as you glide across the lake through the early mist, passing mosques, floating flower beds and fishermen in a journey too magical to be imagined by any screenwriter or romantic novelist. At the market, you'll find farmers and stall holders from Srinagar trading beetroot and carrots, dill and spinach, chrysanthemums and roses, over glasses of hot, milky chai. On the way back, stop at the bakery by the bridge and load up on tea and steaming roti straight from the oven. Get back under the blankets, and munch on the hot, flat bread as you return to Butt's. Breakfast in a waterborne bed to remember for a lifetime: if that's not better than another evening of bow-tied sommeliers and Baked Alaska, then what is?

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