The Blood of Kashmir: Part Four — The Rugby Girls and the Restless Resistance
With my stay in Kashmir now approaching its end, I wandered down to the town’s rugby pitch to see one of the beginners girls’ squads at practice. As Waheed Para had promised, it was a great story: a ray of light befitting the beauty of my surrounds.
The girls had only been playing for a week and seemed unwilling to get too violent with one another. “I saw a video online,” one girl told me excitedly. “They were smashing into each other like cars!” They admitted that passing the ball backwards had initially struck them as counter-intuitive. “Catching” made rugby somewhat difficult to master.
But then rugby, unlike cricket or soccer, doesn’t have an overly long history in Kashmir. When I took a photo of the girls' coach, Irfan Aziz Botta, he pointed to the goal posts behind him.