High up on the road that runs between Srinigar and Leh is a town that every traveller to India has seen a hundred times while bouncing across chunks of country on the springless seats of local buses. You have watched countless chubby heroes and heroines bouncing around its slopes and pretty tree-lined paths in a string of over-coloured, under-directed Hindi films. And for 17 hours on the loop those Hindi films blared out to the happy passengers. They merrily nodded along to the soundtracks, as you pushed a goat out of your face and tried to ignore the combined essences of the farmyard and vomit. Hence the piece of advice we all pass on to those who have not been to India before:

‘Take earplugs.’

‘Do Indians snore a lot?’ The Indian innocent asks.

‘They do, but you will need them for travelling on buses.’

I use my earplugs all the time in Kashmir now. The Hindi film location on the Srinigar-Leh road is no longer the honeymooners paradise that it once was, and no bhangra Bollywood dance sequences have been filmed there for several years . The nights I was there I slept with earplugs to lessen the sound of shelling. The young officer from the Rashtriya Rifles regiment who had been assigned to look after me asked me why I was putting them in. I told him I had not been able to sleep for the previous three nights because of the shelling. I was so tired I was not sure whether I had just been hallucinating about Joan Collins on a waterbed in a scene from The Bitch or whether the shelling was getting to me.

‘I think I have stopped noticing,’ the young officer said.

When he was looking after me in April 2000 he had been up in Kashmir for 18 months without leave, right through a major conflict between Pakistan and India that ran from May until July 1999, and then right through the heightened border tension when General Pervez Musharraf led the coup in Pakistan in October 1999.

‘Before the coup in October last I knew that if I did not have leave soon I would go mad. Now it is so long I feel numb. My wife had a baby during the war in June last year and so far I have only seen snaps of my son. I hope that it will be possible to be home for his first birthday,’ the young captain said, trying to smile.

He referred to the fighting before the coup as a war. The rest of the world had called it a conflict. India has marked it down as a war because the Indian Army made the most strategic gains. It was their war. The victory parades were hollow, many of the wounded and disabled hidden away. Kashmir is not a place of victories and defeats. It is a theatre of modern terrorist warfare, constant and unpredictable; a place where the enemy can be invisible or your own son or brother.

The young captain and I spent a month together, going through the border towns along the Line of Control, the famously fragile disputed border area of Kashmir between Pakistan and India. Sometimes we stayed in army quarters. That was fine for him, just the usual scene, but it embarrassed me because a couple of junior officers would get kicked out of their room or tent so that the female firangi (foreign) journalist could have some privacy. They had to make do doubling-up elsewhere.

The young captain and I spent a few days in a bunker when there was a local flare-up after some terrorist insurgents were reported to have crossed over from Pakistan, supposedly heading for one of the Taliban’s training camps high up above the voluptuous valley. While the shelling continued we played cards most of the time, and the boys talked about what they were going to do when they finally went on leave. They had all been in Kashmir for over a year. I was the first woman that they had lived around since they had last been on leave. They were polite and bemused. It was while we were playing cards that they talked about how much they misse