Though I had not prayed in many years, I grew up fasting during Ramadan, and when I go through turbulence on a plane I recite the verses of the Koran that I know by heart. Friends and relatives called to convey the prayers they wanted answered in Mecca. In the evening, after he had drawn me a flowchart of the hajj and explained its rituals, I managed to put on the ihram, with the help of a YouTube video in Urdu.

Throughout the hajj, pilgrims wear an ihram, two unstitched sheets of white cloth that resemble a shroud, so my father took me to a store in Srinagar’s center that had a section for hajj gear.

South Asian Muslim men who have performed the pilgrimage are respectfully referred to as Haaji Sahib. They saved up for years and travelled to Mecca in their fifties and sixties, after they had put their children through college and built a house. For many of my middle-class family’s friends and acquaintances, the hajj was the only major journey that they made. Kashmir is far from the cultural landscape of Arabia, but Mecca exerted a powerful influence in my homeland. these two million people will actually be taking part in playing the game.” The pilgrimage, which draws between two million and three million people every year, has become a modern spectacle: it has been described by a Saudi Arabian Minister of Hajj as resembling “twenty Super Bowls in one stadium, when two million will come, and. In the years since his pilgrimage, air travel has replaced sea voyages instead of letters, pilgrims now send texts and e-mail photos from holy sites. When my father left, I clung to his knees, and he promised to bring me a Polaroid camera. I had never seen the sea, but a childhood of reading tales of shipwrecks had filled me with a mortal fear of it. He had travelled by bus through the Himalayas separating Kashmir from the Indian plains, taken a thirty-six-hour train journey to Bombay, and finally boarded a ship that sailed across the Arabian Sea to the port city of Jeddah. Before I went on the hajj, I flew home to Kashmir from Delhi to seek advice from my father, who had been to Mecca in 1987, as a bureaucrat supervising Indian pilgrims.

History of mecca