J&K: Last tonga in Srinagar rolls again, 70-year-old keeps past alive | India News
Srinagar: Clip-Clop. Hoofs pound the asphalt. As a horse-drawn carriage slips into traffic, the engines grow quiet as if it has been forgotten.Ghulam Rasul Kumar reins his tonga through Srinagar’s old town, a lonely throwback to the crowd of honks and headlights. At 70, he’s back on the roads he once left behind when the horse-drawn carriages stopped paying.“I have had a license since 1968. I was 12,” he said, holding up a paper from another era – “Sadiq Sahib’s time… what else is needed.” [late Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq, CM from 1965 to 1971]Kumar resigned in 1986. Returned last year. It became a curiosity overnight. Tourists boarded the ship, influencers filmed reels, photojournalists followed her through narrow lanes. CM Omar Abdullah posted about him on X. For many young riders this is not transportation. It’s memory on wheels.Then the April Pehelgam terror attack. The tourists are gone. Earnings have dried up. Kumar stopped again.Earlier this month, he returned – a horse with a fine black coat brought from Sopore in north Kashmir, a carriage with a bright canopy from Anantnag in south Kashmir – consolidating a trade that refuses to die quietly.He does not charge any fixed rent. “Pay what you want,” he told the riders.Tall, lean, dark glasses, he looks younger than his years. He talks about—the road, the traffic, the loss. “This road was not a road, it was a stream called Nala Mar,” he was saying with the outstretched reins of Bohri Kadl-Sekidafa.Near Nawa Kadal Bridge, sound is slow. Silence takes over. “My two sons drowned in this river, the river took my two sons.”He moves on. The voice is steady. “There were vehicles then, but not like today. Very few had cars.”Drivers now slow down, not out of annoyance but out of curiosity. A Tonga is a sight in modern Srinagar. Kumar wants one thing—patience. “There are no brakes,” he said. “People should be considered.” They are. The honks around him softened.His favorite stories are of other times – when tongas lined the stands across the city, when tourist reception centers were crowded with horse-drawn carriages, when ministers enjoyed rides that he still calls “luxurious”.In the city that went, Kumar stayed. “Last of the Tongas”, people call out to the tinkling of bells and the drumming of hoofs to a slow, steady beat – a sound from the 1930s to 1960s when such vehicles ruled the streets of Srinagar. Traffic now swallows the echo, but for a few fleeting minutes, the city listens to its own past roll.
