Srinagar: The ceremony is simple and common. A Kashmiri Pandit lights a fire, places some herbs, clarified butter and other offerings atop it and through its peculiar alchemy the smoke purifies everything it touches.
But nothing about this Maha Yaghya ritual performed in the once-abandoned Vichar Nag shrine here on a recent Saturday night was simple. A week of downpours left the shrine's grounds waterlogged and putrid. The wood was wet and the fire would not start.
But most peculiar was the ceremony's location, astride one of the world's most fractious religious fault lines, between two nuclear-armed neighbors who have fought three wars, two of them over the land on which the shrine sits.
Twenty years ago, nearly 400,000 Kashmiri Pandits fled the Kashmir Valley, fearful of a separatist insurgency by the area's Muslim majority. Now they are trickling back, a sign to many here that the Kashmir Valley, after years of violence and turmoil, is settling in to an uneasy but hopeful peace.
The valley's upper-caste Hindus, Pandits as they are known, are reconnecting with their ancestral home, a few to stay and even larger numbers to visit. More than a dozen shrines have reopened in recent years, said Sanjay Tickoo, a Kashmiri Pandit who never left the valley and is now trying to entice those who left to return.
Their presence was once part of what made the Kashmir Valley a unique and idyllic patch of India, filled with apple orchards and shimmering fields of saffron framed by spiky, snow-capped peaks. A well-to-do but not overly powerful minority, the Pandits lived for centuries in relative harmony with their Muslim neighbors.
Kashmir's mosaic of relatively peaceful coexistence first began to crack during the partition of British India, in 1947. But it was more than a decade of insurgency beginning in 1989 that turned the region into the battleground of the fierce rivalry between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan, who each control a portion of Kashmir.
Though not all fears or tensions from the past have dissipated, almost everyone here professes to want the Pandits to come back to the valley. Because they had lived here for generations, there is no sense that their return is intended to dilute the region's Muslim majority.
"The overwhelming majority of Kashmiris believe the place is really incomplete without its diversity," said Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. "It is an important milestone in our return to normalcy if they begin to come back."
M. L. Dhar, a 75-year-old Kashmiri Pandit who lives in a suburb of New Delhi, returned recently to Kashmir for the first time. He was astounded at the warm welcome he received from the valley's Muslims.
"I have never been as peaceful as I have been here in the last seven days," he said.
Mr. Dhar lived around the corner from the Vichar Nag shrine and was stunned to find it a wreck. For years troops from the Border Security Force camped out on the grounds of the shrine. They left several years ago, abandoning it to the elements. Today it is withered, all shattered windows and peeling paint garlanded with razor wire.
A group of activists, led by Mr. Tickoo and others, hoped the purification ritual would draw Kashmiri Pandits from outside the valley.
Mr. Tickoo never left the valley. As most of his neighbors packed up to leave in 1990, Mr. Tickoo, then 22, asked his mother if they should go, too.
"She said, 'Lets wait another week,' " Mr. Tickoo said. "That carried from weeks to months to years."
Last year Mr. Tickoo completed a survey of the remaining Pandits in the valley, counting fewer than 3,000.
"From birth to death Kashmiri Pandits have our own culture, our own rituals," Mr. Tickoo said. "Outside of Kashmir you cannot be a Kashmiri Pandit."
Why the Pandits fled, and whether their departure was a hasty overreaction or a rational response to a mortal threat, is debated to this day. Dozens of Pandits were killed in 1989 and 1990, according to government records, and anti-Hindu rhetoric from separatist militants was on the rise.
Now, two decades later, both sides of the religious divide wonder whether they erred. Gulam Rasoul, a retired police officer who lives near the newly reopened temple, said both sides shared blame.
"They ran away, and we drove them out," he said. "Now they regret it, and we also regret the loss."
He quoted an old Kashmiri saying. "Kashmir is like a Mughal garden," he said, referring to the immaculately tended gardens, full of roses, lilies and violets that dot the landscape here. "If you have only one tree in the garden it will have no fragrance. When the Pandits left, the fragrance was gone."
But platitudes belie deep divisions. Many Muslims see Pandits as more loyal to India than to Kashmir, while many Pandits view Muslims as not-so-secret agents of Pakistan.
Some Pandits, especially those who fled farthest from the valley, have never been back and continue to think it is unsafe to return. And they had little financial incentive to come back. Many worked for the government and kept receiving their salaries in exile.
L. N. Dhar, a doctor who lives in New Delhi, left Kashmir with his extended family in 1990. He opened a clinic and settled into an upscale neighborhood in the city's southern suburbs.
"These people had guns, they were free to shoot anyone, kill anybody," Dr. Dhar said. "It was an atmosphere of terror. We had no option but to leave that place."
Leaving Kashmir, he said, has turned out to be cultural suicide, he said. Scattered Pandits find it hard to keep their traditions and rituals alive. Their children barely speak Kashmiri, if at all.
"Once these links are gone out, identity is completely lost," he said.
Despite the feeling that militancy is unlikely to return anytime soon, few Pandits have permanently returned. It was always an affluent and well-educated community, so many Pandits are well established elsewhere in India and beyond.
At the Vichar Nag shrine, as the harmonium wailed and the rising chorus of old Kashmiri songs filled the air, Muslim onlookers marveled at the return of their long-lost neighbors.
"I have not seen these people before, so I am curious," said Nazim Amin Butt, a 22-year-old business school student. He watched with rapt attention as the chanting priest daubed saffron, red, pink and blue powder on the earthen fire pit, and placed heaps of flower petals at the head of the lingam, the phallic icon of Lord Shiva.
"It is not a problem that they come here," Mr. Butt said. "They come from this place just like us. They belong here."