But Kashmir—formally called Jammu and Kashmir— is different. Where Rajasthan (and much of central India) is sandy and dry, it is almost Alpine in appearance, with green, cloud-scraping mountains and vast blue lakes and fields sprigged with wild lavender and Queen Anne’s lace. Where most of the country is, well, hot—from the bone-baking dry heat of the desert to the flesh-melting humidity of Kerala in the south—Kashmir is cool, so cool, in fact, that in the winter the temperatures can sink to sub-zero. Where the majority of India is predominantly Hindu, it is largely Muslim, despite the fact that Islam came to the area in the fourteenth century, later than to the rest of the country. Paradoxically, it is also, especially in its architecture— whose gabled, pagoda-like rooftops resemble buildings that might look more at home 760 miles across the border, in Kathmandu, than 522 miles south, in Delhi—discernibly Buddhist, a rarity in India. (Although Buddhism was born near the Hindu holy town of Varanasi, less than one percent of the population consider themselves Buddhist today, and little of its aesthetic influence remains.)

And yet in other, essential ways, Kashmir is perfectly Indian: in the impossibility of its diversity— human and topographical; in its peculiar and distinct out-of-time-ness; and, not insignificantly, in its love of artisanry, in the perfection and timelessness of its crafts.

You might confuse the vast protected forestland of the Overa-Aru National Park for somewhere in Switzerland.

It was these crafts that I had come to see. In other words, I had come to shop. Not that I feel I ever need to justify traveling to a place to shop— to spend your time in a foreign city’s markets and boutiques is, after all, to learn about its aesthetics, its history, its local economy and daily life—but when you come to Kashmir to shop, you’re in fact following a long tradition, one that began in the Mogul era, when the emperors began spending their summers in and around what is now Srinagar, in the region’s east. This tradition continued during the British colonization, when Srinagar—today a town of 898,000—became a popular summertime retreat for the Raj’s administrators. Today, it’s a pilgrimage site for brides and celebrities, who arrive from Mumbai and Delhi in September and October to buy one of the heavily embroidered yet near-weightless pashminas that are made here and exported throughout India and around the world.

Which is how I found myself at Beigh. Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop. Here, in this room, sat five men, each leaning against a wall, stitching designs on his own shawl. Here, too, all was silent, the only sound the barely audible pluck and whoosh of a length of silk thread being pushed and pulled through wool.

Renuka Savasere, a scholar of Indian textiles and my companion on the day’s tour through the city’s ateliers, borrowed one of the men’s shawls, which was a garden of flowers: scarlets and emeralds and daffodils on a pale-gray background. One man works on only one shawl, she explained. He designs it. He stitches it. And then it will be sold. A typical Beigh shawl, Renuka said, takes at least two years to make and costs $3,000. This type of work is called kani sozni, and to see it so close is both beautiful and heartbreaking: beautiful because it is, and heartbreaking because of the way each man cradles the length of pashmina in his arms, letting it fall around his legs; heartbreaking because there is something gestational about spending so long creating one object.