We weren't looking for the door. We were walking back to the cabins, and it was just there.
This was almost ten years ago — a family trip, not a solo one. We stayed at a resort in Srinagar that still doesn't feel entirely real when I think back on it: cabins scattered across the property, opening out one after another like a film set nobody had finished dressing. It was cold in the particular way Kashmir gets cold in autumn — not biting, just present, the kind of cold that makes you notice how green everything still is even as the season turns.
The door itself: teal shutters, a Kashmiri rug on the threshold gone soft with age, clay pots worn smooth at the edges from years of the same hand pushing the same way open. I stood there longer than I needed to. That was the whole point.
Kashmir in autumn does something no photograph fully captures — the chinar leaves turn amber and rust, and the valley holds onto that colour like it's trying to keep a little of it before winter takes over. Everywhere else was still green: the lawns, the pines around the cabins. The chinar was the one thing changing.
The window frame in the piece carries Khatamband, the geometric woodwork pattern you find in the ceilings of old Kashmiri homes. I moved it down — from ceiling to threshold — a small liberty, but one that roots the piece in an actual craft tradition instead of just a nice view.
Getting the light right took a few passes. Early versions kept wanting to add a warm orange sky, fighting the valley's real palette — sage green and cool morning air, with the amber kept only in the leaves where it belonged. The version that made it through resolves that tension: warm within the door, cool without, the doorway itself the exact seam between the two.
I don't remember which cabin we stayed in, or the resort's name. I remember the cold, the green that hadn't given up yet, and one door that somebody had left open long enough for me to notice it.
That's where The Green Door, Kashmir came from.