Читать книгу The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began - Adrian Levy - Страница 14

They weren’t the type to brag. But Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had been to many places, far more than most of their friends. Soon after getting together back in 1985, they had concluded that in this life there was no point treading water. With no children between them, Don, forty-two, and Jane, forty, had made the most of their shared wanderlust, embarking on six ambitious foreign expeditions in the past eight years. Now, on a summer’s evening in late June 1995, Jane was packing once again, surveying the items laid out around the bedroom of their large, high-ceilinged cedarwood home in the Pacific north-west, ticking them off on a checklist: money belts, passports, tickets and travellers’ cheques, a well-thumbed edition of the Lonely Planet Trekking in the Indian Himalayas, preparing for their latest foreign foray with the clinical confidence of the well-travelled. Memories flitted back and forth – Switzerland, Bolivia, Turkey, India, Nepal. They lived for the wilds, preferably high up in some mountain range. She loved her job as a physical education teacher at a local elementary school, but Jane lived for these summer voyages.

It was a passion for the outdoors that had thrown her and Don together, and as she got ready for another adventure she found herself thinking how strange it was that they had turned out to be such a perfect fit, as back at the start she had not been at all sure about him, and had not thought there would ever be a them. Nowadays she loved Don’s strong, calm demeanour, this dependable climber with a sinewy frame and a rugged beard, who brought others through risky situations with a joke and a squeeze of the arm.

On their wedding day in 1991, Don described them as climbing partners. ‘When you’re tied to someone with a rope,’ Jane would later say, ‘you get to know them very well, and you learn about trust.’

At home they were sober, law-abiding citizens, from solid backgrounds: her father had been a scoutmaster, his a cattle rancher. Out in the wilds, they were both risk-takers. Don had hacked up Mount McKinley in Alaska and taken a tumble at Montana’s Rainbow Falls. Jane had traversed the volcanic glacier fields of Mount Rainier and taught cross-country skiing at Spokane Falls Community College. On a clear day, Rainier, the highest peak in the Cascade Range, was just about visible west of Spokane, a laid-back, outdoorsy sort of city on the eastern fringes of Washington state, where the couple lived and worked. ‘The Mountain’, as people called Rainier, with its three peaks, Columbia Crest, Point Success and Liberty Cap, served as a constant reminder of why they were there. ‘Mount Rainier had a special meaning for him,’ said Jane. Don had been brought up in Spokane, whose motto was ‘Near Nature, Near Perfect’, and the mountains, lakes and woods grounded him like no other place, he said.

Most weekends Don and Jane went out of town. They’d head for the Cascades or the Rockies, whose peaks delineated the skyline to the east and north, trekking, skiing or kayaking with friends, many of them doctors and nurses who had trained or worked with Don, a neuropsychologist, or were old classmates from Spokane’s Shadle Park High. On weekday nights Jane liked to cycle with her fellow teachers and friends from the Spokane Mountaineers, whose eight hundred or so members belonged to the region’s oldest outdoor association. ‘What we did was with the Spokane Mountaineers and through the Spokane Mountaineers,’ she says. For two years she had served as club president, one of the first women to do so, and everyone quickly learned not to get on her wrong side. ‘Don’t bullshit Jane,’ the Mountaineers whispered. Don, as fit as a man a decade younger, joked that he was the First Husband.

Once a month a group of Mountaineers would gather at Jane and Don’s, in the Spokane Valley suburb of Northwood, to plan the next club outing over an exotic dinner. The shady wooden house on stilts with verandas back and front, surrounded by Ponderosa pines, its large sunken living room painted blue and red to match a rug the couple had bought in India, was filled with photos of Jane, smiling or waving against a snowy backdrop, and mementos from the couple’s foreign voyages: Tibetan rugs and prayer flags, tribal masks and recipe books from some far-flung place or other. It was an easy spot to hang out, Don’s golden retrievers, Homer and Bodhi (short for bodhisattva, an enlightened being in Buddhism), sprawled across the floor, Jane walking visitors around her latest botanical acquisitions, displayed in pots along the red-brick path that wound around their garden, Don conjuring some Indian or Thai recipe in the kitchen. ‘You move the flowers around so often you ought to put them on roller skates,’ he used to joke out of the window.

In the summer, most of this close-knit group went further afield, and this year Jane and Don were heading back to the Himalayas, which they had explored twice before. The world’s largest mountain range was a place you could visit time and again, and still know little about it, Don told friends. This time Jane was packing extra carefully, as she had a gut feeling that things might get choppy. They were heading for the mountains of Kashmir. From what they had read, this trip would come with additional risks, as the ranges lay on a political fault-line: a disputed border between warring neighbours India and Pakistan. For the past six years the state had been enmeshed in a local insurgency that pitted Muslim rebels calling for independence against the Indian security forces, which accused them of being in the pay of Pakistan.

Unsettling stories of political and religious turmoil had recently emanated from there, and for several weeks Don and Jane had debated whether to go at all. But they had done their homework, listened to other people’s views and read widely, before concluding that this was, like so many others they had negotiated, a risk worth taking. And now Jane was surveying their kit with a sense of anticipation.

Don’s royal-blue fleecy climbing hat, his blue Gore-Tex Moonstone walking trousers with the black inset panels above the knee, an extra-thick blue Patagonia top. On top of the pile she laid thermal underwear, lightweight T-shirts and rainproof gear. As she ticked off the items, Jane thought how among the many things that had drawn her to Don was something that others found galling: his impulse to order. They were both inveterate list-makers. Hers were invariably practical. His were a mix of function and aspiration, scribbles on yellow legal pads that he left scattered around the house: skiing once a year, cooking the perfect Indian meal, semi-retirement by the age of fifty (which only left another eight years to get his work–life balance sorted out) and, most importantly, an annual mind-expanding and physically demanding expedition. Climbers are like that, he would say. Embracing order so as to cope with the disorder, fetishising the planning in order to counter the random. It was the same with their equipment. Although he said he hated technology, he always bought the latest climbing gear and gadgets. And she loved laying it down, cleaning it, counting it out. This time especially, they needed to get the preparation right.

There was a satisfying rhythm to Jane and Don’s life. He was ‘the philosopher’, she ‘the shipwright’. He sought experiences, while she wrangled with logistics. Prepping for these trips, Don always beefed up on the region’s spirituality and history, while Jane wanted to know how many hours it would take to climb to a particular col. At home, he cooked. She rearranged the garden. He took the photos. She put them into frames. He wanted a crystal ball. She preferred a new set of skis. On holiday, he talked to most anyone, while she took notes and crammed little keepsakes into her rucksack. She was capable and devoted to Don, whom privately she called ‘sweetie’, while publicly she remained fiercely independent, retaining her maiden name. The students at Arlington Elementary viewed her with a mixture of bafflement and awe. ‘Stimulating the nation’s young hearts and minds,’ she said to herself every morning in mock-declamatory style before setting off for school.

With her tight brown curls and turned-up nose, at first glance Jane had an impish air. But to those who knew her well, she was the more driven of the two. Among their circle, many had watched, doubtfully, as Jane had made her first attempts to infect Don with the travel bug. She had gone on foreign-exchange trips at school and travelled across the United States from her native Pennsylvania before pitching up in the Pacific north-west. She was already an explorer, and wanted to partner up with someone who felt the same way.

Don was many things, but until Jane came along nobody would have described him as a man of the world. He was of pure north-west country stock, his father, Claude ‘Red’ Hutchings, having been a tough-talking Idaho cattle-rancher, originally from Coeur d’Alene in the neighbouring county. Don was closer to his mother, Donna, a nurse, and there was a bond between mother and son that had its roots in the loss of his twin brother, who had died at just three days old. But Red had been intent on shaping his surviving son’s earliest memories. Almost as soon as Don could walk, Red had him in the saddle, dressing him in a cowboy hat and boots. Sitting astride his own palomino, Don would accompany his father on week-long ‘gentlemen on horseback’ rides, as he called them, into the wild. But Don wasn’t cut out to be a cowboy.

Instead, a freak accident helped him find his niche. After flying through a car windscreen during high school, he spent months in hospital being put back together. ‘With cuts from ear to ear, tongue damage and teeth knocked out, he thought he looked like Frankenstein,’ said Jane. When he had recovered, Don determined to help others who had also been to the brink. He would follow his mother into the health-care sector. As soon as he was old enough he grew a beard, to conceal his scars.

After school and a BSc from Washington State University, Don opted for neuropsychology, a specialism that appealed to a man who had had many months to explore his inner self while in hospital. For a while it seemed as if he would be a student forever, gaining a Masters and then a doctorate, never straying too far from home. But eventually he made a break, taking up a position as a hospital psychologist in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on the other side of the country. He married for the first time, a psychology student from West Virginia, and together they attempted to renovate a thirty-acre abandoned farm in Pennsylvania. Both projects failed in the end, and Don returned alone and disconsolate to Spokane in 1984.

He found a job as a neuropsychologist at the Sacred Heart. Scott Earl Bently, a former patient who had suffered a severe head injury and paralysis in a car accident, was in awe of him: ‘Don was the catalyst that moved my life away from institutionalised health care to a life of happiness and freedom by integrating me back into society and by remaining my friend, talking with me about hiking, camping, climbing, and other things we were both interested in. I’ll never forget him for that, and I thought then he would remain my friend for my entire life’. Such was Don’s enthusiasm for this esoteric field that the hospital was persuaded to open a dedicated head injuries unit, the first in the region. Soon other local hospitals did the same, bringing Don on board as an advisor.

But the mountains remained his passion. After returning from Pennsylvania he had joined the Spokane Mountaineers, finding a release at high altitude. Soon he was signing up to ice-climbing seminars, instructors’ workshops and winter-camping seminars, and learning Telemark skiing. At five feet eight he had been too short to fulfil his dream of becoming a professional basketball player or footballer, but here was something he could do. Within a few months he was elected to the club’s climbing committee, soon becoming its chairman. One climbing friend described his ‘unbeatable combination of moral fibre that is absolute high-carbon steel’.

Don had not been looking for romance, but through the club he met Jane Schelly. Born and brought up in Orefield, a small town in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Jane had left the flat landscape of the east as soon as she got out of college in 1976, and headed for the wilderness of the Pacific north-west. She had earned a reputation for fearlessness, and could outpace many of the men in the club. Luck ran in her favour too, said climbing friends: ‘Jane is the type who always lands on her feet.’ She and Don had their first tête-à-tête waist-deep in the Jerry Johnson Hot Springs near Lolo Pass, during a club trip to Idaho in October 1984. ‘Don and I sat in the hot pool and chitchatted,’ Jane remembered. ‘He didn’t tell me for many years that he thought, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.”’ Afterwards, Don signed up to a country ski class Jane was running out of Spokane Falls Community College. They dated ‘a bit’, but Don was wary of messing things up again, and they did not come together until the following October. ‘We took the same hot springs trip, and clicked,’ says Jane.

Behind Don’s practical façade Jane discovered a romantic, who took her away from school on Friday nights: bed and breakfast on the bay at San Francisco; Point No Point on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula; an inn in Oregon overlooking the Columbia River. ‘I just couldn’t imagine finding someone as good as Don,’ says Jane. ‘He was a very gentle and sensitive person.’

Don soon became a leader, arranging ‘crazy weekends’, pitching himself and other club members into ‘endurance stunts’, like the time he bivouacked up the East Ridge of Wyoming’s 13,775-foot Grand Teton to watch the Northern Lights. ‘Don got me so fired up about ice climbing,’ recalled Bill Erler, a close friend. ‘We’d just motor up stuff.’ He also gained a reputation as a man who could operate under extreme pressure. Don ‘always tried to do more than his share’, and was ‘a talented and stable force’, according to club member and friend George Neal. Inevitably there were knocks and scrapes, like the winter’s day at Montana’s Rainbow Falls when Don fell and sprained his ankle. Telling the rest of his group to go on without him, he had dragged himself down across a rockslide and to his car, risking permanent injury.

Jane bided her time, waiting for the right moment to widen their horizons. It came in 1988, when they spent four weeks trekking on the arduous Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, in the shadow of Mount Everest. It was Don’s first big foreign trip, and only the second time he had left the US. He could not get enough of the Himalayas, which sparked a fascination in him with all things Asian. Soon his upstairs office in Northwood was crammed with books about climbing in the subcontinent, Tibetan Buddhism and Indian philosophy, yoga and meditation. Most evenings he could be found sprawled across the living-room floor, surrounded by books and maps, Indian music tinkling out of the speakers, plotting the next foray to the East.

The only problem was synchronising their lives. While Jane had the long summer school holidays, Don could never take more than two weeks off. For a while they turned this into part of the adventure, Jane going on ahead and rendezvousing with Don at some distant destination, like the time she toured alone around Thailand and India, having arranged to meet him outside a post office in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. When Don quit his job at the Sacred Heart to set up Spokane’s first independent neuropsychology practice, he did it mainly so he and Jane could spend more time travelling together.

They got round to marrying in 1991, a home-made affair in their back garden, literally tying themselves together with climbing ropes looped into a double fisherman’s knot. It could have been corny, but that was Don and Jane, bound to each other by the things they loved. The act, for Jane, ‘symbolised the dependence of each of us upon the other’. Afterwards, Don gave a set of Tibetan bells to the chaplain in thanks. For their honeymoon they returned to the Himalayas, this time visiting Ladakh, a solemn, arid mountain landscape dotted with prayer flags and Buddhist monasteries in India’s far northern Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state. Don came home mesmerised by what they had seen, and also by what they had heard of another nearby destination, the Kashmir Valley, that lay three hundred miles to the west, a place of ancient gods with a landscape shaped by hunters and poets.

Four summers later, Jane was packing for the Kashmir Valley. This trip would be a culmination of many things: ten years of climbing, ten years being together, almost a decade of foreign exploration. They had decided there was no better location in which to celebrate.

The journey was well within their physical capabilities. Jane had worked it out. The twelve-day trek would, they hoped, fill their heads and hearts. If the maps were accurate – Don had struggled to find anything half decent – they hoped to cover over a hundred miles, which seemed about right for the kind of weather and the severity of the inclines they expected to encounter.

Don read how the wilderness of glacial chutes and iridescent mountain lakes had a way of punishing trekkers, while serving as home to hard-pressed nomadic gujjars, dards and bakarwals, the native herders, hunters and cowboys who wore kohl round their eyes to ward off evil spirits, their children bound to the backs of their ponies with rope. Through a silent landscape they moved in slender single-file convoys to summer pastures of lush, flower-filled valleys and on to the high Himalayas, a medieval caravan of maroon robes and scarves. Up high, the temperatures careened from the seriously sub-zero to the high forties. There was a dry heat that cracked skin, and a wet cold that blistered everything. Sometimes the wind dropped, only to slam into you like a pantechnicon.

But then, many times before Don and Jane had started off from somewhere beneath a cobalt sky, only to end up in a white-out. Jane had read that it was not exceptional for the highest passes in Kashmir to become blocked by snow even in summer. At times they might need to double back. She knew that, warming and cooling, dehydrating and freezing, the mountains would be punishing, but their years of experience should get them through the worst of it. In Kashmir, where the rich pastureland typically remained frost-free from May to September, they would probably walk for ten hours a day. In the upper reaches, where they would have to negotiate fields of scree that would punish their ankles and knees, they might go down to eight hours. But they had time.

Their destination was a high-altitude ice cave called Amarnath that was dedicated to Lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and transformation. A giant, gaping hole, it looked as if a meteorite had slammed into the side of a mountain. While Amarnath was virtually unknown in the West, it was revered across India as an ancient Hindu pilgrimage site, to which hundreds of thousands of devotees flocked annually. Some came by foot, others by pony, a few on their hands and knees, the least able piggybacking on local guides, everyone scrabbling to scale the mountains so as to demonstrate the depth of their faith.

Don was drawn by the collective act of devotion, and loved the idea of going on Shiva’s trail, but he and Jane intended to arrive at the end of June, before the main pilgrimage season began the following month. That way they would have the route to themselves. After Amarnath they would head west, following the ice-water streams down to the lush pasture of the Lidderwat Valley, where mountain flowers gorged on snowmelt, according to the guidebooks. There they would pitch their tents at a legendary campsite that travellers simply referred to as ‘the Meadow’, a velvet green cleft at a little over ten thousand feet, with an icy river running through it and enveloped on all sides by conifer forests. There was something prosaic, minimalist even, about the sound of the Meadow. Don and Jane looked forward to pitching camp up high, surrounded by aromatic mountain pasture.

By late evening, Jane had placed tidy little heaps of possessions all over the bedroom floor. Now she slid each one of them into a separate waterproof pouch, working on a maximum load of fifteen kilos per person. Using the vacuum cleaner, she sucked the air out of each before slotting the shrivelled jellyfishes they now resembled into the new frameless purple-and-red Sundog daypacks she and Don had bought during a recent club trip to Montana. For Jane, packing was an art, the trip broken down into components, each of them carefully arranged like evidence at a crime scene, then layered in a bag that just might save you one day. Plasters, antiseptic spray, teabags, Don’s favourite Snickers bars; and should she bring some more Imodium? Could you get Imodium over there? She did not know, and threw in an extra packet.

The most important thing was her journal, in which she would note down the route, the ascents, the views, as well as snippets of lore picked up from locals and information on flowers and plants. Sometimes she enjoyed the quiet moments after dusk just as much as the walking, a time to lounge across their sleeping bags making notes, with books scattered around, her head propped against Don’s flat stomach, their limbs heavy from exertion. This was a real existence, the living that gave purpose to life.

Batteries, waterproof bags, first-aid kit, rolls of film; she counted the final items off her list. Don’s post-expedition slide shows at the house had become a tradition among the Spokane Mountaineers. They were nothing flashy, just a chance for Don to cook, try out the latest micro-brewery beers and give a talk. He loved to share what he had seen. Some people didn’t get that Don and Jane were just who they appeared to be. They had no interest in getting one over on anybody, or crowing about their far-flung adventures. There was no edge to them. Their lives were about getting out and making it back sufficiently healthy to tell others what they had experienced.

As she finished packing, Jane reminded herself to remind Don about his black-and-yellow Casio altimeter. He would be sorely disappointed if he got halfway over Mahagunas Top at fifteen thousand feet, only to realise he’d left it at home in a bedside drawer.

Finally she stood back and surveyed her handiwork, pondering the things that were not yet sorted out. Was this really a good time to go to Kashmir? What did they actually know? They had both had a gnawing sense of unease that had kicked in after they had bought the tickets, as they read that the region was in a state of flux, a worrying instability that became more real to them with every new snippet of information they gleaned from newspapers and magazines.

Don knew from his research that as a geographical and spiritual crossroads between the Arab world to the west, China to the north and the tropical subcontinent of India to the south, Kashmir had always been steeped in one conflict or another. Its recent troubles stemmed from the Partition of India in 1947, when the predominantly Muslim principality, whose residents longed for independence, had been split in two after both India and the newly founded Pakistan claimed it. Since then the two countries had fought three wars in their attempts to gain the other’s share, in 1947, 1965 and 1971, with the Muslim population of the Kashmir Valley caught between the aspirations of the warring neighbours, and held in a firm grip by the Indian government in New Delhi.

In the years after the 1971 conflict, Kashmir had settled down for a time. Srinagar, its summer capital, became a place of pilgrimage for Western backpackers, the valley eulogised by the likes of Led Zeppelin, whose music evoked a mystic kingdom of the mind, a lyrical paradise wreathed in hash smoke, drawing in thousands of visitors who put up on intricately carved wooden houseboats moored on the city’s tranquil lakes, Dal and Nagin. Between the lotus gardens, floating markets and bobbling villages glided some of the world’s most persistent salesmen, touting shawls woven from antelope hair, almond biscuits, semiprecious stones, papier-mâché boxes and sticky gobbets of dark charas from their hand-painted shikara boats, against a backdrop of the jagged Zabarwan mountains.

But these days Kashmir had an undercurrent of tension, especially after reports that New Delhi had rigged the state assembly polls of 1987, so as to box in the independence lobby. This ham-fisted act of muscle-flexing had gone largely unnoticed in the West, but had led to an explosion of protests in the state that had developed into an armed insurgency. For the past six years, bloody clashes had been erupting between Kashmiri Muslim youths calling for freedom from India, and the Indian security forces sent by New Delhi to neuter them. India accused Pakistan of exacerbating the dissent. Pakistan slammed India for triggering a revolution through its brutal crackdowns, as army bunkers rose up on the street corners of Srinagar, and post offices and cinemas were requisitioned as barracks and interrogation centres.

What little news leaked out had served to deter much of the foreign tourist trade. Rather than Kashmir, stoners and their disciples, adventurers and refugees from the West now headed for India’s Parvati Valley, or far south-west to the beaches and freshwater lagoons of Goa and Kerala. The number of tourists visiting the mountain state shrank from eighty thousand a year in the mid-eighties to fewer than ten thousand in 1994, leaving the houseboat owners destitute, dreaming of a time when their paradise had paid the bills.

Jane and Don knew they would have to be careful. But then, ascending a mountain was no different. ‘We did a lot of preparation before we left,’ Jane said. ‘We knew there was some turmoil in Kashmir, but we had been in northern India in 1991, and what we had heard about the Kashmir area from various people was that … there were no problems trekking in the areas where we were most interested.’ But in those days it was difficult to find up-to-date and accurate information about such a remote area without actually going there. ‘Don had recently purchased a computer for work, but he hated technology and we were not on email yet,’ Jane recalled. ‘Thus, we had limited access to news of that area.’ Jane and Don decided to leave for Kashmir with maps in hand, ready to switch destinations should they become spooked by the ground realities.

A few nights before they left for New Delhi, Don took out a notepad. ‘The Don Hutchings yellow-legal-pad method of decision-making’, as friend George Neal called it. The biggest ‘pro’ was the weather. Don’s work commitments meant they could only trek at the end of June that year, and for a maximum of two weeks. That ruled out possibly safer destinations like Nepal, which would be lashed by monsoons at that time. For Jane, there was also Kashmir’s flora, which she had read was second to none: wild mountain strawberries, lilac and forget-me-nots.

The obvious ‘con’ was the unrest. What to say about that? Don made a list.

1 According to the limited information they had been able to pick up, the trouble was largely restricted to the northern and western portions of the Kashmir Valley, close to the border with Pakistan, far from where they intended to trek in the mountains rising to the east of the valley.

2 None of the violence had been aimed at foreigners.

‘We had heard consistently that as long as you stayed out of the central part of Srinagar, the summer capital, out of the old part of the city … there were typically no problems,’ Jane said. Although they would have to fly in to Srinagar, they planned to stay only as long as it took them to negotiate a taxi ride south to the hill-station town of Pahalgam sixty miles away, the starting point for many treks.

Don and Jane invited some Spokane Mountaineers over for a farewell dinner. They were leaving with open minds and a back-up plan, they told them. Mount Rainier was probably far more taxing than anything they would encounter in Kashmir, Don said, reminding them that in 1981 an ice plug had fallen from above, entombing eleven climbers traversing the Ingraham Glacier on the mountain’s eastern flank, the worst mountaineering accident in American history. And Don and Jane had erred on the side of caution once before, and regretted it. Having travelled to La Paz in Bolivia so as to climb to Machu Picchu, they had been warned away by local officials, only to discover from other climbers that the route had been safe.

‘We’re going to look into it,’ Don told his friends as he bade them goodbye. ‘We’ll ask the authorities there: the Indian government tourism bureau and the American Embassy. We’ll see what they have to say.’ He had already tried to call the Indian Consulate in San Francisco several times, but had been unable to get through. He had another worry too. Jane had recently injured her shoulder, and part of the reason they had decided to head for Pahalgam was because they had read that there they could hire ponies to carry their equipment. ‘That was the first choice, as I wouldn’t have to carry a heavy pack,’ Jane said. They promised to make some final checks upon arrival in New Delhi. ‘It only seemed logical that the Indians would know best what was safe or unsafe.’ For a seasoned traveller like Jane Schelly, asking people on the ground for advice seemed the logical thing to do.

India even confuses Indians. And in June 1995, a 48°C heatwave was cooking everything, including the roads, chewing them up, licking deep concave bowls into the tarmac, while the humidity that made the night queen blossom like nowhere else in the world also peeled the stucco off buildings. Jane had taken the sensible precaution of ringing ahead and booking a hotel with air-conditioning for the two nights they intended to stay in New Delhi.

But nothing had prepared them for the wall of opportunists waiting in the arrivals hall of the old Indira Gandhi International Airport, all of them with an idea, and an address. A traveller needed a rude strategy to deal with them, a fixed plan to stick by, a determined walk that gave not a scintilla of encouragement to the waiting crowd. Weakness was punished. Politeness was exploited. Indecision was manna for the middle man. Born-and-raised New Delhi-ites blanked strangers and brushed aside enquiries from touts. Surrounded by the throng, Jane and Don found their contingency plan failing the minute they arrived in New Delhi on 25 June 1995. The chaos bowled them over.

Weakened by ‘thirty-five hours in the air’, as Jane put it, no sooner had they collected their luggage than they were lured into a conversation with reps from a private-accommodation agency and convinced that their pre-booked hotel was a bad choice. Hustled off to a different place in another part of town, Jane and Don began their Indian journey in confusion. It happened to everyone, Don said afterwards. It was no big deal, Jane murmured. They had seen this sort of thing before.

The phone in their hotel room did not work, and the next morning Jane and Don headed out into the mêlée of New Delhi’s streets. A taxi they had not ordered was waiting to take them to a private tourism agency they did not want to do business with. ‘We knew there was another scam going on,’ recalled Jane. ‘But we said to ourselves, “OK, we’ll go and we’ll listen, but we’ll be watchful.”’ At the agency, the staff proved helpful, and seemed knowledgeable about Kashmir. They assured them it was safe. The main focus of the insurgency, as Don and Jane had already heard, was far away, concentrated in the western portion of the valley near where Pakistan began, a ceasefire line so disputed that neither side could agree to call it a ‘border’. Instead, it was known as the Line of Control (LoC).

This sounded reassuring. But they wanted a second opinion, and set off for the government tourism office. ‘They didn’t deny there were problems,’ Jane said, but the general message was the same: the insurgency was very localised. Stay out of downtown Srinagar and everything would be fine. Most importantly, the trekking areas were safe. Finally, they spent an hour trawling backpacker hangouts, searching for anyone who had just returned from Kashmir. There were plenty, and those they spoke to had all had a trouble-free time. ‘They seemed to love it, and gave glowing reports of the beauty,’ said Jane.

Even though both of them were now flagging, Don insisted on one more stop. They took a ride to leafy Chanakyapuri, New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave, to get advice at the US Embassy. ‘It was closed for lunch, and we were intimidated by the long lines of people,’ Jane said. ‘It was hot as heck – we were jetlagged, and had been told at the Indian government tourist office that the area was OK for tourists.’ They gave up, and returned to the hotel. ‘If there had been a red flag at any point, then we would have researched further,’ said Jane.

As Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings began to plot their Kashmir plan in the spring of 1995, Julie and Keith Mangan, from Teesside in the north-east of England, were packing for the trip of their lives, one that would also lead them to the Meadow. Casting their eyes around the world for somewhere to explore in the run-up to their tenth wedding anniversary, Julie and Keith, both aged thirty-three, had decided on India. This would be their first time in the subcontinent. In fact, it would be their first exotic trip together anywhere, a holiday they had long promised each other, having married at a time when they had been too broke to have the kind of dream honeymoon they had both wanted.

India, and Kashmir in particular, sounded very far from the close-knit and hard-working Teesside city of Middlesbrough, where Julie and Keith had grown up. With its flinty vistas of pipelines and cooling towers, it wasn’t pretty, but Middlesbrough people seldom left. They worked in the vast foundries and industrial plants of companies like British Steel. Among them had been Keith’s father, Charlie Mangan, a British Steel plater whose punishing working life had left him with a miserly pension and a host of chronic ailments.

Julie and Keith loved their families, and they loved the north-east. They scorned people who denied who they were, people who overwrote where they came from. But they needed a change. Keith had hankered to see the world since he was nine, an itch he had got when he had gone to Lake Garda in Italy on a school trip. His mother Mavis, a school dinner lady originally from Brambles Farm council estate in the east of the city, still had photos of him larking around at the water’s edge with Neil Jones, his best friend. It hadn’t been the greatest adventure in the world, but it had set something off in Keith, and after he married Julie he had got her thinking about travelling too.

Middlesbrough had seen its best days. When Julie and Keith were growing up in the seventies it was impoverished and struggling. Times were tough for everyone, including Julie’s parents, Anita and Robert Sullivan, who lived in Eston, a working-class suburb to the east. Keith’s parents had moved to up-and-coming Brookfield, in the south, where they lived with their three sons in a tidy post-war bungalow, its pristine garden being Charlie’s pride and joy.

Julie and Keith had met as fifteen-year-olds at the local comprehensive, Bertram Ramsey. Keith was not particularly interested in Julie, but that changed when he bumped into her again five years later, inside the blue double-doors of Madison’s, a dive of a nightclub in Middlesbrough town centre, better known to locals as Mad Dog’s, where a famed cloakroom attendant called ‘Queenie’ took the coats. Julie, full of life, her hair a cascade of brown curls, and Keith clicked in a way they had not at school. By then, lanky Keith, the oldest of Charlie and Mavis Mangan’s three boys, had set himself up as a self-employed electrician, one of a group of school pals who had all gone into trades. Julie already had a sensible head on her shoulders, and she could see that unlike many other young men she knew, Keith was determined to do something with his life.

His mates described him as level-headed and laid-back, ‘a good bloke to have around in a storm’, while his father Charlie, who had barely ever left his native Teesside, was proud of his eldest son’s inquisitive nature, saying to anyone who would listen that Keith ‘soaked up new experiences like a sponge’. Keith was also, Julie now noticed, tall and good-looking, sure of himself but not arrogant. When they met at Mad Dog’s she was working in Clinkards, a Middlesbrough shoe shop. Chatting in a corner by the bar, they found they had many friends in common. By the time Keith celebrated his twenty-first birthday six months later, on Boxing Day 1982, at the Central pub on Corporation Road, Julie knew she had found the man she wanted to marry. Keith made her laugh. He was dependable and loving. And both of them had a geeky thing for Star Trek.

Three years later, they became the first in their group to tie the knot. The wedding was a traditional affair of red carnations and frothy white chiffon at St Barnabas church in Linthorpe. Their white-leather wedding album shows Keith, dressed in a silver suit and winklepickers, towering above his new bride. After a make-do honeymoon, Julie became the daughter Mavis Mangan had never had. Straight-talking and easy-going like her new mother-in-law, Julie enjoyed a laugh, and embraced her new family, ringing up Mavis for a chat most days, always starting the conversation the same way: ‘Hello, Mrs Mangan, it’s Mrs Mangan here.’ That’s why Charlie and Mavis were so taken aback when Julie and Keith announced out of the blue in 1989 that they were leaving for London. Nobody in either family moved away, especially south.

But Keith and Julie lived for each other now. Leaving their home in Ingleby Barwick, a residential estate south of Middlesbrough town centre, they rented a small flat in Tooting, south London. It was a big wrench for both of them, leaving a real neighbourhood where they were surrounded by friends and family to live far away, among strangers. Middlesbrough was always only a phone call away, Julie would say to herself whenever she was alone, but in a new city as vast and anonymous as London, she struggled to make friends.

To start with, the Tooting flat didn’t look much, but Julie tarted it up. Keith, already planning their next jump, hopefully to somewhere hotter, put his energies into developing his business, and began picking up contract work all over Europe. It wasn’t the kind of travelling he had had in mind: without Julie, just a bunch of lads who rarely saw anything but the inside of one project or another. But the money was good, and he started to save. Left behind in Tooting, Julie wasn’t going to sit on her hands. She trained as a nursery nurse, took cake-decorating classes and got herself a job.

In 1994, Julie and Keith got the break they were looking for when a Sri Lankan friend invited them to Colombo to meet his family. At first it was just pub talk, a crazy idea bandied about over a few pints. But the more they thought about it, the more they realised they wanted it. They didn’t have kids yet. They had worked hard, saved well, and now they were ready to leave it all behind. It wasn’t intended to be a permanent break, just eighteen months travelling around the world, chasing new experiences. Sri Lanka would be a soft landing for the voyage into the unknown. Just the thought of giving up Tooting for the South Asian island sent a shiver through both of them. From there, they could go anywhere. In early 1995 they took the plunge. They bought two rucksacks, matching petrol-blue his-and-hers bomber jackets, walking boots and travel guides. They went back up to the north-east on the train to break the news. So far only a couple of destinations, Colombo and New Delhi, were definite, but the climax to the trip would be dinner in front of the Taj Mahal on 3 August. That would be a proper tenth-wedding anniversary, Julie and Keith told their family and friends. In Eston and Brookfield, there were stunned faces.

Julie and Keith Mangan’s leaving bash at the Ship, a pub in Eston, around the corner from Julie’s parents’ house, was a proper drunken affair, even if afterwards they had a last-minute wobble. But they had already bought the tickets. Keith had sold his electrical business to a schoolmate. They’d given notice on the Tooting flat, and Julie had resigned from work. It was too late to turn back. A few days later they pitched up in Colombo, jetlagged and initially overwhelmed by the heat. But it did not take them long to realise they had made the right decision. They had the run of the golden beaches of Galle. Their Sri Lankan friend was there to show them around, and they gorged themselves on seafood. The first few weeks flew by so easily that Julie persuaded Anita to come over. Going home full of stories, Anita worked on Mavis and Charlie Mangan too. Keith’s parents had barely ever left the north-east, but now they all made plans to meet up in Sri Lanka in one year’s time. Before then, there was so much to do. Julie and Keith were ready to explore.

Having talked to other travellers, they locked on to Kashmir. What struck them when they entered the Indian Consulate in Colombo were the posters. ‘Paradise on Earth’, one declared above a photograph of rosy-cheeked Kashmiri women picking saffron in a crocus-filled meadow beneath a dramatic, snow-capped Himalayan skyline. Emblazoned across another scene of gaily-painted wooden shikaras skimming across Dal Lake were the words ‘Garden of Eden’. As the sweat trickled down Julie and Keith’s backs, the images of Kashmir’s spectacular peaks seemed to offer the prospect of welcome relief from the humidity of Sri Lanka. The Kashmiri people were welcoming, they were told, while the floating hotels of Dal Lake provided luxury for only a handful of rupees a night. Julie and Keith were keen for a change of scene.

They were going to Kashmir. They did not know where in Kashmir. They did not know anything about Kashmir. Perhaps they would stay on a houseboat before heading off on a mountain trek. Nothing too exhausting, just far enough to see the flower-filled pastures they had been reading about in the Lonely Planet guidebook – and of course the Meadow. It sounded idyllic. But when Keith rang home to wish his father a happy sixtieth birthday and mentioned their plans, Charlie was horrified, and did his best to dissuade him. Mavis tried to reassure her husband. ‘Keith’s a sensible lad,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t go off the beaten path.’ ‘Ring the British Embassy if you get into trouble,’ was all she could think to say to her son.

In June 1995, Paul Wells, a twenty-four-year-old photography student from Blackburn, Lancashire, was also packing. He had planned a life-changing trip to the Indian subcontinent, but he didn’t want to be alone. He had spent much of the spring trying to persuade his reluctant girlfriend, Catherine Moseley, to come with him.

Paul had just inherited a Nikon camera and a small cash legacy from his grandfather, and he intended to use them to put together a photographic project that he hoped would launch his career as a photojournalist. For several months he had been searching around for the right location, and after seeing Desert in the Sky, a TV documentary about the Buddhist kingdom of Ladakh, the same place Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had visited in 1991, he knew it was where he would go. He had loved the film so much that his mother, Dianne, had recorded it, and still has the video today. ‘He was fascinated by the eagles turning on the thermals,’ said Dianne, who remembered Paul sitting in the family home in Blackburn, watching the film over and over again. ‘It was another world to me, but the isolated mountain region appealed to Paul, who’d developed a fascination with spirituality and reincarnation.’ Bob, Paul’s father, said: ‘Once he’d seen that bloody film, he was determined. He was off buying maps and guidebooks.’ He also spent £800 on photographic equipment. ‘After he latched on to something, there was no stopping him. That was our Paul.’

Paul wanted Cath, as he called his girlfriend, to go with him, but she was not grabbed by the idea. She was busy, she told him, committed to her demanding social-work job. Then there was the expense. ‘He told her he would cover all the costs out of his legacy,’ said Bob. ‘Paul saw it as one “last big holiday” before they moved apart. He hoped to be able to spend some time together before Cath went off to study in another part of the country, and he just nagged at her until she gave in.’ By the middle of May 1995, the trip was on. ‘In the end, she did a trade,’ remembered Dianne. ‘She’d come, as long as they went to the forts and palaces of Rajasthan, in western India, after he’d got the Kashmiri mountains out of his system.’

Paul had always loved exploring. ‘Walking, climbing up things, hanging off things,’ was how Bob put it. ‘Walking is in our family’s blood. Paul just stuck at it, and always went further than the rest of us.’ When Paul was growing up, the family moved around regularly, following Bob’s work at Debenhams department store, where he managed the gents’ suit department. Dapper Bob, originally from the West Country, had taken the family to Scotland, and then to England’s north-west. For Dianne, originally from Ealing in west London, it was an unsettling existence. ‘To be honest, wherever I was, was too far away from family and friends,’ she says. When they finally set up home in a modern cul-de-sac on the Pinewood estate in Feniscowles, a suburb of Blackburn, she had been delighted. They would not move again, Bob promised.

Paul enrolled at Feniscowles Junior School. Of the three Wells children, he was always the reckless one. ‘He spent more time outside the head teacher’s office than in the class,’ recalled Bob. ‘There was no telling Paul. If he had any idea in his head he just went for it.’ But soon after moving to Blackburn, Paul formed a steadying bond with Dianne’s father, Grandpa Seymour. With the Lake District on their doorstep, Seymour introduced Paul to hill walking, climbing and orienteering. Soon the young boy and his grandfather were off most weekends, walking a section of the Pennine Way, or climbing Low Fell or Helvellyn.

By the time Paul was a teenager, he was struggling academically at Darwen Vale High School. But he could happily guide a party up Scafell Pike, and family photos show him standing tall in an Aertex shirt against the hills, walking socks wrinkled around his bony ankles, his face sun-bronzed, his hair wind-ruffled. He dreamed of following in the footsteps of Chris Bonington, Britain’s most famous mountaineer. A former army instructor, Bonington had led a life that Paul wanted to emulate. While Dianne thought he was studying upstairs in his bedroom, his head was with Bonington, on Everest and K2. ‘The walls of his room were covered in pictures of the Himalayas,’ says Dianne. ‘He had all Chris Bonington’s books, and would read them obsessively.’

Paul’s parents knew he wouldn’t get the grades to go to university. He didn’t care. After leaving school he followed in Bonington’s footsteps, seeking out an outward-bound training course sponsored by the armed forces. But, reckless as ever, he abandoned it in favour of a last-minute climbing holiday in Spain. For two weeks he trekked alone through the El Chorro gorge in Andalusia, coming back with a new idea. ‘That time alone gave him pause for thought,’ says Bob. Grandpa Seymour always carried a camera, and Paul loved tinkering around in his darkroom. In the autumn of 1994 Paul signed on for a Diploma in Photography at South Nottingham College, finally moving out of home at the age of twenty-three. ‘“Paul Wells, the photojournalist” – he liked the sound of that,’ said Bob. ‘He was always backing the underdog, getting into the wild. It was the perfect career for him, and he chanced on the idea all by himself.’

It was in Nottingham that Paul hooked up with Catherine Moseley, an art graduate from Norwich whom he met at a gig in Rock City, a venue whose manager liked to call it ‘an oasis of alternative culture in a desert of Gaz-and-Shazness’. Cath was a willowy blonde social worker at Base 51, a drop-in centre for troubled Nottingham teens, and her romance with Paul was intense. Paul was not afraid to speak his mind. He was only ever going to be himself. Two years older than him, Cath was quieter, having grown up in middle-class Norfolk. Paul was smitten, and as far as his parents could see, Cath too was committed to their having a real life together.

When Grandpa Seymour died unexpectedly just before Christmas 1994, Paul was ‘crushed’, according to his father. But after the funeral Paul picked himself up and went back to college in Nottingham, taking his younger brother Stuart along as a flatmate. With the money his grandfather left him, he could afford his first real taste of foreign adventure. All he talked about that spring was the Ladakh plan. And he had kept going on at Cath: ‘Please come away with me to India. It will change our lives forever.’

Even though she had finally said yes, Cath was still nervous as summer approached. She called tour agencies in Nottingham, and went so far as to contact the Foreign Office for its latest advice on travelling to India. Ladakh was part of the troubled Jammu and Kashmir state, she was told, but this eastern sector had been untouched by the conflict that rumbled on further west.

The cheapest way for Paul and Cath to travel from New Delhi to Ladakh was to take a bus to Srinagar, a grinding thirty-hour trip, before getting a connection along the Kargil road to Leh and finally to Ladakh, another two days’ journey. Like Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, they were told that the riskiest part of the trip was the time they would have to spend in Srinagar. If they wanted to avoid travelling through the Kashmir Valley there was a more circuitous route via Himachal Pradesh, to Kashmir’s south. Or they could fly. Since the last option was too pricey, and no one in the UK appeared to know much about the first two, they decided to make their decision in New Delhi.

Towards the end of the summer term, Cath booked the flights and a hotel in New Delhi. ‘She got their jabs sorted, too,’ says Bob. ‘Paul even went to the dentist and got his fillings fixed.’ As they waved Paul and Cath off from Manchester Airport on 15 June, Paul’s parents felt a pang of fear. Dianne wondered when she would see him again. ‘Don’t worry,’ Bob reassured her, putting an arm around her shoulder. He was pleased that his son was at last sorting himself out. ‘Paul can look after himself. He’s a strong lad.’ For Dianne, the only saving grace was that Cath was going with him.

Jetlagged and dehydrated, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley arrived at Indira Gandhi International Airport on 16 June. As Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings would nine days later, they fell prey to a tout. This one convinced them that people were rioting in the street near their pre-booked hotel, and that he should take them somewhere safer instead. Panicked and sweating, they agreed, only to find themselves deposited at the entrance to Paharganj, a swamp of squalid backpacker hostels opposite New Delhi railway station.

Lost, Paul and Cath lugged their overstuffed rucksacks past dusty roadside stalls displaying joss sticks, scarves and fake silver. Eventually they found the hotel the taxi driver had recommended, a tumbledown establishment where a handful of teenage boys lay snoring on the floor behind the reception desk. Paul and Cath gingerly stepped over them, trying to block out the pungent smells, and headed for their room.

Over the next couple of days, as they acclimatised to the heat and the lack of sanitation, they tried to make the best of it, buying homespun Indian kurtas and quizzing young travellers over banana pancakes and coffee laced with condensed milk about routes to Ladakh. The owner of their hotel turned out to be a Kashmiri, and offered to book their onward trip for a small commission. They opted for the bus to Srinagar, a journey that would involve travelling north across the New Delhi plains and into the Punjab, before striking north-west to Jammu and the Pir Panjal mountains, taking them, according to their map, alarmingly near to fractious Pakistan. As they left, the hotel owner pressed a handful of his relatives’ business cards into their hands, ‘Just in case you want to stay in Kashmir.’

John Childs was heading towards the Meadow too, although he did not know it yet. By the time Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, Keith and Julie Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley had arrived in New Delhi, the forty-two-year-old chemical engineer from Simsbury, Connecticut, had already been in India several weeks, although his experience of the subcontinent could hardly have been more different from theirs. Childs, an introvert and a deep thinker, a wiry figure whose hangdog expression belied his quick wits and dry humour, was not joining any hippy trail. When he wasn’t in his running gear he was happiest in a suit and tie addressing executives in New England boardrooms. He worked for an American weapons manufacturer, Ensign Bickford, and had come to India to tour explosives plants in and around West Bengal. His schedule had been put under the microscope and mulled over for many months – nothing he did was unconsidered, and all too often he tended to see the worst in everything. But then, he was the kind of man who had learned to celebrate his own fatalism. He had worried about this journey for several months, but in the end he had decided to go for it. It would be his first foreign trip for the firm he had joined the previous February, and he hoped that at worst, even if he was struck down with dysentery, it would take his mind off the messy divorce that he feared was going to put a distance between him and his much-loved daughters, Cathy, six, and Mary, five. There was another upside to the visit. After the work was done, he hoped to get in some trekking on the company’s account. And as John was a self-confessed ‘cheapskate’, born watching the nickels and dimes, this was a boon. ‘I never go anywhere without someone else paying,’ he liked to say.

However, from the moment he landed in Calcutta, John, who had grown up surrounded by suburbia on Long Island, New York, the second son of churchgoing Joseph and Helen Childs, found the teeming subcontinent oppressive. India was a chaotic mix of vinegary odours. He couldn’t eat the food. He felt as if he could bench-press the humidity, it weighed so heavily on him. Not widely travelled, he was overwhelmed by the surface details that the locals did not seem to notice, the ‘noise and filth’, as he put it. He also found it more difficult than he had expected to communicate with his Indian counterparts, even though they were all supposedly ‘talking the same language’, and he knew in an instant that he had nothing in common with the Western travellers who milled around the Saddar Street backpacker area, close to his five-star hotel. John had gone straight from school to college, and then into his first job. He couldn’t see the point of putting off the inevitable by travelling aimlessly around the globe. He was always uneasy around people like that.

After Calcutta, John’s colleagues had driven him several hours into the industrial heartland of Bihar, a state that even Indians call the Wild West because of its reputation for corruption and chicanery. He was appalled by the grime-cloaked factories, staffed by hordes of impoverished workers who toiled in atrocious conditions: ‘Coming from the land of the free, I could not take in how people could live and work like that.’ His final work destination was Gomia, a town in southern Bihar where an enormous explosives factory was operated by the British chemical giant ICI. The plan was that he would work there with local managers and technical staff on improving the quality of the explosive materials they supplied to Ensign Bickford.

By the end of June, John’s work was done, and as he had planned, he had a week in hand. Back home in Simsbury he was an endurance athlete, proud of the fact that he ran four or five miles around the local school track every day. He climbed and skied too. Doing business just down the road from the greatest mountain range on earth – he had seen the Himalayas on the flight over to Calcutta and been staggered by their jagged heights – had been one of the reasons he had agreed to make this trip.

But where in the Himalayas should he go? He had thought about doing part of Nepal’s challenging Annapurna Circuit, the mountain trek Jane and Don had completed in 1988, and there were regular flight connections between Calcutta and Kathmandu. But then he came across the adverse weather reports, just as Jane and Don had: ‘When I set about looking into it, I realised pretty quickly it was the wrong time of year for Nepal. The monsoon ruled this option out.’ The ‘real treat’ of seeing Everest was now out of the question, but running his finger along the range to the west he could see other options: ‘All the guides said the same thing. June and July was the best time of year to visit Kashmir.’ Wherever he ended up would be an adventure, he thought, as he zeroed in on the trekking routes in the Kashmir Valley.

Was it safe? John was no authority on the region, but even he knew that Kashmir was troubled by a simmering war he was ‘vaguely aware of’ from the occasional news report. However, the descriptions and photographs he studied of the treks around Pahalgam, to the south-west of the summer capital, Srinagar, were inviting. Was it possible to reach the mountains without being caught up in the state’s insurgency? He was still feeling fragile as a result of the divorce, and he had two confused young daughters back home, about whom he had worried constantly since arriving in India. The last thing he needed was to screw things up by getting himself in a tight spot on the other side of the world. He rang his mother, who was still his main confidante, in Salem in upstate New York. ‘Check things out with the locals,’ she said. ‘They’ll know what is and isn’t safe.’

John sounded out several of his Indian colleagues at the Gomia plant. ‘Half of them jumped straight in. They said I was crazy. They said there was a war going on. Didn’t I know? There had been some kind of kidnapping involving Westerners the previous summer too. But the other half said it was fine to go, and the 1994 incident had been quickly resolved with no one hurt.’ Like every other discussion he had had since arriving in India, this one quickly dissolved into a confusing roundabout of conflicting arguments, with everyone talking over each other.

Most vocal were a couple of Kashmiri staffers. They were in the camp that firmly believed he should go. Over a cup of tea, they told him alluring stories of the challenging trekking, the wildlife and the wildness around Pahalgam. It was a world away from the troubles, they said, ‘a paradise on earth that everyone should experience at least once in their lives’. All Kashmiris knew, they insisted, that the insurgency was restricted to the LoC and to militant-infested towns in the north of the valley like Kupwara, Sopore and Baramulla. No one had any interest in getting tourists mixed up in a local dispute. The militancy had been rumbling on for six years already, and Pahalgam remained thronged with trekkers.

These two employees seemed credible and likeable, and they gave John numbers for local contacts: guides, hotels and taxi drivers, many of whom they were related to and said they trusted completely. Eventually, even the cautious John was persuaded, and he arranged a six-day excursion through his hotel. Taking account of flight connections, that would give him four days’ trekking, which was just about enough. ‘In life, you go to many places and you have to make many judgements about your own safety,’ he said. ‘And my judgement at that moment in time was that Kashmir would be OK.’

As their plane approached Srinagar airport on 26 June, Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had heart-stopping glimpses of the Himalayas bursting through the clouds, and a lattice of orchards, conifers and villages sprinkled across the dun-coloured Kashmir Valley. After bumping down on the runway, the plane rumbled past rows of Indian Air Force fighter jets, military transporters and camouflaged helicopters. Here were gun emplacements and corrugated-iron hangars, all of them draped in olive-green netting. Sentries in foxholes, machine-gunners in pillboxes, zoomed in on the plane. Jane and Don immediately forgot the reassuring news they had just read in the paper: US Ambassador Frank Wisner, accompanied by his daughter, had returned from a fly-fishing trip to Pahalgam. This place looked like a war zone.

But as they stepped down onto the tarmac, the cool air was a joy after New Delhi. Up ahead, beyond the exit barrier, what looked like a thousand sombre male faces, many of them bearded, most of them smoking, eyed them. Aquiline noses, cat-green eyes, skin so fair that many seemed more Aryan than Don or Jane – some Kashmiris could have passed as Europeans. The noise was overwhelming: a helicopter whumping somewhere above them, tour guides shouting to get their attention.

As Jane and Don stood by the ancient, flaking luggage carousel, a police official sought them out and took their names, passport details and notes on their itinerary. ‘Foreigner registration,’ he said by way of explanation, tapping a laminated label on his clipboard. ‘What a madhouse,’ Jane recalled. ‘It was an absolute nightmare … I had to open and taste my sealed pack of Western Trail mix to show it wasn’t poison or a bomb. The absolute bizarreness of the whole process almost made it entertaining.’

Outside, the full scale of the Indian military operation in Kashmir hit them: a chaotic jumble of sandbags, concrete barriers and barbed wire, the roads jammed with armoured vehicles of all descriptions: trucks, pickups, tanks, around which scores of heavily armed soldiers milled. It took an hour to get through the checkpoints encircling the airport. Barrelling into town, their taxi passed yet more bunkers and pickets, out of which dark-skinned Indian soldiers peered, their guns aimed at Kashmiri men and women who walked solemnly along the broken pavements, heads cast downwards.

Gigantic piles of decomposing trash were everywhere, with sleeping pi-dogs lying on top of them. Not a windowpane seemed intact. Shops were barricaded or boarded up. Long avenues lined by trees were choked by every kind of machine of war imaginable. At one point the driver slammed on his brakes to avoid an oncoming army convoy, a vast column of khaki lorries with soldiers riding atop them, their faces obscured by black bandanas, who beat canes on the side of the taxi, drumming everyone out of their way. ‘Welcome to Kashmir,’ he muttered under his breath. Jane and Don said nothing. ‘We hadn’t expected things to be this bad, no way,’ Jane said.

Then she and Don caught a glimpse of the mountains ringing the city, and the hairs rose on her arms.