Читать книгу The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began - Adrian Levy - Страница 16

‘Paradise on Earth’, declared the sign beside the old Jammu and Kashmir tourist reception centre on Residency Road, a short rickshaw ride from Lal Chowk, Srinagar’s main shopping bazaar, with its cake shops and dressmakers, kurta-sellers and papier-mâché emporiums, behind which sprawled alleyways and lanes faced on either side by rickety wooden and stone structures. Plastic-chair depots blended into office supplies, and then came an entire street selling computers shorn of their inner workings, before you reached car parts, bath taps and telephones. Here was a Sikh gurdwara and an Islamic welfare association, hotels selling hot buttered toast, seekh kebabs and Lipton’s tea, while in the lanes below suited businessmen and Kashmiri housewives picked their way around overloaded handcarts.

But it was the large signboard that attracted Jane and Don’s attention that morning. It might have convinced the increasing number of Indian tourists coming from the cow belt that all was peaceful here, the dark-skinned holidaymakers from the south who were all keen to do their bit to reinforce the government’s writ in Kashmir. But it struck Don and Jane as odd, given what they had seen so far: the occupation of everything by the security forces, including this tourist centre, which was surrounded by razor wire, sentries and bunkers.

Inside, there were no tourists. The deserted corridors smelled of bleach and someone else’s lunch. Asking for information on trekking routes at reception, Jane and Don were half-heartedly directed to a room where they found two Kashmiri officials sipping tea beneath a whirring fan that agitated the curling edges of posters depicting Kashmir’s many beauty spots. The men seemed delighted and surprised to have visitors. One jumped up, proffered a hand and introduced himself as Naseer Ahmed Jan, ‘of the J&K tourist police’. Immediately he launched into a speech about the dangers of travelling alone in the mountains. It was the first voice of caution Jane and Don had heard since arriving in India, and it immediately grabbed their attention. There was a possibility of thieves, he said, sizing up their reactions, and a real chance of getting lost. They should be clear that the weather up in the mountains was unpredictable. For these reasons – and to ensure that they found the best routes and the right campsite – it was imperative that they take along a recommended guide.

Jane knew a sales pitch when she heard it. She was not surprised when Mr Jan introduced the colleague sitting by his side as being able to arrange a taxi to Pahalgam, as well as find ponies. ‘He tried to give us many reasons why we shouldn’t go on our own, why we should hire someone to go with us. It was inappropriate,’ said Jane. She and Don got up to leave. Looking perturbed to have lost out on an opportunity, Mr Jan handed them his card. ‘Call me,’ he said weakly as the other man followed them out, still talking silkily: ‘You choose the price. Only pay me what you feel I deserve. The decision is yours …’ Out in the street, Jane and Don concluded wearily that they would only have to go through the same performance with someone else at the trekking station. Why not get it over with? ‘We were persuaded,’ Jane said. ‘The guide then said he would hire the pony-men.’ Without really thinking it through, they had been hustled into committing to the Pahalgam option.

Seven days earlier, just before midnight on 21 June, Julie and Keith Mangan had lugged their belongings to the Inter State bus stand in New Delhi, where they were to board a coach to Kashmir. After three months in Sri Lanka, the British couple were bronzed, and they had become deaf to the mayhem of the subcontinent, feeling like old Asia hands. As they were settling into their seats on the Srinagar-bound bus Julie spotted two other Westerners, who with their blue-white skin and hassled expressions seemed to be fresh off the plane. Pushing their way through the crowds, with bags and tickets tumbling around them, the young couple were being trailed by a crowd of coolies, children and chai-wallahs who had sniffed out an opportunity. It was Paul Wells and Catherine Moseley, who had survived the experience of staying in the backpacker district of Paharganj and were now heading for Ladakh, having decided to take the cheapest route, by road via Srinagar, after the owner of their guesthouse arranged the tickets for them, taking a healthy commission. ‘Do you need help?’ Julie shouted over the hubbub. The young woman surrounded by beggars whipped around at hearing the English voice, and seeing Julie standing on the steps of the bus waving, burst out laughing. Cath was finding the whole India thing mind-boggling.

Once they were safely aboard, Julie introduced herself and Keith, and made a gentle jibe about Cath and Paul’s lack of experience. More than twenty-four hours on an Indian bus would see to that, she joked. Had they come prepared, Keith asked, listing the necessary provisions for the trip: toilet roll, Imodium, real mineral water. ‘Test the seals before you buy, or face a lifetime on the shitter’ was the mantra of the travelling Westerner in those days, since so many water bottles were actually filled from the nearest unfiltered tap. Cath told them she and Paul had signed up to another forty-eight hours of travelling beyond Srinagar. As the bus roared out of New Delhi, passing pavements where homeless children slept beneath the fierce glow of halogen lights, Cath and Paul began to relax.

Despite the age difference, the Mangans chatted easily with the young backpackers. Keith, Julie and Paul discovered that they were all from the north of England, and they swapped stories from home and away. Having been in South Asia for so many weeks, Julie and Keith were familiar with the road trick of building casual relationships with other travellers. Leaving the hot colours of the Indian plains behind, the bus, keeling ominously, headed into the Pir Panjal, a mountain range in the lower Himalayas that separated the Kashmir Valley from the rest of India. By that afternoon, 22 June, they were in the foothills and the two couples knew pretty much everything there was to know about each other.

That night, as the last light faded, they headed through the dank Banihal Tunnel, the only road route connecting Kashmir to the rest of India. At times of heightened tension this road would be blocked by the army, sealing Kashmiris in, but just now it was open, although at its end an army checkpoint loomed like a giant mousetrap. Welcome to Paradise, the couples thought to themselves as the waiting Indian soldiers waved flashlights in the gloom. The bus came to a halt, and all the passengers were ordered off and made to stand in line with their passports and identity documents to hand. As the only Westerners on board, Keith, Julie, Paul and Cath were taken over to a small cabin that served as the local office of the J&K tourist police. There they were asked seemingly endless questions, their details noted down in longhand in lined ledgers, the pages bookmarked with elastic bands. Keith wondered if anyone ever read them afterwards.

Most of the other passengers on the bus were Kashmiri, born broke and destined to spend their lives trapped in the valley; or if they could get the papers, compelled to be permanently in transit, travelling the vast subcontinent the cheapest way possible, carrying plastic suitcases full of shawls, business cards and trinkets. It was thirty-four hours to Calcutta from here, and forty-two to Goa. More than two thousand miles lay between Kashmir and Pondicherry, in India’s deep south-east. They were willing to ply even these far corners of the subcontinent, eking out every opportunity to make a small profit. Behind the hut where Paul, Cath, Keith and Julie were being questioned, they glimpsed Indian soldiers trampling on the Kashmiris’ possessions. They were probably checking for contraband, weapons or explosives, someone murmured. After all, a nation had every right to protect itself.

Half an hour later they were back on board, rumbling north along National Highway 1A in the dark. From here on they would be in the bowel of Kashmir, as locals called it, the valley cupped by a sinewy lining of mountains. The road was quiet, but every couple of miles they passed sleeping army encampments, their whitewashed gates and watchtowers rising above walnut orchards and saffron fields. Along the camp perimeters, the bus’s headlights lit up chain-linked fences strung with empty whisky bottles, a crude intruder alarm designed to give the sentries a few minutes’ warning of a guerrilla attack. Quite a party the soldiers must have had, someone joked.

Finally disgorged at Srinagar bus station in the early hours of 23 June, the two British couples were glad to be stationary at last, and gulped in the cool air. Around them brightly painted buses revved and rattled into life, while local women jostled to board them for distant towns and villages – Kupwara, Handwara, Baramulla, Pulwama – their arms overflowing with children, shopping bags and live poultry. A few of the women wore black abayas or pale-blue burqas, but most only covered their heads with scarves. ‘Good Luck’, the hand-drawn signs above the bus drivers’ cabins read. It all felt very foreign, but Keith, Julie, Paul and Cath were soon distracted by the breathtaking mountains that ringed the city, the crest of peaks clear in the crystalline early-morning light, a delicate, craggy line of snow-tipped summits meeting a sapphire sky.

However tense they felt about being in the much-talked-about hotbed of Srinagar, Paul and Cath had already decided they were going nowhere in a hurry. Over the course of the journey, Julie and Keith had talked them into staying a night or two, and as they collected their luggage from the belly of the bus, a heckling crowd of houseboat owners massed. There were so few tourists and too many berths. Soon they were surrounded by jabbering touts, who pressed laminated photos and testimonials into their hands. Eventually the British tourists plumped for the Holiday Inn, an intricately carved wooden houseboat on Dal Lake. The name raised a laugh, and the owner, a middle-aged man called Bashir, had a friendly face and promised electricity and hot water.

Bashir led them to his friend’s waiting taxi, and as they drove through the city the houseboat owner pointed out the centuries-old wooden houses owned by Pandits, the valley’s indigenous Hindu inhabitants, who claimed to trace their history back thousands of years. These days their homes were locked, deserted and collapsing, the owners having fled Kashmir as the local war had become tinged with sectarian savagery. Could they stop? Bashir said he’d explain about the Pandits later. In the old city quarter of Nowhatta they passed the minarets of Jamia Masjid, built by Sultan Sikander in the fifteenth century, one of Srinagar’s most significant mosques, that could hold thirty thousand worshippers. Was it worth visiting? Bashir said he could not stop. Now was not good. He would show them its magnificent courtyard and hall of 370 wooden pillars ‘another time’. Wrestling their way through the back streets of Maisuma to Lal Chowk, he pointed to the ancient, delicately carved fretwork of the wooden shrine to Shah-e-Hamden, which he said contained ‘the secrets of all Islam’, and which would be wonderful to visit another year, for reasons he would tell them later. Bashir was finding it difficult to disguise his nervousness at having foreigners in the car, although outside the market hawkers, mothers with young children shopping for cheap Chinese blankets, old men reading newspapers pegged outside a shop, seemed oblivious to the heavily armed Indian soldiers milling all around them.

Paul and Cath could not get over the overwhelming security presence. The place was heaving with armed men and their bullet-marked, rock-battered military vehicles. Julie too was intimidated. Everything, from the old cinema to the old post office building, from the sports stadium to Raj-era hotels and villas, had been cloaked by vast khaki nets, while beside every fortified army camp and pillbox some New Delhi-wallah had pasted yet another colossal hoarding declaring, ‘If Paradise is on Earth, it is here, it is here’. Perhaps this also related to another time.

Everyone’s mood lifted when they pulled up on Boulevard Road, with its bakeries, shikara moorings and photographic studios that had last been decorated in the sixties. To the left of them Dal Lake shimmered, and beyond, through the haze, the mountains unfurled. Bashir pointed to a houseboat 150 metres out in the water, and whistled for a shikara. One skimmed over, and they settled beneath its curtained canopy as the boatman rowed them like a Kashmir gondolier, humming a lol-gevun, a local love song. Boys dressed in jeans and Western T-shirts waved from passing skiffs. An old man in a skullcap drew up. ‘Chrysanthemums, madam?’ he asked the women. ‘Silver? Shawls?’ They found themselves smiling as they shooed him away, having finally arrived somewhere that felt gentle and evocative. Everyone was reassuringly attentive. ‘Welcome to your home!’ cried Bashir as the shikara glided to a halt at the Holiday Inn. The entire family had gathered to greet the guests. Cath and Paul were overwhelmed, and Julie and Keith thought it the most beautiful place in the world. Their eyes were drawn to the pink and purple lotus flowers that covered the water’s edge. ‘It sent tingles down your spine,’ Julie recalled.

Inside, the Holiday Inn was a confection of cut-glass chandeliers and carved walnut, with a panelled corridor leading to six spacious double bedrooms. For the next few days they would stay in style, waited on hand and foot as if they had been transported back to the time when the British fled roasting Delhi for the cooler mountainous climes, and these boats had first been built. Bashir’s unseen wife produced steaming gusturba (boiled Kashmiri meatballs), pilau rice and curd flecked with jeera. His sons carried it all to the polished dining-room table in chipped porcelain servers. At night the rooms were heated by wood-burners, the bedsheets warmed by a ‘winter wife’, the universal Kashmiri term for a hot-water bottle.

After a day, none of them wanted to leave, as life on the lake floated by. Paul and Cath lay on the boat’s decked roof, writing postcards home. ‘Dear Mum and Dad,’ Paul wrote in green ink, ‘It took us 30 hours to get here and I (oops!) we are now staying on a houseboat for £3 a night. I’m sitting on the roof of the houseboat writing this to you. Srinagar is very nice but there are political problems. It’s a bit like N. Ireland.’ For Bob and Dianne Wells back in Blackburn, the fact that their son was writing postcards seemed to be a sign that he was settling down. ‘Paul was never one to put pen to paper,’ Bob says. ‘Kashmir must have made a significant impression on him.’ While Paul and Cath lazed, Julie and Keith hired a skiff to explore the shallow lake brimming with floating allotments, exploring the broken camel-back bridges and pontoons of a Mughal Venice that had run out of luck, snapping photographs of each other to send back home: Keith taking the oars as they set out across a silvery expanse of water, Julie grinning happily in a white T-shirt, her hair bunched up, making her look years younger.

In the evenings they all met in the carpeted living room of the Holiday Inn to compare stories. On the first night Bart Imler, a solo Canadian traveller, introduced himself. He was looking to team up with another party and go trekking somewhere near Pahalgam. When Bashir overheard the discussion, a sell began, softer than chamois. He got out his oversized photo album, and started leafing through pictures of tourists waving against the striking backdrops of Sonamarg, Gulmarg and Aru, smiling foreigners sitting astride tough little mountain ponies, sooty faces around a campfire at night, trekkers with their arms around each other. There were dozens of satisfied comments in the guestbook, too: ‘Dear Bashir, we thank you and your family for being so welcoming and kind and giving us the holiday of a lifetime. We will be back soon.’

It didn’t take long for everyone to cave in. Paul and Cath would postpone Ladakh so they could all climb to the Kolahoi Glacier, a high-altitude ice sheet in the mountains above Pahalgam which Bashir described as one of south Kashmir’s must-see destinations. The expedition would take three days up and two days down, with a stop-off in the Meadow. Had they heard about the Meadow, Bashir asked, getting out more photographs. Keith and Julie recalled seeing photos of it in the Indian Embassy in Sri Lanka: a campsite where the grass was as soft as shahtoosh. Snow leopards ran wild up there, Bashir said, along with the burly Himalayan black bear, while the forests were alive with hangul stags, chiru antelopes, monal pheasants and even the odd (and very rare) blue sheep. Their guides would provide everything. They would fish for trout, fried in butter and Kashmiri almonds on a roaring fire, and tether milk and beer bottles to rocks in the rushing river to keep them cold.

Was there any danger? There were no real risks, Bashir assured them, adding that the price was extremely reasonable. He would take them there himself, along with his handpicked party of guides and pony-wallahs, who all seemed to be brother-cousins or cousin-cousins. They knew secret picnic sites, and the most beautiful back routes that other trekkers would not have heard about. The others were convinced, but Julie still wanted one more opinion. The following morning she took them all to the Jammu and Kashmir tourist reception centre on Residency Road. Mr Jan was waiting, sipping tea. ‘Don’t do the trip,’ he warned them. They listened intently. ‘Only go if you have a good guide.’ Just by chance, he had such a man. He introduced his colleague, who he assured them came at a good price. The Westerners knew a scam when they heard one, and told Mr Jan they had already done a deal with Mr Bashir. Seeing that there was nothing in it for him, Mr Jan showed them out, handing over his business card as he did so. ‘Call me if you have any troubles,’ he said brightly.

John Childs flew in to Srinagar on 30 June, carrying a sleeping bag, a tent and a small backpack. He was determined to get his trip up and going as soon as he touched down. He knew roughly where he wanted to go, and had maps and trekking contacts from the factory workers in Bihar, although he had not yet rung them to make firm arrangements. As the other Western passengers dispersed, leaving him standing alone by the luggage carousel, he suddenly realised that he had not really thought this through: ‘Signs of war were everywhere. Sandbags, soldiers, tanks and guns of every possible description. I was a little overwhelmed.’ Although he worked in the weapons industry, and could identify the make, model, bore and clip capacity of pretty much any gun from a distance, he had never handled one in a conflict situation, or even really thought about the realities of war. ‘I should have just turned around, got back on the plane to New Delhi and listened to the voice inside my head.’ But stubborn John got talking to a taxi driver instead, who offered to take him to his hotel for what seemed an honest fare. He wasn’t interested in seeing Srinagar, other tourists or the inside of a houseboat, he told the driver. He just wanted to have a good sleep at the hotel he had booked from New Delhi, and to get going first thing in the morning.

After a circuitous trip through downtown Srinagar, during which John saw a lot more razor wire, the taxi driver pulled up at a patch of waste ground. ‘Sir, your hotel seems to have been knocked down,’ he said, eyeing John in the rear-view mirror. Incredulous, John attempted to get out of the car. ‘It’s not safe here, sir,’ the driver insisted, ushering him back in. ‘I am not lying to you, sir. This area has been appropriated by the army. It happens all the time. There are militants in this district, and the security forces are building here to beef up security. You should stay on the houseboats, that is the only safe place for tourists, and not city-centre hotels.’ John sat back down. He had no way of knowing if the man was telling the truth or not. The hotel had been his only pre-planned arrangement in Kashmir, and now it seemed to be gone. Or was this even the right address? It sunk in that he did not know anyone here, or even if it was safe to call the numbers the factory workers had given him.

The driver reassured him. ‘Sir, please, I am a tourist guide. Stay with my family tonight and we will help you make your onwards arrangements in the morning. I will not charge you.’ Within minutes John had been driven down to Boulevard Road, where his bags were tossed into a waiting shikara. ‘I was embarrassed and angry. Before I knew it, I was being rowed down these little waterways accompanied by a man I had only known for thirty minutes who might well be planning to slit my throat as soon as we got round the next corner. I knew I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.’

His mood lifted a little when they arrived at the houseboat, which, just as the driver had promised, was luxurious and welcoming. The men of the household, all dressed in brown pherans and smoking heavily, quickly surrounded him, while the women dispersed to cook him ‘a Kashmiri wazwan’. What were his trekking plans, the men wanted to know. ‘Kolahoi? Aru? Sonamarg? Tar Sar? Sheshnag? Chandanwari?’ When they found that he had nothing in mind, they began bidding for his cash. ‘They showed me letters from foreigners who had been on successful treks with them.’ Afterwards there was a lavish banquet and all the houseboat’s wood burners were lit. Relaxing a little, deciding he had little option other than to go with the flow – a difficult decision for a planner like John – he bartered with the men until they reached a price: US$300 for a four-day trek, with food, guide and a pony-wallah thrown in. Within half an hour, two men appeared. The guide was a lean, mournful-looking Kashmiri with a pencil moustache, who introduced himself as Dasheer. He talked John through where they could walk and what he would see, recommending the Lidderwat Valley, with a stop-off at the Meadow. Had he heard of it? ‘One of the most beautiful campsites in the world.’ John quizzed him about trekking times and elevations, and concluded that the man knew what he was talking about. That night, for the first time in several weeks, John slept soundly, dreaming of his girls back home and of the mountains to come.

They set off by taxi down Highway 1A just after dawn on 1 July. John spent most of the journey batting away questions fired at him by Dasheer, the driver and the pony-wallah, Rasheed, all of whom chain-smoked, filling the cab with fumes. What was America like? How did he get into the weapons business? How much was he paid? Did his company sell guns to India? Did he know how poor Kashmiris were? Unused to being bombarded at such close quarters, John buried his head in his guidebook, so he did not see the locals queuing at checkpoints to be body-searched, their pherans held aloft, as his vehicle, with its conspicuous passenger inside and its tourist permit glued to the windscreen, was whisked past them. He barely noticed the relentless caravan of military traffic that dominated the road. But as soon as they turned off the main highway at Anantnag, and started heading north-east towards the mountains, everyone fell silent as the car manoeuvred around several large craters in the road. ‘Mines,’ the driver said by way of explanation, glancing at John in the rear-view mirror.

John was dismayed, but the driver seemed unconcerned, laughing as he used his entire body to force the wheels around another hole. Military convoys were constantly on the move nowadays, he said as they careered around another, ever since the Indian Army had taken over the holy village of Aishmuqam. Once it had been most famed for its hilltop temple, the last resting place of a fifteenth-century Sufi saint, or rishi, called Zainuddin. It was venerated by the boatmen of Kashmir, who would take their children there to cut off their first lock of hair. ‘If this was done elsewhere, the child would die or become blind,’ explained Dasheer, who had been born on a houseboat himself. Should they stop to have a look, John asked. Earnest Dasheer shook his head. Like many of Kashmir’s ancient mountainside pilgrimage spots, which held special meaning for Muslims and Hindus alike, the Aishmuqam tomb had attracted visitors for centuries, but these days people were frightened of the notorious army garrison and signals headquarters that lay in its shadow, and of the anti-government militants who constantly sniped at them.

When John said he had been assured that all the trouble spots in Kashmir were far away, to the west of the valley, his companions exchanged glances. Were they just trying to scare him, he wondered as he stared out at the crocus fields on either side of the road. Maybe it was the Kashmiri factory workers in Bihar who had lied? If so, what else had they not told him? What about the kidnapping of the foreigners the previous year? He asked his companions if any of them knew anything about it. The men shrugged, lit up cigarettes and began speaking to each other in Kashmiri.

At Aishmuqam there was nothing much to see of the army camp, and John’s fears lessened as they entered a gentler landscape, a terraced valley of lush green paddies. ‘Kashmiri rice,’ the driver declared, pointing towards the fields, where young girls and old women stooped over the ripening crops while their men looked on, smoking cigarettes. ‘The finest in subcontinent. Twice the price of Punjabi rice. Doubly delicious.’ But nowadays, he continued, it was mostly exported to rich Indians to the south: ‘Locals cannot afford to eat it.’ Dasheer and Rasheed shook their heads. The road started to climb again, following the flank of an ice-melt river in which ancient boulders had been worn flat.

By the time they reached the confluence of the East and West Lidder rivers, between which the trekking station of Pahalgam sprawled across a flat grassy plateau, they were at nearly nine thousand feet. John took in the view: gentle pine-topped ridges folding into one another as far as the eye could see. Pahalgam’s canny tourist and guide agencies had long ago dubbed the town ‘the Gateway to the Himalayas’, although its charming old wooden quarter was gradually being swallowed up by modern modular concrete hotels. But it was not the town planning that drew people here, John thought. And it certainly was not the golf course. He had laughed when they had passed its cratered fairways. On a fine day like today there were stunning glimpses of the snow-covered foothills beyond. From here, trekkers climbed north-east towards Sheshnag and Amarnath, or north-west to the Meadow, the mountain village of Aru, Kolahoi Glacier and the three high-altitude lakes Tar Sar, Mar Sar and Son Sar.

Just as John was beginning to feel excited for almost the first time since arriving in India, several small heavy objects rattled against the car, one of them clattering into the windscreen. ‘Stone pelters!’ yelled Dasheer, diving for cover. Panicking, John ducked too. Was this some kind of militant attack, he wondered, spotting that the rocks were being thrown by a group of young Kashmiri men outside the bus station. As he lay down on the back seat, his companions shouted at them in Kashmiri. Soon the car was completely encircled by furious-looking trekking guides, and at one point it seemed certain a full-blown fight would erupt. What the hell was going on, John asked. ‘They’re jealous that we picked you up in Srinagar,’ Dasheer shouted to him. ‘They say we’ve stolen their trade. Life here is hard, you see. Don’t worry. This happens all the time. Everything will be OK once we’re up in the mountains.’

After a few minutes the crowd drifted away, and John asked to get out of the car. He was becoming concerned that everything he had heard about Kashmir was unreliable. He could still turn back, he told himself; but then he gazed at those distant mountains once more. He wandered off, still nervous, but hoping to ask other travellers for tips. The further he walked into the town, the more alarmed he became by the air of decay that hung over this place. Pahalgam was empty, a single road fringed by wooden shop-houses, some offering trekking services, and not a soul to be seen in any of them. John passed the ornamental park and gardens, the police station and a couple of grander-looking hotels down by the river, the Heevan and the Lidder Palace. Where were all the tourists, he wondered, the throngs of people he had been told about by the factory workers in Bihar. The only visible Western faces were in yellowing photographs pasted in travel-agency windows. But every few yards there was a sorry huddle of trekking guides, all of whom would rush over at the sight of a rare Western visitor. These days it seemed all they could do was dream of a time when they had had all the work they could handle, carrying clanking cooking stoves up and down the mountain paths to glittering shrines illuminated with ghee lanterns and burning sandalwood.

Sick of the relentless attention, John waved off the last huddle and strode down the road in search of his companions. Dasheer had made arrangements for them to stay in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the town. ‘I seem to recall it didn’t really have windows,’ John said. ‘At the time I felt I was semi-camping already. But soon I would come to think of it as luxury.’ As he bedded down for the night, he tried to forget about the worryingly negative aspects of his trip, and focused on the next day. The three of them would set out at dawn the following morning for the Lidderwat Valley. They would head for Kolahoi Glacier, the three lakes of Tar Sar, Mar Sar and Son Sar, and would set up camp in the Meadow. He was determined to enjoy his holiday, whatever the cost. His company was paying, after all.

By 2 July, the day John Childs set out from Pahalgam, Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had been walking at high altitude for several days. They too had been concerned by the cratered road up from Anantnag – ‘a horrendous, horn-honking mad dash’ – and the ghostly appearance of Pahalgam. But once they had departed the town along the eastern route, following a well-worn track beside the East Lidder River, heading into the heart of the Betaab Valley and towards Amarnath Cave, their misgivings were left behind. ‘It was glorious shirt-sleeve weather,’ says Jane. The temperature was in the seventies. The scent of pine and lilac filled the air. The skies were clear, and the meadows alive with grazing sheep. Due to an unusually late thaw, the wildflowers were only just coming out on the hillsides, springing up with extra vigour because of the snowmelt. Little streams wound between pollarded willows, their crystal-clear water flowing between banks of vivid green moss and over beds coloured like autumn leaves. Jane was delighted. ‘Everything was perfect. Good food. The guides, Bashir and Sultan, were good. All we saw were the local shepherds.’ The only disconcerting sight was the occasional army jeep charging past them.

The first day, their guide, Bashir, had suggested they take noon chai with a gujjar family. It was a tourist stunt, but Jane didn’t care. This was a way for these people, who had little, to make a few rupees, and for visitors to see how they lived. Jane and Don followed Bashir’s lead, and sat dunking rolled-up pieces of salty girda bread into sugared tea. The family’s hut, or dhoka, set back from the main trekking path among the pine trees, was constructed of four sturdy trunks around which stone walls had been built, using mud as a mortar. Someone had pushed little strands of wild plants into the cracks, allowing them to cascade down the walls. The family sat mute, smiling. They spoke no English, and the guide said they did not speak Kashmiri either, but had their own dialect. Don took a few snaps, and Jane asked Bashir to identify some of the local flowers, and wrote their names down in her journal. Noonday chai would become a welcome part of their routine.

Later, after zigzagging back and forth over the East Lidder on little wooden pony bridges, wild lilac bushes perfuming the air, they reached Chandanwari, a village Hindu pilgrims called Amarnath base camp. Famous for its snow bridge, a semi-permanent glacial sheet that spanned the river, this was as far as army vehicles could reach. From now on the route consisted of a trekking path that climbed sharply, and Indian soldiers had to proceed by foot to their positions in the heights. Although the military presence was by no means overwhelming, there were still troops everywhere. Don and Jane reasoned that security was a good thing. The soldiers gave them no trouble, and soon they had left them behind, walking through pastures filled with violets, primulas and anemones, and spending their first night in the open steeped in air flecked with blossom. They sat with their books and journals by a gurgling stream, while Sultan, the pony-wallah who also doubled as their cook, prepared pots of daal, rice and curried vegetables on a kerosene stove.

After eating, Jane and Don talked a little to the guides about their families, who lived in Aru, a village near the Meadow. ‘You will come to our homes,’ they said. ‘You will have a meal with our families.’ But behind the smiles, Bashir and Sultan seemed sad, as if they knew that this business that had come their way would not be sufficient to mend Kashmir’s problems. Jane and Don had been quick to spot this, and it unsettled them. Whenever the guides talked together in their own language, over the pots and pans or with the ponies, they seemed to be arguing. ‘Life is hard these days,’ Bashir commented one evening, trying to spark up a conversation. ‘Why have people stopped coming?’ Jane asked, and probed them about any danger from militants. Bashir frowned. There was no militant activity in these parts, he mumbled. She must be sure to tell her friends back in the United States. ‘You are our friends, your friends are now our friends too.’ When the conversation dried up, Bashir and Sultan drifted off for a smoke. Jane and Don contemplated the valley as the darkness deepened, the roar of the river swelling and spreading. Above them rose the sombre masses of the snow-topped mountains, and meteorites streaked across the sky behind the seven snowy peaks of Sheshnag to the north-east. From this vantage point, the two Americans could see why these mountains, so closely connected to each other, were said to resemble the writhing heads of a mythical naga. This untamed beauty was worth coming to Kashmir to see. But they couldn’t help wondering if they would ever understand the crisis that had blighted the state.

The next day they hiked to nearly ten thousand feet, clambering across a field of moraine over Pissu Top. Don looked back, taking pictures along the valley. They dropped down into Zargibal, a wind-blasted stone hamlet, and a little further on they spent another night in the open, listening to their campfire crackle.

Up with the sun, they headed for Wavjan on the third day, overlooking the velvety waters of Sheshnag Lake and a slew of glaciers that ballooned out before them like pegged laundry. Blue irises grew all around. Jane asked Don to take some pictures, as she doubted if the specimens she picked would survive the trip back home. From here, Bashir told them, they would have to make it over Mahagunas Pass, before descending into the meadows of Panchtarni, the last place they would camp before trying for the Amarnath ice cave. Don had read that the cave was the supposed site of a tryst between the Hindu god Lord Shiva and Parvati, his divine consort, the place where he had explained to her the secrets of immortality. Bashir said a pair of mating doves had overheard, transforming the cave into their eternal dovecot. Inside was a shrine built around a giant ice lingam, a phallic stalagmite that represented Shiva’s potency. During the holy Hindu month of Shravan, between the full moons of July and August, when devotees made their annual yatra, the lingam was said visibly to wax and wane.

Eventually, still walking well, despite a few aches, over fields of scree, they reached Mahagunas Top at fifteen thousand feet. With rippling layers of geology exposed all along the bare ridgelines, and the glittering Himalayas spread out ahead, the landscape inspired them to forget the weariness they had begun to feel in their calves and knees. After Don, thinking of the post-trip potluck dinner they would arrange back in Spokane, got as many shots as he could, they headed for Panchtarni, the confluence of five streams, and the last camp before the holy cave itself.

Amarnath was a hard three-hour walk from there, the culmination of the yatris’ pilgrimage, at the end of a well-worn path that wound its way at a forty-five-degree angle through a gigantic glacial amphitheatre, where the bedrock rose hundreds of feet on either side, causing the trekkers’ footfalls to echo. When Don and Jane reached their destination the following morning, the giant cavern, more than 150 feet high and open to the elements, carved deep into the side of the mountain, was an overwhelming spectacle. The final approach was a zigzagging path, and Jane and Don could imagine how the cave had inspired stories of the gods for many hundreds of years: the Rajatarangini, a twelfth-century Sanskrit chronicle of the kings of Kashmir, had recorded how Aryaraja, a monarch who had ruled around the time of Jesus Christ, had worshipped a phallus formed of snow and ice ‘in the regions above the forests’.

After reaching the mouth of the cave and catching a glimpse of the giant ice lingam, filling their lungs with the sandalwood incense left by pilgrims, Don and Jane began to retrace their steps along the mountain path before branching off along a little-used track Sultan had told them about. ‘We didn’t do a “V” all the way back to Pahalgam, but instead cut across due west at around the area where the streams come into the East Lidder River from the north,’ Jane says. ‘That would have put us a little south of the village of Barimarg.’ There were trails all over the place, and the guides knew the routes. They were heading for the Lidderwat Valley and the Meadow, where they would spend the night before pushing on north-west, along a high-altitude route to the difficult Sonarmas Pass, at eleven thousand feet. Near here they would spend their last night in the mountains. A few hours beyond lay Sumbal, a village on a metalled road, from where a taxi would take them back to Srinagar.

Carpeted with white daisies and blue gentians, the Meadow was spellbinding when they reached it at the end of that afternoon, exhausted after a full day of walking and climbing. Bashir and Sultan set the tents up as usual, choosing a pitch in what they described as ‘the Upper Camp’, near a couple of empty dhokas, whose roofs were grassed over for insulation. They made a point of positioning Jane and Don’s tent close to the blue ice water, so they could hear it where they lay.

The couple fell asleep early, Jane complaining of toothache. The next morning, 3 July, they woke feeling glum. Just one more yomp to the high-altitude lake, Tar Sar, lay ahead of them. The adventure was coming to an end, although Jane’s toothache almost made her quit early: ‘I thought it was just a seed that had got stuck and so I ignored it, and we went ahead.’

The day John Childs set out on his trek up the Lidderwat Valley, heading for the Meadow, British tourists Keith and Julie Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley, accompanied by their new Canadian friend Bart Imler, arrived in Pahalgam with the Holiday Inn’s owner Bashir, who introduced them to their guides and pony-wallahs. True to his word, Bashir had arranged a full team: ponies, a cook, guides, and two extra teenage boys, brought along for ‘emergencies’. But there would be none of these, Bashir had assured them, his words ringing in their ears after the alarming drive down from Srinagar, the road pitted with constant reminders that there was a major military operation going on in the Kashmir Valley.

Now that she was here before the mountains, Julie was excited, and grateful that she would not have to heft her cumbersome kit. The party set off in bright sunshine, Julie and Cath in shorts and T-shirts, small daypacks slung over their shoulders, following the same track up the Lidderwat Valley that John Childs had taken at daybreak. Bashir was chatty, passing on titbits about the flowers and wildlife. The pony-wallahs asked where they came from, what life was like in the UK and where they had been so far on their travels. As they made their way out of the town, heading north-west up a gentle incline along a path that followed the route of the sloshing Lidder River, Paul got out his camera and began taking photos of the nomadic shepherds tending their flocks, men whose entire lives were spent wandering with the seasons, their burnished faces topped by wool caps, inset with tinsel and mirrored fragments to catch the sunlight.

Apart from the occasional herder, the group had the valley to themselves. For a while they walked in silence, listening to the cries of a hawk on the thermals high above their heads. Paul snapped his walking companions: Julie, wearing a bandana and baseball cap; bow-legged Keith, sporting a natty woollen waistcoat, bought from an insistent shikara salesman; Cath striding along with an improvised walking stick, happy for the first time since she had arrived in India. Ahead was the hulking mass of one of the smaller peaks.

‘It was as if God had given us a piece of paradise,’ Julie recalled. It was everything the posters had claimed. Kashmir had won her round. The mountains rose ever higher, thickly cloaked in red pines that grew so densely that the absence of light below the canopies ensured that nothing grew in the warm mulch of crushed leaves and cones around their bases.

After a few hours they stopped for lunch at Aru, which marked the end of the drivable road. Spongy, lush grass lay beneath their feet. A clutch of wooden houses served as chai stalls and guesthouses. This was their last chance to buy sweets and biscuits. They sat down to vegetable curry and rice before heading out of the village, on a less well-defined path than before. Paul snapped a couple of shots of the dilapidated ‘Milky Way Tourist Bungalow and Cafeteria’ on the outskirts of Aru. It looked like a set from a spaghetti Western. Bashir mumbled that he didn’t like the place, and ushered them past. Something bad had happened here, he said. The owners were not good people. He would explain another time.

The path headed up through the pine forest at a precipitous gradient before swinging down to rejoin the Lidder. After a couple of hours they broke out of the conifers and into an expanse of grassland, a glacial valley that smelled of clean washing and star anise, where the wind blew the grass into eddies. Bashir said they had at last reached the Meadow.

Julie and Keith reached for warm jackets, while Bashir and his crew pitched the tents. There were a couple of other small groups already camping here, among them Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, but Julie and Keith, conscious of everyone’s desire for space, chose not to go and poke around. People could come down later, drawn by the campfire, if they wanted to talk, they reasoned. Instead, the Mangans wandered over to the stony banks of the Lidder, taking sips from the ice-cold water while Bashir’s team clanked around, setting up the kitchen. They had brought everything they would need: big blackened cooking pots and pans, kerosene stoves, and enough food to feed a cricket team. One of the boys was sent off to forage for wood while Bashir set a fire in a ring of stones left by some other trekking party. By the time the tea had boiled the Westerners had settled around the fire, hungry and footsore. Tomorrow they would head for the glacier, travelling light, leaving most of their kit behind. The Meadow was that kind of place, Bashir said. It wasn’t like back home in Blackburn or Middlesbrough, he joked, where you had to leave the lights on all night to keep the burglars guessing. But, just to be safe, he would leave a couple of his boys to guard the camp while they did the eight or nine hours up and down. They would take food for the journey, but there was nowhere to stay at the top. Julie wasn’t sure she’d make it all the way, but she’d give it a try. The Meadow was already proving hard to leave.

The next day, at dawn, Keith, Julie, Paul, Cath and Bart slowly made their way on towards Kolahoi base camp, a gentle climb at first through a vast, sweeping glacial valley, its floor littered with large boulders deposited by ancient ice floes, a solemn, eerie landscape that rose on either side towards sheer granite cliff faces high above. Here and there wild ponies grazed, tiny specks dwarfed by the rugged landscape. Dotted around was the odd gujjar settlement, a row of tiny stone shelters that jutted out of the hillside. Occasionally the party met the families who lived in them. They were dressed in scarves and robes, the men with brightly hennaed beards, the women with tightly bound hair, their children riding on the ponies along with the pots and pans.

A few hundred metres short of the base camp, an opaque mist had settled, limiting their visibility, though the sun shone through it with a glare that was trying to the eyes. Then the dark granite of the Kolahoi peak suddenly became visible, with the Zanskar mountains just visible behind. The party paused to take it all in. Ahead, they could see there had been an ice-fall, with huge seracs below the peak. To the left was the glacier itself, a frozen torrent of water, an iced-over moment that looked as if it could fracture at any time, sweeping them away. Then there were the crevasses that they imagined lay ahead, having heard stories that they regularly consumed sheep and ponies. In the distance they thought they could make out tiny figures climbing the fluted ice ribs and hanging glaciers. ‘Indian soldiers,’ said Bashir matter-of-factly. They came here to train before being deployed to the army’s most vertiginous bases at Siachen, at 18,700 feet. Paul took rolls of film, switching from black-and-white to colour. After their six-hour ascent they stayed at the summit for some time, taking in the panorama below, and the vapour trails above that seemed to be almost within reach. ‘I think at that point Paul must have realised he was very pleased that he had come to Kashmir,’ Bob Wells mused later. ‘Although it wasn’t Ladakh, it was just about as foreign and awe-inspiring as he could imagine a place to be.’

Later, their legs stiffening as the afternoon clouds rolled in, signalling that the temperatures would soon plummet, the group picked their way back down to the Meadow. Julie was finished well before she got back to the camp, and slumped down inside the entrance of her tent to examine her badly blistered feet. Bart too had had enough. In the grip of a vicious headache, he suspected he was suffering from altitude sickness, and went off to lie down without eating.

That night, the others sat around the fire, planning. It had been quite a day, the best since arriving in Kashmir. Some of them, exhilarated by what they had achieved so far, talked of going up to Tar Sar the following morning. Keith was keen, but Julie put the kybosh on it. This was her first attempt at serious trekking, and Kolahoi was enough. Tomorrow, she was staying put. Paul and Cath were also tired, and opted to explore closer to the Meadow. Keith was alone in wanting to try to see the mountain lake. He would follow the track up for a while, he said, just to find out what was up there. ‘A big, strapping lad’, as his mother Mavis called him, he thought he could make it there and back in seven hours. He would probably be back by mid-afternoon, definitely by dinner, he promised Julie.

John Childs had also arrived at the Meadow. ‘It was truly peaceful,’ he remembered. He had asked his guide Dasheer to set up his tent on a hillside, away from the other tents gathered down by the river. He had come here to push himself through the wild mountains, and he wanted to do it alone: ‘I was going to go down and say hello, but it just didn’t happen. I’m a very quiet, shy and private kind of person.’ While the Kashmiris prepared camp, John walked up to the woods behind his tent, following a herders’ path through the creaking pines. Somewhere up above he could hear dogs barking. Perhaps it was a remote gujjar settlement, he thought as a family of herders appeared through the trees. On seeing him they instantly scurried off into the undergrowth. ‘Although we were way up in the mountains there were people everywhere,’ he said. ‘It felt like nothing happened around this valley without everyone knowing about it.’ When he headed back down later, tired and hungry, he noticed that more tents had been pitched in the Meadow, but he was glad to see that his was still several hundred yards from its nearest neighbour. Unlike Calcutta and Bihar, which he had found suffocating, here there was plenty of space. It looked as if he had chosen the perfect spot for a two-nighter.

Dasheer pondered John as he prepared their evening meal that night. He had torn up the track from Pahalgam, from where they had set out at daybreak, barely speaking a word the whole way. Most foreigners walked at half the speed of a Kashmiri, and many of them struggled to adjust to the altitude. But John had been at his shoulder all the way, making Dasheer work harder than he was used to. Three hours from Pahalgam to Aru, with two more to reach the Meadow. He could probably make it to Tar Sar and back with half a day to spare, Dasheer guessed. The Kashmiri guide admired the steely American, even if he could not say that he liked him. John seemed to him to cut a lonely figure. Kashmiris like to be surrounded by friends and family, but this American sought out no one’s company other than his own. He had not given Dasheer a chance to get close, and after exchanging pleasantries at dinner he retired to his one-man tent.

Jane and Don packed up and left the Meadow at dawn on 3 July, without meeting either the British party or John Childs. They wanted to get as much out of their last two days as possible, pushing to the head of the Lidderwat Valley and then branching north-west along a path that took them over a series of precipitous ridges. ‘It was the best day’s trekking we had, some of the most spectacular scenery we had seen on the Kashmir trip,’ Jane says. They began their descent, heading east through a sweeping valley to a remote campsite at Sekhwas. ‘I remember camping and seeing the moon in the sky next to what might be the 13,450-foot Yarnhar Peak.’ They were lucky to have caught it, Jane thought as she tracked wisps of light cloud moving across the plush darkness.

They woke on the morning of 4 July, daunted by the knowledge that by evening they would be back in Srinagar. Breaking camp, they headed out west along the same route they had taken the previous day to Tar Sar, but this time they continued towards the Sonarmas Pass. For the whole trip Jane had kept a record of their route, and now she added this final journey to the map, tracing it in black felt-tip pen. As they ascended, Don photographed the wildflowers. ‘The meadows were still somewhat soggy from recently melted snow (not all of it was gone), and the wildflowers including creeping phlox were amazing,’ Jane recalled. Then some gujjars up ahead waved them down. The normally solitary herders were feared by many Kashmiris, who treated them like tinkers. This group talked for a time to Bashir in Urdu. He nodded, then turned to the foreigners. The gujjars had said the pass ahead was choked by snow, he told them. There was no way through. But there was something about his manner that made Jane and Don uneasy. They needed compelling reasons to abandon a route. Bashir suggested they should return to the Meadow, and camp there for one more night before descending to Pahalgam early the next day.

Don and Jane did not want to retrace their steps. Was he sure the information was accurate, Jane asked Bashir. She and Don were experienced ice climbers, who could make it over most things. Sultan, silent at first, claimed he was worried about his pony falling, while Bashir appeared uneasy. Was it laziness, or was he being overprotective, Jane wondered. Or was there something else to the story? Was he pushing them into another part of the mountains on the instructions of some unseen hand or authority? Don and Jane debated it. They were paying the guy, so he should do as they wished. ‘But if the pony got injured we’d be responsible,’ Don reasoned. ‘In the end,’ said Jane, ‘we had to take Bashir at his word.’

As they irritably started their descent, a young Danish couple came up the path towards them, travelling alone. They stopped and chatted in English. When Don and Jane explained what their guides had told them about the blocked pass, the Danes said they would take their chances. They had no ponies to hold them back, and were experienced climbers. Jane never saw them again, ‘But I think about them even to this day. Turning back would be the worst decision of my life.’

Shortly after, Jane and Don had another chance encounter, meeting a tall young British trekker, walking alone with a daypack. He introduced himself as Keith Mangan from Teesside, and said he was on his way up to Tar Sar. It was truly stunning, they said, well worth the effort. Keith said his wife, Julie, was waiting for him at the Meadow. They were heading back there, they replied. ‘Tell her I’ll be back later,’ Keith said with a wave before heading up the path.

Within a couple of hours, Jane and Don were back at the Meadow. The Upper Camp was crowded, but they easily found Julie, sitting outside her tent. ‘We met your husband,’ Jane told her. They chatted for a few minutes, until Don looked around for Bashir and Sultan. They had agreed to pitch camp here, but the guides were already heading down out of the campsite, seemingly in a hurry. Jane and Don gave each other a look. Bashir knew something that he was not sharing. ‘We felt that he was being evasive,’ says Jane. But, nearing the end of a glorious trip that had buoyed their spirits, they followed anyway. They were tired, Jane’s tooth throbbed and she was actually looking forward to going home.

Twenty minutes later they stopped beside a newly-built log bridge that marked the start of the Lower Camp. Bashir and Sultan were already busy getting the tents up. Jane went down to the river to relax while Don attempted to wash their socks and T-shirts in the icy water, doing his best to work up a lather. She caught up with her journal. It was 4 July, Independence Day. She realised this was the first time she’d thought about it all day. ‘What would all our friends be doing back in Spokane?’ she wondered. The great thing about leaving home was the warmth of returning, she thought. Don was already talking about what he would tell the Spokane crew. She started to write one last sentence about the day: ‘So we agreed to come back the same way we had come,’ she began, before she was interrupted.