The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  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.

  FOUR

  Home

  The name chosen for the
operation was Ghar, the Urdu word for ‘home’. It reminded everyone of the objective – getting Masood Azhar back to Pakistan. And from the moment of its conception in January 1995, one candidate emerged as the man to handle it.

  His Pakistani handlers called him, flippantly, ‘the Kashmiri’. But in his native Kashmir, where their name meant nothing, he had many others. His parents had named him Javid Ahmed Bhat. School friends dubbed him ‘Dabrani’, after his village, Dabran, a few miles outside Kashmir’s unruly southern town of Anantnag, an hour and a half’s drive from Srinagar.

  Javid was a stocky boy who lived in a two-storey brick house near the village’s communal wash-house – a stone-lined pond where everyone cleaned their linen – and close to the ramshackle store, with its cardboard boxes of five-paisa chews, so congealed that you had to eat them with the wrappers on.

  The Bhats were an educated family, Mr Bhat having been a quality-control officer in the district’s agriculture department. Javid had done well enough to qualify for the government college in Anantnag, where he studied engineering. It always seemed to his neighbours that he would be somebody, one of the few who would escape the village, with its spinach-green houses and stone-and-mud lanes that tracked the saffron field. Dabran sat in a quiet copse of walnut and chinar (an oriental plane tree), surrounded by terraces of paddy. In high summer the village was dappled in light, and in winter it was frozen to the bone. In the daylight hours Dabran bustled along, while at night, like most villages in the valley, it coiled up like a fern, its residents locking shutters and barricading doors against the regular Indian security-force patrols that clattered through conducting cordon-and-search operations. Ostensibly, they were trying to catch militants, but they had become vengeful, with windows being smashed and possessions thrown into the mud, doors stoved in, sons and fathers taken away to an uncertain fate, women and girls hauled into dark places where bored soldiers, a long way from home, assaulted them.

  As a child, Javid had lived for the spring, when he could finally prise open his bedroom shutters and oil his cricket bat, hand-carved from cheap Kashmiri poplar by an uncle. A pace bowler and a robust batsman, a thinker and a leader, it was no surprise to anyone in Dabran that this boy who others loved to be with had a loyal following by the time he was sixteen. He was a dependable friend, but also a worry to his family.

  At college he joined the J&K Students Liberation Front (SLF), the youth wing of the azadi or ‘freedom’ movement that had taken root in campuses across Kashmir as a reaction to India’s clumsy rigging of the state elections in 1987. For Javid, the SLF was also a vent for his fear and anger at all that he had seen his neighbours and family endure. He quickly moved up the ranks of the organisation, acquiring another name, Saifullah, to shade his political activities, while his alter ego pushed forward silently, attaining a BSc in engineering.

  As the screws tightened around the valley with the introduction of Governor’s Rule in December 1989, the SLF debated how to respond. Like students the world over, they were at the forefront of street protests, but some among their ranks wanted to take up arms and fight. ‘Is it worth marching any more?’ Javid had asked one day at a meeting convened to arrange a demonstration. He had been reading about radical German students who had taken up arms and formed the Red Army Faction in 1970. His intervention stopped all of them in their tracks. ‘Holding placards won’t stop the bloodshed. We are at war,’ he continued. In April 1990, with calls for Kashmir’s tahreek, or armed struggle, gaining momentum and being fuelled from over the border by Brigadier Badam and the ISI, Javid became part of a breakaway SLF bloc that took the plunge following the arrest of several student activists. India would only withdraw, so the argument went, if Kashmiris were willing to make it too costly for them to stay. Javid’s group abducted the Vice Chancellor of Kashmir University and his elderly assistant while they were on their way to Friday prayers. They also snatched the general manager of Hindustan Machine Tools from downtown Srinagar. Their aim was to use the captured men to bargain the release of the jailed activists. A line had been crossed.

  The Indian government refused to negotiate, throwing the SLF into a panic. What were they to do now? For days there was a standoff, until reports emerged that the Vice Chancellor and his assistant were to be freed anyway, at Padshahi Bagh, a beauty spot close to Anantnag town. The news was greeted with widespread joy, but as the two hostages clambered through the short grass, heading for freedom, they were shot in the back by unseen gunmen. The third hostage was cruelly killed too, his body dumped in the Srinagar neighbourhood of Batamaloo.

  Many in the valley were shocked by these executions. Ordinary Kashmiris and regular SLF members rose up in disgust, pointing out that Indians were always pleased to see Kashmiris killing each other, as it saved them the trouble. Such actions only benefited the oppressor, said the mainstream SLF leadership, denouncing the breakaway faction that Javid had joined. Although he was unconnected to the abductions and killings, he refused to criticise those who had carried them out. ‘They are not darshit gar [terrorists], they are mujahids,’ he told his friends. ‘Don’t shy away. We have to meet this terror head-on. Remember the massacres of Gawakadal, Sopore and Handwara.’ The bloody events would mark the beginning of Javid’s withdrawal from mainstream Kashmiri society, and while some in the SLF went underground, he sought out more militant comrades. If India was to be beaten, then all the old ways, of soft-edged politicking and mystical faith, had to be replaced by a razor-sharp Islamic identity. The only way to purge India from the valley was through tahreek, Javid declared. He signed up with the Ikhwan Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of religiously conservative Kashmiri mujahids who had been sizing up the massing Indian security forces. As he took up arms, he was a long way from the schoolboy Javid Ahmed Bhat, or the jaunty cricket player Dabrani. But in his own mind he was not yet far enough.

  In the summer of 1990, on the run from the Indian security forces after the Brotherhood had been bloodied in an encounter in Anantnag, Javid unexpectedly stopped by to see his family in Dabran, shinning in through the kitchen window. ‘No need to worry,’ he said, at which his mother and father froze in fear. For Kashmiri parents, said Mr Bhat, these four words meant just one thing: their child was going ‘over there’.

  ‘We knew then that he was heading for Pakistan. He kissed us and he was gone. Then we heard absolutely nothing.’ For months, hundreds of young men across the valley had been disappearing over the LoC, heading for training camps. But terrible reports soon seeped home of boys, too young and inexperienced to evade the hardened Indian border forces, being cut down the minute they crossed back over into Kashmir. Those who made it further into the valley were also being culled, as India stepped up to the growing militancy. After a while Javid’s parents started mourning, hoping someone would be kind enough to bring his body home to be buried in the village cemetery, a shady spot near a line of knock-kneed chinars. But no news came. ‘To be honest, there were times when I would have claimed any body – just so we could say it’s done,’ said his tearful mother.

  In Javid’s absence, the pocket handkerchief of scrub that made up Dabran cemetery rapidly filled with ‘martyrs’. One third were boys of Javid’s age, friends with whom he had played cricket in the summer holidays, killed by the Indian Army while serving one tahreek organisation or another, some of them home-grown, some funded from across the LoC. Another third were boys who had had no connection to the militancy whatsoever, but were killed just for coming from Dabran, which for many in the Indian security forces was crime enough, given the village’s links to Javid and other up-and-coming figures in the azadi movement. The remaining third were unknowns, mostly gunned down by the Rashtriya Rifles (RR), a new specialist counter-insurgency force raised by India’s army chief in May 1990, whose ruthlessness would change the face of the conflict beyond recognition.

  Made up of soldiers seconded from other parts of the Indian Army and paid extra, the original six battalions of the RR – motto Dridhta au
r Virta, meaning ‘Strength and Bravery’ – had been created as a counter to Brigadier Badam’s ISI operation. But soon the RR, which would have forty thousand men in Kashmir, the largest dedicated counter-insurgency force in the world, was as renowned for its reckless lack of precision as for its ingenuity and valour. In Dabran and other villages across the valley, the bodies of those it had killed, who it described as ‘foreign militants’, were dumped at the local police post, without justification or documents. Most were Kashmiri civilians who had been abducted by the RR and summarily executed, but no one was brave enough to take it to task. Instead, Dabran’s cemetery became a place to bury the evidence, and for collective mourning. Everyone in the village had someone ‘over there’, so the Dabranis clubbed together to pay for the last rites and the burial shrouds of these unclaimed corpses, hoping the same civility would be accorded their kin, should their bodies be found on Pakistani soil.

  One day early in 1995, six years into the insurgency, while snow settled on the single track through Dabran, a stranger banged at Mr and Mrs Bhat’s front door. His face was obscured by an unkempt beard and a pakul, the flat woolly cap favoured by the Afghan mujahideen, and the couple were terrified until he spoke. Then Mrs Bhat fell to her knees. It was Javid, the son who in her mind’s eye she had buried. After the hugging and kissing, and the pouring of namkeen (salt tea) from the thermos, Javid cleared his throat. ‘I am not Javid any more,’ he told them, adding that he did not have long to explain. He was with some men with guns, on their way to carry out an important mission. Right now they were stationed outside as lookouts.