by Adrian Levy
After they had gone, Mr Bhat came outside, and for the first time in many years he swore out loud. ‘Chacha-chod!’ he spat, using the Kashmiri word for uncle-fuckers. ‘I hate this fucking war!’ he shouted to his neighbours as they made their way out of their hiding places towards the tent Hans had pitched to face the seven peaks of Sheshnag. A pair of flip-flops still lay on the ground, as if someone was asleep inside. Mr Bhat peered in, hoping that he had somehow got it all wrong, and Hans would be smiling back at him. But clothes were strewn around, photographs torn and jumbled, a packet of instant porridge, a small gas stove and a bottle of honey. A jar of Horlicks had been emptied onto the sleeping bag.
Mr Bhat tried to make things tidy, although in his heart he knew that Hans would not be returning. Hidden beneath a brown woolly hat he found a Norwegian edition of Opening Doors Within, a volume of meditations by Eileen Caddy, a British New Age guru, and a book of poems by Khalil Gibran. Mr Bhat could not read in any language, but from the bottom of the sleeping bag he fished out a bulging black notepad with red linen trim. Written in Norwegian, the first page read: ‘The books of Katharsis Theatre, Hans Christian Ostrø’. Beneath was a biro sketch of a dancing figure, arms raised, with a budding rose drawn over its heart. Intense currents of swirling script raced across and up the sides of the following pages, interspersed with more biro scribbles: ghostlike faces, lips, hands and eyes. The writings, mostly in Norwegian with a few English words scattered about, were a combination of jottings about kathakali, notes on Hindu myths, diary entries and quotes from the great Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore. Interspersed between them were private, deep-felt thoughts about regrets, old girlfriends and missed opportunities. Mr Bhat deduced that these things were personal, and shut the book immediately.
That night, he called everyone in the hamlet together. What should they do, he asked nervously. ‘Keep quiet,’ a few of them suggested, pointing out that any admission that mujahids had been here would only bring a harsh response from the security forces. An elder tut-tutted and hissed ‘Cowards!’ Mr Bhat said they needed to report this abduction to the police. The blond foreigner had been travelling alone, and if they didn’t raise the alarm it could be weeks before anyone knew he was missing. ‘He lived with us, we owe him,’ Mr Bhat said. ‘Think about his family.’ Someone seconded the motion: ‘Tell the police. The DSP down in Pahalgam is a bastard who could talk an antelope into eating its young, but he is even-handed compared to the army.’ Someone remembered the DSP’s name was Kifayat Haider. Everyone had to forget the beatings, the scorn and threats, bile and petty insults they had received at the hands of police constables. They should stick their necks out for the Ox.
But the following day, nothing happened. Nobody went down to Pahalgam, and the tent was left where it was, mournfully flapping. Mr Bhat tried to call another meeting, but nobody came. Not until the morning of 10 July was a lone messenger delegated to make the climb down to Pahalgam, carrying the foreigner’s abandoned possessions. Braving the police station, he spoke to a Duty Inspector, who noted down receipt of the tent and its contents before sending an urgent message down the police radio to DSP Kifayat Haider in Bijbehara.
‘Another foreigner abducted at Zargibal.’ Haider was horrified. Just that morning he had been watching the television news in his office and seen the press conference held by General Saklani at which John Childs had said a few words. Haider contacted the control room in Anantnag, and checked with police headquarters in Srinagar too, but no one could understand what the information from Zargibal meant. It must have been a duplicate report, they said in Srinagar: ‘We already know about the German, Dirk Hasert, the fifth hostage. He was taken on the morning of 8 July at 7 a.m., trekking on the path just north of Chandanwari.’ But, after checking and rechecking, it appeared that militants searching for John Childs had grabbed Dirk Hasert at 7 a.m. on 8 July, and had then run into another foreigner in Zargibal around midday. Haider confirmed that there were two more missing trekkers, both seized after Childs was rescued, although no word had come from the al Faran kidnap party confirming that it was them who had carried out these new abductions.
The DSP was beside himself. He was already two days behind, since the villagers in Zargibal had failed to report this latest abduction until now. ‘The worst of it was the wider implications. There were still thirty-three trekkers out there in the hills, and evidently the column of insurgents had begun picking them off one by one.’ There were now five hostages in the mountains. ‘How many more are going to be taken before we get this under control?’ Haider screamed at no one in particular.
As the senior police official responsible for the area in which the kidnappings had taken place, he was responsible for investigating the crimes, establishing who had committed them and finding the kidnap party. A day earlier he had received express orders to that effect from General Saklani’s office, and these were now updated to inform him that police constables would have to be taken off yatra duties to track down the remaining thirty-three trekkers who had not yet been accounted for. As Haider understood it, the army would be responsible for leading the search teams for the missing backpackers, as they were already deployed in the mountains to secure the yatra route. But then, this was Kashmir, and as always the division of responsibilities was ‘as clear as a murky Mughal lily pond’.
Haider barked questions about the new Zargibal hostage into the phone: ‘Nationality? Name? Next of kin?’ Who the hell was this sixth captive? But no one in Pahalgam knew. He had been travelling alone, and the militants had taken his passport and wallet: ‘It seemed he had not followed the rules stipulating he had to register his route with Pahalgam tourist police on his way through. Or the police had failed to follow the rules and register him, which was more likely. Either way, we did not have much to go on.’ Incandescent, the DSP decided to drive up and take charge at the crime scene.
But at the police station in Pahalgam there was nothing new, just the tent and some books that Haider decided he would look at later. He drove on up to Chandanwari, the village where the single-track road ended, close to where the German Dirk Hasert had been seized two days earlier. Thousands of yatris were congregated around the perimeter of the local Rashtriya Rifles base, sporting balaclavas and tank tops to withstand the coolness of the Kashmiri summer, many of them wearing hired brown plastic booties, slipping and sliding all over Chandanwari’s famous ice bridge across the East Lidder River. For most, it was the first snow they had ever touched or seen, and snappers made bundles of rupees selling the pictures as souvenirs, while entrepreneurial Kashmiri boys hired out sledges so pilgrims could hurtle down the slope.
Haider pressed past them on foot, skirting around the sooty ice sheet, littered with discarded Thums Up cola bottles and Amul ice-cream wrappers. He intended to search the spot where Dirk Hasert had been taken and then hike the five miles on to Zargibal, scene of the sixth mysterious abduction. Only two sharpshooters accompanied him, as no one could spare more men. But as he progressed, he was surprised to see no evidence of any kind of army search operation, contrary to the claims Saklani had made on television. Perhaps they were already higher up, he thought, giving them the benefit of the doubt as he marched on purposefully. After all, the heights were the army’s domain all year round, with some bases overlooking the Line of Control at up to sixteen thousand feet, manned even in the deepest winter.
As he continued climbing, there was still no sign of a search. Then he was abruptly halted by an Indian Army patrol. ‘I’m DSP Haider from Bijbehara,’ he said, proffering his police ID, expecting to be ushered through. The soldiers would not budge. ‘Let me pass,’ he demanded. ‘I’m sorry, sir, we have orders. No one can come through,’ they replied. An incredulous Haider swore that he would get them disciplined. Then a Rashtriya Rifles Major strolled over. ‘There’s a cordon,’ he said firmly. ‘We’re not allowing anyone beyond it, other than army officers, sir.’ Haider insisted. There were two new kidnappings he needed to investigate. ‘Please go
back, sir,’ the Major told him. Haider decided there was no point wasting more time arguing up here with junior ranks. He would climb down to Pahalgam and make a complaint to army HQ and the Governor’s office before returning to his criminal investigation, coming at it from a different angle, one that tapped into his knowledge of the mountains and their inhabitants.
If he could not go into the mountains, others would go for him. After the abductions of Don Hutchings, Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and John Childs, Haider had taken it upon himself to open an informal office away from the main police station in Pahalgam, inside an anonymous shop house up the road towards Chandanwari, to which visitors could come without being stigmatised for entering police property. He had sat in the gloom of the shop for an hour a day, dressed in his civvies, instigating a system of casual rewards for any tribal mountain men who dared call in, promising to buy them ponies and goats in exchange for titbits of information. ‘I’m not offering you money, but if your horses have died or you lost some cattle on the high pass, come and tell me,’ the wily policeman said. A pony here. Two goats there. It did not cost much, and snippets flowed in: ‘One gujjar told me the hostages were in Sheshnag, moving around on a track high above the yatra route. Another said that one of his relatives had been forced at gunpoint to cook a meal for the hostages, and that they had seemed to be in good health, since they complained about the food.’ Then Haider picked up something he had not been expecting, something that went a long way to explaining why the army cordon in the hills above Chandanwari had stopped him. A local hunter whispered (in return for two ponies) that two days back, a Western female trekker had approached the RR camp at Chandanwari to say she had witnessed the abduction of Dirk Hasert. Instead of taking her seriously, an RR major had sexually assaulted her. Senior officers had been sent into the mountains to hush her up and investigate the errant major. Now an operation was in place to prevent anyone knowing the shame that had befallen the RR, which was why Haider had been barred from climbing up to the scene of the second kidnap.
‘I could barely believe what I was hearing,’ said Haider. ‘We had several crises on our hands, and yet an army officer was acting like an animal with a valuable female witness.’ Over the next twenty-four hours, Haider would lodge an official complaint with the army about withholding vital eyewitness statements, his report making it clear that he knew about the incident in Chandanwari. ‘I intended to let rip with the higher-ups,’ he said, emboldened by the power of holding such a useful bargaining chip, but unsure if it would elicit any information about the female eyewitness. The army was a world unto itself.
Then the DSP gleaned another revelation from his Pahalgam Duty Inspector, one that did not work in his favour at all. The previous day a team of detectives from the police Crime Branch in Srinagar had been spotted in Pahalgam, roughing up residents and taking a particular interest in the Heevan Hotel. Haider was mortified. He thought he was the sole police investigator. Nobody from headquarters had thought to inform him that others had been drafted in too. He knew that once Crime Branch, the specialist criminal investigation department of Jammu and Kashmir Police, got its hands on a case, the local officers were pushed to the margins. Was he about to be manoeuvred out of the biggest investigation of his career? If his new mountain sources got wind of this development, they’d disappear in an instant. Haider sat back at his desk in Pahalgam police station, deflated. He smoked a couple of Classics, and wondered about the Heevan Hotel. Why had Crime Branch gone there, he asked himself. Was there some connection to the kidnapping?
Before he went there to check, he remembered what he did have to himself: the contents of the tent that belonged to the sixth kidnap victim. They were packed into a large black holdall: books, dried food, clothes and some other personal items. No different to any of the bags that ended up in police hands in Pahalgam after being stolen from trekkers by unregistered pony-wallahs. But then he spotted something the Duty Inspector had missed. The DSP was after all an educated man, and an avid reader. Here was writing and references to places that led him to deduce that the sixth victim was from Norway, and that he had been in India for several months. Delighted to have something new to report, he informed Srinagar of his discovery. He then called up his friend, BBC man Yusuf Jameel, in the Press Enclave. He would need all the help he could get in identifying the missing tourist as quickly as possible. Yusuf prepared a late-night dispatch.
The following morning, 11 July, Tore Hattrem, a young diplomat based in New Delhi, was watching the television news from his desk in the political section of the Norwegian Embassy in Chanyakapuri when a report came on about a sixth tourist being abducted in Kashmir. ‘When they mentioned local police were saying the missing man was a Norwegian national, I immediately had one thought: it was the traveller I had met here a week earlier, an intense young man with piercing blue eyes.’ He had been memorable, not just because very few Norwegians went to Kashmir these days, but also because he had been extraordinarily upbeat about his trip.
Hattrem had first come across this man conducting a conversation with the Embassy receptionist in Malayalam, a language from India’s southern state of Kerala. ‘He explained he’d been in Kerala for five months, learning kathakali dancing. He said it had been a tough experience, because of the language.’ Having recently completed his ‘graduation dance’, he was now qualified as a kathakali master. Tore had been impressed. He had been in India much longer than the young man, but had not seen much beyond the compound walls. The man enthused about an up-and-coming kathakali performance he was planning in Oslo. He had also written a play. ‘The theatre’s booked,’ he said. ‘You must come. It’s my first big bash.’
The visitor told Tore that he was going to spend his last days in the subcontinent trekking up to Amarnath Cave in Kashmir. Was it safe, he had asked. Now, with the news blaring in his ear, Tore remembered that he had replied that he had never visited this region, and didn’t feel qualified to answer. He had called over a colleague, but he did not know what the two had discussed. What was the young man’s name, he now asked himself. He was sure he had left a photocopy of his passport. It should be on record somewhere.
When Marit Hesby wanted to get away from it all, she and her husband John went down to her family’s wooden summerhouse near Tønsberg, Norway’s oldest settlement, dating from AD 871. It was a friendly town, a little over an hour south of Oslo, and they had a black clap-board cabin overlooking the southern reaches of the silvery Oslofjord. Without telephone or television, it was a place to absorb the black-granite landscape and the indigo sky. Tønsberg was pitted with memories for Marit, since she had been born there, and her parents still had a house close by. She also had many happy memories of bringing her children here, although these days she lived and worked in Trondheim, in the far north of the country, and they were far away.
On 11 July 1995, Marit and John were just about to sit down for dinner with some old friends at the Tønsberg summerhouse when there was a knock at the door. Marit’s neighbour was there, apologising for disturbing them, but she had just heard some worrying news on the television about a Norwegian man taken hostage in Kashmir. She didn’t want to panic anybody but wasn’t Marit’s son Hans Christian there right now? ‘I just froze in an instant,’ Marit recalled. Everyone loved the charming, animated Hans Christian, and he left an indelible impression on all who met him. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. She had last spoken to him two weeks back, when he had called from New Delhi, excited at just having just left the Norwegian Embassy with a green light to go to Kashmir. ‘He told me they had said not to worry, to call them if there was a problem.’ He was heading up to Srinagar as soon as he could get a flight, he said before saying goodbye. ‘I didn’t know the first thing about Kashmir.’
Returning to the table, her face blanched, Marit had a sinking sensation, a feeling she would later describe as a mother’s intuition. She had felt the same a year earlier, when Hans Christian had been travelling alone in South America, camping in the Bolivian
mountains. He had been sleeping in his hammock when armed police had arrested him during a raid on a coca plantation. He had nothing to do with the drug dealers who ran it, but in his usual dreamy way he had camped in the plantation by mistake. ‘Ever since he had been a little boy he always seemed to land himself up in some scrape or another,’ Marit said. ‘He was just too trusting and too curious.’ Trying not to panic, she found an old radio in a cupboard. ‘I said to my guests, “I have to put the news on to listen.” We heard the same report as our neighbours. A missing Norwegian in Kashmir. I remember saying to my friends, “Why are they not reporting the age?” If they had reported the age then we would know at least if it could have been Hans Christian or not.’
Marit knew her twenty-seven-year-old son had arrived in Kashmir by 30 June, because she had received a postcard from him a couple of days back with that date. It depicted Dal Lake, and bore a characteristically upbeat message: ‘Hello! My last little hello from India. Himalaya is fantastic. I’m going to hire a guide and a pony and go into the Buddha cloister. I’m looking forward to enjoying the mysticism and peace of the mountains. It’s good to be here with the people and the mountains. I’m coming home on 31 July with SK150 from London at 20:00. Looking forward … HCO.’
Marit’s friends reassured her. Hans Christian had been in India for six months, and he knew how to look after himself. They were sure that the missing man was someone else’s tragedy. Soon after, Marit’s brother, who was staying at another family cabin nearby, called round. He too had heard the news. She asked to borrow his mobile phone to call her ex-husband, Hans Gustav, a bank manager who lived in Oslo. He would know what to do. ‘Have you heard?’ Marit asked him, struggling to stay calm. ‘Do you think Hans Christian is in trouble?’ Hans Gustav had sighed, exasperated. ‘Don’t be stupid, there’s hundreds of Norwegians up there. Call the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the morning if you’re worried.’ Hans Christian had been their perfect first baby, conceived at the end of her husband’s accountancy exams in the spring of 1967, when the young couple were living in Oslo. When a little sister, Anette, had come along two years and four months later, Marit thought her family was complete. But the call to her ex-husband demonstrated what had been wrong with their marriage from the start. She had felt things, Hans Gustav had dismissed them. She had had ideas, he had undermined them. That was why they had split when the children were young.