The Meadow Page 5
John Childs was heading towards the Meadow too, although he did not know it yet. By the time Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, Keith and Julie Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley had arrived in New Delhi, the forty-two-year-old chemical engineer from Simsbury, Connecticut, had already been in India several weeks, although his experience of the subcontinent could hardly have been more different from theirs. Childs, an introvert and a deep thinker, a wiry figure whose hangdog expression belied his quick wits and dry humour, was not joining any hippy trail. When he wasn’t in his running gear he was happiest in a suit and tie addressing executives in New England boardrooms. He worked for an American weapons manufacturer, Ensign Bickford, and had come to India to tour explosives plants in and around West Bengal. His schedule had been put under the microscope and mulled over for many months – nothing he did was unconsidered, and all too often he tended to see the worst in everything. But then, he was the kind of man who had learned to celebrate his own fatalism. He had worried about this journey for several months, but in the end he had decided to go for it. It would be his first foreign trip for the firm he had joined the previous February, and he hoped that at worst, even if he was struck down with dysentery, it would take his mind off the messy divorce that he feared was going to put a distance between him and his much-loved daughters, Cathy, six, and Mary, five. There was another upside to the visit. After the work was done, he hoped to get in some trekking on the company’s account. And as John was a self-confessed ‘cheapskate’, born watching the nickels and dimes, this was a boon. ‘I never go anywhere without someone else paying,’ he liked to say.
However, from the moment he landed in Calcutta, John, who had grown up surrounded by suburbia on Long Island, New York, the second son of churchgoing Joseph and Helen Childs, found the teeming subcontinent oppressive. India was a chaotic mix of vinegary odours. He couldn’t eat the food. He felt as if he could bench-press the humidity, it weighed so heavily on him. Not widely travelled, he was overwhelmed by the surface details that the locals did not seem to notice, the ‘noise and filth’, as he put it. He also found it more difficult than he had expected to communicate with his Indian counterparts, even though they were all supposedly ‘talking the same language’, and he knew in an instant that he had nothing in common with the Western travellers who milled around the Saddar Street backpacker area, close to his five-star hotel. John had gone straight from school to college, and then into his first job. He couldn’t see the point of putting off the inevitable by travelling aimlessly around the globe. He was always uneasy around people like that.
After Calcutta, John’s colleagues had driven him several hours into the industrial heartland of Bihar, a state that even Indians call the Wild West because of its reputation for corruption and chicanery. He was appalled by the grime-cloaked factories, staffed by hordes of impoverished workers who toiled in atrocious conditions: ‘Coming from the land of the free, I could not take in how people could live and work like that.’ His final work destination was Gomia, a town in southern Bihar where an enormous explosives factory was operated by the British chemical giant ICI. The plan was that he would work there with local managers and technical staff on improving the quality of the explosive materials they supplied to Ensign Bickford.
By the end of June, John’s work was done, and as he had planned, he had a week in hand. Back home in Simsbury he was an endurance athlete, proud of the fact that he ran four or five miles around the local school track every day. He climbed and skied too. Doing business just down the road from the greatest mountain range on earth – he had seen the Himalayas on the flight over to Calcutta and been staggered by their jagged heights – had been one of the reasons he had agreed to make this trip.
But where in the Himalayas should he go? He had thought about doing part of Nepal’s challenging Annapurna Circuit, the mountain trek Jane and Don had completed in 1988, and there were regular flight connections between Calcutta and Kathmandu. But then he came across the adverse weather reports, just as Jane and Don had: ‘When I set about looking into it, I realised pretty quickly it was the wrong time of year for Nepal. The monsoon ruled this option out.’ The ‘real treat’ of seeing Everest was now out of the question, but running his finger along the range to the west he could see other options: ‘All the guides said the same thing. June and July was the best time of year to visit Kashmir.’ Wherever he ended up would be an adventure, he thought, as he zeroed in on the trekking routes in the Kashmir Valley.
Was it safe? John was no authority on the region, but even he knew that Kashmir was troubled by a simmering war he was ‘vaguely aware of’ from the occasional news report. However, the descriptions and photographs he studied of the treks around Pahalgam, to the south-west of the summer capital, Srinagar, were inviting. Was it possible to reach the mountains without being caught up in the state’s insurgency? He was still feeling fragile as a result of the divorce, and he had two confused young daughters back home, about whom he had worried constantly since arriving in India. The last thing he needed was to screw things up by getting himself in a tight spot on the other side of the world. He rang his mother, who was still his main confidante, in Salem in upstate New York. ‘Check things out with the locals,’ she said. ‘They’ll know what is and isn’t safe.’
John sounded out several of his Indian colleagues at the Gomia plant. ‘Half of them jumped straight in. They said I was crazy. They said there was a war going on. Didn’t I know? There had been some kind of kidnapping involving Westerners the previous summer too. But the other half said it was fine to go, and the 1994 incident had been quickly resolved with no one hurt.’ Like every other discussion he had had since arriving in India, this one quickly dissolved into a confusing roundabout of conflicting arguments, with everyone talking over each other.
Most vocal were a couple of Kashmiri staffers. They were in the camp that firmly believed he should go. Over a cup of tea, they told him alluring stories of the challenging trekking, the wildlife and the wildness around Pahalgam. It was a world away from the troubles, they said, ‘a paradise on earth that everyone should experience at least once in their lives’. All Kashmiris knew, they insisted, that the insurgency was restricted to the LoC and to militant-infested towns in the north of the valley like Kupwara, Sopore and Baramulla. No one had any interest in getting tourists mixed up in a local dispute. The militancy had been rumbling on for six years already, and Pahalgam remained thronged with trekkers.
These two employees seemed credible and likeable, and they gave John numbers for local contacts: guides, hotels and taxi drivers, many of whom they were related to and said they trusted completely. Eventually, even the cautious John was persuaded, and he arranged a six-day excursion through his hotel. Taking account of flight connections, that would give him four days’ trekking, which was just about enough. ‘In life, you go to many places and you have to make many judgements about your own safety,’ he said. ‘And my judgement at that moment in time was that Kashmir would be OK.’
As their plane approached Srinagar airport on 26 June, Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had heart-stopping glimpses of the Himalayas bursting through the clouds, and a lattice of orchards, conifers and villages sprinkled across the dun-coloured Kashmir Valley. After bumping down on the runway, the plane rumbled past rows of Indian Air Force fighter jets, military transporters and camouflaged helicopters. Here were gun emplacements and corrugated-iron hangars, all of them draped in olive-green netting. Sentries in foxholes, machine-gunners in pillboxes, zoomed in on the plane. Jane and Don immediately forgot the reassuring news they had just read in the paper: US Ambassador Frank Wisner, accompanied by his daughter, had returned from a fly-fishing trip to Pahalgam. This place looked like a war zone.
But as they stepped down onto the tarmac, the cool air was a joy after New Delhi. Up ahead, beyond the exit barrier, what looked like a thousand sombre male faces, many of them bearded, most of them smoking, eyed them. Aquiline noses, cat-green eyes, skin so fair that many seemed m
ore Aryan than Don or Jane – some Kashmiris could have passed as Europeans. The noise was overwhelming: a helicopter whumping somewhere above them, tour guides shouting to get their attention.
As Jane and Don stood by the ancient, flaking luggage carousel, a police official sought them out and took their names, passport details and notes on their itinerary. ‘Foreigner registration,’ he said by way of explanation, tapping a laminated label on his clipboard. ‘What a madhouse,’ Jane recalled. ‘It was an absolute nightmare … I had to open and taste my sealed pack of Western Trail mix to show it wasn’t poison or a bomb. The absolute bizarreness of the whole process almost made it entertaining.’
Outside, the full scale of the Indian military operation in Kashmir hit them: a chaotic jumble of sandbags, concrete barriers and barbed wire, the roads jammed with armoured vehicles of all descriptions: trucks, pickups, tanks, around which scores of heavily armed soldiers milled. It took an hour to get through the checkpoints encircling the airport. Barrelling into town, their taxi passed yet more bunkers and pickets, out of which dark-skinned Indian soldiers peered, their guns aimed at Kashmiri men and women who walked solemnly along the broken pavements, heads cast downwards.
Gigantic piles of decomposing trash were everywhere, with sleeping pi-dogs lying on top of them. Not a windowpane seemed intact. Shops were barricaded or boarded up. Long avenues lined by trees were choked by every kind of machine of war imaginable. At one point the driver slammed on his brakes to avoid an oncoming army convoy, a vast column of khaki lorries with soldiers riding atop them, their faces obscured by black bandanas, who beat canes on the side of the taxi, drumming everyone out of their way. ‘Welcome to Kashmir,’ he muttered under his breath. Jane and Don said nothing. ‘We hadn’t expected things to be this bad, no way,’ Jane said.
Then she and Don caught a glimpse of the mountains ringing the city, and the hairs rose on her arms.
TWO
A Father’s Woes
For most of his working life, Master Allah Baksh Sabir Alvi had been a teacher of religious studies at a government school in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, lecturing indifferent boys in what had once been the influential capital of a Rajputana princely state, a glittering city lorded over by a Muslim nawab and his entourage. Nowadays Bahawalpur was a chaotic sprawl of back-street mosques, low-lying mud-brick compounds and potholed roads, on the banks of the Sutlej River. Deep in the heart of the scorched southern Punjab, it was encircled by fields of cotton, sugarcane and corn, and these days it was ruled by a small circle of feudal landowners or zamindars, industrialists and entrepreneurs, who squeezed all they could out of the impoverished majority.
The only thing everyone had was faith. Here and there, down traffic-choked streets and back alleys, was a multitude of mosques and madrassas (religious schools). When Master Alvi was growing up there had been a few dozen madrassas in the city, and perhaps only two hundred throughout Pakistan. By the time he retired there were twenty thousand across the country, some consisting only of breeze-block classrooms, others gathered around the marble apron of grand mosques. Like most people in Bahawalpur, whether by profession or dint of the especially charged atmosphere of religiosity, Master Alvi spent his days praying, reading and discussing the Koran.
Most Bahawalpuris were conservative Sunni Muslims, their faith shaped by Deobandism, an austere revivalist sect that had emanated more than a hundred years earlier from Deoband, a town over the border in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Many living in Bahawalpur today originated there, but were forced to flee India at Partition in 1947. Millions of Muslims had abandoned their ancestral homes in the central plains of India and its former princely states as stories spread that the new India would welcome only Hindus. Families were torn apart, villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands massacred, former friends and neighbours killing each other, sending thousands of trains speeding east and west, carrying a tide of people to an uncertain future. In the years that followed, while India flourished, life in the new nation of Pakistan became ever harder. Supporters there of Deoband became increasingly sectarian, their tone and demeanour echoing that of the oasis-dwelling Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, who championed a return to the medieval life described in the Koran.
Master Alvi and his circle were as literal-minded as you could get. Known among more liberal neighbours as the ‘no-doubters’, they were certain about everything, especially matters ecumenical. Alvi and his followers believed that every form and facet of Islam that was not of the Deobandi-infused Sunni school was contemptible. These opinions were passed down through the family like a gold watch. But while the Alvis sought security and comfort in an age that no longer existed, the world outside Bahawalpur was changing fast. And in the summer of 1995, Master Alvi confided in his friends that for the first time since Partition, nothing seemed certain.
He had read how Islam was under attack in many places around the world. In former Yugoslavia, Serbs were massacring Bosnian Muslims in a genocidal onslaught. In the Caucasus, Russia had launched a war against Chechen Muslims, leaving many thousands dead. Most distressing, as it was nearer and involved a people he regarded as his closest brothers and sisters, was the Muslim uprising over the border in Indian Kashmir, which was being put down by hundreds of thousands of Indian security forces, turning the Kashmir Valley, once regarded as a jewel, into one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world.
Master Alvi had more personal worries concerning Kashmir, too. The ‘rock’ of Kausar Colony, as he was known to his neighbours in the comparatively well-to-do community where he lived, by whom he was regarded as a matchmaker, troubleshooter, arbitrator, religious pundit and general go-between, a man who was trusted, loathed and envied in equal measure (like all big religious fish in small barrels), Alvi had a serious problem that needed fixing. One of his sons, his favourite, Masood Azhar, the third boy of eleven children, had gone missing in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Although Master Alvi still thought of him as his ‘golden child’, Masood was actually twenty-seven, short-sighted and a squat five foot two inches tall. Sporting an oversized pair of aviator shades and a luxuriant beard, Masood had, much to his father’s delight, embraced the family business of ‘no doubting’ with great enthusiasm, becoming the scourge of all kufrs, or unbelievers, including Muslims who did not adhere to the Deobandi way, such as Shias, whom he once described in a pamphlet as ‘cockroaches’. Masood was not handsome or charming – his siblings teased him for being a ‘little fatty’, according to a relative. One brother joked, in an aside that was passed around Kausar Colony, that with his head swathed in an Arab keffiyeh and his body robed in a white cotton shawl over traditional white kurta pyjamas, Masood looked like a ‘fundamentalist pupae’. But when he opened his mouth, something happened. Elaborate bursts of English, Urdu, Persian and Arabic flew out, arpeggios of assertions that, despite his somewhat high-pitched delivery, stopped people in their tracks.
Masood had the gift of the gab, something that had first been noticed at the age of four, when he recited lengthy tracts of the Koran at the local maktab (Islamic elementary school). After winning prizes for public speaking, he had caught the eye of a relative who taught at Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town, a wealthy mosque and madrassa a short bus ride from downtown Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, five hundred miles south of Bahawalpur, on the Arabian Sea. One of the largest religious seminaries in Pakistan, Binori Town was widely recognised as among the world’s most influential centres of Deobandi ideology.
To Deobandis, Binori Town, with its vast, sprawling campus, dusky pink towers, delicate, white-topped minarets and grand gateway, was Paris. Since its foundation in the 1950s by the religious scholar Yusuf Binori, members of every faction of the biggest Sunni religious-political party in Pakistan, the Assembly of Islamic Clergy, had vied to study there. Having one’s son among its 3,500 students was considered a blessing that would markedly raise one’s standing in the community.
In 1981, a year after twelve-year-old Masood h
ad been enrolled and Master Alvi had received the necessary plaudits, the madrassa began taking its students down a new path, one that would transform the course of Masood’s life. Exciting dispatches had begun arriving from Afghanistan, sent by three recent Binori Town graduates who, styling themselves ‘The Companions of the Afghan People’, had headed up to Peshawar, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, a gateway to neighbouring Afghanistan, where they had joined the mujahideen fighting against the Soviet Red Army that had occupied Kabul eighteen months previously. This anti-Soviet campaign was being secretly funded by the US government through the CIA, and run on the ground by its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency was a secretive organisation, with enormous resources, whose skilled agents, never publicly identified, were universally feared for spying on, abducting, torturing and executing Pakistanis, as well as ruthlessly meddling in the affairs of the country’s neighbours. Now in Afghanistan, knee-deep in America’s battle to temper Moscow’s regional ambitions, the ISI made sure that it got a grip on the recruitment and training of those Pakistanis who went there to fight, as well as on the Afghani tribes being trained to mount resistance.