The Meadow Read online

  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 Em
bassy 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 i
n 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.’