The Meadow (19 page)

At 10 p.m., Jane returned to her own tent at the Lower Camp. Julie had tried to convince her to stay, but Jane secretly hoped that Don would make it back. If anyone could, Don would, and she wanted to be there just in case. As she walked alone in the moonlight, the landscape took on a new, more menacing hue. Dark silhouettes of trees surrounded her. In the distance, the bleating of a goat sounded like a child’s cry. All the worries they had talked through before going on this trip came flooding back. She wished they had never come to Kashmir. But now she was in this predicament, she would have to deal with things as Don would deal with them, logically, methodically and rigorously: ‘It was pointless wasting energy on regrets.’

As she entered the camp, her heart sank. Sultan and Bashir were nowhere to be seen. And Don’s camera, the daysacks they had bought on last year’s club trip to Montana, all the things she had carefully folded up on their bed and packed back in Spokane barely two weeks before, were gone.

She crawled into the wreckage of her tent and pulled something warm over her. The silence she had once craved now deafened her. She ran over what had happened, trying to piece it together. She should not panic – Don would find a way out of it. In a fix on an ice wall, bivouacked on a summit ascent or beaten flat by sculling snow, he always did. And anyhow, things always looked brighter in the morning.

At first light, Jane heard voices. Don! She looked at her watch. It was only 4 a.m. Heart thumping, she poked her head out of the tent. The first rays of the sun were gilding the ridgeline, and a party of Kashmiri teenagers was passing through the campsite. One of them came over and introduced himself as Khurram Parvez, a student from Srinagar. He spoke good English, asked if she was all right, and explained that he and his friends had been in the Upper Camp too, and had spent the night locked in a shepherd’s hut. They had just broken out, leaving several foreign trekkers behind. She told him her husband had been taken, and that she wanted to wait here a little while longer, in case he returned. She asked him if he understood what was going on.

Khurram had some ideas. Before being locked up, he had spoken to one of his captors. ‘He talked to us in broken Urdu,’ Khurram recalled. The man’s accent suggested he was Pashtun. ‘He was abrupt. He asked us where we were from. When we told him Srinagar, he said, “Why are you trekking when your brothers are dying, fighting the Indian Army?”’ Khurram could tell that this was not a rhetorical question, and the man expected answers. Fearful that whatever he said would anger him, Khurram had replied that he and his friends were students.

‘Then all of us were asked to line up. My friends were scared. My cousin and I continued trying to talk. We asked one of these guys, “Where are you from?” He said, “Dar-e-Khyber [the Khyber Pass, in Pakistan].” I asked them which militant group they belonged to. He replied, “Harkat ul-Ansar.”’ Khurram had felt a chill. He knew the Movement was a Pakistan-backed militant group, but to Jane the name meant nothing.

Khurram told Jane they would raise the alarm. She nodded, and returned, dazed, to her tent. She must have dozed off, because the next time she looked at her watch it was 6.30 a.m., and Bashir and Sultan were back, boiling up tea. Her frustrations exploded. Where had they been, she demanded. What did they know about the men who had taken her husband? Were they in on this? Unshaven, with black circles round their eyes, they appeared to be terrified, and Sultan looked as if he was about to burst into tears. The gunmen had ordered them to run into the forest, Bashir told her. They had obeyed, frightened that if they did not they would be killed. ‘Sorry, sorry, so sorry,’ they both kept repeating. Kashmiris were all too intimate with the cost of the militancy, although Jane did not know that yet.

Where
was
Don, she wondered. He should have been back by now. She had to get her head together. She went down to the riverbank. She scanned the ridges and forests. 7 a.m., 5 July. Nothing was moving apart from a
gujjar
family on a goat track high above her. She’d give it another half hour, then she would move. Suddenly she saw a figure walking up from the direction of Aru. Was it Don? She ran down towards the man, her heart thumping. But as she drew nearer, she pulled up quickly. It was a Kashmiri wearing a
pheran
. He waved, but she did not return the gesture, suddenly unsure of him. When he reached her a few minutes later he introduced himself as Dasheer, John Childs’ guide. In the chaos of the previous evening she had not noticed him among the party that had returned from the Upper Camp before taking off with Don. The gunmen had ordered him to come back with a message.

Dasheer handed Jane a damp note, explaining that the commander of the group had written it. She snatched the piece of paper, but found it was in Urdu. Frustrated and shaking, she handed it back and asked Dasheer to translate it. Addressed ‘For the American Government Only’, it listed twenty-one prisoners the gunmen wanted freed in return for Don, Keith, Paul and John. The deadline was 14 July, nine days from now. The note threatened: ‘accept our demands or face dire consequences. We are fighting against anti-Islamic forces … Western countries are anti-Islam, and America is the biggest enemy of Islam.’
For the first time, Jane realised that something life-changing had just happened: ‘That’s when it really hit me.’

Where was her husband right now, she asked, struggling not to cry. Dasheer had no idea. He’d been sent packing by the commander, and had last seen the kidnap party heading over a high-altitude ridge. ‘What about Aru?’ she asked, thinking of the story they had been told of the commander waiting to check passports. They hadn’t gone there at all, Dasheer replied. ‘It was like a really bad dream,’ says Jane. ‘I went into some kind of trance.’ But even in her heightened emotional state, she instinctively knew what to do. She would summon up all the courage and stamina she had developed over years of climbing, descend to Pahalgam and whip the authorities into action, and as quickly as possible. But first she would have to marshal the others, Julie Mangan and Cath Moseley. ‘Come on!’ she shouted at Dasheer, intending to hike back up to the Upper Camp.

As she packed up what was left of her belongings, Jane heard voices: Julie, Cath and others from the Upper Camp had come down to her. They had heard nothing from anyone in the past twelve hours. There was a Japanese tourist and an American woman with her teenage daughter who had also been staying at the Upper Camp, but had not been targeted. When Jane showed them all the note and explained what it said, Cath started crying. Julie was already numb. Bart Imler, the Canadian, was so weak he could barely walk. They all had to leave the Meadow, Jane said, right now. ‘It’s imperative we reach someone in authority from the British or American embassies as soon as possible.’

‘Walking out was a terribly difficult thing to do,’ Jane recalled. ‘It was hard to leave the site. It was hard to see Bart, the young Japanese fellow, the American woman, and to know they were coming out and Don wasn’t. It wasn’t anger, but maybe envy. That they were lucky and we weren’t. “Why us?” I kept thinking. “Why Don?” What had we done? It wasn’t that I wanted anyone else to be taken. It was just hard to imagine why … that we were the ones with the bad luck that day.’

5 July 1995 was an idyllic, sunny day, but none of them were taking in the landscape. Following the silvery twists and turns of the Lidder River, Jane Schelly, Julie Mangan and Cath Moseley retreated from the Meadow as quickly as they could. Along the way they gathered witnesses and other trekkers. ‘It’s not safe,’ they told every passer-by. ‘People have been abducted. Don’t believe what the tourist officials tell you.’ Every herder or villager they saw on the path represented a potential kidnapper or spy.

On the way down they stopped off at Aru, the village where they had been told Don, Keith, Paul and John would be taken for the so-called passport checks in the middle of the night. The story seemed even more unlikely given what Dasheer had recounted of the previous night’s journey. Nobody in Aru admitted to knowing anything about foreign fighters passing through in the company of four Westerners. And the villagers shrank back in fear when Jane tried to engage them in conversation: ‘We hoped to get some information, a sighting or a direction, but there was nothing.’

By the time they reached Pahalgam at around 2 p.m., after six hours’ trekking, they were tired and footsore. More than fifty people were now in their party, a motley caravan of ponies, heavily laden trekkers, worried guides and hennaed village elders who filed solemnly down the main street, past the empty trekking agencies, bakery and souvenir shops, the mouldering craft emporiums and general stores, with their bright strips of bunting made of multi-coloured crisp bags that crunched and rustled in the breeze. Many shop owners pulled down their shutters, seemingly anticipating what was to come.

The centre of town was already in an uproar, news of the abductions having come from Khurram Parvez and his friends. The kidnapping of a local for money was so regular an occurrence these days that it barely raised an eyebrow. But meddling with foreigners’ lives broke the unspoken code of Kashmir. Whatever people’s private thoughts about the beliefs and behaviour of those who came here from abroad, foreigners were the valley’s bread and butter, and seizing four of them was unthinkable. The large group of loud Westerners drew nervous crowds, while taxi drivers, desperate for trade, tried to secure fares
down to Srinagar, and hotel agents attempted to block-book their rooms. ‘It was bedlam,’ recalled Jane.

She, Julie and Cath pushed their way into a phone booth, only to find that the line was down. They found another which was working, and as a dozen faces pressed against the glass outside she rang the US Embassy in New Delhi. Two American citizens had been abducted, she tried to explain calmly on a line that echoed and whined. She gave their names and Don’s passport details, and said that her brother-in-law Donald Snyder, a Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, could be called upon to help. She said the only thing she knew about the other American man who had been seized was his name: John Childs. Next, they phoned the British High Commission, and relayed a similar message: armed Islamic militants had kidnapped two Britons and were demanding the release of jailed activists. The phone line seemed to howl in sympathy. The officials appeared to understand through the static, and said they would put their emergency protocols into action, dispatching representatives by the next available flight, which would not be until the morning. It was imperative that the women report the abductions to the local police, they were advised, and file an FIR, a First Information Report, officially registering the incident. That way a criminal inquiry would have to commence immediately. Then they should head, quickly, to the sanctuary of the United Nations office in Srinagar.

Jane asked if she could be alone, and made the hardest calls of her life. Fearing she would finally break down, she rang her parents, Joyce and James, in Orefield, Pennsylvania, and, knowing the news would terrify them, told them calmly and methodically where she was and what had happened. She then called her older sister Nancy, and asked to speak to her brother-in-law, Donald. He promised to get straight on to the US State Department. Finally she called her husband’s family in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. Struggling to understand, they were horrified.

Afterwards, gasping for air, Jane went outside while Julie rang her mother in Middlesbrough and Keith’s parents, Charlie and Mavis. Hearing Julie’s distant voice calling, ‘Mavis, Mavis, is that you?’ Keith’s
mother knew something was wrong. Where was the usual joke – ‘Hello, Mrs Mangan, it’s Mrs Mangan here’? Julie explained how Keith had been kidnapped by ‘Kashmiri rebels’, along with another Brit and two Americans. The four men had been taken off somewhere into the mountains, and the rebels had issued a note demanding the release of twenty-one prisoners. It was a confused, rambling story, and Mavis struggled to keep up. Putting the phone down, she turned to her husband and cried.

Lastly, it was Cath’s turn to ring her family in Norwich and Paul’s parents in Blackburn. Bob was stunned when he took the call: ‘What the hell am I going to tell Dianne?’ She had been against this trip from the start. ‘I thought it was the worst day of my life,’ says Bob. ‘But it was just the beginning.’

Pahalgam police station, a brick-and-plaster building with a curling tin roof, nowadays ringed with sandbags, sentries and coils of razor wire, lay at the split in the road just north of the bus station, where the Lidderwat Valley route peeled off to the north-west and the East Lidder River road headed north-east to Amarnath. It was thronged with constables and clerks when Jane, Julie and Cath arrived to file their FIR at around 3 p.m., accompanied by several other trekkers from the Meadow who wanted to report the theft of their money and possessions. They fought their way inside, passing a morbid tableau of photographs of corpses, each one an unidentified victim of the conflict or of some mountain misfortune whose body had been recovered, each one an unexplained tragedy. Unsure what to do with the Western party, a constable ushered them into a small, humid ante-room filled with mismatched chairs. On the table lay a couple of the previous day’s newspapers, carrying excerpts of a speech by Frank Wisner, the American Ambassador in New Delhi, to mark Independence Day. ‘I can think of no better way to celebrate our own Independence Day than to reaffirm the commitment of the US to a long-term relationship with India that will serve our common interests and protect our common ideals,’ he was quoted as saying.

After some time Jane, Julie and Cath were shown into the Deputy Superintendent’s office, with constables, head constables and
sub-inspectors squeezing in behind them. By this stage Jane was ‘feeling physically ill’. Someone was dispatched to find the tea-boy and buy some
girda
bread before the proceedings could begin. The women only wanted to get on with filing their report. ‘Wait, wait,’ the policemen responded, trying to be hospitable, coaxing a fan into life by poking bare wires into an electric socket. ‘I remember as many people looking on as could possibly fit in,’ says Jane. Noticing the jumble of dusty files piled up on shelves behind the Deputy Superintendent’s desk, she wondered if their FIR would end up there, unread and unactioned.