The Meadow (41 page)

Marit had joined Anette and her ex-husband in New Delhi just in time to contribute to an emotional appeal by the families of all the hostages that would be placed in key Kashmiri newspapers. Jane, Julie, Cath and Anne had by now relocated to New Delhi at General Saklani’s request. Although it was a relief to be out of Srinagar, they all felt unnervingly removed from whatever was happening in Kashmir. ‘We make a compassionate appeal to you for the unconditional release of these innocent tourists,’ their joint statement began. For Marit, it was better than sitting at home pasting newspaper articles about the kidnapping into a scrapbook for Hans Christian to read when he came home, which was how she had filled up her time until now. Somebody must know something, they had all hoped. Someone would feel a pang of guilt.

And somebody had felt something. A couple of days after the advertisement appeared, the Norwegian Embassy handed Marit a copy of a letter from her son, sent by fax from Srinagar. Somehow, he had managed to write it without his kidnappers knowing, and then to discard it, hoping it would be found. Incredibly, having withstood the beating sun, rain and possibly frost, as well as grazing animals and curious village children, it had been discovered by someone who understood its importance and who had then risked the wrath of militants and the suspicions of the Indian security forces to ensure it reached the authorities.

Marit felt an intense surge of emotion as she saw her son’s trademark chaotic handwriting, and she struggled to suppress the image of him held hostage. He had written in English, knowing that, unlike Norwegian, it was widely spoken in Kashmir. ‘My dear family, I am fine,’ he wrote. ‘I keep on believing in the good in people. My biggest concern is what you think and feel. Please be strong because I am. Love from Hans Christian.’ Ever the optimist, Marit thought, marvelling at these words that had come from nowhere. This letter was clearly written by her son. As was its second half. In the midst of this crisis he was addressing the Embassy in his pernickety way: ‘I must ask you for a favour. When I was taken hostage by the Mujahadin [sic] there was a thick black notebook in my tent. It is ¾ full of
handwriting in Norwegian. It contains three months worth of drama and poetry. I have booked the Black Box stage in October and this book is absolutely necessary for the play. (I don’t want anything in the book published, if found. It’s private.) My name and address stands on the first page and I have promised a $50 reward if lost.’

Marit was relieved that he was still focused on the performance he had been planning all these months. He clearly believed he had a future. ‘Please help me,’ the note ended, ‘contact the Indian army etc. Please keep the pressure on the Indian government. Their officials in three tourist offices
guaranteed
that my trek was absolutely safe.
Nobody
told me the Mujahadin had been in this area for
six
years. Thank you very much. Hans Christian.’

Marit read and reread the astonishing letter, tears pouring down her face. Soon afterwards, more artefacts materialised: a black kitbag, held for weeks by the police in Pahalgam, that was filled with the contents of Hans Christian’s tent. Unzipping the bag, Marit was overwhelmed by the smells of incense and pine resin. She sat with her daughter Anette, pulling out the contents one by one, inhaling the aromas of the place from where Hans Christian had been taken, a brown woollen hat that he had brought back from Peru, his army-issue string vest, and a pair of broken old sunglasses he had had since his teens. She also found the large black notebook; she would keep it safe in her room. At the very bottom of the bag was her son’s money belt. Rigid with dried sweat, it was curved by the shape of his body. When she felt it, it was as if she was running a hand along his abdomen, as she had done when he was six years old, bathing him in the family’s home in Tromsø. Inside the money belt was his old student ID card from 1990, Hans Christian adopting a well-practised ‘academic pose’ in the photograph: head tilted at an engaging angle, eyes staring quizzically into the camera, his fingers clasping his chin as if deep in thought. At the time it was taken, it had made her laugh. Now it just reminded her of his absence and her loss, making her wish she had been as engaged in his life as she now was in his disappearance. There were also his driving licence, Imodium tablets, business cards from hotels and shops in Cochin, New Delhi and Srinagar.
Folded up along with his yellow-fever certificate she found little slips of paper bearing Hindi or Kashmiri phrases written phonetically with English translations: ‘They reminded me of when we had moved to the far north of Norway when Hans Christian was six, and he had charged straight over to the house next door, eager to learn the local dialect from the neighbours’ son.’

Inside a zipped compartment at the back of the pouch was a tightly folded piece of paper. With a finger Marit worked it free, starting to sob a little as she guessed what it was. She pushed and twisted it until it eventually came loose: the fifty-krone note she had given her son the night before he went to India. Now he had no bus money to get home.

Another startling packet from the mountains arrived a few days later. Again there was no indication of how it had been assembled, discarded, found and delivered, filling Marit with conflicting feelings of pleasure, pride and pain. This one consisted of another letter and nine snapshots. Was someone in the kidnap party assisting her son? Marit could not guess. Had he recruited some villager somewhere to his side? He had always been capable of springing surprises, but even so, she was amazed that he could be so prolific and brazen, risking everything to alert the outside world to their plight, while the other hostages apparently remained silent (apart from the tape recordings). She felt as if she could feel his determination coursing through the lines of text. The photos were copies from a set he had already sent home of his
kathakali
graduation performance in Kerala back in May. She wondered why he had smuggled them out now, until she turned them over. On the backs of each he had annotated the images, again in English. ‘I am Hamsa, the gold swan who threw away a wheel,’ he had written on one. The messages were cryptic and oblique, the kind of dreamy prose he’d adopted in his teens, but imbued with snatches of his new-found world of
kathakali
. From postcards he had sent home earlier, Marit knew Hans Christian’s teachers in Kerala had named him Hamsa, the ancient swan character of
kathakali
who epitomised equilibrium, the mystical pearl-eater who was able to
throw off the troubles of the physical world, symbolised by the wheel, channelling thoughts to the eternal.

In the picture, Hans Christian was dressed as Hamsa. ‘Good night,’ he had written underneath the message. ‘Good night, my lovely boy,’ Marit said to herself.

Her son was a magpie, picking up snippets of knowledge everywhere he went. Hamsa was a key figure in ancient stories of love, separation and reunion. Was that her son’s message, she wondered, desperate to comprehend his intended meaning. Was this a sign to his family that he would struggle until he was back with them? Or was it meant to indicate that he would not
stop
struggling, regardless of the danger? One way was imbued with hope, the other was reckless. However Marit took it, he seemed not to care about the risks he was taking. But that was Hans Christian all over.

A second photo was covered with dense notes: ‘On little eyes which still can look but understand little of the complicated processes which regulate human relations, I am quiet …’ This showed Hans Christian’s frustration at not being able to reach out to his abductors, she thought. ‘Hopelessness and meaninglessness take over where love should have been blooming.’ Did this mean that, unable to convince them away from their prejudices, he was exhausted and heading for a confrontation? ‘I still believe in the world’s meaning and achievement. But I am understanding by living the opposite.’ He remained engaged, even as his energies were sapped and he was becoming drained by his time in captivity, Marit thought.

She read on nervously, often finding his writing obscure. ‘Like a storm of wild, sick horses, caught in a corral, they have been running in panic,’ he wrote. ‘The hooves smashing against bare granite, the white is in their eyes.’ Had they all fled from something? Had there been a firefight, with al Faran battling the Indian security forces, and the hostages trapped in the middle? Her mind cast back to the haunting photographs of Don Hutchings and Keith Mangan. Or was Hans Christian saying he had clashed with his guards? ‘They pull and draw in all directions, the wheels are lifted above the ground and make flashes together with the lightning. Thunder booms like machine
guns.’ It sounded like a battle. Her eyes played over the next sentence: ‘I am tied up under the wagon. Stones and grass cover my body.’ She prayed that this was not literal, and that he was not lying in some wooded encampment, trussed like an animal.

‘I’m cold and calm even if rats are jumping up and hanging off my skin.’ His words were getting darker with every line, but Marit could not tear herself away. ‘Nearly all the horses are fallen and are drawn by the two left. One horse is falling over against the wagon. Everybody is dead. I am alive.’ Something terrible had happened. What was it? She needed to know. She read the next lines aloud: ‘Winter does not wait to start, summer does not wait to end, the mist does not come with advance warning, but people who give in are slaves in time and place.’ That must mean Kashmir’s changing seasons were beginning to impact on the kidnappers. ‘Only people make stars in the snow.’ Up in the high passes, winter was on its way, endangering the lives of those struggling to survive its bleakness. ‘Only people take their own lives.’ He was expecting a showdown.

Marit knew her son. He would never take his own life. But she was not so sure he would not sacrifice himself to save his fellow captives. Generous and reckless, he had always put others first. ‘I will refuse to eat and die,’ he wrote here. He had started a hunger strike in an attempt to force the kidnappers’ hands, she was sure of it. ‘Their not eating strike was short, we moved and now I am exhausted …’ The others had done the same, but had folded too soon, and they had been moved as a result. Or was it just him? Then, the first mention of something concrete: ‘0.24’ – it looked like a time, just past midnight, but there was no date. When he was young, she had often found Hans Christian writing under his duvet in the middle of the night, and she imagined him, cold and hungry, doing the same now.

The penultimate coded message was the worst. ‘My searching battery is flat. I, who can vibrate around the whole world, have little spirit left. There is little joy left over.’ It must have been a very bad day indeed. ‘Little humanity. But I need to fight and I need to escape. I’m not dead, even
if I can kid myself that I am … I still want to be a human being …’ The force within him was still strong. ‘I will escape if I can. I will not eat.’ It was hard to go on, but she turned to the last letter. Thankfully, this one seemed more hopeful: ‘You are a light wind of gold dust, spreading down into the river of my life. You are the most beautiful, concrete earthly thing in my fantasies. Your body and your soul shine out from your being. I’m very awake now. I’m more awake than for a long time.’
A light wind of gold dust
. Marit was heartened to see that her son had not yet lost what the family called ‘the glow in his soul’. But then she came to the last line: ‘I’m in mortal danger, surrendered to people without balance or God.’

Marit desperately wanted to talk with the other families about these letters. But Arne Walther, the Norwegian Ambassador, had asked her not to share the contents of the package with anyone. It was a protective measure, he had said. Marit told Anette that she felt this was dishonest. ‘Everyone was telling us to keep quiet and let the Indians get on with their job,’ Anette recalled. ‘The American Embassy said it. The FBI came to see us and said it. Arne said it. It didn’t seem right, and went against our instincts. But we were so inexperienced that we went along.’

Fingers of light poked through the curtains in Marit’s room at the Embassy. Hearing bulbuls twittering in the bougainvillea, she knew why her son loved India. When he was free again, she would take time to enjoy it with him. Today, 13 August, would be a better day, a good day, she told herself as she got up and set off on an early-morning stroll around the Embassy garden. Frank Elbe, the German Ambassador, had invited the hostages’ partners and family members over for Sunday lunch.

Deputy Superintendent Kifayat Haider was enjoying a calm Sunday. Finally the
yatra
was over, and he was down in Srinagar with his family. But he was finding it hard to unwind. When the message was relayed to him from Aishmuqam communications centre that officers were needed to attend a crime scene in his district, he was quietly glad of something to do. Women gathering firewood high up in the Shael Dar forest, north-east of Anantnag, had discovered a body. It was a mortuary trip, but he could do with stretching his legs. So, gathering
three armed constables, he drove out in a white police Gypsy jeep. A guide who knew where the body lay would be waiting at Seer, a village on the banks of the Lidder River.

At Anantnag, the party took the Pahalgam road, crossed the iron bridge over the Lidder at Martand and followed a track along its right bank. As the Gypsy climbed beneath the shadows of deodars, the constables sitting on either side of Haider gripped their rifles. Occasionally the jeep scattered a few straggly children and stray dogs, but otherwise they seemed to be alone. Lighting a Classic with an ostentatious flourish, Haider was actually a little nervous. Ahead was Logripora, the final resting place of Zain Shah Sahib, the patron saint of the Lidder Valley. His shrine in an ancient tree trunk had once been a popular place of pilgrimage, but since the area had become dense with militants, hardly any worshippers came.

A few miles short of Aishmuqam, the jeep reached Seer, where a bent old man in a
pheran
and white skullcap was waiting beside the road. Motioning to a steep incline up through the dark pine forest behind him, he said the quickest way to where the body lay was on foot. Haider elected to go with him, while the constables took the long way round in the Gypsy, agreeing to meet them at the top, in Panz Mulla village. Early-morning mist shrouded the trees, and everything was still as the DSP and the old man climbed up the hillside without talking. Eventually, after more than an hour, they emerged at Panz Mulla, a settlement of dilapidated
dhokas
where 220 families lived in a state of near-constant siege, preyed on by the security forces that came up here to hammer militants hiding in the woods. Smoke rose from several chimneys, but there was no welcome party or cup of
chai
. The villagers were frightened, and these days they barricaded themselves inside when they knew trouble was coming.