The Meadow (5 page)

India even confuses Indians. And in June 1995, a 48°C heatwave was cooking everything, including the roads, chewing them up, licking deep concave bowls into the tarmac, while the humidity that made the night queen blossom like nowhere else in the world also peeled
the stucco off buildings. Jane had taken the sensible precaution of ringing ahead and booking a hotel with air-conditioning for the two nights they intended to stay in New Delhi.

But nothing had prepared them for the wall of opportunists waiting in the arrivals hall of the old Indira Gandhi International Airport, all of them with an idea, and an address. A traveller needed a rude strategy to deal with them, a fixed plan to stick by, a determined walk that gave not a scintilla of encouragement to the waiting crowd. Weakness was punished. Politeness was exploited. Indecision was manna for the middle man. Born-and-raised New Delhi-ites blanked strangers and brushed aside enquiries from touts. Surrounded by the throng, Jane and Don found their contingency plan failing the minute they arrived in New Delhi on 25 June 1995. The chaos bowled them over.

Weakened by ‘thirty-five hours in the air’, as Jane put it, no sooner had they collected their luggage than they were lured into a conversation with reps from a private-accommodation agency and convinced that their pre-booked hotel was a bad choice. Hustled off to a different place in another part of town, Jane and Don began their Indian journey in confusion. It happened to everyone, Don said afterwards. It was no big deal, Jane murmured. They had seen this sort of thing before.

The phone in their hotel room did not work, and the next morning Jane and Don headed out into the mêlée of New Delhi’s streets. A taxi they had not ordered was waiting to take them to a private tourism agency they did not want to do business with. ‘We knew there was another scam going on,’ recalled Jane. ‘But we said to ourselves, “OK, we’ll go and we’ll listen, but we’ll be watchful.”’ At the agency, the staff proved helpful, and seemed knowledgeable about Kashmir. They assured them it was safe. The main focus of the insurgency, as Don and Jane had already heard, was far away, concentrated in the western portion of the valley near where Pakistan began, a ceasefire line so disputed that neither side could agree to call it a ‘border’. Instead, it was known as the Line of Control (LoC).

This sounded reassuring. But they wanted a second opinion, and set off for the government tourism office. ‘They didn’t deny there were problems,’ Jane said, but the general message was the same: the insurgency was very localised. Stay out of downtown Srinagar and everything would be fine. Most importantly, the trekking areas were safe. Finally, they spent an hour trawling backpacker hangouts, searching for anyone who had just returned from Kashmir. There were plenty, and those they spoke to had all had a trouble-free time. ‘They seemed to love it, and gave glowing reports of the beauty,’ said Jane.

Even though both of them were now flagging, Don insisted on one more stop. They took a ride to leafy Chanakyapuri, New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave, to get advice at the US Embassy. ‘It was closed for lunch, and we were intimidated by the long lines of people,’ Jane said. ‘It was hot as heck – we were jetlagged, and had been told at the Indian government tourist office that the area was OK for tourists.’ They gave up, and returned to the hotel. ‘If there had been a red flag at any point, then we would have researched further,’ said Jane.

As Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings began to plot their Kashmir plan in the spring of 1995, Julie and Keith Mangan, from Teesside in the north-east of England, were packing for the trip of their lives, one that would also lead them to the Meadow. Casting their eyes around the world for somewhere to explore in the run-up to their tenth wedding anniversary, Julie and Keith, both aged thirty-three, had decided on India. This would be their first time in the subcontinent. In fact, it would be their first exotic trip together anywhere, a holiday they had long promised each other, having married at a time when they had been too broke to have the kind of dream honeymoon they had both wanted.

India, and Kashmir in particular, sounded very far from the close-knit and hard-working Teesside city of Middlesbrough, where Julie and Keith had grown up. With its flinty vistas of pipelines and cooling towers, it wasn’t pretty, but Middlesbrough people seldom left. They worked in the vast foundries and industrial plants of companies like
British Steel. Among them had been Keith’s father, Charlie Mangan, a British Steel plater whose punishing working life had left him with a miserly pension and a host of chronic ailments.

Julie and Keith loved their families, and they loved the north-east. They scorned people who denied who they were, people who overwrote where they came from. But they needed a change. Keith had hankered to see the world since he was nine, an itch he had got when he had gone to Lake Garda in Italy on a school trip. His mother Mavis, a school dinner lady originally from Brambles Farm council estate in the east of the city, still had photos of him larking around at the water’s edge with Neil Jones, his best friend. It hadn’t been the greatest adventure in the world, but it had set something off in Keith, and after he married Julie he had got her thinking about travelling too.

Middlesbrough had seen its best days. When Julie and Keith were growing up in the seventies it was impoverished and struggling. Times were tough for everyone, including Julie’s parents, Anita and Robert Sullivan, who lived in Eston, a working-class suburb to the east. Keith’s parents had moved to up-and-coming Brookfield, in the south, where they lived with their three sons in a tidy post-war bungalow, its pristine garden being Charlie’s pride and joy.

Julie and Keith had met as fifteen-year-olds at the local comprehensive, Bertram Ramsey. Keith was not particularly interested in Julie, but that changed when he bumped into her again five years later, inside the blue double-doors of Madison’s, a dive of a nightclub in Middlesbrough town centre, better known to locals as Mad Dog’s, where a famed cloakroom attendant called ‘Queenie’ took the coats. Julie, full of life, her hair a cascade of brown curls, and Keith clicked in a way they had not at school. By then, lanky Keith, the oldest of Charlie and Mavis Mangan’s three boys, had set himself up as a self-employed electrician, one of a group of school pals who had all gone into trades. Julie already had a sensible head on her shoulders, and she could see that unlike many other young men she knew, Keith was determined to do something with his life.

His mates described him as level-headed and laid-back, ‘a good bloke to have around in a storm’, while his father Charlie, who had
barely ever left his native Teesside, was proud of his eldest son’s inquisitive nature, saying to anyone who would listen that Keith ‘soaked up new experiences like a sponge’. Keith was also, Julie now noticed, tall and good-looking, sure of himself but not arrogant. When they met at Mad Dog’s she was working in Clinkards, a Middlesbrough shoe shop. Chatting in a corner by the bar, they found they had many friends in common. By the time Keith celebrated his twenty-first birthday six months later, on Boxing Day 1982, at the Central pub on Corporation Road, Julie knew she had found the man she wanted to marry. Keith made her laugh. He was dependable and loving. And both of them had a geeky thing for
Star Trek
.

Three years later, they became the first in their group to tie the knot. The wedding was a traditional affair of red carnations and frothy white chiffon at St Barnabas church in Linthorpe. Their white-leather wedding album shows Keith, dressed in a silver suit and winklepickers, towering above his new bride. After a make-do honeymoon, Julie became the daughter Mavis Mangan had never had. Straight-talking and easy-going like her new mother-in-law, Julie enjoyed a laugh, and embraced her new family, ringing up Mavis for a chat most days, always starting the conversation the same way: ‘Hello, Mrs Mangan, it’s Mrs Mangan here.’ That’s why Charlie and Mavis were so taken aback when Julie and Keith announced out of the blue in 1989 that they were leaving for London. Nobody in either family moved away, especially south.

But Keith and Julie lived for each other now. Leaving their home in Ingleby Barwick, a residential estate south of Middlesbrough town centre, they rented a small flat in Tooting, south London. It was a big wrench for both of them, leaving a real neighbourhood where they were surrounded by friends and family to live far away, among strangers. Middlesbrough was always only a phone call away, Julie would say to herself whenever she was alone, but in a new city as vast and anonymous as London, she struggled to make friends.

To start with, the Tooting flat didn’t look much, but Julie tarted it up. Keith, already planning their next jump, hopefully to somewhere hotter, put his energies into developing his business, and
began picking up contract work all over Europe. It wasn’t the kind of travelling he had had in mind: without Julie, just a bunch of lads who rarely saw anything but the inside of one project or another. But the money was good, and he started to save. Left behind in Tooting, Julie wasn’t going to sit on her hands. She trained as a nursery nurse, took cake-decorating classes and got herself a job.

In 1994, Julie and Keith got the break they were looking for when a Sri
Lankan friend invited them to Colombo to meet his family. At first it was just pub talk, a crazy idea bandied about over a few pints. But the more they thought about it, the more they realised they wanted it. They didn’t have kids yet. They had worked hard, saved well, and now they were ready to leave it all behind. It wasn’t intended to be a permanent break, just eighteen months travelling around the world, chasing new experiences. Sri Lanka would be a soft landing for the voyage into the unknown. Just the thought of giving up Tooting for the South Asian island sent a shiver through both of them. From there, they could go anywhere. In early 1995 they took the plunge. They bought two rucksacks, matching petrol-blue his-and-hers bomber jackets, walking boots and travel guides. They went back up to the north-east on the train to break the news. So far only a couple of destinations, Colombo and New Delhi, were definite, but the climax to the trip would be dinner in front of the Taj Mahal on 3 August. That would be a proper tenth-wedding anniversary, Julie and Keith told their family and friends. In Eston and Brookfield, there were stunned faces.

Julie and Keith Mangan’s leaving bash at the Ship, a pub in Eston, around the corner from Julie’s parents’ house, was a proper drunken affair, even if afterwards they had a last-minute wobble. But they had already bought the tickets. Keith had sold his electrical business to a schoolmate. They’d given notice on the Tooting flat, and Julie had resigned from work. It was too late to turn back. A few days later they pitched up in Colombo, jetlagged and initially overwhelmed by the heat. But it did not take them long to realise they had made the right decision. They had the run of the golden beaches of Galle. Their Sri Lankan friend was there to show them around, and they gorged themselves on seafood. The first few weeks flew by so easily that Julie persuaded Anita to come over. Going home full of stories, Anita worked on Mavis and Charlie Mangan too. Keith’s parents had barely ever left the north-east, but now they all made plans to meet up in Sri Lanka in one year’s time. Before then, there was so much to do. Julie and Keith were ready to explore.

Having talked to other travellers, they locked on to Kashmir. What struck them when they entered the Indian Consulate in Colombo were the posters. ‘Paradise on Earth’, one declared above a photograph of rosy-cheeked Kashmiri women picking saffron in a crocus-filled meadow beneath a dramatic, snow-capped Himalayan skyline. Emblazoned across another scene of gaily-painted wooden
shikaras
skimming across Dal Lake were the words ‘Garden of Eden’. As the sweat trickled down Julie and Keith’s backs, the images of Kashmir’s spectacular peaks seemed to offer the prospect of welcome relief from the humidity of Sri Lanka. The Kashmiri people were welcoming, they were told, while the floating hotels of Dal Lake provided luxury for only a handful of rupees a night. Julie and Keith were keen for a change of scene.

They were going to Kashmir. They did not know where in Kashmir. They did not know anything about Kashmir. Perhaps they would stay on a houseboat before heading off on a mountain trek. Nothing too exhausting, just far enough to see the flower-filled pastures they had been reading about in the Lonely Planet guidebook – and of course the Meadow. It sounded idyllic. But when Keith rang home to wish his father a happy sixtieth birthday and mentioned their plans, Charlie was horrified, and did his best to dissuade him. Mavis tried to reassure her husband. ‘Keith’s a sensible lad,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t go off the beaten path.’ ‘Ring the British Embassy if you get into trouble,’ was all she could think to say to her son.

In June 1995, Paul Wells, a twenty-four-year-old photography student from Blackburn, Lancashire, was also packing. He had planned a life-changing trip to the Indian subcontinent, but he didn’t want to be
alone. He had spent much of the spring trying to persuade his reluctant girlfriend, Catherine Moseley, to come with him.

Paul had just inherited a Nikon camera and a small cash legacy from his grandfather, and he intended to use them to put together a photographic project that he hoped would launch his career as a photojournalist. For several months he had been searching around for the right location, and after seeing
Desert in the Sky
, a TV documentary about the Buddhist kingdom of Ladakh, the same place Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had visited in 1991, he knew it was where he would go. He had loved the film so much that his mother, Dianne, had recorded it, and still has the video today. ‘He was fascinated by the eagles turning on the thermals,’ said Dianne, who remembered Paul sitting in the family home in Blackburn, watching the film over and over again. ‘It was another world to me, but the isolated mountain region appealed to Paul, who’d developed a fascination with spirituality and reincarnation.’ Bob, Paul’s father, said: ‘Once he’d seen that bloody film, he was determined. He was off buying maps and guidebooks.’ He also spent £800 on photographic equipment. ‘After he latched on to something, there was no stopping him. That was our Paul.’