by Adrian Levy
Marit’s dinner guests left: ‘They thought I needed time alone to deal with what was happening.’ She walked into the snug box-room that Hans Christian shared with Anette when they came here for family reunions: two wooden bunk beds still made up with their childhood duvets. A cushion lay on top of each, hand-sewn with flowers from a mountain meadow. He was looking forward to returning to Tønsberg, he had told her in that last call. He wanted to bring some friends over, eat pizza and drink beer beside the freezing water and then maybe go for a dip. Marit looked at a set of shelves Hans Christian had filled with childhood mementos: his old Seiko watch and Iggy Pop badge; a photo of him in his beloved Manchester City football strip, his arm strapped up after he had broken it during a match; another photograph of him cuddling his pet hamster, which he had named Harald Hanssen. He had pestered her for months, picking up stray dogs every time they went on holiday, saying that all his school friends had animals, so why couldn’t he too? For a while she’d held out, saying they wouldn’t be able to go away on holidays if they had a pet to care for. ‘But of course he had won in the end.’
She looked around the room at other family photos: two blond-haired kids, Hans Christian and his sister, ringlets, scraped knees, short socks, always together. Where was he now?
Marit Hesby had always been afraid that Hans Christian’s wanderlust would get him into trouble, but she felt some responsibility for sending him down that path. She was a travel agent, and when the children were small the family had been entitled to a free foreign holiday every year. ‘Did I cause him to be permanently unsettled?’ she wondered, thinking how on these family holidays he had often got into trouble. ‘He was just so trusting and generous with everyone, always wanting to go off to talk to the locals.’ On one trip to Turkey, something had happened between her son and a group of locals. ‘He’d gone off on his own. When he came back, he said he wanted to go home straight away. He wouldn’t ever talk about it.’
Although she had worried that India was too much for her intense, easily led son, she had helped him plan the trip, and contributed to the cost of his air ticket. For the last few years he had been a constant source of worry to her, and she hoped that in India he would at last find peace. A sunny, happy child who loved records, films and the theatre, he had gone through a difficult period during his teens, dropping out of school and leaving home at the age of seventeen, having come up with a hare-brained scheme to pay his way through theatre school by travelling around Norway selling books: ‘In his mind, he’d already been accepted by the National Theatre.’ There was no dissuading him, even when reality took over. Despite several attempts, the prestigious theatre school in Oslo did not offer him a place. ‘He was crushed. It was the only thing he ever wanted to do, and afterwards he sank into a deep depression.’
Hans Christian had begun smoking too much hash and hanging out in Oslo squats with people Marit didn’t know. But he still loved acting, and at the age of twenty his life took a new turn when he was cast in an Ibsen play after volunteering at a free theatre school. Reinvigorated, he joined a circus workshop, and there he met Gry, a trainee social worker. In 1991 they married and set off for an extended honeymoon in Amsterdam. When the money ran out he sang in the streets with his guitar. Back in Oslo, things seemed perfect. Hans Christian won a couple of bit parts in Norwegian movies, and he and Gry moved into a one-bedroom flat and got a kitten they called Tingaling (Tinkerbell). They even talked about having children.
But in 1992 Hans Christian was forced to do his national service, something he had been putting off ever since dropping out of school. Not one to do anything by halves, he chose the hardest option, an arduous survival training course in the far north of Norway that took him away for months. The posting had a devastating impact on his relationship, and in the spring of 1993 he and Gry split. Broken, Hans Christian lost his head in meditation and Eastern spirituality. ‘He grew his hair, gave up meat, eggs, alcohol and smoking. The split with Gry marked the beginning of his fascination with India.’
That autumn, unemployed and rootless, Hans Christian joined another free theatre school, this one run by the government for out-of-work actors. Through it he was introduced to Lars øyno, a classically trained actor who had turned his back on traditional theatre to run an avant-garde group, Stella Polaris. Lars was looking for volunteers to take part in a play he was preparing for the 1994 Winter Olympics, to be held at Lillehammer. His particular interest was in putting on complex, audience-challenging performances, like the plays of Antonin Artaud, the French playwright and advocate of the Theatre of Cruelty. Hans Christian was transfixed. ‘He saw that theatre could be a weapon, a way of life,’ Lars recalled. ‘After rehearsals, he’d sit there with his big black notebook, writing furiously.’
In September 1993 Hans Christian travelled to Gjøvik, the town where the Lillehammer performers were rehearsing. Lars was planning an ambitious outdoor interpretation of a Nordic myth that involved using Lillehammer’s streets as the stage, with actors playing troll-like creatures and rappelling down a corn silo. Hans Christian was in his element. ‘He was frantic at the start,’ said Lars. ‘Very strong, just out of the army. He wanted to rappel free-style, without a safety rope. He was almost too strong physically, and always ready to go. But I kept saying to him, “If you don’t start calmly, breathing freely, relaxed physically, you’ll injure yourself.”’ At one point Lars banished him from the set after he refused to take direction. But he was back in time for the final show, pushing the boundaries as always.
Meeting Lars changed Hans Christian’s life. After the performance in Lillehammer, in February 1994 he returned to Oslo and started casting around for something more challenging than his unemployed actors’ workshop. Soon he realised there was nothing to keep him in the city any more. Gry and many of the friends they had made together had moved on. His younger sister Anette was away at film school in Stockholm, and his mother was remarried and living in Trondheim. Hans Christian booked a trip to Peru, Brazil and Bolivia to study under a physical-theatre teacher to whom he’d been introduced by Lars at a party. To fund the trip he sold his vast record collection: Peter Gabriel, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Waterboys.
The trip to South America was Hans Christian’s first time out of Europe. It started badly, when he arrived to find Lars’ teacher friend wasn’t there. Making the most of the situation, he used his time to learn about the Incas, visiting their remote jungle temples, fascinated by their beliefs, especially reincarnation. ‘I have had some fantastic visions,’ he wrote in one letter home. ‘Visualising light pouring towards the earth. The earth has opened itself unto all the light and turned into a lotus of light.’ For Hans Christian, this vision was ‘a sign of grace, that everything is well and that new life will continue to sprout and grow on the compost heap’. Exploring spirituality and seeing more of the world were becoming as important to him as his desire to be on the stage.
Inspired by Lars, Hans Christian returned from South America determined to establish a theatre group. He applied for a scholarship, set himself up at an artists’ commune in Oslo and launched his group, Catharsis, in December 1994. Despite the doubts of some around him, he planned an ambitious production that would draw from an exotic mix of Aristotle, Artaud and Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian director whose film The Sacrifice, shot on a Swedish island, he adored. He was so sure of himself that he went ahead and booked a venue, the Black Box Theatre, for 21 October 1995. With the pressure on, he needed inspiration. It would have to be something foreign and extreme, originating in a part of the world far from Norway.
In the run-up to Christmas, Hans Christian toyed with the idea of going back to South America. He also thought seriously about Bali, where Artaud had studied the island’s ritualised dance. But then he met an actor friend of Lars who had recently spent time in southern India studying kathakali. Hans Christian knew that this was it. He’d already been thinking about India as a source of inspiration after coming across the poems of Rabindranath Tagore
– while he was in Peru, he’d written to friends that one day he wanted to interpret them theatrically. ‘He’d told me once, [Tagore] is a man who Artaud would really have liked to have met,’ recalled Lars.
‘Hans Christian told me he was heading to India on New Year’s Eve,’ said Marit. ‘I was a little scared for him.’ But by the end of December he was on the plane to New Delhi with his guitar. ‘I kept telling myself that he’d become more grounded and serious. I hoped he would be OK,’ said Marit. Before leaving, Hans Christian and Anette posed for photographs with their mother, wearing traditional Norwegian felt hunting outfits she had bought them for Christmas. Marit gave him a fifty-krone note to put in his money belt. ‘On his way home from Bolivia in 1994, he had run out of money and had to walk thirty miles home from Oslo airport,’ she recalled with a smile. This time she wanted him to be better prepared.
‘I felt very responsible,’ said Lars øyno, who met up with Hans Christian one last time shortly before he left Norway. ‘He went to India as a result of Artaud and his philosophy. And I had introduced him. But at the time I was very happy to have planted that seed.’
Despite his mother’s misgivings, Hans Christian had landed on his feet in India, living a pared-down existence with a well-respected family of orthodox Brahmins in Sreekrishnapuram, a Keralan village draped in bougainvillea. The habitually erratic Hans Christian slowed down and embraced the frugal lifestyle as an antidote to too much freedom. Up at 7 a.m., he would train for six hours with his kathakali master. After lunch he meditated and read until village children came to play with him, pestering him to tell them fairy tales from back home in his ‘troll voice’.
Most evenings he sat with the Namboodiri family around the duck pond, strumming along to their Malayalam songs with his guitar. In letters back home to Norway, he described how they had given him a new name, ‘Hamsa’, meaning Swan, kathakali’s royal messenger. The village of Sreekrishnapuram was his ‘Garden of Eden’.
‘It’s nice to be here,’ he wrote to his grandfather Ole Hesby. ‘It’s hot, they are really friendly people. They’re not too pushy. There are many exciting things to see and do. Also there is much poverty. Love HC.’ Soon the young Norwegian was walking barefoot and wearing a sarong. Sometimes he was homesick. ‘I am doing big jumps and have big blisters,’ he wrote to Ane Ostrø, his paternal grandfather. ‘I give you a big hug and am longing for home.’
When the austerity got too much, Hans Christian took trips up into the hills, hiking in the cool air around the tea plantations of Munnar. Never one to pass up a new experience, he wrote that he had had an opportunity to try ‘hot coal running’. He befriended a local Keralan photographer, George, who lived in Cochin. Over cold beers they would discuss spirituality, meditation, women and Hans Christian’s plans to introduce kathakali to Norway. They also shared books, Hans Christian giving George a copy of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, a fictional account of a traveller who lectures a group of men about life and the human condition as he prepares to make his journey home after twelve years away. George still has it.
But after five months, Hans Christian was ready to go home. ‘Katarsis Teater and Kerala Kalakendra Proudly Presents a Kathakali Night’ proclaimed the flyer he produced in English and Malayalam for a performance he would give before he left Kerala. Hundreds came, curious to watch him play Bhima, a Hindu immortal of ‘great stature and unimaginable strength’ who was a brother of Lord Hanuman, the monkey deity. Hans Christian paid George to photograph and video the performance, and afterwards the verdict in Sreekrishnapuram was that it was the best graduation show they’d seen in years.
All that was left for him to do now was to visit Kashmir. The night after the show, he discussed his plan with the Namboodiris. They were appalled, warning him that Kashmir was a terrifying place of murderous jihadis and Pakistani fidayeens, or suicide bombers. Hans Christian almost came to blows with the Namboodiris’ eldest son after he accused them of being small-minded. They responded that they were Hindu Indians, and knew more than him about the truth of Kashmir. ‘I will go anyway,’ Hans Christian retorted. ‘If anything happens to me, it will be according to my fate.’
A few days later, the family tried again to dissuade him. A famed kathakali teacher was coming to stay in the village, and they urged Hans Christian to stay longer and train with him. Almost persuaded, Hans Christian tried to change his Air India ticket, but was unable to do so. He rang his mother. ‘I tried to buy him a new one so he could stay on in Kerala,’ she recalled, ‘but I couldn’t find him a seat anywhere.’ Instead, he bought a rail ticket, packed his Bhima costume and sent it back to Norway by ship.
Around midnight on 11 July 1995, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reached Marit’s brother on his mobile. ‘As soon as it rang I knew it was Hans Christian who was missing,’ said Marit. The family needed to supply a recent photograph, as the police in Kashmir were struggling to identify the missing trekker. ‘Kidnapped!’ Marit said. ‘It was like a wicked dream.’ His twenty-five-year-old sister Anette, who was in Stockholm, got the call at two o’clock the next morning. ‘This is not happening,’ she thought. ‘It’s a joke.’
On 12 July Marit awoke to find reporters outside the house, and her son’s photograph all over the front pages. She panicked. ‘My elderly mother was in hospital. My father would be sitting at home alone watching television.’ Marit rang him, but before she could speak he said he had news for her, as he had just received a postcard from Kashmir. ‘So this card is the last one,’ Hans Christian began. ‘Now I’m in the mountain country. Here, it’s extremely fantastic … On the photo here, I have gone without a guide, this is at eight thousand feet. I am so happy you gave me the equipment (sleeping bag, etc). Please look after yourself. Give mormor [granny] a big hug. PS. I’m coming home on the night of 31 July 1995 … See you soon. HC.’ He had supplied a caption for the place he was writing from: ‘Mountain beauty of Pahalgam’.
NINE
Deadline
If a car says anything about its owner, BBC man Yusuf Jameel’s battered motor said that while he was sufficiently affluent to have a vehicle (which set him above most Kashmiris), he was insufficiently corrupt for it to be a flashy trophy. In an impoverished valley where most working people could not conceive of ever being able to afford any set of wheels, the journalists who rode around town in brand-new Tata Sumos and Mahindras, and whose children were enrolled in top-notch private schools, were all rumoured to have been paid by warlords, religious leaders, intelligence agencies or politicians who expected the right words to be written and broadcast. While the finger of suspicion pointed at these men with their inexplicable wealth, Yusuf’s modest ride meant he had few detractors.
As he drove to work on the morning of 12 July, Yusuf’s head was filled with worries about the day ahead: the captives and the yatra. The previous day, all hell had broken loose in Srinagar when the news of a sixth kidnapping filtered down from Pahalgam. The phones at the red-brick Press Enclave, tucked in a cul-de-sac behind Residency Road, had been ringing for hours. Dozens of foreign news teams were already ensconced in the city, just around the corner at the dingy Ahdoo’s Hotel, where every telephone was tapped by one Indian agency or another, or a ten-minute drive away at the dour Welcome, a two-storey modernist beehive overlooking Dal Lake. The Western media were ravenous in their attempts to identify the sixth victim, hiring Kashmiri journalists, boosting their thin local salaries. By the time a name had emerged on 12 July – Hans Christian Ostrø, from Norway – these local stringers were set running to gather what they could, in the absence of any comments from the silent Indian authorities or the terrified family in Oslo, where Hans Christian’s father, Hans Gustav Ostrø, was fielding all approaches.
It was now more than a week since the kidnappings of Don Hutchings, Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and John Childs, yet there had been nothing more from the kidnappers: no reaction to John Childs’ escape on 8 July, and nothing to confirm that ‘al Faran’ was behind the abductions of Ostr�
� or Dirk Hasert. All there was was a deadline, issued in the original al Faran demand Jane Schelly had brought down to Pahalgam, that now had just forty-eight hours to run. Two days in which to release twenty-one prisoners, or the five remaining hostages, representing four nationalities, would face unspecified ‘dire consequences’.
Arriving at the Press Enclave, Yusuf toyed with his personal theory, sparked by Sikander’s call on the night of 4 July, that al Faran was nothing but a subsidiary of the Movement, and that the kidnap party holed up in the hills was the same one that had been behind the two 1994 episodes. He wondered what to do with this potentially significant nugget. Nothing, for the moment, he decided. He still needed to work it up into something more substantial.
Tonight was the full moon, which signalled the official start of the pilgrimage to Amarnath Cave. Many reporters and photographers were heading to Pahalgam, both to catch the action and in the hope of picking up some titbits on the kidnappings. But Yusuf was going nowhere. He opted to stay put in Srinagar, judging that he would get more from his contacts on the phone than he would drinking tea in Pahalgam’s expensive tourist cafés. In the absence of a view from inside the kidnappers’ hideout, with Sikander remaining frustratingly silent, Yusuf spent the morning ringing round his police contacts.
