The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  Just as he was about to boot it up, thinking it would be a welcome distraction, since he had run out of Alistair MacLean novels, a worry surfaced, something that hit him so hard he kicked himself for not having thought of it before. Although it had not been discussed, he assumed the intelligence agencies were covertly monitoring al Faran, and probably attempting to trace the telephone number the negotiator was calling on. Suddenly distressed, Tikoo called for his driver. ‘I went back to my people right away and to the Security Advisor. I said, “For God’s sake, don’t go for a raid.” I told them, “Look, I know the tendency is to trace the caller’s location and then ambush. That’s what I would do in any normal circumstance. But that way you will not get the hostages freed. Possibly you might get this fellow, the messenger. More likely, as per normal, the messenger will escape, and then you’ll kill the innocent householders. And if we are honest, you will probably slaughter the neighbours too, and that, with the greatest respect, is the most certain way to lose the case. Bang. End of story.”’

  He arrived back home after midnight, reassured that he had convinced General Saklani of the sensitivity of the situation, but still concerned that he was too remote from the decision-making process to be sure the message had got through to all those who needed to know. For a while he sat in the gloom, smoking his pipe, thinking about going to bed, until the phone rang.

  He was not expecting anyone at this hour. ‘Who is this, please?’ he asked tentatively, willing the caller to go away.

  ‘We have a question,’ the caller said politely. It was al Faran once more. ‘Are you drawing this out so as to track us down? What I mean is, is this line bugged?’

  Tikoo ran his hands through his hair, smiling to himself: al Faran had had exactly the same thought as him. Great minds. If only this man knew what Tikoo had just been discussing with General Saklani. ‘My friend, I give my solemn assurance that nobody will disturb you,’ the IG said. ‘As long as we are talking to each other, you are safe.’

  Tikoo tried another tack, using this opportunity to broaden the relationship. ‘How are the guests? Are you treating them well?’ ‘Guests’ was a word that Tikoo knew had great significance to Pashtuns and Afghans, tribal peoples steeped in traditions of hospitality and respect.

  He pondered the identity of his night-time caller. This man’s education had been restricted to the prayer book, and he was definitely not from the valley. Those clipped ‘t’s’ and ‘r’s’ – it was a familiar accent, but he could not quite identify it, and in his mind’s eye he had raced up and down the Pakistani districts hugging the Line of Control searching for a place name. Then he had it. Mirpur. That was it. Most likely this man was from the Mirpur-Kotli belt, in the southern part of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, or POK, as Indians referred to it, making it sound like catching a dose. The accent of Mirpur was as distinct as the area itself, a region that had become known as ‘Little Britain’. Thousands had emigrated to England from there in the sixties, impoverished farmers who worked in the cotton and wool industry and returned as rich as kings. The intermediary was a Pakistani, and from Mirpur.

  ‘What do they eat?’ asked the al Faran man. Tikoo smiled as he wrote the words down. He realised how much the kidnappers must be struggling with this alien situation, faced with trying to keep these Westerners alive and comfortable. They were tribal men who had spent their lives on the battlefield in Afghanistan or eking out an existence along the Pakistan–Afghan border. They had only ever known a diet of rice, bread, ghee, the odd vegetable and occasionally a fatty lump of meat. And they had never met anyone who was different.

  ‘Friend,’ replied Tikoo, ‘don’t give them this mirch [chilli], you know.’ In the tape recording Tikoo had listened to earlier that night, Keith Mangan had described having stomach problems. ‘Not too much red chilli. They can’t eat that. Give them, you know, meat and potatoes, but without spice.’

  There was a pause as the intermediary took this in. Emboldened by his new paternal position, Tikoo filled the gap with an extemporised attempt to get a real conversation going: ‘I’ve been reading.’

  ‘Yes?’ The caller seemed unnerved by the change in tone.

  ‘Tell me, where has it been provided in the Koran that you are killing innocent bystanders?’ This was a risky tactic Tikoo had wanted to try from the start, confronting the intermediary with the fact that the Koran outlawed the killing of innocents. He had regarded it as essential to study the Koran, as had many of his ancestors, who travelled widely in predominantly Muslim lands and never stopped educating themselves. One great-great-grandfather, Diwan Nandram Tikoo, had been Prime Minister of Afghanistan at the time of the Second Anglo–Afghan War, and before Partition Tikoo’s father had been a successful tycoon in the real-estate business in Bombay, to which he had moved from Kashmir. Despite his deep sense of his Kashmiri identity, Rajinder Tikoo had spent much of his childhood in Bombay, being schooled at St Xavier’s, a strict Jesuit academy where he had stood out as a gifted pupil with a voracious appetite for learning. As an adult, back in the valley, he had come to despise those who manipulated the ill-educated, like the so-called religious men who used Koranic justifications for bloodshed.

  There was no answer from the caller.

  ‘And these people are Christians. Do you know? They are Ahl al-Kitāb,’ Tikoo pressed on. The term meant ‘People of the Book’, adherents of religions like Christianity and Judaism that had revealed testaments. Showing off, Tikoo spiced things up a bit with a reference to his own religion, Hinduism. ‘Look, I am a non-believer. This is true. I am an idolater. Undeniable? I am an anathema to you. You kill me, it’s OK. Sure, my friend, you butcher me. But these people, they are practising Christians. They are neither involved in the war, nor are they supporters of it. You are holding them and threatening to kill them, and for that you risk damnation. Am I right?’

  There was a long silence, which left Tikoo worrying that he may have overstepped the mark. ‘Maybe talking Islam with the mujahideen doesn’t cut any ice,’ he thought. He had been too hasty, too cocky, he realised. What had he been thinking? After all, these people had had sophisticated counter-intelligence training in Camp Yawar, where they had probably been instilled with a strident self-belief and instructed to avoid debates on philosophy, that were probably psychological ploys aimed at demoralising the faithful.

  It was too late. The silence told him that the caller had hung up. Rajinder Tikoo cursed his arrogance and dropped the handset into its cradle.

  The Inspector General sat back in his chair, looking at his uninspiring surroundings. When would the intermediary call back, he wondered anxiously. While he waited, he watched the local news bulletins, hoping not to see reports of Western bodies being fished from the Lidder River. Over in the corner, his computer’s green-and-white screen blinked at him.

  He had to get a rhythm going. Two deadlines had already passed with no progress made. In three days’ time three of the hostages would have endured seventeen days of captivity, the same as Kim Housego and David Mackie in 1994. Would the seventeen-day rule apply again? The theory had cropped up in today’s newspaper, but he thought it unlikely. He wondered what the hostages’ partners knew about the 1994 incident and about what he was trying to do, as well as the limits placed on him by his government. ‘I wished I could slip out and share my impressions with them.’ But Saklani’s orders had been explicit: the women were off-limits; and Tikoo’s role, and any information gleaned from it, were classified. Everyone was to be kept at arm’s length.

  Depressed at this thought, Tikoo cast around the room for something to distract him. Someone had dropped off a well-thumbed Clive Cussler novel, Sahara, and as he began to read, inhaling the aroma of printer’s ink and dust, his shoulders dropped a notch. This promised to be just the kind of rollercoaster he needed to take his mind off reality.

  The next day, 19 July, started as well as could be expected, with Tikoo playing a round of golf before returning to Transport Lane. Halfway through his first pip
e of the day, the phone rang.

  ‘Sub bakhair,’ he said, delivering an Urdu good morning. He was in a better mood, having spent half the night thinking through his tactics, and deciding that he was not going to pose as the intermediary’s friend at all, but go at it from another angle, becoming ‘how this man sees me’. This was Tikoo all over: a thinker. He had gone to university in Bombay, graduating in 1965, at the age of sixteen, with a science degree. A single-minded and highly inquisitive teenager, he had decided to work for his country. ‘But since I had to be twenty-one to compete in India’s elite civil service exams, I amused myself for the next couple of years, gaining an MSc in pure maths and an MA in British history.’ Armed with a degree and two postgraduate qualifications by the time he was twenty, Tikoo was bored, ‘and still too young for entrance to the civil service’. But he was not too young to sit the highly competitive Indian Police Service entrance exam. By the time he returned to Kashmir at the age of twenty-one in 1970, he had found himself with a vocation he had never previously considered. Before he knew it, the accidental policeman was an assistant superintendent.

  Now, with more than two decades of service under his belt, the IG launched his opening gambit: ‘Look, you have your 786. Well, from now on I am 108.’

  ‘What? What is this?’ The caller was perplexed. ‘I have him on the back foot,’ Tikoo thought to himself.

  Tikoo knew that in Pakistan, 786 was sometimes used as a substitute for the opening phrase of the Koran, ‘In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate’, since Islamic numerologists argued that the Arabic letters added up to that value. He explained to the intermediary that for Hindus the number 108 had similar significance: Lord Ganesh and Lord Shiva had 108 names; the Hanuman Chalisas were to be recited 108 times; there were 108 ways to represent the universe in the Vedic system; 108 beads in a Hindu rosary; 108 ancient Upanishad texts; 108 holy places associated with Lord Vishnu; and Sati’s body split into 108 pieces when she heard that her husband, Lord Shiva, had been insulted. ‘And so on and so on,’ Tikoo said.

  ‘My point in all of this is simple,’ he continued with a flourish. ‘The way you love Islam, I love my religion. I have a conflicting point of view. We should accept our differences and get on.’

  Tikoo stared at the window, and waited for the caller to mull these thoughts over. He tried to conjure the smell of Lidderwat, that unique combination of moss and mutton.

  Then the caller responded: ‘OK, 108, I thank you.’

  Tikoo’s fingers did a silent jig on his dressing table. ‘That clicked with him, you see?’ he recalled. ‘I realised that to reason with a person hung up on fundamentalism does not get you anywhere. For every quote that you have, he gives you a counter-quote, a chapter this and verse that. To accept that we were enemies was a first step in the right direction.’

  He spoke again. ‘Choose a name, my friend. Come on, we should be civil with one another.’

  ‘OK,’ said the caller, laughing. ‘Mera naam Jehangir hay.’ My name is Jehangir.

  ‘Be careful what you wish for, Mr Jehangir,’ said Tikoo, taking advantage of the first moment of shared levity. ‘Jehangir is a jolly good name, but let me tell you that particular Mughal ruler might have been the Conqueror of the World, but he was famed for creating one of the first systems of criminal justice, that hunted down the callous and cruel.’

  The line went dead, but Tikoo was still smiling broadly.

  The following morning seemed never to end. Tikoo was nursing a sore head, and for a while he thrashed around on his exercise bike before playing minesweeper on the computer, having found the game on the hard drive. ‘Boom boom: it was amazing how these things exploded.’ But after fifteen minutes or so he had tired of such child’s play.

  Just as he was thinking about the families, for whom this was Day Sixteen, or 20 July in the calendar of the free, the phone rang. He grabbed it, and waited eagerly for his opposite number to speak.

  ‘Jehangir here,’ the intermediary said coldly. Tikoo could sense that something was wrong.

  ‘Mr Jehangir, my friend, how are you?’ he said brightly, trying to lighten the mood. But just as he was about to launch into a speech, the caller interrupted him.

  ‘You have violated your word, and you will be blamed for the consequences. You want their deaths on your hands? How stupid do you think we are?’

  What the hell was going on? ‘Calm yourself please, my friend. Please, Jehangir, tell me what has happened.’

  ‘There was a raid.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘You betrayed me, and now there will be a price to pay.’

  ‘I tell you, I know nothing,’ Tikoo replied as calmly as he could, although his mind was racing back to the late-night conversation he had had with Saklani a couple of days ago. ‘Please tell me. Explain to me what has happened, and then give me a day to find some answers. Ring me tomorrow, and I will get to the bottom of this.’ The line was already dead.

  Tikoo called for his driver. Had the army found the kidnappers’ hideout and tried to free the hostages by force? If so, he could not believe that he had not been warned. Down the lane by the Holy Family, he drove through the dappled sunlight and out onto Maulana Azad Road, where IG Tikoo looked longingly through the rusty fence of Srinagar Golf Club at the freshly watered fairways. There had been no announcement of any rescue attempt, so he hoped Jehangir was talking of a lesser incident – maybe the raiding of the house of an al Faran sympathiser, or the discovery of a hidden weapons store. Turning right, Tikoo’s Ambassador raced past the Tourist Reception Centre where the oft-quoted Mr Jan worked. At the top of Church Lane the vehicle was stopped before being waved through the security cordon.

  They pulled into the Security Advisor’s compound. Tikoo found General Saklani seated at his desk, doling out ten-rupee notes to a long line of distraught women and old men clutching pictures of their missing sons, who they claimed had last been seen alive in army custody. ‘Out, out!’ he said, shooing them all away. ‘We are not to be disturbed!’ he shouted at Altaf Ahmed.

  Tikoo relayed the message he had just received from Jehangir, telling Saklani, ‘You gave me an assurance.’

  The Security Advisor raised a hand to calm him. ‘A raid?’ he said, with a look that suggested he did not know anything either. ‘Give me some time. I’ll make some calls.’

  Tikoo excused himself and called for his driver, a dozen possible scenarios whirling in his head. ‘I had been in this business long enough to know that toast always landed butter-side down,’ he recalled. Whatever had happened would have serious implications for his role as negotiator, assuming the hostages were not already either free or dead. While he waited nervously for Saklani’s explanation he was driven aimlessly around Srinagar, trying to calm himself by recalling the city in the days of his grandfather, before the bunkers and sandbags, when it was still possible to glimpse how the wooden maze of the old town might have looked.

  When he returned to the government compound an hour later, Saklani was smiling. A wave of relief washed over Tikoo. ‘From the look on his face I knew that at the very least the hostages were still alive.’ The information from Saklani’s comrades at army headquarters in BB Cantt was that a team of paramilitaries from the BSF had got intelligence about some Pakistanis holed up in Khanyar, a militant stronghold in Srinagar’s old city, and had raided a house there. By the time they got inside, the place was empty, but they subsequently discovered that a phone line in the building was the one al Faran had first used to call Tikoo. ‘Just a routine op. No one knew that our man was in there,’ Saklani said. ‘A left-hand-right-hand kind of a thing. No one communicating. My apologies, but I’m sure you can smooth things over.’

  That night, Tikoo tossed and turned as he tried to work out what had really happened. He had a finely tuned ear for these things. This was not, in his mind, what the cops called a ‘Pink Panther kind of thing’, the phrase they used to describe the countless cock-ups that went on in Kashmir. The onl
y logical conclusion he could come to was that the army, accidentally or otherwise, had discovered Jehangir’s hideout and decided, despite Saklani’s assurances, to chance a raid. He fumed. For Tikoo, this was proof that the army regarded these five foreigners, none of them VIPs or politicians, as less important than their task of wresting control of the valley from the militants. How much more careful would the authorities be, and how much heavier would these five lives weigh if this kidnapping was unfolding in Europe, Tikoo thought. There, a different gravity existed, facilitated by peace and development, in which every single human being, encased in a complex tapestry of lifelong medical, social and financial records, from blood types to library borrowings, was important, and distinguishable from the throng.

  The hostages were still out there, and Tikoo’s job had been made significantly harder. How was he going to mend the broken bridges with Jehangir? And how, he wondered, would al Faran respond? To date it had been a tit-for-tat relationship. Firstly, Saklani had put up the partners at the press conferences, and al Faran had then put up the hostages, first in the form of the photographs, then their taped messages. Now the bungling security forces had raided an al Faran safe house, what would the kidnappers’ reaction be?

  While he waited for the phone to ring, Tikoo dug around among some cardboard boxes and pulled out an old tape recorder. He was not prepared to be the fall guy, should anyone from New Delhi conducting a post mortem on the affair be searching for a Kashmiri to hang out to dry. His written transcript was no longer enough. From now on, he would record everything that was said in this room and on the line to al Faran – as an insurance policy. Having concluded that the army must have been listening in to the calls before making the decision to raid the house in Khanyar, Tikoo wanted an end to that damn leaky telephone too. He would have to find a new way of communicating with the kidnappers that protected both sides.