The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  The IG called up one of his most trusted officers, Superintendent Farooq Khan, the man he had placed in charge of the STF. Later that day Khan sent a man round to Transport Lane with a box. Inside was a Kenwood VHF two-way radio that the STF had seized from a militant cell it had eliminated in downtown Srinagar. It was still working, and Tikoo had decided that the talks, if they could be resurrected, would have to continue by these means. Such communications were far harder to trace. A roaming band of hostage-takers would almost certainly have the same kit. Tikoo pushed a phono cable into the Kenwood, inserted the other end into his tape recorder, and sat back.

  For more than twenty-four hours there was nothing except the monotony of the cream walls and the bricked-up view. The day dragged by, punctuated with filling and refilling his pipe from a rapidly emptying tobacco pouch, a bout on the exercise bike followed by minesweeper. Then, on the afternoon of 21 July, Day Seventeen, the telephone rang. Tikoo began to explain about the VHF set, and which frequency they should use, and the code they would then employ to change frequencies, but Jehangir started shouting, ‘There’s been an encounter!’ He used the army word for an exchange of fire between troops and militants. Tikoo paled as Jehangir continued: ‘Hostages are injured. You … have … blood … on your hands.’

  ‘My friend, my friend Jehangir, it is not possible,’ said Tikoo. He could hardly believe that even the Indian Army would conduct another raid, targeting the kidnappers’ hideout. Before he had a chance to ask anything more, the connection went dead. Panicked, Tikoo tore round to Saklani’s office. He found the Security Advisor busy with some army officers, discussing the yatra. ‘Saklani seemed genuinely surprised to see me. But on seeing the state I was in, he cleared his office and asked me to explain.’ Then he picked up the phone to army headquarters. ‘I sat there watching his reaction as he made a succession of calls,’ Tikoo remembered. ‘But there was nothing, no information about any kind of operation involving the hostages, either in Srinagar or in the mountains.’ General Saklani said he would go and speak to the Governor, and that they should meet again that evening. Confused, Tikoo went back to sit by the silent radio in Transport Lane.

  Later that night, Saklani told him there were no reports of a raid of any kind connected to the hostages. But the story would not go away. Instead of calling Tikoo, al Faran delivered a message to the Press Enclave, claiming that the Indian Army had attacked the kidnappers and that two hostages were seriously injured. The Press Enclave printed and broadcast the information. Jane, Cath, Julie and Anne learned the news from their diplomatic liaison officers.

  ‘We were absolutely silent and aghast,’ Jane recalled. ‘We had only recently heard the recording of their voices, which was a major boost. It just didn’t seem possible that they might now be injured. Our thoughts were: what sort of wounds do pistols, machine guns and hand grenades cause? How would you get them to a safe place, on horseback or on a litter? Would they be in shock? Would Don be critically injured? So many thoughts and concerns that I actually felt physically ill, a feeling I hadn’t had to such a degree since the night and the morning that Don was actually taken.’

  An official public statement had to be made. An Indian government spokesman emerged to issue an emphatic denial of ‘any gun battle between the security forces and the kidnappers’. At the state guesthouse in Srinagar, the women, their nerves shredded, did not know what to believe, but felt relieved. ‘Although I still wanted proof that they were safe,’ Jane wrote in her journal that night, exhausted by the day’s events, which she likened to being lurched around in a fairground ride, ‘[the government statement] was reassuring.’

  That weekend, Jane spent most of her waking hours doing some serious thinking. The longer this went on, the more she felt like a punchbag, soaking up every incident, claim and feint without being able to do anything. In just over a week’s time her and Don’s tickets home would expire, and even before the story of the raid had broken she had been toying with going back, hoping to better serve Don’s cause by lobbying from the US, where she could use her brother-in-law Donald Snyder’s political connections to get some serious attention. ‘By Monday, 24 July, which was Day Twenty-One of Don’s captivity, I awakened, as it always seemed, at 4 a.m., the time of the morning prayers,’ she wrote. ‘I was able to go back to sleep but at 6.30 a.m. I was back up and my mind was busy turning things over and over.’ Jane had decided she had reached the end of the line in Srinagar, where she felt she couldn’t do much more. She and the other three women were also coming under increasing pressure from their embassies to relocate to New Delhi, ‘simply because we wouldn’t be as at risk as we were in Srinagar’.

  To-ing and fro-ing in her mind, Jane wondered, ‘If New Delhi, then why not Spokane?’ There at least she could start sorting Don’s life out. Although colleagues were covering for him, he was long overdue back at work, and a neighbour was looking after their dogs. She could not go on like this. Jane felt certain that if she did go back, Don would respect her decision, and she would also be comforted by her family and friends. But on the other hand, if the situation changed, and Don emerged from captivity physically or mentally injured, ‘I would want to be there quickly, and from Spokane it’s nearly a thirty-five-hour trip.’ She did not want to miss the moment Don was set free, and knew ‘Don would be disappointed if I were not there, or feel that I had bailed out’. The last thing she wanted was for him to feel she had deserted him. She would have to sit tight for now.

  For several days there was nothing. Then, on 4 August, another envelope arrived at the Press Enclave.

  Yusuf Jameel ripped it open, and out slid colour photographs of Don Hutchings and Keith Mangan lying in a gujjar hut, bloodied and injured. Don’s eyes were closed and he was stripped to the waist, his midriff bandaged with white gauze, with what looked like blood seeping from a gunshot wound. Keith too had his eyes tight shut, his chest exposed. He lay on a tartan blanket, with a broad ribbon of bloodstained white bandage across his breast. What looked like an intravenous drip was attached to his right arm, and pills were scattered around.

  A tape clattered out of the envelope. Yusuf pushed it into his cassette player. ‘I do not have the strength to speak much,’ said an American voice that was evidently Don Hutchings’, ‘but I think Keith is critically ill with many wounds in his broken leg. We have no medicines.’ Also in the envelope was a note in Urdu. Hans Christian Ostrø, Dirk Hasert and Paul Wells were also sick: ‘For the last three days they have stopped eating. Unless immediate treatment is given they might die and for that the Indian government will be responsible.’ The note continued that the governments of Britain, America, Norway and Germany had a responsibility to put pressure on India to get on with meaningful negotiations. As a sign of good will, al Faran was unilaterally reducing its demand on prisoner releases from twenty-one men to fifteen, but Masood Azhar remained a priority, top of the list.

  Al Faran appeared to want a resolution, thought IG Tikoo when he heard the news. But would any of the hostages live long enough to see it through? Or was this just a ruse, the mocked-up after-effects of a non-existent encounter, calculated to turn the knife and keep New Delhi hopping? Not even he knew.

  The photos and the threats felt real enough to the hostages’ families waiting overseas. In Eston, Middlesbrough, Julie Mangan’s mother Anita noted that Julie and Keith had been planning to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary at the Taj Mahal on the day before the photos emerged: ‘She’s devastated. We all are. We have done nothing but cry since Saturday.’ A local Teesside radio station obtained the pictures before the families, and called Keith’s mother, asking if she wanted to see them. ‘Of course I said yes, and so they, the people from the radio station, came out to the house. “Is this your son Keith?” they wanted to know. And I said, “Yes, this definitely is Keith.” It looked so authentic in the black-and-white version they had.’ The Mangans were so worried they called the Foreign Office, which by now had appointed a family liaison officer. ‘A Famil
y’s Agony’ ran the headline in the Middlesbrough Gazette above the picture of Keith lying injured. ‘I don’t know how we’re coping,’ Mavis said, describing this time as the ‘days from hell’.

  In Spokane there were shocked headlines too: ‘Hostage Shot, Critically Ill, Rebels Report’. Don and Jane’s friends – climbers and walkers, doctors and psychologists – passed around copies of the photos to scrutinise. On the waistband of Don’s walking trousers it was just possible to make out the label ‘Moonstone’, confirming to them that this was really Don. But the peaceful expression on his face and the pristineness of the bandages suggested to some in the Spokane medical community that the pictures were faked. There was also something odd about the positioning of Don’s right hand, which was in the foreground of the picture. The fingers seemed to be at an unnatural angle. A sign-language expert in Spokane suggested that he could have been signalling ‘I’m OK.’ In Middlesbrough, Charlie Mangan was also not so sure about the photographs when he saw them in colour for the first time: ‘You could tell that the blood looked like Tabasco sauce, and the needle in his arm was not stuck in.’

  Back in Transport Lane, Srinagar, IG Tikoo studied the photographs in a newspaper. He thought he knew what this was all about: retaliation for the BSF raid on the house in Khanyar. He could see that the bodged operation had given al Faran a fright, and the kidnappers wanted the families (and New Delhi) to suffer too. In this they had succeeded. Mavis Mangan recalled: ‘If those men holding our son wanted us to feel the terror, they did with that, they certainly did. This was real terror.’

  Tikoo’s confidence ebbed. Nothing felt certain any more. He did not even know if he could trust Saklani. He thought long and hard as he contemplated the photographs reproduced in the paper. This was the essence of what terrorism truly meant: powerlessness and not knowing. Al Faran was working the grey space between ignorance and speculation. What, he wondered, was his side really doing?

  TWELVE

  The Golden Swan

  Marit Hesby woke with a start on the night of 12 August. An air-conditioner hummed above her head, and she could see from the clock that it was just past midnight. She was still on Norwegian time, although she’d been in New Delhi for three days. She’d never be able to get back to sleep now, she thought, so she tried to recollect her dream: something to do with cats. That worried her. Whenever she dreamed about cats it signalled a momentous event in her son’s life. Where was Hans Christian right now, she wondered. He was strong and resourceful, she told herself, trying not to think of where he might be sleeping, as she lay in the plush cotton sheets of the Norwegian Embassy.

  He could survive this. Later, the experience would become one of the family stories recited every Christmas, like the one about him and his girlfriend struggling home from school summer camp five hundred miles away without a krone in their pockets.

  Marit had arrived in New Delhi on her son’s thirty-third day in captivity, her journey prompted by the ambush photos. In Oslo she had woken to see the brutal images of Keith and Don lying bandaged and supposedly bloodied on the NRK morning news. Horrified, she had called Anette, who had already flown out to India with her father Hans Gustav on 18 July. Anette confirmed that there was a possibility that a secret army rescue attempt had gone wrong, but the Indian authorities were so unforthcoming that anything was possible. ‘Later, people said the pictures were fake, but it didn’t make any difference to me,’ said Marit. ‘I just knew I couldn’t sit by in my cosy little life any longer while my boy was out there suffering.’

  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 ov
er 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.