The Kashmir Trap (23 page)

T
hey
departed on time the following morning in a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter minibus. Max was relieved the Ministry of Information man had been replaced by another, just as attentive and observant, but at least not travelling in the same vehicle. The official travelled with Ingrid, who waved every time they overtook one another. Starting off at top speed and with horns to blare away trucks and rickshaws, the convoy edged its way forward, pothole by pothole, away from Muzaffarabad. As they distanced themselves from the capital of Azad Kashmir, the road started to deteriorate, soon to become nothing more than a winding mountain trail shared by half the country.

At dusk, they arrived in Chakothi, only five kilo­metres from the Line of Control and Indian Kashmir. It was cold in the village, as the heat and humidity of the plain gave way to glacial temperatures. The wind blowing in from the mountains was punctuated with machine-gun bursts echoing through the night, never mind the truce trumpeted by the media. It was hard to imagine Najam Sattar leaving Srinagar to come and live here at the gates of war.

The Westerners were billeted in different houses requisitioned by the government, Max wound up with a British representative of the Anglican Church, a modern English vicar, aware of the world's hardships, just the sort once recruited by Her Majesty's Secret Service. This wasn't Christopher's first mission: he'd been a human shield in Iraq during the First Gulf War and considered his holy intervention as some sort of extreme sport. The Bible he read before going to sleep at night was blood-stained.

“My blood, actually,” he said with a note of pride.

Max was first up in the morning, and the mountains appeared on every side of the village with a splendour that made him queasy. This was the most beautiful landscape in the world turned into a battlefield.

Max was concerned that the engineer who was to be his contact upon entering the village had not yet arrived. A logistical problem? Maybe a lack of confidence … or worse. Ingrid joined him, followed by the missionary, complete with blood-stained Bible. They'd slept badly and were all starving. In addition, Ingrid had been bitten by bedbugs all night. By day, Chakothi was depressing. There were soldiers everywhere, just like the day before, walking up and down the muddy street at the centre of the village. Half of the shops were closed for good, and most of the inhabitants hadn't been able to return to their villages since the threat of war in recent weeks. The group was to spend the day and following night in Chakothi, then head off to Kotli and Bhimber, farther south. From there, they would go to Gujarat, then Lahore.

One week on the road, a second week for debriefing, a third week for consciousness-raising, then it was back to Europe. If Najam Sattar still failed to show, Max would have to go home empty-handed.

The aid crowd spent the morning visiting a school financed, of course, by the government in Islamabad. In the afternoon, they listened to an elderly lady thanking the soldiers for protecting them from the Indians, “bloodthirsty beasts.” Finally, in the evening, they had to convince a shepherd to interpret a traditional song in Urdu that one of them absolutely had to record. They also visited a bunker that a merchant and his family had built beneath their shop. All these humanitarian visits wore them out, and the evening meal was not enough to satiate their hunger. At precisely nine, the members of the group went their separate ways, and Max found a note in his room:
The small bridge at the village entrance … absolutely have to see this spot before leaving the region. Mountains at midnight illuminated by the moon.

Of course, Najam Sattar. Max sighed. So, this guy was more of a poet than an engineer.

The guns were quiet now, and the wind as well. It could have been a village in the Alps a century ago, with its oasis for shepherds, no hotels, restaurants, or tourist buses. The moon, full, round, and white, lit up the mountains. Najam Sattar was right, the countryside was even more spectacular at night. Max had no trouble getting to the bridge over the Jhelum, and encountered not a soul on the way. At the height of the long-expected war, the village had been shelled. You could still see marks of it on the houses.
It seems a miracle that the bridge still survived despite the artillery barrages
, thought Max. He leaned on the balustrade and rubbed his hands to keep them warm.

Any minute now, he expected a military patrol to catch him watching the stars, but the village was deserted. Everyone was asleep. Max waited twenty minutes, then half an hour. He thought he'd give it another fifteen minutes before he rejoined the bedbugs. Something unexpected must have come up, or the whole thing was one of Aziz's bad jokes. Then a shadow suddenly appeared on the other side of the bridge, a man smoking. Max ambled over to him. It was a frail, tiny old man from the village he'd seen earlier that day.

“Najam Sattar?” He asked. Surely not. This guy was over eighty years old. With his cigarette-hand, he signalled Max to follow him. He fell in behind the man. They walked quickly and soon found themselves on a path leading deeper and deeper into the woods. Max didn't like the way this was going and hesitated. The old man waited for him on the promontory. Then they walked some more, higher and higher as the trail got bumpy. From time to time, Max stopped for a breather, then to lace his shoe, so he yelled at the old man to wait. When he raised his head, a Kalashnikov was aimed at him and more jihadists in beards and scarves stood waiting to shoot him from the side as well.

“Welcome to Azad Kashmir.”

Max's first thought was the 1995 kidnapping of tourists who'd ventured here against all advice from their governments and guides. Their reason? The Indian tourist office had assured them there was nothing to fear up there. They'd been captured by Islamist rebels and held for an exchange involving political prisoners. The government didn't budge, and the body of a decapitated young Norwegian was found weeks later. This perhaps was what Max now had to look forward to. He counted about fifteen of them. Armed to the teeth and with cartridge belts slung over their shoulders, bandolier-style. He also figured on hand grenades, submachine guns, and portable rocket launchers in their backpacks. All that had to weigh a ton and hamper their movements. Max hesitated barely a second and threw over one of the men who was stepping forward, then another onto the hillock behind, instantly throwing himself down a ravine to his right. He was expecting a volley of machine-gun fire, but there was nothing. They must have been under orders. He crossed the stream without looking back and ran a long time, till he was out of breath, finally collapsing behind a boulder. Now what? Where to go? Unbearable pain at the back of his neck squelched all further thought. One lightning flash, then another. He was being beaten mercilessly. When he brought his hands up to his head for protection, the third blow crushed his fingers. His knees hit the ground, and he rolled over onto his side. He could see the muddy boots of the rebels and the rocky path, then, one last time, the rushing waters of the Jhelum between the rocks. Then nothing.

When he came to, Max was in motion, carried by the two heaviest of the group. The old man from the village, his delivery completed, had vanished. Off to his right he heard a growl: they'd noticed he was conscious again. The pair dumped him on the path, and the one who'd hit him, the chief most likely, came over to him.

He ordered Max in very bad English not to cause any more problems. Max got up. In pain, his head was echoing like a gong. Sleeping for a hundred years seemed like the only thing to do, but he was pushed onto the trail, and he asked: “So where are we going?”

“Shut up!”

Then a blow from a rifle butt hit him in the ribs.

The Himalayas were a landscape fit for a calendar, with patches of evergreens clinging to the mountain and letting through occasional glimpses of moonlight. Far off, he heard the sound of a water cascade. Max was trying to get oriented. He had seen Ursa Major from the bridge; now he scanned the sky for the North Star. They were walking east toward India. What the hell did all this mean? They were headed to the mountain on a
well-laid
-out trail, though narrow, so narrow you couldn't get mules along it. This had to be strictly for human use: smuggling and a night trail for people in a real hurry, the connection between two countries that had hated each other for half a century.

The rebels must have been taking this route several times a month, forging ahead without so much as a glance behind. Which group did it belong to anyway?

Max ran through the names of local organizations in his cracked head, from
Hizb-ul
-Mujahideen to
Lashkar-e
-Taiba, and not forgetting Al-Badr and
Jaish-e
-Mohammed. But why on earth were they headed for Indian Kashmir, when it had to be crawling with soldiers and police? Obviously, they weren't about to kill him just yet, or they'd already have done it. Ransom, maybe? Boy, imagine Luc Roberge's face when he found out two hundred thousand dollars was needed to save his sworn enemy! Now that was a hat Max would love to see him pass around to his colleagues! Two hundred thousand? Sure, why not … to see his throat cut!

If that were true, they'd be taking him to Pakistan instead, then lock him up nice and tight and call his family. Not so. They were walking into the jaws of the lion, India. Maybe, just maybe, he was getting lucky. There'd be Indian soldiers at the Line of Control, and if he could somehow attract their attention, but then he remembered Jayesh saying that the two Kashmirs had been trading freely forever, in peace or war. India's reinforcement of its positions to counter terrorism — Al-Qaeda, for example, liked to take a turn at the wheel — did nothing to change that. A dotted line on some vague map or other, a pencilled mistake over undetermined territory.

They'd been climbing nonstop in single file. Max sometimes felt a rifle barrel in his back, and that sped him up. The trail was surrounded on every side by mountains, and behind them was the Line of Control, so there had to be a road down below for troop transport, but he couldn't see one.

All of a sudden, the sky lit up: the sun was rising. They'd been walking for eight hours, and Max was wiped. Still there was no question of stopping just yet. Shots could be heard in the distance. Another day was dawning. Then a different sound caught their attention, and it preoccupied the chief of the group for the first time. A gesture from him had the others drag Max onto a different path higher up. Then they disappeared behind a bush as an Indian patrol passed where they had just been with the sound of footsteps and clicking of mess kits. It was now or never, but the chief had his revolver barrel to Max's head.

As soon as they were gone, the band returned to their path and continued walking across the mountain. Once in a while, they lost the trail, and found it again farther off, but it was narrower and narrower each time. Max was worn out and famished, having the feeling they were going round in circles. The sounds of gunfire never let up. He couldn't believe they'd kept up this nonsense for fifty years just to give one another a scare.

The small town of Uri suddenly appeared to the side of the path in full sunlight, and behind the houses was the river Jhelum, though they couldn't see it from where they were. A few kilometres east, in the direction of Srinagar, only steps from the Line of Control, lay Gulmarg, a ski resort that kept working intermittently since the fresh outbreak in the nineties. Now they were in India, so perhaps the rebel base was at Uri, where they were headed.

They had now left the pathway for a narrow dirt road passable to vehicles. Max became hopeful once more. They could see tire tracks in the mud, recent traces. The chief looked left to right and seemed worried again, as though for the first time, things were not going as planned.

From behind a rock, Max saw a parked Jeep, with its motor still running and a flag of the Indian Army on the hood. The soldiers must have got out to pee, have a smoke, or hunt a rabbit. They couldn't be far off and might emerge from the woods at any moment.

Confrontation was imminent, and carnage as well, but there was a chance he could make it out of this, so he made a gesture toward …

Then the gong in his head echoed from a blow once more. A thousand little A-bombs went off in his skull as his eyes fell shut.

 

 

T
he
wind on his face woke him; a glacial mountain gust that made him shiver from head to toe. The pain was atrocious. The noise, a humming, more like a groaning, from somewhere unknown. He felt burning on his eyelids, which opened only to be blinded by sunlight. He closed them again and tried to roll over on his side, off his sore back. He tried opening his eyes once more and found himself lying on a wooden plank in the hold of a boat. Above him was an opening. That's where the wind and sun were coming from. The groaning came from the motor. With difficulty, he managed to get upright, though his head was spinning. Then there was a shadow over him and words he didn't understand, but he fully expected to be struck again. Instead, someone held out a pan of water. Oh great, first concussion, now gastro-enteritis. What the hell? Why not? He drank greedily, and when he moved away from the vessel, he saw three men leaning over him. They weren't mountain men, but other rebels, bearded like the others and with the same dishevelled turbans.

Beyond them, through the porthole, he was amazed by the landscape: still the same mountains, but the forest had disappeared far off. The boat was on an immense lake swept by the wind. It was a sort of tugboat or fishing boat, but he saw none of the usual equipment. He tried getting up, but his legs wouldn't hold him. He fell down and lost consciousness again. Water on his face this time, and he opened his eyes. Same old jihadists. More water. They really wanted him upright this time. How long had he been out, anyway? An hour, two? No way of telling. The sun was still high, and the boat was in the middle of the lake, far from shore. The motor was off now, and the silence was menacing. They had got where they were going, but where was that? Where they were through injuring him, or was he just being held for a specific purpose, if they bothered to transport him by boat from the forest? The craft was flat-bottomed and covered with a canvas scribbled all over in Arabic lettering. The smell of rotting fish gave him the heaves, but no way was he going to throw up here in front of them. They pushed him firmly, but not violently, onto the tarp, and his face hit the floor. The covering too felt disgusting, and he had the urge to throw up again. That would be the last thing to do. Were those inscriptions a prayer to Allah? This wouldn't be Max's first sacrilege by a long shot, but why make things worse? What was going to happen to him? He wasn't so sure they planned to keep him alive after all. Maybe this covering and this flat-bottomed boat were some sort of ritual, a special death reserved for strangers. He'd be carved up right here and the leftovers tossed into the water.

He had more shivers that had nothing whatsoever to do with the wind.
This is it
, he told himself,
it's all over
. He'd just die out here like a dumb beast in the middle of nowhere. Well, that was also how he'd lived, after all, wasn't it? It was logical: his own personal karma. With a brisk motion, one of the rebels whipped back the tarp beneath his head, and it hit a cold glass surface. The boat-bottom was transparent, like those used to view coral reefs and exotic fish. Now he was really puzzled. Was he the first-ever member of Club Med Kashmir? Clearly, they wanted to show him something, so he swept the bottom with his eyes, trying hard to see through the waters. Okay, there were no fish, no coral reefs, so the tourist season would definitely have to wait. The sun had disappeared behind a cloud and now emerged again. That illuminated the water straight to the bottom. That's when he saw it. First the minaret, then the bit of balcony where the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Then, farther down, the cupola that was still in good condition. So that was it, a flooded mosque.

“And that's not all there is, Mr. O'Brien. This whole part of the valley was submerged. Twelve villages.”

Max turned to see a man with thin grey hair and a well-trimmed beard standing next to him. Tall and Kashmiri-dressed, he wore no weapons, at least none that Max could see. Then, smiling, he said, “I'm forgeting to introduce myself. I am Majid Khankashi, imam of the Kasgari Mosque in Delhi.”

Genghis Khan in the flesh.

Max had been expecting a dusty and rumpled Osama bin Laden with a machine gun and munitions belt. Here he was, face to face with practically a dandy. Khankashi helped Max up as the rebels stood guard around them. The imam appeared to be their guest, not their chief or their guide. He signalled one of them and spoke a few words in Urdu. Then a pan of water appeared before Max. He drank greedily like the previous time.

Genghis Khan watched him intently, as if trying to read his thoughts.

“David never mentioned you.”

He wasn't the only one
, thought Max.

“It's truly terrible what happened to him. A horrendous loss.”

“Nothing to do with you then?”

“I had much respect for David, much gratitude, also. Without him, I might still be locked up in Tihar.”

“And Ahmed Zaheer?”

The imam smiled sadly. “I've read his articles. Never met him.”

Khankashi took Max by the arm to the bridge, while one of the men put the tarp back in place along the bottom. The fresh air did Max good, as the two approached the front railing.

“So we are on the lake created by Stewart-Cooper?” Max asked, though he knew the answer.

“Hindus lived in this valley too, not just Muslims. They were displaced. The lives of thousands were turned upside down.

“The company didn't pay damages?”

“Oh yes, of course, they were relocated, free of cost, nearby in better houses around Rashidabad, and that reduced the influx of migrants to slums of Delhi or Mumbai.”

“Thanks to the dam, they lived a little better,” ventured Max, “better than the rest of Kashmir, at least. Zaheer emphasized that in his articles.”

Majid Khankashi said nothing, silent in thought for a while.

“Oh doubtless,” he said with resignation, “but the whole valley lost its soul and its reason for being. Before that, the Himalayas set the pace for people, but now, a hydroelectric complex does that for them.” Khankashi turned toward the mountains and the shore.

“The Himalayas are forever, but not SCI. You see, the plant is now closed.”

The Indus River that irrigates the eastern part of Kashmir on the other side of Srinagar springs from the Ladakh Heights near the Chinese border, while the Jhelum River has its source in Kashmir, and in the West, the two rivers running parallel on either side of the Line of Control. Once past India, they cross Pakistan from North to South. Somewhere around Mithankot, the Jhelum flows into the Indus along with other waterways from the mountains, a rather undistinguished and anonymous end, but here in Kashmir, the Jhelum still retains all its power for both the greater glory and misfortune of Rashidabad.

“The village clinging to the mountainside, the low and probably dark houses, like the sky at this moment, would be deserted by the tourists, in November, for instance, when the inhabitants are left to their devices after a season of bows and curtsies and forced smiles.”

Low, dark houses, like the sky at this moment, were clinging to the mountainside. The village looked abandoned, despite the fact that a few inhabitants came and went. As he crossed the town in Genghis Khan's Jeep, Max had no trouble imagining how dynamic the place had been before the personnel of the complex left. He could picture the bustling main street, the vitality of the shops and small businesses drawn by the centre's employees, and its isolation from the outside world. Of course Srinagar was only a few minutes away by helicopter, and Max had already noticed the landing pad covered by weeds as one entered the village, but who benefited from this other than Susan Griffith and the company bosses?

Now it was all gone, and a cloak of sadness and resignation had descended on Rashidabad. The agitation and dynamism from before the war had only left a bitter taste. These people had been fleeced, and they didn't even know by whom, or how, but they felt themselves victims of a disaster they had no way of measuring. Nor could they explain its origins. The wondrous valley of Kashmir had turned into a nightmare, a bad, greyish, and depressing dream from which no one on either side of the Line of Control could awaken.

Down one street, Max was able to see the gigantic complex out of all proportion to its surroundings, almost as though it wanted to challenge the mountains against which it leaned. Curiously, it didn't seem abandoned, or at least it didn't have that air of broken and discarded toys so prevalent in the other Rashidabad constructions. Max knew nothing about the creation of electricity, but he felt as though it could start up again just like that with the flip of a switch. Maybe the bosses at SCI thought that way, but certainly not the villagers.

The imam Khankashi described the enormous poverty of Kashmir, deprived now of its tourism, replaced with the military and subject to almost daily acts of terror. Whereas in Hyderabad or Bengaluru, a new India was setting aside the Hindu-Muslim conflict, here in the north, the battle raged on, to the great misfortune of the population. At the outset, the issue was a legitimate one: develop the region and invest in infrastructure to remove the motivation and reason for financing extremists, according to New Delhi, by Islamabad. Made desperate by the region's extreme poverty, the people had to be shown by real action that terrorism wouldn't solve anything, but economic development would. Stewart-Cooper also wanted to use southern expertise, which of course pleased the heads of the BJP. Thus the influx of Hinduist technicians, drawn by the promise of work at SCI, would move to Kashmir and help “Hinduize” the region. The Muslims wouldn't be left out either, Khankashi added. The population would provide abundant manpower, and the government also wanted to hire professionals from other regions of India or even overseas: hence the hiring of Najam Sattar.

The retired engineer was waiting for them in the dining room of the New Century, the one and only hotel still open. He was small, round, and nervous, the exact opposite of Khankashi, who was tall, thin, and Britannically calm. Sattar greeted them with a nod. What was he doing here? When he learned a stranger wanted to talk to him about the dam and the death of Zaheer, he'd contacted Khankashi in Srinagar. He did nothing without first consulting the imam.

All through the conversation, he cast glances at Khankashi, and with each new piece of information, the holy man acquiesced with a slight movement of his head, an approval he required at every instant. Sattar spoke of his hiring by Griffith, who'd sought him out in Mumbai though he was already earning a very good living there. Someone had tipped her off that this ex-Kashmiri native was very alert to the misfortunes of his people, so the chance to run the site was particularly attractive to him, as was Griffith's determination.

It was a triumphant return home for Sattar, and what deplorable condition it was in! When his parents had left Srinagar in the seventies, Kashmir was still relatively prosperous, at least by Indian standards. The 1971 war ended in favour of India, and Pakistan had been obliged to cede the eastern portion, now Bangladesh. Both countries emerged extenuated from the war which, despite its cost, had once again failed to solve the Kashmiri problem. Both simply needed to rest and recuperate. At about that time, European charter companies were beginning to discover India and Nepal, and Magic Buses were leaving Paris and Amsterdam filled with hairy hippies loaded with cash, at least by Indian standards, again, and they crossed Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan to Pakistan, then into India via the Punjab. Numbers of them were enthralled with the beauties of Kashmir before going on to Goa or Kathmandu. Srinagar was a destination of choice, not only for Western millionaires, royal families, or heirs to international fortunes, as always, but ordinary tourists, too, who wanted to make the most of houseboats, mountain hiking, and
shikara
rides on Dal Lake. Imbued with these childhood images, and homesick for Srinagar (as a civil servant in Jammu, his father moved with his family to the other capital every summer), Najam Satar discovered a Kashmir that had fallen prey to chaos. Gone were the tourists, no longer daring to venture north of Amritsar. Gone was the influx of foreign revenue and peaceful evenings at Shalimar Bagh. Welcome back to the skirmishes between Indians and Pakistanis at the Line of Control. Srinagar was a city bled to death, filled instead with soldiers, Hindus for the most part, making their presence only too well known with intimidation, theft, and rape, a breeding ground for violence, and a resistance, and a series of small terrorist groups aiming at the occupying troops but mowing down innocents, the universal victims. Seen from Srinagar, the heart of Kashmir, the most insane project of all: building a hydroelectric plant in the middle of a militarized zone that was ripe for guerrilla action and disputed by the two countries. Nevertheless, it still had a certain chance of success.

Well, at first. With the examples of Bengaluru and Hyderabad to guide them, the government was making serious efforts with this one. Skeptical at first, the population of Rashidabad nevertheless played the game. It was explained that they would be the first to profit from this plant; they'd be hired as construction workers and remembered when it came time to put it into operation. Poorly educated, if at all, and with no technical training, they'd have low-grade jobs like drivers, canteen workers, and security guards. Still, they'd be making more rupees than ever before.

SCI had never concealed the impact all this would have on the area, with the valley flooded, some villages being vacated, and the need to move far away. Ahmed Zaheer, for one, had vaunted the company's approach in
Klean Kashmir
. By then the great upheaval was the subject of much information, advance warnings, and reparations payments. In fact, according to Zaheer's article, some of the valley's inhabitants were disappointed when their rocky little lot wasn't expropriated, unlike that of their neighbours. No surprise there, no popular protest movement, not even a spontaneous demonstration, environmental or otherwise, no “save our riverbanks” like elsewhere in India, like the Narmada Valley in Andhra Pradesh, or China with its Three Gorges Dam.