The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began

It was in Nottingham that Paul hooked up with Catherine Moseley, an art graduate from Norwich whom he met at a gig in Rock City, a venue whose manager liked to call it ‘an oasis of alternative culture in a desert of Gaz-and-Shazness’. Cath was a willowy blonde social worker at Base 51, a drop-in centre for troubled Nottingham teens, and her romance with Paul was intense. Paul was not afraid to speak his mind. He was only ever going to be himself. Two years older than him, Cath was quieter, having grown up in middle-class Norfolk. Paul was smitten, and as far as his parents could see, Cath too was committed to their having a real life together.

When Grandpa Seymour died unexpectedly just before Christmas 1994, Paul was ‘crushed’, according to his father. But after the funeral Paul picked himself up and went back to college in Nottingham, taking his younger brother Stuart along as a flatmate. With the money his grandfather left him, he could afford his first real taste of foreign adventure. All he talked about that spring was the Ladakh plan. And he had kept going on at Cath: ‘Please come away with me to India. It will change our lives forever.’

Even though she had finally said yes, Cath was still nervous as summer approached. She called tour agencies in Nottingham, and went so far as to contact the Foreign Office for its latest advice on travelling to India. Ladakh was part of the troubled Jammu and Kashmir state, she was told, but this eastern sector had been untouched by the conflict that rumbled on further west.

The cheapest way for Paul and Cath to travel from New Delhi to Ladakh was to take a bus to Srinagar, a grinding thirty-hour trip, before getting a connection along the Kargil road to Leh and finally to Ladakh, another two days’ journey. Like Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, they were told that the riskiest part of the trip was the time they would have to spend in Srinagar. If they wanted to avoid travelling through the Kashmir Valley there was a more circuitous route via Himachal Pradesh, to Kashmir’s south. Or they could fly. Since the last option was too pricey, and no one in the UK appeared to know much about the first two, they decided to make their decision in New Delhi.

Towards the end of the summer term, Cath booked the flights and a hotel in New Delhi. ‘She got their jabs sorted, too,’ says Bob. ‘Paul even went to the dentist and got his fillings fixed.’ As they waved Paul and Cath off from Manchester Airport on 15 June, Paul’s parents felt a pang of fear. Dianne wondered when she would see him again. ‘Don’t worry,’ Bob reassured her, putting an arm around her shoulder. He was pleased that his son was at last sorting himself out. ‘Paul can look after himself. He’s a strong lad.’ For Dianne, the only saving grace was that Cath was going with him.

Jetlagged and dehydrated, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley arrived at Indira Gandhi International Airport on 16 June. As Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings would nine days later, they fell prey to a tout. This one convinced them that people were rioting in the street near their pre-booked hotel, and that he should take them somewhere safer instead. Panicked and sweating, they agreed, only to find themselves deposited at the entrance to Paharganj, a swamp of squalid backpacker hostels opposite New Delhi railway station.

Lost, Paul and Cath lugged their overstuffed rucksacks past dusty roadside stalls displaying joss sticks, scarves and fake silver. Eventually they found the hotel the taxi driver had recommended, a tumbledown establishment where a handful of teenage boys lay snoring on the floor behind the reception desk. Paul and Cath gingerly stepped over them, trying to block out the pungent smells, and headed for their room.

Over the next couple of days, as they acclimatised to the heat and the lack of sanitation, they tried to make the best of it, buying homespun Indian kurtas and quizzing young travellers over banana pancakes and coffee laced with condensed milk about routes to Ladakh. The owner of their hotel turned out to be a Kashmiri, and offered to book their onward trip for a small commission. They opted for the bus to Srinagar, a journey that would involve travelling north across the New Delhi plains and into the Punjab, before striking north-west to Jammu and the Pir Panjal mountains, taking them, according to their map, alarmingly near to fractious Pakistan. As they left, the hotel owner pressed a handful of his relatives’ business cards into their hands, ‘Just in case you want to stay in Kashmir.’

John Childs was heading towards the Meadow too, although he did not know it yet. By the time Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, Keith and Julie Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley had arrived in New Delhi, the forty-two-year-old chemical engineer from Simsbury, Connecticut, had already been in India several weeks, although his experience of the subcontinent could hardly have been more different from theirs. Childs, an introvert and a deep thinker, a wiry figure whose hangdog expression belied his quick wits and dry humour, was not joining any hippy trail. When he wasn’t in his running gear he was happiest in a suit and tie addressing executives in New England boardrooms. He worked for an American weapons manufacturer, Ensign Bickford, and had come to India to tour explosives plants in and around West Bengal. His schedule had been put under the microscope and mulled over for many months – nothing he did was unconsidered, and all too often he tended to see the worst in everything. But then, he was the kind of man who had learned to celebrate his own fatalism. He had worried about this journey for several months, but in the end he had decided to go for it. It would be his first foreign trip for the firm he had joined the previous February, and he hoped that at worst, even if he was struck down with dysentery, it would take his mind off the messy divorce that he feared was going to put a distance between him and his much-loved daughters, Cathy, six, and Mary, five. There was another upside to the visit. After the work was done, he hoped to get in some trekking on the company’s account. And as John was a self-confessed ‘cheapskate’, born watching the nickels and dimes, this was a boon. ‘I never go anywhere without someone else paying,’ he liked to say.

However, from the moment he landed in Calcutta, John, who had grown up surrounded by suburbia on Long Island, New York, the second son of churchgoing Joseph and Helen Childs, found the teeming subcontinent oppressive. India was a chaotic mix of vinegary odours. He couldn’t eat the food. He felt as if he could bench-press the humidity, it weighed so heavily on him. Not widely travelled, he was overwhelmed by the surface details that the locals did not seem to notice, the ‘noise and filth’, as he put it. He also found it more difficult than he had expected to communicate with his Indian counterparts, even though they were all supposedly ‘talking the same language’, and he knew in an instant that he had nothing in common with the Western travellers who milled around the Saddar Street backpacker area, close to his five-star hotel. John had gone straight from school to college, and then into his first job. He couldn’t see the point of putting off the inevitable by travelling aimlessly around the globe. He was always uneasy around people like that.

After Calcutta, John’s colleagues had driven him several hours into the industrial heartland of Bihar, a state that even Indians call the Wild West because of its reputation for corruption and chicanery. He was appalled by the grime-cloaked factories, staffed by hordes of impoverished workers who toiled in atrocious conditions: ‘Coming from the land of the free, I could not take in how people could live and work like that.’ His final work destination was Gomia, a town in southern Bihar where an enormous explosives factory was operated by the British chemical giant ICI. The plan was that he would work there with local managers and technical staff on improving the quality of the explosive materials they supplied to Ensign Bickford.

By the end of June, John’s work was done, and as he had planned, he had a week in hand. Back home in Simsbury he was an endurance athlete, proud of the fact that he ran four or five miles around the local school track every day. He climbed and skied too. Doing business just down the road from the greatest mountain range on earth – he had seen the Himalayas on the flight over to Calcutta and been staggered by their jagged heights – had been one of the reasons he had agreed to make this trip.

But where in the Himalayas should he go? He had thought about doing part of Nepal’s challenging Annapurna Circuit, the mountain trek Jane and Don had completed in 1988, and there were regular flight connections between Calcutta and Kathmandu. But then he came across the adverse weather reports, just as Jane and Don had: ‘When I set about looking into it, I realised pretty quickly it was the wrong time of year for Nepal. The monsoon ruled this option out.’ The ‘real treat’ of seeing Everest was now out of the question, but running his finger along the range to the west he could see other options: ‘All the guides said the same thing. June and July was the best time of year to visit Kashmir.’ Wherever he ended up would be an adventure, he thought, as he zeroed in on the trekking routes in the Kashmir Valley.

Was it safe? John was no authority on the region, but even he knew that Kashmir was troubled by a simmering war he was ‘vaguely aware of’ from the occasional news report. However, the descriptions and photographs he studied of the treks around Pahalgam, to the south-west of the summer capital, Srinagar, were inviting. Was it possible to reach the mountains without being caught up in the state’s insurgency? He was still feeling fragile as a result of the divorce, and he had two confused young daughters back home, about whom he had worried constantly since arriving in India. The last thing he needed was to screw things up by getting himself in a tight spot on the other side of the world. He rang his mother, who was still his main confidante, in Salem in upstate New York. ‘Check things out with the locals,’ she said. ‘They’ll know what is and isn’t safe.’

John sounded out several of his Indian colleagues at the Gomia plant. ‘Half of them jumped straight in. They said I was crazy. They said there was a war going on. Didn’t I know? There had been some kind of kidnapping involving Westerners the previous summer too. But the other half said it was fine to go, and the 1994 incident had been quickly resolved with no one hurt.’ Like every other discussion he had had since arriving in India, this one quickly dissolved into a confusing roundabout of conflicting arguments, with everyone talking over each other.

Most vocal were a couple of Kashmiri staffers. They were in the camp that firmly believed he should go. Over a cup of tea, they told him alluring stories of the challenging trekking, the wildlife and the wildness around Pahalgam. It was a world away from the troubles, they said, ‘a paradise on earth that everyone should experience at least once in their lives’. All Kashmiris knew, they insisted, that the insurgency was restricted to the LoC and to militant-infested towns in the north of the valley like Kupwara, Sopore and Baramulla. No one had any interest in getting tourists mixed up in a local dispute. The militancy had been rumbling on for six years already, and Pahalgam remained thronged with trekkers.

These two employees seemed credible and likeable, and they gave John numbers for local contacts: guides, hotels and taxi drivers, many of whom they were related to and said they trusted completely. Eventually, even the cautious John was persuaded, and he arranged a six-day excursion through his hotel. Taking account of flight connections, that would give him four days’ trekking, which was just about enough. ‘In life, you go to many places and you have to make many judgements about your own safety,’ he said. ‘And my judgement at that moment in time was that Kashmir would be OK.’

As their plane approached Srinagar airport on 26 June, Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had heart-stopping glimpses of the Himalayas bursting through the clouds, and a lattice of orchards, conifers and villages sprinkled across the dun-coloured Kashmir Valley. After bumping down on the runway, the plane rumbled past rows of Indian Air Force fighter jets, military transporters and camouflaged helicopters. Here were gun emplacements and corrugated-iron hangars, all of them draped in olive-green netting. Sentries in foxholes, machine-gunners in pillboxes, zoomed in on the plane. Jane and Don immediately forgot the reassuring news they had just read in the paper: US Ambassador Frank Wisner, accompanied by his daughter, had returned from a fly-fishing trip to Pahalgam. This place looked like a war zone.

But as they stepped down onto the tarmac, the cool air was a joy after New Delhi. Up ahead, beyond the exit barrier, what looked like a thousand sombre male faces, many of them bearded, most of them smoking, eyed them. Aquiline noses, cat-green eyes, skin so fair that many seemed more Aryan than Don or Jane – some Kashmiris could have passed as Europeans. The noise was overwhelming: a helicopter whumping somewhere above them, tour guides shouting to get their attention.

As Jane and Don stood by the ancient, flaking luggage carousel, a police official sought them out and took their names, passport details and notes on their itinerary. ‘Foreigner registration,’ he said by way of explanation, tapping a laminated label on his clipboard. ‘What a madhouse,’ Jane recalled. ‘It was an absolute nightmare … I had to open and taste my sealed pack of Western Trail mix to show it wasn’t poison or a bomb. The absolute bizarreness of the whole process almost made it entertaining.’

Outside, the full scale of the Indian military operation in Kashmir hit them: a chaotic jumble of sandbags, concrete barriers and barbed wire, the roads jammed with armoured vehicles of all descriptions: trucks, pickups, tanks, around which scores of heavily armed soldiers milled. It took an hour to get through the checkpoints encircling the airport. Barrelling into town, their taxi passed yet more bunkers and pickets, out of which dark-skinned Indian soldiers peered, their guns aimed at Kashmiri men and women who walked solemnly along the broken pavements, heads cast downwards.

Gigantic piles of decomposing trash were everywhere, with sleeping pi-dogs lying on top of them. Not a windowpane seemed intact. Shops were barricaded or boarded up. Long avenues lined by trees were choked by every kind of machine of war imaginable. At one point the driver slammed on his brakes to avoid an oncoming army convoy, a vast column of khaki lorries with soldiers riding atop them, their faces obscured by black bandanas, who beat canes on the side of the taxi, drumming everyone out of their way. ‘Welcome to Kashmir,’ he muttered under his breath. Jane and Don said nothing. ‘We hadn’t expected things to be this bad, no way,’ Jane said.

Then she and Don caught a glimpse of the mountains ringing the city, and the hairs rose on her arms.

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