Eight months after terror attack, walking up to Pahalgam

Like every other morning, Noor Jahan, 40, and her six-year-old son are busy collecting firewood to cook their meals. Kashmir is already in the grip of chillai kalan, the peak winter months when the days are short and the cold clings to the mountains, settling deep into the bones. The mother and son go around a small mosque metres from their hut, bending every now and then to pick dried branches and twigs. They can no longer go into the nearby forests for wood like they used to.

“Hamein aage jana mana hai, toh hum nahin jaate (We are not allowed to go any further, so we don’t),” she says.

Noor Jahan and her son live in a small settlement at the base of the dirt track leading to the Baisaran meadow. (Express photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

Since that afternoon of April 22, when the guns rang out in the meadow up the hill, a sense of fear has hung over the Lidder Valley mountains that rise out of Pahalgam, disrupting the life that Noor Jahan and her neighbours led in this settlement of 10 homes, most mud huts like hers.

It’s from here that the trek to the Baisaran meadow begins. It was from here that she witnessed terror that afternoon, when the blood of 26 civilians had spilled on to the emerald green meadow, changing Pahalgam forever. She had stood outside her hut, watching people, young and old, run downhill from the meadow, shrieking, shaking in fear. “Since then, I have only seen men in uniform go up and down the hill,” she says.

Now, as the year that saw one of the deadliest terror attacks on civilians winds down, Noor Jahan finds it hard to move on — if only memory and fear could be flipped like the pages of a calendar.

She did not hear the gunshots that day. “It (the attack) happened in the afternoon. I was probably busy cooking,” she says.

April is the peak tourist season in Pahalgam. It is also the time her husband, a daily-wage labourer, finds work more easily, when the markets and hotels are full.

Off the market in Pahalgam, the road goes up for 2.5 km, before splitting into two — a 5-km longer road that passes through the settlement where Noor Jahan lives, and a shorter 2-km trek. Both these routes meet at a point, beyond which a kilometre-long path leads up to Baisaran.

Until the attack, Baisaran was a popular tourist destination, along with three other meadows in Pahalgam — Aru Valley, Betab Valley and Chandanwari. Every tourist season, about 5,000 ponywallahs would ferry visitors to Baisaran and back. What made the meadow irresistible was its location — along a popular trekking route to Tullian Lake, an alpine waterbody nestled between sharp-edged mountains.

Tourists who have trekked up to Baisaran often talk of being taken by surprise at the sudden clearing in the middle of a thick forest. The climb is tough, with the path strewn with boulders and largely accessible only on horseback, a journey that takes around two hours. Except for the pine trees, there is little that grows out of the rocky facade of the hill.

The boulder-strewn route that tourists took before the April 22 terror attack. (Express photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

But now, the road to Baisaran lies deserted, the meadow itself shut since the terror attack, pending a security review. “Usually, this would have been such a busy time. It’s all quiet now. This is not like any other December,” she says.

Rouf Wani, 36, drags his feet as he treks up the shorter, 2-km route to the meadow. It’s his first trek in the eight months since the attack and he is without his pony.

Walking up the winding route to the meadow, the ponywallah halts after every few steps. He looks around, afraid of being stopped by security officials. “I have spotted tyre tracks. Only Army trucks or official vehicles go up till the pony tracks now,” he says.

Rouf Wani, who owns a pony, treks up the path. (Express photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

As the climb to Baisaran begins, the town unfolds on the right, the expansive Golf Course spread out like a green carpet. Pahalgam is fresh off a spell of rain and for a December morning, it’s unusually sunny. That’s how Baisaran feels to most tourists, Wani says, after the tough, hour-long climb, the meadow opens up “like the skies clear up after the rain”.

But all that changed after April 22. The gunshots that echoed in the park that day were absorbed by the dense forests, and didn’t reach downhill, where Wani was when the terrorists struck. “I was about to start a trip uphill in the afternoon when I got a call from a ponywallah who was outside the park. When he told me that there had been firing in the park, I didn’t believe him at first…I have gone up and down that route my entire life, and never once felt a sense of fear.”

His calls to the police and the local Army units that day were met with similar disbelief. Wani says he raced up the hill in 40 minutes with at least 10 other pony owners to help the tourists.

“Women and children were running downhill. We helped them because the route is covered in stones, making it easy to trip and fall,” he says, adding, “That day too, I couldn’t bring myself to go inside the meadow.”

Throughout the day, before the police, ambulances and all-terrain vehicles could arrive at the scene, he recalls the wave of grief and panic that had taken hold of everyone around him.

“There are nine villages in Pahalgam. I don’t know of anyone who slept well that night. I will never forget what I saw on the run up the hill — the blood and bodies that weren’t whole anymore. Each time I look at this track, I can still see the blood on the gravel from that day,” he says.

The attack changed everything, he says. Since then, with very few tourists in Pahalgam, he gets work ferrying Amarnath pilgrims and tourists on the Chandanwari route. “As much as I would like to get back to work here, I don’t think I can ever take another family to Baisaran,” he says.

A memorial for the 26 victims of the April 22 terror attack in the Baisaran meadow. (Express photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

Before the attack, he says, the park would come alive during the tourist season, with traders selling handicrafts, pashmina shawls and papier mache outside its gates. “There were several tea stalls too. Ponywallahs would stop at the (park) gates and then take the tourists back to the (Pahalgam) market. A family would easily spend two hours at the meadow, taking in the scenery, rolling down the hills and doing zip lining. On some days, they would stay till 9 pm,” he says.

While the tourism department’s rate for hiring a pony to Baisaran is Rs 1,320, Wani and the others usually charge around Rs 3,000-4,500 for the trek, depending on the season.

Nearly 2 km from the park, Wani bends down to pick a board that announces ‘Welcome to Baisaran Adventure Trek’. He says he is not sure when the board broke off its wooden beams. Across Pahalgam, all signages pointing to Baisaran, like this board, have been removed or scrubbed off to dissuade people from walking up the trail.

Refusing to walk any further, he says, “Isse aage nahin jayenge (I will not go beyond this point). There are clear instructions that the place is closed.”

As he walks back to the town, Wani says, “Visitors have started inquiring about the Baisaran meadow again, asking if they can go up, but we cannot violate security instructions,” he says.

Mohammad Yawar, 29, was among those who were outside the park gates that day, waiting for customers and talking to other shawl sellers. He only has to close his eyes to hear the gunshots from that day. “If I ever find the men who were behind the attack, I will make them answer for their lack of humanity,” he says, standing by the roadside, at the point where the road to Baisaran begins. These days, he spends most days hanging around, doing nothing.

But until the terror attack, tourist season meant brisk business. He and the other shawl sellers had worked out a roster and would take turns to go up to Baisaran — “a good spot to sell”. The rest, he says, would remain in the market that day.

April 22 was his turn at the park.

“When I first heard the gunshots behind me, I thought someone was bursting crackers. It did not occur to me that someone would choose this place to fire guns,” he says.

Then, Yawar says, he heard more gunshots coming from the left — and the hair on his neck stood up. “Everyone started running. I threw my bag of shawls right there and started running along with the tourists. It was not until I was down the turn from the park that I realised the firing was taking place at intervals,” he recalls.

Everything — the park full of tourists one minute, the horror and screams the next — now seems distant. “Despite the cold, Christmas and New Year would bring many tourists to Pahalgam. This year, Pahalgam is empty,” he says.

Metres away, on the main road in Pahalgam market, Mohammad Ayoub, 65, stands at the door of his 85-year-old handicrafts shop, soaking in the winter sun. Business has been terrible this Christmas, he says. “Tourist numbers are down by nearly 80%. Yet, I open the shop everyday. I have run this place for about 45 years. Before me, my father ran it,” says Ayoub.

While Pahalgam has seen “good years and bad years”, something snapped after April 22. “Even in the worst years, it was always understood that tourists would not be harmed. But that changed with the attack in the meadow.”

Mohammad Ayoub, 65, stands at the door of his handicrafts shop on the main road in Pahalgam market. (Express photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

Ayoub points to the banners and buntings going up in the market for the Pahalgam Winter Festival, now an annual event that lasts from Christmas to New Year’s Day. “The festival always sees a good turnout and when that happens, I’m hoping people will see that it is safe to come back here. I have done enough business, seen enough highs and lows to know that somehow, things always turn around.”

In the market, a group of men in their late 20s walk around, sipping coffee out of styrofoam cups and taking turns to pose for photographs. From Rajasthan, the four are on a year-end trip to Kashmir. “I’ve been here for four days now. We landed in Srinagar, went to Gulmarg and then came to Pahalgam,” says one of them.

He says two of the four in the group haven’t told their families about the trip to Pahalgam. “They would have tried to dissuade us. But we had to come here.”