What lies beneath

I was on my way to Nadimarg, a village so small it hadn8217;t earned its place on the Valley8217;s 14-year-old blood-soaked map until that morning. Hours earlier, my local guide had told me that 24 Hindu Pandits were brutally slaughtered in the Valley8217;s worst massacre in three years. 8216;8216;Do you want to come with me to cover it?8217;8217; he8217;d asked.

Earlier that morning, sitting in a room in a deserted hotel in downtown Srinagar, I8217;d watched BBC TV reporting the Coalition8217;s advances in southern Iraq, I had read the local newspaper8217;s front-page headlines about how the entire city would be closed in protest against the US. How could I want to weave my way through the Kashmir landscape to see this horrific event? But I grabbed a bandana to cover my hair and jumped into the car.

As we passed through villages, we passed young men gathered to express 8216;8216;anti-US8217;8217; sentiment. In the village of Pulwama, a growing crowd pressed against our car, raising their fiery effigy of George Bush. The turquoise bandana didn8217;t seem enough to hide my identity from a crowd that saw Bush8217;s image in my own.

As we neared, a stick hit the window of our car. I ducked into the foot well of the backseat while my fellow classmate, Mike McPhate, averted his face. Though he8217;s travelled in Kashmir before, he later admitted he was shaken by the incident. Our US passports, once enviable to most travellers, suddenly felt like our greatest liabilities.

Far more frightening was the massacre site. Nadimarg was tucked so far into the countryside that dirt roads gave way to a pot-holed path upon which large military vehicles moved back and forth. Army officers stood at attention every few feet. I wandered past the journalists and the police to where one woman wailed at the head of her dead husband.

His sheet-covered corpse, along with 23 others, formed a long line of bright white cotton rectangles, which stood in sharp contrast to the muted earth tones of a town that hadn8217;t seen new development in many decades. The last time I8217;d reported on a death, the American victim had had a short illness. I saw her only in a funeral home casket, her body preserved and her face made up so she looked like she was taking a nap. This death was different.

Beneath the sheets, most victims had been mutilated, their insides spilling into the dirt, their faces unrecognisable. Someone directed me to the Chinar tree across from the pink Hindu temple where the villagers had been rounded up and shot.

First I saw a woman8217;s shoe, a lantern, and a pair of flip flops; then I noticed the blood. It hadn8217;t yet dried, and it welled up in puddles between brown and yellow leaves. From the little crime reporting I have done, this scene would necessitate yellow tape, white chalk, and forensic scientists who would take samples from these items to a laboratory to eventually help identify the murderers.

But two days later when I returned, the shoes hadn8217;t yet been moved, the blood had become brown and crusty. The dead leaves had covered a lot of the stains.

Later in the morning, a paramedic moved down the row of bodies with a silver dish, performing a Hindu ritual by spooning water into the mouths of the deceased. As he pulled the sheet from a body toward the centre of the line, the miniature features of a child appeared, his hair matted against a graying forehead. As the paramedic spooned water into his mouth, blood gurgled up and spilled from his lips.

My job as a journalist was to document the situation through words and photographs. But my fingers remained frozen, my camera hanging limp from my neck. My knees buckled and swayed, and vomit rose to the back of my mouth. Mike and I were the only Western journalists to record the day8217;s events. I was the only woman. I felt I needed to toughen up, to brace myself against my emotions. If the past two days were any indication, covering death was a way of life for reporters in the Valley.

As I looked up, I noticed a steadily growing crowd of Muslim neighbours. They came walking along the thin path that connects this cluster of homes to the Muslim neighbourhood across the gorge. In their faces were fear and agony. They sat with the survivors, brought them water and held their hands and heads.

As per stereotypes I8217;d acquired through things I8217;d read, I8217;d always thought that Hindus and Muslims didn8217;t get along. I entertained images of vicious Islamic militants perpetrating hatred towards their neighbours. But in Nadimarg, Muslim neighbours came by the hundreds to express their grief and outrage. One Hindu survivor told me the Muslims had planned for the Hindu funerals and helped with arrangements for the bodies8217; cremations.

I approached some Hindu women on a blanket and one woman, the aunt of the two deceased children, beckoned to me to take her photograph. As I touched her shoulder, she placed both hands on my arm. I wanted something that would allow me to say that I was trying to understand her grief but I had nothing except a camera. So I took scores of photographs, pictures I have trouble looking at now that I8217;m back in the United States.

I watched politicians show up late in the afternoon, deliver their speeches and leave. It seemed the event had become a rallying point for their political agendas. In fact, the following day, L.K. Advani visited Nadimarg. I8217;d had the chance to interview Advani in Delhi just days before and he8217;d seemed so affable in his grand North Block office as he shook our hands.

In Nadimarg, he shook his fist, blaming India8217;s 8216;8216;neighbour8217;8217; for the event and inferring that the Hindu Pandits should leave for Jammu if they felt 8216;8216;insecure8217;8217;. To be fair to him, however, he did mention that an exodus of Hindus from the Valley was 8216;8216;what the enemy wanted8217;8217;.

As I mingled among the villagers, an old man asked where I was from. I paused, thought, then lied: France. 8216;8216;Good,8217;8217; he said. 8216;8216;They8217;re with us.8217;8217; Never misrepresent yourself, that8217;s what we are taught as journalists. But for that fleeting moment, my pangs of guilt were buried under my fears of security. I spent the late afternoon on a grassy hill some 50 feet from the bodies, smoking cigarettes even though I don8217;t smoke. The Kashmiri journalist who was my guide told me he was 32. He said 70 per cent of his nursery school class had lost their lives to this conflict. Every time I looked up, it seemed some soldier8217;s gun was pointed directly at my head, and I kept shifting position to steer myself clear of their potential lines of fire.

My guide pulled folded graph paper from his wallet and read from a poem he8217;d written: 8216;8216;Before Satan gets you, get the hell out of this place.8217;8217;

Now that I8217;m back in the US, I read the body counts plastered on the front page of our local newspaper: 136 British and US soldiers. CNN has posted each of their pictures on its website with their names, ages, and the way that they died. I see the victorious picture postcards from the streets of Baghdad and Tikrit, of a child kissing a US soldier, of an adult hugging a Marine. And I wonder where the truth lies, is there something beyond the frame of these pictures that didn8217;t make it to the camera lens? Or am I reading too much into these simple scenes?

On the night of the massacre, I returned to my hotel room exhausted. If I were at home, I would surely have participated in San Francisco street protests against the war. But on the way back to Srinagar, my heart sped up in fear whenever we passed through a village where there might be a demonstration.

I borrowed a headscarf to wear and spent the remainder of the week clumsily trying to prevent it from slipping off my head. Later that evening, I watched the Academy Awards from the safety of my hotel room. Steve Martin made jokes about Bush. American movie stars paraded across a stage in dresses that cost more than my college education.

I sought refuge in the frivolity of an event. And when I closed my eyes, I saw a woman8217;s shoe dripping in blood against the foot of a Chinar tree. I still see that picture, I search for the right words for its caption.

The writer, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleague, Mike McPhate, covered the Nadimarg massacre for salon.com