At Matigund, Masood, by now exhausted, was greeted with salt tea and unleavened lavash by ‘Brother Raees’, a Kashmiri militant who explained that he was right-hand man to Sikander, the Movement’s local District Commander. Sikander had proved himself a trustworthy lieutenant to the Afghani, but he was not present: ‘He had skidded on the ice on a mountain road and crashed his motorbike.’ He would attempt to reach them some time the next day.
Fifteen mujahids were waiting in the village house that had been commandeered for the majlis. Bearded and wearing an assortment of khaki uniforms and tribal dress, they were led by Abu Ghazi, a veteran tactician and weapons expert who had previously been based at Camp Yawar in Khost. He was now chief trainer at the Movement’s main camp in Kashmir, concealed a stiff one-and-a-half-hour walk east, far beyond the point where the electricity pylons and telephone lines ended. Sixty recruits were currently there, Ghazi said as he gratefully accepted a wad of cash that Masood had brought from his ISI benefactors. ‘We saluted them warm-heartedly and soon a majlis-i-jihad [jihad council] was in full swing,’ Masood wrote.
The men, who had been fighting for their survival in the pine forests, were greedy for news, and they pressed forward as Masood began to speak. ‘What an exhilarating scene it was!’ he noted. ‘In front of me and around, were faces shining with the spirit of jihad. Decorating the chests of these young men were magazines and grenades, and within them burned high the flame of courage and bravery. They cradled their Kalashnikovs in their laps like babies. Some of them had rocket launchers as well as carbines that they had seized from the Indian Army.’
Mesmerised by the surrounding weaponry and the proximity of men at his beck and call, Masood spoke uninterrupted for several hours, explaining why they needed to come together while all around him held a respectful silence. Out in the surrounding forest, he was informed, militants acting as lookouts also listened in via their radio sets. ‘Their presence was vital where they were, and so they had to content themselves by listening to us over the airwaves.’ At 2 a.m. Masood was politely interrupted. The brothers had not eaten all day. ‘Our historic meeting ended when one of our companions informed us that the dinner is served (one of the two hens).’ Dishes of gravy and chicken were set down beside a pile of cold girda, a striated Kashmiri flat bread. Afterwards, as the fighting men stretched out, Masood got up. ‘I quietly took up one of the Kalashnikovs and started downstairs, to join the mujahideen on guard. Halfway down, in the darkness, I felt the weapon in my hands … It was cocked, and the bullet was in the chamber. A feeling of ecstasy descended upon me. My joy knew no bounds as I held the loaded gun in my hands.’ There were no older siblings to make fun of the ‘little fatty’ now.
Outside, the night sky seemed overburdened with stars. You rarely saw them in polluted Karachi. ‘It was the wee hours, a cool breeze was blowing,’ wrote Masood, imagining himself as a fighter. ‘Praise be to God who granted me an opportunity to perform guard-duty on the front of Kashmir.’ Here, on the front line of a holy jihad in Kashmir, he could finally expunge those stinging memories of his embarrassing departure from the battlefield at Khost.
At daybreak, the Afghani sprang a radical plan. Since there was still no sign of Commander Sikander, Masood should deliver the Friday sermon at the Jamia mosque in Anantnag. This was a unique opportunity, and it would be a defiant act, demonstrating to the Indians, who would hear about it later, that the Movement was capable of bringing its General Secretary to the heart of south Kashmir under their noses. Masood was unsure, but the Afghani reassured him, saying the town’s people had risked much by supporting the Movement, and he needed to give something back.
Reluctantly, Masood agreed. Leaving the guards behind, he, the Afghani and Sikander’s deputy Raees walked down to the car. But half an hour into the journey the vehicle spluttered and died. Masood panicked. Miles from anywhere, they set off on foot until they spied a village, where they commandeered an auto-rickshaw. ‘Raees got seated with the driver while I and the Afghani settled in the back,’ Masood wrote. Just before they reached Anantnag, the rickshaw driver noticed a BSF truck driving at speed behind them. ‘Army!’ he yelled. But it was too late. They were totally encircled.
Raees was ordered to run for it, his weapon clanking beneath his pheran. ‘As the soldier tried to search him he threw one man down, let off a grenade and made it to the woods,’ recalled Masood, who remained frozen to the spot, aghast at the sight of the Indian paramilitaries running towards him, firing off their weapons in all directions. For a few moments the Afghani sat calmly, holding Masood’s hand, until they were hauled into the snow, chained and thrown into separate trucks. ‘The Indian soldiers were beside themselves with joy,’ Masood wrote. ‘We were blindfolded, our hands tied behind our backs. A crowd soon gathered there, and I could hear them cheering “Jai Hind! Bharat mata ki jai! [Hail India! Victory to Mother India!]” We had no choice but to pray.’
Khundroo Army Camp, protected by 2nd Rashtriya Rifles and located close to the headquarters of the Indian Army’s 21 Field Commandos, was a twenty-minute drive south of Anantnag. The signboard by the gate proclaimed ‘If Paradise is on Earth it is here, it is here’, but those who lived nearby thought of it differently. Like every other army, paramilitary and police camp in the valley, Khundroo had its interrogation centre, that consumed the daily intake of the detained, holding them for weeks or months without reference to the courts. Far away from the prying eyes of international human rights delegations, the Geneva Convention did not apply here, and the Afghani knew many comrades who had emerged from here and camps like it lame, broken and shamed. Masood had written countless column inches about prisoners who had been tortured or killed in detention centres, hung upside down, whipped, burned with blowtorches, electrocuted, near-drowned, their wounds rubbed with chilli, many of them vanishing altogether. He had never expected to find himself inside such a place, and he was terrified.
When an officer accompanied by plain-clothed agent arrived to begin their questioning, Masood shrank back and let the Afghani take the lead. ‘It was indeed a spectacular scene,’ Masood recalled later, emboldened by the passage of time. ‘His eyes were sparkling dangerously.’ The Afghani announced that he had a confession to make, but only in front of a senior officer. Someone found ‘an old Colonel with the red dot on his forehead, which the filthy Hindus consider to be blessed’.
‘Congratulations!’ announced the Afghani without fear. ‘Today you have gained great success. I am the commander of the Movement.’ The Indian soldiers exchanged glances. ‘But this scholar accompanying me has nothing whatsoever to do with the mujahideen. He is a visitor to this country. I kidnapped him. In all likelihood his prayers were answered when you arrested me, otherwise I would have held him until I got a ransom.’
According to his own later account, Masood swivelled to look at the Afghani before the penny dropped: ‘In every era there have lived pious slaves of Allah who have chosen to drink the cup of death in order to save their fellow brothers.’ For the next two days the Afghani was ‘tortured horribly’, but revealed nothing. Yet somehow ‘the Indian Army discovered a hole in the story’.
In fact, according to the Indian interrogation transcripts, when Masood’s turn came he broke down within thirty minutes and blurted out the truth: he had not been kidnapped at all. The Afghani was furious, and this time could not bring himself to forgive Masood. Now, after twelve days in Khundroo, both of them would face long prison sentences. Many months later, when Masood and the Afghani were reunited in Ward One of Tihar jail in New Delhi, where India housed the men it regarded as its most feared terrorists, the commander refused even to acknowledge his General Secretary. ‘Here, for the first time we developed differences,’ Masood later wrote circumspectly. ‘After four months the situation changed; he came to me and asked me to forget everything, as it was harming the freedom movement.’ The Afghani kept silent about their time together in Kashmir, even after Masood began telling other prisoners his life story, concocting a new explanation for his pronounced limp, which he now said was the work of Indian interrogators.
It was quiet in Kausar Colony, Bahawalpur. Two of Masood’s brothers were away in Afghanistan, fighting alongside the