Frontline Kargil, Kashmir: Spot of shelling follows the morning shop

THE TENSION mounted as we drew closer to Kargil. We were deep into the lifeless brown peaks of Ladakh; the town of Dras, pummelled by Pakistani shelling for weeks and from which all the townspeople had been driven out, was 45 minutes back. We went through a checkpoint. The army major on the bus pointed up into the crags. "Pakistan is behind that ridge."

Five minutes later there was the loud, sharp report of a shell exploding. This was enemy fire: Indian fire, exploding on the other side of the peaks, sounded softer, muffled.

A small stencilled sign by the roadside said "Caution: fire area ahead" as it might warn of tight bends or schoolchildren.

Five minutes further on, we passed a crippled oil tanker by the roadside, its cab burnt out.

And then Kargil. The name of this old trading post straddling the crossing of two rivers halfway between Srinagar, Kashmir's capital, and Leh, capital of the Ladakh region, has become shorthand in India for the war it is waging against Pakistani-backed infiltrators. "He's joined up to go to Kargil," people say. "I'm so upset." Rightly, because in the Kargil sector, early in May, the first Indian patrol to go after the intruders disappeared. Here the fighting started. And here the human effects of the war have been most directly felt.

Yet when we arrived, my first reaction was that there must be some mistake; life in this one-street town was too normal. An ugly mosque, shabby shops but many of them with their roller-shutters up, doing business. People milling about. No ruins, no tottering buildings.

We checked into the Hotel Siachen, like many other journalists before us. Siachen is a byword for non-service. Early in the conflict, after Pakistani fire had punctured the town's reservoir, it had neither power nor running water nor anything to eat or drink. The filthy rooms had beds, but most guests preferred to sleep underneath them.

Here, too, things were looking up. Sporadically we had both water and power, though there was still nothing to eat - the town seemed to survive on dry biscuits.

The morning is Kargil's busy time, because the Pakistani gunners are usually less active then. Twenty-six thousand people, I was told by a senior local official, have fled Kargil since the fighting started, most of them moving into the small villages on the road out of town that leads up into the Zanskar valley. Many of them take the bus into Kargil in the mornings to do their shopping, then scuttle back to safety before the shelling starts again, usually after 2pm. So in the morning GH Rasool, General Store, A-One Tailors, and the Himalayan Haircutting Saloon do a brisk trade.

A wild-eyed young man seized my hand as I tottered, gasping, down the main street, trying to adjust to the shortage of oxygen (Kargil is 9,000 feet above sea level) and the blinding sunshine. We stepped into a gloomy shack at the side of the road and drank milky tea laced with butter and salt while he told me his problems.

"I'm a tour guide in Leh," he told me, "but this year tourists are down to 5 per cent of the usual numbers. All the schools here are closed. We've been shelled all the time for the past two years - now the buckwheat is ripe but people don't dare to reap it because of the shelling."

His name was Sadiq, and like most of Kargil's population he was a Shia Muslim, and deeply hostile to Pakistan, which is predominantly Sunni. He was also severely critical of the way India was conducting the war. "They send soldiers up here from places like Rajasthan which are at sea level, they order them to climb a mountain. The people fighting on the Pakistani sides are mountain men, like us. We've told the army we are eager to fight - you could train us in months, not years - and if you let us at them, we'd be in Islamabad in days; we'd destroy Nawaz Sharif [Pakistan's Prime Minister]. But they doubt us. Because we are Muslim."

Kargil is a husk of a town. Three weeks ago, a shell landed in a house next to the district hospital, shattering windows in the nurses' quarters. All the nurses fled. Now only three doctors remain, taking in emergency cases, women in labour and local depressives. "We have to function both as doctors and nurses, giving injections and so on," said Dr Zohara Bannu.

A new hospital has opened a few miles away on the safer side of town, but emergencies still come here. "We get many cases of premature deliveries due to the shock of constant shelling, tension-induced abortions, depression, insomnia."

Kargil has been quieter for the past two weeks, though few dare to hope that this is more than a lull. How much more can Kargil take before its remaining inhabitants flee? In Baroo, the administrative quarter half a mile out of town, police superintendent Deepak Kumar enumerated the local buildings that had been hit: deputy commissioner's house, primary school, tourist bungalow, police station. As he spoke, the distinctive sound of enemy firing - that loud, sharp report - cracked across the valley. "First one today," he said.