Page 327 - James Caan - The Real Deal

32 · Kashmir

will see terrible things. You can help from here.’ At the hotel we
met up with two friends of mine who worked in finance in
Islamabad: when I’d called them from the car and told them I
wanted to go to Kashmir they said they would come with me. One
of them had a 4 4.
I knew Kashmir was fairly close on the map, but I had no idea
how long it would take to get there: was it twenty minutes or two
hours or two days? We drove to the town of Muzaffarabad, which
is just over the border from Islamabad. The road took us through
some of the most beautiful mountain scenery I have ever seen, and
it was difficult to comprehend that we were about to enter a
disaster zone.
After a couple of hours, we reached the end of the road.
Literally. It had been destroyed in the quake and the road just
stopped. A queue of cars had built up and so we left the 4 4 and
continued on foot.
The first thing that hit me when I got out of the car was the
smell. Corpses had been lying on the ground for a week and the
stench was sickening. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine
the end of the world. Imagine every building crumbled into rubble;
imagine everything in sight destroyed; imagine bodies lying stiff in
the street and blood smeared down the side of concrete slabs as
people have tried to pull survivors out of the wreckage; imagine
those who can still walk encrusted in blood they’ve not been able
to wash off for a week; imagine people dying slowly of horrific
wounds that no one has any supplies to treat: I really felt as if I
was witnessing the end of the world. It was like a bomb had gone
off and destroyed everything.
Nothing I had seen on TV had prepared me for how I would
feel. No one can describe to you the smell of death. We walked
among the ruins in silence as we took in what we were witnessing.
A few people stared at us as we had clearly just arrived, but mostly
the survivors were so focused on finding their loved ones that we

317