Page 334 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

bargained for, but it was a problem that could at least be solved
with money. With one solution found, we were faced with another
problem. I went back to Kashmir just before Christmas and spoke
to an army brigadier who was distributing tents: it was so cold I
couldn’t believe that anyone could survive without a proper roof
over their heads – this was the Himalayas in winter, after all. I told
him about the prefab houses that were being made and where we
intended to build them. By this point, they had completed their
register of survivors and told me there was a problem with my
plan.
‘You have to be careful who you give a house to.’
‘Why is that?’
‘You can’t build a house on a piece of land that doesn’t belong
to you.’
It made perfect sense, but it was something we hadn’t con-
sidered.
‘Leave it with me. I will go through our records and see who is
still alive and who is also on our land register.’
It would take him a day or two to do it, so I decided to go back
to the valley to see what had been done. Mercifully, the corpses
had been removed, but I couldn’t see any evidence of rebuilding. I
had hoped we might have been able to do something by now, but
everything had been more complex than I could ever have
imagined. People were living communally in the buildings which
still stood, and their living conditions were verging on the
inhumane. We had to step up the pace. These people were in
desperate need.
The land registry revealed there were 700 families in the valley
that could prove they owned some land. We were only having 100
houses built: how were we to allocate them? I went through the
list of survivors. There was a seventy-six-year-old who was
looking after six grandchildren: he would get a house. A woman
who had had a leg amputated and had lost her husband and still

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