The India Spy

by Jon Stock

  It was only ten thirty but it appeared that I was late. I walked towards a large, pavilioned tent that had been erected to the left of the drawbridge and in which drinks were being served. A warm breeze was blowing across the adjacent cricket pitch, carrying the unmistakable scent of freshly cut grass. The sides of the white tent were billowing like untrimmed sails. Through the shimmering haze I could see some malis tending to the parched wicket, painting the crease lines and pulling up weeds. Beyond them two men were cutting the outfield with a manual lawnmower, one pushing, the other pulling on a tow-rope. They paused for a moment, passing a plastic bottle between them, pouring water into their mouths, careful not to touch the rim with their lips.

  The roof of the tent was elaborately lined with cream silk, block printed with a blue family crest; the backs of the chairs, covered in white, were adorned with silver bows that looked like angels’ wings. I recognised a few faces from the High Commission, glanced at the array of bottled spirits, all of them imported foreign brands, and took a glass of bucks fizz.

  This was unashamed opulence as I had seldom seen it. I needed to step back from it all for a few moments and walked round to the far side of the house, where there was a paddling pool, some slides and a Mickey Mouse bouncy castle which looked considerably more authentic than the edifice behind it. A struggling generator was trying to keep Mickey upright but his face kept crumpling into a distorted, hideous frown that fascinated a small boy who was watching. Others were playing inside, occasionally disappearing in the plastic folds when the pressure dropped.

  My eye was caught by a brightly patterned canopy flapping loose behind the bouncy castle. Two men were battling to tie down one of its corners in the wind. Half a dozen ayahs were sitting in a group underneath, one or two of them keeping an eye on the children. Beyond them, about twenty yards away, a young elephant was swaying from side to side in a pool of shade, a small howdah on its back. A mahout was spreading out leaves in front of the elephant on the grass and a seven-digit Delhi phone number had been written in white chalk between its eyes, which had been circled with brightly coloured patterns.

  “He’s opening the bowling,” Jamie said behind me. I turned to meet his grinning face. “Glad you could make it,” he continued, his arm round my shoulders. “I couldn’t remember when you were off.”

  “It’s been delayed a couple of days,” I said. Part of my brief was to tour all the medical centres attached to British consulates around India. I had been due to leave that morning but the doctor in Madras, my first stop, had been taken ill.

  “Some place,” I said, walking back with Jamie to the front of the house. Two children were playing on the drawbridge, dropping sticks into the water.

  “Do you know how many malis they employ?” Jamie asked.

  “How many?”

  “Guess.”

  “Twenty?”

  “A hundred and ten. Can you believe that?”

  “And they’re into arms, is that right?”

  “Steady,” Jamie said, looking anxiously around him. “We only talk about the steel mills.”

  *

  Kumar and Rita, our hosts, turned out to be a surprisingly modest couple, given that they employed a hundred and ten people just to mow their front lawn. Generous, too. There were tables and tables of food, most of it Western: hummus, caviar, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, slices of rare beef, Mediterranean salads. Nothing out of the ordinary back in Britain, but out here in Delhi some extremely good contacts in INA market were needed for a spread of this sort. Kumar seemed most concerned that we all try his homemade “venison” sausages. A woman next to me giggled, knowingly.

  “Black buck, isn’t it?” she said.

  Another young woman nudged her in the ribs. “Ssshhh,” she said. “He’s coming over.”

  “What’s black buck?” I asked, trying to strike up a conversation.

  Both women looked at me in disbelief and melted away, hands covering their mouths.

  As I wondered what I had just said, Jamie leant across and whispered, “It’s Salman Khan’s favourite food.”

  “Who’s Salman Khan?” I whispered back.

  “He’s a famous Bombay film star,” Jamie said, still whispering. “He got caught shooting black buck in Rajasthan a few years back.”

  “And why are we whispering?”

  “Because that’s Salman Khan over there.”

  I looked up to see a well-built man wandering over to the drinks table accompanied by a woman in a miniskirt who knew people were looking at them. One of her arms was in a plaster cast. It quickly became clear that they were the subject of discreet attention from almost all the assembled Indians, who made up about half the guests.

  “Is he a good actor?” I asked Jamie.

  “Not my cup of tea. But they say he’s got a mean pelvic wiggle.”

  *

  After a few minutes of consuming black buck and bucks fizz, we were all asked to change into our cricket whites. Ten minutes later we were standing in two groups. Jamie was captaining the expats, a mixture of British, South Africans and Australians, and Kumar was in charge of the local team.

  “We’re a man short,” Kumar said, counting his men again.

  “And we’re one over,” Jamie replied, doublechecking.

  For a split second, I experienced a feeling that I hadn’t had since I was at prep school, when we used to stand in a line as two captains chose their teams, one by one. Perhaps it had been because I was the only Asian boy at the school, perhaps it was just my unorthodox batting stance, but I was always the last one to be picked. Even this far out, I knew what was about to happen. I noticed a few expats’ eyes were already on me, discreetly, watching to see what I would do. I decided to hold my head up and managed a smile.

  “Right,” Jamie said, in a tone that suggested he had always been captain. “Who’s going to be our mole on the other side?” I had that feeling again, butterflies mixed with a desire to be sick. It grew stronger, to the point where I thought I was actually going to throw up. As a way of stopping myself, I half raised my arm and said, “I’ll go.”

  “Good man,” Jamie said, a little too quickly.

  I walked across to the Indian side and looked back at my old team, all eyes now on me. I might have been imagining it, but I heard someone, a British expat, say, “Makes sense, really, doesn’t it?”

  *

  The match turned out to be a serious affair, far from the casual encounter that I had been expecting. For the record, I was put in to open and made a modest twenty, but the highlight came when Jamie was batting and I was asked to bowl. His eye was in, and he had been opening his shoulders, hitting a succession of boundaries.

  “Are you sure?” I said to Kumar. “It’s been a while.”

  “No problem,” Kumar said, tossing me the ball. “Leg spin?” he asked.

  “Right arm over,” I replied. “You’d better push a few players back.”

  Kumar sent most of the fielders off to the boundary and I looked down the wicket to see Jamie, tapping at his wicket, concentrating. He didn’t smile at me or crack any jokes about Shane Warne. He was nervous.

  I bowled my first ball, which he prodded defensively back down the wicket to me. Again, I tried to make eye contact, to lighten the mood, but he wasn’t having any of it. The next ball beat his bat, spinning up fiercely into the wicket keeper’s gloves.

  “Nice bowling,” Kumar said, clapping in encouragement. It was a difficult situation I found myself in. Did I bowl a few short deliveries, let Jamie hit me all over the ground, or should I go in for the kill? I thought of Priyanka for a moment, adjusted my grip and let fly with a wrong ’un. Jamie was clean bowled. My team were ecstatic and I was congratulated with a hug from Kumar and high-fives from everyone else. Everyone except Jamie, of course, who threw me a withering look before heading back towards the castle.

  “It’s only a game,” I said to him over tea. He grunted, taking a bite out of his sandwich. I couldn’t believe how ba
dly he was taking it.

  “You were meant to be on our side,” he said, softening. “Deep cover, remember?”

  “What could I do? Bowl underarm? You just seemed to seize up.”

  “I hate playing spinners. Always have done. You never know which way they’re going to turn.”

  He looked up at me with those unsettling eyes of his, timeless eyes that I was now convinced had witnessed acts of unspeakable cruelty. Then he suddenly relaxed, encouraged by the sight of a waiter coming round with a box of cigars.

  “Ah, the stogie-wallah,” he said, taking two cigars. He put one in his top pocket, the other he held up to examine. “Too dry,” he said, sniffing it. “You know what you should do if you are without a humidor and your cigars are drying out?” I shook my head, knowing that he was about to tell me. “Put them in a plastic bag with a slice of apple.” He patted me on the back and walked away in search of a light.

  Not for the first time I sensed that I was being ignored by both sets of teams. I could understand the Delhiites’ reservations – as Jamie said, emigration was hardly a compliment – but the coldness of most expats was unexpected. I had always been surprised by racism although I knew I should have been prepared for it. Living in Britain had involved little compromise for me; I was not consciously having to suppress my cultural identity, or trying to integrate myself into an alien land. My father had done that for me. I had been at peace, on a level with the land where I was born.

  The cricketers’ sudden hostility caught me off guard, pulling at my ankles like a hidden rip tide. Assuming it was just my imagination, I walked over to a group of English players, who were in the midst of a heated conversation about beggars.

  “I have a simple rule,” one of them was saying. “Five rupees for every limb. If it’s a no-arms, no-legs situation—”

  “—A bob, I call those ones bob,” someone else interrupted.

  “Right, if it’s a bob situation, the bloke gets twenty rupees. The only snag is where to put the money.” I slipped away to my car as they fell about laughing.

  8

  If he had been here now, Frank would have told me that this was a place that divided those who got India from those who didn’t. It was an enthusiast’s part of town, not exactly sight-seeing country, and known locally as Yusuf Sarai although the name rarely appeared on any maps. I was drinking chai with Ravi at a shack called the Haryana Tea Stall. Ravi had also asked for a glass of lassi and in a misguided attempt to get me to join him he had pulled back a muslin cloth on the counter to reveal a basin of curd buzzing with flies. I watched as he was served a stainless steel beaker of it, shaken with ice, and then I turned away as the man with the ladle carefully scraped off a layer of skin and smoothed it out on top of Ravi’s helping, as if he were laying a table.

  “Try, sir,” Ravi offered, holding up his beaker.

  “I’ll stick to the chai,” I said, sitting down. Without warning, there was a sudden swirl of smoke that curled round our table, engulfing us both. I turned to see a tandoor oven which had just been fired up behind us. A young boy was standing back, proudly, with an empty can in his hands.

  “Kerosene,” Ravi said, throwing both arms up in a surprisingly energetic gesture. “Whummph!” He was sitting on the edge of a bench, barely touching it, after I had insisted he didn’t have to stand up all the time.

  The tea stall was on one side of a small square at the far end of a narrow lane. On our left we were overlooked by the vast façade of the Uphaar cinema. According to Ravi, almost sixty people had died in there when a fire ripped through the building a few years ago. It had remained closed ever since, still displaying a hand-painted poster for Border, the film it had been showing at the time. Sunny Deol gazed down on us, his features betraying none of the tragedy that had unfolded a few feet away. Behind us there was another stall, serving simple dal and naan. Its tandoor was already glowing, and a man was pressing moist naan breads against the white-hot insides. After each one he took a pinch of flour and clapped his hands together, sending fine powder into the air.

  But it was the small alley immediately opposite us, to the right of the cinema, that intrigued me most. I wandered down it after finishing my tea, carefully avoiding the dog turds and oil slicks. This was one of Frank’s favourite haunts in Delhi. I was not getting it at all. I kept going, though, as there was a shop along here which was meant to be the best place in Delhi to take your computer. When it opened after lunch, I hoped they would be able to salvage something of my Apple Mac’s hard disk, which had crashed the night before.

  Towards the end of the alley I began to understand a little more of what Frank meant. I came across a small workshop with a yellow sign above it saying “Rashid’s Enfields and Silverplus Explorers”. Spilling out onto the road was a collection of Enfield motorbikes, 350cc and 500cc Bullets, most of them with their engines spread out in bits. Even in this dismantled state, the bodywork shone through: the pregnant swell of the fuel tank, the sparkling spokes. I asked a mechanic if he knew of a computer shop and he nodded upwards. There was a sign on the second floor behind me saying “Anything Mac and some things IBM”.

  So this was it: Frank’s India. One of the Enfields rumbled into life, its guttural roar drowning the noise of a nearby generator. I glanced up at the balconies overlooking the alley, wrapped in a tangle of telephone wires, and then noticed, for the first time, the entrance to a traditional haveli, its cusped arch crumbling, the old brickwork visible underneath the faded yellow plaster. I peered inside to a shaded courtyard, and saw a woman hanging a turquoise sari to dry on the timber railings; an old man sat on a charpoy bed reading a newspaper; next to him a girl was having her hair brushed by her mother. Apple Macs and Enfields and the humble pulse of domestic life – either you got India or you didn’t.

  Given the problems Frank had been having recently with his computer, I was not surprised when he walked into the shop five minutes after me. For an instant, I was delighted to see his sunburnt, rounded face, his swelling girth, until my own stomach tightened as I remembered Jamie’s warnings.

  “Raj, you found the place,” Frank said, patting my back. “You’re in safe hands with Arvind,” he added, nodding towards a young engineer who was looking closely at a circuit board. “Where have you been, anyway? I’ve been trying to ring you for days.”

  I didn’t know where to start but I knew then that I would confide in him, sooner rather than later, no matter how dangerous it might prove to be. I didn’t need to give him the details, just a rough outline, like one of his sketches.

  “Are you busy this evening?” I said, too abruptly, unable to disguise my unease.

  “This evening?” Frank asked. A shiny new iBook was being unpacked on the table in front of us. “Aren’t they wonderful?”

  “I need to talk to you about something,” I continued. “Not here, not now.”

  “No problem. Come round for something to eat, about eight? You missed a great game of carrom.”

  “I was playing cricket,” I said.

  “Very grand.”

  “I can’t do dinner,” I added quickly, “not at your place.”

  “No? Why ever not? It’s not my cooking, is it?” His tone had become more concerned.

  “How long will it take?” I asked Arvind, ignoring Frank.

  “One, maybe two days,” Arvind said, looking at me and then at Frank, sensing the tension. “It’s not reading the disk, that’s the problem.”

  “If anyone can sort it out, Arvind will,” Frank said, giving Arvind’s fragile shoulders a squeeze. “This is the story the West chooses not to hear about India. I bet you didn’t know it was a bunch of Indians who invented the CD-ROM. Okay, they were living in America at the time, but the future of IT is right here. Believe me. These people have software in their DNA. Even Bill Gates thinks so. Chai?”

  “I’ve just had one,” I said. “Can you meet me in Hauz Khas village, by the reservoir, at seven? We can go for a walk.”

  “Okay,” F
rank said, more serious now, giving me a look, unconditional, unquestioning, that reassured me that I was doing the right thing, that my priorities were right. “The reservoir. I’ll be down near the ruins, next to the tomb of Firoz Shah.”

  As I walked out of the alleyway and across towards the car, feeling immeasurably lighter at the prospect of sharing some of my worries, I noticed a Tata Safari parked in front of the cinema. It was on the other side of the square, partially covered by the branches of a neem tree, but I caught a clear glimpse of a foreigner sitting in the passenger seat, smoking, his elbow resting on the open window. He hadn’t been there earlier, but I knew I had seen him somewhere before, around the High Commission compound, perhaps. As I got into the car, glancing across the square again, the Safari pulled out and drove off past us in a cloud of dust. The passenger window had been wound up and it was impossible to see through its tinted windows.

  I climbed in alongside Ravi, careful not to bang the door against Frank’s battered old Ambassador, which was parked next to ours. I told myself the Safari was just a coincidence, but this was not a regular part of town for expats.

  *

  I spotted Frank before he saw me, his squat silhouette wandering through the ruins in the dying sun. The remains of Firoz Shah’s pillared madrassa looked warm and welcoming in the natural light; in a couple of hours they would be lit up by spotlights for the benefit of diners in the adjacent recherché restaurants of Hauz Khas village. I had a few moments to check if Frank had been followed. I hadn’t seen a Safari in the car park and the village itself was too congested tonight to park amongst the chic boutiques and galleries. It looked as if he was alone.

  Between us was a large expanse of empty reservoir, built by Alauddin in the fourteenth century and now used by walkers. In the middle of the open area there was a raised section where a pavilion had once stood. It was just a cluster of trees these days, ringing with the sound of birds. I made my way across the vast space dotted with leafy bushes which had pushed up through the uneven surface. Up ahead the dramatic ruins of the madrassa dominated the skyline. Much of the brickwork had crumbled, but it was still possible to imagine how it must have been when it was a thriving centre of learning. High up on one wall there was a series of arched windows, in one of which a courting couple sat opposite each other, chatting as they watched the walkers below. Once they would have been students, testing each other on their Arabic studies. Frank was sitting on a corner of a wall, lost in thought.