by Jon Stock
I opened the door and Priyanka was standing there, smiling, nervously or with quiet confidence – it was impossible to tell. She stepped quickly into the room, checked the corridor in either direction, and closed the door.
Afterwards we lay there for a few minutes, on our backs, next to each other. I looked across at her breasts, dark and swollen, rising gently up and down. She was completely relaxed, her legs slightly apart, arms above her head. We hadn’t said a word since she had arrived and I wanted to keep it that way, hoping that it might prolong the exquisite feeling. I half expected some tricky remorse or regret, anger even at what we had done, but when Priyanka finally spoke, her voice was bright, full of poise.
“This goes against all my upbringing, everything I was taught at school, all that my parents told me at home, the world that I believe in.” She paused. “And do you know something?”
“What?” I said, stretching my hand out to find hers.
“I never want it to end.”
Part 3
16
It felt strangely reassuring to be back in the republic. The road outside my house had been resurfaced in anticipation of the approaching monsoon, which last year had apparently turned Sainik Farms into a nouveau Venice, its tiny lanes transformed into fast-flowing canals. The road had also been raised by three feet, something I only realised when Ravi turned off into our drive and the car plunged downwards. The front wall, which I shared with the Bakshis and which had once stood the height of a prison perimeter fence, was now barely four feet high. Mrs Bakshi can’t have slept for days.
As I climbed out of the air-cooled car into the hot wind, acknowledging a salute from the guard, I looked back at the wall again, pleased at how disempowered it now was. The once hidden activities of the busy road behind it had taken centre stage: a clay pot bobbed past on a hidden head, followed by the upright torsos of two gliding cyclists and the board of an icecream wallah selling kulfi. I felt less isolated, a little closer to India.
My only worry was the sky, which seemed darker than it should have been for a forty-two-degree day in late April. The brutal sun had been weakened in some way. Then I saw them, thousands of tiny pieces of black paper, floating down to earth like charred confetti. I looked down at the driveway, which was littered with the same small pieces, and noticed a plume of smoke rising in the distance, beyond Dr Gupta’s house, too far away to smell the burning. Someone was incinerating reams of paper: court evidence, tax returns, forged five-hundred-rupee notes. It could have been anything in the republic.
The atmosphere inside the house was decidedly tense as Chandar, my cook, opened the doors, turned on the fans, and began sweeping up the thick layer of dust that had blown in from the rocky outcrops of Haryana. It was clear that he had been away rather than looking after the house. As I worked my way through the mail over a cup of massala chat, I wondered whom I should ring first: Sir Ian or Jamie, who had left several neutralsounding messages on my answerphone. I had spent most of the flight back trying to work out how Jamie was involved with Macaulay. For the moment I had to assume that IPI not only existed but was the link between them. In which case, Macaulay would have told Jamie about my visit, my questions, my father. What I didn’t know was how Jamie would respond, if at all, to the information. I had an overwhelming desire to see Sir Ian first, to share what little I had discovered.
I rang him at his office, even though he had warned me against making any direct contact. His secretary took the call.
“I’m afraid Sir Ian’s very busy at the moment,” she said, when I told her my name. I could hear Sir Ian’s voice in the background, talking on another phone.
“Please, just let him know one thing,” I insisted, sensing she was close to hanging up. “Tell Sir Ian that I have a rare recording from Kerala that would be a worthy addition to his collection of 78s. Please, just tell him that.”
His secretary must have detected the urgency in my voice, noticed it was at odds with the innocent contents of my message. She put me on hold for a minute and then came back on the line.
“Could you be ready with the records in half an hour?” she asked. “He’ll have them picked up outside the Mughal Gate.”
The line went dead before I had a chance to ask for more time. It normally took me forty minutes to reach Chanakyapuri. I downed my tea, rushed outside and found Ravi, who was chatting in the shade of the guardhouse with Chandar. Two minutes later, we were weaving our way through Sainik Farms again, faster than was safe, and on into South Delhi, past the lychee sellers who had suddenly appeared on Lala Lajpat Rai Marg, their flat-back rickshaws decked out in vermilion plastic. I didn’t tell Ravi to slow down.
By the time we reached the British High Commission, the evening light had turned a vivid yellow, tinged at the edges by dark storm clouds. Ravi dropped me on the main road and waited at a discreet distance. I walked down a quiet slip road to the Mughal Gate, the Commission’s main entrance. The unusual light was enriched by the brief beauty of Chana-kyapuri’s laburnum trees, which were in full bloom, overflowing with brilliant yellow. In two weeks they would be green again.
In truth, I didn’t know what to expect, whether I would be ushered into the compound or picked up by a car. A few moments later I had my answer. The heavy double gates opened and the High Commissioner’s electric-blue Rolls-Royce swung round the corner, bumped through the entrance, where it was saluted by Gurkha guards, and drove out into the open, manicured spaces of Chanakyapuri. I spotted Sir Ian’s wife through the rear window, but the car didn’t stop. Behind it, however, another car, a white Ambassador with darkened windows, drew up alongside me. The back door opened and I could see a figure inside, sitting on the back seat, one hand gesturing. I glanced at the Gurkha guards, who were now closing the gates, seemingly uninterested in me, and then stepped inside the car.
“Keep your head away from the window and listen to me very carefully,” Sir Ian said. He was wearing a polka-dot blue bow tie and a black dinner jacket. There was no welcome, no introduction. His tone was cold, phlegmatic.
“I saw Macaulay—” I began.
“I know. Please, we haven’t got long.”
Sir Ian leant forward and tapped the thick glass that separated the back seat from the driver, who looked British. He nodded and flashed his headlights at the Rolls-Royce, which was thirty yards ahead of us. I hadn’t seen a glass partition in an Ambassador before. Then I noticed a compact fax machine between the driver and the front passenger seat and realised that this was no ordinary car. There was a two-way radio unit under the dashboard, where there would normally have been a cassette player, and a mobile phone charging on either side. The back of the car was no less sophisticated, with a small foldaway desk behind the front passenger seat, complete with a pinpoint reading light, and a closed laptop computer.
“I have just received a copy of an intelligence report from London,” Sir Ian continued. “It’s about your father. He was picked up this morning by Special Branch and is being interrogated about his consultancy work at the UK Atomic Energy Authority. They’re also asking questions about his early career at Dounreay. The implications are very serious: basically, they are questioning his loyalty. The report also casts doubt on your own suitability to be working here with Jamie and recommends that you should be brought in for questioning, too.”
“Me?” I said, thinking about my father, how Special Branch’s visit would knock at the very foundations of his life in Scotland, undermine all that he believed in and loved. I could picture him in his tartan pyjamas, insisting that there must have been a mistake, offering them all tea and oatcakes.
“The message was sent to Jamie and it will be up to him how to proceed,” Sir Ian was saying. “A copy was routinely circulated to me. It’s strictly a security matter and I cannot be seen to be involved. Jamie needs more evidence before he will act. Behave as if you know nothing, do whatever he asks. It will buy you time. Remember, he doesn’t know you are aware of this report. You must try to hang on to
that.”
“This is about IPI, isn’t it?” I said quietly. Sir Ian’s staccato words were ringing in my ears. They thought my father was a traitor. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Sir Ian looked at me for a moment, the first time our eyes had properly met since I had got into the car. He was tired. “At least warn me?”
“I know how it must seem,” he said, turning away. “It was important you knew nothing. I couldn’t afford for you to say anything that might have alerted Macaulay. It would have jeopardised everything.”
“Does it still exist?” I asked.
“IPI? Not as such.” He paused. “Have you ever heard of something called the Cardamom Club?”
“The Cardamom Café,” I said. “And Macaulay’s email service, Cardamom News.”
“They’re all connected. The Cardamom Club is best understood as a particularly invidious mindset,” he continued. “A group of like-minded individuals in the intelligence community who keep the old IPI fires burning.”
My father would not begin to understand what was happening. I thought of him in a cold cell, emptying his pockets, his old hands shaking, exaggerating his Scottish accent.
“And these people sent the report, about my father?” I continued, hesitantly.
“Yes. They’ve got members in Five, Six, a few at Cheltenham.”
“But why?” I asked, raising my voice. “Why? What conceivable threat can my father, a seventy-year-old, dying man, pose to anyone?”
I hadn’t openly spoken of his deteriorating health before, not since I had been in India, and it felt weak and cheap to do so now.
“I know,” Sir Ian said, sighing. “The fact remains that these people believe that our national security is being compromised by warmer ties with India, whether it’s increased bilateral trade or from people closer to home, certain immigrants whose loyalties, they claim, can be called into question.”
“You mean people who fail the Cricket Test.”
“It’s a little bit more serious than cheering for the wrong side. You must understand that there were certain British intelligence officers who never really recovered from the shock of losing India. They had fought and lost their own very personal cold war. The arrival of large numbers of immigrants a few years later rubbed salt into their wounds, particularly when they started to do well. Ex-IPI officers, who had reluctantly taken up desk jobs in MI5, were convinced – deluded – that some of these people were former Congress activists, subversives, communists, revolutionaries, you name it – basically the old enemy. Never mind we’d invited them. They were especially alarmed by the later wave of much better qualified arrivals in the early Sixties. They watched them work their way slowly into sensitive jobs in the civil service, the armed forces and, in the case of your father, even the nuclear industry. The more extreme among them believed that some of these people, the deep sleepers, would wake up one day and start reporting back twenty, thirty, forty years later to a country that now had ambitions to become a superpower.”
“Did anyone really believe that?” I asked. “Anyone?”
“Someone must have done. Because the Club’s still going, welcoming new, younger members every day.”
“Can’t you stop them?”
Sir Ian managed a dry laugh. “Not until we know how far up the line this thing goes. Macaulay and Jamie report to someone higher. Much higher. Out here, on the ground, different camps are clearly identifiable. The boundaries become more blurred in Whitehall. I can’t blow the whistle, not yet, not until I can be sure who will be listening. I could be recalled to London tomorrow if the wrong people find out that I sent you to Macaulay. That’s how high this thing goes.”
“It was a calculated decision, then, to send me?”
“Yes. It was.”
“I was bait, in effect.” I was beginning to comprehend just how much I had been used. Sir Ian didn’t answer. “How much did you know about my father?” I continued.
“Nothing, and I doubt whether any of it is true. As I said before, Macaulay is a revisionist.”
“But you knew that he would be interested in a British Asian working for the Foreign Office.”
“I knew Macaulay, a fully paid-up Club member, would come up with something when he saw you, yes. In the event he excelled himself. You confirmed his worst fears. Even if you were just a doctor, you were living proof that the Club has good reason to be concerned. The ‘threat’ could live on, buried deep in the second generation.”
I thought back to Paul’s words again. He’s been waiting for you, someone like you, for many years.
“But you didn’t think that sending me would lead to my father’s arrest, and possibly my own,” I said, trying to justify Sir Ian’s decision to send me, to find something that might exonerate him from an increasingly obvious charge of callousness. Sir Ian hadn’t given a second thought to my own interests or safety. He had made a cold decision that he would ultimately be able to count on my support, the colour of my anger, once I had discovered the existence of something as noxious as the Cardamom Club.
“Of course not,” Sir Ian said. His voice was conciliatory. “But, as I said, I knew Macaulay would find something and I needed to see which Whitehall hands the security report passed through.”
“Was there any mention of IPI, even just the initials?”
“No. In fact, it was impossible to establish which desks the report had crossed.”
“None of this would ever have happened if I had gone to Madras,” I said, sitting back, unable to hide my growing frustration. “If I had stuck to my original brief. If I had stayed working as a doctor.”
The back of the car suddenly felt hot and cramped.
“Wouldn’t it? Working for Jamie?” Sir Ian’s voice was also getting louder. “Come on, you know he never really took to you. Now we know why. He was waiting to pull you down, sooner or later.”
Sir Ian put a hand on the car door as we cornered sharply. He was right, of course. Jamie had always been suspicious of me. It hadn’t been his idea to employ a British Asian. He had even told me so, said such things caused problems at the MEA. My promotion had been exactly the sort that the Club opposed. It was Sir Ian, not Jamie, who had lobbied for me. And then there was Jamie’s anger at my friendship with Frank. My days had been numbered from the moment I set foot in India.
“On whose authority were you acting, anyway?” I asked. “Sending me to Cochin.”
“On behalf of all decent thinking people in both countries. Not a big mandate, I admit, but enough to fight for.” Sir Ian’s tone was more resigned than before, a hint of world-weariness creeping into his voice. “My belief, for what it’s worth, is that the Club is involved in something far more pernicious than just keeping track of immigrants. The forces of globalisation are very attractive, initially. But when those we trade with threaten to become equals, or even superior, not everyone feels comfortable. The Cardamom Club can’t cope with the notion of a strong and independent India.”
“A nuclear India?”
Sir Ian nodded. “They’re big boys’ toys. Not for the likes of Delhi. The Club’s doing what IPI used to do best: spreading lies, propaganda, spinning a dark subcontinent to the Western world.” Sir Ian was twisting his hands as he spoke, as if he were turning a globe. “I see its fingerprints everywhere, in the morning newspaper cuttings that are laid on my desk. ‘PM’s astrologer has finger on the nuclear button’, ‘Indian rope trick rises again’. I can sense its exotic influence on CNN, see it on the BBC. It’s nothing new, of course. Krishna Menon protested to The Times about its Indian coverage – that was the 1950s. The spirit of IPI is far more pervasive than you imagine, has been for a long while.”
He sat back and looked out of his window, signalling that the lesson was over.
“And what if I do come up with some evidence?” I asked, thinking of Macaulay’s website, the news service.
“Take it back to the media. Complete the loop. I look forward to reading about it. Now, if you will excuse me, I have
a dinner engagement at Rashtrapati Bhavan.”
Leaning forward, Sir Ian tapped on the glass with the back of his fingers, his wedding ring clicking against it, and then he opened a panel to the side of his headrest, and adjusted his bow tie in a small mirror. The driver slowed, looking in his own mirror.
“Just tell me one other thing,” I continued, trying to ignore the fact that we were about to stop. “Did you send Dutchie?”
Sir Ian’s hands fell motionless for a moment, and then, still looking in the mirror, he flicked some hair back at the side of his head, just above his ears.
“His uncle, Walter, was a good friend of mine,” he said, tweaking the wings of his tie. The driver glanced at us again as we came to a halt. The Rolls-Royce carried on ahead, towards a roundabout. “Dutchie was once involved in an unorthodox, extremely successful intelligence operation. A one-off. He proved surprisingly good. I fear this time it didn’t go so well.”
“Where is he now?”
“Back in England. Recovering with his father. Macaulay did something to his mind. Fortunately, he never made the connection, never suspected Dutchie might have been sent. He was a drifter, a traveller who accidently stumbled into a room full of files. After that, Jamie just wanted him out of the country.”
“But he was onto something.”
“He did well.”
“But why send someone like him?” I asked, thinking back to his shaved head, his nose stud, the no-hope demeanour.
For the first time Sir Ian cut a lonely figure as he looked out into the darkness.
“At that stage I didn’t know what I was looking for,” he said. “Actually, he blended in very well to the internet café culture down there. Christ, I couldn’t exactly ask Six to investigate Macaulay. He was too close to Jamie, to previous high commissioners.”