by Jon Stock
My record didn’t look good when you saw it from Jamie’s point of view, from the warped perspective of the Club: young British Asian lands sensitive job with the Foreign Office after much lobbying from Sir Ian, a High Commissioner who is known to be soft on India. On his arrival in Delhi, he immediately falls in with the wrong crowd, mixing with people like Frank, a former Bolshevik revolutionary. It quickly goes from bad to worse: there is sufficient evidence, in the hands of their own revisionist historian, to argue that his father, a man privy to state secrets, was a militant member of the freedom struggle. At the very least, he represents a security risk, no matter how old he is, given his sensitive work at Dounreay and with the UKAEA. He may even be a spy, which doesn’t reflect well on his son, a man who is about to be entrusted with his own important intelligence work.
The Club must have been weeping with joy. Their case was almost complete, a job well done. All I had to do now was demonstrate that my affection for Priyanka, one of my “own people”, prevented me from doing my job properly, from turning in her father, a very senior officer in RAW. I would then be held up as an example to all, to the security services, to local government, to the nuclear industry: employ British Asians at your peril, it is not just cricket that divides their loyalty.
Unless, of course, I could explode the secrecy of the Club, its unconstitutional influence, its febrile paranoia about all things Indian. And Dutchie’s return might just be the break that I needed, providing he was conscious enough to talk.
Because Dutchie had seen the files.
18
I was looking forward to being back at the clinic, to dealing with routine medical problems again: malaria, dengue, gastroenteritis, dysentry, pneumonia, perhaps even some cholera. It had rained last night and the trees in the republic looked scrubbed, renewed. Even the barbed wire along Mr Jain’s front wall, across the road, was sparkling with optimism. I remembered the extraordinary wedding I had watched there, shortly after I had arrived. Someone with a television camera had been shouting instructions to the bridegroom, who ducked his head, ran across to a small helicopter perched on the lawn, and climbed inside. The helicopter rose two feet into the air, hovered unsteadily and returned to earth again. The groom then stepped out and walked over to his wife-to-be. Later the wedding video would record that he had arrived by helicopter. All was maya, illusion.
Mr Jain regularly rented out his house as a wedding venue, helicopter included. It was still there, behind the wall, ready to rise up to meet the aspirations of Delhi’s social climbers. I smiled as Ravi drove up onto the road outside, its surface so high that it felt as if we were on our own private flyover. I wouldn’t be making this journey for much longer. Something had to give soon and I was determined it wasn’t going to be me.
As we passed the Country Club, another misnomer, my pager hummed in my pocket. I pulled it out and read the following message: “HC very ill – please go to Rajaji residence. Urgent.”
I told Ravi that we had to go first to Rajaji Marg, the road where Sir Ian had his official home. I wondered who had sent the message, presumed it was the clinic, and rang them. There was no answer. I tried to relax. Middle-aged women were sitting quietly in groups in the shade, knees drawn up, waiting to collect grass cuttings from the republic’s well-watered lawns and sell them to the city’s cowherds. We passed others, walking slowly in the heat, who had already bundled up their suburban harvest in grey plastic sacks bulging on their heads.
As we drew closer to Chanakyapuri, I became increasingly convinced that it was Jamie who had paged me. By the time we were on the roundabout, outside Sir Ian’s house, all doubt had gone. I told Ravi to go round again as we slowed to enter the gates. Something was not right. Ravi looked puzzled as he accelerated back onto the roundabout, watched suspiciously by a Gurkha guard standing at the entrance to the residence. When we approached for the second time, the gates were open and I could see some activity in the porch. One of the figures was Jamie.
I told Ravi to turn off down a road just before the gates, and then immediately right into a side road where he had parked before. We pulled up next to two other cars, both of which had British High Commission number plates. Two drivers were leaning on the bonnet of one of the cars and I asked Ravi to inquire about Sir Ian.
“The High Commissioner, he is ill, sick,” I told him, unfairly frustrated by his confused face. “Ask them if he is in the house, inside.”
Ravi dutifully got out and started talking to the two drivers. After a few moments he climbed back into the car.
“Gone, sir. Airport.”
“He’s gone?”
“Eight o’clock, morning time,” Ravi said, pointing at his watch. My pager had gone off at around 8.30am. I suddenly felt very vulnerable, too close to Jamie for comfort. I could be recalled to London tomorrow if the wrong people find out that I sent you to Macaulay. Behind the two cars, on the other side of the wall, lay the back garden where I had been barely two weeks ago, standing under the lanterns in the trees, blissfully unaware of what lay ahead, of the consequences of my short conversation with Sir Ian in the dhobi room, accompanied by the great Vinayakrao Patwardhan from Madhur.
“We must go, abijust,” I said to Ravi, unsure exactly where. As he turned the car round, a Gurkha guard appeared on the corner of the street and pointed excitedly down the road at us.
“Go, challo,” I shouted at Ravi.
The back wheels spun as he completed the turn and accelerated down to the main road, where the guard was standing, but before we could pull out, away from the roundabout, Jamie’s Land-Rover had blocked our way. Ravi hooted and then swerved round the square bonnet, before crossing in front of the oncoming traffic onto the main road.
“Where, sir?” Ravi asked, driving at last at the sort of reckless speed he had expected of foreigners. (I remembered his face on my first day in India when I had told him to slow down. “You don’t like speed?” he had asked, incredulous.)
“Anywhere. Just go. Challo.”
Ravi glanced in his rear mirror. I turned round, fastening my seat belt. Jamie had managed to cross the traffic and was now on our side of the road, about eight cars behind. He was driving fast, swerving as he overtook cars on the inside and outside.
“Connaught Place?” Ravi asked.
“No.” I paused. “Dharamsala.”
“Dharamsala?” he repeated, pronouncing my “s” like “sh”, his voice going up a tone.
“Yes. Dharamsala.” I copied his pronunciation, relishing the sound.
“Abi?”
“Now,” I confirmed, glancing around again at the Land-Rover, which was still gaining on us.
“First we go my village,” Ravi said. He looked happier than I had ever seen him before as he settled down into his seat. “Very near. No problem?”
“Okay, okay, koi baat nay. Just lose the Land-Rover.”
*
Thanks to some anarchic driving by Ravi, we had left the Land-Rover far behind by the time we reached the Inter State Bus Terminal. We drove on through the day, stopping for food in Chandigarh, and for a short sleep in Una. I was warmly welcomed in Ravi’s village, which we eventually reached after nightfall. Ravi immediately walked taller, commanding more respect than he had done in Delhi. Working for a foreign high commission ranked as one of the best jobs for a driver and here, in the village of Kandhi, all the men were drivers. They knew. Ravi’s three brothers were drivers, his cousins were drivers, but his one-year-old son, Abishek, was going to be a government officer with a pension.
I had noticed that Ravi sent money back every month to his wife, queuing patiently at the post office to fill out the form, unlike other drivers in Delhi who squandered their salaries on Bagpiper whisky and rummy. His wife greeted Ravi with a warm, toothy smile, her head covered with a chunari, but she seemed quite unsurprised by his unannounced arrival, taking it in her modest daily stride, even though he normally returned only once a year. I liked that, envied her outlook.
We le
ft early the next day, after a simple breakfast of bindi, chapati and cardamom tea, and reached Dharamsala by late morning, twisting our way up from the Kangra valley. The town was set precariously on a mountainside, its buildings fighting with pine forests for a foothold, clinging on for a view of the mauve-misted valley below. Immediately above the town stood the brooding rock faces of the Dhauladhar range, and behind them the snow-peaked Himalayas: immutable, reassuring, more silencing than I had imagined them to be.
I almost missed the Shambhala café as I walked along Jogibara road in McLeodganj, the upper part of Dharamsala. For some reason, I had it down as a large meeting place, teeming with backpackers, but instead it was a dark, cosy joint with six small tables, three down either side. I was early for lunch and Dutchie had not arrived. The only customers were a Western couple who had two small children. One was eating a plate of chips, the other, a baby, was being passed, asleep, through to the kitchen at the back of the restaurant, where an elderly Tibetan woman wrapped it in her arms and disappeared.
To the left of the kitchen door was a glass food cabinet where a collection of white, yellow and pink rolls of lavatory paper was on display. There was a mug on top of the cabinet full of coloured pencils and a pile of small sheets of scrap paper. On the walls were various posters calling for a free Tibet, and two faded posters of the Dalai Lama. A young Tibetan man welcomed me with a smile, handed me a well-thumbed menu and gestured at the paper and pencils.
I sat down at a table to the side of the cabinet, facing the door, and glanced idly down the menu. I was not hungry, but the smells coming from the kitchen stirred something and I settled on vegetable fried rice. This was the sort of place I should have come to if I had taken a gap year. Instead I had studied, which I realised now was a mistake. But I could never have sold the idea to my father, even if I hadn’t mentioned India. “What do you want a year off for?” he would have said. “A holiday, at your age? You haven’t even started work.”
I glanced up at the Western couple with the children. They were English, in their thirties, and didn’t have the rushed look of people on a brief holiday. Their clothes were too smart for them to qualify as travellers. Instead of rucksacks, they had two Karrimor baby carriers, propped up neatly in the corner. I envied their lifestyle, their freedom to travel. It was all about choices, that was becoming clear, and I was beginning to accept that I had made some wrong ones in the past few months.
I had no regrets about joining the Foreign Office, or coming to Delhi. I would never have met Priyanka if I had stayed at home. And I stood by my friendship with Frank, one of the few decent people I had met out here. It was living with the consequences of a wrong decision that troubled me: in that respect life could be very unforgiving. I had once been given a rare second chance in love and perhaps I had helped Priyanka to avoid a wrong decision, too. But I could never undo what had happened here in India. The shadow of MI6 would always fall across my life, even if I did manage to persuade someone – who? – of the existence of the Club. Frank was right: spooks stayed with you for life. And it was not stubbornness or pride on my part – I would have left tomorrow if I could – but an inability to do anything about it, which was far more frightening.
I wondered if my father had ever questioned his decision to leave India. And if he had, what had stopped him from returning, from unpicking his life? Was it obstinacy, a refusal to admit a mistake, or something else? Dharamsala was the first place in India which had made me think I could settle here. Perhaps it was the Tibetan presence. I would feel like an exile, too, in the first few months, far away from Scotland and not fully at home in India. But the feeling was not strong, not least because it was exactly what the Club would have wanted: repatriation. And what I wanted was to send the Club back to where it belonged, buried deep in the history books.
The only man who could help me walked into the café a few minutes later. Dutchie was looking sallow and withdrawn, more so than he had done at the clinic, his shaven head adding to the look of emaciation. He was wearing purple and orange striped trousers, troppo sandals, an off-white (dirty) collarless tunic, and a cotton shoulder bag, out of which a bottle of Himalaya mineral water was sticking. He still wore a nose stud, but his ears were less adorned than I remembered, a solitary gold ring hanging from his left lobe.
There was no reason why he should have recognised me – he had been barely conscious the last time we met – and he sat down at the corner table to the right of the door. He was looking down, as if he were shielding his sunken eyes from the brightness of the day, from the world, and when the owner approached, he mumbled a barely audible order. The man was not well, but at least he was here in India, which must have required a certain amount of cogency. I was amazed he hadn’t been pulled over by Customs.
I climbed out of my narrow seat and walked across to his table.
“Dutchie? I’m Raj Nair. Paul in Cochin said you would be here.”
He still didn’t look up, giving the impression of a scolded schoolboy. I stood there: this was going to be harder work than I had thought. But then he began rocking his head slowly from side to side and a broad smile lit up his face. It couldn’t be described as a direct response, but at least the lights were on. I pulled back the chair opposite him and sat down, becoming aware of a pungent damp smell rising from his clothes. Dutchie turned suddenly to look out of the window, his hunched body animated, as if an electric shock had passed through him.
“Oh, man, there he is again.”
“Who?” I asked, following his gaze out of the window onto the busy street. I could sense the Western family looking at us.
“Did you see him?” Dutchie asked.
“Who?”
“He’s been following me everywhere.”
I looked for someone, anyone, who might fit the bill, but the street was quiet except for a couple of children playing with sticks and an old bicycle tyre. Dutchie relaxed and he turned back to face me, although his eyes were still looking down. We had yet to make eye contact.
“Who’s been following you?” I repeated.
Dutchie waved an arm carelessly in the air and stayed silent. If there was someone pursuing him I might not have long. I watched as he pulled out a pouch of tobacco and a packet of Rizlas, and started to roll a cigarette.
“Paul said you saw the files. On Macaulay’s island, in Cochin. Is that right?”
“Did you speak to Paul?”
“On the phone. He rang me two days ago.”
“You must help him. You’re a doctor, right? Such pain, every hour of every day. Man, can you imagine that?”
I was momentarily taken aback by his concern. Naively, I had dismissed him as a self-centred traveller, solely concerned with his own journey, spiritual or otherwise.
“We might not have long, Dutchie. Can you tell me what you saw?”
“You want to know what I saw? I’ll tell you.” For the first time he looked up, fixing me with his wasted, frightened eyes. He tried to hold the stare, but his head was wavering, as if he were drunk. Whatever he had seen was still trapped inside, burnt onto the back of his bloodshot eyes. He finished rolling the cigarette, struck a match and lit up with an unsteady hand.
“I saw a young boy, the same age as him.” He nodded in the direction of the Western family, blowing out some smoke. The little boy grinned at us for a moment, his mouth smeared in ketchup, and then returned to his few remaining chips. “First he tied him up, taped his mouth, then he hung him upside down from a meat hook on the ceiling.”
I swallowed hard, hoping my food was still a long way off. I had meant him to talk about the files but he clearly had something else to share first. It was important that he continued. He was talking loudly now, and I glanced round to see who was listening. The mother threw me a concerned look. I managed a thin smile, an apology. Mercifully their meal was over and they were getting up to leave, the mother putting her head round the kitchen door and being handed back her baby.
“They cut his eyel
ids first, sliced them off with a pair of surgical scissors. Then they took a carving knife to his ears and nose. You’ve never seen so much blood, never thought someone so little could kick and fight like that. When he was still, they cut out his tongue. They collected the blood in a dish and offered it to Kali.”
I thought of the man who had waited outside the clinic. Tinkoo had met with a similar end. Angrez, the man had said. An Englishman. My stomach tightened. The implications were too far-reaching, too odious.
“Who did it?” I asked.
Dutchie drew on his cigarette, his hand shaking badly. Neither of us wanted to say the name.
“Macaulay?” I eventually said, almost whispering the word, thinking back to the dinner on the island, how I had sat next to him, so close. Dutchie’s head began to tremble, small vibrations, nothing more. I pressed my teeth together. It made sense, in a diabolical way. There had been something unexplained about Macaulay when we had met, something acutely disturbing. Priyanka had felt it, too, and she hadn’t seen the attack on the boy, or the shrunken head.
“I never saw his face,” Dutchie said, his head more still now. “It was covered with a mask and no words were exchanged. Whoever it was made me watch the whole show. First he tied my hands and feet to a chair, then he taped my head to a pole attached to the back of the chair so I couldn’t move it. Finally, he wedged matchsticks here and here” – he pushed his eyelids wide open with a finger and thumb – “so I couldn’t close my eyes. I tried to roll them but I saw everything. Fie sat me down in front of the child, barely two feet away from where his face was swinging. I thought he was going to kill me.” Dutchie faltered, his eyes welling up. “I wish he had, instead of the boy.”