Invisible Armies

by Jon Evans

  A group of men, relatively hale and hearty, sit around a small open fire, smoking bidis, cheap Indian cigarettes made from individual dried tobacco leaves, and drinking, from clay cups, what Danielle angrily realizes is whisky. One of them sees Laurent, recognizes him, stands to greet him. The others glance over at them and then away, disinterested.

  “Namaste,” Laurent says to the standing man, pressing his hands together in front of his heart and bowing.

  The man returns the greeting. He seems neither pleased nor displeased by Laurent’s presence.

  “Dr. Lal?” Laurent asks. “Is possible?”

  The man gives Laurent the sideways Indian nod, bringing his ear almost to his shoulder; not quite as much a ‘yes’ as the Western nod, but a definite acknowledgement. Without another word, he stoops to put his cup on the ground, then turns and walks away.

  “One of our doctors should be near here somewhere, doing vaccinations,” Laurent explains.

  “Should we go with him?”

  “No. He’ll find him faster alone. We need to rest.”

  Danielle can’t argue with that. Now that they are safe, however briefly and tentatively, bone-deep weariness has fallen on her like an anvil. She finds a relatively inviting patch of grass, some distance from the whisky drinkers’ fire, and sits. Laurent does the same.

  “Is this the village where they captured you?” she asks.

  “No. No one here would report on us. This is a village of friends. But they will search for us here. We need to leave very soon. If we are found here we endanger the entire village.”

  “Endanger how?”

  “They might burn every building. With the families inside.”

  “That’s crazy,” Danielle says, shocked. “There has to be – can’t the government do something?”

  “There is no government here. Delhi and Bangalore are too far away. Government officials don’t go where there are no roads. Think of this as a different planet. The state authorities are bribed by Kishkinda, the local authorities are Kishkinda, and even if someone was willing to believe illiterate farmers, they don’t dare testify in court, they know their families would not survive. As Jayalitha showed. And even if the government did get involved, this isn’t as simple as ‘evil Western company exploiting the poor’. The Indian government owns a one-third share in the mine. And there are rifts among the local people, mostly caste but also money, the landowners support the mine. You understand, these people around us, these are the lucky ones. This is a village of free men. Most people in this district are slaves.”

  “Slaves?”

  “They call it debt bondage, but it’s slavery. Most lower-caste men and women here, nine in ten, spend all their lives farming their masters’ fields, in exchange for a single kilogram of wheat per family per day, and a single acre to grow enough vegetables to feed their family with, if they have any strength left over after twelve hours in the fields. If they flee they are killed, but the sad truth is, the idea never even occurs to most of them. Their debts constantly increase, and then the debt, meaning the slavery, is inherited from parent to child. Some of the families here have been slaves for a hundred generations. The federal government tries to buy their freedom and give them money to live on, but of course the program is thoroughly corrupt, especially here, all that money goes straight into the landowners’ pockets. Don’t misunderstand. It’s not unique to Kishkinda. There are millions upon millions of slaves in India. The men and women you saw working the fields on the way here? Slaves, all of them.”

  “Slaves.” Danielle shakes her head. It seems insane, that thousands of people could live in feudal slavery amid these barren, windswept ridges, only a short train journey from Bangalore, city of tomorrow. But then this is India, a nation torn between medieval and ultramodern, where physics researchers in Mumbai study string theory a few miles from the largest and most awful slums in Asia, a country where hundreds of thousands of computer programmers graduate every year, but hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers live on less than a dollar a day.

  Danielle closes her eyes. Then tiny fingers tug at her shoulder. When her eyes fly open, she is lying on the grass, she fell asleep without knowing it. A dozen children have clustered around herself and Laurent, their eyes bright with wonder, chattering incomprehensibly. Most poor Indian children have learned to ask white strangers for ‘one pen’ or ‘one rupee’, or at least to say ‘hello’, but these ones know no English, they only want Danielle’s attention. Three of them, two boys and a girl, have faces so deformed Danielle has to fight instinctive repulsion. One girl is missing a leg; another has a grotesque tennis-ball-sized growth on her throat. A boy with some kind of elephantiasis has to use his hands to drag his bloated legs and body along the ground. She is almost glad she cannot understand anything they are saying. That would be too heartbreaking.

  “God,” Danielle says. “Is this all from the mine?”

  “This?”

  “Their…their faces.”

  “Yes. Tailings, dumped upstream. Toxic waste. Of course Kishkinda denies it. They produce sheafs of faked studies saying the water is safe and the land has not been poisoned. And people believe them. No, not really. People simply don’t care. One billion people in India. Too many already.” Laurent ruffles a boy’s hair. “These children are expendable. Let them suffer. Let them die.”

  Danielle can’t think of anything to say.

  “There’s Dr. Lal,” Laurent says. “I hope he can help us.”

  * * *

  Dr. Lal rides into the village on a creaking, wobbling bullock cart, driven by the man Laurent sent. A large water bottle and a matte black shoulder bag sit on the cart next to him. The doctor, skinny, twentysomething and ponytailed, wearing very dirty khaki cargo pants and a T-shirt that may once have been tie-dyed, disembarks gingerly and shakes hands with Laurent.

  “What happened to you?” Dr. Lal asks.

  “Thuggery,” Laurent says. “We need to get to Hospet.”

  Dr. Lal purses his lips. “I see. Will they be looking for you?” His Indian accent is barely noticeable. Danielle guesses he has studied in America.

  “Yes.”

  “There is only one road.”

  Laurent says, “I know.”

  “Perhaps we can try to hide you?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  The doctor nods, American-style, and has a brief conversation with the driver, who turns the cart around and leads it to the edge of the village, towards a small mountain of hay that has been piled and left to dry.

  “If my parents and professors could see me now,” Dr. Lal says, smiling slightly. “There were no courses on cloak and dagger work in Iowa. Such an oversight. I can dress those cuts while we wait.”

  “I’m fine,” Laurent says. “They’re shallow.”

  “As you wish. Be sure you clean them when you can. Are you all right?” he asks Danielle.

  She nods.

  Dr. Lal looks around. “I don’t think I’ve been to this village before. It seems healthier than most.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Danielle says.

  “I’m afraid so. The free villages are terribly sickened. The debt slaves are much healthier. I suppose sick workers are discarded. There are villages like this with a cancer rate of six in ten. And always much higher among children.”

  “God. Is there anything you can do to help them?”

  “I have my bag of tricks,” Dr. Lal says. He indicates his black case. “Justice International keeps us well supplied, no mean feat in India. I’ll vaccinate them, I’ll medicate them, I’ll treat them as best I can, I’ll keep careful records. Some of them will respond. But most won’t.” He sighs. “We don’t have enough volunteers. And most stay less than a year. I may not stay much longer myself. It isn’t the money. It’s…in Mumbai, or Bangalore, I would mostly treat patients who wouldn’t sicken and die no matter what I did.”

  Danielle looks at the children who surround them, some of them smiling
and excited, others shy and downcast, all of them fascinated by today’s exotic visitors.

  “Come,” Laurent says, taking her arm. “Our limousine is almost ready.”

  * * *

  Four hours later, Laurent and Danielle enter the city of Hospet on the back of the bullock cart, hidden beneath bales of hay piled upon layers of jute cloth. The jute feels like sandpaper, the cart is made of hard many-splintered wood, and the road is as warty as a toad’s back; her bruised stomach aches as if aflame; but as she lies on the cart, squeezing Laurent’s hand in hers, Danielle’s mind is occupied not by pain and discomfort and exhaustion, but by two other, sharply contrasting things. The sheer exhilaration of still being alive, and the bright, hopeful eyes of the wretched village’s misshapen children.

  Hospet is a busy, modern Indian city, and when they emerge from cover, in an alley near the open market, the profusion of noises, smells, colours and people is almost overwhelming, hallucinatory in its intensity, after the isolation of the last two days. Stalls heaped with mangos, coconuts, papayas, bananas, goat carcasses hanging in the air as small boys use rags to wave flies off them; machine-gun haggling from all around the dense crowd of women in bright saris, moustached men in dark slacks and pale shirts, and the odd Westerner in stained cargo pants. At the edge of the market, autorickshaw drivers shout at one another for some perceived slight, revealing teeth stained red by betel nut, as chauffeurs relax behind them in bulbous Ambassador cars.

  “You said you had your wallet,” Laurent says. “Is there any money in it?”

  “Yes.” Danielle checks. “Almost five hundred rupees.”

  “Please give fifty to our driver.”

  Danielle passes fifty rupees, about one U.S. dollar, to the man. He takes it with the same lack of emotion with which he agreed to help them escape. He and Laurent exchange namastes, and Laurent leads Danielle into the market. The mingling smells of food make her mouth water and her stomach cramp with hunger.

  “They will be looking for us,” he says. “We must take the first train to Bangalore. We will be safer there.”

  “Do I have enough money?”

  “For third class. It won’t be comfortable.”

  They eat street food in the market, chapatis and aloo parathi and chai, ten rupees per person, the finest meal Danielle has ever eaten. They then buy T-shirts to wear, fifteen more rupees apiece. A nervous twenty minutes pass at Hospet Junction railway station. There are a few white backpackers, but Laurent and Danielle stand out, especially he, barefoot and bruised, his left eye swollen shut, easy for his captors to find. But nobody approaches them.

  Daytime third class is worse than Danielle imagined. All the seats are taken, and the overflowing throng of fellow-passengers presses against her on all sides, forcing her to stand in various aching, uncomfortable poses. Vendors selling coconuts, chai, and deep-fried pakoras somehow pass through what seems like a solid mass of humanity, holding vats of boiling water above their heads as they jostle and elbow their way through, but somehow, miraculously, disaster is perpetually averted. Even after Danielle manages to garner enough personal space to sit crosslegged, a privilege she knows she is only accorded because she is white, the eight-hour journey seems to stretch into forever.

  But eventually, late at night, they reach Bangalore, once India’s Garden City, now its modern high-tech hub, the most Westernized city in the country. Danielle has never been so grateful to arrive anywhere. She is also so tired she feels almost drugged. So is Laurent, she can see it in his glazed eyes. It feels very strange, and very draining, to have escaped desperate peril, then travelled from a fourteenth century village to a twenty-first century metropolis, all in one day.

  They leave the train and pass through the main hall, where, in typical Indian style, workers are prying up what seem like perfectly serviceable stone tiles in the train station’s main entrance hall and replacing them with new ones, rather than working on any of the ten million sites in Bangalore that actually need repair. It isn’t until they are outside that she realizes she has no idea where to go. She hasn’t been in Bangalore since quitting Infosys four months ago. There were a few people at work she might be able to stay with, in an emergency, but she doesn’t have their phone numbers, only email addresses.

  “My ATM card,” she says, thinking aloud. She checks her wallet and nearly drops it, exhaustion making her move clumsily, as if carrying an anvil. Relief floods into her at the sight of the silver card with the Citibank logo. How strange that this little piece of plastic, and its four-digit code, can be the sole difference between comfort and desperation.

  “We should go to the police,” she suggests.

  “The police?” Laurent shakes his head. “No. Here that is never a good idea. Everyone who is anyone is for sale. And Kishkinda have much more money than you. It will only be a beacon for them.”

  “You think they’ll still be after us here?” Until now she has assumed that once they reach Bangalore they are safe.

  “They have a long arm and a long memory. We won’t be safe anywhere in India.”

  “Then what do we do? We can get money, but we can’t leave the country. They’ve got our passports.”

  “A hotel,” Laurent says.

  “They’ll want our passports too.”

  He manages a tired smile. “I think we’ll find a five-hundred rupee note works just as well, at the kind of hotel I have in mind. Worry about tomorrow tomorrow. First we must rest. Rest is a weapon.”

  * * *

  Berry’s Hotel, on Church Street, obviously dates back to the days of the Raj. Its foyer’s mahogany panelling, ancient leather couches and iron-lace elevator doors have a certain decaying stateliness. Unfortunately the same charm does not extend to its rooms, whose most noticeable features are low ceilings, exposed wiring, rusted plumbing, cracked furniture, stained linoleum and torn bedding, but Danielle is too tired to care. She is just glad that they found an ATM quickly and that the hotel’s obsequious proprietor was happy to take money in place of identification. She and Laurent fall onto the room’s two twin beds and pass out so quickly she does not even remember to undress, much less pull the cover over her. Not that they need covers. Bangalore, a thousand metres above sea level, is cooler than most of India, but it still feels like a hot summer night in Boston.

  She spends the night trapped in nightmares of a labyrinthine prison, pursued by men with warped faces in business suits, carrying lathis, down endless gray corridors that echo with the howls of dogs. She wakes to Laurent’s gentle but persistent shaking, and half-sits, supporting herself on her elbows, still dazed. Her dreams slip from her mind like sand through fingers. She welcomes the amnesia.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is grim. “You need to get up.”

  “What for? What’s wrong?”

  “Have some coffee.” Two paper cups with bright red COFFEE DAY logos sit on the table between the beds. “I made some phone calls. I have news. None of it good.”

  Chapter 7

  Angus is late. Keiran waits in the corner of the Prince Albert, a diminishing pint of Kronenbourg on the table before him, increasingly annoyed, trying to ignore the noise and the smoke of a London pub at ten PM. Angus is thirty minutes late by the time the small, fine-featured Scotsman finally enters the pub from Coldharbour Lane and weaves through the crowd towards Keiran. With his colourful tattoos, and the gold strands woven into his dreadlocks, Angus stands out vividly even in the sea of spectacular humanity that is Brixton.

  “I remember you used to be punctual,” Keiran says sourly, as Angus sits.

  “Did I? Really? Must have been all those drugs.” Angus smiles. “I apologize. Usual Tube problems. Why are we here?”

  Keiran says, “I’m giving up.”

  “Giving up what?”

  “Giving up your project. I quit. Find someone else to do it. Sorry.”

  Angus blinks. “What prompted this?”

  Keiran shrugs and sips from his Kronenbourg. “I just have too many
other things going on to keep working on this too. Sorry. I shouldn’t have agreed to try to do you a favour in the first place.”

  After a moment, Angus says, “Did you at least send Jaya’s passport to your friend?”

  Keiran nods. “They should already be back in Goa by now.”

  Angus studies Keiran silently for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” Keiran says. “I just don’t have the time. I’ve made zero progress anyways. Two weeks and I’m still nowhere. I’m probably too rusty to help you in a timely manner.”

  “I don’t understand. Last I knew you, you would have lived for this. You would have been positively bubbling with excitement. You would have been up hacking all night, every night.”

  “Last you knew me was four years ago,” Keiran says. “When I was probably off my head on drugs all night, every night. Things are different now. I’m sorry. Of course I’d like to help you out. I just don’t have time to waste on things like your project.”

  “As simple as that. You just don’t have time to waste.”

  “As simple as that.”

  “Well,” Angus says. “Of course I’d hate to waste your time. I know it’s just enormously valuable.” His voice is thick with sarcasm. “Thirty pounds an hour, no? Is that what they pay you to keep the virtual cogs of capitalism running smooth? Is that how much you sell yourself for?”

  “Angus. There’s no point arguing. My decision is made. You asked me for a favour, I took a hack at it, I didn’t get anywhere, and now I’m done. End of story.”

  Angus studies him. Then he says, “Do you remember the car park?”

  Keiran twitches. After a moment he says, “Vividly.”