by Aimee E. Liu
Ranjit, as he insisted they call him, was in his early twenties, tall and gangly soft, the roundness of his face exaggerated by a ballooned red turban and heavily fringed brown eyes. His skin bore the pockmark scars of childhood disease, but he wore a spotless white shirt, navy trousers, and blazer, and spoke impeccable English. He was a medical researcher at Dharamsala Teaching Hospital and had been sent to Kashmir to document the spread of TB among those displaced by the war.
“Do you know Srinagar well?” Joanna asked.
“Well enough to do my work, to find my way about. My family used to summer here, before the fighting.”
In the street before them three little boys—younger than Simon—commandeered a thicket of sheep down the main market street. They faced horse-drawn carts, public buses, and irate merchants whose displays of goods and produce were at risk of tumbling under the sheep’s hooves, yet the boys managed to maneuver their flock with unflappable grace and good humor. Joanna shook her head.
“I suppose you’re wondering what we’re doing here,” she said to Ranjit.
The young doctor sipped his tea. “I believe you will tell me.”
Joanna directed Simon to a clear area a few yards from their table where he could play with the yo-yo without hitting anyone—and where he would not hear her. “In point of fact,” she said, “I’m looking for my husband. I was informed that a plane in which he was flying disappeared in the mountains near Leh four days ago. We’ve been to see the United Nations general in charge, and he’s not very cooperative. I realize this has nothing to do with you or your business here in Kashmir, but frankly I’m at my wit’s end. Is there anyone you know—any locals, I mean—who might be able to help us?” She showed him Aidan’s press photo, the only picture she had thought to bring. It looked like a mug shot.
Ranjit sighed, abruptly grave, and Joanna realized how desperate she must seem. But the more she thought about it the more certain she was that Farr and the bureaucracy behind him were stonewalling her. If the downing of that plane had the slightest political implication, which in this climate it was sure to, then she’d be the last to know what had really happened to Aidan.
Ranjit put his fingers to his temples and rubbed in vigorous circles. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “Achcha! I know just the fellow.” He glanced at Simon, who had stopped playing with the yo-yo and was staring rapt at an elderly peddler outside the tea stall. The man’s wares consisted of daggers and swords, which he displayed in a large tin trunk.
“Come, come!” Ranjit called to Simon. “Where we are going you will find all of this and more.”
“What do you mean?” Joanna asked warily.
But Ranjit looked pleased with himself. “Well, you see, Dr. Akbar is a bit of a collector.”
Specifically, he explained as they began to walk, Mahmood Akbar was an ethnologist, scholar of tribal customs and crafts. He had been at school in England with Ranjit’s father but grew up in Kashmir and returned here after launching his career at the British Museum. “He is a bit cagey about his current endeavors. Calls himself ‘an incorrigible antiquarian/but he knows everyone from Lahore to Kashgar, right down to the lowliest goat-herders. If anyone has information about your husband, Dr. Akbar will know it.”
The ethnologist’s home, a deceptively dark, weather-beaten structure located at the northern end of the city, itself resembled a museum. Tribal artifacts lined the entry hall. The walls glittered with mirrorwork, coral and turquoise jewelry, embroidered leathers and headdresses. A houseboy ushered them to a long parlor, where Dr. Akbar welcomed them warmly.
A trim, short man, he wore spectacles, a dark mustache, and a black pin-striped double-breasted suit at least one size too big for him. He gave Ranjit an uncle’s embrace, but was equally effusive in his greeting of Simon. Young boys, he informed Joanna, could be counted upon to appreciate his toys. He showed them his collection of Turki carpets and Ali Baba urns, his tank of purple and red speckled goldfish, and his five angora cats. But as Ranjit had intimated, Akbar’s prize was his artillery treasury, which he kept in a small sitting room off the parlor. Crossbows, swords, blowguns, matchlocks. Soon Simon was happily occupied with an array of pistols—unloaded, Akbar assured Joanna—dating back to the 1700s. The houseboy brought a large samovar of coffee, but at this point Ranjit excused himself with apologies that he must return to his work, and so Joanna found herself alone with this unexpected host.
Akbar’s manner was so unaffected—he had a habit of chewing intently on the end of his mustache as he listened—and his enthusiasm in greeting new guests so persuasive that Joanna soon let down her guard. She started to explain why she had come but had barely mentioned the plane crash when Akbar began to nod. As Ranjit had predicted, he knew all about it.
“Such news travels swiftly and widely here. Also, my work places me in contact with the hill people.” He lifted one bony hand, tipping it back and forth. “There is difference between official and unofficial. For myself, I value more the unofficial reports.” Akbar paused, selecting his words. “As I understand, all aboard were in uniform.”
“In uniform.” She searched the possible implications of this detail. “You mean they’ve found the crash site…and he wasn’t—”
“Mrs. Shaw, were you told where this flight was destined?”
“All I know is the U.N. team was investigating some cease-fire violation.”
Akbar shook his head. “Oh, yes. There were reports that a shot had been fired, and a man had been seen burying his victim. It turned out that victim was a mad dog. You know, I believe this team had completed its inquiry and was in fact already returning to Srinagar when the crash occurred.” He smoothed the damp tip of his mustache back into a smile. “How many did they say were aboard?”
“Including Aidan and the pilot, I think there must have been five.”
“Well, there you have it. I am told only four bodies were seen at the crash site. All, as I say, in uniform. It seems to me, Mrs. Shaw, that your husband may have stayed on wherever that plane put down.”
Joanna exhaled, her heart racing. She knew Aidan was alive.
Through the archway she could see Simon kneeling on the floor, head bowed as if he, too, were giving thanks. She went in and crouched next to him. He held up a small red bow strung with catgut, pretended to ready an arrow. She said, “Dr. Akbar thinks Daddy’s all right.”
Simon let the invisible arrow fly. Then he frowned. “Does that mean we have to go home?”
Joanna flinched. She stroked his shoulder but did not reply. She turned back to the parlor.
“You are at ease now,” Akbar suggested.
But already she was not. Simon’s question had hit its mark. “How can we know Aidan wasn’t aboard?” she demanded. “He could have gone for help. He could be injured and lost.”
Akbar shook his head. “Perhaps. But I am told the wreckage and terrain are both very bad. Survival would be unlikely.” His tone warned that even this was an understatement.
“Tell me,” she said finally. “You seem to know this territory. If you were an American correspondent, why would you stay on in the middle of nowhere?”
Again Akbar’s palm rose, equivocating. “Perhaps he wished to report on the Ladakhi lamas? The area where the shots were reported is not far from Leh.”
“I doubt it. Aidan finds religion tedious, except when it’s provocation for war. The Buddhists aren’t inciting a war, are they?”
Akbar grinned, wrinkling his nose so that his glasses rode up. “In Tibet, perhaps. Not at Leh.” But he quickly sobered, humming a low dirgelike melody as he outfitted a silver holder with a cigarette and lit it, then sat smoking thoughtfully.
At last he said, “Leh is the last city this side of the Karakoram Pass. For thousands of years it has been the final supply station for trade caravans. Not many go through now, due to political instability both here and over the border in China, but some weeks ago I met another American journalist headed that way. She came to me with questi
ons about the hill tribes. Were they friendly? Had I heard reports of bandit attacks in China? Were the rebels interfering with travel over the pass?”
“She?” Joanna thought she had heard him wrong.
“Indeed! A most lovely young girl. One of your yellow-haired beauties, though she dressed like a man in trousers and a leather flight jacket. Her name was Alice.” He studied Joanna as if seeing someone else. “Alice James. I do not forget.”
Joanna glanced at Simon, now obliviously playing with the cats at the end of the hallway. “You think,” she forced herself to ask, “that this Alice meant to trek all the way to China?”
Akbar appeared not to notice her discomfort. “I think she was most concerned by reports that the Chinese Nationalists have been mistreating the Turkestan tribesmen, which I assured her were true. Yes, yes, I said. Burdensome taxes, conscription of men and boys, raids and pilfering of the people’s stocks and harvests. Everything you hear is true, but your government knows all this. Do they! Oh, Miss Alice James was most indignant.”
He paused. “Perhaps you have heard the term, Tournament of Shadows? Or, Great Game?”
She looked at him sharply. “Yes.”
“Then you know, for nearly two centuries Russia and England have competed for influence over these northern access routes linking India and China.” He selected a well-thumbed atlas from his wall of books, and opened it to a map of Central Asia. Above the stretch of mountains to the north of Kashmir floated a lengthwise yellow oval marking the Takla Makan Desert. The desert was rimmed by a string of names familiar to Joanna only because of Aidan and Lawrence’s history chats. Khotan, Yarkand, Kashgar. These stops along the old Silk Road were also playing fields of the Great Game.
“In this century,” Akbar continued, “the Tournament has been revised, contestants multiplied many times over. Sinkiang has seen many recent rebellions. The native tribespeople have been fighting for independence from Chinese rule. The Chinese Nationalists have been at odds with the growing Communist forces. The Soviets, too, have been sparring with the Nationalists as well as with the British. And now the Americans have been building an air base in the Sinkiang capital, Urumchi—Tihwa, the Chinese call it.” He chewed on his mustache. “Urumchi is the old native name. It means Beautiful Pastures. But General Chiang Kai-shek prefers a name more in keeping with his true designs, so he calls the capital Tihwa, which means Assimilation. He would gladly rub out these ethnic minorities if he could do so without his Western allies taking note.”
He paused to smoke. “Nothing is happening here in Kashmir. It is most distressing, but the situation appears to have reached a stalemate. If I were a foreign journalist in search of a good story, I think I, too, would prefer Sinkiang. The American press—perhaps not even the American government—wishes to admit that the Communists are winning the war in China—”
Joanna interrupted. “This Alice. Whom did she work for?”
“Ah. She said she had an assignment for the Washington Post. I believe she called herself a freelancer, however.”
“But she left weeks ago?”
“Mmh. What is most remarkable of all, she was traveling alone.” He studied Joanna through a plume of smoke, then moved his fingertip along the line in the atlas marking the Karakoram Trail northward through the Kun Lun Mountains to China. “Eastern Turkestan. Also known as Sinkiang.” Akbar tapped the map. “You understand, the most direct route from India would be the lower six-week trail to the west through Gilgit. But since the line of control was drawn down the middle of Kashmir, Gilgit now lies in Pakistani territory, and to get there from Srinagar would mean crossing the line. So even though the Karakoram route has technically been closed since ’47, the dak still occasionally struggles through this side, as does such trade as has survived. It is high and rough, and not closely patrolled.”
Joanna studied the twisting course. If everything this man said was true, then the prospect of Chiang Kai-shek’s abuses so near could be as alluring to Aidan as it seemed to be to this Alice James. But you didn’t start a trek like this on the spur of the moment. And he’d promised to be home in two days!
“What you’re suggesting is preposterous,” she said. “Something must have happened to my husband.”
Akbar turned his cigarette holder between the pads of his finger and thumb. “I am sure you are right. However, you asked for my opinion.”
Joanna sensed it was time to leave, but she felt rooted to her seat. If Aidan’s trip to Srinagar had in fact failed to produce the expected exposé of Communist dirty tricks, then all he could anticipate on his return to Delhi would be another round of recriminations and reprimands from Washington. Was it so implausible, then, that he would delay his return? He was no stranger to impulse. And his impulses were hardly predictable. Early in the war, in Burma, he had been out on a story when his photographer, Ben Eldon, tripped a land mine. The explosion threw Aidan clear, but ripped off the lower half of Ben’s leg. Aidan carried the bleeding man and the severed leg two miles to the nearest medic, then returned to reclaim Ben’s equipment. He proceeded to shoot six rolls of film from the perimeter of the mine’s crater—of the nearby village and its residents, children, soldiers, women and old people, water buffalo and goats, the flies that swarmed the congealing pools of his friend’s spilled blood. Ben survived, and much later discovered this film in his camera bag. “It was as though he held nature to account,” Ben told Joanna the day he came to the house in Rockville to leave a set of the prints for Aidan. “As though the camera were his weapon, and he was avenging the attack on us by shooting all the witnesses—even those who themselves had been injured in the blast.”
Your government knows all this, Akbar had said. Stars and Stripes will have to wait.
She lifted her eyes. “How long is the flight to Leh?”
5
After Mrs. Shaw left the rescue home, I tried to rest and not to think what the future would bring. I was the youngest of all the girls there, and without Mrs. Shaw, I had no desire to stay. Yet this was a Safe Haven, even if in name only, and where else did I have to go? I thought, perhaps there will be another Mira here, who will care for me as a younger sister, console me with her smiles. This, however, was not to be.
Some at Safe Haven sat by the window and rocked endlessly back and forth. Others plotted fantastic escapes involving babus who had promised to marry them and take them off to Africa or Trinidad or New York. Still others occupied themselves with gossip and gambling or concealed jars of whiskey and petty theft, which led shortly to clawing, hair-pulling, eye-scratching fights. The constant clatter of glass bangles and the thickness of perfumed oil and sweat intensified the sensation of closeness that resulted from our crowding and the heat, but more than that, from the common pointlessness of our being there.
The only organized activity was the cooking of our individual allotments of chickpea flour and rice. This we did in shifts over a long iron stove in the kitchen. One small window offered little ventilation, and the billowing smoke led to tears and more quarreling among the inmates. I took my food away and ate by myself in a corner of the common room beneath a notice promising embroidery lessons. Along the opposite wall sat three large iron sewing machines, but when I asked, no one had ever seen a teacher. Another notice promised literacy classes, and though there was no sign of this teacher either, I did discover a stack of books in the passageway outside Mrs. Shaw’s office. They were shiny red with pictures of yellow-haired girls and boys. A Rajasthani girl who saw me eyeing them told me to be careful, they had been sent special by Mrs. Shaw’s friends in America and the ayah Suman said not to touch them. I waited until she left, then slid one under my tunic. As soon as others began going to bed I crawled under the covers myself and examined the book in shadow.
I was not illiterate. I could decipher those notices on the wall, and like the language of the hills, the words in this book remembered me. Long ago my father had taught me to read. He was a soldier and knew at least five languages, but he instru
cted me that my worth would be weighed in English. I was then only three or four, but he taught me using a book just like this one, with images of foreign children and stories about goblins and witches rather than Hindu deities or Muslim heroes. He called them fairy tales. However, on the last night he spent with me he read a tale from that same book in which the moon looks down not on a white child but on an Indian maiden burning her lamp by the Ganges. She places the lamp upon the stream and sets it afloat as a test. As long as the flame remains lit she will know her loved one remains alive.
I hunted through this book at Safe Haven searching in vain for that story, but as I stared at the words, I could not read for the picture that arose in my mind of a man I had nearly forgotten. A man with black eyes and the softest of beards who cradled me in his lap and held me with gentle words. His wide square fingertip traced the letters by flickering candlelight. “He lives!” he taught me to read. “She rejoiced, and from the hills came the echo, ‘He lives!”’
The walls were high around Salamat Jannat, and the windows barred. There were only two ways into the compound, and I had checked both and found them securely locked. In spite of my nightmare that Golba possessed the key and would come to me here in this bed, and even though the other girls slept fitfully and several cried out during the night, no one from outside disturbed us.
Six mornings passed, and Mrs. Shaw did not return. But her friend Lawrence came each afternoon, bearing sweets and cinema magazines and words of encouragement for us all. It was Vijay who really took charge, but the girls much preferred Lawrence. They would swarm about him like bees to the hive. And he would laugh and play magic tricks, pulling an anna from behind one’s ear, turning three bangles into four. I no longer begged for him to take me with him, but hung back waiting my turn. For on the second day he had pulled me aside. He lifted his eyebrows, which were like two short flames, and led me to the farthest corner of the courtyard, away from all the others.
Speaking in broken Hindi, he asked if I was Kashmiri. I decided he wanted me to say yes. So I said yes. He said, good, would I like to go back there? I took a large breath and, daring to trust him, nodded.