The Kashmir Trap

by Mario Bolduc

  “Lots of meetings with colleagues, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he make any phone calls, receive any visits?”

  “Phone calls, but no appointments that I remember. I took care of it at Mr. Caldwell’s request. The few days in Delhi before his departure weren’t enough to finish up the Kathmandu files along with the run-up to Montreal.”

  Kathmandu again.

  This trip had been playing on Max’s mind. He put himself in David’s place — having to go home in the middle of the night after preparing the Montreal conference. Endless meetings with Bernatchez, Caldwell, and company. There were a thousand details to attend to and time was running short. The investors had to be reassured, fussed over, and given tender loving care; a huge job. Still, David had to go to Kathmandu in the shadow of the mountains … with Vandana along, too. Two fewer pairs of hands to do Bernatchez’s bidding.

  That didn’t take into account Béatrice’s impromptu visit. David hadn’t seen his mother for months, and yet he chose that very moment to leave town.

  Odd.

  “Kathmandu — what exactly happened there? What did you do?”

  “Meetings and get-togethers.”

  “What about?”

  “A literacy project we’ve been on for months with CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency.”

  “Even during a civil war?”

  “The situation’s calmed down a bit,” she replied unconvincingly.

  Max sensed she was hiding something, but what was it? He’d felt it from the beginning. A professional liar himself, he knew how to spot an amateur who’d never make it to his level of the game. The ones with no talent for it, like Vandana, didn’t have the skills for his kind of work.

  “You’re right,” she said, changing the subject, “I left the flowers.”

  13

  David lay hidden beneath layers of therapeutic materials, and Béatrice hovered over him with a facecloth, which she used very tenderly to bathe his face, afraid of hurting him further. I feel like Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross in a half-tone Renaissance painting, thought Juliette. Outside the door, security agents kept watch. She was a member of their group now. She knew their habits, their tics, and their first names. They shared the same routine. The fountain at the end of the corridor, for example, was their turf. When they came into the room, however, it was always on tiptoe, but it was more for her and Béatrice than for David. He’d become part of the furniture, a thing, a pall.

  At first, the two women had taken turns at his bedside, but now they left together in the evenings. Once in the apartment at the Rockhill, Juliette found Béatrice crying alone in the dark. Then they hugged each other tight. Juliette had just decided to tell Béatrice about her pregnancy, but she was no longer brave enough.

  There was a long, plaintive ring of the phone in the night, and Juliette ran to pick it up before Béatrice had time to ask “Who could that be at such an hour?” Juliette knew somehow it was Max on the line.

  “How’s David?”

  His voice was surprisingly clear, though it came from the other side of the world.

  There was so much to tell him, but she couldn’t get a thing out. Like a bashful young girl, she got all tangled up in polite phrases. I must sound like an idiot.

  Max, genuinely polite, pretended not to notice.

  Since yesterday, David had become feverish and developed pneumonia. She told him about her last discussion with Dr. Dohmann, the EEGs he’d shown her. Barring a miracle, there was no hope, he had said. She spared him the details of her fainting, her legs folding just like that in front of everyone, then the crying in Béatrice’s arms, both of them in tears.

  “What will you do?” Max inquired.

  She closed her eyes: “I don’t know. I believe in miracles.”

  Max did, as well, but what was that worth compared to the belief of Dr. Migneault? Dohmann’s replacement was a thorough young doctor with a shaved head, a bit tough-looking. Béatrice suspected this was to pre-empt the appearance of baldness. Juliette and Dr. Migneault shared a love of chocolate. She pretended to hope, but knew she could not. She found herself in an office with Béatrice and a corpulent social worker. Patterson stood in the hall, discreetly out of the way.

  “The decision is yours and yours alone,” Migneault said with the appropriate flutter in his voice. “We can wait for weeks, if you wish, but his condition will not alter.” He glanced from the social worker to the pair of them. Juliette knew what was next.

  “David is clinically dead,” Migneault said.

  Whatever he said afterward didn’t register with Juliette. All her thoughts were for David. She pictured the timid young man who’d approached her in the cafeteria at McGill University, relived those evenings discussing international politics, those long walks in Westmount parks when he passionately but patiently explained the inevitable nature of things in general and the world order in particular. There was the coffee spilled in that Sherbrooke Street Restaurant and the young waitress’s irritability. What about that absurd shirt he absolutely had to hang on to, the stolen bike he never got back, his hopeless attempt at wearing contacts, or his illegible signature, and that mix-up at the post office — “Just why, tell me, do you have to write as though you’re retarded?” His last birthday was at Montebello. Never another. Never growing old. Dying young. Dying, period.

  Moments later, out in the corridor, Patterson was all solicitude. Words of encouragement were the very last thing she wanted to hear, neither his nor Béatrice’s. They’d abandoned David, and now it was her turn to do so. Dohmann and Migneault, too. What cowards we all are.

  Chocolate, once more, chocolate.

  David was not allowed to die, not until she decided. The terrorists had done their worst by leaving his fate in her hands.

  “Mukherjee remembered saying goodbye to David late in the afternoon,” Max continued, “about four-thirty. Luiz was with him on his way back, then nothing, the car just disappeared. No witnesses, just an explosion by the Yamuna in the evening. Near a Muslim slum … on top of it.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone’s talking.”

  “Majid Khankashi — Genghis Khan, they call him,” Max said. “Vandana told me he and David met often. Did he ever tell you what about?”

  “No.”

  Juliette regretted not having been more curious. David returned home from the High Commission worn out. Why bother him with questions?

  “He never came to see him in Maharani Bagh?”

  “Just evening phone calls … David never brought his work home with him.”

  “Except for the conference.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They met the day before the explosion.”

  Juliette hadn’t known that. Anyway, she never asked him about his movements. Why not ask Khankashi himself?

  Disappeared …

  She remembered once having met him by accident with David in Old Delhi near the Kasgari Mosque. The impeccably trimmed beard allowed a glimpse of what Juliette considered an enigmatic smile, one given to showing joy as well as sadness. He offered them tea in a nearby café. She’d felt no apprehension at the time. In the crowded streets, passersby eyed them with respect, and yet the papers portrayed Genghis Khan as a bloodthirsty Islamist, despite his being a Sufi mystic. How could there be a monster behind such a harmless facade? Why was David committing the blunder of being seen with him in public? She’d brought it up that evening, and his answer was, “If Sri Bhargava invites me to tea, I go. Both of them monsters, perhaps, but my job doesn’t exempt me from horror or allow me to pretend such people don’t exist.”

  “Sri Bhargava, founder of the Durgas,” said Max.

  “Ah, Vandana told you about them?” replied Juliette.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he sponsored the attack”?r />
  “I don’t know. Did David meet him or make contact?”

  “Not at all.”

  “What about members of the RSS or other Hindu groups?”

  “David never mentioned it.”

  “Any complaints to the High Commission about, say, ‘connections’ with the imam Khankashi?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any comments, accusations, or even threats from Hindu personnel? Or anyone, for that matter?”

  “Never.”

  “What about helping the imam … any insinuations or hints?”

  “No, I’m telling you, no! David knew his job to a T, as well as his mandate. He was in New Delhi to represent Canada and its citizens, not to mix in India’s internal controversies.”

  She recounted for him a discussion they’d had.

  “Having tea with a Muslim extremist, isn’t that taking sides?”

  “Khankashi’s no extremist.”

  “That’s definitely not what the Indian papers are saying about it, David.”

  “Only the ones that support the BJP, not all of them.”

  Max was puzzled: “You’re sure he said it that way?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Khankashi’s no extremist.”

  Police and security officers were rushing down the corridor and out of the stairwells, out of breath, sweaty and excited. Orders were bellowed. Juliette got into the middle of it all as Béatrice exited the elevator, where a uniformed man stopped her from going any farther.

  “What’s happened?”

  “They arrested someone in the kitchen.”

  They sent the two women home with an escort and a policeman to keep watch overnight. What was all this?

  The Rockhill turned into a fortress with the comforting presence of a patrol car in the parking lot. Another officer with a hat too big for him said good night to them in the corridor and touched the butt of his handgun as if to say Don’t worry. I’ll be right here.

  Béatrice closed the curtains with a dramatic sweep. There might be snipers hidden in the building facing them. No point taking chances. Juliette could not sleep and felt guilty for not staying with David.

  The phone rang. It was Patterson back from his information hunt.

  “The unidentified man was walking in a suspicious way through the hospital basement. An employee thought he looked strange, so he alerted security.”

  The rest of it followed the usual pattern: The supposed cook didn’t have his ID with him, nothing. He tried to ditch the security agents before the arrival of the police; then there was a foot-race through Orthopedics, a fight in Obstetrics among a crowd of panic-stricken mothers, and finally the takedown in Rheumatology.

  “Was he there for David?” asked Juliette.

  The police didn’t know. They hadn’t finished questioning him. Patterson promised to keep them posted.

  The next day, Dr. Migneault found Juliette at the vending machines. “I’m sorry I didn’t put things too well yesterday.”

  “No, you were right. Why insist on overdoing it?”

  “In the face of life’s horrors, we don’t count for much, nothing at all.”

  14

  Max and Jayesh went through the Palika Bazaar followed closely by bhikharis, a whole family of them in rags with hands outstretched. When the two men reached the limits of their territory, they turned back. They emerged at Connaught Place, and more beggars followed in their wake. Jayesh ignored them, the same as the others.

  The two men stopped under the arcade of the Regal Cinema. Nearby, next to a column, a shoeshine boy called out for customers in a tired voice. Most people paid no attention to him, but one man stopped, rolled up his pant leg, and put his foot on the small wooden box. The shine began without a word. When it was done, the customer tossed some coins on the ground, but the shoeshine boy didn’t seem at all insulted. He fell upon the coins scattered on the pavement amongst the passersby, before returning to his spot by the column.

  “Dalit,” murmured Jayesh, “untouchable.”

  Max turned to him and Jayesh explained: “If the shoeshine boys touch the leather shoes, which are made from cowhide, they’re impure. That’s why that guy threw down the money instead of putting it into his hand.”

  Jayesh was a Vaishya — merchant class, third rung on the Hindu social ladder — and this explained his father’s occupation. Even in America, Siddhartha Srinivasan respected, in his own way, his place within the caste system.

  While Max was speaking to Juliette on the phone the day before, Jayesh was at the Kasgari Mosque impersonating a CBI investigator: “Just a few more questions about some things we need to clear up.” He’d met the “second-in-command” of the imam Khankashi. He was told the imam had kept in touch with David because both of them were on the same wavelength, especially about Kashmir. The imam would never openly acknowledge such a thing. Genghis Khan had supported the separatist movement from the beginning, while still keeping his distance from Pakistan. It wasn’t easy. The brutality of the Indian forces, especially in Srinagar, played right into the hands of Pakistan. Pervez Musharraf’s government would have welcomed this son of Islam safely home from Hindu territory with open arms. Khankashi was an idealist, though. He professed to believe in a multi-ethnic India, as Gandhi and Nehru had imagined it. An India where Hindus, Parsis, Christians, and Muslims could live in harmony with respect for one another.

  “So, you’re thinking bluff?”

  “Of course. The usual sitar song to put people to sleep while the Islamist killers of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen build up their arsenal, courtesy of the Pakistani secret service.”

  “Sufis and jihadists fighting side by side … pretty weird, no?”

  “I’m telling you, showbiz. Whatever. The imam shouting from the rooftops that Muslims are second-class citizens, worse than untouchables. From time to time, some Dalits get roughed up, but Muslims get exterminated … with the government’s blessing. No problem with putting Hindus first in everything in this country: schoolbooks get ‘revised’ to showcase Brahmin heritage.

  “In a situation like this,” Jayesh went on, “Genghis Khan has no choice but to walk the straight and narrow, and for years the Vajpayee government has been longing for him to step out of line so they can put him away. So what does our holy man do? He cites proverbs from the Mahatma and yet he still rips into the BJP and the Islamists every chance he gets — James Bond included. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day we found Khankashi stuck away in the country eating bread and water while he weaves the cotton threads of his charkha, like Mahatma. It would be just like that asshole to slide back into the old passive resistance number!

  “David’s association with the holy man had tongues wagging among Bhargava Hindus, without a doubt; not that he made a point of publicizing it, but it was no secret either. I mean, tea out in public in Old Delhi. He had to be doing favours for the imam on the q.t., in the guise of diplomacy.”

  Max came back to Vandana’s theory that James Bond had probably used David as an example to other diplomats that they had better play in their own sandbox. “Maybe, but if so, why didn’t they claim the attack? Terrorism has a marketing scheme all its own, but it’s been a whole week and nothing. Old news. There’s been Afghanistan, then Kashmir and the worsening situation between India and Pakistan took centre stage and stepped back into the general melee.”

  “But getting back to Genghis Khan,” said Jayesh. “Whatever his Islamist reputation, especially among the papers loyal to the BJP, he denounced the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11 — against the spirit of the Qur’an, he said.”

  “I bet that put a chill on his Islamist buddies in Pakistan,” guessed Max.

  “Precisely.”

  “Yet the Indian cops are sure he’s hiding out in Karachi.”

  “They have no idea where he is, so they dream up any
old thing, as usual. I think he’s still in Delhi and laughing his ass off.”

  “So, a fake ‘moderate,’ is that it?”

  “That’s what the Durgas are saying. They’d do anything to get their hands on him. Bhargava would love to finish him off personally.”

  “And where exactly is he? How do we get in touch, talk to him?”

  “No one knows but his closest cronies.”

  This was just getting better and better with both suspects disappearing into thin air: Genghis Khan to his lair and James Bond into clandestine retirement. One thing was certain, though. Dhaliwal and his team were going to have to treat this one with kid gloves. If they did tie the attack on David to his contacts with Khankashi, it would make waves that might drown them all, even Bernatchez and the High Commission. For instance, if Dhaliwal could prove that David had “privileged” connections with Muslim officials — already suspected of financing or protecting Kashmiri terrorists — Canada would be in hot water, just when its businessmen were about to break into this new market and important contracts were to be signed at the Montreal conference.

  Was Bhargava the culprit? It was a sexy hypothesis, but it couldn’t withstand serious scrutiny. Hindu extremists didn’t give a damn about world opinion. Their country’s “Hinduization,” as they put it, was domestic business, a religio-nationalist delirium that knew no diplomatic scruples. What was it Vandana said? As recently as March, Prime Minister Vajpayee had crossed his arms while fascist groups in Gujarat staged pogroms against Muslims for two months without denouncing or forbidding them or even sending in the police. A government like that was not going to bother about a diplomat — Third Secretary to boot — being friends with the imam of a mosque.

  Nope. The answer had to be somewhere else.

  Summer 1984. Max was living in the U.S. under three different names and passports, still a Canadian citizen according to two other passports he hardly used anymore. Now he was in Hy’s Steak House in Toronto, specializing in T-bone, filet mignon, and surf ’n’ turf, sitting on a leather seat worn in by an army of clients every day at noon in the thrall of red meat. Philippe sat facing him; he was soon leaving for Bangkok with his small family. David was six and mischievous-looking in the photo his father had thumbed a million times. Philippe looked up with that winning smile he often showed. Max smiled back, but for different reasons.