by Mario Bolduc
“The girl that usually works here, I’d like to talk to her …”
With his serving spoon raised, the server looked at Max and Juliette in puzzlement, while customers behind them began grousing once again, louder this time. He turned to one of his colleagues and said something in Hindi. A second man approached them, while a third dialled his phone, and behind him a door opened and closed. Through the half-opening, appeared another uniform — the young girl’s.
There wasn’t a minute to lose, and Max pushed Juliette aside, leaned on the cash register, and jumped over the counter, jostling the server as he did so. Behind Juliette, customers were shouting, as indignation gave way to panic. Max ran for the door, but the telephone guy was in his way, so a solid punch sent him flying into a pile of dishes that cascaded onto him in a deafening racket. Now the entire cafeteria was dead silent, with all eyes on the Indian counter. Max made the most of it to head for the door, this time with Juliette trailing behind. Before it could close behind them, though, she saw two security firm uniforms running after them with walkie-talkies in hand.
The food at the Mughal Palace was prepared at the restaurant a few streets down and delivered every morning. Max and Juliette found themselves in the storage space that was also the loading dock for some other franchises. At the end of the day, it was also where the empty cardboard boxes were piled, along with the leftovers and other detritus from the clients. In other words, they were backstage, and they saw the Indian girl running for the far exit, and behind them, the two security officers. Everything was stacked against Juliette and Max: the girl and the agents knew the place, and soon the police would have it surrounded. The security agents had to be slowed down, no matter what. Juliette got Béatrice’s 25-calibre handgun out of her bag — “easier than a tube of lipstick” — and she fired in the general direction of the men, but into the air nevertheless. Clearly, they weren’t armed, because they froze on the spot. This was beyond their pay grade, so they left things to the “real” cops.
The alley was deserted, and the young Indian woman had disappeared. The security agents had given up completely. Now there were sirens, but the officers knew their quarry had weapons and would use them. Max and Juliette looked around. They were in the rear alley behind the stores on Jean Talon, with stairs leading to apartments above. The girl could have dodged into almost any place across the way. Max and Juliette had no way of finding her. It was all over.
Just then, Juliette spotted a statue lying horizontal next to the brick wall of what appeared to have once been a store. She knew it to be Shiva Nataraja with its four arms dancing in a circle of fire, and in doing so, the right foot crushed Mulayaka, the demon of ignorance. It was the most common god figure in India, and she’d seen it everywhere, from the Ramnagar Fort palace in Varanasi to the off-duty shop at Indira Gandhi Airport. The local Indian population had converted this store into a temple. Juliette dragged Max along with her. If ever they needed the gods, especially Shiva, it was now. Inside, it was dark and deserted, the old statue in the alley having been replaced by a shiny new one. The wheel of flames was larger and even more spectacular.
For an instant, Juliette felt as though she were back in India, instantly transported thousands of kilometres from Montreal. Somehow, nothing mattered much anymore. She was barely aware of police sirens wailing, their pursuers, the shots she’d fired, and she’d fire again if need be. It had all just faded away.
Max seemed similarly affected by the place and atmosphere. Shiva the dancer god was Pascale’s favourite — “Fear nothing. I am here to protect you.” A sound caught their attention, a rubbing, a bit like a snake sliding across the ground. In India, thought Juliette, the temples were infested with snakes, symbol of Ananta, who watched over Vishnu in his sleep. Had Montreal Hindus gone so far as to import snakes to decorate their temples? First Max, then Juliette looked behind the statue of Shiva, and the rubbing sound recurred. Max heard a wisp of breath, and, in the dimness, spotted a glimpse of silhouette, then the Mughal Palace uniform and the girl wearing it. She was in the corner, rolled up in a ball with her legs bent tight. What they had heard was the scuffing of her shoes on the temple pavement.
She seemed terror-struck, and now that she’d been caught, she didn’t hold her breath anymore. Her breathing was jerky and nervous, as though she couldn’t choose between howling in panic or breaking down in tears. Max held out his right hand to her, palm open like Shiva, and softly said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re here to protect you.”
“Abhaya mudra,” repeated Juliette in Hindi. At last her university courses were of some use.
The girl seemed somewhat reassured.
“You are friends of David’s?” she asked hesitantly in English.
“His uncle,” said Max.
“His wife,” said Juliette.
The girl closed her eyes a long while, but then the sirens snapped Max and Juliette back to reality.
“Do you know this temple? Is there another way out?”
Wordlessly, the young woman got up and took them to a hidden door to the right of the altar, then a stairway behind a partition, along the wall. In moments, they were on the roof among empty cans of spray paint and used condoms. From here, they could see the neighbouring roofs, as well as the terraces for some of the duplexes, and, below them, the streets being throttled by the fruitless search for Max, Juliette, and Miss X. Fruitless for the moment, at least.
The young woman turned to them. “My name’s Indrani.”
Max recalled a corpulent man, proudly so, as if girth were a sign of success and prosperity, an obesity he displayed with neither embarrassment nor regret, going so far as to select tight shirts that underscored his belly. He’d come to America thin and svelte, but, like a tree over the years, his trunk had acquired new layers. Now the man who stood before them had hollow cheeks, the light in his face had gone out, and his emaciated limbs floated in clothes that were too ample. Siddharth Srinivasan was a mere shadow of his former self. It seemed to Max that Jayesh’s father was a sick man.
“Contrariness, that’s his problem,” exclaimed his wife wiping her hands on her apron. Deepa went around the stationary bicycle that stood in his way and toward the new arrivals.
Jayesh’s parents had passed their prominent facial traits on to their son, though he resembled his mother more. Wearing a sports shirt and slacks like her husband, Max felt she was responsible for Siddharth’s new look and lifestyle.
“She’s been feeding me grapefruit for six months,” he sighed.
Deepa turned to Max. “The same food every day, as if it were all my fault! Who’s been stuffing themselves these past thirty years? Who, eh?”
Max just knew somehow they had this same discussion every day, too, with or without an audience. Deepa and Siddharth exchanged accusing glances punctuated with acerbic remarks until they realized Juliette and Indrani were standing behind Max, slightly off to the side.
“You and Jayesh are in trouble again,” remarked Siddharth, noticing the two women.
“Jayesh isn’t, at least.”
“That would indeed surprise me,” replied Deepa turning to Juliette and adding, “it is so terrible what happened to your husband.”
Their living room hadn’t changed a bit. There was the same extravagant furniture, way too massive for the Birnam Street place, the same abstract-but-kitschy pictures testifying to their fumbling attempts to blend in locally.
Max consoled himself with the thought that the bad taste acquired here reflected more on North America than it did on the Srinivasans. The wall also displayed photos tracing the life path of Siddharth; first black-and-whites showing a slim, young Indian man who sold used Oldsmobile Cutlasses, then moved on to new ones in an immense fluorescent-lit showroom.
The Srinivasans could have moved out of the neighbourhood, like numerous other Indians who had “made it,” and set up in some cushy suburb on t
he South Shore, for instance, but they could never bring themselves to leave the triplex on Birnam Street. They’d made one very big move, and that was enough for them.
Siddharth asked Max, “Do you need a lawyer?”
“Just a safe place for Indrani right now.”
“Well, she’s got that here, but I’m worried about if she’s eating enough.” Siddharth turned to Indrani and said something in Hindi. She shook her head.
“Okay,” Deepa said, “Jayesh’s room, but she’ll have to excuse the mess.”
“Unless she’s partial to the Dark Demon,” replied her husband with a mysterious smile.
Dark Demon? Through the partly drawn curtain over the kitchen sink was the apparition of an enormous homestyle Daybreak 34 RV, which half-filled the backyard and was about the size of Red Fort in Delhi.
“That horror! He loves it more than his wife.”
The Srinivasans were used to eating in front of the TV. That night, while an exhausted Indrani slept in the next room, they, Max, and Juliette finished their meal watching a news report of the Indo-Canadian conference, which had just begun.
Naturally, the death of Patterson, following so soon after David’s, weighed on them, and the organizers, who knew Patterson, praised his courage, honesty, professionalism, and great knowledge of the Asian markets. Next came Detective Sergeant Mancini’s press conference on the “mysterious” murder, as well as the flight of Max and the complicity — now no longer in doubt — of Juliette. The “hostage” had surely become an accomplice via a particularly shocking manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome. Curiously, there was no mention of Indrani in the report. Max recognized three Mughal Palace employees and realized the scale of the police search around the Labyrinth, including his old friend Luc Roberge. Standing next to Mancini, Roberge summed up Max’s criminal “career” for the viewers. A notorious fraud, he called him, a crook who was a past master in the art of manipulation and self-transformation, a recidivist who had cut a swath of misfortune and desolation over the years, but a murderer? Here Roberge hesitated. He’d known his share of crooks, and very rarely were they killers. He had his doubts about Max’s guilt on this score, although with him anything was possible, so perhaps he had changed.
Siddharth Srinivasan pushed away the thali, which contained the remainder of his dried grapefruit. This was really not fit to eat.
45
Indrani came from a small village in Bihar, one of the poorest states of India. Nourished by this misery, of course, were also hate, violence, and intolerance. Hindus and Muslims faced off, just waiting for a chance to exterminate one another. Thus childhood for Indrani and her older sister was unhappy, especially with their mother raped and killed by Muslims. All their father thought about was avenging her death, and he turned into an enraged fanatic. Indrani and her sister saw the RSS militants meeting regularly in their home, each more radical than the next, and talking about it long into the night. Gradually, the girls joined with the adults in their way of thinking, renouncing their Muslim friends and boycotting non-Hindu stores. They followed their father to Uttar Pradesh when he went to try and find a better life. What they found was more like a battlefield.
Ayodhya.
The destruction of the Babri Mosque, then the pogrom, saw thousands of Muslims hunted by Hindu extremists.
“That morning, the RSS fanatics marched just outside our windows,” Indrani recalled. “My father was among them, and he was proud to be there. Him and his high-flying zealots were finally going to deal with that sacrilegious mosque. For my sister and me, it was the finest proof of love he could offer us. The greatest homage to my mother as well. When they got there they took apart the mosque stone by stone like an army of ants, and they yelled Hinduist slogans while they were doing it.”
One hundred and fifty thousand fundamentalists, including Indrani’s father in the front lines, exacting vengeance for his wife. Normally, the police would intervene to stop it, but the BJP-run government of Uttar Pradesh ordered them not to.
The killings began the following night all over India, and once again the authorities refused to intervene. Two thousand dead in three days: Muslims, mostly, including women and children, but finally Delhi did apply some pressure, and the cops of Uttar Pradesh were forced reluctantly to do their work and gradually gain control of the situation.
“When my father got home, he was changed,” Indrani continued. “He was even proud more spellbound than before, and that’s when I got scared. He’d killed Muslims with his own hands. He was even to be covered in the blood of swine, as he called them. Then he told us the most horrible things, and he smiled as he did it. The old men he stripped to see if they were circumcised, then killed. Women and children were thrown in the river, while onlookers smoked bidis. Even worse things than that — women with their breasts cut off, young girls impaled as their parents watched before dying themselves, slowly, though, to make the pleasure last.”
Then came the calm, the warrior’s rest. The father made plans, which he explained to Indrani and her sister. Indrani was disgusted, but dared not let on. Their father’s vengeance grew and grew. He wanted a gang of his own, his personal organization, a sort of shock troop. He’d shown what he was capable of, and that’s when he decided to create the Durgas.
“Your father is Sri Bhargava?”
“Yes.”
At first, it was a small fringe group like any other, but even the hard-liners of RSS were taken aback. The James Bond of “Hinduness” had one sole objective, if he couldn’t pursue Muslims into Pakistan, he could at least exterminate them in India. His determination spiralled upward. Bhargava had an organization with disciples and sympathizers. He was all the more terrifying for being soft-voiced and calm, unlike the henchmen who lay around his house. He was always poised and serene, aloof, like a sadhu, or Buddhist monk and, with a contented smile he spoke of pogroms as nirvana, his two adored daughters by his side.
“In 1992, around the time of Ayodhya, the Bharatiya Janata Party wasn’t yet the political powerhouse it is today,” Indrani explained. The National Congress Party of Gandhi and Nehru had almost always held power in Delhi, an immovable object no one could imagine declining.
At the end of the nineties, the BJP had a chance at power, but some convincing and reassurance had to be carried out. That meant breaking with the most radical Hinduists, such as the Durgas. So the party decided to cut off Bhargava, and this made him furious. Being at the grass roots of the Hinduist movement, Bhargava and the others had supplied the BJP with its most devoted and determined members, whose enthusiasm could sway the silent masses. Now the party was going to form a government, and it pushed aside the militant base of extremists who had devoted their lives to Hindutva.
The Durgas were soon going to need a source of funds or cease their operations. So what was Bhargava’s brilliant idea? Using SCI, which was building a dam in Kashmir. That was the source to turn to. With this in mind, Bhargava moved there with his two daughters and others like him. They set up in the region of Baramulla, though separately, thus appearing to be workers from the south eager to leave their furnace of a village for mountainside rupees.
Here, playing the Hinduist card was going to be more delicate than in Uttar Pradesh. In the rest of the country, Muslims were a minority, but in Kashmir, they outnumbered Hindus, except in Jammu, the winter capital. Still, Bhargava was a believer. Indrani feigned belief too, but could no longer tolerate her father and sister’s murdering madness. Avenging her mother, sure. But Indrani had the impression it had no end, and was even a pretext for the sheer pleasure of inflicting pain. In her eyes, the Jhelum site was turning into hell itself, a quicksand sucking in the company bosses. The only goal of her father’s band of agitators was not to close the site, she explained, but on the contrary, simply to apply pressure and create an impossible situation, yet one with an exit available to Susan Griffith and the other bigwigs. The bottom line was that
Bhargava had set the company up so completely that when things had gone far enough south, he showed up in Griffith’s office made a proposal: the famous “second agreement.”
“Do you have any proof of this?”
“I am your proof. I heard it all, saw it all … my sister, too.”
Very soon, the country caught fire. In, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, or Uttar Pradesh once again, and Bihar and even Bengal, Hindu extremists attacked Muslims with steadily increasing daring and violence. Everywhere but Rashidabad. The severely drained and weakened organization had turned into a solid and well-oiled machine with considerable financial resources — courtesy of SCI. Dozens of shakhas, schools teaching Muslim-hate, opened all over the country. Hundreds of militants were housed, fed, and trained at the Canadian company’s expense.
In March 2002, after a week of massacres going both ways, Indrani decided to act. She had to bring down this industry of violence with its Hinduist militia and pogroms.
“To my father, I was just a girl with no access to anyone, a young Brahmin brought up in the cocoon of her caste and cut off from the outside world. He never thought I would carry through with my threats to turn him in and put an end to this horrid blackmail he was using against Griffith and her engineering firm.”
Indrani left Rashidabad in a panic. She boarded a bus for Srinagar, hoping to melt into the crowd in the summer capital. That’s where she found Ahmed Zaheer, the young man she’d met and befriended a few years earlier, and who now, when shuttling to and fro, offered the support of the Indian Geographic Magazine, based in Mumbai. Two outsiders: a Muslim homosexual and the young Brahmin daughter of a militant Hinduist, not a pair one would expect to be in touch. Then again, nothing was the same. Nothing made any sense in India anymore. The “blended world” we were now forced to live in was polluting every one of us. Well, Indrani was through with “purity.” Cleanliness seemed more and more repugnant, and her contact with the “filth” of Zaheer, and his impurity, gave her the feeling of being back in the real world, not that of the Qur’an or the Upanishads, two bibles, she said, that pitted man against man.