by Mainak Dhar
The next morning did nothing to improve my mood.
When I switched my phone on, I saw twenty missed calls from Zoya and ten text messages in the hours following the raid. I had not only turned my phone off but removed its battery so that its GPS tracker could not be turned on remotely.
The temptation was strong to talk to her, and I needed to know more about what was going on before I put her at risk by alerting Thapa that I was alive. Being presumed dead bought me time to investigate what was happening and how best to proceed next.
I browsed the Net on one of the goons’ phones and cursed loudly, waking Karzai up.
'What happened? Are they coming?'
I showed him the screen, which had an article with a photo of the man I had known as Thapa.
Vikram Thapa, whose real name was Pruthvi Sai, was tipped to become the next director of the Intelligence Bureau. The article talked about his illustrious career spent handling dangerous assignments in India and abroad, how his intelligence network had let to the raid that had ended the terror sniper menace in Mumbai. Another report talked of how a couple of isolated lone-wolf attacks had taken place in the last twenty-four hours, but by and large, the terror attacks had ceased after the raid.
I swore under my breath, trying to control my anger. 'Bastard! His promotion was coming up, and he wanted to erase all the evidence of his past sins. I’m pretty sure he’s the bastard behind that drug ring in Afghanistan, given how insistent he was on you taking out anyone who knew of Lotus.'
I looked at Karzai to see how he reacted to the mention of Project Lotus. This time, I saw a very different reaction. There was a look of confusion, since it was clear that so much of what had driven him over the last few months was being revealed to be a lie. There was building anger; rage directed at those who had used him.
Suddenly, he shook his head, as if something didn’t make sense. 'He could have just got those officers taken out by local hitmen. Why me? Why set this up as a terror attack? Why kill all those other people?'
'Because one death is a murder and will be investigated. A handful of deaths of officers who served close to each other would also arouse suspicions and would be investigated in detail. But a hundred deaths is an atrocity – where the details and backgrounds of each victim are rarely looked at.'
We went over various news websites, trying to see what else we could learn. Anything that would help me figure a way to take things forward. The first thing we learned was that the Pakistani president was planning to come to India.
Varsha Singh was on the web link, 'Over the past week, tensions have been high along the Line of Control given the targeted assassinations of former Indian armed forces officers by what the Indian government claimed to be Pakistani-sponsored terrorists. We've had at least a dozen exchanges of fire along the LoC. The Pakistanis have accused Indian forces of using heavy artillery. Pakistani President Asghar Karimi, who stormed to power in a military coup a few months ago and has been battling calls for a return to democracy at home, welcomed the end of the sniper attacks, saying the ISI had in fact passed on information to the Indian intelligence agencies to help them track down and kill the Mumbai sniper, reportedly an Afghan fanatic trained by ISIS.'
The streaming video now cut to show Karimi looking dapper in a suit, with his salt-and-pepper beard neatly trimmed. Unlike most tinpot military dictators, he had stopped wearing his uniform and medals when he took over. Instead, he made a conscious effort to show himself to be a statesman trying to rescue his country from ruin.
'I wish to reassure our Indian friends that we are fighting a common enemy – terrorism. The proof of that is in what happened yesterday, when our security services collaborated with their Indian counterparts to help track down this killer and his henchmen, ending their killing spree. I want to tell my fellow Pakistanis that we are in a state of war against these terrorists who would destroy us, backed by the same evil forces that are destroying societies and countries in the Middle East. I promise to lead us through these trying times, and as a sign of my willingness to work with the Indians, I extend an invitation to the Indian prime minister to meet and discuss how our nations can collaborate on this.'
That evening, Karzai and I sat in our filthy room. I was still at a loss on how to proceed further, to figure out what was going on.
'Karimi must be in on it,' I said suddenly. 'I wonder if he has any past connection to Thapa… I mean Sai.'
'You're assuming that because you hate Karimi's guts for what he's done to you before. You yourself told me that you had killed his nephew and he destroyed your career.'
'Karimi supported terrorists coming over the LoC for years. I've seen what his nephew did with my own eyes. A man like that doesn't suddenly become a peacemaker overnight.'
'People change. Politicians change all the time when it's convenient to them.'
I just snorted, too irritated to say anything.
'Major, how long will you keep that pistol with you and leave me unarmed? Not fair, is it?'
I glared at him. 'I've kept you alive when I could have killed you. Isn't that enough?'
'We're stuck together. If we both want to live, we need to work together and…'
I cut him off in mid-sentence. 'Look, we are not buddies and we never will be.'
He shrugged and got back to making tea. He made another attempt at conversation. 'Why did you join the army?'
For a second, I considered ignoring him, but at that time, he was literally the only person in the world I could have spoken to, so I replied, 'When I was a kid, I guess it was the glamour. As I grew up and understood the world I was growing up in, it was to help defend my country, to make a difference in a way that sitting in an office could never do.'
As Karzai handed me my cup of tea, his eyes caught mine. 'We're not so different, Major.'
My instinctive response was to tell him that we were very different. Him, a terrorist, a gun for hire. No way could he compare himself to an Indian Army officer.
But he raised his left hand in a conciliatory gesture, palm out, to tell me to let him continue. 'My father was an engineer who studied in the US. He came back in the late seventies to help his home country develop. I was a small kid then, and have no memories of the US, though I was born there.'
I looked up in surprise. That was something I had never heard before. Karzai was a US citizen by birth?
'Then came the Russians. Oh, it was hell. I remember the bombings, the gunfire all night. I was old enough to register some of it. Hell of a childhood to have, but my father insisted I get an education. He was working in the government and used his contacts to get me to Russia to study. I dropped my education and came back when the Russians left, and the Talibs swept through the country. My father, a US-educated government officer who had worked with the Russians, was a prime target. The Talibs killed him and hanged his body outside our home. My mother was spirited away by some relatives connected with fighters who would join what later became the Northern Alliance.'
I was holding my cup, but neither of us was drinking.
Karzai kept speaking as if he needed to get it all this off his chest. 'I was young, angry. I wanted revenge; I wanted to protect my people from the new evil spreading across our country. So-called religious students, and later their Saudi funders, Osama and Al-Qaeda. The rest you know. Northern Alliance, being trained by Americans, Russians and yes, some Indian instructors as well. All I learned about sniping I learned then. Everyone saw the evil brewing in Afghanistan, but nobody wanted to get their hands dirty, and left us to do all the fighting. Till 9/11, of course.'
He paused to drink his tea and I took a sip before asking, 'Why the hell did you join the Taliban later?'
I could see a look in his eyes, one of pain, of betrayal. It was a look I had seen in the mirror when I had looked at myself after leaving the army.
'What did they do to our country after supposedly freeing us from the Taliban? The same old warlords came back into power. The same bloody co
rrupt officials. The US troops were professional enough, but then came the private contractors when they began withdrawing their troops. Where did that leave the people? The same as ever – at the mercy of the people in power who cared nothing for them. You oversimplify it when you say I joined the Taliban. I never did. First, I joined the Afghan army to try to give peace a chance. But then a girl… someone I cared about…'
He paused, and I could see how hard it was for him to continue.
'Some American security contractors got drunk and went out for fun one night in a village on the outskirts of Kabul. They raped the women, killed anyone who resisted. I was away at that time. Arfa killed herself, unable to live with the shame. I took up my gun, asked around. A lot of my old buddies were now in Afghan intelligence. I got the name of the American unit and contractors. I ambushed them on a patrol. I shot six of them that night. After that, there was nothing for me to do but hide. The army was hunting me, the Americans were hunting me. So I ran for some time and the joined up with some old friends trying to gather together old Northern Alliance fighters, who were disillusioned with what had happened to our country.'
'What about ISIS in Iraq, about killing American soldiers?'
Karzai looked at me and smiled. ‘So, you believe everything Thapa told you? I had nothing to do with that. I took out some corrupt local officials and a few smuggling rings in Afghanistan but never went to Iraq, Syria or wherever they told you. I got requests to do jobs by people who needed help. I turned most down. But there were always men who deserved to die. Contractors who had killed or raped civilians, our old enemies in the Taliban who were now somehow the ones in power. I never shot a civilian. Then one day, a man I trusted, someone in Afghan intelligence, told me about a big operation. Two American drone strikes which had killed over a hundred innocents. He showed me intercepts and papers from ISI, showing how this operation was being run by some Indian officers along with the Americans, who had deliberately targeted insurgents when they visited their families under a project called Lotus. He told me the Indians got involved because some of these insurgents had found their way to Kashmir and ended up on their radar. Highly classified and something the Americans never owned up to.'
'I can understand your being angry. I can also see that you are being manipulated, perhaps by the same people who set me up. The Pakistani involvement actually increases the probability that Karimi is involved, but that might be another smoke screen. But why the hell did you come here to avenge those deaths?'
Karzai looked at me, fire in his eyes. 'One of the dead was my mother.’
I listened in silence. There was really nothing I could say.
'That's why Abdul insisted on coming along. It was a family matter, not just any mission. He may have had problems, but when I got the chance to come here and avenge the death of my mother and other innocents, he volunteered. Abdul was the black sheep of the family. I would never have approved of bringing him along, but under the circumstances, I couldn’t say no. I have killed men here, maybe those who did evil things, but now I wonder if I had any right to end their lives. They did nothing to hurt me. I was uncomfortable with all this to begin with, but accepted it as a price to pay to avenge the deaths of my mother and others. I am not a soldier by your definition. I do not wear a uniform, but I have my own code of honour. In the past few days I realized I have gone against that. I have become the very thing I was fighting against —a gun for hire, with no ideals and no concept of who should be a target in war. I will have to live with that. I will have to live with what I have become. A monster.’
He got up and walked to a corner of the room and sat down, facing away from me. I looked at Karzai and realized that perhaps he was right. Perhaps we weren’t so different at all. I had fought for a flag, a country, my ideals. He had fought for his own cause — to avenge the loss of loved ones and for his countrymen. We both thought we were fighting the good fight, in our own ways, and we had both been misled and betrayed by those we thought we could count on. We had both learned the hard way the lesson many soldiers learn — that we end up shedding blood, our own and that of others, to serve a purpose that ends up being nowhere near as noble or as glorious as we had been led to believe.
I could hear Karzai sigh loudly. Perhaps he was thinking of the same things I was.
He looked at me, smiling sadly. ‘One of my Russian trainers who had served in all kinds of hellholes with their special forces, Spetsnaz, told me only two percent men are born killers. The rest are either victims or passengers. In any firefight, most soldiers end up missing their shots, because they can’t bring themselves to kill a fellow human. A small percentage do most of the killing. He saw me as one of the two percent. I took it as a compliment then. I was young enough and stupid enough to be proud of being labelled a killer. I wonder are people like us killers, the ones who are labelled a hero or a terrorist, depending on which excuse – a call to duty or faith – we obey?’
We just sat in silence for some time. There wasn't really much to say. Finally, I put the pistol on the floor between us and stretched out, planning to get a good night's sleep. Karzai saw the gesture. I could see the surprise in his eyes.
'Major, what are you thinking?'
‘I’m thinking you are a natural-born killer, indeed. You could talk someone to death,’ I looked at him and grinned. He smiled back.
'We do have some things in common. The same bastard screwed us over. Both of us have spent the last day like civilians, hunkering down and reacting to what's happening. It's time we got back to acting like who we really are, take the initiative,' I said.
Karzai raised his eyebrows as if to ask what I had in mind.
'Tomorrow we go to war.'
Then I went to sleep.
'Come on, young man, have some more. Sunanda, give him one more piece of the sandesh. Eat up, you won't get something so delicious this side of Kolkata.'
I had come prepared for many things. I had got my head shaved, bought glasses and a fresh change of clothes, all paid for in cash that I had got from Karzai's stash. To most people other than those who knew me, I would perhaps not have been recognisable at all. In fact, the first time I saw myself in the mirror, I had a hard time recognising myself with the bald head and glasses. I had also bought a nice pen and leather-bound writing pad, which I thought would go with my cover of being an aspiring author wanting insights into both the process of writing, especially about the subject my interviewee was an expert on. I had reached out via email through a new account that I had created. To my surprise, the man had agreed not just briefly to chat on the phone as I had suggested but also meet up in person. That quickly turned into an invitation for lunch when I told him I was a struggling author who needed help.
What I hadn't been prepared for was how much I was going to be fed. MK Dhar and his wife were sitting at the small dining table of their modest home in the suburbs, asking about my life. It didn't seem right to lie to such good people, but there were things I couldn't tell them, so I mostly tried to be honest. I was truthful about my family and childhood, about having worked in the corporate sector. Of course, I left out any mention of the army and the writing bit was pure fiction. I also changed my surname to Roy, in case the old man made connections to a certain Aaditya Ghosh who had been in the news.
'My grandson is also called Aaditya. I hope he grows up to be a nice young man like you.'
Mrs. Dhar beamed at me as she shared photographs of her grandson, playing on the beach, sitting with his parents, eating chocolates, playing football.
'Sunanda, we'll FaceTime with Aadi later tonight. Now, let me see how I can help this Aaditya with his needs.'
As we retreated to the small study, I saw shelves crammed with books and an old computer where the old man got his writing done. I had read up on him, and it impressed the hell out of me. A highly decorated officer, known for putting his neck on the line. Once, he had walked into the Golden Temple dressed as a fruit-seller during Operation Black Thunder, his baske
t containing weapons for government covert operatives hidden among the terrorists inside. Then he had retired and become a bestselling author. His breakout book Open Secrets had offered insight into how India’s intelligence services functioned, and how they were sometimes misused by those in power. He was known to call out things most people wouldn't dare to, and if I was to wage a war against those who had wronged me, I needed intel. I was blind about who my enemy really was, and after learning about M.K. Dhar and hearing his candour on TV, I had reached out to him on the off chance that he may have something that I could use. We spoke about writing for some time. I bid my time to get to what I was really interested in.
'Suppose someone uncovers something wrong within the IB. Say, corruption, for example. How could they be heard? In the corporate arena, there are whistleblower policies and people can call a number or send a mail to an account, knowing their anonymity will be protected. How would it work in the IB?'
Dhar shifted uneasily in his chair. 'Young man, an intelligence agency is not an accounting firm. Dirty linen cannot be washed in public. Not just to protect methods and techniques, but to protect sources. A source burned is often a dead source. But there are checks and balances. Any officer can report things going amiss. Action will be taken, often quietly, often behind the scenes. People reassigned, asked to retire. Of course, if the law is breached, the person is cut loose to face the law and the bureau melts away.'
'Sir, that's fine for someone within the bureau. They'll know whom to reach out to. What if someone on the outside were to find evidence of wrongdoing? This is the plotline of my story. I wanted to at least build off what might actually work in real life.'
He gave me a long, hard look before continuing. 'Son, if this someone had some brains on him, he would not speak too much to too many people. We look like accountants, but many of us are pretty dangerous people. That's how we survive decades of tangoing with terrorists and killers. The first rule would be to not do what so many dumb people do today – to vomit out their allegations on social media.'