Sattar was not given a radio receiver. Communication would remain one-way—from Sattar to the Resident—and dictated by Sattar’s convenience.
***
It was four weeks before the correspondence address in Islamabad received a letter from a man writing to assure his friends that he had arrived safely, was in the process of securing suitable quarters, and would write to them as soon as he was done sorting out the nitty-gritties. Faisal Baig had successfully infiltrated the town of Kahuta.
Two days later, the second letter arrived in a village outside Peshawar, and was delivered to a tea shop in Islamabad by a truck driver a few hours later. In it, a man tersely informed his family that by god’s grace he had found gainful employment and would soon be able to send them some money. Meanwhile, it said, they were to continue praying at the dargah in the next village for god’s grace to keep shining benevolently upon them. That was Sarfaraz Minhas informing the Resident that he had managed to blend in.
Sattar wouldn’t write. He was supposed to be illiterate, one of the most difficult acts for a person who knew how to read and write to pull off. After a while even the most inconsequential piece of text would draw at the eyes, and avoiding that required constant vigilance. Instead, a short telegram reached an address outside ‘Pindi. Sattar would have dictated it at the post office to someone kind enough to write it down. It was understood by the Resident that any further communication from him would be bad news.
***
Although Baig had been infiltrated a few days before Sarfaraz, the Resident gave the latter the responsibility of achieving the first breakthrough. It had taken Sarfaraz a few days to be accepted among his linguistic cousins, the Minhas tribe which lived in villages and hamlets outside Kahuta town. While a prosperous few owned shops in Kahuta or worked in the market there, most Minhas were engaged in agriculture and sheep rearing along the plains and hills east of Kahuta. After finding accommodation in one of their hamlets, he had begun cultivating friendships with those who worked in the market at Kahuta. While work was hard to come by in the rest of Pakistan, especially for the unskilled, Kahuta’s economy was booming. The people who worked at the “factory” outside town were rich by local standards, and the shops in Kahuta were struggling to keep up with the needs of the new population. His new friends had quickly found him work sweeping some shops in the Kahuta market once a day. The pay was enough to sustain him and, more importantly, the work allowed him to loiter outside those shops without arousing anyone’s suspicions.
The people who worked at the “factory” were easy to identify. They were mostly urban, and Sarfaraz had little trouble telling them apart from the rural folk of Kahuta and its surrounding villages. For one, they dressed differently from the shalwar kameez-clad locals—mostly in shirts and trousers of the western style, sometimes even in those suits that, till then, he had only seen officers of the Pakistan Army wear. Their dialects told them apart too. While most of the “factory” people spoke Punjabi when they visited the market, Sarfaraz felt that their pronunciations showed an Urdu influence. And they always seemed to be in a hurry; they were busy people and few of them had time to spend in the market. He had tried striking up a conversation with a few of them outside one of the shops he cleaned, remarking about the weather or asking them about which city they came from and how life was over there. The responses he received were gruff and suggested, with little ambiguity, that they did not welcome the idea of socialising with riff-raff like him.
There was a small shop at the corner of the market where the underclass—unskilled workers like him who worked in the market—gathered and socialised over cups of thick and strong tea twice a day. In the afternoons some gathered under a tree behind the shop to gamble their wages on card games, mostly Kharr Wanj. Sarfaraz was welcomed enthusiastically when it became apparent that he wasn’t very good at the game, and within a week he had friends who worked at nearly every shop in the Kahuta market, including one of only two hair salons in all of Kahuta. The barber from that shop was particular skilled at Kharr Wanj and, after cleaning Sarfaraz out over four hands of the game one afternoon, felt pity for the fool and took him under his wing. It helped that they spoke the same dialect and belonged to the same tribe. Sarfaraz had his man.
With a deliberate lack of haste, Sarfaraz began cultivating a deeper friendship with the barber by feigning interest in becoming a barber himself.
‘Did you have to go to college to become a barber?’ he asked while drinking tea with him.
The barber snorted, almost choking on the tea before gulping it down and laughing loudly.
‘I can barely write my own name, you fool. Who would let me into college?’ he replied.
‘So how did you become a barber?’ Sarfaraz asked.
‘I became an apprentice to a barber in my village,’ the barber replied. ‘He taught me how to cut hair.’
‘Is it very difficult?’
‘Extremely. It took years of hard work!’
‘Really?’
The barber laughed again. ‘You really are a fool, Sarfaraz. I worked for him for six months. That was all it took to learn. Now, if you want to learn that fashion-washion, it takes much longer.’
Sarfaraz became silent, apparently absorbed in thought.
‘Will you teach me?’ he asked after a while.
‘What’s in it for me?’ the barber asked. ‘It takes time to teach, you know. Will you pay me for my efforts?’
Sarfaraz appeared to think carefully for a moment. ‘I will sweep your shop for you,’ he finally offered. ‘You don’t have to pay me—just teach me to cut hair.’
He began his apprenticeship the very next day, waking an hour earlier in the morning to finish sweeping the other shops before heading to the hair salon. The shop was open seven days a week, from nine in the morning till sundown. He would sweep the barbershop thrice each day: once in the morning when it opened, once in the afternoon before the barber and he headed—during quiet hours—to the tea shop, and once in the evening before they headed home. In return the barber let Sarfaraz remain in the shop for the entire day and observe him—from a distance—as he attended to customers. Sometimes he would even talk about what he was doing.
Sarfaraz noticed that the “factory” people spoke to the barber much more politely than they had spoken to him. In fact, when they were seated in the chair, many became quite talkative, discussing everything under the sun with the barber except the “factory” itself. The barber, for his part, never asked about it. They still eyed Sarfaraz with suspicion—or perhaps it was disdain, he couldn’t be sure. So he kept his thoughts to himself when the “factory” people were there.
It took him less than a month to notice the hierarchy among the “factory” people based on how self-effacing the barber was when speaking with them. There was one gentleman who seemed to terrify the barber. Sarfaraz knew him as Bajwa Sir because that was how the barber referred to him. He was middle-aged and rotund, and insisted on smoking cigarettes even while in the barbershop chair. He came every Sunday morning to have his hair trimmed and dyed, and brought his own hair dye with him. It was a foreign brand, the barber once told Sarfaraz after Bajwa Sir had left, and a bottle cost more than Sarfaraz made in a month.
‘He must be very rich,’ Sarfaraz remarked.
‘Of course. He is a big sahab at that factory,’ the barber replied. ‘Everyone works for him.’
The next Sunday Sarfaraz cleaned the shop immediately after Bajwa Sir left. The barber was surprised with the change in schedule, but said nothing: if the fool wanted to do extra work for him why should he complain? He didn’t notice the fool pocket a clump of Bajwa Sir’s hair.
***
Sarfaraz’s second letter arrived in the first week of August and, unlike the first one, bore a return address. It sang paeans in praise of the barber and the wonderful Minhas tribe that had made him feel, after more than a decade in
Pakistan, finally at home. Accommodation was less expensive than he had earlier thought, it went on, and he would, within a few months, find a house suitable for them all. Then they could travel to the wonderful town nestled in cool, green hills by god’s continuing grace. He hoped the money he had left them would suffice till then, but if it didn’t, his wife should have the headmaster at the boys’ school write to him asking for more. The town was populated with big old fauji sahibs, so he lived in a village a few miles away in keeping with his station. He mentioned a shrine outside Kahuta, a Sufi saint’s dargah that he visited as often as he could to pray. Then the letter rambled on about mercy, about perseverance, and about the need for their children to learn a trade as early as possible. He thought carpentry or construction would be suitable for them given how fast buildings kept coming up as truckloads of cement and concrete were moved around the country—he had seen armies of trucks swarming over the road from Peshawar to Rawalpindi, he claimed. He also mentioned that he himself was learning to become a barber—a wonderful trade that paid well—and spent a good paragraph on the virtues of the barber who was teaching him.
‘I am sending a clump of hair from the first customer I cut hair for,’ he wrote. ‘Please offer it to the Pir outside our village as an offering for my success.’
The letter ended with a sheepish acknowledgement that although he would like to write to them again soon, the cost of sending a letter was very high.
‘The gentleman,’ it said, ‘told me to fix six stamps. Imagine that—three rupees for a simple letter to Peshawar.’
After reading the letter thrice and collecting the clump of hair, the Resident began drafting a report for Mishra. The town saw intense construction activity, he wrote, and was populated by retired army officers for the most part.
‘The agent confirms that this is the location we sought,’ he added.
The next diplomatic pouch to New Delhi carried the Resident’s report along with a clear plastic bag containing a small lock of grey-black hair.
TEN
With the clump of salt-and-pepper hair and the tiniest flakes of dandruff secured inside a double-sealed container, Sablok was dispatched to the airport once more. This time Arora tagged along to make sure the sample was never left unattended.
The previous evening’s telephone call to Dr Menon had begun awkwardly as he realised that she had forgotten all about Major Singh. After he reminded her of their conversation in her consulting room and explained that he had a suitable sample in possession, she asked him to bring it over ‘tomorrow evening’. Learning from his previous experience, Sablok and Arora arrived late in the afternoon and waited in silence till the last patient had left. Then they stepped into her consulting room a little before 7 p.m. After greeting them and being introduced to Arora, the doctor handed Sablok a piece of paper with a name and address scrawled on it in what was unmistakably a doctor’s handwriting. While he read it and puzzled over the detour, she rang someone up and mentioned, without needing to identify herself, that they had arrived and would be there soon.
‘If you rush, you’ll find him waiting at that address. Go to the second floor of the main building; his office is on the left, at the far end of the corridor,’ she said after ending the call.
‘Will he analyse the sample?’ Arora asked. She nodded in reply.
‘I thought you would perform the tests here,’ Sablok said, a bitter smile on his face.
She shrugged. ‘Unfortunately, Major Singh,’ she replied, referring to Sablok by the cover name he had given her, ‘we don’t have the equipment or the expertise for it here. All cases of heavy metal poisoning have samples sent there,’ she said, pointing at the piece of paper that now lay on the table before Sablok. ‘He has a lot of experience in dealing with marginal cases.’
‘Is he a doctor?’ Arora asked, taking the paper from Sablok and reading it. There were no qualifications written after the name.
‘In a way. He has a doctorate in analytical chemistry.’
‘You mentioned heavy metals, doctor. Has he ever done this sort of thing for uranium specifically? I’m nobody to question his competence, but that’s exactly what I must assure myself of before reading him in.’
‘Uranium is a heavy metal too, sir. It won’t be a problem for him,’ she tried to assure them.
‘Would you stake your reputation on it? A lot of good people went through a whole lot of trouble to get this in our hands,’ Arora countered, holding the container before him. ‘We cannot afford to take chances, doctor.’
Her eyes narrowed, and her face assumed a pinched expression.
‘I am not in the profession of referring spies to chemists, sir, so I don’t see how this is relevant to my reputation.’
Arora swallowed, then cleared his throat.
‘My apologies, I misspoke,’ he said, carefully walking back his own words. ‘What I meant to ask was, how confident are you that this will work? How well do you know him?’
She was getting late for rounds.
‘I’m confident that if the sample is sufficient, he’ll find your uranium. As for how well I know him, I’d say fairly well: he is my father.’
Glancing pointedly at her wristwatch, she stood to indicate that the meeting had run its course. Arora thanked her for her time and stepped out, walking towards the staircase, sealed container and address in hand. Sablok caught up with him at the landing below, the hint of a smile on his face.
***
In the gloom typical of government campuses after dark, the cream-coloured portico appeared to be an afterthought to Sablok, a hastily erected structure clamped against the fading grey of the stone building behind it. On the second floor, they found the professor in his room, alone and engrossed in a thick tome. Three cups of tea stood on the table before him, steaming their life away into the dense, humid air of Matunga.
‘I do have a lot of questions,’ he confessed after introductions, ‘but I was told—well, warned—quite clearly and emphatically that the flow of questions would be towards me. Shall we begin after tea?’
It was unlike any Arora had ever tasted. He thought the flavours hinted at Earl Grey, but some nuances surprised with each sip. Their host chuckled when Arora remarked on the character of the clear brown brew.
‘A little knowledge of the chemistry behind it goes a long way,’ he replied, adding, ‘as does a dash of opium.’
Arora’s expression changed swiftly, like a fat, dark cloud blowing in from the Arabian Sea and blocking the sunshine on Shivaji Park. The delicate agility with which the obese visitor rushed to place the cup back on the table drew a loud guffaw from the chemist.
‘That last part was a joke, sir,’ he sheepishly said, a few moments later. Arora left the last drops untouched.
After Sablok had drained his cup, he left the room to make sure the corridor and neighbouring offices were free of eavesdroppers.
‘We have a hair sample that needs to be analysed, professor,’ Arora began, before giving the standard OSA spiel and reading him in.
‘What manner of trouble has my daughter got me into this time,’ the professor wondered aloud upon seeing the documents Arora wanted him to sign. But he signed them anyway.
‘We would like to know if the sample shows excess uranium,’ Arora said after the signed documents were safely in his briefcase.
‘Do you have a threshold value in mind?’ the chemist asked. Then, seeing the confusion on the spook’s face, he continued, ‘Uranium occurs naturally. In many places the concentration of naturally occurring uranium is greater than usual. So if you want to use the quantity of uranium in the sample to make sure it isn’t due to natural causes, you need to decide on a threshold value. Unless of course all this relates to a weapons programme, in which case that’s the wrong way to go about it.’
Arora felt the onset of a headache. They needed to invest in a coherent cover story within the
next few minutes or they’d have to come clean, at least with the experts advising them. The trouble was, each expert had a different perspective and, as a consequence, needed a different set of “facts”.
‘If it were related to a weapons programme, and I’m not saying that it is,’ Arora quickly added, ‘what would be the right way to go about it?’
‘We will determine the relative concentration of the two major uranium isotopes. If there is a lot more U-235 than normal, that would indicate enrichment. The proportion would tell us how close they are to building a weapon. I’m not entirely sure about what level of enrichment is required, though. Genocide has never been my cup of tea, you see.’
‘We are,’ Arora assured him. ‘Well, I meant...genocide isn’t our cup of tea either...but we know what level of enrichment is required, professor.’ Then, recovering his composure quickly, he continued, ‘How long will the procedure take? We cannot let the sample out of our sight.’
‘A few hours. But before we begin, let’s be clear about one thing: the sample will be destroyed in the process. There may be a tiny bit remaining after we’re done, but if I were you I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘Finding another sample will take months, professor, if not more...This has to work,’ Arora replied in an unusually grave manner.
The ominous tone did not escape the chemist’s notice. By now a clear picture had formed in his head about these two and the hair that they wished to test. If his daughter hadn’t referred them to him, he would have asked for a letter from whichever ministry they reported to before even beginning to perform the test.
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