The Kashmir Trap (26 page)

Antoine paused the tape and zoomed in for a close-up. Her face was still blurred and grainy, but they could still make out her features. Her hair was tied back, her eyes deep, serious, and concentrated. She was scarcely twenty, virtually an adolescent, and she obediently followed Patterson. Oddly, her face reminded Max of someone, and he asked Antoine to replay the tape, and again. Now back to the freeze-frame. Max was sure he'd seen her before.

The Mughal Palace.

She was the young waitress at the buffet where Patterson ate on the ground floor of the Labyrinth.

 

 

INDRANI

O
f
course, that was it … hide her in the middle of the Indian neighbourhood, among her own and in plain sight. What better way to protect her?
thought Juliette. Patterson had done it right. She asked Max to slow down, and he checked the rear-view mirror as he took his foot off the gas. She'd made a point of going with him instead of staying quietly behind with Antoine.

After zigzagging through the traffic, Max turned left on Jean Talon, then right to the Al Sunnah Al Nabawiah Mosque. He stopped the car in front of Athena Park. The Labyrinth was just across from them.

“Okay, leave this to me,” exclaimed Juliette, just as Max was about to get out.

“Better stay here. It'll be safer.”

But Juliette was already crossing the street, so Max fell in behind.

Office workers on a smoke break crowded the front doorway, so the pair wove through them and headed for the cafeteria, which was full to bursting, as usual. Same crowd, same chit-chat. The Mughal Palace was a gold mine. At the far end, Juliette couldn't see the girl among the other employees. Perhaps she had quit, to hide even deeper among the anonymous city's masses. Max pushed aside a few grumbling workers, thrust aside trays, then planted himself next to the glass-encased counter with
rogan josh
and
dum aloo
, but Juliette beat him to it.

“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 the 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.

 

 

I
ndrani
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.

She confided in Zaheer what she knew about the Griffith-Bhargava agreement, and told him she wanted to tell all, but she didn't know how to go about it. Talk to the police? She knew they were crawling with BJP supporters who'd been placed there, and even if there were an investigation, she knew it would get adulterated, covered up, and masked by a hundred other files “more urgent and scandalous.” Zaheer hit on the idea of spreading it out in the media, going to the news outlets instead of the police. Indrani had thought of it, too, but that too could be blocked by corruption and influence-peddling that would keep it off the front pages. Specialized papers like
Klean Kashmir
would be interested but less credible. As for the Muslim press, forget it. They had zero impact on government.

She recalled Zaheer smiling at that. He wasn't thinking of the Indian papers, but the Canadian ones. After all, Stewart-Cooper International was a Canadian company, wasn't it? Sure, they were cautious about their activities abroad: protection of the environment, respect for local unions, the company's reputation was intact. Zaheer had even praised them for avoiding ethnic scandal, and now here they were financing Hindu terrorism! He could just imagine what would happen when it came out in the Canadian media.

“Why Hamilton, though?' Why confront Griffith, when all he had to do was descend on
The Globe and Mail
or the
Toronto Star
with the industrial scoop of the year?” asked Max.

Indrani did not know, but when they discovered Zaheer's body, she knew she was in danger. If they could get to him, why not her, as well? They'd been very cautious and not mentioned to anyone the real reason for his trip to Canada. Someone else knew and was determined to act, but who?

“Bhargava?”

“Not directly, my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“Vandana.”

So that was it. Now it all made sense: Vandana, the model employee!

David, returning from Srinagar, was nervously trying to hide what he knew from his colleague, the older sister still faithful to her father, who suspected something strange in the attitude of the Third Secretary … Bhargava's reluctant accomplice? Not likely, downright enthusiastic would be truer, in fact every bit as impassioned.

“Now,” explained Indrani, “Vandana's making sure the money keeps on flowing from Griffith to the Durgas.”

“Because your father's back in charge.”

“He held his prey, and he wasn't letting go.”

“Then the journalist threatened to shed light on it all.”

“But how did Bhargava find out about Zaheer?” asked Juliette, still stunned by the revelation.

The young Indian woman shook her head; she knew nothing. What about leaks, or an outright accusation? The young journalist might have bragged to
The Srinagar Reporter
or
the
Indian Geographic Magazine
, even indirectly hinting that he had information that would cause trouble for the Hinduists and shake the Vajpayee government. The BJP had ears in every corner of the country, and a zealous Hinduist might have passed on the message to the leaders, who would surely turn their attention to him.

“Well, Ahmed was certainly chatty,” she went on. “He liked to brag and show off his journalistic skills.”

“Where does David fit into this?” Juliette asked.

“One day, Vandana told me what he'd done for Genghis Khan in prison, and she was furious.”

After her journalist friend died, Indrani mistrusted everyone, not even daring to come out of the apartment opposite Zaheer's, where she was in hiding. Then one night, she heard strangers going into his place.

“Bhargava was looking for you.”

“So I called David in New Delhi and told him everything. I begged him to help me.”

Max and Juliette could fill in the rest: the young diplomat's secret trip to Srinagar to fetch Indrani; then the Delhi airport with a fake passport for Béatrice Gupta O'Brien; the flight to Montreal via Paris. David had it all set up with Patterson, who met her at Dorval and found her a job at the Mughal Palace; a room he could watch from his office on Jean Talon. He was the invisible hand shielding her, an ace up David's sleeve when he needed it.

The conference would be the perfect platform for David's revelations. Griffith would be there, and so would journalists from all over Canada and India. The floor would be jammed with personalities for his denunciation of the CEO. He knew she owed her job to the “Rashidabad miracle,” and she stood to lose it all when the scandal became public. She wasn't his real target, though. He wasn't just out to do damage, to accuse people for the sake of it. He was more concerned about the victims of the inter-communal riots Durgas had unleashed, and he wanted an end to the horrors, the way Philippe had done in El Salvador.

His father had mobilized the media, and so would he. Philippe had set fake negotiations while the peasants fled via the sewers after managing to get the reporters together in front of the embassy without even calling on them. David would use the Indo-Canadian press the same way.
For the first time in my life, I have the power to change things.

“David wouldn't do anything like that,” exclaimed Juliette. “It isn't a diplomat's job to get up there and mete out justice!” She was right, and Indrani smiled.

“That's exactly what David said, but he had a solution for that.”

Patterson.

The former diplomat had nothing to lose. David's initiative would push him to the forefront, and at David's request, he was the one who would have made the revelation to the whole world from the podium at the conference. For once, he had the opportunity to reach Philippe's level of heroism:
See, I risked my life, too.

“David would have stayed in the background on purpose, so as not jeopardize his future in foreign affairs.”

“So that explains Patterson's silence to us,” Max added.