The Kashmir Trap (7 page)

Hours later, she accompanied them along the Ganges to the
ghat
in Manikarnika, where the cremation would take place. Max didn't know Westerners had this right. By way of response, Sister Irène smiled in Indian fashion and shook her head. She knew very little of the road Pascale had taken. Pascale had simply shown up about ten years ago and joined a Buddhist community, as young foreigners do at the outset. Then, after a few months, most go back home, where they can take a shower, eat with utensils, and move on with their own lives, not one belonging to a group, religion, and culture of which they can never really be a part. Their intense and inevitable spirituality takes on the more comfortable form of a photo album.

Against all probability, though, unlike those other foreigners, Pascale had taken root in India, wavering between open, welcoming Buddhism and closed, hierarchical Hinduism.

“You know you can't convert to it. It's sealed off from everything else.”

“There are enough of them already,” Max shot back. “They don't have to worry about recruiting.”

Sister Irène smiled. Their rickshaw, like Antoine's, was stuck in a monstrous traffic-jam: rickshaws as far as the eye could see, utterly paralyzed, as well. It was like Friday evening at the entrance to New York's Lincoln Tunnel.

Max had no idea whether Pascale's body had been carried across the city on a bamboo stretcher, as was the custom, but now she rested on a pile of logs placed one by one to keep track of the price of this ceremony. The priest was about to set fire to the pyre when he suddenly turned to Sister Irène and pointed to something on the body. They conferred in Hindi for a moment, then Sister Irène asked Max and Antoine, “Do you wish to keep her ring?”

The officiant hadn't waited, however, and was already taking it off to hand to Irène, who gave it to Max. He recognized the “jewel.” He'd made it himself in the prison workshop at Temagami, using recycled metal from tin cans, then given it to her when she visited the following weekend. She had cried and cried, so much that the guards, who were used to bursts of tears, came over to see if she was in hysterics. So this was all that remained, this ring of twisted scrap metal. Max was on the verge of tears now, too, and slipped it into his pocket as they lit the fire.

The smoke danced over Pascale's remains, then flames lapped out from the centre. Max heard the crackling of wood and saw sparks tracing a path in the sky. Hypnotized, he watched without understanding, still in shock from the chintzy ring, the poor photo, and the letter saying nothing. Antoine stared rapt at the fire, walled in silence as always.

Pascale was burning well. Licked by flames, her body was now black. An odour of burning skin and hair invaded the
ghat
and blew toward them. Smoke was coming from every direction as Max closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he saw the fire had dwindled after the men stopped piling on wood. Max turned to Sister Irène as she apologized: “The orphanage has little enough money for the living, let alone the dead, and wood is expensive.”

“What will they do with the … what isn't burnt?”

“It will go in the Ganges. The river's full of human remains …”

Animals too. Climbing out of the rickshaw, he had seen a cow drifting with the current. He spoke to the man in charge and pulled a pile of rupees from his pocket. The man understood. He weighed out some more logs and threw them on. The flames grew again, stronger and higher. Antoine turned away, and Max saw he was sobbing off to one side, alone. His eyes met Sister Irène's, and he felt like crying, too. He did.

Once Pascale's body was completely consumed, Max and Antoine went down to the level that bordered the Ganges, their hands clutching ashes: some of wood, some of Pascale, who knows? Still, a ritual is a ritual, and Max felt both solemn and ridiculous at the same time. Antoine released them first, and the ashes vanished in the wind over the water. Then Max did the same, turning to Antoine, perhaps to hug him. What do you do at a time like this? Anyway, Antoine was gone. Max spotted his friend climbing up the ghats at full speed, as though chasing after someone. Max followed. What was this about? He caught up with Antoine, out of breath on the last level.

“He was here. I saw him,” he said looking around nervously. “He was watching us.”

“What are you talking about, who?”

“Some Westerner,” Antoine said. He'd already noticed him in the station at Varanasi, but thought he was dreaming … and now today, here.

“What, a tourist?”

Antoine turned to Max: “The guy at her place that night …”

Max recoiled. Her “kidnapper” — her lover — had come here to see her off, too.

 

 

T
he
voices of sunbathers in the pool snapped him awake. Max O'Brien opened his eyes and snatched his watch off the dresser: 4:00 p.m. He'd slept almost twelve hours — his first rest free of nightmares in a week. He opened the curtains. The pool was swarming with the usual tourists, beached on deck chairs. Young Indians in livery went among them handing out drinks. The heat seemed crushing and the war just a bad dream.

Max spotted his friend Jayesh in his Speedo trunks with an American newspaper on his knee, a Kingfisher beer nearby.

When Max strode up a few minutes later, Jayesh exclaimed, “Why don't they pay José Théodore a
decent
salary? He should just take off for Colorado like Patrick Roy. Sometimes you'd think they don't want to win the Stanley Cup at all.”

Max sighed. If there was one thing that absolutely did not interest him, it was hockey. Jayesh Srinivasan, though, born on Birnam Street in Montreal, was the greatest (the only?) Indian fan of the Montreal Canadiens and goalie José Théodore. Today, around the pool at least, it was no contest. Jayesh had the air of a geek on vacation, a computer whiz weaned off his technology. Slicked-back hair, dark shades, discreet tattoo on the shoulder — a change of style, he called it — Jayesh had the look of a playboy. At the age of twenty-nine, he had decided to try his luck in India, after a stretch of work with Max: three years of cons in the big U.S. cities, playing a Saudi investor in search of greedy pigeons longing for a quick score. Tired of such easy pickings, Max imagined him at the High Commission of India in Ottawa explaining to some bureaucrat why he wanted to “go home” to Tamil Nadu where his family had lived. Then followed four years in Mumbai, a choice he stuck to wholeheartedly … except for the lack of hockey. Even so, he followed all the gossip in
USA Today
, and from his parents in Montreal, as well. They'd never understood the decision of their only son. Siddhartha Srinivasan, now a retired star salesman from Cummings Chevrolet Oldsmobile on Décarie, felt cheated by his “ungrateful son,” who had rejected America, the costly and
much-sought
-after gift they had bestowed on him.

“The case has been handed to Chief Inspector Dhaliwal,” he said, draining his Kingfisher, “a hard-ass from the Indian Army trying to make his mark in the CBI. I have to admit, he's had some success, too.”

“And the RCMP guy, what about him?”

“Josh Walkins, till now a gofer, paper-pusher, and maker of paper-clip chains — he's in charge of the internal investigation.”

“Which means …?”

“No way they're letting the Indian Police inside the High Commission. Same with David's place. Walkins passes along whatever they get to Dhaliwal … who in turn sends a cc. to Lal Krishna Advani, minister of home affairs.”

Despite the collaboration, the Canadian cop was a mere
over-the
-shoulder spectator to the real players in this card game.

“What have they got?”

“No idea,
yaar
. All very hush-hush, but I have a contact, and we'll soon know.”

“How about the High Commission?”

“All packed up and ready for the airport shuttle, same as the Brits and the Yanks.”

A young woman dived into the pool. Jayesh followed her closely with his eyes, then returned his attention to Max. “Besides, things are worse since yesterday. You know what Prime Minister Vajpayee did? He just went on up there, to Kashmir and the Pakistan border, and told his soldiers: ‘The hour for decisive combat has come, and we will win this war,' or something like that. Same stuff from the Pakistanis. President Musharraf had his National Security Council meet in Islamabad and banged his fist on the table. These two nutbars are sharpening their knives on Kashmiri backbones. Then they spread the cloth and set the table.”

Jayesh could describe the generals' “hors d'oeuvres”: the Indian bombardment of the Azad Kashmir, or Free Kashmir, controlled by Pakistan since Partition. Hajira had seen twenty dead in a week, nine of them the day before in Abbaspur, then the Pakistani response in Manyari near Kathua, where sixty houses were destroyed. All these fireworks against a backdrop of national mourning in Srinagar. Abdul Ghani Lone, the moderate Kashmiri leader just killed by Muslim extremists and buried amid much grief and anger …

In short, it was a complete train wreck.

But Max wasn't seeing it. The country on the verge of war? That was hard to believe for any of those sitting around the pool at the Oberoi. He knew nothing of India, and even less of war. Perhaps this was how all wars started, with no one believing it, then, all of a sudden, fighter planes screaming overhead, refugees travelling in convoys, foreigners stranded in the airports. At least one thing was certain: with war on their doorstep and the embassies virtually closed, it would be much harder to catch the perpetrators.

“Do you think he'll make it?” Jayesh was referring to the still-comatose David.

“I don't know.”

The Most Welcome Restaurant still existed: Formica furniture, electric signs, colourful uniforms, but a different clientele. Max had previously seen only tourists here, those who were fed up with filthy dives (while the Most Welcome Restaurant would have flunked a health inspection in any major European city, it was still a notch above the local grease-encrusted spoons). But now there were Indians here in place of the foreigners, many of whom had probably already fled the country. They were well-dressed, even hip-looking young people who wouldn't have been out of place in Soho or Greenwich Village. Most striking was the air of prosperity about them, social climbers eager to show off their nouveaux riches.

Jayesh had ducked into the restaurant briefly to make a phone call. “Some transactions don't belong on the cellphone,
yaar
!”

After he climbed back into the Maruti, they drove for quite a while. It seemed as though they'd never run out of city. One slum hot on the heels of the next, growing back in like fungus after Indira Gandhi's disastrous attempt to root them out in the seventies — that was how Jayesh summed it up. By all means, get rid of the symptoms of poverty, just not the cause.
Nussbandhi
(vasectomies) had been forced on the poor, civil liberties suspended, and a state of emergency declared for months on end. That was modern India's darkest chapter. Then in 1991 came a sudden change. The country opened up to private capital and foreign investment and the results had been positive. This time, Max saw numerous changes: the young upstarts at the Most Welcome and the Maruti that Jayesh was driving instead of an old Ambassador, for instance.

There was no mistaking the general air of economic recovery, but the religious misery of India still showed through: the deformed and crippled beggars and the
sadhus
covered in ashes and barely clothed stole the spotlight from this new India, as though refusing to be pushed aside. At a red light on the way out of town, a leper approached the car, asking for change and waving his stump in Max's face; next were the slums, the
jhopadpattis
, with kids in rags jamming the sides of the roads, so resigned to their situation that they didn't even reach out for charity. Through all this wash of human catastrophe, Jayesh showed little or no emotion, just waving aside one beggar in exasperation, the way you'd listlessly shoo away a fly, knowing it would soon be back.
Odd, this Jayesh
, Max mused, wondering if the Srinivasans felt that their family monkey god Hanuman was playing a joke when they bore this playboy, homesick for the old Indian motherland.

Jayesh felt Max's gaze on him. “Okay, we're almost there. Next village.”

He braked for two starved-looking cows feeding on a pile of garbage by the side of the road, then honked his intentions of passing the cart in front of him. But the Maruti was still stuck behind a Mercedes — not the first Max had seen this time, though there had been none on his previous trip in 1991.

“Hey, it's one of mine,” yelped Jayesh.

“The Mercedes?”

“I sold that one and some others.”

“Seriously, back in your father's dealership?”

Jayesh roared in wholehearted laughter. He pointed to the slow-moving car in front, way too precious for these roads. “You know what the import tax is on a car like that? Three hundred percent. Big shots from Malabar Hill in Mumbai have to pay not just the price of the car plus transport, but bribe the Vajpayee government ‘legally' three times the purchase price.”

Max hadn't yet cottoned on, but he knew his young friend had made out on this somehow.

“It isn't just the poor who are unhappy here, the rich are, too. Actors in Mumbai, computer whizzes in Hyderabad, crooked lawyers and lobbyists from Delhi — who do you think they turn to?”

“Mother Teresa?”

“Naaah. Jayesh. If they want a Cadillac or a Jaguar or a Merc, I get it for them.”

Honk
… this time for a herd of pigs, something only the
dalits
are allowed to eat, so now they were in Untouchable country. This slum was their castle.

“The law is clear about this,” Jayesh continued. “Indians who buy toys overseas can bring them back free of duties and taxes.”

It began to dawn on Max.

“All those Indians working in Kuwait or the Emirates as cleaning staff, floor washers, and street sweepers spend, what, maybe a year or two there? Then they come home with the money, plus a little something for their better half,” said Jayesh.

“And with your help, a Mercedes they've never seen and never will,” said Max.

“Paid for by my client along with a small return for my contact and a commission for
bibi
.”

“The police look the other way?”

The same good-natured roar of laughter.

The Maruti now went down a dusty road flanked by small, modest houses, luxurious compared to the slums on the main street. Jayesh stopped in front of one, and two kids in filthy pants appeared in the doorway, but an adult male hand forced them back inside.

Max followed Jayesh into the house. A woman in a cotton sari bade them
namaste
, then immediately retreated into a back room with the children. Buckets beside the table told Max the neighbourhood had no running water, at least for now. The place was clean, with minimal furnishings. A policeman's uniform hung behind the door.

“Ashok Jaikumar works at CBI headquarters,” Jayesh explained, as the man nodded left to right as Indians do to show agreement. “He's in on all Chief Inspector Dhaliwal's meetings.”

Jaikumar ran his hand through his oily hair and invited the two men to sit at the table. He had on a
kurta
pyjama, as always when he was inside, was about thirty years old, his head held high, even lofty, as shorter men often do. He seemed proud at being questioned, rather like the finalist in a quiz show. He offered them tea and
barfi
, boiled-milk sweets, but the two visitors declined.

“Exactly what do you want to know?”

First, how far the investigation had got and Dhaliwal's thoughts on it. Apparently, Dhaliwal was at his wit's end. It resembled nothing he'd ever seen before.

“Any connection to the group that attacked Parliament?” Max asked.

“That's what Dhaliwal's team thought at first:
Harakat-ul
-Ansar — they'd intercepted some of their activists a few days before; or maybe
Jaish-e
-Mohammed — they're also very active in New Delhi. The police had their inside informants, moles, in fact, and at least a general notion of the jihadis' comings and goings, but embassies and consulates weren't on their hit list.”

“A change of strategy, maybe?” Max asked. “I mean, who'd have thought that
Lashkar-e
-Taiba would one day launch an attack on Parliament?”

“Sure, especially with ammonium nitrate–based explosives. They're a favourite with terrorists,” said Jaikumar.

“Not to mention kidnapping,” Max added.

The policeman was surprised to find Max so
up-to
-date on what, until now, had been kept from the media, and equally surprised to discover he knew about David's wounds from before the bomb attack, something the investigators found intriguing, needless to say.

“What, in fact, happened between the time David and his driver left the High Commission —”

“Witnesses put it at about 4:30 p.m.,” cut in Jaikumar.

“— and the car bomb six hours later by the banks of the Yamuna on the other side of town?”

Baffled, Jaikumar shrugged. “The police are leaving no stone unturned, and Lal Krishna Advani, the minister of home affairs, is following the investigation closely. You know Inspector Dhaliwal is from Gandhinagar, in Gujarat, the same state Advani represents in Parliament, and he keeps him constantly up to date, verbally, of course, as one does with politically dangerous files like this.”

Jaikumar was biding his time, holding something back till he got the price he wanted. Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw Jayesh pull out a huge roll of rupees, and he dropped some bills on the table. The policeman looked at them for a long while without touching them, then said, “The RCMP fellow searched the diplomat's house from top to bottom, went off with his computer at the High Commission, and then scanned his appointment book, address list, and agenda.”

Jaikumar slid the rupees into a drawer under the table. Now it was time for the grand revelation. “The day before the kidnapping, do you know who the young man saw? Majid Khankashi, imam at the Kasgari Mosque, better known as Genghis Khan to the Hindi press.”

Jaikumar was proud of his scoop and happy with the money, so he added, “An opinion-maker with considerable influence in Jammu and Kashmir State, where he comes from, and Delhi, too, of course. He's suspected of being the
éminence grise
of
Hizb-ul
-Mujahideen, perhaps even an agent of Inter-Services Intelligence.”