The India Spy Read online

  THE INDIA SPY

  J.S. Monroe

  writing as Jon Stock

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About The India Spy

  Raj Nair, a young British Asian doctor, is posted to Delhi. It’s hist first time in India, his first job with MI6 and not every one is pleased to see him. Ambitious and patriotic, he is soon forced to question his own loyalties, particularly when his father is arrested in Britain on spying charges. Raj realises he is up against a secretive, colonial organisation working at the very heart of Whitehall: the Cardamom Club. Is it responsible for a chilling sati and other brutalities at odds with a modern, progressive India? Can his father really be a traitor? And will Raj expose the Club before it destroys him?

  The India Spy is an electrifying, sinister thriller which asks disturbing questions about patriotism, identity and the West’s relationship with India.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The India Spy

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part 3

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  About J.S. Monroe

  Also by J.S. Monroe

  J.S. Monroe writing as Jon Stock

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  For Hilary, Felix, Maya and Jago

  “Which side do the Asians cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you cam from or where you are?”

  Norman Tebbitt, 1990

  “One is patriotic only because one is too small and weak to be cosmopolitan.”

  Anthony Trollope

  Part 1

  1

  New Delhi, 1999

  The sports bar at the Radisson Hotel was not the sort of place where I normally spent an evening, but there weren’t many choices in Delhi when you needed a break from India. The homesick headed for Djinns, an English pub attached to the Hyatt Hotel, where you could take calls in a red telephone box at the end of the bar. But I needed a break from Britain, too, some anonymity. And in this bland no man’s land out here on National Highway 8, near the Indira Gandhi International airport, I could listen to a Filipino band singing the Beatles and imagine, just for a moment, that I was nowhere.

  I wasn’t, of course. All was maya, illusion. It was one of the first things I had learnt about India. Even in this quarantined, five-star environment, the subcontinent still managed to seep in. India was like that: airborne, irresistible. Eleanor Rigby soon gave way to a taped recording of Daler Mehndi. Tukatukatuk. Tukatukatuk. My taxi driver had played it all the way in from the airport when I first arrived, told me he was the Punjabis’ answer to Michael Jackson. Somewhere outside a diesel generator started up. Chugachugachug. And then, in front of me, across sixteen television screens, Sachin Tendulkar flickered simultaneously into life. I was in India, no question.

  Tendulkar was preparing to silence England’s supporters, a few of whom were cheering meekly in one corner. It was the mobile phone set, engineers mainly, who in five years had changed for ever the face of communications across South Asia. Newspapers were calling them the “telecolonials”. Young Delhiites, phones clipped to their belts like pistols, were laughing and talking up at the bar, flirting with each other in between overs. I had seen their cars on my way in, 7 Series bought by doting admirals and arms dealers for their precious children. The women had a brash kind of beauty in their tight, imported leggings; the men, wearing Nike T-shirts and Levi jeans, looked moneyed and cocksure. These were the notorious BMW kids of Delhi, famed for their wealth and wicked Western ways.

  A second group of English fans was playing table football, burnt-out businessmen waiting for the midnight flight back to London. Sizing up the women at the bar, they began pulling suggestively on the spinning handles, tongues and ties loosened by too much alcohol. An anxious member of staff, one eye on the football, reached for a telephone. Before he could speak, the bar was erupting around him: Tendulkar, quick hands, heavy bat, had flicked an attempted bouncer for four. The TV cameras panned across a delirious section of the crowd, focusing on a banner: “We fail the Tebbit test and we are proud of it.”

  The barmen became distracted, huddled in a nervous group, arguing over who should approach the unruly angrez. I caught the eye of one of the businessmen, his bald pate scalded by Delhi’s ceaseless summer sun. He stared through me as he finished his beer, wiping froth from his mouth with the back of a hand before returning to the football. He was so full of lager it seemed to slop out of him, like an overflowing water butt. His eyes were small and distant, two beads floating in milky red pools.

  Glancing at the man’s paunch, his shirt shiny with spilt beer, I thought about Tebbit’s cricket test. Then Tendulkar walked down the pitch to hit another boundary. All across India, in shops, buses and homes, I could picture them: men, women and children leaping up as one. It was too much for the businessman. Without warning, he grabbed the nearest person, one of the young men at the bar, twisted him round by his collar and headbutted him to the ground. The whole room fell quiet, as if we had all drawn in breath together. For a moment the businessman seemed to hesitate, looking down at the figure by his feet, then he was gone, running into the warm night.

  I pushed my way through the gathering crowd, explaining that I was a doctor, and knelt down beside the man. His nose was broken but otherwise he was okay, just a little groggy.

  “Is he breathing?” someone asked. “I can’t see him breathing.”

  “He’s going to be fine,” I replied, discreetly checking for a pulse. The man was regaining consciousness. “Could someone bring a blanket, a jacket?”

  The hotel doctor arrived a few minutes later and I gave him a brief summary of what had happened, aware that the rest of the Englishmen had already left the bar. I realised, from the unsteadiness of my words, that I was trembling. As we talked, one of the young Delhiites strolled over. His chest was unnaturally broad, pumped up, his head too small, way out of proportion with the rest of his body. Following a step behind him was a petite woman, barely five feet, with fragile arms and strong hair.

  “Thanks,” the man said. His shrunken eyes flitted nervously, assessing the scene, me. I took a card from my wallet and handed it to him, noticing the woman was wearing platform soles. Even with those, her head barely reached his chest.

  “Let me know how he is,” I said, my voice still unsteady. The man’s blue T-shirt was so tight it looked like a layer of skin. “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  “Raj Nair, British High Commission,” he read, my card lost in his big hands. A smirk creased across his face, ruining its toned symmetry. He passed the card back to me. Then he turned and walked away, cradling his delicate companion.

  *

  Later that evening, as I was driven home, we followed a wedding band. They were squatting in the back of a Tempo truck, cradling their tubas and drums. The musicians’ ill-fitting uniforms, white with crimson shoulder pads and gold tassels, seemed incongru
ous as they stared out into the night. They were like toy soldiers who had been put away in the wrong box. It was almost the end of the wedding season, a propitious time to get married if the stars were to be believed, and I had seen many bands in recent weeks, lying around outside gates in the afternoon heat, trudging in single file from one dusty venue to another.

  I had seen the bridegrooms’ horses, too, magnificent Marwaris from Rajasthan with their sickle-shaped ears and upright gait. Traditionally they had carried the bridegroom to meet his wife but these days he preferred to go by Japanese hatchback than horseback, riding for only a few short yards, first when he left the family driveway and later as he arrived at the chosen hotel. The bridegroom turned up looking relaxed and immaculate, unlike the horse beneath him who was breathless and steaming. At this time of year you saw them everywhere, galloping across town to make sure they arrived on time, ready to complete the charade.

  After reaching Qutab Minar, we headed east towards Saket, one of South Delhi’s more lively suburbs. Its chief attraction was the Anupam cinema, on the front of which was an Andy Warhol image of an Asian Marilyn Monroe. Already I found this stretch of road more terrifying than most. Shortly after Qutab Minar, the road widened, without warning, into an informal dual carriageway for five hundred yards and then closed up again. My toes curled over. At the point where the traffic was meant to return to single file we passed the carcass of a Blue Line bus that had driven straight into a tree on the central reservation. I felt like shouting, “You see, you see, everybody in this country is so bloody relaxed about driving, but look what happens. Look! People die!”

  Instead I said nothing. Ravi, my driver, laid back, slowing down, shook his head in an ambiguous way. At least he had noticed the accident, made a mental note not to die in one himself. It was a fresh crash, he said, probably caused by brake failure. I wound down the window and looked at the twisted metal to the left of the driver, where the women usually sat. The bodies had gone, but I could still taste the scene, the warm, sticky carnage.

  We drove on, squinting at the dusted shards of headlight spiralling past us. A private ambulance of some sort slipped eerily by, its siren so faint you wondered why the driver bothered. Sometimes the oncoming traffic seemed to be on our side of the road. Ravi never flinched. Occasionally he would flick his headlights but most of the time he just hooted, not aggressively, but as a way of acknowledging passing cars. Every car, in fact. If hooting was like a nod of the head, then Ravi knew everyone.

  The last straw was when we slid inside a tree that was pushing up through the cracked tarmac of the outside lane. I shut my eyes, understanding in a moment why my father had left India. My posting here suddenly felt like a lifetime. I could only begin to imagine the condition of the roads in his day. Nobody seemed to think that the tree’s presence was odd. I looked back at it and then glanced at Ravi for signs of a reaction. Nothing. (He couldn’t see the wood for the trees.)

  I kept my face near the open window as we drove on. Swept-up leaves smouldered along the roadside in piles edged with faintly glowing embers. The earth was slowly releasing the heat of the day and the night air was still warm. It was only April but Delhi was already a firebowl, hot and powdery, hostile. I thought of the bodybuilder giving back my card, his look of comprehension followed by rejection. There was no reason why he should have been more civil. One of my compatriots had assaulted his friend.

  We turned right into Sainik Farms, the residential colony where I had rented a temporary house while the British High Commission built more accommodation on the compound. Sainik Farms was probably Delhi’s richest suburb; I later discovered it was also illegal, although residents preferred terms like “informal” and talked of its imminent “regularisation” by the government. There was no official power or water supply. Instead we used diesel generators and drew water from our own wells. When the water dried up, we hired big, noisy boring machines and dug deeper. Locals called it the Republic of Sainik Farms. Its citizens were a mixture of corrupt politicians, struck-off doctors and underworld dons – an unholy alliance so influential in India that it was rumoured Pakistan had used Sainik Farms as the target coordinates for its nuclear arsenal. Their money was mostly new, much of it spent on hapless architects who were consulted, ignored and then ordered at gunpoint to carry out their clients’ own kitsch, napkin sketches of Palladian excess.

  My home, like the others, was described as a “farmhouse”, although it was nothing of the sort. There was no farmyard or tractor or fields of sun-kissed corn. Farmhouse was a term used liberally for “elite effect”; it suggested land ownership, which in an expensive city such as Delhi meant wealth. It was also a harkback to the 1960s when Sainik Farms (literally “soldier farms”) was set aside for army officers who were allowed to use it for agricultural purposes such as keeping chickens or cows. Nobody seemed to have questioned why these animals needed to live in marble palaces with twenty bedrooms, bathrooms attached.

  My farmhouse belonged to a retired general and was constructed solely, of course, with livestock in mind. A sprawling one-acre estate, it boasted two water features (cascading ponds that lit up at night to the sound of Handel), a jogging track (a vivid blue gravel path, lined with white stones, that meandered round the borders of the property to ensure outdoor exercise could continue throughout the soggy monsoon) and a crazy golf course built into the foothills of a Himalayan rockery. The house itself appeared to have been an afterthought. Tucked away in one corner, it was an uncharacteristically small, slit-windowed fortress designed to look like a log cabin, complete with a concrete veneer of knotty bark.

  I had been in Delhi for a month and I was still not used to the idea of living in this house, or employing the staff that came with it. Every time the uniformed chowkidar opened the gates to let me in, I was surprised, turning round to see who was coming. Tonight, despite repeated instructions to the contrary, he saluted as we drove past, and saluted again when he opened my car door, stamping to attention for good measure. My landlord called him the sentry.

  “At ease,” I whispered, as I walked up to the oak-effect front door. He never smiled.

  I was tired and headed straight to bed. In England sleep would have followed soon after, but bedtime in Delhi marked the beginning of a battle that would rage for most of the night. Moving systematically round the bed, I tucked my mosquito net under the mattress, covered myself in Jungle Formula and hoped in vain that the enemy would be kind.

  I had no plans to visit India until I was posted here, no desire to discover my Indian ancestry halfway up a hillside in the Kullu Valley. I was too rational for that kind of thing, too English. I was also too old, not by much, but old enough to feel uncomfortable listening to Talvin Singh down at the Blue Note in Hoxton. Now, though, I was in India, not by choice, but here nevertheless. And in those rare moments of solitude, I did wonder if this place of my birth would resonate, if it would tug at my sleeves in the stillness of the night. And if it did, how would I feel? What would I do? Would I still pass the Cricket Test?

  2

  There was a new woman on reception when I arrived at the medical centre, but I didn’t expect to be stopped.

  “Can I help you?” she said, as I breezed past. Her tone was emphatic.

  “It’s okay, I’m working here,” I said. “Started last month.”

  “Can I see your pass?” she asked.

  “My pass?” I said, laughing lightly. “Of course.” She was only obeying orders. The medical centre was on the British High Commission compound and subject to the same levels of diplomatic security.

  “Thanks,” she said, as I handed it over. She gave it back immediately, smiling. “Sorry.”

  “No need. Did you start today?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “And are we busy?” I asked, turning round the clipboard on the desk in front of her.

  “Lots of babies. And a Mr Grade.”

  She looked up at me as if I should know his name. I could feel my mouth drying. I
hadn’t met him yet – he’d been away on holiday – but he had obviously returned.

  “What time?” I asked casually, glancing at my watch.

  “First up. There’s also…” She paused, then nodded at the waiting area behind me. I turned round and saw the bald businessman who had attacked the Indian last night. The top of his head was still sunburnt, but it was his left eye that had brought him here. It looked as if the bodybuilder had caught up with him.

  “Does he have an appointment?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Keep him waiting,” I said quietly.

  The morning clinic was a fairly routine affair, much like a travel clinic in Britain. Injections for hepatitis B and Japanese encephalitis, advice on dysentery, tips on how to avoid dying in Delhi (don’t drive at night), reassuring a newly arrived expat mother that one mosquito bite on her baby girl didn’t mean that she had cerebral malaria, and listening to another mother who would only bath her child in imported bottled mineral water that had also been boiled. Today, however, was entirely coloured by the imminent arrival of Jamie Grade. I heard him first, chatting up the receptionist in a quiet, semi-serious way, and then he was knocking on my door.

  “Come in,” I said, feigning indifference, wondering what this legendary man would be like. Officially he was head of the political unit; unofficially he was king of spooks.

  “Ah, Raj, good man,” Jamie said, beaming, his hand outstretched. “Just who I was hoping to see.”

  I was expecting a suit but he was wearing khaki, empire-building shorts, a plum-red short-sleeved shirt and deck shoes without socks. He sat down, pulling one leg up across his knee, which he held there with his hand, and launched immediately into telling me a joke.

  “There’s this one-eyed man,” he began, ignoring my bewilderment. “You don’t mind, do you? I’ve been dying to tell you this one all day.”