The India Spy Page 2

  “Please, go on,” I said, trying to take him in.

  “It’s a doctor’s joke, you see… Anyway, this one-eyed man accidentally swallows his glass eye two days before a proctological examination. He decides to go ahead with the appointment, undresses at the surgery, bends over and waits. The proctologist walks in, takes a look up the man’s arse and the first thing he sees is the glass eye glaring at him. ‘You know,’ says the doc, ‘you really must learn to trust me.’”

  I laughed, more out of politeness than anything else. Despite his sense of humour, Jamie must have been fifty. He was in good health, sandy-haired and fresh-faced, and everything about him was young except his eyes, which were flat and slate-grey and suddenly upon me.

  “How are you settling in?” he asked, still smiling at his joke. I had to look away from those eyes, ancient and tired, violently at odds with the rest of his boyish face.

  “Fine,” I said. “I had a bad case of dengue last week, but otherwise the community is thriving.”

  “No hilariously embarrassing sexual problems?” he asked.

  “Nothing I can share, I’m afraid.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  He looked at me for a moment, untroubled by the silence. Neither of us was fooled by his manner.

  “Listen, I’ll cut straight to the chase,” he began, suddenly sitting forward. “We’re planning to get you on stream in a couple of weeks, after you’ve toured the regions.”

  “Anything specific?”

  “Not yet. I’m still congratulating myself. The perfect cover, don’t you think? A doctor.”

  “An Asian doctor.”

  “Yes,” he said, pausing. “Actually, that was our new High Commissioner’s idea. Sir Ian. You met him in London, I think.”

  “Once,” I said.

  “Very New Labour, the whole thing. I wasn’t so keen, myself.”

  “No?” I asked, wondering what he was about to say next. I had met people in Edinburgh, usually drunken medics at dinner parties, who had told me without a hint of anger or malice in their voice that there were too many Asians working in the National Health Service. But it was invariably late and they immediately put an arm round my shoulders and started slurring apologies. Jamie was sober and it was barely lunchtime.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued, looking straight at me. “Nothing personal about it. Really. Equal opportunities and all that – very important, crucial. Just not for all jobs. We’ve had a few problems in the past, that’s all.”

  “Problems?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, the usual sort of thing. Last year London sent over a nice bloke from Birmingham, Javed I think his name was. He was here on a ten-week attachment with the political unit. The first time we took him over to the Ministry of External Affairs, the Indians asked him where he was from. ‘Birmingham,’ he said, in his best Brummie accent. ‘But me parents are from Lahore.’ The MEA never spoke to him again. They thought he was spying for Pakistan.”

  “And you think I’ll have similar problems?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. Your parents were from the south, no?”

  “Kerala. But I was born and brought up in Edinburgh.”

  “The dynamics will be different, that’s all I’m saying. You tell me. In my experience Indians aren’t always overwhelmed to see people who have passed up their own country to live somewhere else.”

  “And they’re delighted to see the British back in India, are they?” I asked.

  “We have our own complicated relationship,” he said, looking at me as an equal, it seemed, for the first time in our conversation.

  He leant back, put his feet up on my desk and spoke for a while about my job in Delhi. I had heard so much about him that it didn’t feel as if we were meeting for the first time. He had no wife or family – married to the job, according to colleagues. Nobody on the compound was in any doubt what that job was: station head of MI6. His cover job at the political unit suited him well, as his skills in that department were formidable. Rumour had it that he had managed to predict the correct prime minister for the previous three elections (no mean feat in a land which had seen so many governments come and go in the last few years), winning the office sweepstake each time.

  Without thinking, he pulled out a packet of cigarettes and then checked himself, laughing, tapping the cigarette on the outside of the packet. Ironically, he said, it was safer talking in the medical centre than it was in his office, which the Indians had recently rewired. At least ninety per cent of my working day, he explained, was to be spent helping run the clinic. The rest of my time belonged to him, to MI6. His idea was that the High Commission, in the spirit of cooperation and free market enterprise, would make available its Western medical services to any Indians who could afford them. By that he meant politicians, civil servants and, with a bit of luck, some senior members of the Armed Forces. My role would be to gauge whether any of these patients had anything interesting to say about matters of national security. Those I deemed suitable would be worked upon further by the spooks.

  “I can’t understand it, myself,” he said, getting up and walking over to the window. “In a country with so many top doctors, these people still go abroad for their treatment. Look at Jyoti Basu, chief minister of West Bengal, Marxist to the core, champion of the swadeshi movement, and yet he still flies over to London every six months for a videshi check-up. And then there’s your lot” – my lot? – “from Kerala. The Communist Party of India – Marxist. CPIM. One of their distinguished leaders, Achuthanandan, developed a bit of a problem with his thymus gland. So what does he do? What would you do in Kerala, a state which produces some of the best doctors in the world? He flies to London, of course, and checks in for £15,000 worth of private care at the Royal Brompton. Paid for by the party, naturally, who had a whip-round, which is why his car goes via Highgate on its way to the hospital.”

  “Highgate?”

  “Yes. He’s a Marxist, remember. A patron of private hospitals, but still a Marxist. When he gets to Highgate, he walks across the cemetery and salutes at Marx’s grave, accompanied by a few senior colleagues and watched at a distance by some of ours.”

  Jamie was in his stride and I let him talk. I didn’t immediately warm to him, but there was something infectious about his enthusiasm, the lightness of touch underpinned by a sharp intellect. He understood India better than anyone I had so far met, perhaps with the exception of Sir Ian.

  I told him that in my own mind I would always see myself first and foremost as a doctor – my father had been a doctor in Edinburgh. The approach from MI6, made at a medical conference in London, was flattering, I said, and gave me a chance to put something back. Neither of us mentioned the subject again, but we both knew that my attachment had more than a little to do with ethnic quotas. Unlike the rest of the civil service, MI5 and MI6 employed very few people of Asian or Afro-Caribbean origin. I hadn’t come up through the ranks, I was not even full-time, but I would do. I was a useful statistic for the government and an unwanted complication for Jamie.

  He left after ten minutes, told me to keep in touch. I had the same feeling of excitement as I had felt when I was originally asked, a sense of embarking on something that mattered, that would count. I also wanted to prove Jamie wrong, allay his fears, show him that I was the best man for the job. On his way out, Jamie passed the receptionist, who put her head round the door.

  “That man at reception,” she said. “I’m worried he’s going to collapse on me.”

  “Send him in,” I said.

  The bald businessman stumbled in a few seconds later. He was in a bad way, which upset me greatly, of course.

  “Watch the cricket last night?” I asked, looking at the bruising above his eye.

  “Caught some of it,” he said. “You must be chuffed.”

  “Why?” I asked, reaching for an alcoholic wipe. With a bit of luck, this was going to hurt.

  “Winning so comfortably.”

  “We didn�
��t.”

  The man let out a cowardly yell as I cleansed the incision. I wondered if he had even heard of the cricket test.

  “Watch it with that,” he said, pulling his head away.

  “I have to clean the cut. How did you get it, anyway?” I asked.

  He leant forward, gingerly.

  “Car door,” he offered. It was usually car doors, or low-flying pigs.

  I showed him the door, armed with some suncream, but just as he was leaving, he turned to me, smiling. “I’ve got it now. You’re from Southall, aren’t you?”

  *

  By the end of the morning, I had vaccinated three babies against polio, lectured a pregnant mother about hygiene, and offered tentative advice to someone with a hilariously embarrassing sexual problem. I was just closing up to go for lunch when I heard a noise from the far end of the corridor. It sounded like a human cry. We had half a dozen beds in private rooms, but as far as I knew nobody had been admitted over the weekend. I heard the noise again, a faint wailing. Walking down the corridor I came across the director of the medical centre coming out of one of the rooms, locking it behind her.

  “I didn’t know we had any admissions,” I said.

  “He’s just arrived,” the director replied. She was a stout woman in her forties, matronly, severe, more concerned with management systems than patients.

  “Why didn’t somebody tell me?” I asked.

  “Mr Grade didn’t mention him to you?” she said, suspiciously.

  “No,” I replied, thinking back over our conversation. “I would like to see him.”

  “But nobody’s allowed to see him.”

  I was shocked by her words, but she meant what she was saying, her body language suddenly protective of the room behind her.

  “I’m sorry, but I am the doctor around here,” I said, looking over her shoulder at the door. “I think I’m entitled to see my patients.”

  “Mr Grade’s orders, not mine.” She stood her ground, unflinching.

  “Give me the keys,” I said, as authoritatively as possible, not rating my chances. “I insist.”

  “I can’t. I’m sure it’s fine for you to see him, but you must check first with Mr Grade. Sorry, orders.”

  I couldn’t believe what she was saying, her more conciliatory tone somehow making it worse. It was more calculated than stubborn. A minute later I was back in my office and on the phone to Jamie, demanding an explanation.

  “Of course you can see him, how absurd,” he was saying. “I can’t believe I didn’t tell you about him this morning.”

  “You didn’t,” I said, struggling to sound calm. “Who is he?”

  “His name’s Dutchie. He’s a hippy, a low-rent traveller. We’re flying him out tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s our responsibility and we don’t want an embarrassing scene.”

  “Our responsibility? Why ours?”

  “Because he’s a British citizen.”

  Jamie added that Dutchie had been hanging about in Kerala when he got involved in something he shouldn’t. That was all, but I knew he was not telling me everything. I took the keys from the director, her unchanged manner denying me any satisfaction, and walked back down the corridor, my brittle heels echoing my frustration. I unlocked the door and went in, accompanied by the director. There was one bed in the middle of the room, neatly made and empty. I looked around and spotted Dutchie curled up on the floor, beneath the basin. He had his forearms up against his face, shielding it from an imaginary threat, and his whole body was trembling. The director moved quickly forward to pick him up but I gestured for her to keep back and squatted down next to him. He was clearly in shock. It was not the sort of case I expected to see in the clinic – far too interesting – and I had nearly missed it.

  Dutchie’s head was clean shaven. His ears were full of rings and there was also a glistening stud in his nose. He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt and a faded maroon lunghi.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked. He flicked his eyes sideways at me for a moment and then turned his head away. I looked up at the director, who was standing by the door.

  “Has he been given anything?” I asked.

  “A sedative in Cochin at nine this morning. The nurse is giving him another one tonight, before the flight.”

  “What exactly happened to him?”

  “Nobody knows. All we’ve been told is that he was found wandering around Ernakulam Junction in a semi-delirious state.”

  I looked at him again and noticed that his lips were mouthing something. I bent down, closer, wincing at the smell of his rotting clothes.

  “What are you trying to say?” I asked, my ear close to his mouth.

  He was barely audible, but I could just make out one word, “Kali”, which he seemed to be saying over and over again.

  *

  I spent the whole evening at home, searching the internet for information about Kali and her fearful reputation. To judge from the large number of web pages in her honour, she was alive and well in modern India. One of the fiercest deities, she was the dark goddess of death, worshipped mainly in the north with sexual rituals and sacrifice, sometimes human. Her image was terrifying: she wore a garland of skulls and her lolling tongue dripped with blood. She wasn’t all bad, though. Many believed that she represented the creative as well as destructive aspects of nature, empowering the downtrodden and abused women of India. Her manifestations were numerous: the destroyer of time, a sensual, swan-like woman, a prolific drug-taker (camphor, musk and wine), the embodiment of female desire, and a worshipper of young women with foreplay.

  I thought of Dutchie again. All things considered, Kali seemed an entirely appropriate goddess for a drugged-up traveller. Perhaps he had just had a bad trip. But there was something else about him, his struggle to communicate, that made me think otherwise.

  3

  The following evening, after a routine day at the medical centre, I was invited over to dinner with the only people I knew in Delhi who didn’t work at the High Commission. Susie and Frank were easy company and they had been very good to me in my first few weeks. They had come into the clinic on my second day with their eldest son, Kashmir, who was suffering from a bad case of gastroenteritis. I followed up his treatment with a home visit, stayed for a meal, and we had been good friends ever since.

  Unlike the rest of us, Frank and Susie celebrated being in India. I didn’t understand why they did, but it made a welcome change from the paranoia of my colleagues, most of whom were desperate to jump on the first plane out of Delhi. Living in a state of siege behind the barbed-wire walls of the High Commission, they ate fish and chips at the compound restaurant on Fridays, and insisted on drinking cow’s milk that was flown in twice a week from Tesco’s. (One woman told me, in all seriousness, that a pint of the local product, buffalo’s milk, contained enough DDT to kill an adult elephant.) They were trying, much like the bar at Radissons, or Djinns, to deny the existence of India. I didn’t like the country much but I was living here and to deny it seemed futile. Meeting Frank and Susie was a bit like encountering a brilliant scientist who also believed in God. There had to be something about India that I was missing if two sane, rational and warm people had lived here for fifteen years and showed no signs of wanting to move on.

  “Either you get India or you don’t,” Frank had once told me. If I was ever going to get it while I was here, it would be by spending time with people like him. He was an artist, currently obsessed with painting richly coloured abstracts of rural Rajasthan, and always seemed to be on the point of converting to Sufism. They lived in a haveli in Nizamuddin, a leafy, bohemian suburb named after a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and favoured by journalists, artists and anyone else who wanted to experience the old city of Delhi without having to trek up to Chandni Chowk. Their trick, it seemed, was to incorporate the occasional Western comfort into their otherwise wholly Indian way of life. Guests could drink Kingfisher beer or Chivas Regal whisky a
ll night long at Frank’s place, but he also offered fine wines from France, procured, he would explain proudly, from a gold-toothed Mr Tricky who had good contacts in the African embassies. Mr Tricky’s “Bordix”, “Stemillion”, “Bew Rividge” and “Pully Fussy” were particularly recommended, but for special occasions he would always insist on “Pippa Headsick”.

  There was a daily throng of people passing through their house – writers, photographers, intellectuals, almost all of them Indian – and that night was no exception. Frank led me through to an open courtyard at the back of the haveli, his arm round my shoulders. Nobody had shown me this sort of kindness in Delhi. In the winter I suspected he wore reassuring patterned jumpers, holed at the elbows. That evening, though, he was wearing white kurta pyjama.

  Sitting on the edge of a pool in the middle of the courtyard was a writer I had met once before called Tapash. He was short, gnomic, with a grey-flecked goatee beard that didn’t make him look any taller. Next to him was an ageing, unfamiliar man in a red turban and cream churidar kurta. He was talking to two women, one of whom was Susie. The other, an Indian woman, I had not met before. She glanced up at me, turning away as soon as our eyes met.

  “Raj, how lovely to see you,” Susie said, rising to kiss me on both cheeks. She tossed back her silk dupatta over one shoulder and turned to the others. “Tapash-ji you know, of course,” she said, waving in his direction. Tapash stood up and greeted me with hands pressed together in front of him. “And this is Ranjit Singh, who used to be ambassador to London.”

  “Many years ago,” Ranjit said, rising to shake my hand. I hadn’t realised how tall he was until he was standing above me. He was well-built, too, naturally broad across the shoulders, no evidence of any gym visits.

  “And this is Priyanka Pillai,” Susie said. Priyanka held out a soft hand for me to shake, which surprised me. I had been preparing to greet her with a respectful nod of the head. I took her hand, feeling its warmth, and noticed that she was not wearing shoes. Her feet were slender, small gaps between her painted toes, the ankles gilded with silver chains. She was wearing a purple sari, which allowed a glimpse of taut stomach above the hip.