The India Spy Read online

  Frank soon emerged from the arrivals lounge, weighed down by a bulging suitcase and beaming at us as he dodged out of the way of a snaking line of trolleys. We both hugged him, Ravi taking his suitcase as we walked over to our car. A couple of boys tried to relieve Ravi of the case, but he snapped sharply at them and they melted away. Above us storm clouds were gathering.

  “You got your story, then,” Frank said from the front seat. He turned round to us, pulling his own folded copy of Seven Days from his jacket pocket. “They were selling it as I came through.”

  “We couldn’t have done it without you,” Priyanka said, leaning forward to squeeze his shoulder.

  “Or him,” Frank said, nodding towards me, smiling broadly. “You could do worse, you know.”

  It was a relief to see Frank back on seemingly good form.

  “How’s Susie, by the way?” Priyanka asked, blushing, changing the subject.

  “Okay,” he said. “Actually not that good. It hit her very hard, what happened.”

  I knew I should say something but I didn’t know where to start. The ensuing silence made me feel even worse.

  “Is she taking anything? Medication?” I asked, slipping behind my professional mask. “I could arrange for something.”

  “She’ll be fine. She’s planning to bring the kids back soon, maybe in a month or two, when things here have settled down.”

  Our plan was to head into South Delhi, drop Frank off at his house, and drive over to the Press Club, where the senior management of Seven Days was due to hold a press conference about its story, just in case anyone had missed it. Despite my own reservations about returning to his old house, Frank was determined to get his life back to normal, make himself at home, order in some Bordix from Mr Tricky.

  As we drew up at the traffic lights beside Qutab Minar, however, our plans changed. Ravi got talking with a taxi driver in the next lane, as was his wont, and then turned to us.

  “Sir, big problem at British High Commission. Argy-bargy BJP. RSS.”

  “Khaki underpants,” Frank said. I looked at him for an explanation. “Hindu nationalists. Shall we take a look?”

  “Is it safe?” I asked.

  “With her in the car we couldn’t be safer,” Frank said. “She must be a national hero by now.”

  “Stop it, Frank,” Priyanka said, blushing for the second time. “We should go, though. It’ll be interesting.”

  *

  By the time we arrived in Chanakyapuri, there must have been several hundred demonstrators outside the High Commission, waving banners and shouting, but not with the passion Ravi had led us to expect. The presence of a number of Black Cats, India’s elite armed guard, who were deployed in front of the gates and along the perimeter wall, probably had something to do with it, but it wasn’t enough to stop one enthusiastic youth setting fire to a Union Jack and dancing round it with some friends, filmed by a grateful camera crew.

  We hadn’t mentioned Jamie yet, but I sensed Frank could restrain himself no longer. “Do you suppose he’s in there?” he asked.

  “If he’s got any sense, he’ll already have left the country,” I replied.

  “What car does he drive?”

  “A white Land-Rover, why?”

  “Like that one?” Frank was nodding at a vehicle pulling out of the side gate, down by the medical centre, unnoticed by the crowd in the dying evening light.

  “What a nerve.”

  I looked around for Ravi, who was leaning against the bonnet, having a cigarette. He quickly concealed it with the back of his hand when he saw me.

  “Sir?”

  “You see that Land-Rover?”

  “Yes sir?”

  I didn’t need to say anything else. He smiled as both of us remembered the last time we had encountered one.

  “No bumping, just follow it,” I called, as Ravi turned the car round.

  “I think I’ll stay here,” Priyanka said, kissing me on the cheek. “I’m not sure I’m Jamie Grade’s best friend right now. Find me later at the Press Club. And keep a note of anything he says.”

  Frank and I presumed Jamie was going to the airport. Ravi closed up behind his Land-Rover. Neither of us discussed why we were in pursuit, or what we might say if we confronted him, but we were united in a desire to see Jamie one more time, out of curiosity, or anger, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps we just wanted to make sure he left the country.

  It soon became clear, however, that Jamie wasn’t heading for the airport, not yet, at least. We were moving slowly in heavy traffic along the Vikas Marg flyover, and had just passed over the Jamuna river when Jamie turned off suddenly down a side road and doubled back under Vikas Marg, bumping along a dusty track. We turned off, too, but I told Ravi to pull over, at least five hundred yards behind Jamie’s Land-Rover. Ravi switched off his engine and lights, and we all sat there, peering into the gloaming. Jamie had climbed out of his vehicle and was walking over to the water’s edge, where he stopped and stared across the river, towards the Indian Tax Office buildings on the far side. Behind him was a cluster of slum dwellings, jhuggis, a few dim lights and the occasional figure just visible within. Parked in front of the jhuggis was a row of ornately decorated, horse-drawn carts. High above, the traffic was inching along under the orange glow of street lights, commuters returning home from Connaught Place, oblivious of this other world below.

  “Batar,” Ravi said, cutting into our silence. “Hindi film.” I hadn’t noticed the music drifting across the riverbank. There was so much background noise in India that I had become adept at ignoring it. Now he had mentioned it, I marvelled that I had managed to block out the sound. As I listened, I became aware of the foul-smelling river, too, and the mosquitoes that were chewing my ankles, the sweat trickling down my back, the distant rumble of thunder. I returned to watch Jamie as he struck a match and lit up. He was too far away to see clearly, but I knew it was a coheba. He seemed to toss the match into the water and just stood there, a faint silhouette in the dusk, head occasionally tilting back as he exhaled some smoke.

  “Have you thought what you will do when all this is over?” Frank asked, still watching Jamie.

  “Not yet.”

  “Will you stay out here?”

  “Perhaps. Sir Ian will recover, come back out and all will be well with the world. You?”

  “I’m damned if I’m letting one man ruin our lives. We nearly moved when we first heard he had been posted to Delhi, but I decided then it would give him too much pleasure.” He paused. “The kids are fine, but Susie needs a little more time. She’s enjoying being with her family, her sisters. She didn’t realise how much she missed them.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Behind the jhuggis, a large electricity pylon, weighed down with a tangle of illegal hook-ups, was shorting out, sending fits of white sparks into the night air.

  “Was it strange being back in Britain?” I asked, realising that I was no longer surprised by the sight of a short-circuiting pylon.

  “Strange? I was a foreigner. Kept checking my change all the time.”

  Jamie hadn’t moved from his riverside spot. I suddenly had a horrible feeling that he was waiting for us.

  “What about him?” I asked, gesturing towards Jamie. “Shall we go over? Say our fond farewells?”

  “Why not?” Frank said. “Old times’ sake.”

  As we walked down the track towards him, I became aware of a large shape a few yards beyond, close to the turbid water’s edge. It was an elephant, swaying from side to side as it pushed some straw around with its trunk on the muddy ground. The animal’s ankles were chained together. Beyond it I saw four or five other elephants, similarly hobbled, swaying on the shore.

  “Ah, comrades,” Jamie said, turning to us. For a moment I thought we had been watching the wrong person. Jamie looked different, his hair darker, the balance of his face altered in some way, too much forehead. Was he expecting us? It was hard to tell. Nothing was ever straightforward with Jamie. “I hope you’re
satisfied,” he continued, turning back to the water. “Job well done.”

  “Are you flying out tonight?” I asked, noticing that the bottom of one of his trouser legs was ripped.

  “You saw the mob.”

  Then it occurred to me that Jamie had disguised himself. He probably had any number of identities and passports, a perk of the job.

  “I don’t think you’ve met Champa, have you?” he said, looking round at the elephant. “He belonged to Macaulay, the elephant he first trained with.”

  I looked past Jamie at the vast animal, its chains clinking, remembering Priyanka’s questions on the island about Macaulay the mahout. I wasn’t sure who looked the more pathetic standing there: Jamie or Champa.

  “I felt I should let him know his old master’s dead,” Jamie continued, more subdued. “The least I could do. Then I must tell Asif, his present mahout. He’s only seventeen, less than half Champa’s age.” He nodded in the direction of the jhuggis behind us. “They liked him around here, you know. Liked him very much.”

  “Did he visit often?” I asked, trying to picture Macaulay picking his way through the mud, wondering if it was the elephants who drew him, or the youthful mahouts.

  “Not so much in recent years. But when he was younger…” Jamie trailed off in mid-sentence, then began again, apparently addressing Frank. “Your lot refused to see this side of India. You paid for your party elephants in the air-conditioned comfort of Khan Market, but how many expats knew where these animals had come from? It takes four hours to reach Vasant Vihar from this colony – hot work in the heat. Oh yes, you all loved their pretty chalk colours, the cameras clicked, children gazed up in awe, but who saw the mahout’s bloody metal spike stuck deep into the elephant’s neck?”

  “What is it you so fear about India?” Frank asked, interrupting Jamie with an urgency that I had never heard in his voice before. “What is it?”

  “Fear?” Jamie laughed. “It’s got nothing to do with fear. God, Frank, you never cease to amaze me. Lutyens had it about right: ‘Liberty is a blessing which must be earned before it can be enjoyed.’”

  “Let’s go. We don’t have to listen to this,” Frank said to me, turning to leave. “I would ring the airport, tip them off you’re coming, but the sooner you’re out of this country, the better.”

  “I remember thinking something similar when you left Britain,” Jamie replied. Frank stopped and the two men glared at each other for a moment, the mutual hatred tumbling down through the years. Then Frank turned away and started walking towards our car. As I caught up with him, Jamie called: “Where’s the girl, by the way?” I resisted saying anything. I suddenly regretted coming here and wanted to be as far away from Jamie as I could get. “Look after her, won’t you?” he called, his voice fading under the noisy flyover.

  23

  One of the least surprising aspects of our marriage was its endorsement by the stars. Priyanka’s father had told me first, letting me break the news to his daughter. In all other respects, the Pillai family had overlooked the differences our proposed love marriage had presented, the challenges to tradition, but no amount of talking would have persuaded them to waive the thalakuri. Priyanka had been depressed for days, knowing how unlikely it was that I would have chowa dosham, too, but I had been quietly more confident. Something about our whole relationship, the way we had come together, had given me hope. And in the end that hope had proved well founded.

  A far greater surprise was the appearance in Cochin of my father, who arrived from Delhi in time to see me tying a sacred locket, or thali, round Priyanka’s neck. He had watched the proceedings from a wheelchair, which he was initially cross about, but his legs were much weaker than he admitted and he later relaxed into it, particularly when he was wheeled around by a succession of Priyanka’s disarmingly beautiful cousins. I was more than happy to participate in the ceremonial requirements of a traditional Nair wedding, which was a far more modest affair than the gaudy events I had been involuntarily exposed to in the republic. This was definitely a helicopter no-fly zone.

  A pipe and drum had played when I tied the thali with a gold thread, but not the sort I was used to back home. The pipe, called a nadaswaram, had soared to a high pitch at the moment my nervous knot was complete. We were sitting on cushions, on a decorated dais, which we later walked round three times in front of a lighted lamp. I also presented Priyanka with a silk sari, which her sister (who had grown considerably less frosty towards me, particularly when the horoscopes had come through) had helped me to choose on the M. G. Road, together with another traditional Kerala dress.

  All of which had left me profoundly moved. Priyanka had looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her, and her family had made me feel unconditionally welcome, which couldn’t have been entirely easy for them. My only pang of sadness had been before the ceremony, when we went around the elders to accept their blessings. My father was wearing a white shirt and a mundu wrapped round his waist (he had bought it, he said later, immediately after touching down in Cochin, from a shop in Ernakulam that was still standing from his day), and it was nearly too much when Priyanka and I both knelt down before him and touched his feet. As we rose, I saw tears in his eyes and sensed, in that moment, that he regretted closing the door so hard.

  It was now the evening and we had all gathered on the lawn outside the Malabar Hotel for what everyone kept referring to as Raj’s Western-style reception. I had insisted on paying for something (as had my father), and a party overlooking the harbour where it had all begun seemed as appropriate as anything. My father had changed into a kilt and was regaling a crowd of people with stories about his life in Edinburgh. Dutchie was also in attendance, getting drunk on Kingfisher as he chatted up three of Priyanka’s cousins, all of whom had clearly never seen anyone quite like him.

  He looked a changed man (he, too, was wearing a mundu, with gold stitchwork round the hem, though tactfully not as embroidered as my own) and I was pleased to see him here. I had asked him to be my best man, on condition that he didn’t make a speech, and he had been the model of good behaviour, taking his turn to wheel my father around and making sure my glass was never empty. I had declined his offer of a stag night – it was too terrifying a prospect – and we had settled instead on a pub crawl round Edinburgh with some old friends after Priyanka and I returned from our honeymoon. I was taking her to a remote desert island called Bangaram, which sounded expensive and far away, but which was, in fact, only a few hundred kilometres off the Malabar coast. She had agreed to live in Edinburgh (where the government had offered me a job in tropical medicine and hygiene), providing that we visited her family together at least twice a year, which seemed a fair deal.

  Priyanka had become something of a celebrity in journalist circles, both in India and abroad, in the weeks since Seven Days had published her account of Macaulay and his fiery demise. As for the Cardamom Club, the British papers turned the story into a fullblown spy scandal, bringing Indo-British relations to an all-time low, damaging bilateral trade and severely embarrassing the government in London. By all accounts, the Club had never enjoyed any formal endorsement, but came into its own after India and Pakistan conducted their tit-for-tat nuclear tests in the desert. Up to that point, it had been much as we thought: an entirely unofficial cell of officers within the intelligence community who had common concerns about India. They had long believed that the former colony represented a potentially grave threat to Britain’s internal and external security, a subtle menace that was perceived as being quite different from the noisy Islamic fundamentalism of Pakistan. The seemingly unstoppable rise of Hindu nationalism only served to confirm their worst suspicions.

  Sir Ian, in other words, had been fully justified in his fears. What he hadn’t been aware of was the extent to which the Cardamom Club’s unofficial existence had been tolerated by successive heads of MI6 and MI5, without the knowledge of their ministerial bosses. The Club was seen by intelligence chiefs as a useful place where their off
icers could safely let off steam. Messages sent between those sympathetic to the cause were nostalgically signed IPI, shorthand for a certain frame of mind, a hidden agenda that might one day be more formally acknowledged. (Interestingly, though, the existence of the Cardamom Club did appear to have become temporarily known to one or two senior members of the Conservative Cabinet in the 1980s. It was, after all, the era of the Cricket Test.)

  As the original members of IPI either retired or died, the Cardamom Club might reasonably have been expected to disappear for good, but its membership swelled with the next generation of Indophobes, men like Jamie Grade, a middle-ranking MI6 officer who was against the promotion of India and “dilution” of Britain. In the 1980s, Jamie went about persuading sympathetic colleagues in MI5 to put numerous Indian immigrants under surveillance, and was in regular contact with Macaulay, calling up the occasional old file, commissioning new ones, and generally raising his profile within the intelligence community.

  Macaulay couldn’t believe his good fortune. For a few years he basked in his southern glory and was even sent out a few high commissioners who were known to dine occasionally at the Club. But his luck seemed to have dried up with the arrival of a Labour government and he slipped back into the shadows. Macaulay’s star, though, was destined to rise once again after the nuclear tests. While the Cardamom Club’s line on immigrants had been, in reality, only occasionally bought by the security chiefs, its other argument, that post-Independence India posed an increasingly dangerous threat to the new world order, suddenly found itself official government policy.

  Encouraged by all the attention from London, Macaulay continued to update his database on immigrants under the cover of writing a history of modern India. The fact that he had failed to unearth a single mole in over forty years seemed to have been overlooked by the Club, but he thought his boat had finally come in when a young British Asian working for the Foreign Office showed up in Cochin. He wasn’t a Muslim, which would have been a bonus in an increasingly anti-Islamic culture back home, but he did work for MI6. A quick cross-reference to his father’s files (a former anti-British subversive) and bingo! A whole family of moles. It hadn’t quite worked out like that, of course.