by Jon Stock
As Ravi turned the car into the driveway I sensed immediately that something was wrong. There was a yellow and black taxi parked outside the back door with its doors open like insect wings. Inside I could see a number of figures sleeping. Ravi slowed and hooted, his first reaction to anything. The taxi driver, an old Sikh man, stirred and turned to tap the people in the car, one of whom I now recognised as Frank.
I told Ravi to stop and I got out of the car. As I approached, I spotted Susie in the back with Kashmir and Jumila, who were both sleeping, clasped in her tight embrace. They looked like frightened refugees washed up on a foreign shore.
“Frank, what on earth are you doing here?” I asked.
“Is it such a problem?” Frank said, getting out of the front passenger seat.
“No, of course not,” I said, cross at my own tone of voice. “Of course not,” I repeated, noticing that he was dripping with sweat. I glanced at the car again. “What’s happened? Are you all right? The children?”
“Can we go inside?” he said, looking back at his family. “It’s a hot night.”
“Of course, come in,” I said, checking that the front gates had shut. I could almost inhale Jamie’s presence, his disapproval.
I opened up the house, telling Jagu to crank up the main generator as we would need to run the air conditioning. Jagu was half asleep and was walking around with a wet towel wrapped round his head. I went back to find Frank, who was helping Susie out of the car. Kashmir was asleep on her shoulder. I offered to take Jumila, who was laid out on the back seat, but Frank picked her up, turning his back to me as he leant into the car.
“Can we have something to drink, Raj?” Frank asked quietly, as I followed him over to the house. Jumila woke momentarily on Frank’s shoulder, her frightened eyes staring ahead.
“Water? Juice?” I offered.
“Something a little stronger?”
“Of course, of course.” I patted Jumila’s back gently but it was a futile gesture.
I showed them to the guest room, where they laid the children on a bed. Susie hadn’t said anything to me yet, but as she curled up next to them she asked for a glass of water and managed the faintest of smiles. Her hair was unkempt, her eyes bloodshot. I said nothing as I went over to the window to turn on the air-conditioning unit. I walked past the listless figures again. I didn’t know where to start. Susie was staring at the wall. Gently I let down the mosquito net, which tumbled all around them, and then I left, closing the door quietly behind me.
“Frank, will you please tell me what’s going on, what’s happened?” I asked, as we went into the sitting room.
“You tell me, Raj,” he said, watching me pour a whisky. Sensing his attention, I kept pouring and handed him a large peg.
He walked around the room, taking big sips of whisky.
“I’ll just take Susie some water,” I said, leaving the room as Frank started to talk. Part of me didn’t want to hear what he might have to say. Frank carried on regardless.
“We’d been at Karims for a meal out, we usually do on a Sunday, it’s a fun place to be.”
I could still hear him as I took the water to Susie. Her eyes were now closed and I left the glass on the bedside table.
“Go on,” I said, by way of encouragement, coming back into the room.
“The first thing I noticed was the guard at the end of the road. He gave me an anxious look. Normally he’s all smiles and we exchange a few words. But not tonight. By the time we got to the house it was obvious that something had happened. The front door was closed but it opened when I pushed it. The lock had been jemmied. Inside was like a bomb site. The whole place had been turned upside down, drawers emptied, pictures taken off the walls, books ripped open.”
I knew as soon as he started that it had something to do with Jamie. As Frank continued to describe the mayhem, the defecation on the landing, the pile of Susie’s underwear on the bed, ripped to shreds, I felt sick to the core. I also felt trapped, claustrophobic, unable to find a way out of it all.
I sat down on the sofa, watching Frank pace around. He was angry now, the first time I had seen him like this.
“Who did it?” I asked, with little curiosity.
“I was hoping you might know,” he said, more quietly. “It wasn’t the Indians, not their style. I thought I’d left this behind when we left Britain. I promised Susie.”
“It’s happened before?”
Frank laughed. “Our flat was turned over twice a week when we were living in London. We didn’t bother keeping anything in it in the end.”
“But why?”
“Why?” He laughed drily. “Why?”
He sat down next to me, patted my knee. “At least then we could blame the Tories, eh?”
“Frank, I don’t know anything about this, I really don’t. I told you today everything I knew. Jamie doesn’t trust you, but he’s got nothing to go on, nothing to justify this.”
“Ah yes, Jamie. Shall I tell you something about your friend? I didn’t want to mention it before.”
I nodded, wondering what he was going to say, hoping it would justify my own reservations.
“We go back a long way.”
“You and Jamie?”
“Our paths first crossed when I was still involved with CND. I was working on some research, compiling a list of the intelligence officers who had been assigned to keep an eye on us. We got hold of some pretty sensitive stuff, had a sympathiser on the inside. Jamie didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. We knew he was working for MI6, but never figured out what his interest was in us.”
I wanted to pick up the phone there and then and talk to Sir Ian, ask him why Frank’s house had been ransacked, find out what Jamie was really doing in Delhi, but I had a horrible feeling that he didn’t know.
“We did have one lead,” Frank continued.
“What was it?” I asked.
“We intercepted a message to Jamie. It was signed with the initials IPI, printed rather than handwritten. It was the only time we ever saw it.”
“IPI? What did the message say?”
“It was about someone who had recently joined us. A nice enough mole. His parents were from Gujarat. When we asked our man what it meant, he told us to back off, said we were getting into something too deep, too dangerous.”
Part 2
10
A patchwork of water and land stretched out beneath me, green and innocent after the heat and dust of Delhi. Somewhere below was Cochin airport, although almost every strip of Kerala’s lush soil appeared to be covered in coconut trees. To the aircraft’s right was the Arabian Sea, whose glistening littoral we had followed ever since we had touched down briefly in Goa. It felt so good to be out of Delhi that I wondered how I had managed to stay there for two months. I had left behind the choking smoke of ITO junction, its morbid police sign recording how many people had died on the roads the day before, and the smog of Lutyens’s Delhi, which was sometimes so thick it was impossible to see the President’s Palace from halfway down Rajpath. But most importantly I had escaped from Jamie, whose twisting cigar fumes had proved far more constricting than the city’s torpid traffic.
Frank and Susie had stayed the night but I hadn’t seen them this morning. I felt terrible about what had happened and wasn’t sure I could have coped with sharing breakfast with them, not yet. I suppose I hadn’t expected my decision to work for MI6 to have such immediate and detrimental effects on the lives of those around me, particularly friends. I had prepared myself to live with what I knew might occasionally be uncertain consequences, but I never thought others would have to. To my shame, I had just left a note explaining that Ravi would run them home after he had dropped me off at the airport. I had also asked Jagu to give them a hand clearing their place up. I didn’t care any more if Frank was under surveillance, if they traced my car back to me. Any loyalty to Jamie was fast evaporating. I also wanted to find out more about the initials “IPI”, something that had kept me awake for most of the
night.
The pleasure of acting now without Jamie’s knowledge was considerable, given how much Jamie did behind the backs of others, but I was feeling something else as I sat there, looking idly at a map in the inflight magazine. Kerala was a reassuringly long way from Delhi, the same distance as Rangoon, Abu Dhabi, the Aral Sea. I felt a sharp sense of freedom, but I was also anxious. I looked at my palms, the moisture between my fingers, and closed them tightly.
Priyanka had given me a number in Kerala before she left and I knew I would ring her. At best she would be indifferent, more probably there would be quiet anger, disappointment. Either way I was prepared for it to be complicated, but I had to speak to her, to know where we stood. Sir Ian could have asked me to go anywhere, but he had sent me to Cochin. I owed it to myself, to whatever had determined that I was here.
I felt very neutral about my father, even though I was also journeying to the place where he had grown up, where his own parents had lived, and their parents before them. Kerala had been so thoroughly cleansed from our household that I could have been arriving anywhere in the world. I had no sense of pilgrimage because there had been no premeditation – I had never consciously meant to come here – but I felt a respect for the place, more out of duty than anything else. I was also curious to search for clues, to see if the same things provoked me as must have done him.
There were few immediate clues as I left my luggage at the Casino Hotel, near the airstrip on Willingdon Island, and took a cycle rickshaw down to the Malabar at the far end of the island for an early lunch. The swaying journey was slowed by the long chain of the rickshaw, which kept slipping, particularly when we rattled over several railway lines, but the young cyclist ignored my offers to dismount, flashing a brilliant white smile and telling me to relax. I had already asked him how much he wanted. “As you like,” he had said, repeating words I had come to dread in Delhi, but I didn’t protest. Already I sensed there was less hustling here, fewer people on the make.
Even the goods carriers lacked the menace of their northern counterparts. We passed a row of almost fifty of them parked neatly alongside the old railway terminus, which was painted in a municipal creamy orange, unlike the trucks themselves, which were decorated with blossoming vignettes of Ganesh, Shiva, even Jesus, surrounded by floral patterns and philosophical graffiti. One had “Not on our merits but on his grace”. Another, more profoundly, said, “Love is sorrow of the mind”. My favourite, though, was “Make Love Not War”, written above the words “Use Dipper at Night”.
We were greeted at the Malabar by a guard wearing white gaiters and gloves, who directed us into the drive as if we were a taxiing aircraft. He threw a disdainful look at the cyclist, whose taut legs were seesawing up and down as he struggled to pull me over the cobbled entrance. I had had enough and jumped out, telling him that I would walk the final few yards. He shook my hand after I gave him twenty rupees, and pushed his rickshaw back down the drive, watched closely by the guard.
As I sat on the terrace of the hotel overlooking the harbour, drinking a bottle of Kalyani Black Label, I wondered why anyone would want to live anywhere else. The fresh sea air was like pure oxygen (something the traffic police had started to be provided with as I was leaving Delhi), but it was the timelessness of the Mattancherry skyline across the water that made me want to raze Sainik Farms and its ersatz palaces to the ground. The clay-roofed warehouses, some with the pointed eaves of Chinese pagodas, couldn’t have changed for centuries, storing cardamom and ginger and pepper inside their thick, cooling walls. Beyond them Cochin’s famed Chinese fishing nets stood guard on either side of the harbour entrance, sparkling like dewy cobwebs.
Small dugout canoes with stitched, square-patterned sails bobbed about in the water in front of the warehouses. Fishing boats with high, arrogant bows chugged out to sea, chugachugachug, less intrusive than Delhi’s diesel generators. The leading boats were escorted by a small school of porpoises, who occasionally broke off to turn circles amongst stray clumps of water hyacinth that were drifting out to sea. Even when a vast dredger hove into view, blocking out Mattancherry on its way to the main channel, its rusting hulk failed to jar. God, how I hoped Frank and Susie were all right.
As for Priyanka, she was probably engaged by now to an IT millionaire from Bangalore, but I would try to contact her tomorrow. I pressed my hands tightly together, clicking the joints in my fingers. First, though, I had to find Macaulay.
After finishing my beer, I climbed over a low wall and walked round to a rickety jetty where one of the waiters had explained I could catch a ferry to Fort Cochin. It was where Macaulay ran his internet cafe, according to Sir Ian, somewhere behind the fishing nets, near the Hotel Elite in Princess Street.
The harbour was a highway of ferries criss-crossing to and from everywhere except the Malabar jetty. When one eventually turned up, I cursed myself for having waited. Barely seaworthy, it was packed with people hanging off its splintered wooden sides and clinging to the corrugated iron roof, where there was a tangle of bicycles on their sides. I was already reading one of those short newspaper paragraphs that recounted how a ferry on the other side of the world had sunk between islands with the loss of hundreds.
I guessed there was bench seating inside for about fifty people, but over two hundred were on board. A taxi suddenly seemed a very sensible idea. The passengers came ashore, each one stretching across a yawning gap. I looked down at the water rushing past the jetty. The captain rang his bell and I took my chances. There was barely room to stand inside, but I pushed my way to the bow, where there was a small, open-air deck which was in the sun but cooled by a breeze rising off the sea. It seemed to offer the best chance of escape, if we began taking on water.
The internet café would have been easy enough to find even if I hadn’t known it was near the Hotel Elite. I could have followed the steady stream of Western travellers who were making their way there. I wanted to get my bearings before introducing myself to Macaulay, and ordered a coffee at the Elite, from where I could see the café’s entrance, halfway down on the opposite side of the small street. It was called the Cardamom Café and was on the ground floor of what looked like an old Dutch barn, with cane tables and chairs set outside. A couple of beach-blond Westerners were reading guidebooks and drinking milkshakes. Behind them in a darkened window a fluorescent orange poster with zigzag edges listed prices for internet surfing, emails, photocopying and word processing. There was also an address for the café’s own website. I couldn’t see who, if anyone, was inside.
The street itself, more of a sandy track, consisted of other Dutch colonial houses, most of which were still standing as they had been built over three hundred years ago, except for a few fading coats of deep yellow paint. One, almost immediately opposite, had been converted into a discreet shop. Hessian sacks of rice, cumin seeds, turmeric, nutmeg, dried red chillies and ginger were lined up outside, their open tops rolled down, small birds occasionally swooping down to peck for food.
After five minutes a foreigner appeared at the far end of the street, cycling purposefully towards the cafe. He partially dismounted with ten yards to go, both legs on one pedal, and then jumped off, swung his bicycle round and rested it against a lamppost next to one of the cane tables. He locked it with a chain, nodded briskly at the two travellers and walked into the cafe. Macaulay, I was sure of it. He was much more energetic than I had imagined, swifter in his actions, although he was unquestionably old, at least seventy. He was boney, too; tall with pointed shoulders and a slight stoop. His complexion was dark reddish, a trimmed mariner’s beard slate grey. Both his trouser legs were tucked into thin yellow cotton socks. I paid for my coffee and walked across to the café.
A wall of cool air hit me as I pushed open the dark glass door and walked inside. There was a row of computer terminals down each side of the room, almost all of them occupied by Westerners. I paused for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the dimmed lighting. At the far end there was a counter and another terminal.
Macaulay, if it was him, was punching impatiently at the keyboard with two fingers. He looked up for a second and then continued to type.
“Can I use one of the terminals?” I asked, losing my nerve as I walked towards him.
“That’s what they’re there for,” he said waspishly, not looking up. His accent was Glaswegian, which unsettled me. I hesitated for a moment and then turned and walked across to the nearest terminal, trying to gauge whether his tone had been as dismissive as it sounded.
I sat down at the terminal, wiping my hands on my trousers, and stared at the screen. I realised at once that it had been a mistake not to declare who I was. It would only arouse suspicion later. But before I could say anything, a teenage boy was standing next to me, bent double at the waist so that his head was at the same height as his knees. I had only seen photos of polio victims. Even the mutilated lepers at the ring road flyover in Delhi were in better shape than this boy. His legs were thin and bandied and his hands had withered, clutched in front of his chest like a kangaroo’s paws. He had enough movement, though, to lean forward, head pulled up to look at me, and click the cursor with his hand. He smiled as the modem started to dial and then he retreated.
