Borrowed Time u-11

by Hugh Miller

  Arberry laughed. ‘Something like that happened to me, come to think of it. I grew up in Boston, went to Harvard, did most of the Boston things right through my formative years. Then when I graduated med school I got an internship in a San Francisco hospital. The different way of life nearly finished me.’

  The food was wheeled in on two trolleys by the butler and an Indian maid in a blue and silver sari.

  ‘The point I was going to make,’ Arberry said as the dishes were lined up on the sideboard, ‘is that there may be none of the local cultural or decorative touches in the house, but the odour of Indian cooking sure as hell permeates the corridors. I adore the stuff.’

  Mike had been warned that the food served in Kashmir was usually disappointing to anyone who had eaten Indian cuisine in the West. That may have been the case in the restaurants of Srinagar and Pahalgam, but not in Simon Arberry’s house.

  ‘This is the best Indian cooking I ever ate,’ Mike declared.

  Lenny nodded. So did Ram, both their mouths too full to speak. They were served dishes that even Ram had never seen or heard of before-sada pilau, kutchi biriani, aaloo tariwale — with a superb, bewildering selection of sauces and side dishes, and carafes of red, white, and rosé wine. Throughout the meal, Arberry managed to eat as fast as anyone, at the same time delivering a monologue about his plans for the region.

  ‘In eighteen months’ time I’ll open a treatment centre, right at the heart of the Vale, staffed by doctors and nurses specializing in tropical medicine. I have two district outpatient clinics already open, a regional surgical centre just up the hill from here, and the new nurses’ school will train girls from the local towns and villages and qualify them to a standard acceptable anywhere in the world.’

  ‘I can see that your motivation and belief in your work could get some amazing things done,’ Mike said. ‘But where does the money come from?’

  ‘I’m kept afloat by two things,’ Arberry said. ‘One is the approval of the authorities, the other is cash from large organizations throughout the world.’

  ‘How do you get them to part with it?’

  ‘I’m good at badgering.’

  Over brandy and coffee Arberry tried to correct the one-sided bias he had imposed on the conversation. He asked Ram how his research into agricultural practices was going.

  Ram improvised smoothly, turning the topic around and making it an overview of the Vale of Kashmir through the eyes of one whose job it was to study the territory.

  ‘Everything about this region is romantic. Did you know, Doctor, that the Vale is an ancient lake basin?’

  Arberry shook his head.

  ‘For hundreds of years it was full of water.’

  ‘How long is the Vale?’ Lenny asked.

  ‘A hundred and forty kilometres,’ Ram said. ‘That’s eighty-five miles. It’s twenty miles wide. The mountains around the Vale are between twelve and sixteen thousand feet high. They shelter the area from the south-west monsoon. It’s as if…’ Ram held his hands out, palms vertical, facing each other; ‘as if somebody had designed it all, laid it out and said, well now, it needs to be fertile, and because it’s to be a centre for population, it has to be beautiful and also sheltered from the worst of the elements in the surrounding country.’

  ‘And of course, any good Hindu will tell you it was designed,’ Arberry said. ‘By the god Brahma. Ask anybody at all, they’ll tell you.’

  ‘And the next peasant is likely to tell you it was Vishnu,’ said Ram, ‘and the one after him will swear it was Siva.’

  ‘You lost me,’ Mike said.

  ‘Think of the Hindu gods this way,’ Ram said. ‘There is only one omnipresent god, but he has three physical forms to match his principal facets — he is Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Siva, the destroyer and reproducer. In a way they all share characteristics of each other, which is because they’re all really the same being.’

  ‘The theology’s all very well,’ Lenny said, red-faced from the spices and the wine, ‘but what I want to know is, why do official sources always call the country Kashmir-and-Jammu?’ He knew the answer, but it did no harm to stick to his cover in a positive way, now and again.

  ‘That’s the official name,’ Ram said. ‘If you need the full historical and political picture, I’ll lend you a book. It’s enough to know, for now, that half the population of the state of Jammu and Kashmir lives here in the Vale, and we have two capitals — Srinagar in summer, Jammu in winter.’

  ‘And it’s as well to bear in mind the message of my dear dead friend Alex Young,’ Arberry said. ‘In a state troubled with conflicts of a dozen kinds, we in the Vale have the best of it. We are the stable centre.’

  ‘But enough unrest here could plunge the whole of Kashmir into terrible, bloody war,’ Ram said.

  ‘Do you think that’s a danger, Doctor?’ Mike said.

  ‘I certainly do. And I know how it is most likely to come about. If our society here ever breaks apart, it will be because of the bandits. The bandits, more than anyone else, are the ones dedicated to overthrowing the stability and the way of life we enjoy here. If something isn’t done to stop them, soon, they will hack apart the unity of the region, they will lay waste to it, and they will spread such fear, such corruption, that nothing will stop them turning the Vale into a smoking wilderness.’

  ‘And then the land grabbing will start,’ Ram said.

  Lenny nodded. ‘And the empire building.’

  ‘But with the right help none of it need happen.’ Arberry held up his glass. ‘A toast. To the Vale of Kashmir, and to its continued existence as one of the most beautiful, most magical places on earth.’

  Later, Arberry led his guests up the hill to his new surgical centre, a long concrete building housing three operating theatres and two recovery wards. He took them through the anaesthetic preparation rooms, showed them a roving head scanner, the latest mobile X-ray machines, and a battery of examination instruments linked to a central computer equipped with a diagnostic database.

  ‘A surgical unit any community could be proud of,’ Ram said.

  ‘But so small,’ Arberry pointed out. ‘We have an enormous waiting list. To double the size of this place wouldn’t cut the problem in half, it doesn’t work that way. But two more of these units, equally spaced from this one in a two-hundred-square-mile area, would cut the challenge to a third.’ He smiled. ‘You can see why Alex Young’s little medical facility was so valuable, and why it’ll be such a loss until somebody gets it up and running again. Our people need all the help they can get.’

  Before Mike, Ram and Lenny got back in the Land-Rover with old Nisar, Arberry led them down a steep stairway at the foot of the lawn behind the house. It took them a hundred metres underground. At the pitch-dark bottom of the stairs Arberry told them to stop, then he threw a switch.

  ‘My God,’ Mike breathed. ‘That’s amazing.’

  They were in a natural subterranean cave lit by dozens of concealed spots and floodlamps.

  ‘I call it the Golden Cavern,’ Arberry said. ‘That isn’t very imaginative of me, but I think you’ll agree the name fits.’

  ‘It’s like a dream,’ Lenny said.

  The craggy walls and high ceiling were covered in gold. The light thrown back was so bright, so sparkling, that Ram had to shield his eyes.

  ‘It’s actually not gold at all,’ Arberry said. ‘It’s iron pyrites, but in this setting it’s as beautiful as any real gold. And nature put it there all by herself.’

  Before they left, he gave each of his visitors a fat wallet of papers. ‘Facts and figures,’ he said, ‘my observations concerning crime in this area. Perhaps, if you take the information to heart, you may bring collective pressure on your people to do something to help us.’

  * * *

  ‘He’s a charismatic guy,’ Lenny said on the way back. ‘I meant to ask what made him come here in the first place. I can imagine him being a lot more at home in good ol’ gregarious Manhatta
n.’

  ‘It’s a sad story,’ Ram said. ‘He was in private surgical practice in Massachusetts, quietly going places, and he came out here on a holiday with his wife.’

  ‘When?’ Lenny asked.

  ‘Fifteen years ago. It was at the time they advertised the Vale of Kashmir as the Switzerland of India. Mrs Arberry was so in love with the place she persuaded the doc to buy a plot of land, so they could have a house to go to on holidays. But breast cancer killed her before she ever got a chance to come back.’

  ‘I wondered about a wife,’ Lenny said. ‘Men like that don’t usually live alone.’

  ‘He told me her death changed him,’ Ram said. ‘He felt her spirit was where the plot of land was, so he moved here and bought acres around the spot. He built the mansion and since then he’s devoted himself to improving the area his wife fell in love with.’

  ‘Reverend Young was afraid the troubles might drive Dr Arberry out,’ Mike said. ‘The way it sounds to me, he would take some budging.’

  ‘But I bet he knows they could do it,’ Lenny said. ‘He’s civilized, remember. Civilized people don’t stand a chance against the bears. He’s certainly keen that the UN should find some way to run the bad guys off the territory.’

  ‘I only had a quick skim through this,’ Mike said, patting the wallet of papers on his knee, ‘but it looks like a better dossier on the killing and the sabotage and the drug-running activities around here than you guys on Drugwatch International ever put together.’

  Lenny stared at him in the dim yellow glow of the overhead light. ‘You really know how to wound a person.’

  ‘Nothing personal.’

  ‘It’s the doc’s drive that makes him so capable,’ Ram said. ‘I’ve watched him. He won’t settle for less than excellence. Everything he does is a masterpiece of its kind.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a smidgen of that drive,’ Lenny said.

  ‘The secret’s in his sense of impermanence,’ Ram said.

  Lenny looked at him. ‘You going philosophical on us?’

  ‘I’m talking about the way he’s convinced that even the best, the most seemingly everlasting, can be taken from us. It began with his wife. Now he sees something he loves with as much intensity coming under threat. And that makes him want to hang on harder. He lives every day with the pain of the threat, and the pain makes him want to prevail at all costs.’

  ‘He said the whole thing when he was seeing us off just a few minutes ago,’ Mike said. ‘Remember?’

  The other two nodded. Standing with them on the steps in front of the white porch Dr Arberry had said, ‘What hurts me most, what pains me to my soul, is to see mindless thuggery reduce beauty and progress to ashes.’

  10

  Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, is a noisy, colourful, bustling city with its own distinct look and atmosphere. Each time Lenny Trent went there, he could not shake the feeling that he was much further east. The people even looked different, and he had heard businessmen, preparing to return south, say they were going back to India.

  Nowadays Srinagar looked like occupied territory. Everywhere there were roadblocks; armed soldiers sat in bunkers on all the major street corners. An after-dark curfew was in operation and most nights there was fighting, most of it in the old city.

  ‘It resembles Beirut over there,’ Commissioner Jabar Mantur told Lenny. He pointed from the barred window of his second-storey office towards the craggy skyline of the old quarter. ‘So many factions it’s hard to keep track. New movements spring up overnight, every weekend old ones get wiped out.’

  Commissioner Mantur was the second most senior police officer in Kashmir. He was a short, thickset man with iron grey hair that swept down each cheek in wiry sideburns, almost touching the ends of his moustache. He wore a lightweight grey business suit, a stark white shirt and a red tie. As he spoke he smiled a great deal and shook his head, as if it were necessary to disparage most of his own remarks.

  ‘You will have noticed,’ he said, ‘that our police station here is more like a fortress. Twice in three months we had a bomb thrown into the reception area, and a grenade which was lobbed through the canteen window wounded ten of my officers. I was under pressure to do something about our security, so I took my lead from Northern Ireland.’

  Lenny noted the benevolent eyes and the affable smile, and realized he was in the presence of a born diplomat. This wry, civilized administrator had a reputation for operational toughness that made Norman Schwartzkopf look effete. Confidential records at the HQ of Drugwatch International revealed that less than a month ago, Mantur had personally broken into a drug laboratory, shot the three guards dead and beaten up four chemists who were free-basing cocaine with industrial solvents. A note from a field agent formerly based in Kashmir described Mantur as ‘a hands-on police chief who can’t keep his hands off criminals’.

  ‘I have a Security Council memo telling me I should co-operate with you, Mr Trent. You must be an important man.’

  ‘I’m a reliable functionary, Commissioner. I’m a good bridge between sources of information and the people who have to act on it. Important is something I’m not.’

  ‘To be reliable is more satisfying, anyway,’ Mantur said. He went behind his desk and unlocked a drawer. ‘These maps I will give you, they do not officially exist. They contain information which my masters in government would call speculative. They would call it that because nowhere on the maps, or in the accompanying notes, have I indicated how I obtained any of the information, nor do I offer anything else by way of corroboration.’

  He put a sheaf of folded maps on the desk. Lenny picked up the top one, unfolded it and stood with his arms spread wide, marvelling at the scale and the detail.

  ‘I can see this is done by hand, Commissioner, but it looks like the work of an artist …’

  ‘The work of a jailed cartographer, as a matter of fact. I managed to, um, how do you say — cut a deal for him with the Justice Department on condition he would co-operate on the project. He would have co-operated anyway, you understand, but because I made it seem that his eventual early release would depend very much on the quality of the work, he turned out the best stuff he’s ever done in his life.’

  ‘The red lines are — what? Drug convoy routes?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And the blue ones?’

  ‘Dead routes. They indicate trails that have gone inactive as a result of police or military action. You could say each blue line represents a dead drug caravan.’

  Lenny looked at the Commissioner over the top of the map. ‘Dead?’

  ‘Literally. There is no point in arresting bandits and trying to interrogate them. They might as well be a different species for all the help they provide. So they are eliminated as they are encountered. It’s tidy.’ Mantur smiled delicately. ‘It’s also confidential.’

  Lenny refolded the map. ‘You stand by this information, then. The red lines are active drug convoy routes.’

  ‘It cost a lot of time, sweat and called-in favours to make sure the maps are accurate, Mr Trent.’

  ‘Then I have to ask you, sir — why haven’t you acted on this intelligence, if it’s so reliable?’

  ‘Manpower, that’s the first obstacle. I don’t have the men. Every time I mount an offensive against drug peddling I have to borrow officers from other regions. I have to justify the expense to my masters. I even have to give one month’s notice of my intentions — which, of course, gives the peddlers roughly three weeks’ warning that I’m on my way.’ Mantur spread his hands. ‘All I can do, to be effective in any measure, is to keep my intelligence updated in the hope I can use it from time to time.’

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘I concentrate my main efforts on the kind of local drug manufacturing outfits whose liquidation does not rely on the deployment of large numbers of police officers.’

  Lenny started to say something, then realized Mantur had only stopped for breath.

 
‘The other obstacle is disloyalty. Most of my officers are straight and honest men, Mr Trent. But there are a few, an unidentified few, who keep the criminals informed of our planned movements. On balance this would not mean that every assault on drug convoys would be fruitless, but because my masters know there is a problem with disloyalty, they are even less inclined to support my efforts.’ Mantur smiled again. ‘Can I take it that your people are planning some kind of major assault on the drug people?’

  ‘Nothing’s planned,’ Lenny said. ‘First we’re getting acquainted with the situation, as fast as we can. Then when we know the scale of the sickness, we’ll try to formulate a remedy.’

  ‘The drug problem is not a new one, Mr Trent. Nor will it ever be stamped out. Sources of supply are remote and beyond our reach, so as long as someone is prepared to pay poor men and hardened criminals to transport the poison, the trade will survive. I hope you don’t think you can wipe it out.’

  ‘Our concern is a specific area of trade, Commissioner. There’s been an escalation of violence, political agitation and drug running in a previously stable territory, in the west of the Vale of Kashmir …’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mantur said. ‘I hoped that would at least figure in your schedule of matters requiring attention. In fact it’s my biggest concern. The old drug trade has at least discernible limits and predictable features. To some extent it can be contained. Most importantly, it doesn’t carry the threat of all-out chaos.’

  ‘But the troubles in the Vale do?’

  ‘At the centre of those troubles is the traffic in drugs. We are dealing there with a brand new line of supply, and it passes right through that territory. I am aware also that some of the drug couriers are recruited from local communities.’

  ‘And this traffic is well organized?’

  ‘Dishearteningly so. And it is a new style of drug trade. The merchandise includes exceptionally refined cannabis oil, very very fine heroin, top grade cocaine and even quantities of crack. It is a more profitable trade area than the others and it is operated more ruthlessly.’