The Caretaker

by A. X. Ahmad

  A tinny bell rings when he enters the crowded shop. Along the walls are dusty glass cases of children’s toys, and Ranjit can make out lead toy soldiers, battered metal trucks, even a hobby horse with a mangy mane, all marked with numbered tags. One half of the store is taken up by a small wooden stage with rows of empty metal folding chairs facing it.

  A curtain ripples behind the stage and a youngish man with long brown hair emerges, a carton of Chinese food in one hand, chopsticks in the other. He gestures to the rows of empty chairs.

  “The auction isn’t till tomorrow morning. But feel free to browse. We have some wonderful nineteenth-century toy soldiers.”

  Ranjit takes the doll from his backpack. “Actually, I was hoping to learn more about this. I see you have some in your window.”

  The young man puts down the carton and wipes his hands on his baggy corduroy pants. Up close, he is not that young, with a receding hairline and dust in the creases of his face.

  “Can you tell me anything about it? I think it’s quite old.”

  The man lifts the doll, feels its weight, and his expression changes. “Dolls aren’t my department, sir. Please wait a minute.”

  He turns and walks back to the heavy velvet curtains, pokes his head between them, and bellows, “Martha! Hey, Martha, come take a look at this.”

  An elderly lady shuffles through the curtains, wiping a speck of rice from the corner of her mouth. She has a high forehead and dyed black hair swept back with a Spanish comb.

  “Hmmm. Hmmm.” She picks up the doll. “What have we here?”

  She stares at the doll, her face expressionless. Switching on a gooseneck lamp sitting on the counter, she examines it, turning it slowly with her long fingers.

  “Where did you get this, sir?” Her voice is polite, but unable to hide a note of excitement.

  Ranjit just smiles. “Oh, it was a gift.”

  The woman sighs. “Yes. Well. We’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”

  “I was told it was very old. Worth much more than that.”

  The woman nods calmly, but her thin mouth is quivering with excitement. “Well, yes, pre–Civil War, but its value is purely as a novelty item. You see, these mammy dolls were usually made out of cloth, not porcelain.”

  “Mammy? I’m sorry, I don’t understand…”

  The woman speaks slowly, as though addressing a child. “Down south, a mammy was the black nursemaid who looked after white children. This doll was part of a set. Black dolls and white dolls. The white dolls were pretty children. This one was the mammy.”

  There is a silence. The young man to the side watches closely.

  “Did these kind of dolls have hidden compartments? Places to hide things?”

  The woman’s eyes are riveted on the doll, and her fingers caress its rustling skirt.

  “Well, you have to understand that in the eighteenth century there were no banks and no safe-deposit boxes. There were hiding places in every house, in desks and under beds. In dolls, the usual method is a spring-loaded release—sir, I am willing to give you a thousand for this. My best and final offer.”

  “It’s not for sale. Thank you for the information.” Ranjit takes the doll and pushes it into his backpack. As he walks to the door, the woman looks like she is about to faint.

  The long-haired man falls in step with Ranjit, his breath perfumed with sesame oil. “All right. Three thousand. Cash. No questions asked.”

  “Sorry, it’s not for sale.”

  The bell on the door tinkles as Ranjit exits. The young man follows him out onto the sidewalk, shivering with cold.

  “Five thousand, for Christ’s sake. Right now. I’ll go to the bank.”

  Ranjit shakes his head and starts to walk away.

  “Where did you get it?” The man grips Ranjit’s shoulder, his voice a growl. “The only other doll like this is at the Smithsonian. Is it stolen?”

  Ranjit is suddenly tired of being threatened. He stares down at the man, his voice soft and reasonable.

  “Since you just offered to buy it, I doubt that’s your concern. Now get your hand off my shoulder. Or else I’ll remove it myself.”

  The young man snarls and stomps back into the store. Ranjit hefts his backpack onto his shoulder and hurries back toward the Garibaldi Hotel.

  * * *

  It is dark now. His room is cold and there is no sound traveling through the thin back wall; maybe James is asleep.

  Ranjit clicks on the naked overhead bulb and takes out the doll, holding it up to the light. A five-thousand-dollar doll. And if the man had offered that amount, it’s got to be worth much more. But that’s not why the men had wanted it: the blond man clearly said there was something hidden inside it.

  He sits on the bed and holds the doll, running his fingers absently over its porcelain head, its raised features bumpy against his fingertips.

  The woman in the antique store had said something about a spring-loaded mechanism. Which means that a hidden spring would have to be pressure-activated, opening a door into the doll’s body cavity. Yet there is no outline of any opening along the smooth, cool porcelain.

  He puts the doll between his knees and presses his fingertips along its torso. He covers every inch of it, but nothing happens. Damn it. His fingers are slippery with sweat, and he wipes them on his jeans.

  Leaning against the wall with the doll in his lap, he looks out at the snow-covered rooftops. Like a hunted animal, he can sense the space around him shrinking. If the Senator’s men find him in this room, there is no fire escape and no back stair.

  Still holding the doll’s head in his right hand, he squeezes it in frustration. There is a sudden, faint vibration under his fingertips and he feels something give way behind its ears. The spring mechanism is in its head. He squeezes harder, but it’s not enough; there must be another part of the release mechanism.

  Still squeezing with his right hand, he uses his left to push at the nose, then the eyes.

  Suddenly there is no resistance. With a click the head slides smoothly upward and he almost drops it.

  He looks down and sees that the porcelain torso is hollow. Wiping his sweaty hands, he reaches inside it with two trembling fingers.

  What the hell is this? He stares at the object in his hand: a thin, long rectangle of stiff cream cardboard, punched with columns of elongated holes. Inset in a corner is a small square of celluloid film. Holding it up to the light, all he can make out is a faint, elaborate geometry, as intricately constructed as a spiderweb. It is some kind of microfilm, but what do the columns of punched holes mean? They dance up and down, like abstract musical notation, and are saying something, if only he could understand it.

  If only he had access to the Internet, he could find out what this damn thing is. In India there are Internet cafés on every street, but here everyone has computers at home. Then he remembers taking Shanti to the public library in Oak Bluffs, and seeing the row of computers against the wall.

  James has a pile of library books by his bed, so there is probably one close by. It is now past five, and he will have to wait till tomorrow morning. His stomach growls, and he realizes that he hasn’t eaten anything since the cruller early that morning.

  Putting the doll back into its hiding place, he carefully locks his door and walks past James’s room, seeing that his door is shut. The elevator is working now, and he rides it down, looking at the angular graffiti on its plastic walls: Yankees suck. Kilroy was here, 1974, and one that has been scratched deep into the plastic, No one gets out of here alive.

  He enters the Dong Kanh Vietnamese restaurant down the street and orders a takeout container of fish ball soup. The small, steamy restaurant is packed, the sole waiter weaving between the tables with huge bowls of pho and plates piled high with bean sprouts and basil leaves. He watches a Vietnamese family eating at a round table, a father, mother, and a young girl Shanti’s age, with shoulder-length gleaming black hair. He watches the mother reach out with her chopsticks and lov
ingly deposit a morsel of pork onto her daughter’s plate, and he can’t bear to see any more.

  When his soup is ready, he pays for it, then heads up the block and buys a small bottle of Bacardi. Returning to his room, he eats on the bed, alternating the hot, fatty chicken broth with sips of rich dark liquor.

  Outside it is pitch black, and the sounds of Chinatown drift into his room: choppy conversation in Cantonese, the wail of music from a far-off radio, the whine of cars sliding through the slippery streets below.

  Another full day has passed since they picked up Preetam and Shanti: twelve days left before they will be deported. He imagines them in a prison cell lit with stark fluorescent light, still wearing the same clothes. After forty-eight hours of prison, he knows the tricks that the mind can play.

  During the first day they will have felt a faint glimmer of hope, but by now the outside world will have receded, and there will be only the bare walls of the prison. As more time passes, they will turn completely into themselves, like snails retreating into their shells. Once that happens, their isolation will be complete.

  He has to get them out, but how? If Khandelkar were here, he would know. With unerring instinct, whatever the odds, the Sergeant always found a way.

  “You saved me this morning, Sergeant,” he whispers. “Please help me one more time.”

  He holds his breath, willing himself to see a flicker in the darkness. But there is only the darkness of the room and the stink of alcohol on his breath. Pulling off his boots and clothes, he crawls into the bed and chugs the rest of the Bacardi, feeling its warmth spread through him. Soon his consciousness fades, and the alcohol takes him down into sleep.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Captain wraps Khandelkar’s body in a sleeping bag. They bury him in the snow, use his rifle as a marker, and leave him high up on the mountain.

  The Captain leads his three surviving men down quickly, spurred on by confusion and shame. At seventeen thousand feet they run out of water, and when they reach the Indian Army outpost at Bilafond La two days later, the Captain is so dehydrated that he can hardly talk. The commanding officer there sees the frostbite on their faces and hands, and radios for a chopper.

  Eight hours later the Captain and his men are at the mouth of the glacier, jolting in a three-ton truck to the hospital at Kumar Base Camp. The Captain sits silently as the truck rumbles past neat rows of barracks, tall flagpoles, and troops practicing drill formations. It all seems like a stage set.

  He is taken away from his men and escorted into a deserted hospital ward with one small window high up in the wall. A dark-haired nurse examines the black blisters on his hands, clucks her tongue, and pushes an IV into his arm. Cold saline solution flows into his veins and makes his head swim.

  “My hands,” he asks, “are they going to be all right?”

  “We’ll see,” she says. “With frostbite, it’s all a matter of time. Take these blue pills, they will help you to sleep.”

  For one nightmarish day and night the Captain lies shivering, despite layers of blankets, waking every few hours to check for feeling in his hands, willing them to thaw out. He hears the nurse changing the heavy bottle of saline hanging above him, feels the cool liquid seep into him, and waits for the officers to arrive.

  They come late on the afternoon of the second day, when a bright square of sunlight slants across the stone floor.

  The Captain hears the clatter of boots, pulls himself up to a sitting position and salutes, though the movement makes him dizzy.

  A General and a Major walk down the ward. Both wear olive-green dress uniforms with well-polished boots, and the rows of medals on the General’s chest reach back to the sixties, to the original wars with China. The Captain knows that the top brass no longer fear the Chinese, who have now satisfied their territorial hunger by taking Tibet. No, now they fear and hate the Pakistanis, for they have the bomb, and one day will use it.

  As they come closer, the Captain stiffens when he recognizes the short, barrel-chested General with the thick graying mustache. General “Bear” Handa is a legend, the man who single-handedly started the entire Siachen war.

  Back in 1980 the glacier was simply a blank spot on the map, bereft of any people, tactically useless to the Indians and the Pakistanis. Bear Handa, a legendary climber, had taken an army expedition out onto the virgin glacier, climbed many peaks and skied down their icy slopes. Along the way he had found the debris of an unknown climbing expedition, and noticed among it an empty packet of Pakistani Gold Leaf cigarettes.

  Everyone knows the story that then unfolded: Bear had taken the cigarette packet to his superiors as evidence of Pakistani trespassing. Fearing that the Paki military would grab the glacier, the Indian Army had scrambled to get troops up there. They had secured all the high passes hours ahead of the Pakis, and both sides dug in at high altitudes. What was once a wonderland of ice had become a battlefield.

  There is a screech of metal as the two officers pull up folding chairs and take off their peaked caps. The Captain knows that this is the preliminary to a court-martial.

  Outside he can hear the chanting of a drill sergeant as troops march past. Left, right, left, right.

  The Captain wants to get it over with. He wants the blackened, torn bodies of the dead men brought down. He will tell them where Dewan died, and they will find him, too; this is all he can do, now, before they lock him away for good.

  General Bear Handa sits silently, his square face emotionless, turning his cap round and round in hands the size of spades.

  The Major does all the talking. He has a smooth complexion and hair slicked back with sweet, pungent coconut oil. As he speaks, all the Captain can think about is how easily coconut oil freezes; to maintain his sleek hairstyle, the Major must heat up a bottle every day.

  The Major asks about the Captain’s health and that of his surviving troops and then he gets to the point.

  “… so, Captain Singh. Regretfully, we have to ask you about what happened on the glacier. Sixteen men killed. Why didn’t you confirm it was an enemy position before calling in the strike?”

  The Captain tries to focus. “Sir, the post was within the sector given to me by the Frontier Forces people. And we were told to maintain radio silence…”

  Suddenly he is exhausted. He wants to get this over with, and his voice comes in a rush.

  “I take full responsibility for what happened. All I ask is that the bodies be brought down, now, while the weather holds. My Sergeant is up there too, along with a Private killed earlier…”

  The Major pauses before choosing his words carefully. “Captain, I know how you feel. I admire you for your loyalty to your men, but it is not in our best interest right now to go back up there.”

  Through the fog in his head the Captain tries to understand what has just been said. “Sir, I don’t follow. We must get the bodies of those men down…”

  General Handa leans forward. His face is deeply weathered, his voice low and gravelly.

  “Captain Singh, I had the honor to serve with your father. We were both awarded the Param Vir Chakra for the same action.”

  He points to a familiar round medal hanging from a faded purple ribbon.

  The Captain is stunned. He remembers holding his father’s identical medal, feeling the cold, heavy disc in his hands. Suddenly Pitaji is alive again, and he wants to ask, You knew him? What was my father like?

  General Handa anticipates the question. “Of course, you were just a baby, you don’t remember him, do you? The Sardar, as we called him, was a brave man. I was with him in ’71, at the battle of Longewala. With one company of infantry, he held off sixty-five Pakistani tanks all night. The last time I saw him, he was out on the battlefield in a Jeep with a rear-mounted RPG. He’d taken out five or six Paki tanks, and there were flames everywhere. I told him he had done enough, that he should leave, but he just grinned and drove back into the fight. He died, and I lived.”

  The Captain sits upright, imagining
his father silhouetted against the glare of firelight.

  General Handa continues. “Things were different then. We lost half our men, we had to retreat. The Pakis were honorable, they held their fire as we left, and we had time to retrieve your father’s body. Not like the dirty war we are fighting now.”

  The Major leans forward, light rippling across his wavy, well-oiled hair.

  “The General is trying to make a point. We are fully aware of our responsibility to your deceased troops. But there are other considerations. A Japanese television crew is filming on the glacier. They are escorted, of course, but still … It’s not a good time to tell the outside world that we just killed sixteen of our own men.”

  The Captain looks pleadingly at General Handa. “Sir, we can easily bring the men down now. The weather up there can change in a second, you have to understand, avalanches, rockslides…”

  There is silence. Bear Handa leans forward, the medals on his uniform tinkling.

  “Captain Singh, you are from a military family. What happened on the glacier—was unfortunate. If you face a court-martial, you will be convicted. But there is another way.”

  The Captain waits. Is the General trying to save him as a favor to his dead father?

  General Handa’s voice drops to a whisper. “The Japanese film crew is here, and we need support for this war. Public opinion is turning against us. The glacier is seen as an environmental catastrophe. Pah! The environment!”

  He makes a chopping motion with his large hand. “You know as well as I do, Captain, that we need to draw the line here. We need to send the message to the Pakis that we’ll never give up our land. And we need experienced men like you to run our missions. Dedicated, skilled. We need you back out there, not rotting uselessly in a prison.”

  The Major leans in again, the smell of his hair oil making the Captain nauseous. “Things would be completely different if the world finds out that the Pakistanis wiped out our outpost. If the general public gets to see the footage of the dead men up there—”