The Kashmir Trap (16 page)

“Don't you wonder how I caught you?” inquired Roberge, taking another sip of mineral water.

“Béatrice and Patterson.”

“Juliette wasn't so easy. Still, a charming kid, just the same. I bet she doesn't know the part you played in Philippe's death.”

“SHUT UP, ROBERGE!”

Passengers whipped around in surprise. Roberge was content just to smile. Max wished he hadn't got carried away.

“Delhi was child's play,” Roberge went on, “the night watchman at the Liverpool Guest House is a police informant.”

Of course he is.

Max stared out the window. At the edge of the runway there were more slums, people living just feet from the planes and breathing their fumes all day long, never able to talk above the constant roar of 747 engines. Max reclined his seat and closed his eyes so as not to have to listen to Roberge, then willed himself to sleep. Philippe in El Salvador; Philippe the martyr. He finally did sleep. He had no idea how long. Then a voice stirred him.

“Excuse me, sir.” The flight attendant, no longer smiling, held out her hand as he opened his eyes. “This way.”

Max turned to look at Roberge. He was fast asleep with his bottle of Bisleri spilled all over the tray. The plane was still on the runway, so Max had only dozed a few minutes. He followed the stewardess to the front of the plane. Passengers vaguely glanced at them before returning to their newspapers. The door was still open on the opposite side from the embarking platform. Airport employees were almost through loading food trays on carts with multiple shelves. One of the employees turned toward Max: it was Jayesh. He guided Max down the sloping platform to the catering truck parked next to the plane. The flight attendant followed them. Once inside the truck, Jayesh gave Max some coveralls and an ID badge. The flight attendant also changed clothes as the truck drove to the storage depot. The inside of the truck smelled of industrial
chapati
and stale fried food, but for Max it was the sweetest smell in the world.

“Thanks, Jayesh,” he said.

“Don't mention it.”

When the door opened at the depot, Max saw the pilot finally get the plane moving at the far end of the runway. Ragged kids were hanging around the tarmac, but they weren't at all interested in the 747. They were completely preoccupied with just surviving for one more day. That was real poverty; kids who didn't enjoy watching a plane take off. Max imagined Roberge's face when he awoke ten thousand metres in the air, alone with nothing but an orgy of peanuts to comfort him.

Jayesh put a hand on Max's shoulder: “Have you heard the news? The Canadiens have re-signed José Théodore!”

 

 

“To make himself useful to the Indians?” asked Max.

“More like to wait and let events determine his political position,” explained Jayesh.

Hari Singh hadn't left Srinagar of his own volition. In the fall of 1947, the mountain horsemen of Pakistan had set out for the Kashmiri capital, intent on laying waste to it, and then, while they were at it, annexing the entire region to Pakistan.

“So the dream of Kashmiri independence went up in smoke. An independence no one wanted them to have, for strategic reasons above all.”

It was stuck between Islamic Pakistan (a consolation prize from the “international community” after the foundation of the state of Israel that same year) and India, victimized by the caste system and prone to anti-Muslim pogroms, not to mention Tibet to the east, soon to be occupied by Maoist China. There were sentimental factors as well. Kashmir was the entry to Hinduism from the twelfth century B.C. It was also the homeland of Nehru, who, with Gandhi, fathered the modern Indian state.

The approach of the men from the mountains forced the maharajah to request support from New Delhi, which in exchange insisted on the annexation of Kashmir, an offer Hari Singh could not refuse. Indecision is always the worst policy of all. Still, the Indian Army did come to the rescue of Srinagar and succeeded in pushing the invaders back to a few kilometres from the capital. Then stagnation set in, as though the leaders on both sides had studied nothing but the First World War and the Battle of Verdun. This was often the problem with Third World armies, Jayesh said. They were economically too weak to support their military advances.

Then the newly created UN got involved and established a ceasefire line, which is pretty much unchanged to this day. To the southeast lay Jammu and Kashmir under Indian control, and to the northwest, Azad Kashmir, under the Pakistanis, perpetual losers in the wars with India. Now, for the first time, both powers held equal strength due to the nuclear evil that both could deploy.

Buses overflowing with refugees filed past the Maruti, one of many convoys the men had passed on their way out of the capital,
tongas
(horse-drawn carts), as well as other animals whipped on by kids. Such was the ignorance of the poor who thought they could escape nuclear hell by moving a few kilometres farther down the road. Specialists estimated the outcome at 20 million dead. Already, cameramen were in the capital to preserve the mushroom cloud for posterity, as well as the evening news, the first great nuclear boo-boo of the twenty-first century.

Jayesh managed to weave his way between two trucks and get back to the main highway, which was now clear. They spent the night in Chandigarh, then Jalandhar and the Punjab near the crossing into Kashmir at Pathankot, which was swarming with soldiers. Next, they reached Samba, crawling along in the middle of an interminable military convoy. In the opposite direction came Kashmiris headed south in cars smothered in cheap suitcases, and more buses bulging with refugees. This was still an exodus, though different from the better-policed and more “Western” one from Indira Gandhi Airport, despite the numbers. Here, it was a total
free-for
-all. Only a few kilometres west lay the border of the Pakistani sector where all hell was raging.

Jayesh's car was practically the only civilian vehicle headed back north. Fascinated emigrants shook their heads when they saw Max, just another crazy foreigner with a death wish. Ever since he arrived in Asia, he had the feeling people had been trying to open his eyes and teach him a lesson, but perhaps it was really a distraction or a diversion.

“Why?” he wondered aloud. “What are they hiding?”

Jayesh shrugged. “That attack on David, pretty effective, eh?”

“An organization?”

“Killers are careful people, tenacious too. Nothing gets in their way.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Well, we're a long way from our goal, so their attempt to get us off their trail is working pretty good.”

“So we're not a threat anymore.”

“Not in the least.”

“So that's why no one has lifted a hand against us, except Roberge, of course.”

Jammu looked like a big resort town after summer holidays were over. It felt abandoned: dusty streets and closed shops with windows boarded up. A capital without its people, mostly Hindus, who were now in flight amid the usual disorder. A ghost town inhabited only by soldiers in combat gear. The “real Kashmir” was still farther north. That was Muslim Kashmir. The wondrous valley. Max would have liked to go on, but they couldn't because of both the curfew and the mountains. Twelve hours of twisting and weaving along the road through steep-cliffed valleys and long, deep ravines. Bad roads invaded by Indian troops sent to support the one hundred thousand already around Srinagar. A few kilometres away from Jammu there would certainly be another roadblock. At best, they'd have to retrace their steps. At worst, they'd be thrown in jail, especially since Max had no travel papers. The counterfeit IDs Antoine had made were all seized by the cops at the Liverpool Guest House, and even if Jayesh could eventually get him a fake passport, Canadian or other, they'd never get one good enough at Jammu.

They had a another big problem. Max was known to the Indian police now, having escaped extradition, supposing that Luc Roberge had sounded the alarm, and there was every reason to believe he had. Roberge was a proud man, and he'd just been handed a huge humiliation, but he'd still have to get the fugitive tracked down.

The Hotel Sinbad on Canal Road had a pale-skinned manager taller than most Indians. The biggest surprise was his blue eyes and his grey, formerly blond, hair, but despite his European look, the man had an Indian accent. Jayesh told Max that some Indian Kashmiris were descendants of Alexander the Great's troops who decided to settle here instead of returning to their native Greece, a country which, at the time, was tall and blond, not yet mixed with Balkan or Turkish people as it would be in the following centuries. According to legend, the racial purity of these soldiers had lasted to this day. Max realized how this genetic “curiosity” contributed to the Hinduization of the country. Jayesh added that Hinduism had arrived from the north and been imposed on the Dravidians in the south. Thus India was divided in two: the Brahmanic culture to the north, based on purity, and the caste system dominated the Dravidian culture to the south. It was hardly surprising, then, that Untouchables were mainly dark-skinned, and the Brahmins, priests and higher-ups, were lighter.

Their rooms proved spartan but clean, and catered, as advertised, to tourists and travelling officials — so, really, everyone. Line of work? Journalist. What else could you say? A half-dozen of them lingered in the hall, headed, like Max and Jayesh, to Srinagar in the early morning. They were posing as hard-boiled “loose cannons” flying by the seat of their pants at their own expense.

Max fully expected the city still to be marked by the assassination of Abdul Gani Lone, the moderate independence leader, pushed out of the spotlight by the war. Here and there a Durga had scribbled his emblem, a stylized snake emerging from a marigold, on the walls, but nothing else. Horror had given way to terror already.

The noise of Jeeps and military trucks didn't prevent Max from sleeping; he was worn out from all this time on bad roads. At seven in the morning, he was brutally awakened by blows to the door. The reception clerk (didn't this guy ever sleep?) was there with a tray carried by a young Dalit, as though this place were a five-star hotel. There were corn flakes, tea, toast with marmalade, and, once again,
The
Times of India
with the headline:
WAR IN A MATTER OF HOURS
.

The bus was Jayesh's idea. So was the camera. To allow troops to get around easily, intercity transit had been cut back to the minimum, so this vehicle was crowded, and Max found himself as just one more human sardine. There were mostly foreigners, several of whom had stopped over at the Sinbad. Is this the way David had done it? It normally took twelve hours, but today with the military convoys to make way for, it required three or four more.

Udhampur appeared on the far side of the ravine, the last large town before Srinagar. It too was full of soldiers. Then they started out again, bobbing and weaving as always, with hairpin turns and endless waits for convoys to pass. The road was very narrow in places, and reduced to a single lane at best. The ravines contained the carcasses of rusted-out vehicles abandoned after their tumble as much as ten, twenty or thirty years ago. The driver knew what he was doing and took what seemed like senseless risks, overtaking on the edge of ravines, with one hand on the horn and a smile on his face, then whiplash braking behind vehicles loaded with explosives, or accelerating on the long curving declines, as though exempt from the law of gravity.

The first roadblock was at the Banihal Pass, about halfway into their sixteen-hour journey. There was a smattering of police mixed in with the soldiers. Max showed his camera by way of ID: “We're journalists on our way to an appointment in hell.” It worked. Then off they were again, fast. The waiting, the dangerous curves. At night, all of a sudden, beyond a moon-shaped mountain, was the famous valley. The heat returned, as well, and there was Srinagar, or so Max guessed, behind the blackout and human presence despite the curfew. Tons of frightened people were hunkered down at home as was their habit these past fifty years.

There was a densely packed crowd at the bus terminal. That was hardly a surprise. People had spent the night there to get the first bus out in the early morning for Jammu. A board on the wall had about fifty ads for hotels and houseboats. Max found the Mount View Hotel, while Jayesh was haggling over the price of a rickshaw. It was curfew, and the police would be patrolling, but the rickshaw man knew shortcuts and byways, so they relied on him to avoid that sort of problem.

They headed out into the Srinagar night, which a few hours earlier had been like a dark spill of lava submerging houses and businesses. Unlike Pompeii, where all life had stopped instantly, one could see that behind drawn blinds, down dead ends and under the eaves of houses, a world unknown was bustling. The beauties of Srinagar, though, were not to be seen. Every street corner had its sandbag piles, and here and there improvised guard towers had been raised by the Indian Army. Surveillance posts, some of them brand new, others dating from the late eighties, remained from the last really nasty turn in events.

The Mount View Hotel was part of the collective mourning. Its once-luminous sign had been turned off for months. The glimmer of a candle appeared through a parted curtain. There was no other sign of human habitation. The place had its charms, though. It must have been fully booked in the past, but the rear garden where the clients could breakfast or relax — bombardments permitting — had not been kept up.

“Are you phoning from prison?” asked Juliette, when he managed to reach her that evening. Max burst out laughing.