The Kashmir Trap. Mario Bolduc
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“I couldn’t very well force him.”
“Did you fight about it?”
“No, we never fought.”
Well, sometimes, about having a baby, for instance. It was his idea. Juliette hadn’t wanted one at first. There had been shouting, doors slammed, periods of seemingly endless silence. He absolutely had to have one. She tried to reason with him, but her arguments didn’t stand up: Look, we hardly see each other as it is. And a baby on your first posting … in India …? In her heart of hearts, she felt he was getting round her again. First, she’d followed him to Delhi, then this baby thing. Surely it was his turn to give a little. It had to do with principles or something she didn’t believe in, when in reality, she wanted a child as much as he did.
“So he went to Nepal,” Max underlined.
“With Vandana, a colleague.”
“You know her well?”
“Great girl, a good friend.”
“And the political climate in India?” Max went on, “Islamist terrorists, for example, might he have done something to rub them the wrong way?”
“No idea.”
“He told you everything?”
“Uh-huh, we had no secrets.”
She immediately wished she hadn’t said it that way. This wasn’t Béatrice she was talking to, for once, and he didn’t need to be convinced.
“The past few days?”
“Same as always, except the political situation, the deaths in Jammu a few hours before.”
“Any connection?”
“In India there always is,” said Juliette. “Everything’s connected to everything else. You can’t separate anything.”
In David’s tight little circle, there was the prep for the Montreal conference, Béatrice’s impromptu visit, and the official trip to Kathmandu — all in the week leading up to the car bombing. In the background, the deteriorating political climate, the suicide assault on Parliament, the Gujarat massacre, and the killings in Jammu. Whatever meaning there was to the incident involving David was to be found in one of these events, maybe even all of them.
“You’re right: everything seems to be connected, but how?”
She looked at him and understood then and there that she could trust him, no matter what Béatrice, Patterson, and that Roberge character said out of annoying, fake politeness.
“He told me something that morning just before he left: ‘I keep thinking about my father. I’ve become like him. I feel just what he felt.”’
Max stared at her intently, as though that one little expression had snapped him back to something in the past she couldn’t have known about, something that just might have led David to his fate.
“And another thing. Dr. Dohmann thinks David was injured before the bomb went off.” She summed up what the doctor had told her, as Max listened in rapt attention.
“What time did David leave the High Commission that day?”
“I don’t know, just that he promised to be home by nine.”
“It happened on the banks of the Yamuna. Is that his usual route home?”
“Not at all.”
“So a kidnapping, then, just as he was leaving the office perhaps? David and the chauffeur were then held for several hours by the kidnappers, who got rid of them later in the evening. No message, no demands, just executed after a short episode of brutality. Very strange.”
Juliette shook her head: “But why?”
“That’s what I’m planning to find out.”
9
India? Tropical? Sure it is! Eleven years before, in 1991, Max had the surprise of his life when he got off the plane in the early morning to find the airport freezing. The touts paced up and down the deserted concourse wrapped in wool blankets or huddled together sharing bidis — small hand-rolled cigarettes rolled with eucalyptus leaves. Taxi-wallahs clapped their hands to keep warm, and someone ordered someone else in English to “close that bloody door.” Travellers awaiting the first flights of the day noisily slurped their scalding hot chais as they sat on cardboard suitcases. Even the bhikari had their seasonal rags on. Delhi was a northerly city. Back at home, Max had expected to sweat in a soaking shirt caked in dust from the roads. Instead, he rubbed his hands in time with Antoine in their first-class compartment on the Poorva Express, which runs from Delhi to Varanasi. Indians stared at the two in amazement, a bit the way Montrealers would gawk at a couple of tourists wandering along Saint Denis in February: “Hey, Sahibji, you should’ve read a guidebook. You don’t visit northern India in winter.”
Visit … uh-huh, like the lovers at the Akbar Road Hotel who also chose the wrong season and, shivering, stumbled into the former British residence converted to a European-style inn, whose name they could never dredge up. Max and Antoine were just back from Varanasi and waiting for a flight to New York via Geneva. Antoine, who never spoke anyway, suffered his marathon of pain in silence. They’d had three days to kill. Originally they figured they’d spend more time in India for a change of scene, but everything reminded them of Pascale. Every tourist in a kurta pyjama, every baba in a dhoti, any young woman in a salwar or ghagra somehow seemed to be her appearing in the middle of a crowd. After the cremation in Varanasi, Max had tried to change their booking for a quick return to the States, but the flights were filled, all except this one via Switzerland.
The inn was a lugubrious place, chilly too, like the rest of the city. The sight of these two young tourists, happy and in love, with whom they shared the Victorian mansion, cut him to the heart. His room was unbearable as well. Its only window opened onto a billboard: INDIA IS FOR LOVERS. He had avoided the hotel whenever he could. He couldn’t stand the sight of couples cuddling at breakfast. Unable to bear the silence of his travelling companion or the spectacle of that billboard any longer, Max spent his time at Connaught Place and always ate alone at The Most Welcome Restaurant, an American fast-food place near the Middle Circle.
This time, though, Max’s arrival at Indira Gandhi in the middle of the night was in a much more dramatic and public setting. At the Heathrow stopover, the Indian papers were full of news about the deteriorating political climate. The day before, in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, masked men in police uniforms had assassinated Abdul Ghani Lone, a moderate leader (said the experts) of the Hurriyat Alliance, the political front of the Kashmiri separatist movement. Ghani Lone had often opposed the Islamists, who, he said, were trying to seize control of the entire movement. Max recognized the name of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, one of the organizations Patterson had mentioned. The Thousand Fanatics. The Indian government claimed these “madmen” had decided to neutralize the seventy-year-old leader once and for all.
What followed was a chain reaction. India accused Pakistan once again of supporting Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and the others via the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), who used them to interfere with the Indian Army in an attempt to destabilize the region. After the attack on Parliament, then Jammu, and finally blowing up a Canadian diplomat in his car, the murder of the Muslim leader was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee decided to react.
War was about to be declared.
That meant even more problems for Max. Both Canada and the U.S. had announced the “imminent” departure of their diplomatic personnel, and that would result in empty offices and furniture under dust-covers. New Delhi under siege: the airport shut down, armed men everywhere, sandbags, camouflage nets, and tanks on the tarmac. Actually, none of that was happening. Nothing dramatic at all. Except the heat. For real, this time. The sort of stinking heat that brings on nausea. Sure, in the arrivals hall there were a few soldiers done up in spotless uniforms, too spotless, as if they were getting ready for Independence Day. Pants nicely pressed,