K.D. gasps for breath in the darkness. He had never married. ‘K.D. is married to the job,’ his colleagues said. Most of them had married and had families, children, grandchildren. He was alone, is alone. He has had women, has known respectable women and disreputable ones. He has been in love, and he has paid for sex, he has been introduced to relatives of friends with the clear intention of marriage. He sees that marriage is a good thing, and he cannot argue against its virtues. ‘What else are we working for?’ Bloody Mathur said once, exasperated, solicitous. ‘If not for our children, for their future, what else is all this for?’ There was nothing K.D. could say to this, no disagreement he could offer with his friend’s paunchy contentment, his wife speaking in a soft murmur to the cook, his five-year-old daughter Anjali bending over a fairy-tale book on the carpet. Yet he is unable to offer a ‘yes’ to the proposals his friend brings him, or offer a satisfactory explanation, or an illuminating description of what he really wants. ‘What do you want?’ Mathur asks. ‘What, what, what? Who is this heroine you’re waiting for?’ And K.D. is unable to name this woman, to reduce her to a list of ten qualities, to conjure up into words this inchoate refusal that rises from his bones.
K.D. lies in his hospital bed, and wonders what he had been waiting for. It is too late now, he will die alone. His father had also spoken about the comforts of companionship, but had Ma really been a companion to him? Simple Ma with her shyness, her perpetual ghoonghat, her quietness, her endless housework. She had supported her husband in his bruising climb out of poverty, and proudly talked about her husband’s PT-master job to her relatives, and took him his hot lunch every day herself, all the way to his tiny office next to the school’s football ground, his favourite dishes packed in a five-tier tiffin. But she had been unable to follow him into the foreign lands of the English language, and to the end of her life had been confused by phones and remote controls and the true distances of foreign countries, by the size of the world. They had married young, the future trainer of athletes Rajinder Prem Yadav and the simple Snehlata, in the barely formed shapes of adolescence, and had grown into the vividly distinct halves of young K.D.’s life: Papa’s glossy-chocolate shoulders against the white of his banian, his voice blasting commands over the ranks of sweating boys, his awkward and hesitant English, his strictness, his envious fascination with athletic training in Russia, and Ma with her hands lathered with besan, her innumerable festivals and fasts and ceremonies which followed each other in endless cycles, her impressive laughter which she hid behind her pallu, her illiterate woman’s pride in her son’s academic achievements. They had been together for decades, Papa and Ma. What had they said to each other, in their companionship, in their bedroom late at night? Had they saved each other from this early hour of the morning, from this ruinous absence of light? K.D. shivers, and remembers running home after a roadside scuffle with two boys from a rival school, with an aching jaw and his St Xavier’s shirt torn at the pocket. Ma had clutched him close, and fussed with a haldi poultice until K.D. had held her away, physically made her stop. Papa had stood as straight as a steel pillar, his eyes narrowed, and told K.D. to find the boys and beat them up. ‘From next term we will start boxing as a sport in school,’ he said. ‘You must learn to defend yourself.’ That night, Ma had brought K.D. his glass of Ovaltine and had told him to ignore those hooligans, those government-school barbarians. ‘They are just jealous that you are in such a good school. Forget them. Beta, work hard and you will advance. Don’t get involved in all this nonsense, think about your future.’ Ma expected K.D. to stand first or second in class always, despite his peasant ancestry, and she was full of hope, confident of his future.
And here is K.D. in that future, confident of nothing, uncertain even of the pain in his neck and head, pierced by it but unable to know absolutely, without doubt, whether it is in the present or merely relived memory. And now, in the breakdown of his body, K.D. understands that everything he has ever seen had been nothing but phantoms, that a rock held in one’s healthy hand is only a ghost put together inside the skull, that illusions are the only reality. The future is an illusion, but the present is the most slippery illusion of all.
K.D. watches the sun crawl up the wall. He thinks about the colour, which is an orange flecked with red, shading into paler yellow as it climbs. There is no such thing as colour. There are photons bouncing around the world, and into and through a thin membrane on the surface of his eyes. There are electrical and chemical events triggering like novae. But there is no such thing as colour. A nurse moves through the room, prods at him and speaks to him, but he pays no attention. It’s easy to ignore her, and the tiny bite of the needle she slips into his arm, they are merely discrete data flowing through the networks of his consciousness, as unreal as the hue on the plaster, which is now the exact tinge of the skin of a Kerala papaya around the aureole of the stem. It is a specific papaya that K.D. is seeing, one he ate in June of 1977, in a dak bungalow in Idukki. The papaya is present to him, with its slightly nauseating bouquet of rot, its flesh slipping, springing between his fingers. It is as real as this wall, which is turning a dirty white. And then he sees that the lower half of the wall is still dark.
This is not the darkness of night, it is an absence of vision. The lower half of the wall is absent, as if somebody has attached blinders to K.D.’s eyes. If he tilts his head back, and then forward, he can move the edge between vision and non-vision up the wall, and then down. This loss of half his visual field persists if he turns towards the window, or the other way, towards the door leading into the corridor: half-window, half-door. It is a latitudinal loss, an equatorial one. The lower half of his world is gone.
When he tells a nurse about this new symptom, the staff spring into action. He is wheeled out of his room, examined, prodded, scanned by machines. Later that day, Dr Kharas is crisply factual. ‘Your CT shows another lesion, a small one, here. We think there is damage to the visual cortex.’ She is pointing to a cutaway diagram of a human brain, with the segments exploded out and labelled. The colours are brilliant, a primary blue for the cerebral cortex, a deep red for the thalamus. ‘The damage from the tumour is causing a scotoma, a blanking out of part of your visual field. That’s about all I can tell you. Did you feel anything last night? Nausea? Pain?’
K.D. wants to tell her, I felt icy air slicing at my throat as I struggled up a ridge, doctor. I felt blisters bursting on my feet, inside my boots. ‘No,’ K.D. said. ‘Nothing.’
She nods, and writes on her notepad. She is thirty-eight, this Dr Anaita Kharas, married, two children. Dr Kharas and her husband were both born in Delhi, have grown up here. Anjali has run a little background check on her. They are wary of each other, Anaita and Anjali, a little prickly, but K.D. sees how similar they are, how alike in their efficiency, their sensible clothes, their assertiveness over the space they move in, the daily work they have to do against the scepticism and aggression of men to maintain their dignity and independence as women. ‘I’m afraid there is not much we can do about your loss of function,’ Dr Kharas says. ‘There is no surgery that can reverse it, no treatment. There is much that we don’t understand about the mechanics here.’
‘I understand,’ K.D. says. ‘But will it get worse?’
‘Again, this is hard to predict. A glioma is the least predictable of all tumours. Episodes of spontaneous remission have been reported. We will do our best. So, try not to worry.’
But he is not looking for sympathy, or comfort. He knows where he is going. What he would like are the percentages, the numbers. How long will his mind last, how fast will it fail? She has no answers. She lectures him a bit, sharply, about relaxation, about not getting depressed, not giving up. He smiles for her. He likes her. They had only one Parsi in the organization when he joined, and no Muslims, none, not one. He used to protest against this, pointing to the clumsy irony of protecting a secular state with a non-secular organization, to the rank unfairness of it. But the old men at the top thought it was
too big a risk, not justifiable in light of the stakes that were being played for. Think, K.D. was always told, of who we are fighting. Yes. The dushman. They were there, and here we are. Them and us.
Away she goes, the good Dr Anaita, followed by a trail of interns and nurses. K.D. sits up in bed, watches pearls of clear liquid drip into a tube and into his forearm. He remembers Anjali’s question now: why three sadhus, why was Gaitonde trying to find them? K.D. traces his association with Gaitonde, the first approach in jail, the conversations, the understanding reached, and then the jobs given, the favours traded. It was necessity. The world is shot through with crime, riddled with it, rotted by it. The Pakistanis and the Afghans run a twenty-billion-dollar trade in heroin, which is partly routed through India, through Delhi and Bombay, to Turkey and Europe and the United States. The ISI and the generals fatten on the trade and buy weapons and mujahideen warriors. The criminals provide logistical support, moving men and money and weapons across the borders. The politicians provide protection to the criminals, the criminals provide muscle and money to the politicians. That’s how it goes. The dushman agency recruits a disaffected Indian criminal, Suleiman Isa, to plant bombs in the city of his birth, makes him a major player in the endless war. To fight their criminal, we need our own criminal. Steel cuts steel. Criminals have good intelligence on their rivals. It is necessary to deal with Gaitonde, for the greater good. And so there is Gaitonde, in a white T-shirt and white pyjamas and blue bathroom slippers, in the jail superintendent’s office. K.D. tries to imagine himself back, relive the event. Maybe in the details he can find an explanation for the three sadhus. He closes his eyes and tries to slip into that afternoon, back into the room with its shelves of black files, its black-framed picture of Nehru. His breath is coming in short gulps, he doesn’t know why. Stop it. Calm down. Calm, or you’ll cause yourself more injury. Think. Why three sadhus? K.D. has no use for religion, and has always thought of Gaitonde’s religiosity as a crutch for a terrified man incessantly afraid of assassins. Even strong men, hard men, men who are the bosses of companies, cannot face the blankness of death, the irreversible scissor-cut on the frail thread of awareness. One snip, then no more. Finished. This is unbearable, and so even Gaitonde, that bloodstained monster, dreamed fantasies about an after-life. We cannot bear this darkness. K.D. tries to examine his scotoma, to pay attention to it, but it is just nothing, a blank nothing. How dark it is, this loss under my eyelids, just under the red flutter of my pulse.
‘Yes, that’s Daddy’s handwriting,’ Anjali’s mother tells her. Anjali has found an old university text that once belonged to her father, an ancient Indian history text, and she is pointing excitedly to the blue-penned notes in the margin, the underlinings. Bloody Mathur has been gone nearly a year now, but to his daughter he is a daily presence, a figure who looms larger because he is away, he is the romantically mysterious father who is not here. She has been told that he has ‘gone away for a time’, that he is ‘on tour.’ Within the organization, the generally held belief is that he was taken by the very same Sikh militants he was trying to recruit, that he was outwitted and ambushed, that he was probably tortured and then killed. A small minority believes that he was turned, that the ambush was a stage-play that he managed himself, that he has gone over the border, to the other side. But nobody expects him back, except Anjali, who has been told that he is ‘travelling for work’. K.D. despises this lie because he sees expectation in Anjali’s eyes every time the phone rings, a yearning in her knock-kneed sprint to the door when the postman rattles the gate. But she is eleven years old, and her mother thinks that a father who has gone away is what she can understand, or bear. K.D. knows that children face terrors every day, they walk through horrors that their elders deny and flinch away from. And what could be harder to bear than this expectation, this wanting? But he has no authority here. He has to be very careful. Rekha is pouring tea for him. She is formally hospitable to her dead husband’s friend just returned from London, but K.D. knows there is no warmth here, no affection. She has always been polite, but distant, more than likely there is a hard armour of caste feeling under the good manners. If he says the wrong thing, he could get himself exiled, sent away from Anjali for ever. And he knows that this banishment would be something he could not bear. This would not be supportable. K.D. has no connections in the world. Papa and Ma are dead, and he doesn’t have frequent communications with his relatives in Bihar. He has nobody. But Bloody Mathur has always welcomed him into his home, and K.D. has seen Anjali grow from infant to girl. She has always known him, he has been present through her entire life. K.D. understands that this small person sprang from Bloody Mathur and Rekha, but somehow she has become his daughter as well. Somehow he has become a father. He has no authority, but he has love. He understands that this little girl, in her blue school skirt, is his anchor in the world. She binds him together, with that long gaze of hers. He doesn’t know how this happened, or when, but he knows it is true. She leans on his knee now, holding up the English doll he has brought her from London.
‘She won’t talk, Uncle.’
The doll is blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, with a puckered strawberry of a smile and a tinny voice. K.D. now realizes that he hasn’t heard her saying ‘Mama’ for a few minutes. He turns the doll over, and under the pink dress, the panel in the small of her back is loose. He fingernails the panel up, and the wires inside are twisted around the battery, a green chip hangs loose. ‘What did you do?’ he says.
‘I wanted to see how she worked,’ says Anjali.
K.D. laughs, alight with pleasure and love. The feeling inside him is complete, unrestrained, without any of the holding back that he has felt in every other interaction in his life. She giggles. ‘Uncle, I’m too old for dolls anyway,’ she says, not unkindly. ‘I stopped playing with them long ago. You don’t know much about girls. I like reading now. You should bring me books.’ They laugh together, sending each other into pealing outbreaks that spiral away. Anjali’s mother watches, faintly suspicious. At least for that moment, K.D. doesn’t care, and he carries Anjali’s warmth with him into the next day, into the office where he sits at the Islamic Fundamentalism desk. In this enclosed, windowless cabin he collects reports from all over the world, he collates, connects, sifts, analyses. The beliefs and hatreds of men and women come to him in fragments, and he puts together the pieces. And then he writes his own reports, has them typed on crisp sheets of white rice paper, and through them information rises up, to the Additional Commissioner and then the Commissioner and then perhaps all the way to the prime minister. Information rises, and orders descend. Action is taken, and that produces results and new cascades of information. K.D. feels always that he is sitting at a node in a web, at the intersection of globe-spanning lines of energy that hum and spin and change shape. He can strum a thread here, and ten thousand miles away a man will slump in a doorway. He can write a paragraph, and two weeks later hear it paraphrased in a speech by the home minister. In this dusty room he sets strings of events in motion, he changes the lives of millions of people.
But he cannot find the men who took Bloody Mathur. He has a file, a thick one full of police reports and on-the-spot evaluations by teams of organization investigators, who evaluate the incident and also its investigation by the Punjab authorities. The facts are few and clear: Bloody Mathur had been cultivating a certain Harbhajan Singh, who had two years of college and no job, who was the son of a small farmer, who had been arrested twice for petty theft. This Harbhajan Singh had contacts in a certain militant group called the Punjab Liberation Army, and for months Bloody Mathur had fed money to Harbhajan Singh, who in turn had passed money to a close friend who had gone over to the militants. Good information had come back, verifiable material but none of it very useful. The source within the PLA asked for a face-to-face meeting, said he would bring another disaffected friend. Bloody Mathur had a hunch, he went, and then was gone. Leaving a tilted, shattered Ambassador and three dead men. And there the trail stops,
ceases. Bloody Mathur has disappeared, and that is all.