On their way to Ahdoos, sitting in the claustrophobic back seat of an armored Gypsy, Naga held Tilo’s hand. Tilo held his hand back. He was acutely aware of the circumstances in which that tentative exchange of tenderness was taking place. He could feel the tremor, the motor under her skin. Still, of all the women in the world, to have this woman’s hand in his made him indescribably happy.
The smell inside the jeep was overpowering—a rank cocktail of sour metal, gunpowder, hair oil, fear and treachery. Its customary passengers were masked informers, known as “Cats.” During cordon-and-search operations, the adult men of the cordoned neighborhood would be rounded up and paraded past the armored Gypsy, that ubiquitous symbol of dread in the Kashmir Valley. From the depths of his metal cage, the concealed Cat would nod, or blink, and a man would be taken out of the line to be tortured, “disappeared,” or to die. Naga knew all this of course, but it did nothing to lessen the intensity of his contentment.
The sullen city was wide awake but feigning sleep. Empty streets, closed markets, shuttered shops and locked houses slid past the jeep’s slit windows—“death windows,” local people called them, because what peered out of them were either soldiers’ guns or informers’ eyes. Packs of street dogs slouched about like small bears, their burred coats thickening in anticipation of the approaching winter. Other than tense soldiers on hair-trigger alert, there was not a human in sight. By mid-morning the curfew would be lifted and the security withdrawn to allow people to reclaim their city for a few hours. They would swarm out of their homes in their hundreds of thousands and march to the graveyard, unaware that even the outpouring of their grief and fury had become part of a strategic, military, management plan.
Naga waited for Tilo to say something. She didn’t. When he tried to initiate a conversation she said, “Please. Can we…is it…possible…to not talk?”
“Garson said they had killed a man, a Commander Gulrez…they think, or I don’t know who thinks…Garson thinks…or maybe they told him it was Musa. Was it? Just that. Tell me just that?”
She said nothing for a moment. Then she turned and looked straight at him. Her eyes were broken glass.
“It was impossible to tell.”
When he covered the conflict in Punjab, Naga had seen, often enough, the condition of bodies when they came out of interrogation centers. So he took what Tilo said as confirmation of his suspicions. He understood that it would take Tilo a while to get over what she had been through. He was prepared to wait. He thought he knew enough—or at least all that he really needed to know—about what had happened. He forgave himself for the fact that Tilo’s anguish was, for him, the source of exquisite contentment.
Tilo’s answer to Naga’s question wasn’t an outright lie. But it certainly wasn’t the truth. The truth was that given the condition of the body she saw, had she not known who it was, it would have been impossible to tell. But she did know who it was. She knew very well that it wasn’t Musa.
With that untruth or half-truth or one-tenth truth (or whatever other fraction of the truth it was), the barriers came down and the borders of the country without consulates were sealed. The episode at the Shiraz was filed away as a closed subject.
When they returned to Delhi, since Tilo was in no condition to be left alone in what Naga called her “storeroom” in the Nizamuddin basti, he invited her to stay for a while in his little flat on the roof of his parents’ house. When he finally saw her “haircut” he told her that it really suited her and that whoever had done it should become a hairdresser. That made her smile.
A few weeks later he asked her if she would marry him. She delighted him by saying that she would. Very soon, to his parents’ utter dismay, the ceremony was, as they say, solemnized. They were married on Christmas Day, 1996.
If cover was what Tilo needed, she couldn’t have done better than becoming the daughter-in-law of Ambassador Shivashankar Hariharan with a home address in Diplomatic Enclave.
—
She held that life together for fourteen years and then suddenly, she couldn’t any more. There were a number of explanations for why this was so, but chief among them was exhaustion. She grew tired of living a life that wasn’t really hers at an address she oughtn’t to be at. Ironically, when the drift began, she was fonder of Naga than she had ever been. It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.
—
Looking back now, Naga realized that for years he had lived with the subconscious dread that Tilo was just passing through his life, like a camel crossing a desert. That she would surely leave him one day.
Still, when it actually happened, it took him a while to believe it.
His old friend R.C., who had always maintained that working in the Intelligence Bureau and reading interrogation transcripts gave a man an unparalleled understanding of human nature, more profound than any preacher, poet or psychiatrist could ever hope to attain, took him in hand.
“What she needs, I’m sorry to say, is two tight slaps. This modern approach of yours doesn’t always work. At the end of the day we’re all animals. We need to be shown our pee ell a see ee. A little clarity will go a long way towards helping all the concerned parties. You will be doing her a favor for which she will, one day, be grateful. Believe me, I speak from experience.” R.C. often dropped his voice mid-sentence and spelled out random words, as though he was hoodwinking an imaginary eavesdropper who didn’t know how to spell. He always referred to people as “parties.” “At the end of the day” was his favorite launching pad for all his advice and insights, just as when he wanted to belittle someone he always began by saying, “With all due respect.”
R.C. chastised Naga for allowing Tilo to refuse to have children. Children, he said, would have bound her to their marriage like nothing else could. He was a small, soft, effeminate man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. He had a small, soft wife and a small, soft teenaged daughter who was studying molecular biology. They looked like a model family of small, soft toys. So coming from him, this masculine advice was startling even to Naga, who had known him for years. Naga fell to wondering about the nature and frequency of tight slaps that had kept Mrs. R.C. in place. Outwardly she looked placid and perfectly content with her lot—with her houseful of mementoes and her collection of somewhat tasteless jewelry and expensive Kashmiri shawls. He couldn’t imagine that she was really a volcano of hidden furies that needed to be disciplined and slapped from time to time.
R.C., who loved the blues, played a song for Naga. Billie Holiday’s “No Good Man.”
I’m the one who gets
The run-around,
I oughta hate him
And yet
I love him so
For I require
Love that’s made of fire
R.C. heard “I oughta hate him” as “All the hittin’.”
“Women,” he said. “All women. No exceptions. Get it?”
—
Tilo had always reminded Naga of Billie Holiday. Not the woman so much as her voice. If it was possible for a human being to evoke a voice, a sound, then for Naga, Tilo evoked Billie Holiday’s voice—she had that same quality of limbering, heart-stopping, fucked-up unexpectedness to her. R.C. had no idea what he had set off when he used Billie Holiday to illustrate the point he was making.