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.
28
The immense register, like those in all hotels long ago, unfortunately held no mention of David. Max’s nephew must have had no difficulty using an assumed name. India wasn’t in the habit of requesting any ID, passport or other, when one rented a room. Max had already noticed this in Delhi, but the corpulent, stern-faced owner recognized David from the photo Max showed her.
“How many days did he stay?”
“One night I think.”
“Was he alone?”
She nodded.
“What did he do? Make any appointments, visit the city, receive any phone calls?”
“Shabir!” she yelled.
The handyman was elderly, frail, barefoot, and dressed in a salwar. He seemed better prepared for hunting flies than for painting or woodworking. The owner conferred with him, intoning in a language Max didn’t recognize. He later learned it was Kashmiri.
Shabir tilted his head one way, then the other,
