Fire and Ice: AS Dulat opens up about his first novel
Long nights often lubricated with whiskey pegs, clandestine walks through twisty lanes with shadowed homes, friendly faces with unreadable minds, and concertina wires tied to triggers, real and imagined. Kashmir is a character in Amarjit Singh Dulat’s Our Kind of Games (Hachette, Rs 599), his first novel and sixth book, much as it has played a principal part in his 39 year-long career in the Intelligence Bureau and R&AW.
Kashmir—with its philosophical shikarawalas, its leaders whose fathers have left long shadows, its loquacious informers, its children who learnt to distinguish between different kinds of gunfire before they could read and its retired militant—is a place Dulat knows well. The former R&AW chief lived there for two years (1988-1990), the most traumatic period in the Valley when militancy was at its peak and a majority of Pandit families fled, forever changing its social and cultural fabric. But his engagement with the Valley has been much longer, even though he has not always shared Delhi's views on how to handle the “boys” (the militants). “Most Kashmiris think I was in Kashmir for longer but I got the he** out of there when I was posted out. But headquarters in Delhi, my seniors, thought I was the most contemporary of officers and I was asked to watch Kashmir,” he says. He was then joint director in the Intelligence Bureau. “Kashmir gets into your bloodstream. It doesn’t leave you. It’s become an obsession with me. I can’t go out of Kashmir. I wouldn’t know where to go.”
In Ranjit Soni, his protagonist in Our Kind of Games, the 86-year-old spymaster has created a spook who is less James Bond and more George Smiley—invisible, clever and able to blend into the background. These abilities give him access to a wide swath of people. It also makes him a lonely man, his family tucked away in Delhi and unable to comprehend his daily battle with fear. The fear of getting shot, the fear of causing death, the fear of acting on the wrong information, or not acting on the right tip. Mostly, it is fear of trusting someone.
Until he does, and then it is a beautiful woman, Rehana, the accomplished daughter of the PRO of the golf course. She becomes Soni’s anchor, his lover, his confessional, and eventually, his loss. Rose Cottage is where they retire when they meet, where he feels human, where he feeds the illusion that he is more than an officer running sources and writing reports. Was there a Rehana in Dulat’s life? He laughs, in his trademark enigmatic fashion.
In his foreword, former Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah says the novel captures something essential which official histories and government reports never convey. Indeed, the real hard work of Kashmir, which inspires self loathing in Soni, is done in safehouses for informers in Delhi (“Yes, this really did happen,” says Dulat); in interrogation rooms that smell of “old sins and new fears”; on secure lines in Gupkar Road official bungalows with gardens tended to by querulous gardeners.
To use Dulat’s prose: “This was how the game was played—in basements and in bedrooms, in moments of violence and intimacy, by men who understood they were all, in their different ways, imprisoned by choices made long ago in rooms they would never see, by people whose names they would never know, for reasons that would never be explained.”
He goes on: “For every safehouse you established, the other side established surveillance. For every agent you recruited, they recruited a counter agent. For every operation you ran, they ran one in parallel. The game was played in mirrors, and the mirrors themselves could not be trusted.”
And for all the pains one takes, there could be a bullet in your head, from anywhere, even if it was not aimed at you. The novel is full of the minutiae of being a spy. The lies one has to tell to everyone, including oneself; the routes one has to take to avoid surveillance; the clothes one has to wear to enable blending into the background; and the family one has to keep in the dark.
“The memory of the winter of 1989 has not yet faded, nor does Kashmir go easily out of the mind,” writes Dulat. He also details what happened afterwards. The Pandits who left the Valley under cover of the night after targeted killings; the young women, widows of militants or wives of men in prison, turning to prostitution to feed their children; and boys who had fought for azadi becoming drug dealers because the revolution had failed and they needed money. “The idealism that had launched the insurgency had curdled into something uglier,” he writes.
Even now, when Dulat speaks of the book, he underlines the tragedy of Kashmir repeatedly, a state that is beautiful but broken, paradise but also prison, a place that one either leaves in a hurry or never leaves at all. It is a sadness that enters one’s marrow, a sorrow that cannot be removed, and a quiet loss that understands that Kashmir dies a little more each day. As the wise shikarawala tells Soni: “You are player and played both.”
Few people understand Kashmiris as well as Dulat does. He calls them “badmash” (rogues) but “pyaare badmash” (loveable rogues). “I told Mirwaiz once, why do you lie? He told me Delhi taught us to lie,” he says. He is a great advocate of the Kashmiri leadership and of Farooq Abdullah in particular, saying he will, in many ways, go down in history as a greater leader than his father, who had the support of the Mahatma and Nehru, except when he was jailed. “Farooq never had the support of Delhi and yet he has stood by India. He is the most nationalist of Kashmiri leaders. I found Abdul Ghani Lone fascinating. I thought at one point, Farooq and Lone would be fantastic together. Similarly, I felt Omar Abdullah and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq would have been a great combination, along with Sajjad Lone. But it doesn’t happen,” says Dulat.
As far as Omar Abdullah is concerned, he says, he “will live and learn. During the 2002 Assembly elections, he was Delhi’s favourite, adds Dulat, who was in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s PMO between 2000 and 2004 as advisor on Jammu and Kashmir. “Atalji was very fond of him. They wanted him to become chief minister but he lost his own seat, Ganderbal. He is honest and upright. At one time the youth of Kashmir was also enamoured of him,” he adds. “He is beginning to learn now. Delhi has to be dealt with on an equal footing, as Farooq did. Omar is still fighting for statehood.”
Kashmiri leaders have to be honest to themselves and to Delhi, he adds. Dulat remains an admirer of Farooq, recalling what he told him in 1989: “He said he was not his father, that he hadn’t joined politics to go to jail. ‘I will never go against Delhi whoever is in charge’ he said.”
There is a visible Kashmir, he points out, and an invisible Kashmir. And the ghost is the Kashmiri Pandit. He says the Kashmiri has stopped talking now, which is why he/she is most dangerous. Fiction often says more than fact can. Our Kind of Games is indeed nobody’s game.
But he remains an optimist. “This too shall pass,” he says.