Secrets of State (13 page)

It was not a killing blow. Khan had held back. Jadoon stood and shook off the effects, snorting like a bull preparing to charge the matador. That usually ended badly for the bull.

“Do you really want to do this, Jadoon?” Khan asked.

“You don't belong here,” Jadoon replied. “You haven't earned it.”

“I would earn it now if you like.”

“I don't think so, lucky number.”

Jadoon's second attack was more cautious. He had underestimated Khan and was not about to repeat the mistake. The two men circled each other warily, hands extended. Khan was not yet sure if this was going to be a boxing match or a wrestling match, but he had trained in Brazilian jujitsu and either was acceptable to him.

The other jihadis stood to one side, watching. All but Mashwanis, who was now able to sit up but was still visibly disoriented. The others would not interfere with the fight. This was a test of both manhood and Allah's favor.

Jadoon was considerably bigger than Khan and had maybe six inches of reach on him. Size did matter. A good big man would beat a good little man every time. Jadoon was good. Khan would have to be better than good. As Khan had expected, Jadoon went for the head. Khan saw the opening to step in and go for the takedown. Within twenty seconds, it would be over. But he didn't. Instead, he let Jadoon's punch through, twisting his head slightly to take the blow on his skull rather than his jaw. He did not want to humiliate the HeM commander. He wanted acceptance.

For the next thirty seconds, he stood toe-to-toe with Jadoon, trading blows like bare-knuckled boxers from another century. Khan went for the body shots, short, sharp jabs that would sap the strength from the big man's arms. Jadoon tried to lay a knockout blow on Khan's jaw. Khan ducked and moved his head enough to keep Jadoon's punches soft. One left hook caught him on the cheek that was still bleeding from the splinter wound, and for a moment the pain was so intense that Khan saw white. Time to end it.

Khan stepped inside Jadoon's next punch and stood chest-to-chest with the bigger man as though they were dance partners. Grabbing both of his opponent's arms by the triceps and lifting with all of his strength, Khan effectively froze Jadoon in place. The next series of moves were too quick for the onlookers to follow. A leg sweep dropped the HeM leader onto his back like a sack of rice. Khan never let go, transitioning from the clinch into a control position called a
kimura
after the Japanese judo champion who had patented it. Jadoon's arm was bent at an angle behind his back and there was no direction the larger man could move that would not result in a dislocated elbow. Khan gently increased the torque on the elbow until Jadoon grunted and ceased struggling.

“Tap the ground,” Khan commanded.

Jadoon tried again to wriggle out of the hold. Khan clamped down even harder on the elbow, trying not to snap it but not caring especially if he did. Jadoon seemed to sense this. His body went limp to take the pressure off the arm and he tapped the hard dirt with his free hand.

“You win,” Jadoon said loudly enough for the whole team to hear.

Khan released the hold and Jadoon stood, shaking his arm to get feeling back into it. He glared at Khan with his typical intensity, but this time without the contempt that had routinely accompanied it. Khan saw him look over at Mashwanis and at the scorpion that was pinned on Khan's boot knife. He grinned.

“Can you teach the boys to do that?” he asked.

“I can.”

“Good. Give them a training session after dinner tonight. No broken bones. You're our new hand-to-hand-fighting instructor.”

The HeM commander abruptly embraced Khan, wrapping his arms around him in a bear hug and kissing him violently on both cheeks.

“You may be our lucky number after all.”

MUMBAI

APRIL 6

O
n some days, Lena felt like a nineteenth-century Kansas schoolmarm in a one-room schoolhouse. Except for the robots. On any given day, there were a dozen or more children ranging in ages from eight to sixteen working on various engineering and technical projects or sitting at one of the low-slung tables working on math problems. Lena recycled most of her SysNet salary into material for the school, which was operating out of a converted toy factory in the center of Dharavi that Ramananda had helped her find.

The facilities in the slum were basic, and the power supply was spotty at best, albeit without cost to the end user. In Dharavi, municipal services such as electricity were largely pilfered. Running water came and went on a cycle known only to the gods, and trash pickup was more an aspiration than an expectation. A backup generator at the school that Lena had purchased herself helped with the inevitable black- and brownouts. Most important, Lena had made damn certain that her Internet connection was on a par with any in the city. Ramananda's workers—the more legitimate kind—had run a fiber-optic cable from the school to the edge of Dharavi where she could splice it into the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam network.

Lena made sure the kids were supplied with computers, electronics labs, and even robots as part of their education. Although artistic talent had been her mother's ticket out of the slum, Lena believed that STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—was the surest path to a better future for the lower-caste kids of Dharavi.

The expensive equipment Lena had procured for the school would ordinarily have been a magnet for thieves except that Ramananda had put the word out that the school was sacrosanct. It would have taken an especially brave or desperate thief to ignore that instruction and cross Ramananda. Just in case, however, the unsmiling Hard Man by the front door kept the computers and electronics inside as safe as they would have been in a suburban high school in the United States.

Lena surveyed the controlled chaos that was entirely typical of the two-hour evening sessions she more or less led and was largely satisfied with what she saw. One group of young children was gathered around a laptop coding a basic video game in Python. A couple of older kids had disassembled a television and were painstakingly fitting the parts back together.

Nandi and a twelve-year-old girl named Pia were racing Roombas. With only minimal help from Lena, they had hacked the robotic vacuum cleaners and linked them to Microsoft Kinect controllers. Waving their arms up over their heads propelled the Roombas forward and wild arm motions to either side would turn the robots left or right. A few plastic cones on the wooden floor marked out the racecourse.

Pia laughed riotously as her Roomba cut in front of Nandi's, forcing him to slow down as he sought to maneuver around one of the cones. He laughed with her. It was all in good fun, and Lena's spirits lifted at their infectious enthusiasm.

Nandi had a knack for electronics and Pia was developing into a first-rate programmer. They both had bright futures, as long as Nandi stayed out of jail and off the streets and as long as Pia dodged the all-too-common trap of a bad marriage at a young age. Her parents did not know that she was a regular at the school. They were traditional people from the country. Lena did not know what kind of lies Pia had had to tell her parents to keep coming to the school, and she had no intention of asking. In Dharavi, everyone did what they had to do to get by, get ahead, and—if at all possible—get out.

Lena spent the next half hour helping a group of the oldest children with their math problems. Two of them would soon be taking the entrance exams to a prestigious state-sponsored science high school, and they would need to ace the calculus part of the test. At eight-thirty, Lena had the kids pack all of the equipment away neatly into lockers that were padlocked and bolted to the floors.

“That's it for tonight, kids,” she announced.

The children all stopped to thank her individually before heading off into the steamy tropical night toward the overcrowded shacks and shanties that passed for homes in the slum.

Feeling somewhat guilty as she did every night, Lena locked the doors and windows, and headed off to her considerably more comfortable apartment outside of the Dharavi district.

Maybe I should live here,
she thought, as she wandered the familiar alleyways that led back to the canal.
It wouldn't be so bad, really. I could ask the older kids to help me build a solar water heater so that I could at least have a real shower now and then.

Lena knew in her heart that this was both unrealistic and unnecessary, the equivalent of wearing a hair shirt. The kids she mentored would be no better off for her discomfort. They would be considerably worse off, in fact, if she got sick. She could give more to the poor kids of Dharavi through the school than she could as a resident. Besides, she wasn't cut out to be Mother Teresa. Lena had once met Mother Teresa at a hospice in Kolkata run by the Missionaries of Charity when her father had been involved in a project to provide care to the city's HIV-positive poor. She had been a little girl, no more than seven, but Lena remembered Mother Teresa as a figure of almost saintly calm. The contrast with her own roiling emotional life could not have been starker.

She stopped at the bridge to pay the ten-rupee “toll” to Tahir.

“How were the lessons this evening, madam?” he asked politely.

“Just fine, thank you. Why don't you come one night and see for yourself?”

“No thank you, madam. My place is here, guarding the entrance to the district. It is an honorable profession.”

“Yes, Tahir. Yes, it is.”

She dropped the coin in his bowl.

There was nothing fancy about Lena's small apartment. She made a good salary and she could have afforded a larger place in a nicer part of the city, but most of her pay went to buy books and equipment for the school. She dropped her purse on the end table by the door and slipped her shoes off. It had been a long day, and she wanted nothing more than a quick meal, a shower, and bed. But she had promised her father that she would call him this evening and she did not want to disappoint him.

Lena was worried about her father. It seemed to her that he was spending too much time alone, too much time thinking about the past. Lena was afraid that her move back to Mumbai, to her mother's old neighborhood, might have been too much for her father to handle. But she knew he was strong. He had proven that over the years, caring for her mother when she got sick, dealing with Lena's rebellious teenage persona as a single parent, and trying to do some good in South Asia even as he was forced to advocate for policies he frequently did not believe in. It had not been an easy road for him. But he had done well, and he was a good man.

She hoped he could find some way to be happy. A girlfriend might help. There had been one or two over the years, but they had not lasted long.

She was one to talk. Her father was the top entry on her Skype favorites bar. Someday, maybe, he would be bumped out of the top spot by a boyfriend who might become a husband. But that opening remained vacant, and Lena was in no rush to fill the position.

Lena sat down at the desk in the living room and called up the Skype application on her computer. She clicked the button next to his picture.

Her father picked up after half a dozen rings. The picture was a little jumpy, and Lena guessed that he was using his iPad rather than the desktop. The resolution was still good enough for her to see that Sam did not look well.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, baby.”

“Are you okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don't look so hot.”

“That's too bad. You look great. What have you been up to?”

It did not take a rocket scientist to recognize the brush-off. Okay. No frontal assaults. She would have to find a back door in the conversation.

“I'm a little tired of wrestling with the accursed BMC. I'd swear there's no bureaucracy quite like the Indian bureaucracy.”

“They've had thousands of years of practice,” her father agreed. “Any luck moving the ball?”

“None,” Lena admitted. “It feels like I'm just spinning my wheels. And I'm afraid that Uncle Ramananda is planning to take things in . . . a different direction.”

“Violence?”

“More like destruction of property. But still the kind of thing likely to attract the attention of the BMC in an altogether different way than I had in mind.”

“Don't let Ramananda drag you into anything. I know he's your godfather and my friend, and I know I've told you this already, but he is totally unworthy of trust.”

“I know, Dad. Don't worry. But I'm torn. Uncle Ramananda is doing something that I think is basically right. He's going to go all Edward Albee on the Gummadi brothers, and I'm going to sit on the sidelines too scared of the consequences to pull my weight.”

“You can contribute in different ways. The school for one. Ramananda has lots of guys who can put sugar in a gas tank, but not one who can design a microchip or go toe-to-toe with a BMC lawyer and come out on top.”

“Actually, I don't know the first thing about chip design and the sugar-in-the-gas-tank thing doesn't work. I thought so too, but Ramananda says . . .”

“Okay. Okay. But the point's the same. I know this is important to you. But it's his fight.”

“It's mine too.”

“Is it?”

“I'm an Indian citizen and I'm from Dharavi . . . sort of,” she acknowledged.

“Sort of.” He was gentle, but Lena could hear the emphasis in his response. “Remember that the defining feature of life in a place like Dharavi is the inability to leave. You're there by choice, but you and Ramananda are among only a handful who are. Your mother got out the first chance she had and she never looked back.”

“But she never forgot.”

“No,” Sam agreed. “She didn't. She couldn't.”

“And she fought for what she believed in. She fought against caste prejudice, for one.”

“In her art, yes. In her words. By her actions. Not in the streets battling the police.”

“Don't worry. I'm not going to start channeling Patty Hearst.”

“That's a relief. Did you know that the Symbionese Liberation Army's seven-headed cobra was originally a Sri Lankan symbol? It was a guardian
naga
that would watch over the irrigation network and the rice fields.”

“Actually, that's kind of cool.” One of the things that Lena loved about talking to her father was the way his mind worked. He jumped quickly and easily from subject to subject, making linkages that were not always obvious but invariably interesting. Like many FSOs, he was also dynamite at Trivial Pursuit.

“Still,” she continued, “I don't want to man the barricade. But I do want to do what's right.”

“So do we all, sugar.”

Lena could see that her father was distracted. Something heavy was weighing on him. She knew that look. After her mother had died, her father had tried to shield her from so much, tried to protect her from the world. She had rebelled against it and perhaps she still was. Maybe that was part of the reason she had come back to Mumbai.

“Dad, what's bothering you?” she asked. “Don't deny it. I can read you. Something's wrong. Tell me.”

“It's nothing. Just some trouble at work.”

“I thought your new job was supposed to be low-stress.”

“I thought so too, but it's more . . . complicated than I thought it would be.”

“Are you eating okay?” Lena knew that her father had a tendency to rely on Indian and Chinese takeout as his primary source of nutrition.

“More than okay. I could stand to lose a few pounds. I need to get back on the bike.”

“I miss riding when I'm out here.” Lena shared her father's love of the D.C. area's extensive network of bike trails. The C&O Canal offered mile after mile of shaded trails and the W&OD Trail ran some forty miles out toward the beautiful Shenandoah Mountains. Riding a bike through the chaotic Mumbai traffic and sucking on diesel fumes while dodging overloaded trucks on potholed streets wasn't quite the same.

“Come home, then. Even just for a visit. We'll go riding out by Chincoteague.”

“Maybe this summer,” Lena offered.

“Listen.” Her father's face was suddenly quite serious. “Things are really starting to heat up in Kashmir. Another war with Pakistan is absolutely not out of the question. And this time, they'd both have nuclear weapons. There's no way of knowing just how far they'd go. Maybe it's time to think about coming home.”

This was not the first time they had covered this ground, and Lena knew that it would not be the last.

“It's not going to happen, Dad. Rangarajan is totally reasonable, and he'll find a way to compromise with Talwar.”

“Hey, which one of us is the political analyst? It takes two to compromise, and Talwar's increasingly boxed in at home.”