Secrets of State (10 page)

This reference Khan understood. The Basmala was a kind of shorthand for one of the most common and yet most sacred phrases in Islam:
Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim
. In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. It was the first verse of the first sura in the Quran. Believers recited the phrase at prayers, before meals, and before performing any important tasks. When the letters of the Arabic alphabet were arranged in their traditional abjad order, the assigned values of the letters in the Basmala totaled 786. Many Muslims in South Asia used the number as a substitute for Allah when writing on ordinary paper that might come into contact with unclean things. The name of God could not be used to wrap fish or line a parakeet's cage.

“The Basmala is connected to the number nineteen, of course. There are nineteen letters in the Basmala. The root words appear in the Quran as exact multiples of nineteen.
Isim
is repeated nineteen times;
Allah
two thousand six hundred and ninety-eight times, which is nineteen times one hundred and forty-two.
Rahman
is repeated fifty-seven times, or nineteen times three, and
Rahim
appears one hundred and fourteen times, which is the same as nineteen times six. But it is the Basmala in its totality—786—that represents the divine.
Bismillah awwalahu wa akhirahu.
I begin with the name of God at the beginning and at the end. Never forget this.”

They finished their meal. The steward collected the plates and then served coffee in the Pakistani style, a frothy mix of milk, sweet cardamom, and cinnamon.

“I do not believe that your presence in the guest house that night in India was an accident,” Masood said.

“No, Janab. You chose me.”

“Allah chose you,” Masood insisted. “It would be foolish for us to ignore this sign. We've been watching you, Khan. You are different than our other recruits. Most, I'm afraid, are village boys only recently moved to the big city. They come to us for reasons of clan honor. This is entirely legitimate. But you come to jihad as the culmination of a personal journey. You are educated. You have an American passport. And you feel jihad in your beating heart.”

“That is true, Janab.” And Khan knew that it was.

“You traveled a road similar to my own in coming to jihad. Men like us, we see more clearly, feel more deeply. We have tested you. You are, it would seem, extremely intelligent. That is good.”

“I am whatever Allah made me.”

“I have plans for you.”

“I am grateful.”

“What would you say if I told you that you could do something special, something spectacular in the service of Allah? Would you wish to do this thing?”

“I would.”

“What if I told you it was dangerous?”

“I would still want to do it, Janab.”

“What if I told you that it was more than dangerous, that you would surely die?”

“If it is Allah's will, then, yes, I would do it.” And Khan knew that he would. His life was a relatively small price to pay. All men died. Not all could do so for a noble cause.

“You may well get the chance,” Masood said.

MUMBAI, INDIA

APRIL 2

L
ena Trainor was cooling her heels. At least one part of her body would be cool, she reasoned, as the wait in the outer office of the commissioner's deputy subassistant for something or other entered its second hour. It was well over a hundred degrees in the building, or at least it was in the waiting room. Lena suspected that the commissioner and his senior staff had air-conditioning in their offices. It was the hoi polloi and lower castes who came to pay obeisance to what remained of the License Raj who were made to wait in the sweltering heat.

If it was true that the Eskimos had seventeen words for snow, then the denizens of Mumbai surely should have at least as many words for heat. Lena killed another ten minutes coming up with an imaginary list of words to describe the different shades of hot that afflicted the city. She had just reached
wet-and-steamy-hot-stinking-of-seagull-droppings-at-low-tide
when the door opened and a thoroughly bored-looking clerk announced that the assistant to the acting deputy commissioner—or something like that—would deign to see her.

In truth, Lena did not have high hopes for this meeting. It was just one in a series of conversations with midlevel bureaucrats in the Mumbai city government who inhabited a world of process, stamps, and triplicate forms that she found maddening. At times, she felt as if she were drowning, held under the surface of a murky sea by thick strands of red tape wrapped like kelp around her arms and legs. She could see the sunlight above, but she was immobilized by the famously inefficient Indian bureaucracy.

The secretary—or maybe he was the secretary to the secretary, it could be hard to tell—showed her into Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sayyap Vamsam's office. It was refreshingly cool in comparison to the waiting room, but it was still probably somewhere in the eighties. A single window air conditioner wheezed and gasped like an old man as it fought its endless losing battle against the tropical heat.

Vamsam was wearing a lightweight Western-style suit. Lena had learned early on in her battle with the city administration not to be fooled. A Western suit was not necessarily a sign of Western thinking. Indian political culture had its own rules and its own logic, and it had to be understood on its own terms. Vamsam did not rise to shake hands. In fact, he barely seemed to register her presence.

Automatically, Lena assessed her adversary; for whether he knew it or not, that was certainly what he was. Vamsam was a small man, which in her experience was rarely a good thing. That may have been why he did not stand up from the desk, so as not to draw attention to his size. He was middle-aged and might once have been handsome, but the comfortable life of a city official had softened him and given him something of a swollen appearance as though he were about to shed his skin. He would be cautious and defensive, Lena reasoned, concerned primarily with preserving his position of privilege rather than using it to advance some goal or even to pursue higher office. He had “risen to the middle” of Mumbai's faceless bureaucratic hierarchy and that was quite enough, thank you very much.

She looked quickly around the office. Awards and decorations hung on the walls alongside pictures of Vamsam with various Indian dignitaries. A vain man, then. Maybe something of a weakness. She filed this data point away.

The name Sayyap Vamsam was also a marker of caste status. He was a Kshatriya, one of the four
varnas
in the Hindu social order. Traditionally, the Kshatriya had been warriors in periods of conflict and administrators in peacetime. Those traditions had long faded, but Lena had an intuitive sense that they would still matter to Sayyap Vamsam.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Trainor?” the bureaucrat finally asked, with an edge of impatience in his voice. Another weakness, perhaps?

“I'm here to talk to you about the Gummadi brothers' development plans in Dharavi.”

“Yes.” He was suddenly wary. Everyone knew the Gummadi brothers, and their Five Star development was one of the largest projects on the city's balance sheets. Vamsam sensed a threat, and Lena could almost see him pulling back into a defensive crouch.

“The Five Star plan would flatten six blocks in Dharavi. There are nearly fifty thousand people living there now who will lose their names if the development moves ahead. Instead, you'll have housing for maybe a hundred wealthy families. The tens of thousands the project will displace will have nowhere to go.”

Lena was confident that she knew what Vamsam was thinking.
What's another fifty thousand low-caste homeless in Mumbai? Who will ever notice?

“What would you have me do, madam?” he asked instead. “All of the permits are surely in order.”

And therein was the problem. The Gummadi brothers were entirely devoid of scruples, but they were also careful and smart. They had spread their money liberally through the city administration to procure the necessary permits and licenses. Bundles of thousand-rupee notes were the only knife blade sharp enough to cut through the red tape of local government. It was all legal and it was utterly corrupt.

“No doubt they are. But the citizens who live there have a right to a public hearing before the final permits are approved. Any development plan should include compensation for the people who will be displaced. I want that hearing scheduled, and I want it open to the press.”

“And just what is your interest in this case, Ms. Trainor?” He elongated her name to emphasize its foreignness.
Just who are you to be interfering in Indian business?
he seemed to be saying.

“I am an Indian citizen. Dharavi was my mother's home. My godfather still lives there. I run a school in the district with students whose futures matter to me. And you, Mr. Vamsam, are threatening their futures. I'd say that that's a pretty significant equity stake, wouldn't you?”

Lena was not at all uncertain about who she was. She was not half American and half Dalit. She was 100 percent American and 100 percent Dalit. They were not separable. At the same time, she recognized that the Indian elements of her identity and experiences were far more fragile than her Americanness, and she took care to nurture her connections to her Dalit self and her ties to Dharavi.

“We are only a few weeks away from the beginning of construction. It hardly seems useful to reopen debate and discussion on a foregone conclusion. In fact, it seems somewhat cruel, does it not? You run the risk of engendering false hope.”

“We are not weeks away from construction,” Lena shot back. “We are weeks away from
de
struction. The destruction of thousands of people's homes and livelihoods.”

“Well, if you wish to request a hearing, there are procedures to follow; you will need to fill out the proper forms and submit them through the registrar's office at the BMC.”

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation was the real power in the city. The mayor was a largely ceremonial position. The commissioner of the BMC was a civil servant appointed by the Indian Administrative Service who was surrounded by other civil servants like Vamsam and charged with keeping the wheels of the country's largest city turning smoothly. Vamsam's reply was a classic bureaucratic brush-off. He was just a local ward boss. Lena should take her problems to the big boss in the BMC's gothic-style headquarters in the city center. He seemed exceptionally pleased with that answer, as though it were something that would never have occurred to someone like Lena.

“I did that months ago,” she said flatly.

“Well, it seems like it's all taken care of, then. Good day, Ms. Trainor.”

Lena protested, of course, but the audience was, for all intents and purposes, over. It had ended as the others had, with the buck passed to some other part of the system. Not infrequently, two offices would point directly at each other to assign responsibility for Lena's request.

Frustrated and angry, Lena decided not to go back to the office. SysNet would survive an afternoon without her. Lena was on the long-range planning end of the telecom company's operations. The work was important and challenging, but rarely urgent or short-fuse. Lena's expertise was in hardware rather than software. She knew how to code, of course, but she preferred to make physical things, to hold the product of her labor in her hands as though she were a craftsman or a farmer rather than an engineer.

Outside the office, Lena flagged down a three-wheeled auto rickshaw. She negotiated a rate with the driver who did not seem to find it at all strange that a woman in a tailored suit wanted to go to Dharavi. The sprawling slum was nestled between the Western and Central rail lines. To the north, Dharavi bordered a mangrove swamp, and to the south, it butted up against the fashionable suburb of Bandra. The rickshaw driver dropped her off in front of her building, which was located on 60 Feet Road just across the street from one of the western entrances to the Dharavi district.

A block from her apartment building, a flat lot had been fenced off. A dozen pieces of heavy machinery stood idle. The bulldozers, front-end loaders, and backhoes were waiting for the go-ahead to begin leveling the portion of the district right across from Lena's apartment that was slated for demolition. The cheery canary yellow paint jobs seemed somewhat incongruous, like a muscled mob enforcer with a
KISS
ME
,
I
'
M
ITALIAN
button on his lapel. The machines were the face of the enemy in a war for the control of the fabulously valuable land on which nearly a million poor and outcaste squatted with few rights and little security.

On impulse, Lena decided to forgo the pleasures of a hot shower in favor of an impromptu visit to Uncle Ramananda. She did not have to worry about whether he would be home. Her godfather was agoraphobic to the point of being a virtual shut-in. He rarely, if ever, left his house.

The entrance to Dharavi was less than inviting. A rickety wooden bridge spanned a canal that seemed to contain more bottles and plastic bags than it did water. A few dense mats of foul-smelling weeds floated on the surface. Sometimes, the Dharavi boys swam in the canal, a sight that always caused Lena's stomach to turn slightly. The plastic was doubtless the least objectionable thing in the canal.

On the far side of the bridge, a young boy in dirty red shorts and a white T-shirt sat on a thin reed mat with a wooden bowl set on the ground in front of him. He had no legs below the knees. A growth on his neck the size of a golf ball added to his misshapen look. Begging was his profession. The boy sat there at the end of the bridge all day, every day. At night, he slept under the bridge like a troll in a children's fairy tale.

Lena fished a ten-rupee coin out of her purse and dropped it in the boy's bowl.

“Here's the bridge toll, Tahir.”

“Thank you, madam.”

Lena and the boy had something of an understanding. He did not beg from her and she did not provide charity. He was performing a service, collecting the ten-rupee toll for crossing the bridge. That Lena was the only one asked to pay the toll was immaterial. She paid him every time she crossed. For Tahir, it was the difference between hunger and starvation.

There were no real streets in Dharavi, just narrow twisting alleys lined with businesses, homes, and workshops. There were no street signs or maps either. You had to know your way around. For those who had been born here, it was second nature. Lena was still learning, and it was easy for her to get lost if she wandered too far from any of her established routes.

The slum had a vibrant if unregulated economy. Some businesses actually relocated to Dharavi to take advantage of the relative freedom from red tape. Pottery and textiles were the biggest businesses, but on the short walk to her godfather's home, Lena passed a noodle shop; two beauty salons; a bar that she suspected doubled as a brothel; half a dozen kiosks selling magazines, cigarettes, and warm Coca-Cola; and a small factory that turned out cheap plastic toys for the domestic market. There were jobs to be had in Dharavi if you were willing to work hard. They just did not pay especially well.

Even in the hothouse of the slums, a few exceptional individuals thrived. Ramananda was one. He was a rogue, and her father was right that she should be skeptical of his motives, but she enjoyed his company and she could use a little cheering up right now. Her godfather was wealthy by Dharavi standards. He occupied an entire three-story building that in an American city might have been considered a modest townhouse, but in Dharavi it could have housed fifty people.

Lena knocked on the door frame and ducked her head as she stepped inside. At five-ten, Lena was tall for an Indian. Her lanky height was a constant reminder that there would always be something foreign about her here. It was good never to forget that. Ramananda was sitting on a cushion on an elevated dais.

It looked like Ramananda was cleaning up from a party, or at least having it done. Ramananda never exerted himself more than he absolutely had to, and a young boy wearing a T-shirt with the swirling saw blade logo of the Mumbai Indians cricket squad was collecting plastic cups and discarded napkins from the floor. When he saw Lena, however, he dropped his trash bag and came close to her, smiling shyly but expectantly.