To his surprise he had begun speaking loudly and had risen to his feet. He sat down hard and laughed. The moment passed.
‘The funny thing about this blasted nickname of mine’, he said quickly to his dinner-table neighbour, the septuagenarian Very Big Businessman’s improbably young and attractive wife, ‘is that back then we never saw one episode of the TV series. No TV to see it on, you see. The whole thing was just a legend wafting its way from the US and UK to our lovely hill-station of Dehra Dun.
‘After a while we got a couple of cheap paperback novelisations and passed them round as if they were naughty books like Lady C or some such. Lots of us tried the names on for size but only two of them stuck; probably because they seemed to go together, and the two of us got on pretty well, even though he was younger. A lovely boy. So just like Laurel and Hardy we were Chekov and Zulu.’
‘Love and marriage,’ said the woman.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘You know,’ she said. ‘Go together like is it milk and porridge. Or a car and garage, that’s right. I love old songs. La-la-la-something-brother, you can’t have fun without I think it’s your mother.’
‘Yes, now I do recall,’ said Chekov.
3
Three months later Zulu telephoned his wife.
‘O my God where have you vanished are you dead?’
‘Listen please my bivi. Listen carefully my wife, my only love.’
‘Yes. OK. I am calm. Line is bad, but.’
‘Call Chekov and say condition red.’
‘Arré! What is wrong with your condition?’
‘Please. Condition red.’
‘Yes. OK. Red.’
‘Say the Klingons may be smelling things.’
‘Clingers-on may be smelly things. Means what?’
‘My darling, I beg you.’
‘I have it all right here only. With this pencil I have written it, both.’
‘Tell him, get Scotty to lock on to my signal and beam me up at once.’
‘What rubbish! Even now you can’t leave off that stupid game.’
‘Bivi. It is urgent. Beam me up.’
Chekov dropped everything and drove. He went via the dry-cleaners as instructed; he drove round roundabouts twice, jumped red lights, deliberately took a wrong turning, stopped and turned round, made as many right turns as possible to see if anything followed him across the stream of traffic, and, on the motorway, mimicked Zulu’s techniques. When he was as certain as he could be that he was clean, he headed for the rendezvous point. ‘Roll over Len Deighton,’ he thought, ‘and tell le Carré the news.’
He turned off the motorway and pulled into a lay-by. A man stepped out of the trees, looking newly bathed and smartly dressed, with a sheepish smile on his face. It was Zulu.
Chekov jumped out of the car and embraced his friend, kissing him on both cheeks. Zulu’s bristly beard pricked his lips. ‘I expected you’d have an arm missing, or blood pouring from a gunshot wound, or some black eyes at least,’ he said. ‘Instead here you are dressed for the theatre, minus only an opera cloak and cane.’
‘Mission accomplished,’ said Zulu, patting his breast pocket. ‘All present and correct.’
‘Then what was that “condition red” bakvaas?’
‘The worst-case scenario’, said Zulu, ‘does not always materialise.’
In the car, Chekov scanned the names, places, dates in Zulu’s brown envelope. The information was better than anyone had expected. From this anonymous Midlands lay-by a light was shining on certain remote villages and urban back-alleys in Punjab. There would be a round-up, and, for some big badmashes at least, there would no longer be shadows in which to hide.
He gave a little, impressed whistle.
Zulu in the passenger seat inclined his head. ‘Better move off now,’ he said. ‘Don’t tempt fate.’
They drove south through Middle-earth.
Not long after they came off the motorway, Zulu said, ‘By the way, I quit.’
Chekov stopped the car. The two towers of Wembley Stadium were visible through a gap in the houses to the left.
‘What’s this? Did those extremists manage to turn your head or what?’
‘Chekov, ji, don’t be a fool. Who needs extremists when there are the killings in Delhi? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Sikh men scalped and burned alive in front of their families. Boy-children, too.’
‘We know this.’
‘Then, ji, we also know who was behind it.’
‘There is not a shred of evidence,’ Chekov repeated the policy line.
‘There are eyewitnesses and photographs,’ said Zulu. ‘We know this.’
‘There are those who think’, said Chekov slowly, ‘that after Indiraji the Sikhs deserved what they got.’
Zulu stiffened.
‘You know me better than that, I hope,’ said Chekov. ‘Zulu, for God’s sake, come on. All our bleddy lives.’
‘No Congress workers have been indicted,’ said Zulu. ‘In spite of all the evidence of complicity. Therefore, I resign. You should quit, too.’
‘If you have gone so damn radical,’ cried Chekov, ‘why hand over these lists at all? Why go only half the bleddy hog?’
‘I am a security wallah,’ said Zulu, opening the car door. ‘Terrorists of all sorts are my foes. But not, apparently, in certain circumstances, yours.’
‘Zulu, get in, damn it,’ Chekov shouted. ‘Don’t you care for your career? A wife and four kiddiwinks to support. What about your old chums? Are you going to turn your back on me?’
But Zulu was already too far away.
Chekov and Zulu never met again. Zulu settled in Bombay and as the demand for private-sector protection increased in that cash-rich boom-town, so his Zulu Shield and Zulu Spear companies prospered and grew. He had three more children, all of them boys, and remains happily married to this day.
As for Chekov, he never did take a wife. In spite of this supposed handicap, however, he did well in his chosen profession. His rapid rise continued. But one day in May 1991 he was, by chance, a member of the entourage accompanying Mr Rajiv Gandhi to the South Indian village of Sriperumbudur, where Rajiv was to address an election rally. Security was lax, intentionally so. In the previous election, Rajivji felt, the demands of security had placed an alienating barrier between himself and the electorate. On this occasion, he decreed, the voters must be allowed to feel close.
After the speeches, the Rajiv group descended from the podium. Chekov, who was just a few feet behind Rajiv, saw a small Tamil woman come forward, smiling. She shook Rajiv’s hand and did not let go. Chekov understood what she was smiling about, and the knowledge was so powerful that it stopped time itself.
Because time had stopped, Chekov was able to make a number of private observations. ‘These Tamil revolutionists are not England-returned,’ he noted. ‘So, finally, we have learned to produce the goods at home, and no longer need to import. Bang goes that old dinner-party standby; so to speak.’ And, less dryly: ‘The tragedy is not how one dies,’ he thought. ‘It is how one has lived.’
The scene around him vanished, dissolving in a pool of light, and was replaced by the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. All the leading figures were in their appointed places. Zulu sat beside Chekov at the front.
‘Shields no longer operative,’ Zulu was saying. On the main screen, they could see the Klingon Bird of Prey uncloaking, preparing to strike.
‘One direct hit and we’re done for,’ cried Dr McCoy. ‘For God’s sake, Jim, get us out of here!’
‘Illogical,’ said First Officer Spock. ‘The degradation of our dilithium crystal drive means that warp speed is unavailable. At impulse power only, we would make a poor attempt indeed to flee the Bird of Prey. Our only logical course is unconditional surrender.’
‘Surrender to a Klingon!’ shouted McCoy. ‘Damn it, you cold-blooded, pointy-eared adding-machine, don’t you know how they treat their prisoners?’
‘Phaser banks completely depleted,?
?? said Zulu. ‘Offensive capability nil.’
‘Should I attempt to contact the Klingon captain, sir?’ Chekov inquired. ‘They could fire at any moment.’
‘Thank you, Mr Chekov,’ said Captain Kirk. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be necessary. On this occasion, the worst-case scenario is the one we are obliged to play out. Hold your position. Steady as she goes.’
‘The Bird of Prey has fired, sir,’ said Zulu.
Chekov took Zulu’s hand and held it firmly, victoriously, as the speeding balls of deadly light approached.
THE COURTER
I
Certainly-Mary was the smallest woman Mixed-Up the hall porter had come across, dwarfs excepted, a tiny sixty-year-old Indian lady with her greying hair tied behind her head in a neat bun, hitching up her red-hemmed white sari in the front and negotiating the apartment block’s front steps as if they were Alps. ‘No,’ he said aloud, furrowing his brow. What would be the right peaks. Ah, good, that was the name. ‘Ghats,’ he said proudly. Word from a schoolboy atlas long ago, when India felt as far away as Paradise. (Nowadays Paradise seemed even further away but India, and Hell, had come a good bit closer.) ‘Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, and now Kensington Ghats,’ he said, giggling. ‘Mountains.’
She stopped in front of him in the oak-panelled lobby. ‘But ghats in India are also stairs,’ she said. ‘Yes yes certainly. For instance in Hindu holy city of Varanasi, where the Brahmins sit taking the filgrims’ money is called Dasashwamedh-ghat. Broad-broad staircase down to River Ganga. O, most certainly! Also Manikarnika-ghat. They buy fire from a house with a tiger leaping from the roof – yes certainly, a statue tiger, coloured by Technicolor, what are you thinking? – and they bring it in a box to set fire to their loved ones’ bodies. Funeral fires are of sandal. Photographs not allowed; no, certainly not.’
He began thinking of her as Certainly-Mary because she never said plain yes or no; always this O-yes-certainly or no-certainly-not. In the confused circumstances that had prevailed ever since his brain, his one sure thing, had let him down, he could hardly be certain of anything any more; so he was stunned by her sureness, first into nostalgia, then envy, then attraction. And attraction was a thing so long forgotten that when the churning started he thought for a long time it must be the Chinese dumplings he had brought home from the High Street carry-out.
English was hard for Certainly-Mary, and this was a part of what drew damaged old Mixed-Up towards her. The letter p was a particular problem, often turning into an f or a c; when she proceeded through the lobby with a wheeled wicker shopping basket, she would say, ‘Going shocking,’ and when, on her return, he offered to help lift the basket up the front ghats, she would answer, ‘Yes, fleas.’ As the elevator lifted her away, she called through the grille: ‘Oé, courier! Thank you, courter. O, yes, certainly.’ (In Hindi and Konkani, however, her p’s knew their place.)
So: thanks to her unexpected, somehow stomach-churning magic, he was no longer porter, but courter. ‘Courter,’ he repeated to the mirror when she had gone. His breath made a little dwindling picture of the word on the glass. ‘Courter courter caught.’ Okay. People called him many things, he did not mind. But this name, this courter, this he would try to be.
2
For years now I’ve been meaning to write down the story of Certainly-Mary, our ayah, the woman who did as much as my mother to raise my sisters and me, and her great adventure with her ‘courier’ in London, where we all lived for a time in the early Sixties in a block called Waverley House; but what with one thing and another I never got round to it.
Then recently I heard from Certainly-Mary after a longish silence. She wrote to say that she was ninety-one, had had a serious operation, and would I kindly send her some money, because she was embarrassed that her niece, with whom she was now living in the Kurla district of Bombay, was so badly out of pocket.
I sent the money, and soon afterwards received a pleasant letter from the niece, Stella, written in the same hand as the letter from ‘Aya’ – as we had always called Mary, palindromically dropping the ‘h’. Aya had been so touched, the niece wrote, that I remembered her after all these years. ‘I have been hearing the stories about you folks all my life,’ the letter went on, ‘and I think of you a little bit as family. Maybe you recall my mother, Mary’s sister. She unfortunately passed on. Now it is I who write Mary’s letters for her. We all wish you the best.’
This message from an intimate stranger reached out to me in my enforced exile from the beloved country of my birth and moved me, stirring things that had been buried very deep. Of course it also made me feel guilty about having done so little for Mary over the years. For whatever reason, it has become more important than ever to set down the story I’ve been carrying around unwritten for so long, the story of Aya and the gentle man whom she renamed – with unintentional but prophetic overtones of romance – ‘the courter’. I see now that it is not just their story, but ours, mine, as well.
3
His real name was Mecir: you were supposed to say Mishirsh because it had invisible accents on it in some Iron Curtain language in which the accents had to be invisible, my sister Durré said solemnly, in case somebody spied on them’ or rubbed them out or something. His first name also began with an m but it was so full of what we called Communist consonants, all those z’s and c’s and w’s walled up together without vowels to give them breathing space, that I never even tried to learn it.
At first we thought of nicknaming him after a mischievous little comic-book character, Mr Mxyztplk from the Fifth Dimension, who looked a bit like Elmer Fudd and used to make Superman’s life hell until ole Supe could trick him into saying his name backwards, Klptzyxm, whereupon he disappeared back into the Fifth Dimension; but because we weren’t too sure how to say Mxyztplk (not to mention Klptzyxm) we dropped that idea. ‘We’ll just call you Mixed-Up,’ I told him in the end, to simplify life. ‘Mishter Mikshed-Up Mishirsh.’ I was fifteen then and bursting with unemployed cock and it meant I could say things like that right into people’s faces, even people less accommodating than Mr Mecir with his stroke.
What I remember most vividly are his pink rubber washing-up gloves, which he seemed never to remove, at least not until he came calling for Certainly-Mary … At any rate, when I insulted him, with my sisters Durré and Muneeza cackling in the lift, Mecir just grinned an empty good-natured grin, nodded, ‘You call me what you like, okay,’ and went back to buffing and polishing the brasswork. There was no point teasing him if he was going to be like that, so I got into the lift and all the way to the fourth floor we sang I Can’t Stop Loving You at the top of our best Ray Charles voices, which were pretty awful. But we were wearing our dark glasses, so it didn’t matter.
4
It was the summer of 1962, and school was out. My baby sister Scheherazade was just one year old. Durré was a beehived fourteen; Muneeza was ten, and already quite a handful. The three of us – or rather Durré and me, with Muneeza trying desperately and unsuccessfully to be included in our gang – would stand over Scheherazade’s cot and sing to her. ‘No nursery rhymes,’ Durré had decreed, and so there were none, for though she was a year my junior she was a natural leader. The infant Scheherazade’s lullabies were our cover versions of recent hits by Chubby Checker, Neil Sedaka, Elvis and Pat Boone.
‘Why don’t you come home, Speedy Gonzales?’ we bellowed in sweet disharmony: but most of all, and with actions, we would jump down, turn around and pick a bale of cotton. We would have jumped down, turned around and picked those bales all day except that the Maharaja of B— in the flat below complained, and Aya Mary came in to plead with us to be quiet.
‘Look, see, it’s Jumble-Aya who’s fallen for Mixed-Up,’ Durré shouted, and Mary blushed a truly immense blush. So naturally we segued right into a quick me-oh-my-oh; son of a gun, we had big fun. But then the baby began to yell, my father came in with his head down bull-fashion and steaming from both ears, and we needed all the good luck charms we cou
ld find.
I had been at boarding school in England for a year or so when Abba took the decision to bring the family over. Like all his decisions, it was neither explained to nor discussed with anyone, not even my mother. When they first arrived he rented two adjacent flats in a seedy Bayswater mansion block called Graham Court, which lurked furtively in a nothing street that crawled along the side of the ABC Queensway cinema towards the Porchester Baths. He commandeered one of these flats for himself and put my mother, three sisters and Aya in the other; also, on school holidays, me. England, where liquor was freely available, did little for my father’s bonhomie, so in a way it was a relief to have a flat to ourselves.
Most nights he emptied a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and a soda-siphon. My mother did not dare to go across to ‘his place’ in the evenings. She said: ‘He makes faces at me.’
Aya Mary took Abba his dinner and answered all his calls (if he wanted anything, he would phone us up and ask for it). I am not sure why Mary was spared his drunken rages. She said it was because she was nine years his senior, so she could tell him to show due respect.
After a few months, however, my father leased a three-bedroom fourth-floor apartment with a fancy address. This was Waverley House in Kensington Court, W8. Among its other residents were not one but two Indian Maharajas, the sporting Prince P— as well as the old B— who has already been mentioned. Now we were jammed in together, my parents and Baby Scare-zade (as her siblings had affectionately begun to call her) in the master bedroom, the three of us in a much smaller room, and Mary, I regret to admit, on a straw mat laid on the fitted carpet in the hall. The third bedroom became my father’s office, where he made phone-calls and kept his Encyclopaedia Britannica, his Reader’s Digests, and (under lock and key) the television cabinet. We entered it at our peril. It was the Minotaur’s lair.