The Indian foreign minister Swaran Singh touched his arm. “It’s long enough,” he said. “It really is not safe to stand still here for very long.”
For the rest of his life Max Ophuls would remember that instant during which the shape of the conflict in Kashmir had seemed too great and alien for his Western mind to understand, and the sense of urgent need with which he had drawn his own experience around him, like a shawl. Had he been trying to understand, or to blind himself to his failure to do so? Did the mind discover likeness in the unlike in order to clarify the world, or to obscure the impossibility of such clarification? He didn’t know the answer. But it was one hell of a question.
He had begun to look for allies in Washington and had found a few: the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, his eventual successor, Walt Whitman Rostow, and the man who would follow Max to New Delhi after the scandal, Chester Bowles. Bundy learned that the Ayub-China relationship was “significantly closer” than either would admit, and advised Johnson that India, the “largest and potentially most powerful non-Communist Asian nation,” was “the biggest prize in Asia,” and that on account of the United States’ handing seven hundred million dollars in military aid to Pakistan, that prize was in danger of being lost. The tail was wagging the dog. Rostow agreed. “India is more important than Pakistan.” And Bowles argued that America’s unwillingness to arm India had pushed the late Jawaharlal Nehru, and now Lal Bahadur Shastri, into the Russians’ arms. “Only when it became clear that we were not prepared to give India this assistance, did India turn to the Soviet Union as its major source of military equipment.” Johnson remained reluctant to favor India. “We ought to get out of military aid to both India and Pakistan,” he replied. However, Max Ophuls’s Washington contacts charged him to discuss urgently, “on the front burner,” what India wanted most: to purchase American supersonic fighter jets in significant numbers and on advantageous terms. Sitting on carpets and cushions in the Dachigam hunting lodge, laughing and drinking in the intermissions between the acts of the play being performed by the bhands of Pachigam, Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, “the Flying Jew,” the man who had flown the Bugatti Racer to safety, murmured to the Indian Foreign Ministry delegation about the various ways in which it might be possible to structure a deal for the high-speed jets. Then Boonyi Kaul Noman came out to dance and Max realized that his Indian destiny would have little to do with politics, diplomacy or arms sales, and everything to do with the far more ancient imperatives of desire.
Just as Anarkali dancing her sorceress’s dance in the Sheesh Mahal, the hall of mirrors at the Mughal court, had captured Prince Salim’s heart, just as Madhubala dancing in the hit movie had bewitched millions of gaping men, so Boonyi in the hunting lodge at Dachigam understood that her dance was changing her life, that what was being born in the eyes of the moonstruck American ambassador was nothing less than her own future. By the time he got to his feet and applauded loudly and long, she knew that he would find a way to bring her to him, and all that was left for her to do was to make a single choice, a single act of will, yes or no. Then her eyes met his and blazed their answer and the point of no return was passed. Yes, the future would come for her, a messenger descending from the heavens to inform a mere mortal of the decision of the gods. She needed only to wait and see what form the messenger would take. She put the palms of her hands together, touched her fingertips to her chin, gazed at and then bowed her head before the man of power, and had the feeling as she left his presence that she wasn’t leaving the stage but making an entrance on the greatest stage she had ever been allowed to walk upon, that her performance was not ending but beginning, and that it would not end until her life ran out of days. It would be up to her to ensure that her story had a better ending than the court dancer’s. Anarkali’s punishment for the temerity of loving a royal personage was to be bricked up in a wall. Boonyi had seen the movie, in which the filmmakers had found a way of allowing the heroine to live: Emperor Akbar, relenting, has a tunnel constructed under her tomb to allow Anarkali to escape into exile with her mother. A lifetime’s exile wasn’t much better than death, Boonyi thought. It was the same as being bricked up, only in a larger grave. But times had changed. Maybe in the second half of the twentieth century it was permissible for a dancing girl to bag herself a prince.
The embassy aide Edgar Wood, floppy-haired, tall, pale and skinny, with a large, permanent zit on his right cheek to hint at his ridiculous youth, and the feeble shadow of a Zapata moustache to confirm it, was a former graduate student of international relations at Columbia who had followed Max to India at the ambassador’s special insistence. The reason for this was not Wood’s brilliance or industry (though he was indeed smart and a quick learner, known at Columbia as Eager Wood, a nickname he brought with him into the embassy). No, the reason Wood was indispensable was that he would do anything the ambassador needed done and keep his mouth shut about it. It wasn’t easy to find the perfect set-up man, the loyal go-between, the faultless fixer, but without such a person it was impossible for a man in the public eye to lead the kind of life that Max Ophuls’s nature compelled him to lead. He had his own nickname for Wood; in his eyes the kid was not so much an “Eager,” more of a “Beaver”; but of course he never told him so. The first time he had broached the subject of his assignations with women and his need for a discreet assistant, Beaver Wood volunteered immediately. “Just one question, sir,” he asked Max. “Do you have a bad back?” Max was puzzled. No, he answered, his back was fine. Wood bobbed his head in approval and apparent relief. “Excellent,” he said. “Because too much sex and a bad back is what got the president assassinated.”
This was strange, Max thought, and also evidence that Wood was a more interesting fellow than his raw young looks had yet found a way of revealing. “The truss, sir,” Wood explained. “Kennedy’s back was bad to begin with, but it got so much worse because of all the screwing around that he had to wear the truss all the time. He was wearing it in Dallas and that’s why he didn’t fall over after the first shot hit him. He was wounded and lurched over and the truss just sat him up again, boing, and then the second bullet blew off the back of his head. You see what I’m saying, Professor, maybe if he’d had less sex, he maybe wouldn’t have been wearing the truss, and then no boing, he’d just have fallen flat after being wounded; the first bullet wasn’t fatal, remember, and he wouldn’t have been as they say available for the second shot, and Johnson wouldn’t be president. There’s a moral in there somewhere, I guess, but as you don’t have a bad back, Professor, it doesn’t apply to you.”