Meanwhile the Ophuls marriage continued to decay. Six months after the ambassador’s first visit to Kashmir, the thing that Peggy Rhodes Ophuls had most dreaded had happened. Instead of playing the field and bedding every woman who succumbed to his famous charm, her bastard husband had become fixated on one particular girl, a nobody, a nothing, damn him. When the spring came he had visited the village of the traveling players who had by all accounts put on quite a show, drama, comedy, high-wire stunts and of course the dancing, and soon afterwards Max had decreed that a banquet be given “for Indian friends” at Roosevelt House, which by the by was the residence not only of the lecherous U.S. ambassador but of the ambassador’s wretched wife as well, he probably came up with the idea just so that he could bring the hussy down to New Delhi on the pretext of providing after-dinner entertainment-after-dinner entertainment indeed!-the scheme had that young so-and-so Wood’s fingerprints all over it, and the worst of it, the worst of the worst, was that he, her husband, the ambassador-the man she still loved, in her way, in the only way she knew, it didn’t give him what he needed but that didn’t mean it wasn’t love-her Max had made her, Peggy, come home from her orphanage inspections to act as hostess, to sit in her own home and watch that girl dance for him, did he think she was blind, she didn’t need any spies to see what that girl was doing, the effrontery of her hips, the recklessness of her eyes, it was as if they were naked and making love right there in front of Peggy, in front of everyone, the humiliation of it, she had seen a good deal of human cruelty in her life, they both had, so she wasn’t going to lose perspective, this wasn’t as bad as that, but still it was pretty goddamned cruel, pretty goddamned impossible to take.
They had come all this way together, the Rat and her Mole, they had survived so much, only to be shipwrecked at last on the rock of a gold-digging Kashmiri beauty. If the liaison lasted, Peggy Ophuls would of course have to leave him, after all this time and the expenditure of so much love and tolerance she would have to turn back into Margaret Rhodes and somehow live without him for the rest of her life. “Pumpkin time, Cinders,” she told herself. The magic spell was about to break, her gown would once again be an ashy rag, her footmen would turn back into mice, the beautiful fiction of her marriage would finally have to yield to the unpalatable facts. The glass slipper didn’t fit her anymore. It was on another woman’s foot.
The government of India was GOI. The government of Pakistan was GOP. In the aftermath of the Tashkent Peace Conference (TPC) between the two countries, during the period of partial political vacuum created by the fatal heart attack of the Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) on the day following the signature of the Tashkent Declaration (TD), Max Ophuls launched a major new American initiative. In this interregnum, a bitter stalemate between the potentates of the Congress Party ended when the kingmakers Kumaraswami Kamaraj (KK) and Morarji Desai (MD) elevated Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (IPG) to the premiership in the mistaken belief that she would be their helpless puppet. During this period of savage intraparty warfare only President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan rose above the political storm. His national stature and his air of a philosopher-saint gave him unusual influence over all government matters, even though the authors of the Indian constitution had clearly intended the president’s role to be largely ceremonial. Max’s close friendship with this revered figure (PSK) provided the opening for the so-called Ophuls Plan.
The ambassador’s idea was that if he could persuade both governments to work together on multilateral projects (GOI/GOP-MP) they could start getting used to interdependence instead of conflict. Mastering the language of unpronounceable acronyms which was the true lingua franca of the subcontinent’s political class, he proposed a fuel exchange program, or FEP: Pakistan would export its gas (PG) to India and India would send coal (IC) to Pakistan. He further proposed that the two nations cooperate over hydroelectric and irrigation projects (HAIP) in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Tista river system (GBTRS or, colloquially, GABTRIS). He spoke to the Indian government minister for planning and social work (GOIMPSW or MINPLASOC), Asoka Mehta, and assured him of World Bank support. He encouraged his old pal the minister for foreign affairs, GOIMFA Swaran Singh, to send out a feeler to his GOP counterpart concerning the possibility of back-channel arms limitation talks (BALT). Indira Gandhi was settling in as GOIPM, a.k.a. MADAM, and Max urged her to move down the path of reconciliation. The result of all his cajoling and bullying was the briefly celebrated Islamabad Joint Statement, the so-called IJOSTAT or GOIGOPJS(ISL)66. Max received personal messages of congratulations from both POTUS and UNSGUT. Of late, America had been infected by a Western strain of the South Asian disease of acronymial initialitis. JFK, RFK, MLK, and POTUS of course was LBJ and UNSGUT was the secretary-general of the United Nations, U Thant.
The ugliness of the bureaucratic terminology, its aggressive uninterest in euphony, marked it out as power-speech. Power had no need for prettification, no need to make things easy. By showing its contempt for verbal felicity it revealed itself as itself, naked and unadorned. The iron fist took off the velvet glove.
Euphoria over the Islamabad accords proved short-lived. The estranged nations’ common fondness for alphabet soup did not mean they had developed a taste for peace. MADAM summoned Max to tell him of her anger at the cancellation of all joint projects. The military back-channel proposals had been for territorial adjustments along the cease-fire line; India might compensate Pakistan for lost strategic areas. Or, if this were not acceptable to Pakistan, India had suggested it might agree to accept guarantees of more adequate controls by the U.N. Mrs. Gandhi told Max the actual numbers of the war dead on both sides. They were much higher than the published figures. “We can’t go on letting our young men perish like this,” she said. “And the Pakistanis agree, you know. The generals are furious with Zulfy”-GOPMFA Zulfikar Ali Bhutto-“for leading them into a battle over a stretch of icy wasteland. Quelques arpents de neige, isn’t it.” In spite of the two nations’ common concerns, there would be no effective moves toward greater cross-border understanding. Two powerful men combined to sabotage the Ophuls Plan. The old Congress grandee Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon-the great left-wing orator and wit who had once, at the Security Council, filibustered for eight hours without a prepared text on the subject of India’s inalienable right to have and hold Kashmir; who called himself a “tea-totaller” because although he consumed no alcohol he drank a total of thirty-six cups of tea a day, and consequently spoke more rapidly than any man in India; whose rudeness was legendary; and who was considered an enemy by Indira Gandhi even though he had been her father’s friend-had worked assiduously to sabotage the détente. He had found a willing ally in home minister Gulzarilal Nanda, who had been caretaker prime minister twice, for a few days each, first after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death and again after Shastri’s, whose resentment of those who got the job for real was bitter and absolute, and whose nose was still out of joint because Shastri had overruled him about the wisdom of letting Max Ophuls visit the war zone in Kashmir. Together Nanda and Krishna Menon worked hard to build opposition to Ophuls inside the Indian cabinet and parliament, while simultaneously bolstering the Indian army’s military control over the Kashmir valley. At that early stage in her career Mrs. Gandhi was obliged to confess that she had allowed herself to be outmaneuvered. “You also, Mr. Ophuls,” she said. “GOIMHA Nanda and VKKM have foxed you too. Honestly! What a schmuck.” SCHMUCK? wondered Max. Ah… Sabotage of Cooperative… what?… Harmony-Motivated Undertakings Concerning Kashmir? The prime minister of India stroked his arm gently. “It’s not an acronym,” she said.