“Don’t do this,” he warned himself. “To fall in love would break the treaty-nothing can come of it but trouble.” But the secret creature within him stretched and yawned, climbed out of its almost-forgotten cellar and rose toward the light. He began to smile a foolish smile whenever he thought of her, to visit her more often than was wise, and to lavish gifts on her. She wanted treasures from the U.S. diplomats’ store: American cheese in a tin, the new ridged American potato chips that looked like miniature plowed fields, 45 rpm recordings celebrating the joys of surfing and driving fast motorcars, and above all candy bars. Chocolates and sweets, which would be her downfall, entered her life in quantity for the first time. She also craved the women’s fashions of 1966, not the boring Jackie Kennedy pillbox-hat-and-pearls styles but the looks in the magazines she devoured, the Pocahontas headbands, the swirling orange-print shift dresses, the fringed leather jackets, the Mondrian squares of Saint Laurent, the hoop dresses, the space-age catsuits, the miniskirts, the vinyl, the gloves. She only wore these things in the privacy of the love nest, dressing up eagerly for her lover, giggling at her own daring, and allowing him to undress her as he pleased, to take his time, or to rip the clothes roughly off her body and leave them in shreds on the floor. Edgar Wood, given the task of acquiring and later dispensing these gifts in such a way as to avoid suspicion falling on the ambassador, fulfilled his duties with a growing hostility which Boonyi regally ignored. He got his revenge by insisting on being present to watch her take the daily contraceptive pills that had been Understood to be essential to the deal.
As a result of Max’s unexpected romantic infatuation-and also because Boonyi was every bit as attentive as promised-he failed to sense what she had silently been telling him from the beginning, what she assumed he knew to be a part of their hard-nosed agreement: Don’t ask for my heart, because I am tearing it out and breaking it into little bits and throwing it away so I will be heartless but you will not know it because I will be the perfect counterfeit of a loving woman and you will receive from me a perfect forgery of love.
So there were two unspoken clauses in the Understanding, one regarding the giving of love and the other concerning the withholding of it, codicils that were sharply at odds with each other and impossible to reconcile. The result was, as Max had foreseen, trouble; the biggest Indo-American diplomatic rumpus in history. But for a time the master forger was deceived by the forgery he had bought, both deceived and satisfied, as content to possess it as an art collector who discovers a masterpiece concealed in a mound of garbage, as happy to keep it hidden from view as a collector who can’t resist buying what he knows to be stolen property. And that was how it came about that a faithless wife from the village of the bhand pather began to influence, to complicate and even to shape, American diplomatic activity regarding the vexed matter of Kashmir.
Pachigam was a trap, she told herself every night, but the Muskadoon still scurried through her dreams, its cold swift mountain music singing in her ears. She was a girl from the mountains and the climate of the plains affected her badly. When it was summer in Delhi the air conditioners were invariably incapacitated by “load-shedding” power cuts at the hottest times of day. The heat was like a hammer, like a stone. Crushed beneath it, she collapsed onto her illicit bed of shame and thought of Chandanwari, of Manasbal and Shishnag, of flower-carpeted Gulmarg and the eternal snows above, of cool glaciers and bubbling springs and the high ice-temples of the gods. She heard the soft splash of a heart-shaped oar in the water of a mirror lake, the rustle of chinar leaves, the boatmen’s songs and the soft beating of wings, thrushes’ wings, mynah wings, the wings of bluetits and hoopoes, and the top-knotted bulbuls that looked like young girls who had put up their hair. When she closed her eyes she invariably saw her father, her husband, her companions, her appointed place on earth. Not her new lover but her old, lost life. My old life like a prison, she told herself savagely, but her heart called her a fool. She had it all upside down and backward, her heart scolded her. What she thought of as her former imprisonment had been freedom, while this so-called liberation was no more than a gilded cage.
She thought of Shalimar the clown and was horrified again by the ease with which she had abandoned him. When she left Pachigam none of her closest people guessed what she was doing, the dolts. None of them tried to save her from herself, and how could she forgive them for that? What idiots they all were! Her husband was super-idiot number one and her father was super-idiot number two and everyone else was pretty close behind. Even after Himal and Gonwati returned to Pachigam without her and the bad talk began, even then Shalimar the clown sent her trusting letters, letters haunted by the phantom of their murdered love. I reach out to you and touch you without touching you as on the riverbank in the old days. I know you are following your dream but that dream will always bring you back to me. If the Amrikan is of assistance well and good. People always talk lies but I know your heart is true. I sit with folded hands and await your loving return. She lay perspiring on her bed, held captive by the chains of her enslaving solitude, and tore the letters into smaller and smaller pieces. They were letters that humiliated both their author and their recipient, letters that had no business existing, that should never have been sent. Such thoughts should never have come into being, and would not have, were it not for the enfeebled mind of that man without honor whom it was her shame to have espoused.
The paper scraps fell from her enervated summer hand and floated like snowflakes to the bedroom floor, and indeed the messages they bore were as irrelevant to her new life as snow. What kind of husband was he anyway, this clown? Was he storming the capital in his wrath like a Muslim conqueror of old, a Tughlaq or Khilji at least if not a Mughal, or, like Lord Ram, was he at least sending the monkey-god Hanuman to find her before he launched his lethal attack on her abductor, the American Ravan? No, he was mooning over her picture and weeping into the waters of the stupid Muskadoon like an impotent goof, accepting his fate like a true Kashmiri coward, content to be trampled over by anyone who felt like doing a bit of trampling, a wrong-headed duffer who quarreled with his brother Anees who at least had the guts to take matters into his own hands and blow up a few useless things. He was behaving like the performing dog he was, a creature who imitated life to make people laugh but who had not the slightest understanding of how a man should live.
On the night she first lay with him, she remembered, he had menaced her lovingly, swearing to pursue her and take her life, hers and her children’s, if she ever did what she had just so callously done. What empty words men spoke when they had had their way with a woman. He was a weakling, a strutting turkey-cock, a fool. In his place she would have hunted herself down and murdered herself in a gutter, like a dog, so that the shame of it would outlive her.