I knew he’d do it. For I was everything he hated about this country. I was the distillation of all that rage. I was the symptom and the disease.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“What do I want? What do I want? I want what I’ve always wanted. A fucking bit of cooperation. One fucking Paddy who knows right from wrong. I want to know the name of the copper running the heroin, I want to know his name. Give me that. Fucking give me the name. I don’t care if they fucking kill you. I don’t care if the investigation has collapsed. I want that fucking name. I’m going to count to three.”
For emphasis, he clicked the hammer back on the revolver. One slip of his finger and I was dead.
“One,” he said.
The barrel and the sweat. This little room. The sea outside. His mouth fixed, resigned, one way or the other, it didn’t matter. If I didn’t give him the name, he’d top me.
“Two.”
That face, that scarred hand, the paratrooper wings on his wrist. That gun. Would this be the last impression in my retina, the last memory in my brain?
I gagged. I was afraid.
No.
“Thr—” he began.
“John,” I said.
“What?”
“John Campbell. Big guy, blond hair, only a constable, part-time RUC. He’s the one you’re after. Carrickfergus Police Station. You won’t find him, though. He’s already run. He’s in America. But he’s the one, he ran all the drugs, he was the kingpin. Low-key character. He’s the one you want. Constable John Campbell, smart guy, wouldn’t even take promotion. Stayed out of the limelight. He’s the one all right, the one you want.”
I swallowed, felt sick.
Douglas looked at me for a second. Revulsion crept over his face. He knew mentioning that name had cost me something. He believed me. What a coward I was. Douglas spat. And I hated myself. Doing down John like that to save my skin.
Another betrayal.
Douglas nodded, took his finger off the trigger.
“Piece of shit,” Douglas said, put the gun in his pocket, picked up his hat, walked out of my life forever.
The river begins on the roof of the world. All the great rivers of Asia are born there. The Hindus believed that their gods were born in the Himalaya and went there to die. The Tibetans felt that the air was so full of spirits that not even the clean vision of the Buddha could purge it.
The plane flying over the Hindu Kush. Over the opium fields of Afghanistan. I look out the window. The Flower of Joy. I remember. Sip my orange juice.
A round-trip ticket from London to Delhi costs five hundred pounds. I didn’t have that kind of money. But Dad did. Dad, amazingly, had gotten fifty-eight votes in the local council elections. He got his deposit back, for the first time ever. And he promised me he’d lend me the dough if he got the money back. I held him to his word. India? Why not. What else was there? The plane flying over the hazy brown Indian subcontinent.
Touching down. The Morris Ambassador taking me from the airport. The heat, the orange sky, the pollution so palpable it coats your tongue. Child beggars at the traffic stops, filthy and in rags.
“Jao,” the taximan says, which means piss off.
The insane streets around Connaught Place. Connaught — the wildest of Ireland’s four provinces, an appropriate name for central New Delhi.
The hotel. Pancakes from southern India. Delicious. All the food, in fact, incredible. And if you put a lot of spice on and don’t drink the water, you don’t get sick.
Two days in Delhi, amazing grub, sights. At the hotel on CNN International I happen to see Charles Mulholland in an interview. He ends it by saying that a friend is taking him and his wife for a yachting vacation in the Virgin Islands. A wealthy and influential friend, no doubt. Cigar smoke, cognacs: So tell me, Charles, what are your long-term political ambitions?…
The train station. Black and nightmarish in the morning mist. Beggars by the legion, the homeless, the lame, the halt.
The wrong train, directions, the right train. The second-class car. Breakfast. Toast, tea, marmalade. A hot napkin. The Times of India, the Hindustan Times. Hindu matriarchs, blue-turbaned Sikhs, Muslim businessmen, Jain priests, Buddhists, students, hippies. Like a scene from Kim.
A delay. The moving train. The squalor of the suburbs, more beggars, shantytowns, muddy fields, an elephant, vultures, and the brown flat earth of the Ganges Valley all the way to the horizon.
The Ganges is not the longest river in India, certainly not the most beautiful. The continent takes its name from the Indus, so why is the Ganges the holy river of India?
Because the gods say so.
The Ganges begins as a gurgle on a mountaintop. Glacial peaks, permanent snow, spring flowers, yellow, red, blue. It’s a foot wide, this river. If you lay your body down across it, you can stop the flow, you can dam Mother Ganga.
From the mountaintop it moves on inexorably down onto the sienna plain, where everything becomes the color of mud. And down into the holy cities of Varanasi and Allahabad. The latter given that name by the Muslim conquerors who supposedly did not believe in that sort of thing.
Varanasi is the city of Lord Shiva. To die in Varanasi is a great thing. Shiva will look favorably upon you and your next incarnation will be a blessed one.
But holier still is the upstream city of Allahabad. The most sacred site in India. Indeed, when the world is destroyed, only one place will remain and that is Allahabad — Prayag, to give it its Hindu name.
Allahabad is sacred because it is the confluence of three holy rivers. The Ganges, of course, but also the Yamuna and the Saraswati.
The Yamuna is the second holy river of India. Mahatma Gandhi’s body was burned by this river. Three prime ministers also were cremated by its banks in sandalwood funeral pyres, their ashes drifting from the burning ghats into the sacred waters.
The Yamuna and the Ganges meet in Allahabad. An important place. The hometown of the Nehrus. The hometown of Victoria Patawasti’s family.
The train stops. I get off. I walk around, looking at fort ruins, at Jawaharlal Nehru’s house, at Victoria Patawasti’s house.
I visit her paternal grandparents, who are both alive. They have fourteen grandchildren, two of whom have been incarnated already into another form. I spend the day with them and I stay that night in their big turn-of-the-century mansion, exquisitely designed to take cooling breezes off the river.
We talk and we drink nimbu pani soda and we eat sweetmeats.
And Dr. Patawasti tells me the story about the Hidden River.
The river Saraswati flows only in Heaven or, say some, underground. It is the river of Paradise, of the gods, the Ganges and the Yamuna are only its earthly mirrors. They are imperfect. The Saraswati is perfection itself. But Vishnu so loved the world that he allowed the Saraswati to bend down to Earth at one place, at only one spot on the whole globe. At the point where the Ganges and the Yamuna meet. And if you bathe here, your sins are wiped away. Indeed, so sacred is the water that not only your sins but those of seven generations backward are wiped clean too.
“My sins will be wiped away?” I ask.
“Do not even think of bathing in that river,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, “you will catch cholera and die. The peasants defecate and throw their waste in these supposed holy waters. Industrial plants, tanneries, all pump their poisons into the rivers. Dead cows and buffalo are in this water. Why are there no fish? These rivers are toxic.”
“There are many fish,” Dr. Patawasti says. “Mark Twain said that the cholera bacillus cannot survive in the Ganges.”
“Say that to the thousands who catch cholera and typhoid every year,” Mrs. Dr. Patawasti says, a furious look across her face.