“That’s true, yes.”
“Do your parents know?”
“No.”
“So you did not talk to them about what you are doing.”
“I was told not to. They think I am going to relax in one of your little cabins and do a lot of fishing.”
“So all your conversations with friends and family, until now, took place in Hyderabad.”
“Cyberabad.”
“Whatever. Did you feel that your friends and family were speaking freely there? As freely as you and I are speaking now?”
“I don’t know. For much of that time, you know, I was not quite myself. It was only in the last few weeks that—”
“Did you ever see people doing this?” Uncle Dharmender glanced theatrically up at the Subaru’s dome light.
“I don’t understand.”
“It is a gesture people make, meaning, this room is bugged, we are being listened to, I am not really speaking my mind.”
“Perhaps. I don’t remember.”
“What about the people who recruited you for this mission? Who briefed you?”
“People I got to know during the fighting along the Line of Actual Control.” He referred here to Major Raju, who had “befriended” him during his Himalayan exploits and who had stayed in touch with Laks during his convalescence.
“Indian Army.”
“Yes.”
“Not people like us.”
“No.”
“What did these people say to you that made you want this?”
“Want what?”
“To be in the back of your uncle’s car getting into a wet suit so that you can sneak into a foreign country.”
“Our country is in danger.”
“India? Or the Punjab?”
“Same difference. If there is drought in the Breadbasket, all of India suffers.”
“And was this their claim? That there is drought in the Breadbasket?”
“The monsoon was late.”
“Late, yes. But it came. It did come, Laks.”
“Next year it may be later still.”
“That’s always true. To be Punjabi is to live in continual anxiety about next year’s monsoon.”
“But now people are messing with the weather.”
“You’re talking of this thing in Texas. That’s what they told you, isn’t it?”
“They showed me pictures. Explained the science.”
“I’m sure they did.”
They passed through a roundabout on the southern fringe of
town, where three roads came together. “This is not the fastest way,” Laks said.
“What!?”
“You should have taken the first exit. Not the second.” He considered it. “This will get us there, though. It’s only 1.23 kilometers farther.”
“How would you know these things? That intersection was just built last year.”
“I can just feel where I am. Where I need to go. Like a sixth sense. I was leaning into the turn—but it never came.”
“Perhaps your uncle doesn’t want to take you down that first road because it is notoriously rough and winding, and your uncle wants to make it easier for you to get that crazy thing on.”
“Thank you, Uncle. I’m sorry I questioned your navigation.”
“Also, perhaps getting there absolutely the fastest is not most important thing in world.”
“Why not?”
“Perhaps I can talk a little sense into you. This is apparently the first real conversation you have engaged in since your brain got scrambled at the Line of Actual Control.”
“All right, well, let’s make the most of it then,” Laks said, a little absentmindedly. Getting all the bits of the wet suit on really was amazingly difficult. He wondered if the staff of the Indian consulate in Vancouver—who had provided him with all this stuff—had been given his correct measurements. Like many big men, Laks didn’t think of himself as big. He was just normal sized. Trying to get into a wet suit in the back seat of a Subaru gave him a different perspective.
Unspoken here—because it would have been awkward—was something about the family dynamic. Laks’s father was not very outgoing, his mother somewhat naive. Dharmender had guessed, correctly, that Laks’s reception at home in Richmond had been affectionate, but completely devoid of any meaningful conversation.
Dharmender was talking in bursts as he negotiated unfamiliar roads. This stretch of B.C., along the river south to the border, was not the B.C. of tourism brochures. It was the real B.C. of