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And ended just the other day with the joyous mystery of Kuldeep Yadav’s leg spin.
You would expect John le Carré — who died on December 12 — the chronicler of the Cold War and, briefly, with MI5 and MI6, to flourish in the grey half-light of Berlin of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a city scarred by intrigue, crudely divided by The Wall. You would allow him detours to Palestine (The Little Drummer Girl), Southeast Asia (The Honourable Schoolboy) and Africa (The Constant Gardener). But to India?
A sweat-drenched prison cell in Delhi is where George Smiley first met Karla, later the Soviet spymaster, urged him to defect and failed, losing the cigarette lighter his errant wife, Lady Ann Smiley, had given him once. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley remembers the cell, with an “iron table at the centre and iron cattle rings let into the wall”. Karla came “manacled, which seemed silly because he was so slight. I asked them to free his hands and when they did, he put them on the table in front of him and watched the blood come back. It must have been painful but he didn’t comment on it”.
In a red calico tunic, “part of prison ethic,” Karla, a “little wiry chap with silvery hair, bright brown eyes and plenty of wrinkles,” looked “modest and avuncular,” a “shabby, gnomic, small-town Italian priest or a tough, unyielding schoolmaster, but very “small canvas”. He sat stiffly, didn’t say a word, chain-smoked the Camels that Smiley had asked the jailors to buy. When he was paying them, Karla’s look made Smiley feel he was a “fifth-rate imperialist oppressor”. When a man returned with the cigarettes (just how many packets of Camels could you buy in Delhi in the 1950s?), and refused a tip, presumably because he didn’t like the British, Karla, he noticed, was still watching.
The closest Smiley gets to India after that is a downmarket London curry house (a far cry from Jamavar and Gymkhana, today’s chic restaurants), where Jerry Westerby “shatters a popaddam on to the hottest curry on the menu”, then spreads a crimson sauce with “bite” over the top. “Old Khan runs it for me specially…. Keeps it in deep shelter,” says Westerby.
For implacable Cold Warriors, Nehruvian India, deliberately non-aligned, would have been a sideshow. Which is why the desperately mediocre Percy Alleline, Smiley’s predecessor as chief, was sent to India, from all places, Argentina.
Not Berlin or Vienna, centres of the spy universe, not Moscow or challenging Prague or Sofia, but faraway Buenos Aires. In India, his agents regarded him as the “reincarnation of the British Raj”. “Filthy Percy,” as Connie Sachs, the Russia expert, called him, “preached loyalty to them, paid them next to nothing and when it suited him, sold them down the river.” Wouldn’t happen, you’d think in Modi’s or even Manmohan’s India. No one mentions the “Foreign Hand” any more. Not that there aren’t any, they don’t matter quite as much. But in an impoverished, postcolonial country living from hand to ship laden with PL-480 wheat, still insecure after centuries of subjugation?
Look at le Carré’s English ruling classes. With the Empire unravelling, all they had for the Third World was condescension, even contempt. “Just because the Russians know our secrets doesn’t mean everyone else has to… what about all the black men: are they going to be reading the gory details in the Wallah-Wallah News in a week’s time?” asked the minister, also Lady Ann’s cousin, after the spy is caught.
By 2010, in Our Kind of Traitor, le Carré’s looking at a different India. Here are the children of the 1991 reforms, wealthy, but very different from, say, Frank Richards’ Nabob Huree Jamset Singh of Bhanipur. An Indian couple honeymooning in Antigua, playing mixed doubles against a poor man’s Fred Perry (gloriously amateur, but good enough for Queen’s Club) and his girlfriend, and losing narrowly in three exciting sets. Young, good-looking, the Mumbai couple were “a sight too classy” for others at the resort. Antigua, did you say? Whoever went there once, except Indian cricketers, only to be soundly thrashed? Who could afford Antigua when all that socialist India allowed you was $500?
And finally, we are in 2019, with le Carré admiring Kuldeep Yadav’s “tortuous bowling action”. In passably multicultural Britain, you have Nat (short for Anatoly, later Nathaniel) — father Scots Guards, mother White Russian aristocrat and the man himself, entirely Her Majesty’s spook in Agent Running in the Field. Daughter Steff’s boyfriend is Juno (from Junaid), a considerable improvement, thinks Nat from the previous two: both were gay. He’s le Carré’s modern Indian, the “courteous, well-dressed young man who steps forward” and takes Nat’s shopping bag. And then, the “courteous (that word again) young man steps forward again to be formally introduced.” Steff’s wearing a “serious looking ring on her wedding finger” and given a glass of champagne, Juno “accepts without demur and waits for me to invite him to sit down”. He’s a zoologist (studying large flying bats on the island of Barro Colorado on the Panama Canal) with a sense of humour. When Steff worries about crocodiles, Juno drily remarks they shouldn’t be deprived of a square meal.
Juno’ parents, both teachers, are Peter Sellers in The Party. In London for Wimbledon and the India-England match at Lord’s (which is why Kuldeep Yadav), they tell Prue, Nat’s wife, that they’d be “greatly honoured to meet the parents of their future daughter-in-law at any time convenient to the Commercial Counsellor (Nat’s cover) and your good self”.
Prue, “who has as good a poker face as any lawyer when she needs it, comes as close as she ever did to exploding into giggles behind her hand”.
It isn’t just Juno. As we say farewell to le Carré, his espiocrats and assorted rogues, there’s regret: if only he had time for another novel. Now, we’ll never know what Smiley did in the War or what Karla’s story was. What did he tell Smiley before committing suicide in South America?
And, yes, a personal memory. In London, briefly with a prestigious Sunday paper, I wondered if an interview with the great man was possible. I was directed towards Robert Harris, who’d just written Fatherland.
He had a column in the paper and at that time, was the last person to have interviewed le Carré. He wasn’t doing interviews, I was told, but I should write to him. Harris gave me his London address; the letter, he said, was best addressed to David Cornwell. When you are rushing around, you neglect to do the right thing. It’s a letter I never wrote.
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