Алистер Маклин - Borrowed Time

‘My own dedication is to meeting God-awful challenges,’ Arberry said. ‘I am to an extent a humanitarian. My need to achieve things lies in the general direction of downtrodden and disadvantaged people. But first and foremost, what I relish is the provocation of an obstacle.’

When the butler announced that dinner was served they crossed the hall to the dining room. It was long and deep-carpeted, with a French crystal chandelier, gold silk window drapes and a table capable of seating thirty. For this occasion the large table had been put against the wall and another, two metres square, was set up in the centre of the room.

‘You’ll have noticed,’ Arberry said as they sat down, ‘that there are few if any Indian touches about my home. That’s because I find it pretentious for a man of an entirely different culture to pretend he’s at home with the styles and traditional trappings of a place he never saw until he was thirty. It’s one thing to love the country, quite another to absorb its natives’ cultural instincts.’

‘Like a guy from California trying to feel at ease in a New York apartment,’ Lenny said.

Arberry laughed. ‘Something like that happened to me, come to think of it. I grew up in Boston, went to Harvard, did most of the Boston things right through my formative years. Then when I graduated med school I got an internship in a San Francisco hospital. The different way of life nearly finished me.’

The food was wheeled in on two trolleys by the butler and an Indian maid in a blue and silver sari.

‘The point I was going to make,’ Arberry said as the dishes were lined up on the sideboard, ‘is that there may be none of the local cultural or decorative touches in the house, but the odour of Indian cooking sure as hell permeates the corridors. I adore the stuff.’

Mike had been warned that the food served in Kashmir was usually disappointing to anyone who had eaten Indian cuisine in the West. That may have been the case in the restaurants of Srinagar and Pahalgam, but not in Simon Arberry’s house.

‘This is the best Indian cooking I ever ate,’ Mike declared.

Lenny nodded. So did Ram, both their mouths too full to speak. They were served dishes that even Ram had never seen or heard of before – sada pilau, kutchi biriani, aaloo tariwale – with a superb, bewildering selection of sauces and side dishes, and carafes of red, white, and rosé wine. Throughout the meal, Arberry managed to eat as fast as anyone, at the same time delivering a monologue about his plans for the region.

‘In eighteen months’ time I’ll open a treatment centre, right at the heart of the Vale, staffed by doctors and nurses specializing in tropical medicine. I have two district outpatient clinics already open, a regional surgical centre just up the hill from here, and the new nurses’ school will train girls from the local towns and villages and qualify them to a standard acceptable anywhere in the world.’

‘I can see that your motivation and belief in your work could get some amazing things done,’ Mike said. ‘But where does the money come from?’

‘I’m kept afloat by two things,’ Arberry said. ‘One is the approval of the authorities, the other is cash from large organizations throughout the world.’

‘How do you get them to part with it?’

‘I’m good at badgering.’

Over brandy and coffee Arberry tried to correct the one-sided bias he had imposed on the conversation. He asked Ram how his research into agricultural practices was going.

Ram improvised smoothly, turning the topic around and making it an overview of the Vale of Kashmir through the eyes of one whose job it was to study the territory.

‘Everything about this region is romantic. Did you know, Doctor, that the Vale is an ancient lake basin?’

Arberry shook his head.

‘For hundreds of years it was full of water.’

‘How long is the Vale?’ Lenny asked.

‘A hundred and forty kilometres,’ Ram said. ‘That’s eighty-five miles. It’s twenty miles wide. The mountains around the Vale are between twelve and sixteen thousand feet high. They shelter the area from the south-west monsoon. It’s as if…’ Ram held his hands out, palms vertical, facing each other; ‘as if somebody had designed it all, laid it out and said, well now, it needs to be fertile, and because it’s to be a centre for population, it has to be beautiful and also sheltered from the worst of the elements in the surrounding country.’

‘And of course, any good Hindu will tell you it was designed,’ Arberry said. ‘By the god Brahma. Ask anybody at all, they’ll tell you.’

‘And the next peasant is likely to tell you it was Vishnu,’ said Ram, ‘and the one after him will swear it was Siva.’

‘You lost me,’ Mike said.

‘Think of the Hindu gods this way,’ Ram said. ‘There is only one omnipresent god, but he has three physical forms to match his principal facets – he is Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Siva, the destroyer and reproducer. In a way they all share characteristics of each other, which is because they’re all really the same being.’

‘The theology’s all very well,’ Lenny said, red-faced from the spices and the wine, ‘but what I want to know is, why do official sources always call the country Kashmir-and-Jammu?’ He knew the answer, but it did no harm to stick to his cover in a positive way, now and again.

‘That’s the official name,’ Ram said. ‘If you need the full historical and political picture, I’ll lend you a book. It’s enough to know, for now, that half the population of the state of Jammu and Kashmir lives here in the Vale, and we have two capitals – Srinagar in summer, Jammu in winter.’

‘And it’s as well to bear in mind the message of my dear dead friend Alex Young,’ Arberry said. ‘In a state troubled with conflicts of a dozen kinds, we in the Vale have the best of it. We are the stable centre.’

‘But enough unrest here could plunge the whole of Kashmir into terrible, bloody war,’ Ram said.

‘Do you think that’s a danger, Doctor?’ Mike said.

‘I certainly do. And I know how it is most likely to come about. If our society here ever breaks apart, it will be because of the bandits. The bandits, more than anyone else, are the ones dedicated to overthrowing the stability and the way of life we enjoy here. If something isn’t done to stop them, soon, they will hack apart the unity of the region, they will lay waste to it, and they will spread such fear, such corruption, that nothing will stop them turning the Vale into a smoking wilderness.’

‘And then the land grabbing will start,’ Ram said.

Lenny nodded. ‘And the empire building.’

‘But with the right help none of it need happen.’ Arberry held up his glass. ‘A toast. To the Vale of Kashmir, and to its continued existence as one of the most beautiful, most magical places on earth.’

Later, Arberry led his guests up the hill to his new surgical centre, a long concrete building housing three operating theatres and two recovery wards. He took them through the anaesthetic preparation rooms, showed them a roving head scanner, the latest mobile X-ray machines, and a battery of examination instruments linked to a central computer equipped with a diagnostic database.

‘A surgical unit any community could be proud of,’ Ram said.

‘But so small,’ Arberry pointed out. ‘We have an enormous waiting list. To double the size of this place wouldn’t cut the problem in half, it doesn’t work that way. But two more of these units, equally spaced from this one in a two-hundred-square-mile area, would cut the challenge to a third.’ He smiled. ‘You can see why Alex Young’s little medical facility was so valuable, and why it’ll be such a loss until somebody gets it up and running again. Our people need all the help they can get.’