Kukri

A short story

Made on Midjourney

(Author’s note: A version of ‘Kukri’ was published here on 23 October 2024. In a fortunate turn of events, it fit into the ‘War and Peace’ theme of the 2025 Short Fiction Special of Mint Lounge. Shalini Umachandran, the editor, got in touch to ask if they could run the story as part of the special. Thrillingly, ‘Kukri’ appeared as a centre-spread in the print edition of Mint Lounge on 4 January 2025. There are few feelings that match seeing the work in a newspaper, the touch of paper and offset ink a reminder of why you wanted to do this kind of thing in the first place. As part of the arrangement with Mint, I’d taken down the piece from Substack until today—18 January 2025. Here is a paywalled link to ‘Kukri’ on the Mint website. Grateful to Shalini for letting me republish the text here. Grateful also to Somak Ghoshal, for having brought the story to Shalini’s attention.)

In the absence of the predictable rhythm of domesticity, he is washed-up in a way men his age aren’t. It cost him his thirties to realise that a spouse and child don’t wear you down. They ennoble you instead. When you lose the luxury of time and thought, you have no choice but to keep moving. Alone, you’re trapped between thinking and doing, lacking the courage to juice the freedom for its worth.

The lonely ruminative spy. Such a cliche, he thinks as he checks into a hotel the Wing has booked him into. He doesn’t need a fake name. This is only an identification job, a one-off for old times’ sake. They have flown him in from Delhi with a strict instruction: No engagement with Kukri.

The hotel is on Residency Road. Its ashtrays and cheap soaps remind him of the city this once was, before it was choked by musty Ubers and coffee shops that blend into each other. In the restaurant below, he watches men in polyester track pants wipe their bushy moustaches after wolfing down a masala dosa. As he sips a second filter coffee, he thinks back to 2002, when he was tapped by the Wing.

It was his final week in law school, in a leafy campus at the other end of this city. A visiting American professor, an authority on Indian constitutional law, summoned him to an office overlooking the main quadrangle. Skipping pleasantries, Melville asked if he would work with the Wing. I’m CIA, the professor said flatly. Those were early days in the global war on terror. Melville was recruiting for a joint intelligence gathering project.

He had a feeling that the offer may not be a practical joke. The CIA had a history of collaborating with academics working on foreign countries. It was a Cold War thing and Melville was a Cold War man, a learned American in the old-fashioned sense.

Still, he said: You’re messing with me.

Melville swivelled in his chair: If you’re not interested, forget I ever asked.

Why me, he asked.

I think I can trust you, that’s why.

He’d written a paper on espionage law for Melville’s seminar. Following the oral defence, they had a long conversation about spy fiction. He was obsessed with realism back then. He complained to Melville about the genre requiring a suspension of disbelief. But you can’t test everything against logic, can you, Melville said. Was the professor teasing him? Was what was transpiring in the room a scene from one of those implausible novels?

He remembers looking through the grill, at a spot of dead grass in the quad. It was a typical day in this city. The sky was low and grey, and the faint smell of earth and rain hung over everything.

But I’m already signed to work for a law firm in London.

And who do you think got you that job, Melville asked. You’re going to need a cover. A Rajan from Delhi will call you about the formalities.

/

He had the perfect cover in London. During the week, he wore sharp suits and went to work in a glass tower. Nobody suspected anything at the day job. He was seen as a industrious immigrant, not brilliant or singled out for great things, but a reliable chap who could be counted on to respect deadlines. It helped that there was a line that his British colleagues could not be bothered to cross. At drinks on Friday evenings, their polite questions were restricted to the best places to get Indian nosh. On Mondays, when they asked about his weekend, he made up something about cycling and laundry.

The work would happen on the weekend, when he’d collect information from assets, to use the agency parlance. In nondescript cafes in Southall and Kilburn and Edgware Road, he met disgruntled Balochis and delicate Iranians and recovering Khalistanis whose eyes glinted when talking about the arms trade. Most of his interlocutors were men. They wore puffer jackets and joggers.

Spying is waiting, he heard it said often. But spying is really talking, it’s smoking shisha with family men who tell you to ‘find a wife quickly, my brother’. A lot of information that came his way was simply filed away, never to be called up again. Even so, it helped to fill the gaps, to add colour to the shifting picture whose contours had to be made out when it was time to act.

London was a good place to blood people into the business. All kinds of people lived in and passed through the city. It really did feel like the centre of the world, heaving with lives that were desperate and disparate, grand and grimy. He was constantly trying to work out what tied it all together. Was it the gusts of air that whipped around the Tube tunnels? The cold crunch of cress in a supermarket sandwich? Perhaps it was the golden lettering on pub signage, glistening with the lamplit droplets of an overnight drizzle.

On some Sunday nights, he’d take the Tube to Holborn and walk to the Embassy. He’d enter through the backdoor to deposit a sheaf of documents and pick up envelopes he would later slide across a greasy table. He reported to Harpreet, a cultural attaché on paper but really an undercover officer who answered to headquarters.

Later, in his apartment in Russell Square, he would shave, iron his shirt for the next day and write email dispatches for the desks in Delhi and DC. At work, he was embarrassed to tell his colleagues that he had an apartment to himself in Zone 1. So he sometimes told people he lived out in Wembley. These evasions used to amuse Harpreet.

Be cool, Harpreet would say, good spies don’t lie about the small things.

/

On days like today, he feels like the little lies are all he’s ever had. It was as Pushkin had written: a deception that elevates is dearer than a host of low truths. He has many low truths. There’s nothing remarkable about his appearance: average height, thinning hair, skinny fat that makes him conscious about wearing t-shirts. Unlike many of his former colleagues, he isn’t patriotic. This had made life difficult in his last years at the Wing. After the Party’s tentacles reached there, a basic view of the world was valourised as moral clarity. Think less and do more, the new chief had said. It was the prevailing mood in the nation. But ‘do’ to what end? Do so that you don’t have to think. Do to fill up the hours and turn your face away from everyday horrors.

He’s now walking on Brigade Road, which seems to him tacky and tired. Wherever he looks, there are franchise outlets of apparel brands and discount shops hawking phone covers. He turns onto Church Street, newly pavemented and filled with young people tapping into their devices. The street hasn’t changed beyond recognition but many of the old landmarks are gone. Of the ones that remain, bars that seemed to him edgy then look seedy now.

He used to like the job on some days. It gave him a thrill to hold secrets and connect dots. His participation was premised on the fantasy of the eventual reveal. What a man, they would say after he was gone. Such an exciting life, and no song and dance about it. He often writes his obituary in his head. If it doesn’t surprise the people who know him, what would be the point of this life?

He is wearing a navy blue cap and sunglasses. He has grown his hair out. He looks somewhat gaunt now, but he feels fitter than before, as if the vagaries of life have eliminated the body’s trappings.

He reaches a cafe, which has been done up in the usual dark greens and burnished browns. In this cafe, in an hour from now, an engineer from the country’s combat aircraft manufacturing division will meet a person. For weeks now, the two have been exchanging cryptic messages. The Wing knows this because they have tapped the engineer’s phone. They suspect he is leaking information about surveillance instruments that the division is developing for use in recon balloons. If details about the project land with an enemy country or a non-state actor, there could be consequences.

On the engineer’s phone, the person’s number is saved as Kukri.

/

One of Harpreet’s first tips to him had been to reach places well before the appointed hour. Survey the layout, take stock of the exits, know where the washrooms are. He sits outdoors, taking a chair so that his back faces the road. He runs his fingers along the underside of the terrazzo table. The faint smell of earth and rain again. He orders a lemonade, takes out his black diary and resumes his outlining of a short story.

Why are your stories so sad, Harpreet had once asked him as they lingered in bed. His parents had just left London after a visit. His father had been diagnosed by then. He was startled by the pace at which the Parkinson’s blunted his father. Already, when the effect of the morning drugs wore off by early afternoon, the hand tremor and mouth tic would come creeping back. It wouldn’t be long before this man who spanned the world like a giant would be left to shuffle from living room to kitchen.

Harpreet had a way with people. Even his mother, famously hard to please, took well to him. The line they took was that they were flatmates. There’s a photograph of Harpreet with his parents. They are sitting on the grass, each with a can of ginger beer. Harpreet is carrying the frame, with his big broad shoulders, his high aristocratic cheekbones, that smile verging on madness.

You love life too much to work in intelligence, he used to tell Harpreet.

After a couple of years, the Wing asked him to quit the law firm and work for it full-time. Melville was living a retired life in Vermont by then. The threats to national security had become more shadowy. There were more mercenaries on the scene, shorn of ideology. In just two years, his old networks had become irrelevant. It was a quick-churn business, intelligence. Both the demand and supply sides had to keep changing face.

He spent less and less time out in the field, moving into the role of handler. Now that they worked in the same building, Harpreet and him had to be more discreet. Tongues wagged. In their own country, which in a way the Embassy building in London was, they could be considered criminals.

In those days, he was labouring through a novel he never completed, about the rivalry between two disciples of a Hindustani musician. His practice was sincere but his words were not. The sentences were overwrought, the touch too heavy. Back then, he mistook the limits of his talent for the limits of realism as a novelistic form. But he had come around to Melville’s view by now: the rush of blood lay beyond the boundary of logic.

In the cafe, he tries to guess which of the young men and women are courting but it’s hard to tell. He thinks about his own love life. It is a brief history. Romance has never come easy to him. He has had a couple of deep connections, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to exist lightly with a lover. His quiet and desperate need to be liked, to be thought of as a good person in concrete terms, means that he goes through life feeling like there is a gun to his head.

The shame comes from a similar place. He recalls summer nights in London. When Harpreet would return home with beer on his breath and fire in his loins, he’d often find himself negotiating his own desire. He tip-toed around desire, as if it would return in the cold light of day to take its pound of flesh. Yet, he’d receive Harpreet every time, anticipating the face he made after he finished, the face flush with sweat and release. Was that good, did I make you feel good, he would ask Harpreet.

/

You have to stop this, Bakshi had told him. Bakshi was deputy chief of the Wing then. With Harpreet, Bakshi had gone a step further, threatening termination. A prominent member of the Indian community in London had brought it up with the High Commissioner. This interest in their personal lives did not surprise him. It was one way for the diaspora to deal with its deracination. The trade was in their favour: they could have the dollars and drinkable tap water without losing the conservatism.

Harpreet was a proud man. Let’s quit, he insisted, fuck the Wing. Let’s move to Greece or something, you write your books, I’ll cut logs and drive trucks if I have to. Harpreet meant it sincerely. He was out to his parents and friends. He had an older brother who worked for a bank and was a father of two. But for him, an only child with an ailing parent, it was nothing more than an erotic fantasy. He couldn’t just uproot his life and move to a new country with a lover.

I have responsibilities too, Harpreet said, but I don’t make them my personality. There was one thing they had in common: they felt intensely. For Harpreet, that feeling dissipated in living. He immersed himself in sensory pleasure, in running and sex and food. Intelligence for Harpreet was a job, not something he thought he was ordained for. But his own feeling petered out in plotless pages, in tepid words about the tiresome inner lives of his characters.

And so Harpreet left, showing no sign of self-pity. He made good on his plans, too, moving to Athens, where it didn’t take long for him to embed into the queer scene. Occasionally, over email, he sent photographs of high blue skies and clear blue waters. When those stopped, he used to check Harpreet’s Facebook page for updates. He often wondered if he was blocked. His profile picture—light stubble, those veiny biceps, Ray-Bans hiding his shining eyes—was as if frozen in time. Sometimes, he touched himself while looking at it.

The year that followed Harpreet’s flight was solitary and fulfilling. He started writing a new novel, about a secret agent who foils a terror plot in Morocco. When the night’s writing went well, the mundane became imbued with meaning. A morning ritual of a fry-up, a cup of black coffee and a single cigarette felt like it held all the contentment in the universe. He was alone but he had never felt more alive. It was like being left unsupervised to eat a juicy mango with bare hands, or getting drenched in the rain, unburdened by wallet and phone.

It was gauche to advertise the pleasure his aloneness gave him. He realised this after being met with sympathy where he expected acknowledgement and judgement where he went for counsel. This feeling would have to be a private pleasure. His life would always look limited from the outside.

He had to return to India after that year. His father was dying. He wished that his parents were different people, the kind who’d accept the indignities of illness and continue the round with the bad cards they’d been dealt. But they were not, most people were not. Still, it was one of his favourite agonies to wallow in, what if his parents had entirely different personalities?

To its credit, the Wing was supportive of his move back to Delhi. He had a sense that he had outlived his usefulness in London, but still, they could have asked him to leave. They accommodated him on the Middle East & Africa desk, hoping that he would keep the old networks warm. In his turn as dutiful son, he felt, he had been somewhat forgiven for his deviance.

Everything changed after his father died. The passing only widened the distance between him and his mother, who struggled to make peace with losing the thread of her life. Her sixties was supposed to be the decade she travelled the world and experienced the joys of grandparenting. A full house, that’s what she called it. She blamed herself for how he had turned out, how the bright, obedient child had become the balding, unmarried man around whom hung a vague sense of failure.

Two days before he died, his father told him: You have to take care of your mother.

But I am not patient like you, Pa.

You have to learn to be. People will always need you more than you need them.

He had looked up from his phone at his old man, skin white and dry around the mouth, shoulders drooping from the slow ravage of disease.

I know your secret, his father suddenly said with mischief in his eyes.

Which secret?

Both of them.

/

Back on Church Street, the engineer arrives first. His name is Kumaresh. He is small and wiry. He walks purposefully towards the glass door and enters the cafe. His backpack has the branding of a technology company. When he comes out again, he takes a seat at the table closest to the door. He must be in his late twenties. His eyes are dark and his facial hair is patchy, as in the photograph the Wing has shared.

He continues to scribble in his diary. He sees a waiter bring two beverages to the table. Kumaresh asks the waiter to place the hot one, the one in a ceramic cup, in front of the empty chair. Kumaresh is facing him. He sips on an iced drink served in a disposable glass.

Minutes pass.

He senses a tall, turbaned man walk past him and take the chair opposite Kumaresh. The two shake hands. The turbaned man takes a sip from the ceramic cup. This does not look like their first meeting. As Kumaresh busies himself with his backpack, the man turns around in a smooth motion and looks at him. It is a look of recognition but it betrays no sign of surprise.

Harpreet has filled out in the way people do when they don’t have to worry about love and money. He is carrying the weight well. He can make out the shape of it under the checked shirt and fitted jeans. He wears a beard generously flecked with white. The turban and beard are new, unlike the cut in his left eyebrow, the mark of a playful mauling by a pet.

Kumaresh has produced a spiral-bound booklet from his backpack. Harpreet is flipping through it. They exchange a few words. Harpreet hands Kumaresh a small box of traditional sweets. Kumaresh lifts the lid from one corner and looks inside. He places the box in his backpack, shakes hands with Harpreet again and leaves the premises.

He turns his chair towards the entrance to watch Kumaresh until he disappears from his line of sight. He walks over to the table near the glass door and sits in front of Harpreet.

/

Take off those shades for god’s sake. You’ve always looked silly in them.

He removes his sunglasses. He has already flouted the Wing’s instruction—he has engaged with Kukri. He glances at the cover page of the booklet on the table between them. It carries the title ‘Assembling Manual for PC4801’. Feeling bold, he picks up the booklet and leafs through it. The pages are full of line diagrams.

But you look great. As usual. Especially with the turban and beard. A bit like your dad. Is this a disguise of some sort?

I’m a believer now, you know.

Betrayers have to become believers. And Kukri, really? Just say you miss me.

Kukri was the name of a Nepali restaurant they used to frequent in London. He remembers how Harpreet would eat, with a focus bordering on prayer. He ate with body and mind, wordlessly scooping up the aloo sadeko and mutton curry with vigorous movements of his thick fingers. Sometimes, after he took a first bite, he closed his eyes in a theatrical manner.

Betrayer. That’s a big word, haven’t heard you use that one. Read the book, by the way. I take my words back. You should stick to sad stories. The happy ending wasn’t convincing.

He ignores Harpreet’s critique of the novel. Who are you doing this for?

I have a wife and child back in Canada. And I’m useful to the people who want to avenge Surjeet’s killing. Haven’t you guys worked this out yet?

Sunny Singh Surjeet. Activist if he was your friend, separatist if he was an enemy. Surjeet had been murdered by an unidentified gunman in the parking lot of a gurdwara in Ottawa. The Canadians are claiming that the Wing is responsible.

Surjeet had many enemies, he says. The Wing didn’t even need to get involved.

Look at you being all defensive. Has Raghav Sinha turned into a stooge for the state?

You know what is more surprising? Harpreet Bains is now a family man who trades information for the Khalistanis.

Hey hey, don’t taint me like that. I’m a gun for hire. I work for whoever pays me.

I’ll tell you what I think. You’re still not over Bakshi kicking you out of the Wing. Let it go.

Have you let it go though, Harpreet asks, taking his hand. Their fingers intertwine. He wants to look away but can’t. There’s a dull ache below his rib cage. He has an urge to run his fingers in the furrows of Harpreet’s face. To counter it, he tries to play back the moments of his perfect solitude, of belonging to no one.

Tell me, Harpreet says, breaking his reverie, How did you know it’s me?

Ghouri, he says. A knowing smile crosses Harpreet’s face. Ghouri was an old informer from London, a cherubic Afghan whose networks spanned the oceans. They said to never befriend your sources but they didn’t say anything about not fucking them. When a man brings you melons from Kabul and sobs over his wife’s miscarriage in your lap, a kind of friendship is inevitable.

Maybe you should join the Wing again. Stay long enough to get a pension. Make your mother happy, Raghav. Settle down, have a couple of kids. How many more evenings will you walk around by yourself? He pauses for a moment. In Lodhi Garden, he adds.

He rearranges his face so that Harpreet doesn’t register his surprise. He realises he doesn’t want to give this man any more satisfaction.

Ghouri, Harpreet says. They both laugh.

Okay, enough playing. Let’s talk shop. What are you going to do with me? He points at the manual in front of him. You can keep this, actually. I already have what I need. I just needed to give this chap his Canadian passport.

It’s a pity he’ll never leave this hell-hole. Why did he do it?

He’s in love with a Muslim woman. They want to get out of here.

This time, he reaches out to take Harpreet’s hand. He is thinking clearly now, no longer trying to separate Harpreet and Kukri. It is Harpreet for the moments, Kukri over the longer arc. This is how it ends up. Happiness, innocence, abandon, it is all too much to sustain over a life.

They place their elbows on the table. An onlooker might think that they are about to arm-wrestle. His scrawny wrist is no match for Harpreet’s gigantic one. Harpreet’s shirtsleeves are rolled up to the elbows. A ripple from his hairy, muscled forearm goes through his own body like a current.

Tell me, Harpreet insists, what are you going to do with me?

I’m going to ask you to become a double agent.

Harpreet, old and weathered and somehow more beautiful, looks at him defiantly. A lot of years have passed between London and Bangalore.

Harpreet, Harpreet, he sighs. What happened to you? Didn’t you want a happy ending?