Ever since Michael Deacon ruined my unabashedly lowbrow enjoyment of Dan Brown's novels with his hilarious critique ("Don't make fun of Dan Brown," The Telegraph, May 10), I found myself eyeing all thrillers with a jaundiced eye. So it is nice when an Indian helps revive my faith in the genre with a thumping good old-fashioned page-turner.
The author may not have intended it, but the plot of The Caretaker, the first novel from a short-story writer who focuses on immigrant life in the US, is uncannily well-timed given the manner in which encounters in the frozen fastnesses of India's northern borders have dominated the news these past months.
The hero is Ranjit Singh, a former captain in the Indian army and an illegal immigrant in the US. With his stoic intelligence and deep sense of values, he is a sort of Jason Bourne-type character but a very Indian one - a devout Sikh, son of a decorated hero whose father died in one of the border skirmishes. Ranjit is an ace mountaineer, a member of a crack mountain division posted near Siachen. And it is here, after leading a patrol team up the spectacular landscape of the glacier, that he finds himself caught in a life-threatening controversy that ended in a court martial and three years of imprisonment. After his release, he heads for the US with his wife and daughter in search of safety and a better life for his wife Preetam, and daughter Shanti.
Both elude him. Working in Preetam's uncle's store in Boston selling Indian goods, he is condemned to a life of drudgery and the thinly veiled contempt of his employer. Though this book is unabashedly a thriller, Ahmad sketches the uncertain wretchedness of the illegal immigrant's life evocatively. "All day Ranjit stood behind the counter at Kohinoor Food and Spices at Cambridge, waiting on the college students and the hippies who came in for packets of incense and cheap samosas. The worst were the rich Indians who treated him like a servant…Why couldn't Preetam understand he was just cheap labor for her uncle?...He was even more helpless than the illegal Mexicans who worked frying samosas, because he was family and had to be grateful."
Preetam, too, is less than enamoured of the American Dream after she is once arrested for inadvertently "shoplifting", a predicament common to many Indians unfamiliar with how a foreign department store works. As she retreats into herself after this incident and their relationship unravels, Ranjit's life become even more unbearable. Eventually, he walks out on his uncle-in-law and heads for Martha's Vineyard, summering watering hole for the seriously rich and famous (including, the Kennedys), joining the bands of Brazilian immigrants headed there for a summer job.
It is in this unlikely place that his guilt-ridden past - presented to readers in flashbacks and imaginary conversations with Sergeant Khandelkar, among those who died on Ranjit's last ill-fated mission in Siachen - catches up with him.
As the summer ends and Martha's Vineyard empties, he is hired by Clayton Neals, an African-American senator, as a caretaker for his luxury home for the winter. Neals is a cross between Barack Obama (lawyer, Harvard hero, a representative of the emerging elite African-American community) and Bill Clinton (sensitive, statesmanlike). In an inversion of Clinton's career, Neals is a presidential front-runner for the Democrats after a heroic mission to North Korea to rescue two jailed American journalists.
It is that mission - or rather, the fictional quid pro quo that secured the journalists' release - that has a connection with Ranjit's mysterious past. To reveal it here would be to give away the plot but suffice it to say that it involves an antique porcelain doll, a rogue general with personal hawkish agendas, a cover-up of a botched mission, the Indian missile programme and evil North Koreans. If all this sounds as improbable as a Brown thriller, the writer deserves a novelist's licence, and to give Ahmad credit he manages to sustain a fiendishly fast-paced and complicated storyline with no mean skill.
If he makes it work, it is also because he rounds out the dramatis personae and avoids the bad grammar and repetitive prose for which Brown has been so cruelly parodied. We know, for instance, that our hero is handsome, although Ahmad never directly says so. It is conveyed by the reactions of women, notably Anna, the senator's wife, with whom he has an affair (if there is a complaint, it is that Ahmad would qualify for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award). The book can also be read at several levels - the immigrant angst is one (Ranjit finds himself better accepted when he cuts his long hair and shaves his beard) but so is the underbelly of American urban life.
There is a denouement, too, where some baddies are dispatched but that's not the end of the story. Ranjit Singh is on the run again, and it behoves A X Ahmad to follow up a decent debut with a sequel.
THE CARETAKER
A X Ahmad
Harper Collins
292 pages, Rs 399
