They come home to roost: Ranjana Sengupta reviews Stephen Alter’s ‘Birdwatching’

An unusual thriller, slow-paced like the art of watching birds, and as rewarding 

Birdwatching is set in the unruffled universe of New Delhi in early 1962, a time when the roads are wide and empty, and people sit around in broad, shaded verandahs discussing who will be invited to the American ambassador’s reception for the visiting American First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. Guy Fletcher, a young American Fulbright scholar, is among those who gets an invitation. He’s grown up in Delhi, where his father worked for the U.S. aid programme. Always more at home in India than in the U.S., where he feels like an outsider, the story begins when, having qualified as an ornithologist, he returns to India after college in the States intending to study the migratory habits of bar-headed geese in Bharatpur.

One day, while birdwatching on Delhi’s Ridge, he stumbles on a corpse. The man is white and he’s clearly been shot — this accidental discovery triggers far-reaching reactions. For reasons Fletcher doesn’t then understand, an elaborate cover-up ensues, apparently contrived by both Indian and U.S. intelligence agencies, and he finds himself bundled out of India by an American official who, Guy suspects correctly, is a CIA agent.

Useful assets

And once in the U.S., the CIA approach him, telling him his fluent Hindi and his cover as an ornithologist are very useful assets. Fletcher accepts their offer to join the Company for various reasons, not the least because he can live in India. After his training, he is sent to Kalimpong in West Bengal, where a motley group of Chinese spies, Indian intelligence agents, underground communists and Tibetan freedom-fighters have gathered in the build-up to the 1962 India-China war.

There, Fletcher meets the lively, alluring Kesang, daughter of a local doctor, and the dashing Indian Army captain Imtiaz Afridi of the 13 Kumaon regiment; together they try to unravel Chinese intentions, though with different agendas and with varying degrees of success. It is difficult to outline the intricacies of the conspiracies without giving away the plot, but suffice it to say that it is complicated, especially when seen in the context of rising Indo-Chinese tensions and the competing interests of the U.S., the Chinese, the Tibetan resistance, and India’s need to maintain border security.

Graham Greene style

As Fletcher maintains the fiction of studying birds while navigating the shoals of Kalimpong social life, real and fictional characters intermingle. Among the former are the Kazini, Sikkimese politician Kazi Lhendup Dorji’s flamboyant Scottish wife, whose actual interventions in the politics of Sikkim are well-documented. A visit to Sikkim brings Fletcher into the ambit of American debutante Hope Cooke, who married the Chogyal (Sikkim’s traditional ruler) to the great unease of the Indian political establishment.