FROM COVER TO UNDERCOVER
Set against the backdrop of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, Stephen Alter’s new spy novel proves too riveting to put down
In the midst of the threat of a thermo-nuclear war clouding the horizon, it seems almost futile to suggest that out there on the forested slopes of the Himalayas there are birds foraging for their future. Yet such is the compelling power of Stephen Alter’s latest invocation of the past in his tangentially named Birdwatching that you are inextricably drawn into his web of stories. Let us admit that he belongs to the John Masters tribe of storytellers, but with a Harrison Ford type of mediation and derring-do to venture forth in situations where others have dared and failed.
Being the son of American missionaries who settled long ago in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, Alter has a mystical attachment to the region that goes beyond boundaries. In that he is most like another partisan interlocutor, Nari Rustomji ICS. In his 1971 account, Enchanted Frontiers: Sikkim, Bhutan and India’s North-East Borderlands, Rustomji identified himself so thoroughly with the people of the area, he used to say: “I am very much a tribal myself.”
Alter, on the other hand, is more at home in the wilderness. One of his bestknown works, Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime (2014), captures the ease in which his hero Guy Fletcher, a rookie American ornithologist, hurtles across the same terrain just before the 1962 SinoIndian war as a newlyrecruited spy for the CIA.
Some of the most delightful aspects of the novel are the introductory paragraphs that head each chapter, detailing the plumage and mating calls of a diverse number of avian species both in India, the US and even in Bangkok, where Fletcher sees the Vietcong getting restive. Commies are still hiding under every bed.
Needless to add, every Fletcher needs a friend who will fetch and carry him through the longer treks and dangerous reconnoitres into enemy territory. He is the splendid Captain Imtiaz Afridi of the intelligence wing of the Indian Army. They are not just brothers who bivouac together but lovers who share the affections of the sensuously endowed Kesang Sherpa, educated at Calcutta’s Loretto Convent. She is efficient both in bed and out of it and one might even say, quite in advance of the times.
What makes Stephen Alter’s account so riveting is the way he includes real-life events and describes the social setting with an eye to detail. We might know the eventual outcome but he still keeps us turning the page. There are brilliant vignettes of Jacqueline Kennedy’s 1962 visit to Delhi, of being courted by Pandit Nehru; of Hope Cook, the American ingenue, imitating Jackie’s whispery voice and white gloved hands marrying the Prince of Sikkim in 1963. Set against the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, Alter then fast forwards the events of Birdwatching to coincide with the Sino-India war of November 1962. And when all else fails, there is birdsong and the splendour of the snows of Kanchenjunga. ■