Mission Pakistan

Harinder Sikka, a former naval officer, chanced upon a lodestar while witnessing the Kargil conflict. Since the publisher is Penguin, it unfurled a well-oiled marketing campaign in tandem with the book launch. That is how we are well versed with the back-story: Sikka, a former naval officer, has earned his spurs; a campaigner against spurious drugs and an ardent enforcer of intellectual property rights besides serving as a senior corporate executive. 

In between he tried his hand at a controversial film. Sikka got working on the book soon after he heard the story of a Kashmiri Muslim girl willingly marrying in Pakistan to spy for India. By his account, considerable legwork was involved in tracking down the roots of the story to Malerkotla, Punjab.

Meghna Gulzar needs to be commended for polishing the shoddy work by Penguin editors into a nuanced, sensitive film Raazi. Had it not been for the publicity surrounding the movie and the subject matter itself — one out of several stories of rare daredevilry and going beyond the call of duty that studded the 1971 war — perhaps Sikka's work would have also sunk like the countless novels that singlehandedly demolish the bad guys in Pakistan.  

The story line emerges as the redeemer; a real-life event that can tug at the heartstring of any Indian — made more believable than most Bollywood spy flicks, topped by a rarity in the land of spies and double agents — a woman in the starring role, putting her life on the line for the cause of the nation.

The opening of the book is clunky because of the over-investment in clichés and words of every-day usage. The characters are mono-dimensional: Sehmat's son is an Army officer, doesn't believe in caste or religion while Sehmat's parents were ideal Indians, one a Hindu, the other a Muslim, both maintaining separate places for worshipping their respective gods. 

Melodrama takes over as we enter Sehmat's teens; her dedication established by her non-stop dancing at the college festival while blood oozed from her feet.

Then a coincidence, that happens more in the reel world, strikes: Sehmat, after a month's training in espionage, gets married to a Pakistani army officer's son who had helped her father spread his (legitimate) business in Pakistan. He was also unaware of the double game India played under that cover. 

With Sehmat's marriage we enter the second and racier part of the book as she enters places unfamiliar to us Indians, the Pakistan army culture we are unaware about. 

Sehmat courts danger repeatedly. She is on the brink of being busted when she pulls off the big one: alerting India about Pakistani plans to sink the pride of its naval fleet, the aircraft-carrier INS Vikrant.

Sehmat, unlike several real-life Indian spies who got skinned alive after their cover was exposed, manages to get out alive but broken; battling the trauma of carrying in her womb the child of a man whose country she had betrayed. 

Like all feel-good stories, the loose threads are tucked up: INS Vikrant was saved from harm, the unwary Pakistani flotilla in search of the aircraft carrier became the hunted and India won the war. 

However, a lump in the throat is unavoidable, as Sehmat pays the human cost of an intense and brief interlude of living two lives. 

— SD