Our Kind Of Games

A.S. Dulat

‘A chronicle by one of India’s leading spymasters… a page out of a real-life situation.’ – M.K. Narayanan, former NSA and DIB.

From the former head of India’s external intelligence agency, in his first work of fiction — It is the early 1990s and Kashmir has become a killing field. Ranjit Soni runs intelligence operations in Srinagar during the bloodiest years of the insurgency. His job is to turn militants into sources, map terror networks and prevent the Valley from burning completely. He is good at his work and soon sees success.

There is Qureshi, the jolly middle-aged informant who drinks Old Monk and whispers secrets; Imran, the militant commander who returns from Pakistan promising peace; Major Ali, the ISI operative playing both sides; and Rehana, whose affair with Ranjit crosses every fault line that exists in the divided Valley.

As the bodies accumulate, Ranjit realizes a terrible truth: he is not preventing violence; he is fuelling it.

A morally complex novel about espionage, Our Kind of Games is a devastating portrait of politics, betrayal and the impossible equations of intelligence work in a place where everyone plays the game and no one wins.

‘However well masked, the image of the spymaster cannot be adequately cloaked in this work of fiction. The work is certainly not at the level of a John le Carre spy novel, but it retains quite a bit of the grim, morally ambiguous and psychologically ambivalent aspect of good spy fiction. The plots mentioned are not uncommon, involving a great deal of paperwork, surveillance and face to face meetings, alongside absence of moral clarity all along the way. All this is to be expected of a chronicle by one of India's leading spymasters. What also comes through loud and clear is that secrecy of intelligence work, cloaking of false identities and the double life that one has to go through, does have a debilitating impact on human beings. This is not an instance of moral inquiry, but a page out of a real-life situation.’ – M.K. Narayanan, former National Security Advisor, Government of India

'Our Kind of Games takes us deep inside Kashmir with its bleak beauty and terrifying trauma. In Ranjit Soni, the spy who remains in the cold, it gives us a secret agent worthy of Kashmir's endless contradictions, and humanises a state that in popular culture is less a place where people live and more a prize to be won politically. Soni is brilliant and broken in equal parts, his life measured in whiskey pegs and clandestine walks, the master manipulator who is played by all.’ – Kaveree Bamzai, author and journalist