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There is a strange irony embedded in A.S. Dulat’s debut novel. For two decades, the former chief of India’s Research and Analysis Wing has had a prolific literary career built on the promise of the truth, however much filtered, however much diluted by the discretion of a career spy. Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years (2015) and The Spy Chronicles (2018) traded on an electric charge of a real man naming real stakes. Now, in Our Kind of Games, Dulat abandons the crutch of non-fiction and reaches for something harder. It is an attempt to enter the moral interior of a conflict that has too often been narrated through the language of security, sovereignty and geopolitics. 

The question that hovers over every page is simple and unforgiving: Can a man who spent a career concealing the facts now succeed at inventing them? The answer, delivered with more confidence than most debut novelists manage, is mostly yes, though with the seams showing.

The plot is set in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, during the 1990s. This is a period the book terms as the “bloodiest years” of the insurgency. Our Kind of Games follows the story of Ranjit Soni, an intelligence officer tasked with the grim arithmetic of turning militants into informers and mapping the insurgency networks strangling the Valley. Around him orbits a cast that reads like a rogues’ gallery assembled by someone who has actually sat across the table from such people. Qureshi, the genial, Old Monk swilling informant who trades in secrets the way other men trade in gossip; Imran, a militant commander who returns from across the border, wrapped in the language of peace and one of an ex-militant dreaming to be considered for the post of National Security Advisor, certain that no one understands Kashmir’s fault lines as intimately as himself,........

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