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, who once fought across them.Cover of ‘Our Kind of Games’by A.S. Dulat. Published by Hachette India.This is a paradox the novel lets stand rather than resolve; and Rehana, whose affair with Ranjit becomes the fault line running through the entire narrative.What Dulat gets right, and gets right with the authority of a man who lived adjacent to this world for real, is the texture of moral compromise. This is not a thriller interested in car chases or safehouse shootouts. It is a slow, procedural unravelling of a man who believes he is holding back a flood, only to realise, chapter by chapter, that his own hands are part of what is causing the water to rise. The novel’s most devastating move is refusing Ranjit the dignity of a clean villain to blame; there is no single traitor, no moustache-twirling architect of catastrophe, only a system, patient and self-sustaining, in which everyone plays their part and the Valley simply keeps burning.That thematic ambition is the book’s strongest asset, and it is worth saying plainly, that few writers alive have the standing to make readers believe this particular machinery from the inside. When Dulat describes the choreography of running a source, the unspoken rules that govern who gets protected and who gets sacrificed, the prose carries a weight that no amount of research by an outside novelist could replicate. This is fiction written by a man who has actually stood in the room.And yet a novel cannot survive on authenticity of subject, and this is where the book sometimes strains against its own ambitions. The transition from a lifetime of writing measured, diplomatic nonfiction to the looser, riskier demands of narrative fiction is not always seamless. Dulat’s instinct, honed over decades of never fully saying the whole truth, sometimes works against him here. Interiority, the messy, contradictory inner-life that separates a character from a case file, arrives in flashes and not as a sustained current. Ranjit is most vivid when he is working, calculating, weighing one betrayal against another; he is comparatively thin in other scenes, particularly those built around Rehana, where the novel wants us to feel the ache of a man crossing every line the Valley has drawn, and instead gives us gestures towards that ache rather than the ache itself.The prose itself is functional rather than lyrical, which will please readers who came for the procedural machinery of intelligence work and frustrate those hoping for the atmospheric density that a place like Srinagar, contested and beautiful and grieving all at once, seems to demand. Dulat is a far better architect of plot than of sentence. He knows exactly how to withhold a piece of information until it lands with maximum damage, but he is less certain, at times, about how to make a paragraph breathe.Watch: In A. S. Dulat’s First Novel, Kashmir Is a Tragedy and the Head of IB Has a Break DownThere is also the matter of what the novel chooses not to ask. For a book built on the premise that intelligence work fuels the very violence it claims to prevent, Our Kind of Games is curiously gentle with the institution itself. The individuals within the system are shown as flawed, even complicit, but the system’s design and the policies handed down from Delhi, which makes Ranjit’s impossible choices inevitable in the first place, remains largely offstage. Readers hoping for the kind of institutional reckoning that made the 2018 book The Spy Chronicles, co-authored by Dulat, so discomforting for its subjects, may find the novel pulling its punches exactly where a work of fiction, unlike a memoir, had the freedom to swing harder.The novel’s clearest reckoning with this arrives quietly. After Ranjit spends an evening with a shikarawala on the Dal lake, a man whose face holds nothing but the exhausted sadness of someone who has watched too much happen and too many Ranjits come and go. Walking away from him, Ranjit thought about his sources, his operations, his years in Kashmir. What had any of it accomplished? The violence continued. The boys kept fighting. The occupation persisted. People kept dying. His presence had changed nothing except adding more bodies to the count and grief to the accumulated suffering. He was reminded of King Lear, where the Fool tells Lear at the end, “I am a Fool; thou art nothing.”It is one of the rare moments where the book’s restraint gives way to something closer to despair, and it lands harder for having been earned in silence rather than declared.None of this should deter the reader who picks up this novel in search of something rarer than a well-made thriller, a genuinely informed portrait of how the machinery of counterinsurgency actually feels from inside the room where it is run. Dulat has not written a perfect novel, he has written something more interesting: this is a first work of fiction from a man who spent his working life mastering the art of the incomplete confession, now finally letting the confession run long enough to become a story. The gaps in craft are real, and the authority behind the story is rarer still, and it is that authority that will keep this book in the reader’s memory long after the final page.For anyone who has ever wondered what it costs the people paid to keep a fragile peace, Our Kind of Games offers an answer worth sitting with, even when it stumbles in telling the story.Malik Daniyal is a University of Delhi graduate.