Sacred Games

  I had told them nothing, but now I could see that some explanation might be necessary. If Nikhil, who owed everything to me, was willing to say these things to my face, then a morale-boost was necessary. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Listen to me carefully now. I’ll only say this once.’ On the truck passing below us now, there was a circle of some sort of tribals, dancing around a fire made out of a red spotlight and fluttering red ribbons. They were all wearing dark glasses. I said, ‘I can’t tell you much, but I can tell you this. We are searching for this Guru-ji because of business only. He fooled us. He ran a double-cross.’

  ‘He owes us money?’

  ‘Yes. He owes us lots of money. He betrayed us.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Nikhil said. He looked satisfied. I made sense to him now, and the world made sense to him. ‘Then we must find him.’

  ‘Tell the boys that for as long as we are here on this mission, wages are doubled. And there will be a bonus at the end.’

  That cheered him up considerably. I left him on the balcony and went into my room. I turned up the air-conditioner to full and lay on the bed with the lights off. Nikhil would call his wife soon, and talk to his children. I thought of calling Jojo, but I was too shaky. I had been having trouble sleeping ever since I came back to India. At first I thought it was jet-lag, displacement, the barking of the dogs and the creaking of the crickets. But then a week passed and I slept only in snatches. Three nights running I knocked myself out with sleeping pills, and woke up feeling more tired each morning. Now weeks had passed and each night was a long, hard journey, and I walked weightlessly through the days like a ghost. Nikhil hadn’t said it, but I knew he was also concerned about me. I sometimes fell asleep during the day, seated upright during a business conversation with Mumbai, or after lunch while waiting for the sweet. I woke always startled and terrorized by the same dream, the same horizon of ash and darkness. I had to work hard to be able to concentrate on sums of money, on problems of tactics and management.

  I needed to sleep, but tonight there was certainly no sleep. Even over the roar of the air-conditioner, the music of the carnival crashed into my head. There were three songs, or maybe four, in different languages, all bouncing off each other and sometimes mingling into an unbearable throbbing loudness. Under this, there was the murmur of the crowd, which swelled up now and then into a cheery bellow. I cursed them, the over-populating bastards of India, milling about in their lakhs and crores. I wished then that they all had one head, so I could shoot them all dead at once. But no, no silence for me. How many men had I shot dead? Not as many as these. I could kill one every second for the rest of my life, and still there would be plenty left to drum on my skull with their bleating little voices, their mewling enjoyments. They were as many as the motes of silver dust in the yellow bar of light that crossed over my head from the glass of the window. They were inescapable.

  Why did the room smell of mogra? That was the attar that Salim Kaka wore, that he had on that night when I killed him for his gold, that he sprayed over his beard and chest from a green glass bottle before he went off to one of his women. I remembered the way he would tilt his head back and shake the bottle over his neck, and then the thick oily smell of the attar. And his underarms, shaved clean, and the pink of his gums and his great white teeth.

  The room was sealed shut, there were no flowers near by, I knew that. And yet, there was this fragrance, dense and inescapable. I propped myself up on an elbow, took a sip of water, lay down again. And there it was, at the back of my throat and deep in my head, this mogra. I opened my eyes.

  But what was that in the corner, caught by the edge of the window’s glow? A silky red sleeve, a shoulder. Yes. A beard. Long hair, down to the thick nape of the neck. It was Salim Kaka. I had shot the bastard in the back and he had come back. My hands were shaking, and a hum rose in my head higher than the din outside. It was Salim Kaka, it was him. I could see his eyes. Gaandu Pathan. ‘You think I’m scared of you, bhenchod?’ I said. He said nothing. But he wouldn’t blink, and his contempt for me was bright and hard and unwavering.

  Then he was gone, and there was only a window, and a red curtain. I got up and staggered over, I put out a hand and touched the wall with the tips of my fingers. I could see how the curtain, viewed from the bed and in this uncertain light, might have twisted and transformed into an arm. But I had seen his face, those paan-stained lips, and I had seen those deep collarbones. Those huge hands.

  No, no, no. You are going crazy, Ganesh Gaitonde. It is lack of sleep and exhaustion that has made you weak, that has reduced you to madness. I pulled my shoulders back straight, and walked rapidly from one side of the room to the other. Breathe, I told myself. I sat cross-legged on the ground, at the foot of the bed, and practised the breathing that Guru-ji had taught me. I let the anxiety flow out with each exhalation, I took in energy. Slow, slow. It was only a hallucination. Yes. But I could still smell the mogra.

  He had been here, in my room. It was lunacy to believe this, but I knew it was true. Salim Kaka had been a great believer in magic himself, and he had visited a malang baba in Aurangabad every two or three months. The malang baba had given him a red taveez to wear around his neck, and a blue one for his right arm, all to protect him from knife and gun. But Salim Kaka had fallen to my bullets, and I had stolen his gold, and now I was madder than Mathu. I knew myself to be deranged, and yet I knew Salim Kaka had visited me. Maybe the malang baba had sent him back, to make that doglike leer at me.

  We left the next day, for Chennai. As the plane took off over the low green hills, the business-class cabin reeked sweetly of Salim Kaka. He was coming with me, wherever I went. Now that Guru-ji had abandoned me, the malang baba could work his spells on me. He could send Salim Kaka thousands of feet up into the air, and across the ocean. I tried to ignore the smell, and concentrate on my planning. For a while I had thought that our disruption of Guru-ji’s ashrams and their functioning would bring him out of hiding, that he would emerge to punish me and protect his people. But now, in the air, looking down on the fields far below, it became clear to me that a man who saw into the past and future, who conceived of time in yugas, who saw how the centuries whirled according to some secret plan, who had detached himself from his own desires and ego, such a man would care nothing if a mere organization fell apart, if one or two men were killed. He didn’t care what I did. Whatever gestures of affection he had made towards me, he did not care for me. I was nothing to him. He flew far above the highest flight of any jet, and looked down on us as if on ants. By the time we landed, I was sure that our strategy had been a failure. But I had no alternative scheme, and so I kept quiet. We went to our safe house, we waited for nightfall, we executed our break-in at an administrative office. But we found nothing, as I expected. And Salim Kaka stayed with me, back to the house and into the dawn. I gagged on my morning milk, which under its almonds had that syrupy stink of flowers.

  The boys looked dejected. They were draped over the sofas and the beds, looking bleary. Bonus or no bonus, it was hard on them to fail miserably time and time again. I was acting the cheerful leader, but my own feeling of hopelessness was bound to infect them. I knew I should be talking to them about our next operation, but my eyes were bloodshot and scratchy, and an ache had seized the left half of my head, and I just didn’t have the energy. Nikhil was leaning back in his chair, his feet up on a balcony railing, leafing listlessly through an old Tamil film magazine that someone had left in the bathroom. He didn’t seem very impressed by the round-faced southern starlets, or the incomprehensible advertisements with bicep-baring men. He put down the magazine on the table, and I picked it up and flipped it open at random.

  Zoya looked up at me from a full-page picture. She wore white and was lit with a silvery glow that made her look very fair and completely innocent.

  She must have been shooting a southern film recently. She was doing films everywhere, actually, and I could see why. She was beautiful. But, oddly enough, I didn’t want her. I no longer
felt that agonized twist in my stomach that she once had called forth by merely sitting still. I looked at her now and I saw that she was perfect, that she had achieved the proportion we had worked so hard towards, that balance of top and bottom, that fine play of light and dark. Even on the cheap paper of the magazine, through the blurry printing, I could see this. And I felt nothing. I didn’t want her, I didn’t love her or hate her. I was indifferent.

  A longing for a talk with Jojo rose through my chest. I felt myself flush, and I got up. ‘I have to make a phone call.’ I left them all behind, and shut the door to my bedroom, and dialled Jojo. She woke from sleep, husky-voiced and bad-tempered.

  ‘What do you want, Gaitonde?’ she said. ‘In the middle of the night?’

  ‘It’s eight in the morning. And I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Talk about what, Gai-ton-de?’ she said, with a little wail at the end.

  I didn’t really have a subject that I wanted to talk to her about, I just wanted her voice, her breath. But Jojo’s mornings were just suffering until she had had her three cups of tea, and I knew that if I didn’t give her a good reason for waking her up, she would slam down the phone and curse me besides. I needed to make something up. ‘I am looking for a woman,’ I said.

  ‘Bastard,’ she growled. ‘So call me in the evening.’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ I said. ‘I don’t want a woman, like that. I mean we’re looking for a missing woman. She stole some of our money and ran. We can’t find her. For months we’ve been looking.’

  ‘I know her? What’s her name?’

  I had to come up with a name. The Tamil magazine was lying on the table, fluttering its pages under the swirling fan. ‘Sri,’ I said. ‘Sridevi.’

  ‘What? Sridevi ran away with your money?’

  ‘No, no. Not Sridevi the film star. This is another woman. With that name.’

  ‘So why can’t you find her? You watched her family?’ Jojo yawned.

  ‘She doesn’t have any family. Not married, nothing. We’ve been everywhere she worked, but there’s no sign.’

  ‘So you are stuck, Gaitonde.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘So then you turn to me.’ She was very smug. ‘Did you try kidnapping her boyfriend?’

  ‘She doesn’t have a boyfriend. Or even a girlfriend.’

  ‘What kind of monster is this? No friend, boy or girl.’

  ‘We’ve interrogated people she worked with. No use.’

  Jojo was rattling about now, she was up and moving. I knew her routine, she was shuffling into the kitchen where the maid had put a pot of water on the gas the night before. Jojo would light the gas without opening her eyes hardly, and reach for a mug of milk that was kept ready on the top shelf of the fridge. There it was, the click of the gas-lighter. ‘Okay, so you have no other information about this Sridevi. After all this searching, your entire company has found nothing.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I told you your employees are fools.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Many times.’

  ‘Give a boy a ghoda, doesn’t make him smart. Just makes him a chutiya with a gun.’

  ‘Saali, this is how you help? Get back to Sridevi.’

  ‘Okay.’ She was leaning on the counter, I knew, waiting for the water to boil. She was cracking elaichis now, three of them. ‘What is her native place?’

  ‘She doesn’t have one.’

  ‘Everyone has a native place.’

  ‘Hers is gone. It’s in Pakistan. But why?’

  ‘Your brain is also turning into falooda, Gaitonde. People are fools, you know that. They all want to go home. They always do it, even when they know they shouldn’t.’

  This was true. Keep an eye on a man’s village, and sooner or later you got him. Plant an informant in his locality, and one day you could put a round in the back of his head. The police did this all the time, and I had done this. Jojo was right, human beings were stupid, they circled round and around and finally came back to where they started, as if pulled back by the steady tug of an inescapable cord. But what if your home was gone, if there was nowhere to go to? Where would you go? ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘That’s not a bad idea. It’s a possibility.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You think about it. Now let me drink my chai in peace.’

  But I didn’t let her go, not yet. I kept her on the phone and talked to her about her production troubles, and her bai who had an alcoholic husband, and the increasing pollution in the city. ‘I’m hanging up,’ I finally said a full half-hour later, by which time she had finished her chai and was ready to bathe and work. I was feeling more settled, now that I had a direction. I called Nikhil in, and we got to work. We had accumulated papers and documents during our raids, and had seized two laptops. We had information. There was too much of it, actually, two suitcases full and whatever else was on the computers. I explained to Nikhil, and instructed him, and we began to sift through everything. The problem, of course, was that we didn’t know what we were looking for. ‘Home,’ I told Nikhil, ‘any place where he would go home to.’ He looked puzzled, but only as much as I was myself. Where would a man like Guru-ji go? Chandigarh? But we had already been there, and had found nothing. So where would he go? And for that matter, where would I go, or Jojo? Where do you go when home has become impossible? I had no answers, but we kept looking. It took us five days of searching, and then Nikhil found it.

  In Guru-ji’s personal account ledgers for the current year and the year before, there were entries for ‘Bekanur Farm’. Eighty-four thousand and one lakh thirty-four thousand, on the credit side. We didn’t have the records for the five years before that, but there was another entry in the one prior year we could find, for a cheque written – again on Guru-ji’s personal account – for a ‘Tractor for Bekanur Farm’. And there was a letter on one of the computers, from the current year, to the Punjab State Electricity Board about arrears for Bekanur Farm. This letter was signed by none other than Anand Prasad, our recent sadhu friend. What was a high-up in the organization, a supremo like Anand Prasad, doing writing to PSEB about a matter of two lakhs and some odd thousand? What was this farm anyway? We searched all the public literature available about Guru-ji, and found nothing. There was no mention of a farm fifty miles south of Amritsar, not a word about any farm at all. Certainly he had never said anything to me about owning a farm. There was of course his interest in rural development, in agricultural progress, but that was handled by another sub-division altogether. Their agricultural department had a separate organizational structure, a separate chain of command and separate bank accounts. This Bekanur was something else altogether, it was handled by Guru-ji himself and his very closest associates. And it was kept, as much as possible, a secret.

  We went to take a look at this farm. I told the boys that this was our last leg on this journey, that whether we found success or not, we would call a halt to the mission afterwards. They were cheered and relieved, and we landed in Amritsar energized and ready to go. We followed our usual procedure and proceeded to the prearranged safe house in two groups, had a late breakfast, and collected our car and were ready to go. The morning was bright and hot, and I was dozy in the front seat of the car. Nikhil was driving. Behind us, the boys were arguing about the gold in the Golden Temple, how much exactly there was and what it was worth. Jatti, who was a Punjabi but who had only been to Punjab once before, was telling them with authority that the gold was worth arabs, not crores. The others were scoffing, and Chandar wanted to go to Jallianwalla Baug. ‘Since we’re here anyway,’ he said.

  We’re not tourists, I wanted to tell him, but it would have taken too much energy to make the words emerge from my half-sleep. Besides, I was being a bit of a tourist myself. I found myself entertained by the handsome swagger of these Punjabis, their aggressive stares, and their loud voices. There was a sardar outside a garage that was on our left now, his hair piled up into a big uncovered knot on the top of his head, talking into a mobile phone. He raised his
kurta to scratch at his navel as we passed, revealing a full and hairy belly. He was smiling. Maybe that was his garage, and the big pink-and-green house behind it was his, complete with satellite dish and Toyota in the driveway and a watchman with a rifle. Amritsar was a dingy little provincial town, but there was money here, and a lot of guns. A police jeep overtook us, and the three constables in the back all cradled jhadoos in their laps, with double magazines taped together. I hadn’t seen so many automatic weapons on the street, on any street, not ever. In my car there was the smell of mogra. I closed my eyes, and opened them to find us racing through sarson fields, behind a truck brimming with steel rods. There were tigers painted on its back panels, and a goddess in the middle.

  ‘We’re almost there, bhai,’ Nikhil said.

  He turned off to the left, down an embankment. The road narrowed now, and we bumped and swayed over a flowing canal. ‘We’re in the proper dehat now,’ Chandar muttered. ‘Look at the dehatis.’ There were two men walking in the middle of the road, leading a bullock. Nikhil honked, and very slowly they moved aside to let us squeeze past. They bent a little to stare into the car as we went by. Villagers all right, and prosperous ones. The land here was lush and ripe, and I could hear a water-pump thumping not far away. We drove on. We had to ask for directions once, at a fork in the road, from a young couple on a motorcycle. The wife kept her red dupatta tight on her head by biting down on one end of it, but I could see she was a fine, strapping piece. The boys thought so too, I could tell from the strained, attentive silence behind me. The husband was stringy and unkempt and altogether unimpressive, but his directions were good. We got to Guru-ji’s farm just after two.

  There was no steel fence around these fields, and no gates. Just green swathes of wheat, and well-kept bunds lined with trees. A house glimmered white through an orchard. ‘Mango,’ said Jatti as we neared the orderly rows. The road was smooth now, unfinished gravel that crunched under the tires. A peacock called, and I saw a hint of its sudden rush through the trees. Then we turned around a thick, ancient neem, and we were at the house.