Sacred Games

  It was a single-storey building, sprawling and wide. There were no windows along the front wall, which was broken only by a tall archway that led into a small open veranda. The doors in the archway were green and massive and heavy, with a smaller portal let into the one on the left, only wide enough to let a single man through. This was open, and Nikhil rattled the lock-chain hanging next to it. ‘Arre,’ he called. ‘Koi hai?’

  But the only reply came from the pigeons walking along the rafters in the archway. I leant in through the door. A cow and her calf munched happily in a stall to the left. Straight ahead, four brick steps led to a landing, which faced a single room. I could see an old-fashioned takath and two chairs, and a big round clock. The air was fresh and heavy with that old smell of cow-dung and bhoosa. The plaster on the walls facing the landing was cracked, and the bricks in the veranda were worn smooth. This was an old house, old and also old-fashioned. Near the cow-stall, water dripped from a hand-pump and tapped steadily on the iron drain-cover below.

  ‘Are you sure we’re in the right place?’ I said to Nikhil.

  He pointed to the far end of the landing. Behind a pillar, a ramp went up the stairs, just wide enough for a wheelchair. So yes, this was maybe Guru-ji’s place, but it was nothing like anything else that he had built, that we had seen. What was it, exactly? Nikhil rattled the chain again.

  A blast from the car horn made us jump. Jatti was standing next to the car, grinning. He sent up a series of blaring honks, and I shouted at him. ‘Enough, maderchod,’ I said, and he stopped with a hurt look on his face. The quiet was astonishing, after that din, and the pigeons fluttered nervously in the veranda. Then we heard a shuffle, and a man turned the corner of the building.

  He was old, at least seventy, this I could tell straightaway from his stiff-kneed gait. When he came closer I realized he was eighty, if anything. He was wearing baggy white pyjamas, a tattered orange sweater and a grey scarf wrapped tight up to his ears. He peered at us through thick, black-rimmed glasses. There was a crack straight through the middle of the left lens.

  ‘Hain?’ he said.

  ‘Namaskar,’ Nikhil said. ‘Namaste. Are you the malik of the house?’

  That was obvious flattery, this budhau was far from being the owner of anything. But the old man took it in with a smile. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I am the manager.’

  ‘The manager,’ Nikhil said, mocking the man’s Punjabi – ‘munayjer’ – but only gently. ‘Yes. Can we have some water? We’ve driven all the way from Amritsar.’

  He gave us steaming hot chai. He took us inside, seated us in the room next to the veranda, and emerged fifteen minutes later with brass tumblers and a big, blackened pot. He poured us the chai, half a glass each, and only then asked us who we were. Nikhil gave him some story about how we were businessmen from Delhi, and how we were looking for good farmland to purchase. And that someone on the main road had told us about this mango orchard, and the farm, so we had come to take a look. And, by the way, who is the owner of this fine property?

  ‘Saab comes from Delhi,’ the man said.

  ‘And his name?’

  ‘My name is Jagat Narain.’

  ‘Yes, Jagat Narain. You make good chai.’ Nikhil took a long slurping gulp, and looked wholly appreciative. ‘And Saab’s name is?’

  ‘Which Saab?’

  This was going to take a long time. I got up and edged out of the door. At the side of the landing there was a door leading into a dark passageway. I groped through the hall, and came out on the other side into a large brick-lined courtyard. There was a tulsi bush at the exact centre, and rooms along all four sides. I walked along the periphery, pushing doors open. They creaked open to reveal bare floors, old wooden cupboards, simple shelves built into whitewashed walls, saggy charpais covered with rough blankets. In one room there was a black table-fan on a wooden desk, and bottles of blue and red ink and a green fountain pen. I walked on. Along one entire side of this inner square, there was a large hall, open to the courtyard. The floor was covered with chatais, and there was a row of round pillows against the far wall. In little alcoves, there were pictures of Ram and Sita, and Hanuman, and a bespectacled, grandfatherly man in a turban. I stooped closer to this last black-and-white photo, and saw a clear resemblance to Guru-ji. Who was he, Guru-ji’s father or grandfather? An uncle?

  I turned to the right, to the kitchen and three other rooms. A sparrow walked along the edge of the little platform where the tulsi grew, and the sun came into my eyes. The kitchen was dark, hung with brass utensils, and had two blackened chulahs on the floor. No stoves, no gas range. There were two more rooms with beds, and a storeroom that contained only three empty steel trunks. I came back out into the sunlight. I was shivering a little, and my mouth was dry. What was this place? In a corner behind the kitchen there was another hand-pump, the bricks beneath it smeared wet. I put my weight on the handle and pumped, and with a couple of tinny creaks a shiny rope of water dropped and splattered. I drank, leaning down into the flow. The water was chilled and pure.

  Nikhil came through the passageway now, feeling his way with a hand on the wall.

  ‘There’s nothing back here,’ I told him. ‘Empty rooms, everything is old. This place barely has electricity.’

  ‘But it was only built twelve years ago, bhai.’ He was uneasy and excited too. ‘His saab lives in Delhi, goes by the name of Mrityunjay Singh. They bought the farm at the height of the Punjab troubles, got it cheap. Then they broke down the perfectly good house that was already here, dug up even the foundations. Then some years later they built this thing. This saab visits maybe once a year. I asked about the ramp outside. He said that was for a friend of Saab’s who comes in a wheelchair, who has come here maybe two, three times. He doesn’t know the wheelchairwallah’s name, everyone just calls him Baba-ji.’

  So Guru-ji had built this house, and then visited it only three times in more than a decade. Why this house, why here? It must have cost more to make it look old than just to build a new and modern house.

  Nikhil pumped some water, drank and wiped his mouth. ‘That tastes very good,’ he said. ‘The manager said this Baba-ji liked to spend time on the roof. The manager’s gone to get the keys, he’ll show it to us.’

  Jagat Narain came into the courtyard, followed by the boys. He was rattling an iron ring hung with large keys. He led us – slowly – up a staircase that angled up from a corner of the courtyard, a staircase also equipped with a ramp. It took him five minutes to find the right key, and then he scraped with it at the door. I stood, feeling my toes on the edge of a stair, taken back suddenly to childhood, to a holiday morning and running up to the roof with a new kite crisp under my fingers. ‘Maderchod,’ I said. ‘Nikhil, take the keys.’

  But then the ancient bastard managed to get the lock open. We scattered out into the bright sunlight. There was one room on the roof, again with the sparse furnishings and the bare shelves. The flat roof went all around the courtyard, with no railing at the inner edge. I walked around to the other side, trying to get my mind to grasp something that endlessly fell just beyond its reach. It was like I had forgotten something I had just known. I could hear Nikhil talking to the manager on the other side of the courtyard.

  ‘We have one thousand one hundred and eleven acres,’ Jagat Narain said. ‘All the way to the main road and beyond it. We go all the way to the fence.’

  ‘What fence?’

  ‘It’s the border fence, boss,’ Jatti said.

  ‘A very long fence,’ Jagat Narain said, nodding. He made a big gesture with both his arms, to take in the entire horizon.

  Jatti explained the fence to Nikhil, with proprietary Punjabi pride. It was thousands of kilometres long, it went all the way from Rajasthan to Punjab and up beyond, into Jammu. Jatti had seen it on his last and only visit to Punjab, at Wagah. It was a double fence, much taller than a man and electrified. There were bells hung on it, to warn of infiltrators. Jatti’s chacha had seen a Pakistani infiltrator who
had been shot as he tried to cross one night. The machine-gun bullet had taken his face off. Jatti made a clawing motion in front of his face. ‘Do you understand?’ he said. ‘The bastard had no face left.’

  I leaned on the parapet, trying to see this deadly fence. But there was only a soft white haze beyond the arc of the earth, far on the other side of the trees. Jagat Narain lumbered over to stand beside me. ‘Baba-ji looks also.’

  ‘Looks at what?’

  ‘Out there. He likes to sit here in the evenings. Watch the sun going down.’

  What did Guru-ji see when he looked? It was pretty enough, even now. At sunset it must be beautiful. But there were beautiful sunsets elsewhere. Why come out here, to the middle of nowhere, and spend good money on all this land, and on an old house that was new? I half-shut my eyes and tried to see as he did. Here was an endless blur of green, the smell of earth, the sound of running water, and I saw the house of my childhood, and for a moment I was happy. My eyes snapped open, and I found that I was smiling.

  Why?

  But there was no time to ponder this mystery: a man was pedalling his bicycle furiously up the road towards us. As he came closer I saw that he was young, thirty maybe, and he was tall. ‘Who is this?’ I said to Jagat Narain. The bicycle man was glaring up at me as he pumped away, and he was not happy.

  ‘That’s only Kirpal Singh. He was at the Tupa Nahar fields today. We are spraying there for Karnal Bunt.’

  Kirpal Singh was now at the front of the house. He flung down his bike, and a few moments later we heard him pounding up the stairs. He came out on to the roof already shouting, ‘Jagate! Who are these people?’ Nikhil began his looking-for-farmland-to-buy story, but Kirpal Singh wasn’t having any of it. ‘Saab,’ he said, his chest heaving, ‘you must leave. Nobody can come on to this farm without permission from our saab.’ He gave Jagat Narain a bitter look.

  ‘They are from Delhi also,’ Jagat Narain said, as if that explained everything.

  Close up, this Kirpal Singh was a big, rough-cut ruffian, with hair that spiked straight up into a big bush, and he gestured with dirty, cracked hands at least double the size of mine. He was wearing a worn grey Pathani suit, and despite the layers of grime on him, he had the bearing of a policeman, or a jawan.

  ‘Listen, my friend,’ Nikhil said. ‘Calm down. Call your saab on the phone and we’ll talk to him.’

  ‘There is no phone here, saab.’ He was very direct and firm and aggressive, under his thin politeness. ‘Now you go.’

  ‘I have a phone. I have a good signal.’ Nikhil held up his handy. ‘See? We can talk to him. What is his number?’

  ‘The farm is not for sale. You go now.’

  Kirpal Singh was crouched a little now, his shoulders hunched up. He was ready for a fight. I gave Nikhil the nod. ‘Fine, yaar, fine,’ he said. ‘We will go. No problem. Thank you for the chai. Here is my number, give it to your saab if he’s interested.’

  He offered a card, and held it up until Kirpal Singh reluctantly took it. Then we filed down the stairs. I could feel the big lout looming behind me, breathing heavily. He was agitated, but about what? Why was he so nervous? He followed us all the way out, through the passageway and into the front veranda, and through the gate. Nikhil started the car, turned it around, and I waited, standing close to the wall. To my right, Kirpal Singh’s bicycle lay on the ground, where he had thrown it. A large square can of pesticide was tied to the carrier with rope. There was a skull and crossbones on the can, in red. And a red rat, dead, upside down with his tail curled over him. ‘They eat the crops?’ I said to Kirpal Singh. ‘The rats?’

  He looked relieved, now that the boys were getting into the car. ‘Yes, saab.’ He was trying to make up for his rudeness. ‘Not only the wheat. They eat everything. Plants, rubber. The cables for electricity also, they eat the plastic from them. Very hard to stop them.’

  ‘Kill them all,’ I said, and he finally smiled. I got into the car and we drove away.

  Nikhil was looking into the rear-view mirror. ‘What do you think, bhai?’

  ‘There’s something there.’

  ‘Yes. If it was just a farmhouse, that bastard wouldn’t be threatening to bite us like that.’

  We’d given the farmhouse a cursory going-over, and found nothing. Was it worth going back, and worth dealing with Kirpal Singh, to search it thoroughly? I felt strangely dispirited. The road rolled on, and maybe it was better to take it all the way back to Amritsar, and then catch a plane to Delhi and on to Bangkok, and go back to my life. But that was unbearable. I had no life to go back to, not until I had found Guru-ji. Even now, even after all my rage at him, all I wanted was to sit at his feet again. I knew this. I might curse him and call him a fraud, and say that I was done with him, but what I really wanted was to feel his hand cupping my head, and the blessing of his voice. I had questions, yes. I wanted to ask him why he had left, why Gaston and Pascal had died, what he had had us transport for him, what he was doing, what his plan was. The meaning of my life was somehow hidden in these questions. But if he refused to give one single answer, I would accept that, as long as he came back to me. As long as he didn’t leave me like this, just me, without him, without guidance and care. I had to find him. But Guru-ji was too advanced for me, too realized. With all my lifetime’s worth of learned lessons, and my cunning, I would never find him. I could let it go, and ride on, and away. But why was I afraid? If I had learnt anything from my life, it was to trust my fear. And yet: I was so tired. The road raised itself above the fields, and the deep waves of green came one after another. I could sleep. The power cables swept gently up, down. They came towards me, carrying diamonds of light from the dropping sun. The rats ate them. The rats ate cables.

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  ‘Bhai?’

  The car was halted now, near the canal. Above the gurgling of the water, I could hear a very soft wind as it stirred slow waves through the bending stalks of wheat. I twisted in my seat and looked back down the road, at the electricity posts that disappeared into the distance. There was a string of them that angled off from this road towards Guru-ji’s farmhouse, that marched through the fields and past the mango orchard. On the roof, yes, on the roof of the house there was a pole above that single room, a pole at which three power lines terminated. If the house was so old, with its creaky table-fans, why did it need so much power? I hadn’t seen any power cables anywhere in the interior of the house, so what were those rats eating?

  I turned to Nikhil, and told him all this. ‘Yes, bhai,’ he said. ‘But maybe they need the electricity for irrigation. Water pumps and all that, you know.’

  Maybe. Maybe. But there was this new house which only looked old. ‘Turn around,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back.’

  So we went skimming back past the mango orchard, as evening came on. Kirpal Singh came out to meet us, this time. He stood in the middle of the road, legs apart. Nikhil stopped the car, and I got out. I heard the other doors clicking open behind me. ‘Arre,’ I said, ‘did you find my spectacles? Black ones.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No spectacles.’

  ‘Let’s look,’ I said. ‘They may be on the roof.’

  Kirpal Singh was confused. He didn’t want us back here, but he didn’t like the idea that something of mine was maybe in the house he was guarding. He was a nice brute. I took him by the arm. ‘I can’t see without my glasses, yaar. I’m half-blind.’ I turned him back towards the gate. ‘Just let’s take a look.’

  He was stupid, but he was fast. Chandar had come up on his right, and our timing was exact. We had done this so many times in the past weeks that we had practised it to perfection. I would talk to the mark, and distract him just enough so that Chandar could lay his iron-loaded leather cosh along the back of the head. But Kirpal Singh anticipated it, and flinched away from me and turned, so that the blow took him on the kan-patti and half-tore his right ear off. He fought like a demon then. There were five of us on him, and he took us down and gave us pain. He
broke three of Chandar’s fingers, knocked Nikhil back and almost out with a single punch that cracked his nose. Jatti stayed on the ground, hacking and coughing and clutching his neck. We fought him. I found myself sitting on the road, empty of breath and hurting in the abdomen, scrambling back away from the heaving welter of bodies. I got my pistol out, but couldn’t get a clear shot. Then Kirpal Singh was coming at me. I had time for one squeeze of the trigger, and that knocked his collarbone and twisted his lunge to the side. He still got his right hand on me, though, and I felt his weight on me and his mouth was gaping, terrible and crimson. I felt the shots hit his body, the impact through the muscles, and he was lying on me.

  They lifted him off, and I staggered to my feet. ‘How many shots?’ I said.

  Jatti was wheezing, his face wet with tears. ‘That gaandu was a commando or something.’

  ‘Four shots, bhai,’ Nikhil said. His white shirt was stained all the way to the waist with blood from his nose.

  Four was a lot of shots, but it was a big farm. Maybe nobody had heard us. Maybe nobody would pay attention. ‘Jatti,’ I snarled, ‘get into the house and keep the old man quiet.’

  ‘Bhenchod,’ Jatti said, his eyes going wide. He ran to the house.

  The rest of us took hold of Kirpal Singh and dragged him through the gate. He weighed on all of us, weakened as we were by our sudden injuries. I could hear the shudder in Chandar’s breathing as each step jarred his broken bones.

  ‘Hold on, beta,’ I told him. ‘We’ll be out of here soon.’ We threw the body down by the cowshed. I told Chandar to kick some gravel over the blood on the road, and keep a lookout from the gate. Then the rest of us began our search of the house. Jatti had found Jagat Narain in the courtyard, blithely washing dishes next to the pump. He must have heard the shots, but apparently they didn’t make much of an impression. We locked him inside one of the empty rooms, and told him to go to sleep. Then we looked.