Sacred Games

  ‘And they will believe you, Ganesh? A gangster who has told a hundred lies to them, killed a thousand men?’

  ‘I’ll kill more of your sadhus.’

  ‘They all must die some day. What difference is a few days?’

  I had nothing more to threaten him with.

  ‘What difference is a few days for any of this, Ganesh?’ he said. ‘The sooner the end comes for this filth we live in, the better. Think of the future, Ganesh. The future. What comes afterwards.’

  And then there was a click, and he was gone.

  The cars sped by me, bleeding their trails of light in the dusk. I felt as if I was falling. Then, in that moment, I didn’t think of my boys or millions of people or the country or the world. I thought only of me. That faint metallic snap in my ear sliced through my neck and into my stomach, and left me alone. I knew he wouldn’t come back. I wouldn’t find him, and he would not call me again. I was alone. Once again, I was Ganesh Gaitonde setting out into an unknown world, a knife hidden under my shirt. There was bile rising into my mouth. I turned my head and spat, and brownish liquid trickled down the low white wall that ran along a pavement. I watched it flow, and again there was a rupture inside me, an endless, raw-edged chasm, and I was falling into it. I was alone. Across the road, smoke drifted up from a pile of rubbish. I was seized by a violent shaking, a trembling in my legs and arms and shoulders. I stumbled to the car, and got in. The driver carefully avoided looking at me, and we went on. I lay in the rear seat, holding myself.

  The new safe house in Juhu was an apartment on the top floor of a two-storey bungalow overlooking the beach. Bunty had put a team on guard, and the place had been swept and secured. The boys took me on a tour of the place and showed me the two rear exits, down separate staircases, which were also watched over. I went up to the top floor, and I shut two doors and let myself collapse on to the bed. You’re exhausted, I told myself. All that travelling for weeks and weeks, the anxiety of the hunt, the changes in water and food. You need to rest. But I was still shaking, I was full of a wild energy that raced under my skin and made it itch and twitch. And there was that smell. Not just mogra this time, but something smouldering underneath, the heavy bulk of burning flesh. Some bastard must have tossed a dead rat or something into a bonfire on the beach. I’d send the boys out and get the maderchod fixed. I staggered over to the window. No, there was no fire, nothing but the waves drumming evenly on the sand. But these windows. There were windows along the entire sea-facing wall, from floor to ceiling. And more windows along the other wall, facing another building across the road. What sort of safe house was this? Suleiman Isa and his entire organization could watch me from that other roof. The police could station a battalion of snipers on the beach, to take off my head. I called down to the boys. Bastards, come close these windows.

  I had them close and bolt the windows, and draw the curtains. Still there was that funereal stench of flowers and flaming meat. I shouted for the boys again. I had them bring up electrician’s tape and seal all the edges of the windows. They were baffled, and despite their fear of me, and the years of respect, there were some who couldn’t hide their scepticism, and their amusement. I didn’t care. I told them to go out on the beach and look for a bonfire, and to look in the compounds of all the buildings around us. Extinguish any fire you find, I told them, stamp it out. They nodded, yes, bhai, yes, bhai, and they shuffled out. I shut the door and put wide black swathes of tape over all the chinks and gaps and the keyhole. Then I dragged an armchair over to the exact centre of the room and sat, holding my ankles. No question about it, the smell was still in the room. Give it some time, I thought, let the contamination in the room die out, and you will be delivered from it. So I let the minutes sag by, and took in slow breaths. I shut my eyes and practised my pranayama. I wanted calm, all I wanted was a small portion of peace. But there was light pressing up against my eyes, flares of carroty orange against a lighter background of saffron. It was dark in the room, the curtains were golden and thick, some kind of brocade. Where did this light come from? And then I thought of how fragile this building was, how brittle was the glass in the windows. I may as well be sitting cross-legged on top of my funeral pyre, waiting to be blown back into death by my enemies, by whatever disaster was just now heaving itself over the horizon. I had to protect myself.

  Bunty had his handy switched off. I must have called him thirty times over the next two hours, only to get the same bhenchod voice with its purring foreign accents. He finally called back, in a panic. ‘Sorry, bhai, sorry. I just had it on vibrate, and it was under a shirt and things. Sorry. Really sorry.’

  The bastard’s legs didn’t work, but another piece of him was still half-functional. It turned out that he had been with a sixteen-year-old girl, and needed to concentrate so much that he forgot his job and his obligations. I educated him again in the requirements of his position, gave him a rundown on the sort of careless chutiya he had become, and told him what I wanted. And then he became even more of a cringing dog. He confessed that he didn’t have the keys for my underground shelter, for the safe house I had built for Jojo in Kailashpada. He had some long story about how the builders had needed the keys because they had to finish the electrical connections, and they had given it to so-and-so, and this and that. I cut him off, and told him that I wanted to be in my shelter by nine in the morning, and if I wasn’t he would lose something else besides his legs.

  ‘But, bhai,’ he said, ‘don’t you want to go home?’

  ‘Home? What home?’

  ‘Thailand, bhai. The yacht. Now that the mission is over.’

  I told him to mind his own business, and slammed down the phone. Should I go across the waters again? Far away, to safety. But where was safety? I could go to New Zealand, or to some rocky island beyond, yes, sure. But when the burning came, when Guru-ji’s great destruction swept along the seas, what would be left?

  I walked the perimeter of my room, clenching and unclenching my hands, trying to take the cramps out of my shoulders. Where would home be when home was gone? Could you have a home away from home when there was no home? What would you long for, what would you dream of when you settled into sleep? When somebody asked, where do you come from, what would you say? No, I couldn’t go anywhere, I couldn’t leave. I would stay right here, close to the field of battle, in it, and I would stop Guru-ji. He was confident that I couldn’t stop him – ‘You can’t stop it’ – but I was Ganesh Gaitonde. He could see forwards and backwards in time, but I had escaped fate many times. I had beaten what was written, I had changed it. I had survived. Now I would survive again. I would save my home. And to do that I needed to be completely safe.

  Bunty beat his deadline by three hours. He called at six, and had me picked up at six-thirty. I hadn’t slept at all, but I felt strong and alert as we drove through the stirring, stretching city. I watched as an auto driver uncurled himself out of the back seat of his rickshaw, as a mother hurried her stumbling son towards a public toilet. Elderly people walked in a garden, swinging their arms briskly. There was sun on the very tops of the trees. A bhajan was playing on some radio channel, and we heard scattered snatches of it from a long row of kholis as we passed.

  Then we took a left turn and drove up to a market square. The shops were still mostly shut. One yawning seth and his boy assistant struggled with a shutter, and they paid us no attention as we parked next to the white cube in the middle of an empty plot. I ran a hand over a faultless white wall as we went up to the door, and felt better already. I remembered the specifications, the exact hardened thickness of its walls, and the cost of the cement we had used. One of Bunty’s boys rattled the key in the door, until I grew irritated and took it from him. It was a computer-cut key, with little dimples on both sides, and once you slid it in half-way you had to give it half a turn to the left. Then with a little push inwards, it turned like silk. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Tell Bunty I’ll call him.’

  ‘Bhai, if you need anything else…’


  I shut the door – I had to lean into the weight of it with my shoulder – and stood in complete, welcome darkness. There was a low hum of well-tuned machinery in my feet, but the squawking of crows outside was gone, cut short. From the blueprints, I knew exactly where the light-switch was, to my right on the wall, but I didn’t want to reach over. For the moment, I was content to swim in this safety, to know that nothing could reach me here. My mind stilled, and I stood.

  I jerked out of my reverie suddenly. I didn’t know how long it had been, a minute or half an hour. I hadn’t quite slept, but I had rested somehow. I willed myself into movement, switched on the light and pulled up the metal trapdoor in the middle of the room. A short ladder led down into the control room. Everything was as I had planned, the multiple video screens and the computers, the radios and the gas masks. The builders and technicians had followed the instructions precisely, down to the dry fruit stores and sealed bottles of water. There was a small gymnasium, and a shelf of DVDs, of old Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar films. A steel cabinet contained ranks of weapons, AK-56s and Glocks. A man could live here.

  So I did live in my home, my house beneath the earth, for two weeks. I communicated with Bunty and the boys, and took calls from Nikhil in Thailand every morning and evening, and conducted business with Brussels and New York. The boys brought my files over, and all important incoming documents were handed over to me as they arrived. Everything was as before, except that I was not floating about on some foreign sea, or flying from one alien city to another. I did my work, safe in Mumbai’s belly. Not that I was complacent about being back home. I followed all security procedures, and I wore a comfortable nylon shoulder holster always, with a readied Glock 34 in it. I was in a combat zone, and I protected myself.

  But I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, or on the ground, or on a special body-conforming mattress that Bunty’s boys brought me, and none of these gave me a moment of slumber. I ate handfuls of Calmpose and Mandrax, and a bottle of Ambien was specially flown in from New York. But even the American pills couldn’t drag me down into unconsciousness. All I could fight my way to was a twilight between wakefulness and sleep, a suspended paralysis in which my body was heavy and unmovable, but my mind was still awake and aware. Through half-open eyes, I watched driblets of fire crawl up the wall. I knew there was no fire, that what looked like sparks were reflections from the computer monitors and the little red lights on the disk drives, but even when the effects of the chemicals wore off, I could still smell – yes – the mogra and the burnt bodies. I consoled myself with the thought that the air-exchange systems couldn’t completely scrub the city odours away. After all, the carbon filters weren’t creating new air, they couldn’t get out what was already in, at the very deepest levels. What I was smelling was the pollution of the millions above me, the effluvium of their living. From this there was no escape, there couldn’t be, and I taught myself to get used to it. It was only a sharpness at the back of my throat, a small irritation in my eyes. I was Ganesh Gaitonde, I had suffered greater pains.

  I couldn’t get used to the worry, though. Being awake through the day and the night gave me time to sit around and think. Long after business had been taken care of, after I had gone through my to-do list and my accounts and my planning, I sat in my swivel chair in front of the computers and screens and thought. I was of course trying to debrief myself about my recent search for that bastard who called himself a guru, I painstakingly went through the files and papers we had taken from his offices, I tried to remember exactly each sentence he had uttered during our last conversation. Maybe there was some clue somewhere that I had missed, maybe there was some opening that I could squeeze through. I would turn the thing over, our entire history together, and go back and forth, and finally withdraw defeated. I was beaten. So then I worried. I would distract myself with simultaneous channels of television, news and a film and music all together, and yet the worry welled up from the maps behind the newscasters, and from the dances that the heroines and heroes threw themselves into, and the peace of Lata’s voice.

  ‘What are you worrying about now, Gaitonde?’ asked Jojo. She now finally believed that I was back in some foreign country, because of the quiet I phoned her from. And as always, she could tell my mood from the moment I began to speak, and even before, from my silence.

  ‘About you,’ I told her. It was true. If the war came, I would survive in my shelter. But if Jojo was outside, I would lose her. But how would I live without this voice in my ear, without the knowledge that Jojo knew me? I was feeling alone now as I never had before. I had been by myself in my youth, I was then desperately poor and ignorant and quite alone, but the loneliness had hung lightly on my shoulders, like the swirling, streaming cape of a dashing hero. The screenplay of my life had arced upwards in a single continuous movement, and I had left lovers and yaars and enemies behind without regret. It was necessary. It was an essential part of my character, and without it I could never have become Ganesh Gaitonde. But now Jojo was inside me, and without her I would shatter. I knew it. ‘I worry about you only, Jojo,’ I told her. ‘Kutiya that you are. I don’t know why.’

  ‘You’ve gone senile,’ she said. ‘If you don’t know why, why are you worrying?’

  ‘No, no. I know why I am worrying. Only I don’t know why I’m worrying about you. You’re such a rude, shameless, bad-tempered kutiya.’

  She roared out her laughter, like the beast she was. ‘Arre, Gaitonde, after all these years you still don’t know? You really don’t know? All right, all right, never mind. Let it go. But tell me what the worry is.’

  ‘You need to live in a safer place.’

  At this she became unreasonable, as she always did. She spewed abuse, and told me I needed to get my head checked, or my golis, or maybe both. And then that her life was just fine, her business was good, and she wasn’t scared of anything. And that I needed to get my train off this annoying track or she would have to drive it up my gaand.

  I, by contrast, was completely reasonable. I started to point out the rising crime rate in the city, the worrisome incidence of random robberies, the rapes, and also the aggressive posturing of governments and militant groups, leading to bomb explosions in restaurants, and what this might mean for the situation at the border. At this, she whispered fiercely, ‘I wish they would put one of their bombs inside your head,’ and hung up.

  These days, ever since I had entered the bunker, our conversations seemed to be ending this way more often than ever. We had our usual discussions about the girls Jojo was representing, or the television shows she was producing, and trends in the business climate, but finally I would bring the talk around to the nature of the world we lived in, the mortal dangers it was planning to throw at us. Then, with a groan or a curse or a shout, she would hang up. And I would go back to my worrying.

  Today, I began to consider alternatives for Jojo. I could present her with a shelter that looked like a house, and fool her into safety. But how would I guarantee that she kept the doors closed, and keep her from asking where the windows were? No, no. I flipped channels, and saw an advertisement for exotic foreign holidays. A happy couple walked on a beach. I could send her off to remote locations, give her free first-class tickets to some island in the southern oceans. Yes. Fly her off to some resort with plenty of muscular beach-boys and fancy shopping. Yes, here she was, buying a pair of high-heeled boots. I could see her. She was dressed in a tiny red skirt, and her legs were young and muscular. She had a row of shopping bags behind her, and she was happy. Next to her was a little black handbag, very soft leather. And in the handbag there were two phones, one ordinary mobile that she used for her life, and a red encrypted phone that was her link to me. She was safe and happy, and thinking about this made me content. Even if something happened, if fire rumbled behind the horizon, she would be protected.

  But, but if something happened, if that thing happened, the phones wouldn’t work. There would be no flights, no planes perhaps. All the systems that
ran the planes and the phones would crash. I knew enough now, from the films I had seen and the television shows I had watched, I knew that this complete breakdown was what I should expect. Even the machines that were still working would die from lack of power. That was why we had installed a triple set of generators and batteries for the shelter, in addition to hardened power lines from the mains, and made arrangements for solar power. So Jojo would be on her island, and I in my underground rooms. And between us there would be vast oceans, and merciless sun. In all the years we had been together, I had never minded the distance, because I knew that even if I were walking down some street in Belgium, or flying over an Arabian desert, Jojo was with me. She was always nestling close on my hip, two presses of a button away. I could send her away now, but how would I bring her back? I paced the control room, from end to end, thinking of the effort it required to walk a mile. For years now, distance had meant nothing to me, and I had cared only about time. I had located cities by the number of hours it took to fly a jet from one to another, and had learnt to subtract a day from the date, or add half a night to the morning hour. Now, on the ground under my feet, I saw the long lines of longitude and latitude, I saw them stretching out beyond the walls, I saw the awful arc of the earth, and the rocky void that gaped between Jojo and me. We were so small, and this world was so vast. Without her voice in my ear, I was smaller still.

  I had to bring her in. Yes. She would resist, she would be angry at first, but finally she would understand. I would lay out for her the magnitude of the problem at hand, I would convince her of the danger, I would show her the evidence and she would understand. We had always been able to talk, right from the start. She was a stubborn harridan, but she was also reasonable. She was interested in her own interest, and I would show her that it was impossible to remain outside. She would agree.

  I picked up a phone, called Bunty and gave instructions. ‘Get her over here,’ I said.