Sacred Games

  What I wanted was Suleiman’s head, to kick around like a football. But he was safe in Dubai, where he had gone after the Pathans had killed his brother, after he had killed many of them. Bombay had become too dangerous for him, and so he had fled, the bhadwa, but still he ran his operations in the city, through Masood Meetha and others. We were braced for their assault, and for a day we waited, and then sure enough it came. They ambushed three of our boys as they left a relative’s house in Malad. All three of ours died, all three before they could draw their pistols. Ajay Kumble, Noble Lobo, Amir Kenkda. The next day Parulkar’s inspectors were waiting in ambush for our weekly collection run to Darya Mahal Bazaar, where the shopkeepers had their contributions ready. The police party, led by Majid Khan the muchchad, were dressed as labourers. They gave no warning, and fired thirty-four bullets. Vinay Karmarkar, Shailendra Pawar, Ziauddin Qazalbash.

  So we fought Suleiman Isa through the summer, and into the monsoon floods. When we collected our bodies from the morgue, carried them through the white waterfalls of water, it seemed as if we had been fighting them for ever, that the war had always existed. They hurt us, but they couldn’t kill us. And we ate away at them, we bled them a little every day. Meanwhile Paritosh Shah’s Rajhans Airline flew, and he got hair implants because he decided he looked too old on television, and he gave me lectures every day on the power of his dandi-swami. ‘You saw how he answered your need. You asked and he gave. Now how can you not believe?’ I was tempted to believe. But early in my life, I had seen how belief was an inner rot that hollowed out a man and made him a eunuch. I knew faith was a convenient crutch for cowards and weaklings. No, I wanted no such disease inside me.

  So I resisted, I argued coincidence to myself, that the fact that our information had come to us during the puja was clearly a trick of unconnected movements shifting past each other in a way that made sense only to me, random particles bumping themselves into an illusion that seemed like a shape. And what about the thousands of moments in every minute where there were no connections, no sparkling threads of meaning from one event to the next? Paritosh Shah saw Dandi-swami behind the flashing face of every second, he entreated him with gifts and bhajans, and pressured him with stones and charms and secret mantras, and quarrelled with him on occasion. And always he then apologized to Dandi-swami and flew on the wings of his blessings. He was convinced that if only I would let go of my resistance and fall into marriage, I would automatically slide into belief. ‘Once you are well-settled,’ he said, ‘all this nonsense will settle itself also. One-two, like that it’ll happen.’ And he snapped his fingers, one-two. Every day he asked me for my shortlist of girls.

  So the year wore on. September, October. In early November Samant called. We had been doing business all during this struggle and had profited mutually, him in cash, me in dead bodies. But it had become harder for us to meet face to face since we had both been written about in the newspapers. We were trapped by fame. Only Bombay-fame so far, not all-India, but it was enough to make us very careful. So we spoke on the phone, on numbers we changed every week.

  What Samant had to say was simple enough. A month after the seizure of my shipment, the government had distributed monies worth almost a fourth of its value to various officers and a certain anonymous informant. We knew that this unnamed bastard was not Khot or his survivors – we had kept a careful watch on them. So who was it, this gaandu who had taken what was mine? Now Samant had a name: ‘Kishorilal Ganpat’. I knew the name. All of Bombay did. He was a builder, for ten years now he had spread his constructions across the east of the city. From the highway you could see his buildings rearing their heads out of the green fields, above the villages and the old colonies. He was big. There had been talk of his dealings with Suleiman, but their interaction had been just ordinary, of the necessary sort, what any builder would have with Suleiman Isa in the normal course of events. Nothing close, nothing special. We ourselves had talked to Kishorilal Ganpat when he needed some help with clearing slums from four residential plots in Andheri. But if he had taken my money, if he had stolen from me, he was closer to Suleiman than anyone had known. This meant he was a banker for Suleiman, that he ate from the same plate as that maderchod.

  I thanked Samant, and hung up. His reward would follow later, and we had nothing else to talk about. I had the option to swallow this news quietly, to forget that I had heard it, and I also had the option to act. I kept the information to myself, locked it away in my stomach. I wanted to think it over carefully.

  Just before dawn the phone rang again. Another one of ours was dead. This was a boy from Gopalmath itself, a boy I had seen growing up in the lanes I had built. His name was Ravi Rathore, and he had come back on the bus from Aurangabad, where he had relatives. Suleiman Isa’s dogs had picked him up in Dadar at the bus station. An ice-cream-wallah had noticed some pushing and shoving. There had been a black van parked near by. At one in the morning someone had noticed a body in a reeking pile of garbage near the highway in Goregaon East and had made an anonymous call to the police. There was a bullet hole in each of Ravi Rathore’s thighs, and one in his forehead. We brought back the body, to his kholi, in the late afternoon. He had no relatives in Bombay, so I gave the fire to his pyre. The body in its white shroud was tiny under the wood, under the spray of flame. He had been very skinny, Ravi Rathore, with a chest bent inwards, and his favourite belt with heavy silver buckles used to wrap nearly twice around him. When the boys played cricket on Sundays on the sloping pitch close to the hill, running between the wickets made Ravi Rathore heave and pant. Now he was dead. We burnt him and came home. I sat on my chair, on the terrace, and watched the night come again. This valley we live and die in is a valley of light and shade. We flicker in and out of it. How easily Ravi Rathore gave up his small space in it. I turned away tea, and dinner, and remembered a monsoon long ago, and Ravi Rathore’s skinny legs in shorts, paddling in a flooded corner between two twisting lanes. That was what I knew of him, that and his belt and his wheezing enthusiasm for cricket.

  ‘What are you thinking of, bhai?’ said Chotta Badriya. He was sitting on the floor, at the end of the terrace.

  ‘Bachcha, what’s in the boat?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m thinking of Dandi-swami.’

  Chotta Badriya ducked his head down low, rubbed at his ankles. He was trying to decide where my temper was, if he could risk another question. He picked at the roof, took up a flake with his fingernail.

  ‘Leave my house alone,’ I said. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to sink a boat.’

  Kishorilal Ganpat was a great Shiva-bhakta. He thanked Bholenath every morning for all the crores he had swindled, for the bribes he had given, for sand-mixed cement, for shoddy wiring that spilt out of rough-finished walls, for illegal and unlicensed buildings, for encroachments, for extra floors towering far beyond FSI limits, for middle-class money desperate for homes, for starving labour, for slums, for tough, sword-swinging boys, for Suleiman Isa. Kishorilal Ganpat was properly careful in these bad times, so he had two sinewy bodyguards who were so tight-muscled that they walked wide-legged, like somebody had tweaked a rubber band around each of their golis. Kishorilal Ganpat also liked appearances to be just so, so he dressed the driver of his Mercedes in a white suit and a cap, and the two bodyguards in grey safari suits. Kishorilal Ganpat was also a hoarder of time. He collected short-cuts that saved two minutes or three in this jangling maderchod jam of a city, he gave speeches to his employees about Japanese punctuality, he came to the Shiva temple on Satyagrahi Jamunanath Lane every Tuesday morning at eight-thirty precisely, on the ‘dot of the dot of eight-thirty’, as he liked to point out to anyone listening. All of which made the game childishly easy for us. We set up our fielding. Six boys, six Star pistols. We knew where Shiva sat, on his pedestal, we knew the steps that led down to the lane lined with houses and hawkers, we knew where the Mercedes would wait for its master, we knew where the bodyguards would be. It went s
mooth, like an oiled lauda into a wet chut. Kishorilal Ganpat came down the steps, holding his prasad aloft on a special silver thali. He had positioned his shoes pointing outwards at the bottom of the steps, and he stepped into them efficiently, saving a good three seconds. The bodyguards were bent over still, their backs to their boss as they pulled on their sandals, and Kishorilal Ganpat was stepping high, skipping over a puddle of water, when my boy Bunty moved sideways and into his path, and Kishorilal Ganpat turned his head to look, and Bunty raised his right arm and blew out Kishorilal Ganpat’s left eye. One of the bodyguards reached under his shirt and was cut down. The other sat down on the temple steps and never raised his hands from the stone, which he grasped with whitened fingernails. Meanwhile Kishorilal Ganpat staggered and stumbled at the corners of the lane, from door to door, looking for a way out, any way out. Bunty walked after him, squeezing rounds tenderly into his back and buttocks. Finally Kishorilal Ganpat knelt in front of a vermilion door, under an elegantly painted Om in white, his head down and gaand high in the air, his clothes soaked through with blood, quite dead.

  Bunty and the boys walked away, not too fast, not too slow. The exit was as uncomplicated as the job, they got into two cars and left. They then left the two cars on a corner in Malad and got into a van. In three hours they were all out of the city. And those of us who stayed behind grew careful. We knew we had escalated, and so we were prepared. I lived now in three different houses, and went between them at unequal intervals. Paritosh Shah dreamed of flight in a lumbering Mercedes fitted out with armour plate and hardened windows. Chotta Badriya had boys taking strolls through far lanes, watching over our interests. The death of Kishorilal Ganpat moved from the front pages to smaller squares at the back of the newspapers, and then finally disappeared altogether. Apart from two encounters executed by Parulkar’s people, which lost us three boys, life went on as ever before. Don’t get complacent, I told my boys every day. Don’t go to sleep. They aren’t sleeping for sure, they’re preparing something. It’ll come: the axe, the bullet, the fall. It must. We are making war with Suleiman Isa. Suleiman Isa.

  Ganesh Gaitonde: the name had a heft, a certain sturdiness. It stood up straight, it didn’t back down, it was a strong name. In print it had a certain symmetrical solidity, and it rang on the ear like the double clash of a nagada. People trusted it, and people were afraid of it. And yet: Suleiman Isa. All those hissing ‘s’ sounds, they spoke of cunning. Mean, twisty, rat-skinned cunning. Which caught up with us one morning in late November. I was phoned minutes after it happened. Paritosh Shah left the offices of Rajhans Airlines in his impregnable Mercedes. Security guards swung shut the double gates behind the car as it accelerated tank-like down the lane. In the front seat there was a driver, an old trusted employee, and a bodyguard, not Bada Badriya, who was on a week-long holiday in his village in UP, but a stand-in named Patkar. Paritosh Shah sat in the back, entering names into an electronic diary he had received that morning on special order from Singapore. He wanted to do business from the car, make even more money. The lane from Rajhans swung left on to Ambedkar Road. Just as the Mercedes approached the intersection, a van pulled out behind it, and pressed close. And a truck slammed across the lane, blocking the turn, trapping the Mercedes between its side and the van: no way forward, no way back. The van crashed against the back bumper, shoved the Mercedes forward into the truck. Bullets exploded the rear tires. Then there were two men swinging sledgehammers against the Mercedes’ left rear window, which, for all its bullet-proof hardening, starred and curved concave under the blows. The bodyguard had his pistol out, but there was a man pointing an AK-47 at him through the window. To protect Paritosh Shah, Patkar had to lower the window, which would let in the AK-47. The bodyguard pointed his pistol, but the front window stayed up. Meanwhile the sledgehammers crunched on the back window. Paritosh Shah flopped about on the back seat and stabbed his mobile phone with scrabbling fingers. Then, at the top of a large inward bulge in the rear window, a small hole crumbled open under the sledgehammers, a hole about the size of a rupee coin. Enough for a muzzle to press in, a second AK-47. An entire magazine was fired into the car. The bodyguard tried to fire, to shoot at the braying blaze that sprayed into the inside of the Mercedes, but his bullets stopped nothing, and may themselves have bounced around on the inside of the car.

  My boys tried to stop me from going there, from going to my friend. I shoved them aside and drove myself. I was there minutes after the police arrived, and they at least didn’t try to stop me. The rear and side windows of the Mercedes were webbed crystalline, smeared on the inside with a dark jelly. The front left door was open. The driver had survived, and had crawled over the dead bodyguard to get out after the booming fire had stopped. I leaned into the car, rested a hand on the satiny leather of the front headrest, and looked into the leg-space at the back. There was no Paritosh Shah there. There was a mass of deflated flesh, punctured and holed and ripped. There was no face there. Under a broad forehead, a splintered bowl of uncooked meat, shards of sharp white bone. No Paritosh Shah. He could never have fitted into that small flume behind the seat, not Paritosh Shah, not my fat man. But there was a hand with rings, with shiny protective stones. Here was a foot, still in its new tasselled burgundy loafer. He had said that word to me, with much indulgent patience: ‘Not red, bhai, that’s called burgundy. Burr-gandy.’ Here was a styled thatch of dark hair. But where was Paritosh Shah? Not here.

  I went to his house, where the women said nothing to me. Yet I felt their hate. He had died because of me. He had died for me. I had killed him. Nobody dared say it, but it needed no saying. When his body lay in the courtyard, wrapped in white sheets, covered everywhere, while his daughters wailed, nobody said it. Near the heat of the pyre nobody said it. I went back to Gopalmath without hearing it said, and yet it echoed along each whistle of my breath, each squeeze of my pulse. I drank whisky. I told the boys to bring me something, anything, as long as it was here, right now. Now. My throat burnt from the whisky and I saw myself dying. I was knifed, sabred, shot, hanged. My body fell. And then fell again. Bullets separated my elbows, cut my torso in half. I welcomed each fall. Where was death? This life squeezed my head in its iron hoop. Paritosh Shah’s plump flesh emptied of blood, of air. How life lets out. How it goes. Does the spillage make a sound? Or was there only the breaking crack of the bullets? I raised my hand, brought it close to my eyes, pressed my face into the springy growth of hair on the forearm, felt the life in it. Each follicle was alive. A turn of my other wrist broke the whisky glass on a bedpost. With a splinter shaped like a half-moon I cut at the ridge of muscle under my clenched fist. Through the serried stalks of the hair I went, and the blood seeped noiselessly. I turned the arm, and there was the bumping of the pulse on the wrist. Easy to cut, to cease. How easy.

  And then I was disgusted with myself. Paritosh Shah had lived. He had lived fully, he had fed his women, his children, his hundreds of employees. He had fed the world, and even as he had died, he had fought to dial his phone, to say something. He had tried to call me. I knew this. Not his wife, not his children, it was me. What would he have said, through that miraculous leap of electricity, over the distance? Death was already on him, and I could not have saved him. He must have known that. What would he have said, at the end? To me, his friend? I looked into the broken curve of glass, speckled with my blood, and I knew. I crawled to the other end of the bed, found the pile of photographs. From the middle of the stack, without looking, by feel alone, I pulled one. And I called to the boys.

  ‘That’s the one I want,’ I said to Chotta Badriya, who was sitting with half a dozen others, cleaning his pistol. They were all puzzled. They had been expecting a war meeting. Whenever we had lost someone in this fight, after the funeral we always gathered to pick our hits for the next day, the next week. Who to kill, and how, that’s what we talked about. But now I wanted a woman.

  Chotta Badriya picked up the photograph from the table, where I had dropped it. ‘Now, bhai?’


  ‘No, no, not like that.’ I could see he thought I wanted a midnight ride, a quick relieving of my tensions, but this was a respectable-looking girl, and he was puzzled. I thumped him gently on the shoulder. ‘Not that, dhakkan. Paritosh Bhai wanted this. And Dandi-swami. I want to marry her.’

  Her name was Subhadra Devalekar, and I married her four days later. At first, her father thought it callous that I should marry so soon after my friend’s death. I know most of my boys felt this also. But I explained, that this was my friend’s last wish, and then they remembered all his lectures, his shortlist, his nagging. A rumour appeared out of nowhere, and hardened into a certainty, that he had actually called me from the Mercedes, as the hammer-blows had rung on his life, and managed to say to me, ‘You must marry.’ So by the time we walked around the fire, Subhadra and I, our marriage had become an act of adherence to a dead friend’s last wish. The boys came out, in their dozens and dozens, from all over the city, and watched our austere ceremony at Gopalmath temple with moistening eyes, with ready pistols, with ferocious loyalty.

  After the ceremony we sat in front of the house and the people of Gopalmath came to pay their respects. Subhadra’s father collected envelopes. He was a bus conductor who had retired from the 523 route, and he had four daughters. He had been hesitant at first when Chotta Badriya had come calling, after all the afternoon tabloids were still publishing pictures of the ‘Death Mercedes’, but a stack of five-hundred-rupee bricks on his tea tray had persuaded him. Daughters are a care. Now the bus conductor stood to my right and took the gift envelopes from the line of well-wishers. Bada Badriya came forward with a fat red envelope. He had rushed back from his village as soon as we had contacted him, and was still ashamed at letting his boss out of his care, I could see that. But he hadn’t been back to his village for five years, and what had happened was no fault of his. I told him that and hugged him.