Sacred Games

  And yet there were women like Comilla, who, despite all their advantages, made their bargains for another kind of safety, full of lies and drama and half-understood and half-spoken compromises. Did Comilla’s husband know of her affairs? Certainly half the world did, or at least the world that came in and out of the salon. Certainly there were enough women talking to each other about Comilla’s adventures, and to Mary. Maybe he knew. Maybe he knew and looked away, maybe he understood. Mary thought she understood a little herself, but she never mistook this understanding for friendship. Comilla told her all kinds of things, but Mary knew she talked only because leaning back in a chair and offering her head to Mary’s scissors drew them both into a momentary intimacy, a limited closeness that didn’t need the darkness of the confessional box. But the thirty-five or forty thousand rupees that Mary brought home every month didn’t make her a member of Comilla’s social circle, not at all, even if it was more money than some white-collar briefcase-wallahs made. Comilla would sooner call in her driver to sit at her table than invite Mary to one of her dinner parties. Mary was a very good hairdresser, that was all. Mary had no illusions, no fantastic dreams about who she was and what she could become. She had found her place, and made her peace with it.

  A trio of ragged girls passed Mary, their bare feet slapping the pavement, and they surrounded a tall, blond foreigner walking some ten feet ahead. Mary went past him, smiling at the patter of the girls as they held up their open palms to his face. ‘How are you? Uncle, Uncle. Please, Uncle. How are you? Please. Uncle, hungry, hungry. Uncle, food.’ They were jumping up, towards his beaky nose. He looked stricken. All this way he had come, to India, and now he was confronting its fabled poverty, and it had acquired English. The foreigner was shaking his head, no, no, but he had stopped, and Mary was sure that he would reach into his pocket in a moment. A band of little beggar boys streamed past Mary, heading for the foreigner. He’d have them all on his tail now, until he got into a taxi and fled. The privilege of his white skin and money cost him this minor trial, this swirling comet’s tail of the needy. The kids on the sea wall were energetic and persistent, but they had long ago learnt to ignore Mary. She talked to them, but she gave no money, and they were professionals. This was work, and they had no time for idle chatter at this prime hour of evening.

  Twenty minutes of walking had taken her to the far end of the walkway, almost to the Otter’s Club bus stop. Under the deepening black, the low tide had pulled the waves far from shore, leaving a bare scrabble of rock and rubbish. Above it, facing the water, sat Sartaj Singh. Mary averted her face and angled to the left, away. She risked a single glance, quick, and he hadn’t seen her. He was fixed on the stain of last light on the horizon. On she went, to the bus stop, where a bus was just drawing in. She ran the last few yards, and looked again only when she was safely on the bus, looked through the rear window. She could still make him out, alone on the edge of the walkway, his feet dangling over the rocks. She found a seat, and held her small grey purse tightly in her lap. Her pulse was racing, and she knew it wasn’t just from the running. Why had she wanted so much to avoid a conversation with him? She hadn’t done anything wrong. She was guilty of no crime. But he was a policeman, and policemen carried grief with them, like an infection. Better to stay away from them.

  She held on to this relief all the way home, this sense of having escaped an encounter with something turbulent and dark. Even in the brief glimpse she had had of him, she had sensed a coiling sadness. He had been watching the sea and the sky with a questioning, pained tension in his shoulders and neck, as if he expected an answer. Better to run from such a man.

  Mary shut the door to her room behind her, locked and bolted it. She switched on only one lamp, close and low to the wall, so that the shadows held her with a candle-lit cosiness. There was some fish curry left from last night’s dinner, and she made a small bowl of rice with swift efficiency. She ate sitting on the bed, sipping from a large steel tumbler of water that she kept on the bedside table. She liked the animal shows on Discovery channel, the eternal round of birth and migration and breeding. Against the high dome of African sky, even the gory killings of deer and zebras by lions seemed only proper, a necessary link in an enormous cycle of harmony. Mary’s friend Jana, who was addicted to the night-time serials about three-tier families and straying husbands, called her morbid and strange and made her change the channel when she came over. But the ceaseless longings and betrayals of the serials were offensive to Mary, she grew restless and upset and angry. Sharks at least were honest in their appetites, and beautiful besides.

  She washed her plate, and the pots, and then reached to the back of the fridge for her chocolate. She had half a box of rum balls from Rustam’s in Colaba, glorious in their individual gold-foil wrappings. She allowed herself one after dinner, and only she knew what a supreme act of self-control it was not to eat the whole box at once. She took the leftmost ball back to the bed, and turned up the sound on a leopard sliding through brush. The foil came off slowly under the very tips of her fingers, crinkling deliciously, so delicate. Then there was the golden waft of the cocoa, and she inhaled it deeply, and then tilted her head away so that she could come back to it anew. The first bite was always a small one, just a little nip so that her palate pinged from the clarity of the warm taste, and an ache started at the back of her jaws. Only after she had lost that first exhilaration did she allow herself a substantial chunk. And it was heaven. The dark taste of the rum swirled around her tongue, and she let out a little hiss of satisfaction at the leopard.

  Then she was ready for sleep. She wore no make-up, ever, so her night-time ritual was short: a fast wash with a neem soap, and a good brush with Meswak toothpaste. She put on a faded pink caftan, softened by years of washes, and lay on her back, with her hands by her sides. When they were children, Jojo used to tease her about this pose of the dead, this corpse’s motionless pause, but then Jojo even in sleep was a spiralling wind, and awoke often with her feet pointing at the pillow. She kicked and thrashed but wanted to sleep close, and Mary used to grumble about her lost sleep at breakfast.

  Mary sat up, went to the bathroom, came back and lay down again. She tried breathing evenly, deeply. But her mind still turned and moved. Sleep, she whispered. Tomorrow is a long day. And, and. And Jojo had loved rum balls from Rustam’s, but they hadn’t been able to afford them more than once a month. And today there was that Sartaj Singh, plonked like a squatting toad on her sea-wall. The last time she had spoken to him had been in his car, when she had told him about John and Jojo. She had slept very badly after he had come to her with the news of Jojo’s death, for a month she had walked around with a reeling heart, feeling dizzy through the day. Then finally the knowledge had settled in, become part of the structure of the new world: your sister is dead. That’s how it was, when you confronted something impossible – your husband is sleeping with your sister – at first there was a nausea, a loss of all landmarks. Your own home became a hostile borderland. And then one day you knew that this raw wasteland, this garish alien light, was your home. You just had to have patience and will enough to survive the first terrors.

  Mary sat up, propped a pillow against the wall and switched on the television. She found a documentary about space stations, and turned down the sound, and watched spidery white contraptions spin against stars. They were man-made, but soothing. It was always Jojo who had been the religious one, who at eleven had slept with a cross under her pillow, who had gazed up at the church altar with bright, sunlit eyes. Later, she had the same soaring love for celebrity, she had pursued its grail with the same marvellous faith. The closest Mary had ever come to this big-big feeling that Jojo told her about was when she watched wildebeest rumbling across a valley, or when she saw some unmanned spacecraft’s pictures of the rings of Jupiter. She had been saving, for three years and five months now, for a safari holiday to Africa.

  ‘Chutiya, you could go to Africa tomorrow if you claimed what is yours,’ Jana had
said, burning with real-estate lust for Jojo’s flat, which she had never seen. ‘That’s a flat at Yari Road that we’re talking about, not some smelly kholi.’

  ‘It’s not mine.’

  ‘What, it belongs to me, then? Thank you,’ – in English, with a bow – ‘thank you.’

  ‘You can have it.’

  ‘Like they’ll give it to me. Listen, gaandu, these are the facts: she was your sister. She is dead. There are no other living, immediate relatives. So it comes to you. All of it, flat and bank accounts and whatever.’

  Jana had a gaali for every occasion and every other sentence, and she was a very good manicurist, an expert at fancy nails. She had a contemptuous bafflement for Mary’s scruples. ‘Listen, so your sister was a randi. Okay, so that’s where some of the money came from. She also made television programmes, na? So you take the money thinking it’s from television. What’s the harm? After all she took your husband, na?’

  This, to Jana’s mind, was justice: good money for a husband. This was fair. There was no way to make her understand that this was exactly what Mary didn’t want, to be paid off. She didn’t want to take Jojo’s dirty money, made from filth done on filthy hotel sheets with filthy men, she didn’t want to take money in exchange for a husband, for happiness, for a childhood. Maybe Mary had never been able to believe quite wholeheartedly in heaven, but she had once believed quite naturally and easily that life on earth was good, that her future would be one long, gentle story of husband and children and grandchildren, marred just a little by scraped knees and fevers but always buoyant with love. Despite her father’s early death, she had believed this, that she would find the contentment that had eluded her mother. Jojo had expelled her for ever and without possibility of return from this garden of innocence. Jojo had changed her world. For this, there could be no forgiveness, and no purchasing of indulgences. This Mary was sure of.

  Mary clicked off the spaceships and lay back. She took a breath, let it out slowly, tried to find an easy, even rhythm. But Jojo came back tonight and bothered her, kept her awake as she never had during those nights of thrashing about and fast-asleep kicking. Even after Jojo’s death, in that first week of shock, she had never lain awake like this. Of late, with days passing when she didn’t think of Jojo once, Mary had started believing that she was rid of her at last. But the flat and the money were unfinished business. Mary didn’t like slack ends, she had always been the responsible sister. That’s why she would have been such a good mother. Again that upward stab of anger in the chest. Forget it. Breathe, breathe. Let it go. Let it be.

  Mary woke the next morning to her alarm with a tired head, she felt the exhaustion even as her feet hit the floor. Four or five hours of sleep were nowhere near enough, not anywhere close to her usual nine, and still there was the day to get through, work to be done. So she went. Jana noticed it straightaway. In a break between her clients, she slid past Mary and whispered, ‘So got a boyfriend at last, sleepy-jaan?’

  Mary shook her head, but Jana grinned and made back-and-forth humping motions with her hips. Mary looked away quickly, and moved to the other side of her own client, afraid of provoking Jana into some further outrages. It was a small miracle that she hadn’t been fired already. Over lunch, which they ate from tiffins outside the salon, Mary tried to convince Jana that she had just had a sleepless night. Jana wasn’t having any of it.

  ‘You sleep like a bear, even if someone is knocking down a building next door, okay? So try to make a mamoo of someone else. Something is going on.’

  Something was going on, but Mary wasn’t going to tell Jana about the annoying night-time return of Jojo. She knew well Jana’s opinions on the subject, and didn’t want to listen to them again. ‘It was just a bad night, Jana,’ she said. ‘Nothing great. So how are Naresh-Suresh?’ Naresh was Jana’s two-year-old son, and Suresh was her husband, whom she had married against the loud objections of both sets of parents. She called the son and father ‘my bachchas’, and loved to tell long stories proving her affectionate patience and womanly wisdom and motherly firmness. Suresh was indeed five years younger than her, but Mary had always thought that his quiet forbearance in the face of Jana’s temperament was simply heroic. They worked well together, one placid and one loud.

  ‘Don’t be too smart,’ Jana said, inadvertently flicking mango pickle on to Mary’s skirt with her jabbing finger. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell, idiot,’ Mary said, holding off Jana’s attempts to clean off the oil. ‘Nothing at all. God promise.’

  But the nothing kept Mary awake to the end of the week. Every morning she woke more tired. On Friday she declined a girls’ night with movie and dinner, went home and took a Calmpose. At first there was a pleasantly dozy feeling in her arms, and she wiggled her head back into the pillow, anticipating the sleep as keenly as a mouthful of chocolate. But then the sweat gathered clammily under her shoulders, and she had to kneel up to switch the fan to its fastest. She lay under its whirl, and time passed. She tried to think of pleasant things, of Matheran in the rain, of Kaho Na Pyaar Hai and the song on the yacht, of happy clients. She turned her head to find the clock. An hour had passed. She groped on the table to find the papery leaf of Calmpose, and thumbed another one into her mouth. That would knock her out, she never took pills, she took care of herself. Again, she waited. An auto-rickshaw putt-putted up the main road and took the corner into the lane, she could hear its gears grind. Loud, it was so loud. It stopped, very close, and she could hear the rattle of the meter as the driver put it up, and then the engine grunted and turned over again. In the pool of silence it left behind, an air-conditioner hummed and rattled. Mary had never noticed all these night sounds before. She turned on her side and put a pillow over her head. She could feel rage collecting in her stomach like a dead weight. Stop, don’t raise your blood pressure. Relax, relax. But there it was, this gravity of accumulated anger.

  Mary endured the night. In the morning, at first grey, she came off the bed covered in a cold sweat. She showered it off, but a buzzing remained in her head, a small, tinny drone that persisted past her chai and toast. She waited until nine-thirty, and then called the number that Sartaj Singh had given her months ago.

  ‘Not here,’ a constable snapped at her.

  ‘Has his shift started?’

  ‘Shift starts at eight. Bola na, he’s not here.’

  At ten Singh was still not at the station, and not at eleven either. ‘Arre, he’s out on some work,’ a different constable told her, with exactly the same tincture of aggression and boredom. She had to spell her name for him very slowly, and she was convinced that he had tossed the note immediately into some rubbish pile.

  Of course there was no call back, not by noon and not by one. How do the police in this country ever solve anything? Mary grew scathingly bitter by two. She felt perked up, revived. She called Jana, and met her at Santa Cruz station to shop. Jana bought little shorts with blue anchors embroidered on them for her son, and also three tiny T-shirts, and a pair of slippers for herself. Mary was distracted and suddenly very tired. Jana bargained ferociously with the thela-wallahs, beat them down rupee by rupee. Mary slipped an arm through Jana’s and dragged along with her through the shifting crowds. Jana gave her that old all-knowing sideways glance. ‘You know what you need?’ she said.

  ‘Jana, don’t start that boyfriend thing again.’

  ‘What, yaar, you think I don’t have anything more than boys in my head? I was going to say, you need to get out of the city for a while. When you used to visit your Mummy, you always came back looking rested and fresh. This place, too long in it and you get ragdoed down.’

  Mary held on tight to Jana’s arm and nodded. The ragda that you were subjected to came from these streets, these shops, this noise, this air. Going shopping with a friend turned into this tiring trek, this weaving through hurrying throngs, this dodging of cars that darted at you from every side. Every minute you breathed in your dose of poison. But there was no Mum
my any more, and no farm to visit. She had known, despite everything, that there was no escape for her from this labyrinth of hovels and homes, this entanglement of roads. She couldn’t go back, not to live. So after Mummy had died she had sold the house and the farm, all its machines and instruments and furniture, and with that money had paid for her one room in the city, put some in the bank. The will had left everything to her, Mary, and had by name and specific mention removed the other daughter from the family and its inheritance. ‘Where to go?’ Mary said. ‘You want to go to Matheran? Ooty?’

  ‘Ooty would be good, no?’ Jana said, full of longing. ‘Blue hills.’

  ‘Chal,’ Mary said. ‘Let’s go.’

  But a second was all it took for Jana to acknowledge this inevitable defeat. ‘No, yaar. How to go?’ Jana had many needs to save for. They both knew this, there was no need to discuss it further. But the blue hills were a good thing to think about.

  The hills of the south stayed with Mary on the auto ride home. There had been hills on Mummy’s farm too, not quite as high as the blue mountains, but hills nevertheless. Behind their property, to the west, Alwyn Rodriguez had a waterfall on his farm. It wasn’t much of a waterfall, just a thin stream of water that fell over four feet of black rock. But it did curve in the sunlight, and there had been a time she and Jojo had been able to dance under it. Even later, as fresh novitiates, sitting on the bank with their feet in the water, they had the crisp fall of the water on the stone, and the comfortable settling of their insteps on its smooth, worn curve. Then, they had thought of the village as an awful place, small and stifling, with Alwyn Rodriguez and his endless feuds, and the murderous length of the afternoons when the radio stopped picking up All-India Radio and there was nothing, absolutely nothing to do. Mary pulled a chunni tighter over her hair, against the flapping wind and the fumes and the rush of the auto, and curved herself into a corner of the seat.