Sacred Games

  The auto came up the last curve towards Mary’s house. Sartaj Singh was sitting on her steps, in that same forward-leaning squat from the sea wall. Mary got out of the auto, paid the driver. Her fingers were shaky, and she dropped a ten-rupee note and had to bend to pick it up. She was very annoyed. All she had done was call him on the phone, how dare he show up at her house like this? Just because these people were policemen they thought they could do anything. She took her change, and turned around determined to be stern with him, to get across to him that she paid his salary and understood her rights quite well. He was on his feet now. He had grown older. In the slanting light from the light-bulb above, Mary could see the flecks of white in his beard. He had been a handsome man, but now he looked like he had crumbled a little at all his edges. Once he had been all bite and confidence, but now all that sharpness had melted into a tempered exhaustion. His blue civilian pants were entirely lacking a crease. He had put on weight.

  ‘Hello, Miss Mary,’ he said.

  ‘Since when have you been here?’ Mary said, pointing with her chin at her step.

  ‘An hour,’ he said.

  His voice was different too. He was altogether blurred. ‘My neighbours,’ Mary said, quite curt. ‘You could have just called me.’

  ‘I did. You were not here.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry. But I thought it might be urgent. About your sister. Sorry.’

  He was too tentative to fight with. Mary shook her head. ‘Come.’ In her room he stood by the door until Mary pointed to the chair. She didn’t feel scared of him any more, of his authority or intentions, but she left the door ajar. He sat, and she saw that he still had that flat, unembarrassed cop’s curiosity, he examined the room methodically, from left to right, and then came back to her. ‘Water?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Chilled?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She opened the fridge, poured the water and walked across the room to hand him the glass. He watched her walk with that same frankness, and she was aware that although he was different, maybe tired and somehow dented, he was very much still a policeman. When she bent forward to hand him the glass, she got a quick, sour whiff of his all-day sweat, of the trains and the crowds and the steady sun.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said in English, and drank. He drained the glass, and then stared abstractedly into it. ‘I was very thirsty.’

  ‘I need your help,’ Mary said. It came out higher than she intended, shrill. She was not used to asking for help.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘My sister’s property, you said you would help me.’

  ‘You want to take possession?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are no other living immediate relatives?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be too hard. You have to prove to the court that you are really the sister. That should not be hard, even if you had no recent contact. We will give a no-objection statement from the police, saying that there are no implications for our case. I will ask Parulkar Saab, my big boss, to expedite it. Bas, that’s all. It might take a while, it is a legal process after all. You will need a lawyer for the papers.’

  ‘I know one lawyer.’

  ‘From your divorce?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know they say that in Bombay, you should have among your friends one politician, one lawyer and one policeman.’

  ‘She has become my friend, my lawyer. But I don’t know any politicians, or policemen.’

  ‘You know me now.’

  He was smiling. Mary knew that she was supposed to protest sweetly, to say that he was not her friend, and in turn he would argue that yes, of course he was. ‘I’ll ask my lawyer to get my papers ready,’ she said. ‘When can I come and get that statement from you?’

  He lost the smile. ‘You don’t have to come,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring it. No problem.’

  ‘I don’t mind coming.’

  ‘All the way to the station. No need.’

  A police station was no place for a woman was also what he was saying. ‘Listen,’ Mary said, ‘I go up and down this city. I can come to your station. Just let me know when.’

  ‘Okay.’ He was quiet for a moment, quite serious. ‘And…any more information about your sister?’

  ‘I told you everything.’

  ‘Yes. But. In all these months, something more may have come up. Something you remembered.’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Something even very little. It may not seem important, but it may open up the case for us. Please think.’

  She had been thinking for these long weeks now, these months. How little could it be? How would telling him about Jojo’s inexplicable love for fat Rishi Kapoor and his podgy, twinkle-toed dancing help him open up the case? There was everything to tell, and nothing. ‘If I had anything, I would tell you. I don’t even know what you want to know.’

  He nodded, and seemed to come to a decision. ‘The trouble is that we don’t know exactly what we are looking for. We are still investigating the death of Ganesh Gaitonde. It is a matter of national security, and we don’t know very much about why he came back to India, why he killed himself. So we are looking for any information connected to Gaitonde. We know your sister was close to him. We know she sent girls to him. Many girls, over a long period, to Bangkok, Singapore, places like that. So if we knew anything about your sister, what her movements were, who she was connected with, maybe it could lead to information about Gaitonde. That is why I keep asking.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mary said. ‘Okay.’

  He pushed himself to his feet. She could see the effort it took. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I will call you.’ He nodded.

  Mary was suddenly aware of how curt she had been. ‘Thank you,’ she got out. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t mention.’ He shut the door very gently behind himself, and Mary heard his progress down the stairs.

  Don’t mention. When Mary had first learnt English, she had said, ‘Mention not.’ She had said ‘mention not’ for years, until Jojo had corrected her. Jojo had learnt English very fast, and her English was faster and more natural and more correct, and incorrect in the right ways. She had been good at it. Sartaj Singh’s English was ambitious but only half-successful, it stumbled now and then. He probably thought it was better than it actually was. There was that much arrogance left in him still.

  Mary shrugged it all away. She took a long shower, stood under the flow and let it beat on her back. She liked the cold water, the thrill of it, even in winter. I grew up in a village, she’d told John when he’d marvelled. We didn’t have running hot water like you city folks, and if you wanted it you had to carry it.

  The memories came, but they didn’t burden her, not tonight. She lay in bed and let them fly. Now that she had spoken to Sartaj Singh, she felt relieved. She had made a decision. Whatever she still owed to Jojo, she would do. Yes. She remembered now a show she had once seen about African elephants, and fell asleep thinking of baby elephants stumbling and tumbling after their mothers.

  Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited

  I was impotent every day and every night of my honeymoon. As the floor tilted beneath us, I hunched over my wife, working at myself, cursing her, cursing the sea for a putrid whore, but in spite of all my efforts I was inevitably, astonishingly soft. We were on a boat, a ship called the Peshwa, pressing on to Goa. My boys had forced me to go on a honeymoon. After the death of Paritosh Shah, we had killed seven of Suleiman Isa’s men in immediate retaliation, including Phul Singh, one of their top shooters imported all the way from UP. They had then got two of our boys, but their response had seemed less than full force, and I was sure more was coming. Meanwhile, as the days passed after my wedding, Chotta Badriya was increasingly horrified by my lack of interest in honeymooning. ‘How can you stay here in this dirty hole on your suhaag-raat and most beautiful morning? You have to go somewhere beautiful. Everything has to start in be
auty. Switzerland!’ He kept up his Switzerland song until I threatened to send his golis to Switzerland ahead of me. It was madness for me to leave in the middle of a war. And yet Chotta Badriya’s daily campaigning for rose-strewn nights and beautiful days had its gradual effect. This is the modern age, he said, you’ll be in constant touch by phone. After all, even Suleiman Isa ran his operations by remote control from Dubai, he said, and you’ll be gone for only a few days. Besides, Paritosh Shah had been a man of ritual and custom, who believed everything should be done the way it had been done yesterday and the day before, he knew every rite that marked a man’s progress from conception to the feasts after his death. After Paritosh Shah’s death, we had followed the accepted prescriptions in the tiniest details, fed a hundred Brahmins when a dozen would have done, and now Chotta Badriya pointed out that if I was marrying for Paritosh Shah, I had better honeymoon for Paritosh Shah. He tried to send me to Singapore on a plane, and I settled for Goa on a ship. Very romantic, he said, on a ship and all instead of some boring hotel. Yes, yes, I said. I disliked this plan the least because the trip was short, and I could always come ashore and speed back, if I was needed. Three days there, two days in Fort Aguada, three days back, honeymoon done. Except that I wasn’t doing.

  I couldn’t talk to the boys, who were in the next cabin, of course I couldn’t talk to them. On the second night it again became clear that nothing was happening, that all my pulling and stroking at myself, all my calling back to the swaying cabin of every woman, every girl, every whore I had ever bajaoed, and all my frantic imagining of every filmi star I had ever unbuttoned in my dreams, none of this was going to move the slightest flicker in my dead lauda. It curled up ashamedly against my thigh, raw from my rubbing. I curled up against the wall of the cabin. Finally I managed to get out, ‘This has never happened before. It must be the boat, all this up-and-down-and-around like a mela-ride, it makes me sick.’

  She was quiet. She lay with her back to me, her shoulder hunched up against the starlit round of the window. Her name was Subhadra. That much I knew about her. I looked at her arm, the bony narrowness of her shoulder, and in her turning away I was sure there was contempt, amusement. I sat up, and my ribs hurt from the deep breath I took then, such a furious gulp of rage I swallowed. When I turned my head more squarely to her, I had to force the muscles, they were so tight from anger. I wanted to say, it’s you, you skinny chut, with your starving kutti’s lean ribs. I wanted to grab her by the neck and shake her until her head snapped back and forth and shout, who could get it up for you? I would’ve killed her, thrown her into the water far from anywhere, and forgotten about marriage for ever, no matter what friends had said or wanted. My body wanted murder, there was a pressure down my spine that flexed and pulsed and wanted to cleave her in half. I would’ve killed her. But then she spoke.

  ‘Have you ever been on a ship before?’

  Yes, I had been on a ship. I had plunged down slatey valleys of water in a rattling boat, I had killed a man, a friend, I had taken his gold. I wanted, all at once, to tell her about my journey over the seas. ‘Yes, I’ve been,’ I said. ‘Long time ago, when I was a boy, when I first came to Bombay. I went on a trip.’ She turned over to face me now. She was surprised, I think, by the eagerness with which I spoke, I who hadn’t said more than a dozen sentences to her in three days. ‘That was my first time on ship, and first time out of the country,’ I said. I told her about Salim Kaka, Mathu, but now that she was listening, her cheek resting on her two folded hands, I found that I couldn’t tell her the end of the story, I couldn’t tell her about the shots in the dark, about Salim Kaka’s feet threshing the water, that true ending which was the beginning of everything for me. I had never told anyone, and I could hardly tell her, little Subhadra who was awestruck at my daring. I told her the alternative ending, the public ending: we set off for home, longing for safety and the smell of our own earth, and on the way we were ambushed by the police of that foreign country, who had been tipped off by Suleiman Isa, of course, and Salim Kaka fell in a running battle, he fell with his chest torn open by machine-gun bullets, but we left the ambushers far behind, and we made it home. With the gold. She sighed when I finished, let out the first small sound of satisfaction that I had heard from her. I touched her shoulder, and felt her stiffen. She thought I was about to start again with my pulling and pressing at her, but I hadn’t the heart for it. I hadn’t the courage to make another attempt. I kept my hand on her shoulder, and we rose and dropped together, and the long swirl of the water came to us, and slowly she grew safe under my palm, and relaxed. ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Have you been on the sea before?’

  She told me about a childhood trip to Elephanta, about getting sick on the boat and trying to reach the edge but ruining her new yellow frock, about how unmercifully hot it was on the water, which lay still like a glittering mirror and hurt the eyes, about how her father’s pocket was picked on the return trip. But I had profited from the sea. The sea could be both luck and disaster, maybe. I said that to her and heard her whisper a faint ‘yes’, and then we slept.

  Once she got started talking, on and on she went. She woke up talking and never ceased. What she talked about was hard to know, because she talked about everything, her sister’s stomach-aches, Indira Gandhi, going to the airport to watch planes take off and land, Kati Patang, a creaky table-fan her father refused to get rid of, the danger of malaria in the rainy season, the best bhelpuri-seller on Juhu Chowpatty, shipwrecks in swollen rivers. She went from one subject to another in a way that made perfect sense when you heard it, but which became madly incoherent and impossible to recount five minutes later. Hours would pass in this, the skipping flutter of her talk. I found it restful. We sat on the deck, under a blue-and-white striped awning, both wearing dark glasses and she still resplendent in her shining bride’s jewellery, and I listened to the water singing against the side of the boat, and she talked. It was a pleasant hum that emptied my mind, that kept my nightly humiliation at safe distance. The boys kept at a respectful distance, within call but out of sight. I told myself that I was thinking, planning, analysing, that the hours which were passing were devoted to consideration of the problem of Suleiman Isa, the problem of further expansion of the company, the problem of future direction, but really I was lulling myself into a waking sleep. I was at complete rest. I was still.

  Half a day out of Goa, my numb meditation was interrupted by Chotta Badriya. He came clattering up the metal stairs, and in his rapid clanking there was fear, I could feel it. I met him on the stairs, a third of the way down.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘The captain says they just heard the news. It’s bad, bhai.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The masjid was torn down yesterday afternoon.’

  He didn’t need to say which masjid, for months there had been talk of only one masjid, one old faraway ruin of a building which was now the pivot for leaping political parties, the target for processions of thousands, the standing sign for ancient wrongs. I had thought it all quite silly, the whole question and the quarrelling nothing but politicians’ tricks. But if it was destroyed, its falling would shake us all. That much was clear. ‘And?’ I said.

  ‘In Bombay, bhai, things are bad,’ Chotta Badriya said. ‘Riots.’

  In Goa, we drove from the dock to the airport, and flew back to Bombay the same afternoon. From the Goa airport, I tried to reach our controllers in Bombay, but all the dozen numbers I dialled were dead. ‘The police must have switched off the phones,’ Chotta Badriya said. That was likely, they did that sometimes when trouble started. The rumours at the airport were of burning buses, snipers shooting from rooftops into crowds below, men and women hunted down in lanes and killed. I wanted to get back to Bombay before Suleiman Isa took advantage, before those bastards came against us with everything they had under the cover of the chaos. During a riot, a war can come out into the open, and when a body falls or when a house burns, nobody is responsible. A riot is a
free time for free murder. It was not a time to leave my company rudderless, headless, so we flew back. When we stepped on the plane I felt my golis sweat. The rows of seats were all empty, the passengers had all cancelled, only we wanted to fly into rioting Bombay. I sat shaking in my seat, and my crotch was damp – this creaky contraption would fly, this maderchod bus with wings? But I flew. I hurtled into the air, towards Bombay and my responsibilities. We rushed down the black asphalt, rattling and banging, and I said to Subhadra, ‘Talk, talk.’ With a grimace of panic she began, and her dread was not from the sudden upward arc of the plane, but from seeing me drenched through with a fear-sweat, her Ravana-husband become a vomit-spewing, snot-dripping hijra. I retched into a paper bag, and she sat up erect in her seat and put a hand on my shoulder. I knew she found it distasteful, the clammy, cold wet of her husband’s fright. And what a husband, not the awesome rakshasa she had imagined entering her marriage bed, from whose reputation her mind had turned, overwhelmed, not that king but an impotent clown. But she was dutiful. She talked.

  When the plane tilted over Bombay she stopped. I leaned over her and we both pressed our faces against the plastic, and from the muddy coastline emerged a scattering of islands, and then I could see clearly roads, buildings, the shape of colonies and the spreading brown patches of bastis. From behind us I could hear the boys arguing, ‘That’s Andheri there.’ ‘Maderpat, where Andheri? That’s Madh island, can’t you see?’ Then they were all quiet. A thick black snake of smoke grew from a coastline settlement and twisted in towards the centre, towards another dark, curving fume – the city was burning.

  All the way down not a word was said. The buildings fell towards us at a great velocity, but I was not afraid, I was trying to see what had been destroyed, what was on fire. All of us were quiet. The airport buildings were crowded with passengers huddled on the ground, sleeping with their heads resting on bags and suitcases. No taxis were moving, no autos. The phones were still dead, so there was not a way to call anyone in Gopalmath. For a while it seemed there was no getting out to Gopalmath, but Chotta Badriya went out on the road and wandered among the rows of taxis until he found the drivers huddled together near the police chowki. After half an hour of persuasion and much brandishing of thousands of rupees, one of them seemed tempted, and so Chotta Badriya drew him aside and told him not to be afraid, he was transporting Ganesh Gaitonde. This of course reassured the driver, and so we jammed ourselves into the taxi, the six of us, and we drove out into the huge quiet. The straining engine seemed too loud, and as I told the driver to go faster, faster, I realized I was whispering. On all the roads that day there was no one, not one person, the bastis near the airport road were quiet, the hotels on the highway were silent, the windows of the apartment buildings were shuttered. I was afraid, we all were except the taxi driver, who gained confidence with each turn under my protection. But I knew we had no weapons, and if a crowd of hundreds had come howling over us, engulfed us with knives and stakes and bars and swords, we would all have died. In that silence trembling from murder, I could have shouted my name and the mob would still have torn out my throat. Against that blood-fed anger there was no name that was protection. Near Gopalmath we saw bodies, two bodies. They lay crabwise on the edge of the road, near a shoe shop. Blood had spattered on the corrugated iron of the shutter, over the raised lintel.