Sacred Games

  ‘Enjoy,’ Jojo said. ‘Enjoy, enjoy.’

  We were home by eleven. In jail I had got used to waking up early, so already I had done my yoga, eaten, had Suzie. I was feeling light. But some of the boys were yawning. I set them to work. I played for a while with Abhi, who was now speaking in babbles of words and nonsense sounds, who held my face and tried to tell me things. He had little grammar, and no understanding of past and future, and still I could listen to him completely fascinated, my heart yielding in love. At noon Kataruka came into the hall where I was sitting with some petitioners. He leaned close to me to whisper, ‘The nau-numberis are here. They say they have to take you to the station. Interrogation for another case.’

  ‘Who is it? Majid Khan again?’

  ‘No, I don’t know these chutiyas. They say they are with Parulkar.’

  ‘Bastards. Tell them to send whatever questions they have to the lawyers.’

  ‘I did. They have an order from a magistrate.’

  ‘Yes, and the magistrate chodos their mothers in the gaand every night. Tell them to wait. Tell them I’ll come when I can. And get one of the lawyers down here.’

  ‘Yes, bhai.’ Kataruka was smiling. ‘These maderchods have no manners. I don’t feel even like giving them chai.’

  ‘No manners?’

  ‘They parked their van right in front of the house and refused to move it. Very pushy, bhai. Get him here now, like that they’re speaking. They are some special commando types, two of them are carrying carbines, and one has a jhadoo. Think they are heroes.’

  And he went off, humming a song. I turned back to my petitioners, parents who wanted a job for their son. But I was distracted, and thinking about this new nuisance. Commandos with Sten guns and AK-47s meant that there was some new task force maybe, some government initiative set up so that they could look serious about organized crime. Which would amount to nothing in the long run, but which would be a botheration. I made my promises to the petitioners, told them to check back in a week. When one of the boys opened the door for them, we all heard clearly the angry voices, a shout and then Kataruka’s reply. He was hoarse and very loud. Bhenchod police, they were bellowing in my house. Maderchods. I got up, and walked down the long corridor, brushing past the family of petitioners, mother and father and uncles and son. Even in that anger, I was aware of that smell of home, that smell of onions and haldi and oil from the lunch they were cooking in the kitchen. I breathed it in. ‘Get Gaitonde here now,’ the policeman roared. Between him and me there was a scattering of my boys, and other visitors, all clustering around the argument, but through them I could see the policeman’s shoulders and face, and behind him another one, and the long glint of an AK-47. ‘When he is ready, he will come and see you,’ Kataruka answered, as loud and as bloody-eyed as the policeman. I squeezed through the press. I wanted to get to shouting myself. I could see two policemen, but no more. In front of me was Dipu, grown city-smart and polished after his service with us, with a new haircut.

  I asked Dipu, going past him, ‘How many of them are there?’

  Into my ear, he said, ‘Four, bhai.’

  I could see a third policeman now, standing to the left. He had his carbine shoulder-slung and ready, with a finger on the trigger. It came to me in the middle of my stride: four policemen, and only four, armed with automatic weapons and in a van, sent to fetch Ganesh Gaitonde. It made no sense. The shouting policeman leaned in even more towards Kataruka, and in that motion he saw me. Our eyes met. I turned and ran.

  I went low through the blast from the guns, through and over the flailing bodies in the corridor, through the screams. Then I was in my bedroom, scrabbling and pawing behind the headboard for a pistol, and I had slammed the door shut behind me but the bullets fountained through the walls, scattering plaster, and I had less than a moment, and I went through the window to the right of my bed. I fell between the side of the house and the compound wall, and I knew I had broken something in my arm but I had to keep running. I ran out of the rear gate, and now two of my boys were with me, and they took me into the nearby lanes. We turned twice, and went into a house and the door shut behind us and we all three of us fell to the ground, dropped flat from exhaustion, as if we had run ten miles.

  The firing was booming near by, but now with the hammering of the AK and the carbines, there were single shots in reply. Then, suddenly, it was over. No more shots, just screams now, desperate shouting flurrying across the basti. I was alive.

  I came out into the lane holding my arm. Only now, when I started to walk, I felt a heated line of pain across my lower back, as if someone had drawn a molten wire across my buttocks. ‘You’re bleeding, bhai,’ someone said to me. I pushed him aside, went into the house. ‘We got one of them,’ another boy said to me. We had got one, he lay near the front gate, his leg twisted up under his body. Inside the house, in the front hall, there was blood on the ceilings, smears of tissue on the walls. Dipu was dead, and so was Kataruka.

  Seventeen men died in my house that day, and four women, and one child. But at the time, we had no count, only a tangle of bodies. It was only when we started picking them up, and carrying them out, that we found Subhadra and Abhi at the far end of the corridor, in the kitchen, curled up under the cover of her blue sari. They were both dead from the same AK-47 bullet, which had come through the door-jamb, and come through them. They were dead. My wife was dead. My son was dead.

  I went back to jail. After I had my broken wrist plastered, and the graze on my backside stitched up, after we cremated our dead, we considered our options. We knew now that the policemen who had done the firing were not policemen, but Suleiman Isa’s men, that the uniforms had been bought from Maganlal Dresswallah’s, that the van had been stolen – or so the real police said – from Zone 13 headquarters. We knew, reliably, that the supari given for this suicide mission was two crores, so that the four maderchods who came to my house walked away with fifty lakhs each. But two of them didn’t walk away, one died right there in my courtyard, another covered the inside of the van with the blood that he coughed up. He died the same day. But still, my enemies almost got what they wanted. They couldn’t say that they had killed Ganesh Gaitonde in his own basti, in his own house, but they did say that they struck at me in my lair, that I had run from them, that I was a coward with a wound in my gaand. They were ashamed that they had broken the unspoken rule of the companies against hurting family members, but they could say that was an accident, and they could say that they had taken my gaand.

  But I was alive. That was what mattered. Whatever the world said, I was alive. And that is what finally matters. Honour and pride are the dreams that men feed on, and will die for, but my boys understood that, even for them, it was better that I had stayed alive. I was still here, to recoup, to plan, to take revenge. And I had to stay alive. So I went back to jail. It was easy to arrange. I got into a car with some of my boys and went up to Mulund. We stopped the car at the Mulund check-post, and the boys picked a quarrel with the constables there. I came out and shouted too, and the boys conspicuously addressed me as ‘Ganesh Bhai’, just to make sure that the stupid mamus understood who I was. Then we all got back into the car and drove on, far beyond city limits.

  So I had broken the conditions of my bail, and had to be put back in the one safe haven for me. I had understood that this time it had been fake police, but the next time it might be the real ones, come to take me for a ride in a black van, a ride that would end with a bullet in my head. Every door in the city hid an assassin, every day was a battle. I had become too big for them to leave me alive. And so jail was my impregnable castle, where the walls and the rules and the regulations made a home for me, where the jailers were responsible for keeping me from harm, and where I could continue to do business without hindrance.

  I settled back into the old routine. There was a new set of faces in the barrack, but there was the same grouping of dhurries around my own, in order of seniority. Life went on as before. But I was alone,
so very alone. My boys were my family, and they were kind as always, mindful of my losses and my injuries. They took care of me, and I did business. But in my heart I was alone. So many had died, not just in this last attack, but through my journey, in all the battles. And I was still alive. Why? For what? I waited for an answer. I practised yoga in the mornings, in the afternoons I practised pranayama. But all my hard-won calm was taken from me by Abhi’s laughter, which I heard floating in the afternoon sunlight. At night, I went eagerly to my pillow because I knew he would come to me in my sleep, but my very waiting chased sleep away. I was light-headed. I walked through the world like a man sliding weightlessly through a dream.

  ‘It feels so strange,’ I told Jojo, very late at night, on the phone. ‘I feel like, like a lost ghost. Like somebody else’s story. Like there’s a projector going chat-chat-chat somewhere and I’m moving around on a screen.’

  ‘It’ll pass, Gaitonde,’ she said. ‘Pain passes. It always passes.’

  She sounded so close, as if she were in the next bed. I had made her buy a new mobile phone, and had a new handy myself, and we spoke only to each other on these new connections. I had two other phones for business. My enemies hadn’t been trying to kill my family, that I knew, but still I was afraid for Jojo. I told her that our connection needed to become even more invisible to the world, that it was bad for her media-industry image if it became generally known that she and I were friends. This she understood, and she became even more discreet than she had already been. We spoke late at night, only on the special phones.

  ‘Gaitonde?’ she said. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘I’m here.’ But I wasn’t so sure I was there any more. A son roots a man in the world. Take away that connection and you cut him loose. ‘You know what I miss? I miss the smell of his hair after a bath.’

  ‘I know. What do you miss about Subhadra?’

  I had trouble conjuring up her face, remembering what she looked like. But of course I didn’t say this to Jojo. ‘She used to bring me milk at night,’ I said, but I knew Jojo had caught the hesitation. She kept quiet, though, and didn’t read me one of her lectures about men and women.

  ‘Gaitonde. You never talk about your father and mother.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Your mother, who was she?’

  ‘A woman, what else?’

  ‘What else? What was she like?’

  ‘She was my mother. Forget it. All this maderchod talk.’

  Of course she caught the growl in my voice, and was quiet. I hadn’t meant to cut her off, and I didn’t want silence, couldn’t stand it. ‘Tell me about your mother and father,’ I said. I could hear her breathing. ‘Jojo?’

  ‘I am trying not to curse you. Because you already have a lot of tension.’

  ‘If I didn’t have tension, you would give me gaalis?’

  ‘Anybody who speaks to me like that gets gaalis.’

  I was lying on the floor, in a corner of the barrack. I liked the cold concrete on the back of my neck. Through a window I could see the black rise of a wall, the sparkling shards of glass on its rim, keen in the moonlight. I had to smile a little. Somehow Jojo’s recklessness, her anger, it made me smile. In life I would have hated her, I think. But on the phone, me here, she there, she had me smiling. ‘Listen, madam,’ I said. ‘Tension I do have. So forgive me. Tell me about your mother.’

  Jojo told me about her father, who was a sea captain. He drove small boats for a big company, and was away for months at a time. When he came home he wanted the house to be quiet. The parrots in the orchards behind the house drove him into a trembling rage, he threw firecrackers into the tops of trees and finally bought a shotgun. All his murdering of koels and swallows wouldn’t banish the birds, and they sat on the heads of his scarecrows, and nested in their bellies. Finally he retreated to the armchair in his bedroom, put red earplugs in his ears and a black scarf over his eyes. His daughters tiptoed around him, and tried to stay awake late to listen for scraps of conversation between him and their mother. They never heard anything that would make sense of him, not even at meals, when all he said was that there was too much salt in the fish curry and that there was no money for Easter dresses. And so it went until he left, again for a few months. When Jojo was eleven, this big-beard father died of a heart attack on the bridge of his latest ship, on a rainy day in the Arabian Gulf. He died sitting in his captain’s chair, with his black scarf over his eyes, so that his men thought he was sleeping. Finally he had quiet, Jojo thought. But there was no quiet for them, because when it came to the matter of his pension it turned out to be not so much. They were poor. But Jojo’s mother refused to be downcast, or frightened. I have my land, she said, I refuse to live meekly and full of tears because my husband was taken by God. God is merciful and he will look after us. And so she brought them up, with hard work and hardships and hard discipline. You have to buy your own food in this world, she said, remember that.

  ‘I asked her once about them, she the wife and he the husband, the two of them together,’ Jojo said. ‘About how she could stand to be with him all those years, through all that silence. Why.’

  ‘And she said?’

  ‘She said nothing. She used to do this thing with her mouth, make it all small like she was irritated, and wave her hand at you. Like you were a fool for asking. Then she would go on with her work. She was always working.’

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘After I had my trouble with my sister. I didn’t find out until a year after it had happened.’

  The trouble had really been with the sister’s husband, but I let that pass. When women talked about their troubles, it was best to let some things go by. This much I had learnt from my long talks with Jojo, the champion of women. If you argued, you got screaming argument, and then silence. And I wanted Jojo to talk, I needed her to go on talking. Late at night, she saved me with her talking.

  In the mornings I read the newspapers. I started with the Marathi papers, then read the Hindi, and finally the English. My English reading was still very slow and halting, and often I had to stop and ask the boys about meanings and constructions. I had my English-Marathi dictionary, but still it was a dragging business, and I always grew annoyed by the end of it. ‘Gaitonde Outfit Struggles to Recover from Losses,’ the Times of India said, and by the end of the article I wanted to kill the anonymous ‘special correspondent’. It wasn’t just the errors in every other sentence, the carelessness of the reporting, but the tone, that slightly sneering implication that the writer knew everything, even what went on in the head of Gaitonde: ‘As Gaitonde mourns his wife and licks his wounds in his cell, Suleiman Isa consolidates his power.’ These English-wallahs were always superior, as if the world they lived in was some other one, far from my barrack, my streets, my home. When I grew angry, the boys grinned and said, if it aggravates you, bhai, why read this nonsense?

  I didn’t tell them, but I read the nonsense because it made me feel alive. In this pictured Gaitonde, caught between columns of newsprint, there was a vitality I didn’t feel in my belly. He was hard-faced, confident, injured but ruthless, and plotting a comeback. Looking at him, I myself felt proud of him. Here was a man. So I didn’t kill any reporters, but instead gave interviews. I sent bottles of Scotch to them, and flattered them with confidences. All of them wanted to know the story of my life, so I told them stories. They printed all of it. Our revenues grew, and more boys than ever wanted to join us.

  It was in these days of my rising all-India fame that one of the warders came to me. ‘Bhai,’ he said, ‘there’s this mad chutiya in Barrack Five who keeps saying he knew you before you were Ganesh Gaitonde.’

  ‘When I had another name? I never had another name. I have always been Ganesh Gaitonde.’

  ‘I don’t know what he means, bhai. He’s crazy. But he keeps saying it.’

  ‘Forget it, then. Why are you bothering me with it?’

  ‘Sorry, bhai.’ He turned away, ducking his head, a
nd giggled. ‘Sorry. He’s a real vediya, he thinks he’s Dev Anand himself. But he’s always got his finger in his nose like this, crazy bastard.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait. This fellow. He’s with the budhaus? He’s old himself?’

  ‘Yes, bhai. He’s not so old, but he’s got all white hair. He puffs it up, like Dev Anand.’

  I opened my mouth, then shut it. I said quietly, ‘Bring him to me.’

  ‘I’ll tell him you want to give him paper, bhai. He’ll come running.’

  ‘Paper?’

  ‘He draws, bhai.’

  ‘Draws? Never mind, just go and get him. Go, go. Now.’

  There were some ten minutes of delay, as various guards were told what to do. But then there he was. I recognized him as soon as he came in through the door at the far end of the barrack, through all the hundreds of men. He was hunched over, and even thinner than before, but there he was, Mathu. Yes, the same Mathu who had been my fellow-shooter on that trawler long ago, who had travelled with me across the seas to bring back gold, who had been an equal partner in the destruction of Salim Kaka. He came up to me slowly, flanked by two of my boys, peering at me from under scraggy eyebrows. He had a stubble, and his careful grooming was all gone. Now he wore no talcum powder on that rodent nose, but he had his Dev Anand hair still, swept up into a suave curl. The hair was all white, complete white. There were crusts of dirt on his bare knees and ankles, and when he was up close I had to steel myself against his stink of old age and sweat and sadness.

  ‘Mathu,’ I said, waving the boys away.

  He crushed a wad of paper between his hands, nodded his head from side to side and said, ‘Yes, it is Ganesh.’ Then he was quiet, and very still. He was still looking at me, like he was trying to measure me. He was not hostile, or afraid, he was just appraising. Then he seemed to be satisfied, and he lost interest in me, and worried his nose. He flicked away a fleck of green, and then he looked about the barrack, and then began to shuffle through the stack of paper he carried.