Sacred Games

  Sartaj led the way across the divider, and he came up on Jayanth’s right. He matched Jayanth’s stride, and walked very close to him, just like a friend taking the evening air. Jayanth remained calm, Sartaj was pleased to note. He was an old hand, and likely to be reasonable. Jayanth just edged away slightly to the left, and kept at his cone. But now Kamble was on his other side, hemming him in.

  ‘Namaste, Uncle,’ Sartaj said.

  Jayanth nodded. ‘You’re police,’ he said.

  Sartaj had to laugh, from the sheer pleasure of meeting a practised professional. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Made good money today?’

  Jayanth took a bite out of the cone. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  Sartaj put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Arre, Uncle. We have been watching you work all evening. With the two boys. You are very good.’

  ‘What boys?’

  ‘One in a blue shirt, one in dark glasses. Come on, Jayanth Uncle, don’t annoy me now. You’ve come out of retirement, you’re working hard. Nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘My name is not Jayanth.’

  Sartaj cuffed Jayanth in the face. It was a short blow, with the back of the hand that had been resting on Jayanth’s shoulder, but there was some knuckle in it and it rocked Jayanth back. Kamble was staring in disgust at his right foot, which now had a long splatter of ice-cream along the front.

  ‘Let’s just take the bastard back to the station,’ he said. ‘He’ll remember who he is there.’

  On this busy street, only one woman had seen the blow. She was hurrying away from them now, throwing horrified glances back at Sartaj. She was carrying a netting bag full of vegetables and wore bright red sindoor in her hair. Sartaj ignored the impulse to explain to her, this is just the language we speak, nothing really bad will happen to the nice old man. He turned back to Jayanth. ‘So, Uncle. You want to come back to the station with us?’

  ‘All right.’ Jayanth threw away his empty cone. ‘I am Jayanth. I don’t know you.’

  ‘Sartaj Singh.’

  ‘You don’t work in this zone. How much do you want?’

  ‘You have a setting with the local officers?’

  Jayanth shrugged. Of course he had an arrangement with the local boys, but he wasn’t going to give away information. ‘We don’t want to trouble you that way,’ Sartaj said. ‘Or arrest you. Not at all. But we need you to do some work for us.’

  ‘I am an old man.’

  ‘Yes, Uncle. But you don’t really have to work. Just keep your eyes open.’ Sartaj told him that he was to look out for a chokra in a red T-shirt with such-and-such logo, with a black tooth, that he was to discover the chokra’s name, and if possible his habitation. That he was not to alarm Red T-shirt, or hint in any way that big, ugly, violent policemen were looking for him. That he was to call Sartaj or Kamble at this-and-this number as soon as he had a line on the boy.

  ‘I can’t go around looking into boys’ mouths,’ Jayanth said. ‘They will think I am some pervert, they are very smart.’

  ‘I know, Uncle. You just look for the right red T-shirt. Then you talk to him. Be patient. Don’t rush anything. Just do your usual work, and keep your eyes open.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jayanth said.

  ‘He’ll be here,’ Kamble said.

  ‘Of course,’ Jayanth said peevishly. Street chokras were very territorial, they had all their corners and areas marked out, down to borders drawn along the middle of streets. And they defended their regions as fiercely as generals battling over holy lands, everyone knew this. ‘But you think he’ll be here in the same T-shirt?’ And then, to Kamble, ‘What are you doing?’

  Kamble was holding Jayanth’s trouser pocket open and groping about in it. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not picking your pocket. Don’t worry. And don’t worry about the chokra. You just keep alert, keep looking. He’ll show up.’ He held up a brown leather wallet, worn down past the polish to the bare hide. ‘You don’t carry much money, Uncle.’

  Jayanth didn’t miss a beat. ‘Too much crime on the streets nowadays,’ he said.

  Kamble chortled appreciatively. ‘Six hundred rupees, and a picture of…What god is this?’

  ‘Murugan.’

  ‘No I-card, nothing at all.’

  On the other side, in Jayanth’s other pocket, something crinkled under Sartaj’s gentle patting. Sartaj fished with his forefinger, and drew out an inland letter, folded twice over.

  ‘Malad,’ Sartaj said. The letter itself was in some incomprehensible southern script, but the address was in English. ‘You’re working very close to home, Uncle.’

  ‘I’m an old man. Can’t travel too far.’

  Kamble gave him back the wallet. ‘You moved out of Dharavi anyway. I bet it’s a nice apartment in Malad. For an old man you make a good amount of money. Even if you don’t carry it on yourself.’ Jayanth flinched a little under Kamble’s beady-eyed hostility, and looked down.

  Sartaj wrote down the address. ‘Why are you out here anyway, Uncle, at this age? Isn’t your America-wallah son helping you any more?’

  Jayanth waggled his head from one side to the other, and looked quite as sad as any filmi father who had endured a lifetime of family quarrels and ungratefulness and tragedies. ‘He’s got children of his own now,’ he said. ‘His own responsibilities.’

  ‘He married an American woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sartaj patted Jayanth on the shoulder, talked him through the assignment once again, and then sent him on his way. Kamble looked distinctly unhappy, and Sartaj knew he was thinking about the six hundred rupees in Jayanth’s wallet. ‘Woman?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought you were going to find an item. To help with bomb tension.’

  ‘Yes, yes. There’s too much tension nowadays. Even apradhis give you stories of their tension.’

  ‘So maybe you should get two women. For the double tension.’

  Kamble threw back his shoulders and rested his clenched hands on his hips, exactly like Netaji on a pedestal. ‘You’re right, my friend,’ he said. ‘I will take not two, but three women tonight. For the triple tension.’

  Sartaj watched him swagger away, forcing the evening shoppers to step aside and leave him an emperor’s way. Maybe when he was a bit older, and a little more defeated, he would make a good policeman. Right now, he was cocky and very afraid of this new danger he had learnt about today. Sartaj was also afraid, but he had spent a lot of time with fear, and he expected no relief from it. Quick, decisive action could maybe produce the illusion of comfort, but that would be only temporary. You had to learn to live with fear, with its red tongue and its garland of skulls. Sartaj turned to the left and strolled up the footpath. He was on the job, he would stay on it for another half-hour. The bomb could wait.

  The science and art of approach was something that Sartaj had learnt at an early age, in his own home. People tried to approach his father the inspector, usually people in trouble, those who needed help. So they approached through friends and relatives and colleagues, through friends of friends and political connections. Once, a woman who had been threatened by her estranged husband approached through Sartaj’s secondary-school principal. You found a connection with the object of the approach, and then moved favour and obligation through this connection, so that the person being approached felt that they had to help, or at least listen. Approach was how life worked, getting through life meant strumming this web and moving along its many pathways.

  So approach was a skill Sartaj had, but the trouble was that he had never before tried to approach a film star. Like everybody else in Bombay, he knew one caterer who occasionally supplied food for film shootings, two Grade-A extras and one distant cousin whose best friend’s uncle was a film producer. None of these connections would get him into a room with Zoya Mirza without upsetting her. This is what he told Mary and Jana late that night, in a maidan full of dancers and bright lights. He had been unable to get away from the stati
on till very late, but they had insisted on an in-person report on the Zoya Mirza situation. So he had met up with them in Juhu, at the Guru-ji Patta Mandal’s Grand Navaratri Celebrations. The gala posters outside promised ‘Largest Dandiya Raas Ever Seen’, and although Sartaj didn’t believe that to be literally true, he thought there were at least three thousand dancers on this field. Once he had got to the venue, he had called Jana’s husband on his mobile phone, and it had still taken him fifteen minutes to find them, next to the Coca-Cola stand. Sartaj had wandered, quite ravished, in a shimmer and a haze of red and blue and green ghagras. The dancers wheeled with a great flickering of the dandiya sticks, and Sartaj was light-headed from the perfume and the tinkling laughter, from the singer and her Pankhida tu uddi jaaje. Then he saw tall Jana waving to him above the undulating river of jewelled heads. He didn’t see Mary until he was right next to her, and even when he saw her he didn’t know her, not for a full long glance. It was only when she smiled and said ‘Hello’ that he knew her.

  Jana was grinning. ‘She really looks like a real Gujju behn, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sartaj said. Mary was wearing a blue ghagra, and a deep-blue chunni that shone with silver, and her hair was held up by some sort of pearly clips. Her lips were a brilliant red. ‘I didn’t even recognize you.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. But it’s not really that complicated a disguise.’

  Sartaj thought it was quite deep, but he nodded and shook hands with Jana’s husband Suresh, who was resplendent in a crimson kurta and a jari half-jacket. Suresh held up little Naresh, who was dressed exactly like him. Sartaj patted the boy’s head, aware all the time that Mary was watching him.

  ‘Here,’ Jana said. She handed Sartaj a Coke, and then led the way to a sprawl of chairs to the left. She sent Suresh off with Naresh, seated herself comfortably, drew Mary down next to her and turned to Sartaj. ‘Now tell.’

  They both grew quite discontented when it became clear that Sartaj had nothing to tell about Zoya Mirza. ‘Are you police always this slow?’ Mary said. She had her back straight and her hands on her knees, like a schoolteacher.

  ‘Of course they are, baba,’ Jana said. ‘Have you ever tried reporting something at a station?’

  They were both giving him a bit of a tease, and Sartaj accepted the criticism with a smile. He held his hands out wide and said, ‘It would be different if this was official. I have to be very careful.’

  ‘Obviously we’re going to have to manage this for you as well,’ Mary said. ‘Jana, didn’t that Stephanie girl who used to work at Nalini and Yasmin’s have a sister who did make-up for Kajol?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But where is she working now?’

  Sartaj sat back and watched admiringly as Jana cupped a hand over one ear and put a mobile phone to the other. There was now a garba-ized version of Chainya Chainya pumping out over the loudspeakers, and under it Jana tracked down that Stephanie girl. She handed the phone to Mary, who followed a couple of leads. Sartaj was content to watch them, to admire them as they conducted their investigation. It was a peculiar kind of sideways spread, a questioning that moved not necessarily closer to Stephanie, but around her. Jana and Mary had a considered conversation about Stephanie’s ex-best friend, who had also worked at Nalini and Yasmin’s. They talked about this friend’s boyfriend, and a shopping trip she had gone on, to that new mall in Goregaon, and her plan for a trip to Goa in the winter. As far as Sartaj could tell, this had absolutely nothing to do with Stephanie, or with Zoya Mirza. But Jana and Mary leaned close to each other and talked of the ex-best friend with great intensity and complete pleasure. Through the course of the several phone calls, they learnt about other women and their lives, other jobs and marriages and births. Mary was now talking to some woman about her grandmother’s angioplasty. She hung up and said to Sartaj, ‘It’s too late at night, everyone’s gone to sleep. But we’ll have a connection to this Zoya Mirza by tomorrow.’

  ‘A make-up connection,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Are you making fun of us?’ Mary said. ‘Here we are, trying to help you, and you are making fun of us?’

  ‘No, no, no fun. I’m admiring you two, actually. You’re very impressive, how you find out things.’

  ‘Suresh always says I talk too much,’ Jana said. ‘He says I go on and on about things that are completely irrelevant. He says if I want to go from A to C, I don’t have to talk about L, M and Z.’

  Mary drew herself back into a Suresh stance, full of superior distaste. ‘You women, to get from Churchgate to Bandra you go to Thane.’

  Sartaj and Jana broke into giggles. It was a very sharp Suresh imitation, it caught his posture and his quick, clipping speech exactly. Even after talking to Suresh for only two minutes, Sartaj could see that. Suresh emerged just then from the crowd, and said, ‘I left Naresh with Ma,’ and looked quite baffled as his wife and Mary and Sartaj collapsed into helpless laughter.

  Jana stood up and put a hand on Suresh’s shoulder. ‘We’re going to dance,’ she said. ‘Coming?’

  Sartaj was relieved that Mary shook her head. It was a long time since he had dandiya-ed, and he was sure he didn’t want to wade out into this spiralling sea of experts.

  ‘You go,’ Mary said. ‘I’m a bit tired.’

  Jana and Suresh vanished into the whirling wheels of dancers, which were now four, one inside the other.

  ‘Very beautiful,’ Sartaj said. It was, in the halo of bronze spotlights, this sparking set of circles.

  ‘They met here,’ Mary said. ‘Jana and Suresh. His father is one of the organizers.’

  Sartaj remembered meeting Megha on garba nights, in a time so long ago that it was ancient. The music hadn’t been quite so disco, then. ‘Have you been coming for a long time?’

  ‘Ever since I met Jana, four years ago. It’s fun. I like dressing up and coming out.’

  He had to grin back at her very pleased grin. ‘Blending into the Gujaratis.’

  ‘They’re nice people.’

  ‘Except when they’re murdering Muslims.’

  ‘That’s true for everyone, no? Even the Muslims murder people sometimes. Christians do.’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t mean that…Sorry. Suresh seems like a good man.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ She turned in her chair, to look directly at Sartaj. ‘You think everyone is a murderer.’

  ‘Anyone can become one. Sorry, sorry. This is not the talk to have at a garba. It’s just the way policemen see things.’

  Mary didn’t look disturbed, not in the least. ‘So what else do you see at a garba? Tell me.’

  ‘Navratri nights are good for pickpockets, certainly. Chain-snatchers and that lot. And a lot of cash gets handled, you know. At five hundred rupees per ticket in some places, that’s a huge amount. People get tempted, the people who are handling the money.’

  ‘Life is like that, full of temptations.’

  ‘True. That’s the other thing. Boys and girls at these things. Even the very orthodox families, they bring their unmarried daughters out to these garbas. You can’t watch them once they go out into that, that mess. So the boys find them. You know, every year, for the month or two or three after Navratri, all the clinics in town report a rise in abortions.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. Really, we police should take care over that kind of thing.’

  ‘You want to have policemen watching the boys and girls at garbas?’

  ‘If there were enough policemen, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. It’s getting worse.’

  ‘Maybe the boys and girls think it’s getting better.’

  She was exaggeratedly serious, and Sartaj was suddenly aware that she was making fun of him. Amazingly, he found himself blushing. ‘No, you are right,’ he said, looking down and rubbing the back of his neck. ‘It’s very easy to become old-fashioned these days. I sound like my father. He was a policeman also.’

  ‘Here in Bombay?’

  ‘Yes. Here. Actually, you know, Suresh wouldn’t ha
ve liked his stories. He was also one of those people who couldn’t get to Bandra without visiting Thane.’

  ‘I thought policemen were supposed to be brief.’

  ‘Oh, he could be brief. But he always said that what was left out of the final case-report was actually the case. So he would be telling you about a robbery in Chembur, and suddenly you would be in Amritsar. My mother used to laugh at him.’

  ‘Where is your mother now?’

  So Sartaj told her about the house in Pune, and the advantages of having Ma close to family and gurudwara, and then he told her one of Papa-ji’s interesting murder cases which had actually extended from Colaba to Hyderabad. Maybe not as far as Amritsar, but he thought she got the point. She didn’t say much, but the two questions she asked went to the very heart of the bloody matter. It was only when Jana and Suresh came back – with their son sleeping on Suresh’s shoulder – that Sartaj realized that more than an hour had passed. It was long past midnight. Sartaj walked them out, the little group, and saw them into an auto and waved them goodbye. He stood with his back to the ornate, flower-laden garba gate, his hands on his hips, and considered Mary Mascarenas. She was a quiet and complicated one, and surprisingly easy to talk to. She was intelligent, and she didn’t like to reveal this. She had opinions, and she was stubborn. In a Gujarati ghagra she was glossy and somehow modest and small and lush. She was trouble, somehow. Or at least troubling. She was dangerous. She would bear watching.

  Over his chai the next morning Sartaj decided that the whole bomb scare was ridiculous. He felt ashamed of having been afraid, for believing something that so obviously had been imagined by a credulous woman who just happened to be an intelligence officer. And these spies were from a paranoid tribe anyway, they were a caste of secret warriors who always saw a foreign hand in every crime, and a terrorist behind every corner. Sartaj had his chai, and he did not feel afraid. It was an unseasonably cool morning, for the very end of September, and he felt cheerful and energetic. He sat near the window with his second cup and the Dainik Jagran, and watched the birds wheel up out of the swamp into the opening light. The news was bad, or as bad as usual, there was further tension on the border, there had been a grenade attack in Jammu, the ruling coalition at the centre was shaky again and threatening to disintegrate. Things were falling apart, but Sartaj stood in the shower and soaped his chest and sang Bhumro bhumro along with the radio from the apartment below. He could hear children in the apartment above, laughing and singing along also. It was a good morning.