Sacred Games

  They reached the Cozy Nook at nine-thirty. The Nook was five cottages clustered together at the edge of a housing development, with a front office that was of brand-new concrete coloured an alarming pink. There were new houses on the slope on both sides of the Cozy Nook, so it wasn’t really so cosy any more. No doubt they offered the hazy prospect beyond, dissected by electrical wire, as a fine river view. Khandala had filled up with new construction, and was no longer the leafy haven that Sartaj had made trips to with college girlfriends. But at least the hairy-eared, balding receptionist was reassuringly familiar in his jaded boredom and his rudeness.

  ‘Write name,’ he barked, spinning a register across the counter.

  Sartaj grinned at Mary, and explained that he was a policeman, that he didn’t want a room, that he wanted to ask some questions. Hairy-eared baldy was confused by Mary. ‘She’s my assistant,’ Sartaj said. ‘Now take out your registers.’

  The investigation took half an hour. Sartaj found Umesh Bindal’s name easily enough, he signed it with a flourish and two dots under the large curve. The other names on those dates were often illegible and, Sartaj was sure, mostly made up. ‘S. Khan’ gave his address as ‘Bandra, Mumbai’, and left no other information. If he had been the man with the camera, watching Umesh and Kamala in their satiated lover’s walk down the pathway, there was no way to trace him. Sartaj had Baldy put away the registers and walk them around the cottages. Mary followed quietly.

  She spoke when they were outside, back in the car and heading up the hill. ‘Did you find what you wanted?’ she said, her arm bumping against his as he took a sharp turn.

  He shook his head, and waited until they were seated at a table in a restaurant, on the edge of a cliff. There was a breeze lifting up from the stepped floor of the valley, and Sartaj felt wonderfully relaxed and hungry. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anything,’ he said. And then he told her about investigations, about feeling your way along, groping your way along and coming up with half-understood clues, with evidence that wouldn’t work as evidence but you knew was the truth. ‘It’s not like in films,’ he said. ‘Really, half of detection is accident. Like us missing the pictures of Zoya, and you knowing exactly what they were.’

  ‘So you depend on random women to help you find gangsters by accident? That’s not very comforting for the poor public.’ Her eyes were prickling with amusement.

  ‘Aaaah, but I have to be open to random women, you see. You have to be able to listen, to really see.’

  ‘I can see you spend a lot of time listening to women.’

  He knew she was teasing, but he couldn’t stop himself from protesting, ‘No, no, not like that at all.’

  She began to giggle, and he laughed along with her. They ate oversized neer dosas with a fiery sambhar. Sartaj wiped his plate clean and sat back. He was feeling quite content, at peace with the world. Gaitonde was dead and far away, and if there was a bomb it was unsubstantial, it was merely a horror-story device. Sartaj ran his eyes up, over the scrubby green slopes and into the distance beyond the mountain tops, and said, ‘It’s so relaxing to be out of that city. It would be nice to live in a village, you know. Be close to the soil, the clean air. The stress would be so much less.’

  Mary was leaning to one side, her chin propped on one hand. ‘You in a village. That would be something to see.’

  ‘Why, why? I might make a good farmer.’

  She shook her head gently. ‘I’m not saying it is just you. I grew up in a village, and I couldn’t go back. Do you know what it’s really like?’ Then she told him about waking up in a red brick house with a tiled roof, to the dawning chatter of parrots, and stumbling out crumbly-eyed to the cowshed behind the house. The bathroom was a doorless enclosure attached to the cowshed, with water in a big copper pan embedded in the wall, over a fire. There were no toilets, just the fields of usal. Back behind the cowshed was also a well, and beyond that, a row of coconut trees and the paddy fields. A river edging down to the sea, glinting, and the smell of jasmine flowers. Coffee and appams at eight, paes at ten. The day at school, the chatter of Konkani and Kannada and Tulu on the winding dirt road. Lunch, and the eternity of the afternoon, skipping with Jojo on the red floor of the platform in front of the house. The rosary slipping through their mother’s fingers, the hour-long evening prayer, the blessings from the elders. Dinner sitting on the polished floor, Mother on her monai bending low over her plate. The complete, stunning darkness when the lanterns were blown out. In bed by nine. And sleep.

  ‘No electricity, no television, I don’t think we even had radio till I was fourteen or fifteen.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Sartaj said. ‘It sounds very peaceful, but I don’t think I could live there.’

  ‘You couldn’t,’ Mary said. ‘That village isn’t there any more, to return to. It is all completely changed.’

  Sartaj stretched his arms over his head, worked his spine, sighed. ‘It is late. I have some work to do at the station. We should go,’ he said. ‘Back to Bombay.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about Zoya Mirza. Jana will be angry if I come back with no news.’

  So he told her about the meeting with Zoya Mirza as they drove down, not fast, not hurried. The city crept up, not dramatic, just inevitable. The scattered shacks and houses and buildings gathered themselves together into a dense mass. Sartaj had the feeling of being drawn in by a larger gravity, and he was glad of it. This was home. Mary sat comfortably, her knees drawn up, not quite as far along the seat as before.

  At her house, they stood in front of each other, suddenly awkward. Sartaj had one hand on the car, the other awkwardly at his side.

  ‘Zoya, is she pretty?’ Mary said.

  Sartaj shrugged. ‘She’s all right. Nothing much.’

  Mary reached out to nudge his forearm. ‘You’re smarter about women than you pretend. But really, she’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

  ‘Arre, I am not just saying that. She’s okay, bas. Tall and all that, but just okay. You know she’s not even really six feet. Jojo made that up. She’s only a little above five ten.’

  ‘Ooooooh,’ Mary said, quite pleased by the detail. ‘Jojo liked doing things like that.’

  They looked past each other, and the silence grew long.

  ‘I should go,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Okay,’ Mary said. ‘I, I liked the drive.’

  ‘Yes, me also.’

  ‘Okay, bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  She took a step up to him. He was quite stopped for a moment, and then he stuck out his hand. She smiled, shook it. I should kiss her on the cheek, Sartaj thought, but by then she had turned and was away from him. He watched her climb her stairs, waved at her and drove to the station laughing at himself. Where was all that smoothness gone, those old Sartaj-the-deadly-Singh moves? Absolutely vanished, leaving him an absolute bhondu. I am not ageing well, he thought. But he was very cheery, and he hummed mehbooba mehbooba all the way to work.

  Anjali Mathur called him at eleven that night, while he was still working at the station. ‘There’s no mention of a guru in all our files on Gaitonde,’ she said. ‘Was this woman sure about this?’

  ‘Yes. She mentioned several conversations.’

  ‘Odd. He must have kept it hidden.’

  ‘Very hidden. He kept Zoya hidden. He must have kept a lot of things hidden. He was good at it.’

  ‘Yes. I did a search in our databases for the word “pralay”. I came up with nothing. So then I looked for “qayamat”. I found it three times, all in literature from one outfit. This is a militant outfit called Hizbuddeen. They are very shadowy, we have never captured or killed any of their people. We don’t even know where they are based, where they operate. But we’ve found their literature in raids on other Islamic groups in the Kashmir valley, in Punjab, in the north-east along the Bangladesh border. This Hizbuddeen has supplied money and arms to these groups, beyond that we don’t know anything about them. They first seem to surface just around the time of th
e Kargil war. Now, their literature specifically promises “Qayamat”, and talks about the signs of the last days. They quote verses from the Qur’an: “Closer and closer to mankind comes their Reckoning: yet they heed not and they turn away.” Now, this is interesting. Mumbai is specifically mentioned, in each of the pamphlets.’

  Sartaj could hear her leafing through paper. Through the open door, he could see the end of a bench, an empty hallway and a scrubby garden edged by a wall.

  ‘Here,’ Anjali Mathur said. ‘It says, “A great fire will take the unbelievers, and it will begin in Mumbai.” This line is repeated in the other pamphlets with minor changes. “A fire will begin in Mumbai and sweep across the country.” But always, Mumbai is mentioned.’

  Sartaj was outraged. ‘What do these bastards have against Bombay? They don’t mention any other cities?’

  ‘No. They just talk about the nation of India as dar-ul-harb, and about its coming destruction. They insist on destruction. The name of the outfit comes from “hizbul”, which is “army of”, and “deen”, which I think is used here in the sense of the Last Judgement. The word can also mean “religion” or “conduct”, but in this case it refers to the third verse of the first chapter of the Qur’an, I think. So the Hizbuddeen is the “Army of the Final Day”. Anyway, all this would be too little to propose a connection. But I thought the name of this organization sounded familiar. I had been analysing our records of counterfeit money which comes over the border, and I went back and did a cross-check in the databases. Hizbuddeen has been named five times as the source for large sums of counterfeit money. The samples we have from these incidents are exactly the same as the ones from the Kalki Sena, and the ones from Jojo’s apartment, and what we found in Gaitonde’s bunker.’

  Sartaj’s head was starting to hurt. What could be the connection between Jojo and rabid extremists promising annihilation? Between Gaitonde and this Muslim militant outfit? Maybe there was no connection at all. He pressed his fingers hard into his forehead, and said, ‘It is all still too vague.’

  ‘I agree. There is no reason to conclude that this money indicates any connection. We have only possibilities. Nothing yet that holds together. Only more questions. Who is this guru? What was Gaitonde’s relationship with him?’

  ‘I will work on it.’

  ‘Yes. I will keep looking here.’

  So they were to keep on working. Sartaj worked another hour at the station, and then went home. He put his feet on the coffee table and drank his whisky, only one glass today, a light one at that. He was aware that he was still working, thinking about Gaitonde and Jojo and thick chunks of money. This was one of the things Megha had hated, that he was unable ever to stop the job from working inside him. He would drink tea, talk about relatives, go and see a film, and somewhere inside him the fragments of some murder would be fitting themselves together. He had always tried to tell her that none of this was voluntary, that he would stop it if he could. That, somehow, had made it worse for Megha, that it was impulse, or instinct. But instinct had taught him its inescapable lessons, and he had learnt to trust it. Now instinct told him that these pieces somehow made a whole. You knew that sometimes, you had the truth in your mouth but no evidence in your hands. And sometimes you acted on this knowledge, you planted evidence, wrote an FIR leaving out certain facts and putting others in. Justice had sometimes to be manipulated into being properly blind.

  In this Gaitonde affair, there would be no justice, no redemption. There was only a hope for some partial explanation of what had happened, and this creeping fear. Sartaj was afraid now, he truly was. Now that he was at rest, the fear came back, amplified by English-movie images of disaster, of entire cities being obliterated by special-effects fire. Work, he told himself, work on it. Do your job. So Sartaj closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the sofa and held his glass, and let the bits and shards of information fall through his head and body. He couldn’t force anything, couldn’t compel an answer. If he was easy enough, if he was fearless, if he opened his mind and heart and belly, a shape would form. He just had to be patient.

  Ganesh Gaitonde Explores the Self

  On the yacht we watched a lot of films. It was a hundred-and-thirty-foot boat (they had to teach me to call it a yacht) with three decks, and enough room for a sizeable separate drawing room. In that room I put the biggest TV we could fit, and a stack of movie players and a receiver. And in that room we watched movies, hundreds of videos and laser discs and DVDs. Not that we didn’t work: I woke every morning at six and exercised and did my yoga and my puja and was at the phones by seven-thirty, eating my breakfast as I took my calls. Managing my company from a distance was at first a difficult education – I had to let go, to stop worrying about details, to give responsibility to others and not tell them how jobs should be done. I felt like a god, distant from the world but directing it from above. By ten-thirty or eleven I was usually done with the day’s urgent work, and a little later Bunty called from Bombay with the news about collections and the added-up numbers from the day before. At noon I ate a light lunch with the boys, then took a half-hour nap. Depending on where we were, how close to a convenient shore, I sometimes had a girl to wake me up from the nap, Indonesian or Chinese or Thai. But in any case I was up by two, with the day stretching out in front of me.

  So we watched movies: Hum Apke Hain Kaun and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Sholay yet again, and Dil To Pagal Hai and Hero No. 1 and Auzaar. And also Mother India and Anarkali and Sujata. And a thousand others I had never heard of, Bahu Begum and Anjaam and Halaku. I also liked to watch English movies, not just the bang-bang kind the boys enjoyed, but also more talky ones to improve my English. But the boys grew restless and bored by these, the ganwar bastards, and begged to go back to some bundal maderchod film where they could watch Raveena Tandon thrust and shove her hips like some sort of crazed machine. So we watched a lot of Indian movies, even Punjabi and Tamil ones. Mukund, one of the boys, was Tamil, and he translated Nayakan for us, and it was true, the Tamil version with Kamalahasan was a lot better. It was strange to see Bombay in Tamil, through Tamil, but the film had dum. It was true, just like life. We watched Vardarajan’s life in complete silence, from his beginnings in the slums and his rise up to power and fame. When his son was killed, when that choking cry came from Kamalahasan’s throat, we felt that pain, it was ours. We had also lost our loved ones. I had tears on my cheeks. All of us did.

  The next day I told Bunty to have flowers sent to Kamalahasan and Mani Ratnam, no name on the bouquets, just a card, ‘From a fan of Nayakan’. And that night when Jojo called I told her about how much we had all liked the film.

  She burst out laughing. ‘So there was a whole bunch of you tough bhais sitting around crying?’

  ‘Kutti, it was a great performance. And a great story.’

  ‘That last scene of the nayakan’s funeral, I bet you cried all the way through that.’

  ‘There were thousands and thousands of people at his funeral. Of course I cried. It was very touching.’

  Off she went again. Finally she got hold of herself. ‘Oof, you men are such sentimentalists. Don’t worry, there will be thousands at your funeral.’

  ‘Randi, you don’t worry about my funeral. Whenever and however it happens, Parmatma has written it already. It has already happened, but we are fooled by the illusion of time. He has his plan. We are just actors in his play.’

  ‘Vah. Actors in his play.’

  ‘Yes. We dance along the lines of his leela. Birth, life, death, all has a shape, even if we can’t see it.’

  ‘What a philosopher you are today, Ganesh Gaitonde. You have changed, you go on and on about destiny and karma and bhenchod gandugiri like that. What has happened to you?’

  ‘Nothing, except that I have started to understand a little of the truth of the universe.’ Nobody but Bunty knew of my conversations with Guru-ji. I had to keep all these segments of my world apart, Jojo from Guru-ji, Guru-ji from Mr Kumar, and some of m
yself from everything.

  ‘Chutiya, you’ve become one of those holy Hindus.’ And she made a spitting sound, as if she was expelling something foul.

  ‘Jojo, you should think about these questions also. Go to your church, maybe you will find some peace there.’

  ‘Gaitonde, now you are turning into my mother. What mixed-up times we live in.’

  ‘Exactly. This is why the spiritual search…’

  ‘Arre, maderchod, you want me to go to the church so some smelly priest can pry into my head and tell me I am a bad woman and give me punishments? And what will his god, or your god, give me? Peace? I don’t want peace. I want money, I want a flat, I want my business to grow. Peace! Why don’t you give some peace to those girls you thoko every afternoon, my spiritual master?’

  And she tumbled about her bed, laughing. I was smiling a little too. Then she stopped abruptly. ‘Do you give them spiritual sermons also?’

  ‘Arre, no.’

  ‘Tell me the truth, Gaitonde.’

  ‘Saali, how will I give them lectures if they don’t speak Hindi?’

  ‘And they don’t understand your toota-phoota English.’

  ‘My English is getting better every day.’

  ‘Stay on the subject, Gaitonde. Have you tried talking to them about the path to, what did you call it, mokha?’

  ‘Moksha.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, Gaitonde. Tell the truth. You always have to me, even if you lie to everyone else.’

  I was quiet. This was true enough, that I found myself telling her things about myself, my fears and my worries, that I revealed to nobody else.