I usually waited for Guru-ji’s call in my office at five p.m., and he called when he could. I had a satellite phone especially and exclusively for him, with a built-in scrambler. He had a scrambler he travelled with, and so we talked in complete security. I had learnt all this new security technology from my baldy friend Mr Kumar from RAW, all this high carefulness. He had given me a secure satellite phone, and through my own people I had sourced two more, one for Guru-ji and one for Jojo. So I was triply secure: in my patriotism, in my spirituality, in my sex. The Lucky Chance was also designed to be secure. My old friends Gaston and Pascal had found me this old, falling-apart khatara that belonged to a Gulf sheikh, and because he was an old degenerate who we supplied with Scotch and young boys, and because it bored him to argue about such trivial sums of money, he let us have it for the throwaway price of seven crore rupees. Gaston and Pascal had hauled it to a shipyard in Cochin, and refitted it with gun lockers and security doors and special close-range radar, all under the technical advice of the mild-looking Mr Kumar. In Bombay everyone said that Gaitonde wanted a yacht because Chotta Madhav had had one for years, but that was completely untrue. I wanted to live on a boat because it felt safe. On a boat I knew who was coming, and when. A few men could make a boat secure. And Guru-ji had told me that on water I was safe, that my destiny grew and rolled on the waves.
Besides, Chotta Madhav had only an ordinary ninety-footer which he paddled around Malaysian waters. I took the ferociously-armed Lucky Chance wherever I wanted, through Indonesian straits if that’s where we needed to go, and twice we had blasted pirate speedboats out of the water with heavy machine-gun fire. The stupid bastards thought we couldn’t see them coming up in the dark. As long as I had technology and Guru-ji with me, nothing could touch me on the water. So I waited for Guru-ji’s call.
As always, while waiting I spent time with my accountant. He was a full CA, my Partha Mukherjee, a good Bengali boy who had grown up in Bandra East. He had prospered with me, had moved his parents and sister into a flat in Lokhandwalla, and had already found a boy for the sister. The wedding was to be in November, with a five-star reception. I paid Partha Mukherjee well, with double bonuses, but that was exactly what he was worth to me. My company’s annual turnover at that time was three hundred crores, and tracking that money and funnelling it from here to there, and investing it and expanding it, this in itself was a job and a half. Of course we still made money the old-fashioned way, from our taxes on businessmen and movie producers, from commissions earned from good middle-class householders who needed their retirement flats emptied of sticky tenants, from moving substances and materials across borders, from bookies and touts. But we had legitimate investments thrown across Bombay and into India, we had funds and stocks and real estate and start-up companies. All this Partha Mukherjee managed with his computers and his various assistants in various cities across Asia. I gave him half an hour every evening to summarize for me the worming of my money across countries. He showed me charts, and drew arrows on hand-drawn maps to explain to me where it was all going, from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Bombay. I understood, and directed its flow. Fat old Paritosh Shah would have been proud of me.
When Guru-ji’s call came I always threw Partha Mukherjee out. But that day it was not his phone that buzzed, but the other secure phone beside it. Mukherjee stood up without being told and gathered up his papers. All the boys knew, when the special grey phones rang they had to leave me alone. After the door had shut, with a small, reassuring, vacuum-sealing sound with a metallic click at the end of it, I tapped my code into the phone to start the scrambler. The phones were secure at both ends.
‘Ganesh.’ It was Mr Kumar, as stealthy and gentle as always.
‘Kumar Saab.’
‘The Bhavnagar information was good. We got four of them.’
‘Including the local contact? All dead?’
‘Yes. Shabash, Ganesh.’
‘This is only my dharam, sir.’ And there would be no publicity for me or for Mr Kumar. Perhaps the local Bhavnagar police would announce that they had broken a cell of ISI agents, and captured a stash of arms. But for us, who had engineered the entire operation, there was only this quiet shabash between colleagues, on a private phone. This was how the secret agencies worked. Mr Kumar had explained it to me: when we do our work properly, nobody knows. When we fail, everybody knows. This operation had succeeded, now he had plans for a new one.
He said, ‘We are going to hit Maulana Mehmood Ghouse.’
‘Saab, that’s a very big wicket.’ Mehmood Ghouse was a Pakistani mullah, a preacher who had been very active in the Kashmir valley. He boasted openly of how many kafirs he had killed with his own hands, and for a while every television channel had been showing a grainy clip of him at a jehadi prayer meeting in Multan, holding up the rotting, decapitated head of an Indian soldier by the hair.
‘Yes, he’s big,’ Mr Kumar said. ‘And he’s getting bigger. He’s standing for elections. Suddenly he’s a politician, and he’s saying the man in the Multan video is not him at all.’
‘Who will believe that?’
‘The British government. They’re very impressed by the fact that he used to be an electrical engineer, that he uses computers and is a modern mullah. They’ve given him a visa.’
‘Maderchod.’
‘He’s going to be there for a week. He will address public meetings, try to meet English politicians.’
‘Nobody will meet him, saab.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. But he’s stepping out into the open. He thinks he’s going to come back with bags full of pounds and new batches of chelas and an international profile. So we will make him international news. You get a couple of teams in place in London.’
‘What is the timetable?’
‘We think he arrives in London four weeks from now.’
‘Four weeks. Easy.’ We had a base in Cannes, and moved business through Europe routinely. We recently had taken an interest in Slovenia and the Baltics. We were learning and expanding.
‘We will pass you information as we receive it.’
‘We’ll be ready, saab. But why now, saab?’
‘It is a message. These people think they can strut about on television. Bas.’
‘And the message is to be from?’
‘It is to be anonymous, at this point. But let’s see how the operation goes. Maybe we can send it from your address.’
‘Of course, saab.’
‘Bye, Ganesh.’
‘Salaam, saab.’
He was always clipped and to the point, my Mr Kumar. Just so much talk as was necessary, no more. He was not my friend, despite our months of conversations. But this order today, this was a mark of trust. Everything I had done so far was minor compared to this, and I was glad. Not just because being given more sensitive jobs meant that I could ask for more in return, but because I felt genuinely involved in this war. Now I was fighting at a higher level. Chotta Madhav’s men had some years ago hit a Nepalese politician, a main supporter of the Pakistanis in Nepal, but that had only been in Kathmandu. I was to do this work in the centre of Europe, in fancy vilayati London. I would not fail. I would do it despite battalions of bodyguards and all of Scotland Yard. I set about organizing the logistics.
I called in Arjun Reddy, my computer-wallah, and he sent out my commands through secure e-mail. He assured me, as he did every week, that we were using the most advanced encryption technology, that we changed our cipher every week, that even if the CIA and the entire American government spent a billion dollars and their entire computer force on one of our e-mails, it would take them two hundred years to break the code. But e-mail still made me nervous. No matter how much Reddy assured me of steel-clad protection, I couldn’t get rid of the image of my words swimming through the stomachs of the planet’s computers, alone and vulnerable. But anyway, I wrote to my people in Cannes: ‘London mein fielding lagao. Do team bhejo, Sachin aur Saurav dono. Ready rehna, instructions baad mein.’ The op
was four weeks down the line, but I had learnt from experience to have the elements in place early. Sometimes events speeded up, and in any case it was a good thing to have your boys learning the landscapes of the stalking ground, to get them used to the language and the buses and the neighbours, and to have the neighbours getting used to them.
Once the serious work was done, Reddy continued my own instruction in computers. I could handle Windows now, and knew in principle how to open a document and make a new one, how to slide through a spreadsheet and its layers, but I still got lost often. Sometimes I couldn’t find the document I wanted, and sometimes I would get stuck in some box on the screen and nothing I did would back me out. It wasn’t just the English that confused me, but the whole universe inside that screen, I couldn’t reason out where the ground was, and which was the sky. Reddy drew diagrams on paper, but I couldn’t grasp the geography, and it drove me crazy, especially when he tip-tapped with his twenty-three-year-old fingers and sped through the internet, and made the machine and the entire world-wide system do things, do what he wanted it all to do. I had thrown things at the computer a couple of times, coffee cups and dishes. But, still, I always calmed down and came back to the computer. This little box ran everything now, I could see that. I had to understand it. And I had to hire Reddy, and if necessary a hundred others like him.
That evening I made Reddy shut up and watch quietly as I started up the machine, typed in my password, connected to the net and found my way to a couple of websites. He was completely silent but vibrating with impatience at my slow clicking and laborious one-fingered hunting at the keyboard. Without looking away from www.myindianbeauties.com, which published a new actress or model picture every day, I said, ‘All right, chutiya. You’re making me nervous. Out.’
‘Sorry, bhai.’
‘Don’t go far. If I need you I’ll call you.’
‘Of course, bhai.’
He shuffled off. He had big ambitions, and he had been trying to talk me into investing in a website with him and his brother. He had yet to show me how he would make money, since I had never once paid for an Indian beauty on the web. But he kept talking, and coming up with new ideas every two days. Once the door clicked shut again, I leaned back and locked it. Then off I went to Guru-ji’s website, www.eternalsacredwisdom.com.
Guru-ji travelled all over the world, he travelled all the time. He had centres in a hundred and forty-two countries, with others being developed in twelve additional countries. But wherever he was in the world, whatever he was doing, there was always a new pravachan on his site every three days. You could read it in more than a hundred languages, including of course Marathi and Hindi. But of late I had been reading Guru-ji’s words in English, under ‘Discourse’. It took me a while, and some struggle and pain, but I always got through to the end. I kept the Marathi version open in another window for reference, but I stayed mostly with the English and so absorbed not only wisdom but also language. Guru-ji had praised me for my diligence, and had mentioned me in one of his summer discourses on time management, of course without mentioning my name. ‘A successful man is one who never stops learning,’ he had said. ‘I have a bhakt who is very successful, who commands money and respect across the seas. But despite all his worldly achievements, he is not arrogant. He realizes what he does not know. A wise man said long ago, to realize that one is ignorant is the beginning of wisdom.’ And then he had gone on to tell the story of my reading the discourse in a language I had not mastered.
Today the discourse was about sex. Guru-ji was never afraid of controversial topics, and never backed off from speaking about something for fear of offending. He was fearless. I read on: ‘Celibacy is held up as the ideal by all spiritual traditions.’ I had to look up ‘celibacy’ in the English-Marathi dictionary. ‘But to reach for celibacy when one is not ready is a mistake. Celibacy will come to you when you are ready for it. A celibacy that you enforce on yourself is itself a form of sensuality. The struggle with your body will become a passion. And desire will express itself, you cannot dam it, you cannot block it, you cannot kill it. Even the images you make of celibacy will be beautiful as a woman’s hip, the hymns you sing to celibacy will be like a lover’s kiss.’
These six sentences took me fifteen minutes to get through, and not only because of the English. I paused to reflect, to absorb, to admire. He said things so simply, in such direct, forceful language, and yet how deep the words went. I felt them in my heart, under my stomach. What an endless tug-of-war we fought with desire, I thought. How much we pulled, how much it pushed. What torments, and what ecstasy in our torments.
And yes, it was strange even to me, that I, Ganesh Gaitonde, who had once scorned all mention of gods, and regarded any talk of religious solace as weakness, was now a dedicated follower of a guru. How had it happened? It came about because Guru-ji and I started talking. After our first conversation, when I had compelled him to call me in jail, I had not expected to hear from him again. He had, after all, to protect his public image, his vast mission across the world. But ten days after I got out of jail and the country, he called me. He had asked his people to get the number from Bunty, and suddenly, there he was on my handset, Shridhar Shukla himself, with his solid bronze voice and his exquisite punctuation. This was a man who was eagerly sought after by millions, and yet he took the time to call me, to ask after my well-being. I was cynical, I waited for him to ask me for something, as every last caller did. But he had no matter to settle, no need for money or revenge, he just wanted to talk to me.
‘I see, you want to talk to me,’ I said. ‘What do you want to talk to me about?’
He surely heard the sneer in my voice, but he answered calmly: ‘About whatever is on your mind.’
‘All right. I have a question to ask you.’
‘Ask.’
‘I don’t believe that you are a true guru.’
He laughed. ‘That’s not a question. But that’s fine. You don’t have to believe anything about me.’
Then he was silent. It was infuriating that he was not provoked at all. I waited, and thought of slamming the phone down, and then finally spoke, because I was in fact curious. ‘You can’t be a true guru because of what you are having me do for you.’ I meant, of course, the many weapons that I was bringing into the country for him. ‘People who are truly spiritually advanced are peaceful. They are against violence.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Everyone knows that.’
‘So you think you yourself are not very spiritually advanced?’
I flushed, and sat up. ‘We’re talking about you.’
‘All right, Ganesh, all right. But I was curious about where you got this idea about spiritual achievement and what everyone calls being peaceful. It’s all over the place nowadays, everyone repeats it, nobody can say why they believe it.’
‘It’s obvious, no?’
‘No.’
Then again he was silent. Bastard. ‘Listen,’ I snapped. ‘Don’t play games, just tell me. I’ll ask, all right? So tell me, how can you be a true guru and do what you are doing?’
‘Do you know what I am doing?’
‘I know a little. I know my part, and it is not peaceful.’
‘Yes, you know your part. You know the little you can see. And you have been told that to be a mahatma you have to be peaceful, whatever that means. But, Ganesh, can you imagine the whole picture?’
‘Of course I don’t know what your plan is.’
‘But think of the picture that is even bigger than that. Think of life itself. Do you think it has no violence in it? Life feeds on life, Ganesh. And the beginning of life is violence. Do you know where our energy comes from? The sun, you say. Everything depends on the sun. We live because of the sun. But the sun is not a peaceful place. It is a place of unbelievable violence. It is one huge explosion, a chain of explosions. When the violence ceases, the sun dies, and we die.’
‘That is different. It’s not the same as killing a man. O
r many of them.’
‘All men die.’
‘But they don’t have to die because you blow their heads up with your bullets.’
‘So by not killing you bring peace?’
I knew that wasn’t true. I wanted to contradict him, but I knew that non-violence never brought peace. If anything was obvious, that was. He was a frustrating bastard, this guru. ‘That’s different,’ I said. ‘We live in Kaliyug, so we are doomed to fight. But you are supposed to be a holy man, so you should be telling us not to fight.’
‘Why, Ganesh? Why? You are a very intelligent man, but even you have fallen into this trap. Even you. But it’s not your fault, this propaganda is very popular in our time, all over the world. But think back on your own history, Ganesh. Have not holy men fought before? Have they not urged warriors to battle? Does spiritual advancement mean that you should not take up weapons when confronted by evil?’