Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Hello, saab.’

  ‘All good, Shambhu?’

  ‘Yes, saab.’ Shambhu shook hands with both of them. Sartaj had his usual moment of envy for the iron of Shambhu’s grip, for his taut shoulders and his smooth, twenty-four-year-old face. Once, the year before, he had leaned back in the booth and raised his shirt and shown them his biscuited belly, the little triangles of muscle rising up to his chest. A waiter brought Shambhu a fresh pineapple juice. He never drank aerated drinks, or anything with sugar in it.

  ‘Been trekking, Shambhu?’ Katekar said.

  ‘Going early next week, my friend. To Pindari glacier.’

  On the red rexine of the seat, between Sartaj and Shambhu, there was a heavy brown envelope. Sartaj slid it into his lap, and raised the flap. Inside, there were the usual ten stacks of hundred-rupee notes, stapled and rubber-banded by the bank into little ten-thousand-rupee bricks.

  ‘Pindari?’ Katekar said.

  Shambhu was amazed. ‘Boss, do you ever leave Bombay? Pindari is in the Himalayas. Above Nainital.’

  ‘Ah,’ Katekar said. ‘Gone for how long?’

  ‘Ten days. Don’t worry, I’ll be back by next time.’

  Sartaj pulled the Air India bag from between his feet, unzipped it, and slid the envelope in. The station and the Delite Dance Bar had a monthly arrangement. Shambhu and he were merely representatives of the two organizations, dispensing and collecting. The money was not personal, and they had been seeing each other for a year and some months now, ever since Shambhu had taken over as manager of Delite, and they had grown to like each other. He was a good fellow, Shambhu, efficient, low-profile, and very fit. He was trying to persuade Katekar to climb mountains.

  ‘It’ll clear out your head,’ Shambhu said. ‘Why do you think the great yogis always did tapasya way up there? It’s the air. It improves meditation, brings peace. It’s good for you.’

  Katekar raised his empty Pepsi glass. ‘My tapasya is here, brother. Here only I find enlightenment every night.’

  Shambhu laughed, and clinked glasses with Katekar. ‘Don’t burn us with your fierce austerities, O master. I’ll have to send apsaras to distract you.’

  They giggled together, and Sartaj had to smile at the thought of Katekar seated cross-legged on a deerskin, effulgent with pent-up energy. He tugged at the zipper on the bag, and nudged Shambhu with his elbow. ‘Listen, Shambhu-rishi,’ Sartaj said. ‘We have to do a raid.’

  ‘What, again? We just had one not five weeks ago.’

  ‘About seven, I think. Almost two months. But, Shambhu, the government’s changed. Things have changed.’ Things had indeed changed. The Rakshaks were the new government in the state. What had once been a muscular right-wing organization, proud of its disciplined and looming cadres, was now trying to become a party of statesmen. As state ministers and cabinet secretaries, they had toned down their ranting nationalism, but they would not give up their battle against cultural degeneration and western corruption. ‘They promised to reform the city.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shambhu said. ‘That bastard Bipin Bhonsle. All those speeches about cleaning up corruption since he became minister. And what’s all that noise about protecting Indian culture he’s been throwing around lately? What are we but Indian? And aren’t we protecting our culture also? Aren’t the girls doing Indian dances?’

  They were doing that exactly, spinning under disco lights to filmi music, quite respectably covered up in cholis and saris, while men held up fans of twenty and fifty-rupee notes for them to pick from, but the Delite Dance Bar as a temple of culture was an audacity that silenced Sartaj and Katekar completely. Then they both said ‘Shambhu’ together, and he held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay. When?’

  ‘Next week,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Do it before I leave. Monday.’

  ‘Fine. Midnight, then.’ Under the new edict, the bars were supposed to close at eleven-thirty.

  ‘Oh, come, come, saab. You’re taking the rotis from the mouths of poor girls. That’s too-too early.’

  ‘Twelve-thirty.’

  ‘At least one, please. Have some mercy. As it is, that’s half the night’s earning gone.’

  ‘One, then. But you better still have some girls there when we come in. We’ll have to arrest some.’

  ‘That bastard Bhonsle. Close down the bars, but what is this new shosha of arresting girls? Why? What for? All they’re trying to do is make a living.’

  ‘The new shosha is ruthless discipline and honesty, Shambhu. Five girls in the van. Ask for volunteers. They can give whatever names they like. And it’ll be short. Home by three, three-thirty. We’ll drop them.’

  Shambhu nodded. He did really seem to like his girls, and they him, and from what Sartaj heard, he never tried to push his take of the dancers’ tips beyond the standard sixty per cent. From the really popular ones he took only forty. A happy girl is a better earner, he had once said to Sartaj. He was a good businessman. Sartaj had great hopes for him.

  ‘Okay, boss,’ Shambhu said. ‘Will be organized. No problem.’ Outside, he walked in front of the Gypsy as they backed out into the thickening traffic, grinning and grinning.

  ‘What?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Saab, you know, if I can tell the girls you are coming on the raid, you your very own self, I bet I’ll get ten volunteers.’

  ‘Listen, chutiya,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Twelve even, if you escorted them in the van,’ Shambhu said. ‘That Manika asks about you all the time. So brave he is, she says. So handsome.’

  Katekar was very serious. ‘I know her. Nice home-loving girl.’

  ‘Fair-complexioned,’ Shambhu said. ‘Good at cooking, embroidery.’

  ‘Bastards,’ Sartaj said. ‘Bhenchods. Come on, Katekar, drive. We’re late.’

  Katekar drove, making no attempt to hide a smile as big as Shambhu’s. A swarm of sparrows dipped crazily out of the sky, grazing the bonnet of the Gypsy. It was almost evening.

  There was a murder waiting at the station for them. Majid Khan, who was the senior inspector on duty, said it had been half an hour since the call had come in from Navnagar, from the Bengali Bura. ‘There’s nobody else here to take it,’ he said. ‘Falls to you, Sartaj.’

  Sartaj nodded. A murder case three hours before the end of the shift was something that the other officers would be happy to have missed, unless it was especially interesting. The Bengali Bura in Navnagar was very poor, and dead bodies there were just dead, devoid of any enlivening possibilities of professional praise, or press, or money.

  ‘Have a cup of tea, Sartaj,’ Majid said. He flipped through the stacks of Delite money, and then put them in the drawer on the right-hand side of the desk. Later he would move the money to the locker of the Godrej cupboard behind his desk, where the larger part of the operating budget of the station was kept. It was all cash, and none of it came from state funds, which weren’t enough to pay for the paper the investigating officers wrote the panchanamas on, or the vehicles that they drove, or the petrol they used, or even for the cups of tea that they and a thousand visitors drank. Some of the Delite money Majid would keep, as part of his perquisites as senior inspector, and some of it would be passed on, upwards.

  ‘No, I’d better not,’ Sartaj said. ‘Better get out there. Sooner there, sooner to sleep.’

  Majid was stroking his moustache, which was a flamboyant handlebar like his army father’s. He maintained it with faithful indulgence, with foreign unguents and delicate pruning, in the face of all mockery. ‘Your bhabhi was remembering you,’ he said. ‘When are you coming to dinner?’

  Sartaj stood up. ‘Tell her I said thanks, Majid. And next week, yes? Wednesday? Khima, yes?’ Majid’s wife was actually not a very good cook, but her khima was not offensive, and so Sartaj professed a great passion for it. Since his divorce the officers’ wives had been feeding him regularly, and he suspected that there was other scheming afoot. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Right,’ Majid said. ‘Wednesday. I’ll clear
it with the general and let you know.’

  In the jeep, Sartaj considered Majid and Rehana, happy couple. At their table, eating their food, he saw the economy of gesture between them, how each simple sentence contained whole histories of years together, and he watched Farah of sixteen and her exasperated teasing of Imtiaz, thirteen and impatient and sure of himself, and Sartaj was part of the easeful sprawl on the carpet afterwards, as they watched some favourite game show. They wanted him there, and most often he couldn’t stop wanting to leave. He went each time eagerly, glad to be in a home, with a family, with family. But their happiness made his chest ache. He felt that he was getting used to being alone, he must be, but he also knew he would never be completely reconciled to it. I’m monstrous, he thought, not this and not that, and then he glanced around guiltily to the back of the Gypsy, where four constables sat in identical poses, their two rifles and two lathis hugged close to the chest. They were looking, all of them, at the dirty metal flooring, swaying gently one way and then the other. The sky behind was yellow and drifting rivulets of blue.

  The dead man’s father was waiting for them at the edge of Navnagar, below the gentle slope covered from nullah to road with hovels. He was small and nondescript, a man who had spent a lifetime effacing himself. Sartaj stepped after him through the uneven lanes. Although they were going up the slope, Sartaj had a feeling of descent. Everything was smaller, closer, the pathways narrow between the uneven walls of cardboard and cloth and wood, the tumbling roofs covered with plastic. They were well into the Bengali Bura, which was the very poorest part of Navnagar. Most of the shacks were less than a man’s standing height, and the citizens of the Bengali Bura sat in their doorways, tattered and ragged, and the barefooted children ran before the police party. On Katekar’s face there was furious contempt for jhopadpatti-dwellers who let dirt and filth and garbage pile up not two feet from their own doors, who let their little daughters squat to make a mess exactly where their sons played. These are the people who ruin Mumbai, he had said often to Sartaj, these ganwars who come from Bihar or Andhra or maderchod Bangladesh and live like animals here. These were indeed from maderchod Bangladesh, Sartaj thought, although they all no doubt had papers that said they were from Bengal, that each was a bona fide Indian citizen. Anyway, there was nowhere in their watery delta to send them back to, not half a bigha of land that was theirs, that would hold them all. They came in their thousands, to work as servants and on the roads and on the construction sites. And one of them was dead here.

  He had fallen across a doorway, chest inside, feet splayed out. He was young, not yet out of his teens. He wore expensive keds, good jeans and a blue collarless shirt. The forearms were slashed deep, to the bone, which was common in assaults with choppers, when the victim typically tried to ward off the blows. The cuts were clean, and deeper at one end than the other. The left hand had only a small oozing stump where the little finger had been, and Sartaj knew there was no use looking for it. There were rats about. Inside the shack it was hard to see, hard to make out anything through the buzzing darkness. Katekar clicked on an Eveready torch, and in the circle of light Sartaj flapped the flies away. There were cuts on the chest and forehead, and a good strong one had gone nearly through the neck. He might have already been walking dead from the other wounds, but that one had killed him, dropped him down with a thud. The floor was dark, wet mud.

  ‘Name?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘His, saab?’ the father said. He was facing away from the door, trying not to look at his son.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shamsul Shah.’

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘Nurul, saab.’

  ‘They used choppers?’

  ‘Yes, saab.’

  ‘How many of them?’

  ‘Two, saab.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘Bazil Chaudhary and Faraj Ali, saab. They live close by. They are friends of my son.’

  Katekar was scribbling in a notebook, his lips moving tightly with the unfamiliar names.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Village Duipara, Chapra block, district Nadia, West Bengal, saab.’ It came out all in a little rush, and Sartaj knew he had rehearsed it many times at night, had studied it on the papers he had bought as soon as he had reached Bombay. A murder case involving Bangladeshis was unusual because they usually kept their heads low, worked, tried to make a living, and tried very hard to avoid attracting attention.

  ‘And the others? Also from there?’

  ‘Their parents are from Chapra.’

  ‘Same village?’

  ‘Yes, saab.’ He had that Urdu-sprinkled Bangladeshi diction that Sartaj had learnt to recognize. He was lying about the country the village was in, that was all. The rest was all true. The fathers of the victim and the murderers had probably grown up together, splashing in the same rivulets.

  ‘Are they related to you, those two?’

  ‘No, saab.’

  ‘You saw this?’

  ‘No, saab. Some people shouted for me to come.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘I don’t know, saab.’ From down the lane there was a muttering, a rise and fall of voices, but there was nobody to be seen. None of the neighbours wanted to be caught up in police business.

  ‘Whose house is this?’

  ‘Ahsan Naeem, saab. But he wasn’t here. Only his mother was in the house, she is with the neighbours now.’

  ‘She saw this?’

  Nurul Shah shrugged. Nobody wanted to be a witness, but the old woman would not be able to avoid it. Perhaps she would plead shortness of vision.

  ‘Your son was running?’

  ‘Yes, saab, from over there. They were sitting in Faraj’s house.’

  So the dead boy had been trying to get home. He must have tired, and tried to get into a house. The door was a piece of tin hung off the bamboo vertical with three pieces of wire. Sartaj stepped away from the body, away from the heavy smell of blood and wet clay. ‘Why did they do this? What happened?’

  ‘They all had been drinking together, saab. They had a fight.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I don’t know. Saab, will you catch them?’

  ‘We’ll write it down,’ Sartaj said.

  At eleven Sartaj stood under a pounding stream of cold water, his face held up to it. The pressure in the pipes was very good, so he lingered under the shower, moving the sting from one shoulder to the other. He was thinking, despite himself and the rush of water in his ears, about Kamble and money. When Sartaj had been married, he had taken a certain pride in never accepting cash, but after the divorce he had realized how much Megha’s money had protected him from the world, from the necessities of the streets he lived in. A nine-hundred-rupee monthly transportation allowance hardly paid for three days of fuel for his Bullet, and of the many notes he dropped into the hands of informants every day, maybe one or two came from his minuscule khabari allowance, and there was nothing left for the investigation of a young man’s death in Navnagar. So Sartaj took cash now, and was grateful for it. Sala Sardar is no longer the sala of rich bastards, so he’s woken up: he knew the officers and men said this with satisfaction, and they were right. He had woken up. He took a breath and moved his head so that the solid thrust at the centre of the flow pummelled him between the eyes. The lashing noise of it filled his head.

  Outside, in his drawing room, it was very quiet. That there was no sleep yet, however tired he was and despite his yearning for it, he knew. He lay on his sofa, with a bottle of Royal Challenge whisky and one of water on the table next to him. He drank in accurate little sips, timed regularly. He allowed himself two tall glasses at the end of working days, and had been resisting the urge recently to go to three. He lay with his head away from the window, so he could watch the sky, lit still by the city. To the left was a long grey sliver, the building next door, turned by the window frame into a crenellated abstraction, and to the right what was called darkness, what disintegrate
d softly under the eye into an amorphous and relentless yellow illumination. Sartaj knew where it came from, what made it, but as always he was awed by it. He remembered playing cricket on a Dadar street, the fast pok of the tennis ball and the faces of friends, and the feeling that he could hold the whole city in his heart, from Colaba to Bandra. Now it was too vast, escaped from him, each family adding to the next and the next until there was that cool and endless glow, impossible to know, or escape. Had it really existed, that small empty street, clean for the children’s cricket games and dabba-ispies and tikkar-billa, or had he stolen it from some grainy black-and-white footage? Given it to himself in gift, the memory of a happier place?

  Sartaj stood up. Leaning against the side of the window, he finished the whisky, tipping the glass far over to get the last drop. He leaned out, trying to find a breeze. The horizon was hazy and far, with lights burning hard underneath. He looked down, and saw a glint in the car park far below, a piece of glass, mica. He thought suddenly how easy it would be to keep leaning over, tipping until the weight carried him. He saw himself falling, the white kurta flapping frantically, the bare chest and stomach underneath, the nada trailing, a blue-and-white bathroom rubber chappal tumbling, the feet rotating, and before a whole circle was complete the crack of the skull, a quick crack and then silence.