Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘That’s them,’ Chotta Badriya said.

  There were three, all young, wearing white shirts and good pressed trousers, like good businessmen making a living in the world. The middle one was carrying a plastic shopping bag in his left hand.

  ‘Pass behind them,’ I said.

  We came up through the car park, turned right as they reached the bottom of the stairs in front of the hotel, and hummed slowly along, letting them pass directly in front of us. I let them take two more steps, then opened my door with my left hand, pushed it wide, took the pistol from my lap. We all came out at once. Chotta Badriya fired the first shot, and then it was one continual roar. They never even turned around. My hand was unsteady, and I don’t think any of my shots hit. But I remember a gout of blood exploding like a momentary flower on the other side of a man’s head, he must have seen it hanging in front of his eyes before he dropped down dead. It was all quick and easy. Chotta Badriya got back into the car.

  ‘Get the money,’ I said.

  Two minutes later we were safely on S.V. Road. Inside the shopping bag there were three lakhs, and a new bottle of Halo anti-dandruff shampoo.

  ‘Bhai, that’s for me,’ Chotta Badriya said. He was full of glee.

  ‘Here,’ I said, and tossed the bottle into his lap. ‘You have dandruff?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘And now I won’t. I’ll prevent it. You see?’

  I had to laugh at that. ‘You’re one mad chutiya,’ I said.

  ‘I think I should grow my hair,’ he said. ‘I think long hair will look good on me.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’ll look like bhenchod Tarzan himself,’ I said. I managed a nap on the way back to Gopalmath, and when we got home I was given the news that the other mission – to ambush some of their boys who frequented a carrom club near Andheri station – had netted us two more wickets. So we were ahead of them for now, but the match wasn’t over, it had barely begun yet. In the series that followed, we stayed ahead of them, but only just. By the end of the month, they had lost twelve players, and we eleven. Twelve to them was minor losses, they had many many more batsmen waiting to substitute, but we were almost half gone, vanished from Gopalmath. Samant the inspector laughed at me on the phone more than once. ‘Gaitonde,’ he said, ‘they are bajaoing your baja, you better run away and hide, you’ll get finished.’

  After our thirteenth death, three of my boys just didn’t appear for morning attendance the next day. I knew they hadn’t been killed, but that they had just walked away from a losing game. I saw the logic of it. We were indeed brothers, and the battles we had suffered together had made us more so, but when defeat is certain, when you are hiding, exhausted and stripped of hope, and the strong enemy is coming to break your thighs, some men will just quit you. This was just another defeat among defeats, and I swallowed it, and looked to those who were still with me. We went on, kept our businesses going, the daily round of living, all the time moving in twos and threes, comforted by the hard metal we carried under our shirts, our weapons that we obsessively cleaned and oiled and caressed. I saw Sunny, one of my boys, raise his pistol to his head, touch it to his forehead in whispered prayer before he went out of the door, and I laughed and asked him if he lit diyas and did puja in front of it every morning, and he ducked his head and smiled, abashed. But we were desperately in need of blessings, and if I thought it would have helped, I would have prostrated myself in front of my garlanded Tokarev without a second’s hesitation.

  It was a woman who finally showed me the way. I went with Kanta Bai and the boys to Siddhi Vinayak, and we stood in the long queue that wound up the temple steps. It was all nonsense to me, all this praying and whining, but the boys believed and wanted to go, and it was good for morale, so I went along. Despite all her monstrous vulgarity and cynicism, Kanta Bai was a great devotee also. She held a thali in her hands, and had her pallu draped very respectably over her head. Ahead of us and behind us, in line, were my boys, shoulder to shoulder. There was that full, sweet temple smell of rose-water and agarbatties in my head, and I felt safe. Kanta Bai said, ‘I know what you are going to ask for.’

  ‘It’s obvious,’ I said. ‘Even he already knows, if he exists and knows anything,’ I said, with a jerk of my head up the stairs, where Ganesha sat, supposedly knowing everything.

  She shook her head. ‘He can’t give you what you won’t take with your own hands.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She had her head down to the thali, very low, as she neatened up the little piles of rice and sindoor and flower petals. Her neck was puffed up in round folds of flesh. ‘They’re going to kill you,’ she said. ‘You’re going to die.’

  We moved ahead three jerky steps now, up the stairs. On the other side of the passageway came a steady stream of worshippers, hurrying down the stairs, full of hope now, renewed now that they had confronted the god, seen him and shown themselves, shamelessly exposed their need and their pain. ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Because you fight like a fool. All this hero-giri, shooting here and shooting there, you can’t win like that. They will win. They’ve already won. You think war is about showing them you have a big lauda.’

  My pistol was in my waistband, heavy against my belly, and as I looked at her, saying this and not even looking at me, I wanted to pull it out and shoot her. I could have done it easily, I saw it clearly, myself doing it, and the anger came up my throat into my head, like a hoarse humming, until it shadowed my eyes. I wiped at my tears with the back of my hand, and said, ‘How then?’

  ‘Fight the war to win it. It doesn’t matter who kills more men. It doesn’t matter if all of Mumbai thinks you are losing. The only thing that matters is victory.’

  ‘But how to win?’

  ‘Cut off their head.’

  ‘Kill Rajesh Parab?’

  ‘Yes. But really he’s an old fool. He’s the boss, but he’s set in his ways.’

  ‘It’s Vilas Ranade then. He’s the one.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you get Vilas Ranade, you will leave them deaf and blind.’

  Vilas Ranade was the one. He was Rajesh Parab’s general, he had decimated us, tricked us, gone in front of us when we had expected him behind, and he had killed us. I knew now that he led them in war. But I still knew nothing about him, whether he had a wife, sons, what he looked like, where he went. He had no pattern, no habitation, no desires that I could see. I didn’t know how to track a man who lived only for war. ‘I don’t even have a photo of him,’ I said.

  ‘They keep him out of town,’ she said. ‘Pune, Nashik, somewhere there. They bring him in only when there is trouble.’

  ‘He sleeps until it’s time to wake him up?’

  ‘You don’t waste a good shooter on trips to the municipality office. It’s too risky. And he’s the best of shooters. He’s been around for a long time, ten, twelve years.’

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘Never.’

  I was quiet for the rest of our time up the steps and into the temple, and when we finally got up to Ganesha, I didn’t ask him for anything. I just watched him, examined his noose and his goad and laddoos and broken tusk, and wondered how he would scheme his army of ganas out of defeat, how the remover of obstacles would remove an obstacle he couldn’t find and pin down. We had to move on then, the pressure of oncoming worshippers was huge and unrelenting, but I carried his image with me all the way home. We were stuck in a monstrous traffic jam in Juhu, and Kanta Bai fell asleep next to me, clutching her prasad from the temple on her lap, and I listened to her snoring, and thought and thought. My shoulder was burning, quiet little eddies of stinging fire, but the endless circling in my head was more painful: I could see the players of the game, the lanes and the buildings they moved from and to, Gopalmath, Nabargali, all of it laid out before me when I shut my eyes, and I went endlessly round and around, looking for an opening, a way to tear it all apart and put it together again. And the traffic growled and choked outside, and here we were, still aliv
e, still breathing.

  ‘Let me out,’ I said. I leaned over and opened the door, and got out of the car. Chotta Badriya slid out from behind the wheel. ‘No, no, get back in.’

  ‘But, bhai…’

  ‘Listen to me, just get back in. I want to walk for a bit.’

  He was afraid of a coincidence, of somebody from the other side out for a stroll among the evening walkers and bhelpuri-eaters. It was possible, but I wanted suddenly to be alone. I raised a hand at him, and I think I must have frightened him with the look on my face, because he got right back in.

  I walked down the curving road to the beach, past the chat-stalls and on to the sand. There were families walking with me, children excited into laughter by the horses trotting at the edge of the water, by the toywallahs and their hovering, silvery clouds of balloons, by the tantalizing kulfi-wallahs and their cool boxes all filmed over with tiny pearls of moisture. Here there was no war. Here was peace. I walked lightly amongst the old couples out for their evening walks, and the ranks of restless young men. The sea rushed steadily up the land, and finally I sat on a half-built brick platform, facing the waves. I was tired, empty-minded, and it was good to have my hair stirred gently by the water’s slow breathing. There was a movement to my left. I looked, and under a pile of refuse, palm fronds and soggy paper packets and coconut husks, there was a jerky squirming, quick little dashings and then alert stillness. In the shadows there were more shadows, moving fast, and I saw a white cardboard box shift in a zigzag line, trembling with the urgency of hunger. I got up and walked over, and stood over the box, and I could now smell the strong rot, all the last leftover food, everything that had been thrown away. But there was no movement now. I laughed. ‘Rats, I know you’re here,’ I said. ‘I know you are.’ But they were too clever for me. They lay still, and if I wanted I could probably kill some of them, but finally they would survive my attack and me.

  ‘Bhai!’ The shout came from down the beach. I raised my arm.

  ‘Here,’ I called. They came running up, Chotta Badriya and two others.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. I was, really. There was something moving inside me, a faint scurrying I could hardly see. I knew I had to wait for it to emerge. ‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

  I set up a meeting with Inspector Samant the next day. We met at a hotel in Sakinaka. ‘This Vilas Ranade,’ I said. ‘I want his wicket. I have ten petis.’

  He laughed in my face. He had a thick moustache, not very much hair on his head and big white teeth. He was sweating through his shirt, big wet dark patches. ‘Ten lakhs!’ he said. ‘For Vilas Ranade. You’re too hopeful.’

  ‘Fifteen then.’

  ‘Do you know who you’re talking about? He was here when you were still drinking milk.’

  I said, ‘True. But can you do it?’

  ‘It can be done.’

  ‘You know something. What do you know?’

  His eyes were steady, opaque. He was right, it had been a very stupid question. He had no reason to tell me what he knew. I was nervous, over-eager. Then he said, ‘Why should I do it?’

  ‘I will be here long after he’s gone, Samant Saab. You know that. You’ve seen my progress. If we can work together, think of what lies in the future. Those Cobra Gang chutiyas have no future, no vision. What they do, they do, but they won’t do anything new. The future is worth more than cash.’

  He was listening. He wiped his shining takli with a handkerchief. ‘Thirty,’ he said.

  ‘I can do twenty, saab. And once this is all over, there will be much much more.’

  ‘Twenty-five. And I want it all in advance.’

  Which was unprecedented, and insane. But – ‘Yes, saab,’ I said, ‘I’ll bring it to you in three days.’

  He nodded, and took some saunf from the dish in the middle of the table. The bill he was leaving to me.

  ‘Also, then, in three days,’ I said, ‘you had better arrest me.’

  I didn’t have any twenty-five lakhs in cash. I had five lakhs, maybe six and a half if I called in little loans I had made to citizens in Gopalmath, for medicine, for wedding saris. I couldn’t do that, and I knew better than to ask Paritosh Shah for so bulky a loan. He was a businessman, and I was not currently a good risk, but he would find it very hard to say no to me, and it might have broken us apart. So I didn’t ask that of him, but I did ask him for a big score. ‘A target?’ he said. ‘Worth twenty-five lakhs? In three days?’ I knew I was asking much, but he understood the urgency.

  ‘Never mind the risk,’ I told him. ‘Just think about the prize.’ He didn’t have to think about it very long. Mahajan Jewellers, on Advani Road. It pleased me that it was right in the middle of Cobra Gang territory, a mile and a half from Rajesh Parab’s house. We watched Mahajan Jewellers for one day and one night, and then I decided that we would do it during the day. Night might have been safer, but it would have meant getting in through the heavy sliding grille at the front, through the three locks, then through the shutter door they dropped down and locked also, and then through the glass doors. No, we went in at four in the afternoon, straight through the open door. There was one watchman out front, with the usual single-shot shotgun, and when he saw us coming with our seven pistols and choppers he dropped it without hesitation. On our way out, he held the door open for us. We had two stolen cars waiting outside, and getting away was smooth. No problems.

  So now we had the money. The property itself wasn’t enough, Paritosh Shah gave us fifteen lakhs for everything we had taken, and he loaned us the rest. I let him give me the money. I had confidence again, I could see my path, and I knew he felt it. It wasn’t a favour he was doling out now, but an investment in future earnings. I was now full, and he was adding to my fullness. I was good for his cash, and for more. So I had the money, and straightaway, a day early, I called in Samant and gave it to him. And he arrested me.

  Into the lock-up we went, myself and three of my boys. We were arrested for suspected complicity in the Mahajan Jewellers robbery and remanded to custody, that’s what it said in the newspapers. On the outside, my boys disappeared from the streets, from Gopalmath, and the Cobra Gang celebrated. G-Company was finished, over and done with, all very quickly and no trouble at all, that was what they said. I sat in my cell and watched the wall. I had my back to one wall and I watched the other. My boys sat on all sides of me. I could stand the narrow space easily, the heat, I forced down the brittle rotis and the watery dal, but the repose of it, not moving and working, the rest and stillness of it crawled just under my skin and made me want to tear myself open. There were busy, buzzing insects in my veins. But I taught myself patience. I watched the wall. I felt it watching me, strong in its blankness. It wanted to outlast me. It knew it could. I stared it down. And I waited.

  It took nine days. When the constables came to get us, my boys stood guard and I pissed on the wall. I wrote circles into its indifference while they watched, and then I let them lead me out. There was an advocate who had done the paperwork waiting in the senior inspector’s room, and he led us out of the station. Our bail had been posted. It was dark outside, a moonless night and cloudy. Chotta Badriya was waiting outside with a car. He looked very tired, and he had his hair tied back, held back with one of those bands that girls wear.

  ‘What’s that in your hair, chutiya?’ I said.

  ‘Just like that, bhai,’ he said, blushing like a girl and twisting his head down and to the side. And he smiled. When he smiled I knew it was all right.

  He drove us fast into the thick of the city, up the spine and on to the highway, past Goregaon, and I felt revived by the crowds, by the weaving rows of trucks and cars, and the children running after a ball on the side of the road, and the ceaseless noise of it. I was quiet but completely awake, alert like a snake. Chotta Badriya wasn’t talking, and I didn’t want to ask him any questions, not yet. The promise sweltered in the air and it was delicious to hold in my mouth, the anticipation, t
he not knowing. We turned off the highway on to the slip road, and then off it, past a jhopadpatti, into darkness. Our beams conjured up a dusty road, trees sliding into existence and out again, it was like falling into a tunnel. I went eagerly into it. Then we took a sharp left, and the road changed, we crunched over dirt. There was a car parked at the end of the lane, and the hard black of a building through the overhanging branches, and we got out and walked towards it, around a corner, and now there was a single bulb above a door. And sitting on a crate next to the door, Samant, with his cigarette signalling red.

  ‘Took too long,’ he said. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘It was the lawyers and everything,’ Chotta Badriya said.

  Samant tugged on the door, which opened with a long metallic squeak. Just inside, there was a man face-down on the floor. A blue shirt and black pants, and his hips cocked up and stiff.

  ‘Vilas Ranade,’ Samant said, with a little motion of his hand, palm up as if he was making introductions.

  ‘You did it alone?’ I said.

  ‘He was a brown-sugar sniffer,’ Samant said. ‘The stupid bhenchod. He thought nobody knew. Used to go by himself to get it. I know the dealer who sold to him.’

  ‘The dealer told you when Vilas Ranade would come to buy?’

  ‘He had to, if he wanted to keep dealing.’

  ‘You’re sure this is Vilas Ranade?’

  ‘I’ve seen him twice at the Mulund station when I was posted there. He had friends there.’

  ‘I want to see his face.’

  Chotta Badriya stepped over the body, tugged at the shoulder. Vilas Ranade’s shirt was black at the front, soggy. Chotta Badriya got behind him, and then Vilas Ranade sat up into the light. He looked sleepy, eyelids half down. I know him, I thought. He looked just like me. I squatted in front of him, leaned closer. Yes, he was my duplicate. I waited for one of the others to remark on it, but nobody spoke.