Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Time to call the Dilli-wali, sir?’ Katekar said. Long bars of black were sliding up his face.

  ‘Not quite yet,’ Sartaj said. ‘I want to know who this Jojo was.’

  Jojo Mascarenas was neat. She had been dead for five days, but her apartment was clean, still shiny and scrubbed and polished. There was a row of gleaming steel ladles on the kitchen wall, hung on steel hooks in graduated order of size. The two phones and the answering machine on the counter next to the dining table were aligned precisely, and the tiled surfaces in the bathroom off the hallway shimmered a deep blue.

  ‘This woman made money,’ Katekar said.

  But she was careful with it. The office address they had been given turned out to be her apartment, on the third floor of ‘Nazara’, on Yari Road. She made money but practised economies: the first small bedroom to the right of the hallway was her production office, crammed full with files and three desks and a computer and two phones and a fax machine, all in elegant order, all necessary to the work she did. Even her bedroom was not extravagant, just a simple double mattress on a low frame, no headboard. There was a tall mirror on the wall, and a table in front of it, lined with rows of cosmetics, and a black stool. There were no leather sofas, no chandeliers, no gold statues, none of the extravagances that Sartaj had come to expect from people who traded in images and bodies. When he had slid the key he had been carrying in his pocket into the lock, when it had turned smoothly, he had expected to see a red-satined filmi bordello, or a slattern’s mess, but not this sober haven, this quiet home and workplace. It mystified him.

  ‘All right,’ Sartaj said. ‘Let’s search it.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Katekar said.

  ‘Who this woman was.’

  Katekar set to work, but he was impatient, quick, disapproving. Sartaj knew that he liked better the thin, pointed narrative of your ordinary murder case, where there was a corpse, an unknown killer or killers, and you were looking for a motive. Here there were two dead, one had obviously killed the other, and what did it matter what their relationship was? How would you know? Why would you care? Who cared about a gangster and a pimp? Katekar was quiet, but Sartaj knew he was cursing. Aaiyejhavnaya case it was according to Katekar, Sartaj was sure, and aaiyejhavnayi Delhi woman, this was all jhav-ed. ‘Jhav-jhav-jhav,’ Sartaj hummed as he worked. He did the bedroom first, because it was easy. Anything useful would be in the office, but the bedroom had to be done, and so he went at it. There was a cupboard built deep into the wall, along the entire length of the room, and it had two densely packed rows of hanging saris, blouses, ghagras, trousers, jeans, T-shirts, shirts. There was an order to it, a womanly and very personal logic that Sartaj couldn’t quite understand, but it reminded him powerfully of the gradations of shirts in his cupboard by colour, from red to blue. Jojo’s cupboard made him like her. He liked her love for shoes, her care for leather, her understanding of the different functions of footwear, why it was necessary to have three pairs of sneakers, from spare to super-technological, and he liked that she had them on the rightmost end of the lowest of three stepped rows of sandals and boots and chappals and stiletto heels. The apartment was simple, almost bare, but the clothes were flamboyant. Sartaj approved.

  But, as expected, there was nothing in the bedroom of particular interest. A pink bathroom held a multiplicity of shampoos and soaps, and two pairs of panties and a bra hung on the curtain rod. There were more clothes and some dishes and old lamps in the high-up storage slots above the clothes cupboard, and make-up and various kinds of thread and sewing needles in the drawers of the dressing table, and a stack of Femina and Cosmopolitan and Stardust and Elle next to the bed, but that was all. Katekar was finishing up the drawing room when Sartaj came out into the hallway.

  ‘Her big purse was behind the kitchen counter,’ he said. ‘On the floor. Just sitting there.’

  ‘Anything in it?’

  ‘Lipstick-shipstick, that’s all. No driver’s licence, but there is a voting card and a PAN card.’

  He held the cards out. Juliet Mascarenas, they both said. But this was the first time Sartaj had seen her smile. She was very alive in both pictures, sparkling lazily at the camera, confident that she knew something about you.

  ‘Anything else?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Nothing. But there are no photos.’

  ‘Photos?’

  ‘Photos. There’s not one in the entire house. I’ve never known a woman who didn’t stick photos all over the place.’

  Katekar was right. When Megha had left him, she had taken many photographs with her, and still Sartaj had spent a Sunday afternoon putting pictures in a shoe box, pulling them from the walls. And Ma had entire walls of them, histories of the family and the branches of it, all laid out, all its connections and losses. ‘Maybe this Jojo keeps them in her files,’ Sartaj said. And they went into her office. The files were in a black filing cabinet, four chambers high. They were neatly labelled: ‘D’Souza Shoe Ad’; ‘Sharmila Restaurant Campaign’. The bottom shelf was packed, heavy, it came outwards slowly.

  ‘Actors?’ Katekar said.

  ‘Yes, and actresses.’ The men were to the right, women to the left, in alphabetized rows of glossies, with résumés stapled to the back. Anupama, Anuradha, Aparna. Not quite actresses yet, but young and hopeful. Full of hope. And there was a fullness of them, there were just too many of them. Most would not be successful, but more kept coming to this city of gold. From this surplus and hunger, from this simple equation, came Jojo’s business. They searched on, opening drawers and lifting files off shelves. There was a half-height metal cabinet, which the third key on Jojo’s hoop opened, and inside they found her bank books, her cheque books, her bank statements, and jewellery in a metal box: two gold necklaces, three pairs of gold bracelets in different designs, a string of pearls, diamond earrings and a tangled pile of silver.

  ‘Where’s her cash?’ Katekar said. ‘Where does she keep her cash?’

  Cash was how clients for a certain commodity paid their debts. There was some black money in Jojo’s legitimate television business, but much of it was conducted with honest, above-board cheques. Her little side-business of prostitution generated only cash, this was certain, reams of it. But it wasn’t in the metal cabinet. You couldn’t keep it in a bank. Where was it? Sartaj went into the hallway, circled the kitchen and the drawing room. He lifted a framed print off the wall. It was a forest scene, but under the verdant glade there was only the wall. He stood on the edge of the tub in the bathroom and tapped the tiles on the ceiling. It was all solid, no hidden hollows, no secret compartments behind the water tank suspended above the door. Back into the hallway, and Sartaj saw that Katekar had moved the cabinets and tables in the office away from the walls and was on his knees testing the edges of the floor. In the past, they had found money in subtle hideaways, in precisely engineered hollows, there was an expertise in this city in hiding money, the builders had perfected the art of crafting shelves and headboards that slid away at the touch of a secret button to reveal money packed away. Once they had discovered gold bars in the pouchy bottoms of rich red brocade curtains. It was called black money, but Sartaj always thought of it as grey: it was illegal and a blight, but taxes were legal and a blight, and so he searched for it but never felt contempt for those who hoarded it. But Jojo made her cash from selling youngsters to the sticky appetites of men, and so her money was blacker than most, despite the cleanliness she practised in her life. Where was it, this reeking money, this pile of paper smelling of crusty hotel sheets and dried sweat? Where? Not in the pink bathroom, and not inside her mattress. Sartaj took her clothes from the cupboard and threw them on to the bed, making a luxurious pile of silky crimson and white and deep greens. He probed the walls of the cupboard, tapping and then pressing with his hands, and he took in her smell, the breath of her body and her perfumes. He stood for a moment with his palms on the roof of the cupboard, flat, and then he went and sat on the bed. Resting on a cascade of blouses
and skirts, he asked, where have you hidden it? Where? The most likely place was the bathroom, because tiles were easy to build behind, but it was such an ancient cliché: Hema Malini and Meena Kumari and half a dozen other heroines had been caught with cash in their loos, and Jojo was more complicated than that. Sartaj was sure of it.

  Leaning back, he started to see the sense of her shoes. There were three tiers of steps built at the bottom of the cupboard, in the same wood, stretching nearly across the entire width. Bottom step, extreme right, was the most informal, sneakers and bright Bata rubber chappals and then Kolhapuri chappals, a great variety of them. Second step was comfortable shoes, practical ones, professional but hardy, and easy to wear for an entire day of work. But the leftward end of the second step edged over into boots, chunky ones with long thick laces and lashings of attitude, and then the top shelf started on the right with a pair of black boots with needle-sharp heels and soft tops that must have risen half-way up Jojo’s thighs. From there the heels were ever more delicate and dangerous, and the uppers and straps thin and thinner, and Sartaj saw how the leftmost and last pair on the top shelf, a diaphanous, burning amber nothing of a shoe, all tapering knife-heel and single diagonal thong, would make Jojo’s foot naked even as it clothed it. ‘Well done, Jojo,’ he said. ‘Those are shoes, Jojo.’

  He got up, moved the shoes off the middle shelf, and took hold of the plank and tugged at it. It was solid. He bent his head and peered, and he could see the floor and the rear of the cupboard under the shelves. The top row swept down from the boots to the stilettos, and Sartaj said, ‘You go from right to left, Jojo.’ He leaned low, spread his arms wide, and grasped the sides of the top shelf, and pulled. Still solid, and then his fingers slipped and he felt a groove, two grooves, one on each side. They ran along the sides of the shelves, just under the overhanging lip of the top shelf, a finger-thickness high, a few inches long: handles. Sartaj’s nose was an inch from one of Jojo’s black stilettos, and his pulse was humming. Got you. Got you. He grasped the handles and pulled backwards. Nothing, no give. Still solid. But there was a little movement at the top of the right handle, a contraction under his fingers. He braced the heel of his hand against the top of the shelf and squeezed, as if he were pressing a very stiff brake on a motorcycle, and yes, yes, a definite movement, a catch gave way. He did it on both sides and pulled backwards and the whole thing, all of it, the three shelves with the shoes on top, the entire construction came away from the back of the cupboard. He went backwards, grinning, scattering chappals and boots and strappy sandals. ‘Ay, Katekar,’ he yelled. ‘Katekar.’

  Together, they peered happily into the two-foot-deep compartment that Jojo had hidden her secrets in. There was, of course, the cash: neat stacks of hundred-rupee and five-hundred-rupee bundles, pushed all the way back, to the left. Katekar was measuring it professionally between the outstretched thumb and forefinger of his left hand. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Five or six lakhs. Some of it looks the same as Gaitonde’s stash.’ These five-hundred-rupee bundles were all new, in Central Bank of India wrappers, again stacked inside the same efficient shrink-wrapped plastic.

  ‘Gaitonde must have paid her,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘For her randi services.’

  On the right, also against the back of the niche, lay three black photo albums on top of each other. But Sartaj felt no urgency, no desire to take them, to flip them open and delve into Jojo’s hidden life. He was concentrated on the money, and he knew Katekar was also. He could hear it in the slow drag of Katekar’s breath, compressed by the awkward forward squat. The cash was very problematic: six lakhs in black money discovered in a dead woman’s apartment was ordinarily a free gift for the good policemen. Not all of it – maybe five lakhs was the surprise present, and one lakh would have to go into the panchnama and therefore into the government’s maw, and that was enough. Nobody would ask awkward questions about a dead madam’s black money. The amount was small enough for nobody to notice its absence, and so Katekar’s rules of prudence would not be violated. Nobody would notice, unless Jojo kept records, or had told somebody about her stash. Unlikely, but possible. In a high-pressure, Delhi-orientated case involving RAW this was too much risk, there was a single glance between them and it was decided.

  ‘Albums,’ Sartaj said briskly, and drew them out. The first photograph in the first album was a younger Jojo, younger by many years and much experience. She was wearing a red dress, a child’s frock really, with a square neck and a high waist, and looked to be about sixteen. She was sitting on a black couch, her arms intertwined with an older girl’s, a young woman with the same broad, toothy smile. The following few pages had the same pair, laughing on a bed, on the seashore, on a balcony against a rising Mumbai skyline.

  ‘Sisters,’ Katekar said.

  ‘Right,’ Sartaj said. ‘But who is taking all the pictures?’ He flipped on through the pages of happiness and love. Then there was a blank page, all white. But there had once been a photograph there, he could still see the impression it had made under the sheer plastic. The next page again had the two sisters, this time in the Hanging Gardens. But there had been a photograph removed every two pages or so, and about half-way through the album, the sisters were having a birthday. It wasn’t a party really, just them, gifts on the dining table and a pink cake with lots of white icing.

  ‘Seventeenth,’ Katekar said. He had, with his quick head for numbers, assessed the bright candle flames.

  Sartaj turned the page, and there was a blank, this time with no impression left by an image. The rest of the album was empty. The photography had stopped abruptly. Sartaj put the album aside, and turned to the next one. This one went backwards into childhood. The sisters were in white school shirts and dark skirts. And then they stood barefoot, their identical pigtails sticking straight out like wings, happy in front of a house with a heavy stone lintel and thick wooden doors and a sunlit courtyard inside. ‘Village,’ said Sartaj. ‘But where?’

  ‘South,’ Katekar said. ‘Somewhere south. Konkan.’

  Now they were in a studio, the sisters, in identical blue frocks with puffy sleeves and enormous bursts of lace at the throat, and their mother was with them. She wore sober black, a dress with sleeves down to the wrists, and her head shone with streams of grey, and the lights picked out the crucifix she wore at her neck and made it blaze. She was smiling, but carefully. ‘No father,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘No father at all,’ Katekar said. ‘What is it, a farm?’

  The sisters played under trees, in groves brimming over with green light, they ran between long rows of plants with broad leaves curling at the edges. ‘I don’t know,’ Sartaj said. He knew nothing about trees, or plants, or farms. This was another world.

  The last album was of the old-fashioned type which nobody made any more, with thick black pages, and the first photograph was held on to the page by small black corners, elegant little tabs, Sartaj couldn’t remember what they were called. But both he and Katekar said together, ‘Father.’ The father sat with that particular stiffness which men and women from a long-ago generation assumed in front of cameras, it was the formality owed to a rare event, and he wore a white uniform. His shoulders were thrown back, and his right hand was curled in a fist against his hip.

  ‘Navy,’ Katekar said.

  ‘Merchant Navy.’

  The father had his daughters’ eyes, large and direct. Actually, for the next couple of pages he had only one daughter, who stood between him and his wife, holding both their hands. And then suddenly, on a fresh page, here was the new arrival. She reached out with both her hands and her feet towards the camera, grinning toothlessly, fine-haired and round-faced. She reached towards the name above the photo, the name hand-inked on to the black page in white writing edged with flourishes and decorative marks: Juliet.

  ‘Ju-li-et?’ Katekar said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sartaj said. ‘Like with Romeo.’

  Katekar’s laugh was long and full. ‘So Juliet became Jojo? And Gaiton
de was her Romeo?’ He pronounced it ‘Rom-yo’, and Sartaj found his pleasure unfair and ugly, and his guffaws scraped across the base of Sartaj’s skull. He thought Katekar very coarse and ganwar and low-class in that moment, and didn’t care to correct him. Sartaj was feeling protective of the Juliet-that-was, before Jojo ever existed. She grew up in the pages that followed, under the care of her sister and mother. Soon after Juliet began walking, the mother began to dress the two sisters alike, in identical frocks and the same hair and the same hair-band. This first photograph with the two of them in matching outfits was a studio portrait, in front of a backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. They stood holding hands under the graceful arc towards a red sky, and now there were two names in white ink under the picture: ‘Mary’ and ‘Juliet’ separated by a fancy curlicue.

  ‘Mary Mascarenas,’ Sartaj said. That was the sister.

  This paired dressing ended when Juliet was ten, or maybe eleven, in the last pictures in the album. In that birthday photograph, she had her hair cut short in a smart little bob, much shorter than Mary’s, and she had a necklace, bright, light-coloured beads. The frock was the same as her sister’s, but it was somehow different. She carried it better. Juliet had started to assert herself, she knew who she was and she was resisting her mother. Sartaj liked the tip-toed exuberance of her stance, her impudence. And then there was the serious Mary.

  In Jojo’s fat address book, under ‘M’, Sartaj found ‘Mary’ and work and home phone numbers, and an address in Colaba. But the number was old, outdated, Sartaj knew that the Colaba exchange had been converted to digital at least seven, eight years ago. Had Jojo not talked to Mary for eight years? Sartaj pondered, and they put the apartment in order, things back to their original positions, everything but the bedroom cupboard. Then Sartaj made the call to the Delhi-walli.

  They sat in Jojo’s office and waited. Sartaj swivelled slowly on Jojo’s office chair and thought about sisters and their quarrels. Ma spoke often about her own older sister, Mani-mausi, and of her stubbornness, her silly communistic refusal to get live-in help despite long illness and weakness, what if she has one of those fainting spells and falls down the stairs or something, how many times I’ve told her to come here and stay with me, but she’s so stubborn. Sartaj could never bring himself to point out that she, Ma, the younger sister, was no less self-willed, no less protective of her own prickly independence, no less devoted to the house she had built, to its high walls, its lambent floors and familiar lights, its corridors of quiet.