Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Bibi, do you know of any sadhu in connection with him?’

  ‘Sadhu? No. All that praying and piety, everything was a sham. He never did a bit of good for anyone in his life, may he burn.’

  Sartaj thanked her, and said, ‘Now I must go, Bibi.’

  ‘You’re talking to anyone on Gaitonde’s side?’

  ‘Here and there, Bibi.’

  She laughed. ‘Fine, don’t tell me if you don’t want to, beta. But if you have a problem, come to me. After all, you are Sardar Saab’s son.’

  ‘Yes, Bibi.’

  ‘Phone me some time. I am an old woman, but keep in touch. I may be of use. This is my personal number, write it down.’

  Sartaj put the number and name into his diary, but he thought she wouldn’t be of much use, this garrulous old woman. She had nothing useful to give him, or perhaps he didn’t have anything she thought worth trading good information for. He put the phone down, and went out into the station, looking for Katekar. Now they had to visit another woman.

  Mary Mascarenas sat on her bed and shuddered. She held herself around the belly, arms tightly wrapped, and lowered her head and shook. Sartaj waited. Maybe she had quarrelled with Jojo, perhaps she had even wished her sister dead, but now it had happened, a part of her life had fallen away, and she was trembling from the amputation. There was no use trying to talk to her until the agitation was over, and so Sartaj and Katekar were waiting, looking around her very small apartment, one room with an attached kitchen really, and a cupboard of a bathroom. She had a green and black bedspread on the single bed, some small plants on the window-ledge, an ancient black rotary phone, two framed paintings on the wall, a grey-patterned dhurrie on the floor. Sitting on the single wooden chair at the foot of the bed, Sartaj saw how she had built a haven for herself. The walls were a pale green, and he was sure that she had painted them herself, to complement the darker green of the plants and the jungle emeralds of the paintings, where cottages sat amongst exuberant foliage and parrots fluttered through the treetops. Now the bright Mumbai sun slipped through the white blinds and ignited the hues that Mary Mascarenas had arranged for herself, and the shimmering, jerking fall of her hair hid her face.

  Katekar rolled his eyes. He padded into the kitchen, and Sartaj could see his head craning, turning. He was taking inventory. He would go into the bathroom next, and take careful note of buckets, toothbrush, face creams. This was something they had in common, this faith in details, in particulars. Sartaj had noticed it the first time Katekar had reported to him, many years ago, about a pickpocket who worked the line from Churchgate to Andheri Station. Katekar had droned on about name, age, height, and then added that the bastard had married three times, and that he had a weakness for papri-chaat and faluda, in the basti where he had grown up this was well known. They’d caught him three weeks later, at the Mathura Dairy Farm near Santa Cruz station, with his head lowered over a plate of bhel-puri after a profitable evening rush-hour, sitting across from a cross-eyed girlfriend who was well on her way to becoming wife number four. Close observation didn’t always bring arrests, and success, but what Sartaj appreciated was Katekar’s essential understanding of the fact that there were many ways to describe a man, but to say that he was a Hindu, a poor man, a criminal, all of this gave no grip, no hold. Only when you knew which shampoo he favoured, what songs he listened to, who and how he liked to chodo, what paan he ate, only then you caught him, had him, even if you never arrested him. So Katekar was in Mary’s bathroom now. Sartaj was sure he was sniffing at her soap.

  ‘Why?’ she said suddenly. She pushed the hair back from her face, tugged it back angrily. ‘Why?’

  She had her sister’s cheekbones, and a plumper, round jawline, all blurred now by her loss. She wasn’t weeping, but was still quivering, squeezing it down until Sartaj could see it only in the tips of her fingers, and in her chin.

  ‘Miss Mascarenas was involved in nefarious activities with the mafia don Ganesh Gaitonde,’ he said. ‘This resulted in…’

  ‘I heard you before,’ she said. ‘But why?’

  Why everything? she wanted to know. Why a bullet hole in the chest, why a concrete floor, why Ganesh Gaitonde? Sartaj shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Why do men kill women? Why do they kill each other? These were questions that bit at him sometimes, but he drowned them in whisky. Otherwise why not ask, why life? That way lay hurtling chasms, the temptations of long heights. Better to do the job. Better to put one apradhi in jail, and then, when you could, another. Katekar was at the bathroom door, his eyes alive with sunlight. ‘I don’t know, miss,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘You don’t know,’ she said. She nodded heavily, as if this confirmed some great suspicion. ‘I want her,’ she said.

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘I want her,’ she said slowly, with hard-strained patience, ‘for burial.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Handing over of body is sometimes difficult when the investigation is still ongoing, you understand. But we will arrange for the body to be released. But I need to ask you some questions.’

  ‘I don’t want to answer any questions just now.’

  ‘But these are questions about your sister. You just said that you want to know what happened to her.’

  She wiped her face and sat forward a little and suddenly he was the subject of study. Her eyes were a lighter brown than they first appeared, and in a moment he was able to see the flecks dusted through them. He was now very uncomfortable, her scrutiny was shameless, direct and long, and at least his position should have shielded him from the unexpected intimacy of that unending look. But he wouldn’t drop his gaze. At last she said, ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Inspector Sartaj Singh.’

  ‘Sartaj Singh, have you ever lost a sister?’ Her voice rose. ‘Have you ever had a sister murdered?’

  Her utter lack of fear was irritating. Citizens, and especially women, were always subdued with policemen, careful, scared, formal. Mary Mascarenas was dismissively casual. But she had just lost her sister, and so he took a breath and held down his annoyance. ‘Miss, I’m sorry to ask you this kind of thing at a time like this…’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  ‘This is a very important matter. This is a case that involves national security,’ Sartaj said. And then he couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt quite in the wrong, somehow, and therefore angry. Mary Mascarenas didn’t look frightened, but she wasn’t brave either. She was saddened, weary, and truly expecting nothing from him except more suffering. She was just going to be very stubborn, and shouting at her wasn’t going to help. He took a breath. ‘National security. Do you understand?’

  ‘Are you going to hit me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you going to break my bones? Isn’t that what you do?’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Sartaj snapped. He caught himself, steadied and held up a hand. ‘Miss, we will arrange for the release of the body. Also, there were some possessions, and they are impounded currently, for the investigation. But those will be released to you eventually. I will phone when arrangements are complete. Here is the number at the station where you can get in touch with me.’ He carefully put his card at the foot of the bed, at the very edge, and turned away.

  On the stairway Katekar turned his head back up to Sartaj. ‘She will talk, sir.’

  ‘Why are you whispering?’ Usually Katekar was the bulky threat, he was the looming promise of slaps and thumps and kicks, and Sartaj played the understanding friend, the unexpectedly benign and bearded face of authority. With women he was always kind. But Mary Mascarenas had been hostile, and Sartaj was irritated. From the bottom of the yard he looked up at her door, which was shutting as he watched. She had a good little PG at the back of an old house on a quiet residential street, shaded by the interlocked branches of two old trees. The house was one of those unexpected treasures that still survived in Bandra, an old grey cottage with slatted shutters and ironwork on the balconies and white trim on the doo
rs and windows. The yard was covered with leaves which crackled underfoot. All very pretty, and vexing.

  But Katekar was right, she would talk. Sartaj walked down the street. She would feed her anger, tell herself what a beast that sardar inspector was, what a bastard, but finally she would be left with only her guilt, and she would need to tell him what had happened, what had become of Mary and Juliet Mascarenas. She would confess to him because she had to make him understand. Forgiveness was not what they really needed, the survivors, it was always too late for that. What they wanted was only that someone in a uniform, a robe, somebody with three lions on their shoulder should say, yes, I see how it came about, first this happened, and then that, and so you did this and then this. So she would talk. But now it was time to leave her alone. Now it was time to save the body from disposal by incineration, so that Mary Mascarenas could bury her sister. People set great store by small dignities, small illusions. Mary Mascarenas would never see the cold room, he would save her from seeing what really happened to dead sisters. Let her bury Jojo. Then she would talk.

  Sartaj shaded his eyes and peered out at the sea, at the shifting sash of quicksilver visible through the trees and the two buildings below. It was late, time for him to go home, to his own family.

  Prabhjot Kaur sat in an armchair in her bedroom and listened to her home. The house was black. At night it seemed bigger, the familiar contours pushed back by a moving dark, an absence of light that was somehow alive with ghostly slivers of colour. Prabhjot Kaur could hear Sartaj sleeping. It was a long way, across and down the hall, but at this time she could hear many things: the slow settling of the ancient dining table, the steady plit-tap, plit-tap of drops from the tap behind her neighbour’s house, the shivery movement of small animals under the hedge at the front of the house, the hum of the night itself, that low and living vibration that made all other sounds larger. She heard all this, and loud in it, her son’s breathing. She knew how he lay, straight on his back with his head turned to one side, and a pillow held against his chest. He had come late, carrying two overstuffed bags as usual, weary from the train ride but also from much else, she could see that. After a quick bath he had eaten the rajma-chawal she had waiting for him, he ate it silently, with relief. She sat across the table from him, warmed by the familiar way he had of eating the rice from left to right, systematic, and patting the food with his fork often, making it neat. He had done that as a small boy, with the fork held crosswise in his fist. Rajma-chawal was his favourite food, his Sunday treat, and he liked the rice with plenty of fried onion.

  She asked him questions every now and then, whether the slow leak in the Bombay bathroom wall had been fixed, whether he had written a letter to his Delhi Chacha-ji. It was not Sartaj’s answers she wanted as much as the sound of his voice. When he was done, he sat back, stilled, both arms hanging limp at the sides of the chair, blinking slowly. She took his plate. ‘Go to sleep, beta,’ she said.

  The armchair she sat in now was old, the oldest piece of furniture in the house. It had been patched, restrung, re-upholstered, QuickFixed, operated on, saved for her. Sartaj’s father had brought it home one evening, tipped it slowly from the back of a tempo, smiling a glory of flashing teeth over her What-is-this? How-much-money-did-you-spend? It had taken him an hour to persuade her to sit in it, to admit it was not too uncomfortable. It was the first big thing they had bought together, the first piece of their small household that had not come in dowry. Now the night was a vast unknown territory she was exploring alone, a drifting plain that rolled its horizons back eternally, and she preferred to suffer it sitting back in her armchair, because it was lazy to be in bed when she was awake. But no, it wasn’t true, suffering undiluted and pure it wasn’t, even though sometimes loneliness spoke its iron hum of locusts behind her eyes, filled her stomach with blowing sand, gritty and grinding and cruel. There was something else that kept her from living with her son, or from moving into the capacious sprawl of her brother’s house just down the street and to the right, into the tumbling warmth of nieces and nephews and shouted quarrels and kulfi-smeared faces. It was something so monstrous she kept it from herself. But she felt it, late at night, hidden under the contours of her face, which she touched and felt as if it were a mask, as she savoured, slowly, the unspeakable pleasure of being alone.

  She shook her head angrily against this delight now, pushed it away. It took her a full minute to get up from the armchair, four separate movements of arm and hip and legs. There was no need to switch on the light for the walk into the hallway and down it. The bureau was to the left, good dishes in the first drawer and second, the expensive dishes with the lily pattern that she liked for its neat spiralling circles in a bright blue, and to her right shoulder, the glisten of the photographs she could recite and remember, a wedding picture laminated in hard plastic, the red of her sari darkened into a rich black, she could remember the photographer’s two-toned shoes and his head hidden under a black cloth, and her younger devar with his red tie and cheeky smile, ‘Come now, Pabi-ji, where’s that lovely lovely laugh?’ Then there had been an ecstatic glow of light, and she had managed a smile that lingered now, past all decay. And there was Sartaj at ten, in a blue turban too large for his head and a blue blazer with shiny new brass buttons, what you couldn’t see in the photograph was his left knee under the flannel trousers, which he had sliced open that morning on a strand of barbed wire, climbing through a fence to short-cut through an empty plot on the way to the school bus, she had told him a hundred times not to. Then there had been the tetanus injections, and the ice-cream his father had bought him, a whole brick of Kwality vanilla, Sartaj’s favourite. They had the same tastes, father and son, the same urgent need for a mirror glitter on shoe leather, for a new jacket every other year. At the end of the corridor, he, the father, stood against a grey studio backdrop in his last-but-one jacket, a tweed with a green and black weave, worn with a white shirt and a silky green scarf, his beard now a soft white that he finally no longer fought against with stains and dyes. A white beard looks fully distinguished, she had told him twice a day for months on end, until he had believed her, and now she left him behind and stood in a doorway, and Sartaj slept, breathing quickly.

  He spoke now, muttering something into the sheet clumped at the side of his head. At the foot of the bed, she bent slowly and found, on the floor, his pants, shirt, underwear. Sartaj was saying something, she clearly heard the word ‘boat’ in it. She shut the door quietly because he would want to sleep late, and the servants came early. On the way to the bathroom she turned out his pockets and found a handkerchief, and it all went into the washing bucket for the bai.

  In her armchair she listened for the tapping of the watchman’s lathi at the very last turn of the road, it was time. He made a large circle around the clustered homes every hour. And listening, she heard the tiniest creak of resentment rising from her bones, a very small rub of resistance, barely heard amidst the larger music of happiness, of a life not without pain but lived well: home, husband, son, and her the wife. It was unseemly, after all these years and years, this unvanquished and sullen spark rising from clothes on the floor, this small spurt of anger at having to always do things for men, always. Yes, unseemly, especially with Sartaj so tired, seeking comfort, he had come to her. She knew this. He had told her he slept deeply in this house, slept better. He had slept bravely in his own bedroom that first night long ago, he must have been six, maybe a little older when they finally had an apartment with a room for him, with a little veranda that looked out into a small garden where she had grown roses and hung wet saris and uniforms on a line. How many clothes had she washed in those early days, how many blue days of Rin and torn blue short pants and matching socks, and had she on some mornings pressed down that same grating itch of annoyance, buried it firmly and deep under tumbling avalanches of love? Prabhjot Kaur pushed the thoughts back, put her hands on the old wood of the armrests and held them hard and rocked her head back and forward, and tried to th
ink of a holiday time in the hills, she and Karamjeet and their son walking on a winding hilly ridge, but she was seeing instead a house in a city very far away, immeasurably further now that it lay on the other side of a new border and a long wire fence that flashed with murderous electricity, and this house had shutters painted green and a big baithak at the front with all new furniture in it and after you went through the dark passage leading from outside to in, there was a bricked courtyard surrounded by arches and rooms. In this courtyard were Prabhjot Kaur’s father and mother, her two elder brothers and her two sisters. And one of these sisters was Navneet, beloved and best of all, and now lost for ever. Gone, Navneet-bhenji was gone. With both hands, Prabhjot Kaur wiped her forehead, her face. It was useless to remember. The histories had already been written, and what had happened, had happened. Being alive, having a family, came with its inevitable portion of pain. There was no running away from life, and trying to wish away suffering only made it more present. She took a deep breath: bear it. Carry it all, the small dissatisfactions of every day and the huge murderous tragedies of long ago, carry it all with the help and grace of Vaheguru. Carry it for those you love. Prabhjot Kaur took a deep breath and tried to think of the tasks for tomorrow.

  Her breathing was even, slow. From across the garden outside came that steady tapping, the small explosive spatter of water on stones.

  INSET: A House in a Distant City

  The courtyard was washed every morning, and in it sat Prabhjot Kaur, scrubbing a karhai with ash under the hand-pump. She was the best and youngest daughter of three: Navneet, Maninder and Prabhjot. Or actually Navneet-bhenji, Mani and then Prabhjot, or Nikki, for her smallness. Prabhjot Kaur liked to help their Mata-ji, who always said, ‘Look at her, this Nikki of a girl, this Prabhjot Kaur, only ten and helping more than the rest of you all put together,’ which usually meant that Nikki had to watch out for a pinch from Mani, who loved to catch up the flesh on the inner side of her upper arm with fingers as unrelenting and iron as a chimta and twist and twist, whispering, ‘Little rat, I’ll show you, rattie.’ Nikki wore her bruises with forbearance, and even compassion for Mani, who had big ears and looked like an awestruck dehati scarecrow, after three sudden inches gained in her fourteenth year. Mani wandered around, shrieky and awkward and full of rage, not too good at studies, stuck inextricably in the middle of three sisters, which meant that she was not special even by virtue of position or age, always not here and not quite there. Nikki, on the other hand, was coddled by her two brothers, Iqbal-veerji and Alok-veerji, who at eighteen and seventeen were younger than Navneet-bhenji but more remote than her because of their hulking maleness and their passion for cricket. Her father liked to look at Nikki’s notebooks, which she covered with plain brown paper folded into sharp, precise corners and edges, which she adorned with her full, proper name in green ink, with the initial letters of ‘Prabhjot’ and ‘Kaur’ especially elaborated and curled. Her Punjabi and Urdu teachers admired her writing in either script and had hopes for her in the annual composition contest sponsored by Sir Syed Atallulah Khan. ‘My house is new,’ she wrote in flowing green letters, with not a mistake or a blotting because she would discard an entire page for one straggly aleph. She had the universal reputation of being a good girl, serious and obedient, and in her new house she liked to help in the kitchen.