Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Are you finished, Nikki?’ Mata-ji sang from inside the kitchen.

  ‘Coming, Mata-ji,’ Prabhjot Kaur called, and jumped up to pump water, leaning on the handle with all her weight. The water fell in happy gushes, sparking and bouncing in the sunlight. In the kitchen, Mata-ji slapped the paraunthas back and forth between her hands with a sprightliness that made a quick music, tossed them down on the hot tava, each with a final wristy flick. Prabhjot Kaur laid the karhai down carefully. Mata-ji patted at the beaded moisture on her cheeks with the corner of her dupatta, and Prabhjot Kaur watched intently her round red face, with the upturned nose they all teased her about.

  ‘Take these in,’ Mata-ji said, putting a perfect, glistening parauntha on a pile of four. ‘Then you also sit down.’ Prabhjot Kaur always ate second to last. Her two brothers ate mightily, putting away whole dozens of paraunthas, canisters of ghee. Mani was sitting next to them, one knee up under her chin, picking at a pile of bhindi, arranging it in a circle. She paid Prabhjot Kaur no attention, not even a beady stare, she was listening intently to Iqbal-veerji and Alok-veerji, who were talking cricket. Prabhjot Kaur squatted and served herself from the plates scattered on the chatai, and ate, quiet and intent on her food. It was a holiday morning, Sunday, and her father was away, gone to buy a last cartload of bricks. They had been living in the new house for almost a year, but the back was still unfinished. There was to be a store-room and a little separate house of one room and patio, for servants. It seemed like the house had been building for ever. For as long as Prabhjot Kaur could remember, it had been always the Adampur house, for which her father had disappeared on evenings after work, for which her brothers had spent weekends supervising construction, it was a home that had seemed always eternally distant. It had taken them three days to move in, and when they had finally spent their first night, all together in the courtyard on new charpais, none of them had slept until it was almost light. The next morning, through a warm white sheet and puffy, delicious dreams, Prabhjot Kaur had heard the laughter of her mother from the roof. There was a comfortable freedom in the sound, a lack of care so unusual that Prabhjot Kaur still remembered it. This laughter had lingered in their new house, brightened the corridors and mingled with the smell of fresh plaster. Mata-ji now sat down next to Prabhjot Kaur, with the little grunt she always made when she bent her knees, and she was tired from the morning’s work, but still there was something different about her, a rotund contentment that had never been there when they had lived for years in the two rooms at the back of Narinder Dhanoa’s house. She ate with concentration, bending low over the food, smacking her lips with every bite, and Mani stood up abruptly to her full towering length and went stalking away to the kitchen.

  ‘So, Sethani-ji,’ Alok-veerji said, with a hand on his mother’s shoulder. ‘When is your maid starting work?’

  ‘I was thinking I can manage alone,’ Mata-ji said. ‘What will I do with my time?’

  Alok-veerji collapsed on to Mata-ji’s shoulder, laughing.

  ‘We’ll just tell her to start coming from tomorrow,’ Iqbal-veerji said. ‘Otherwise you’ll keep doing this for another ten years.’ As the oldest son he practised an indulgent authority with her, a smiling patience.

  ‘Right, right,’ Alok-veerji said. ‘Otherwise our biggest-kanjoos-in-the-world won’t let the maid near the house.’

  ‘When you start earning,’ Mata-ji said, shrugging his chin off her shoulder, ‘then you’ll know the price of your paraunthas.’

  ‘When I start earning,’ Alok-veerji said, ‘I’ll get you a motor car, with two flags on front.’

  ‘A laat-saab you’ll be straight away,’ Mata-ji said. ‘It took him twenty-one years to build this house.’

  Twenty-one years and some bricks which are still coming, Prabhjot Kaur thought, but she could see that despite the toss of her head, Mata-ji was pleased by Alok-veerji as laat-saab in motor car. It made her smile that downward-looking quick quiver of a smile. That afternoon, when Prabhjot Kaur was settled on a corner of the chatai, her arm under her favourite gadda and head on it, falling densely into sleep, she heard the two veerjis still talking as they lay next to each other, going on about the mysterious maid, who must be found and made to come, who must work, who must sweep the house inside all its many many rooms and outside also, who must push the pocha until the tiled floors are glistering gleaming, who must thrash the laundry and hang it dewy and flapping on the lines in the back, who must winnow wheat, light lamps, clean shoes, gather books, get milk, buy vegetables, who must, who must, who must. Prabhjot Kaur thought that it would be a very strong woman who could do all that.

  But three days later, when the maid came, she was a tiny woman named Ram Pari who wore a funny red salwar-kameez with a ragged dupatta and spoke a rough, blaring dialect that Prabhjot Kaur understood but found hilarious. Ram Pari called Mata-ji ‘Bibi-ji’ and squatted in the courtyard to haggle over wages. When she stood up, after agreeing to five rupees a week, Prabhjot Kaur went and stretched herself up next to her, and it was true, Ram Pari was barely a head taller than her, but standing that close, Prabhjot Kaur discovered a smell. She backed away quickly. It wasn’t exactly a bad smell, but strong, it was like damp earth, or the back of a halwai’s shop, where you got a little dizzy from all the old milky odours. Prabhjot Kaur reeled away from the richness and went and sat next to Navneet-bhenji in the baithak, where as usual Navneet-bhenji had her nose in a big book. Prabhjot Kaur leaned her head on the cottony comfort of Navneet-bhenji’s shoulder, and spelt out the title on top of the page: ‘Wordsworth’. Under the washed briskness of the soft salwar there was the sweet tinge of soap and warm skin. It was a flavour that Prabhjot Kaur had known all her life, and now she breathed it in, scrunching her nose into the cloth and making little snorting noises. ‘What’re you doing, jhalli?’ Navneet-bhenji asked, and reached around with her other hand to pinch the burrowing nose. Prabhjot Kaur didn’t feel crazy, not even close, but it was too difficult to explain why she needed it so, just then. She settled her face into the crook of Navneet-bhenji’s arm and was still. Ram Pari was gone from the courtyard, and Mata-ji came across it, with a plate full of peas. She sat near and began to split the pods and rattle the peas into the plate with her thumb, shuck-shuck-shuck, so quickly that the sound was one long hum. Mata-ji was intent on the peas, and Navneet-bhenji kept the book high on her knees. They were quietly cordial with each other nowadays, but Prabhjot Kaur remembered a year ago when they had quarrelled mightily, after Navneet-bhenji had finished her FA and wanted to go to college for a BA. Mata-ji had told her to think of her brothers and sisters, who were being kept back from marriage and happiness by her selfishness, and when Navneet-bhenji had pointed out reasonably that her brothers and sisters were years and years away from any marriage, Mata-ji had screamed at her, something entirely strange about disgracing the family, and then had refused to eat for two days. Finally Papa-ji had put his large fatherly foot down. If Navneet wants to do her BA, he said, she will, and that is that. But Mata-ji had powers that moved in mysterious ways. She had retreated to her room, and Papa-ji had rolled his eyes and followed her in, and when he emerged the next morning, it had been settled that marriage could be delayed but not put off altogether. So now Navneet-bhenji was engaged, to Pritam Singh Hansra, who was a junior engineer in the PWD and stationed at Gujranwalla. After the engagement Papa-ji had gently stroked his beard, which had just some white in it, under his lower lip, and said, happiness follows from reasonable thinking. Mata-ji had kept quiet. And Prabhjot Kaur, awed by Papa-ji’s way of commanding things out of the air – a boy for Navneet-bhenji, a house for them all – had nevertheless understood that that was never quite that.

  Ram Pari came every day to the house, and Mata-ji engaged in epic struggles with her. Teaching her to wash dishes properly, to a sufficient degree of cleanliness, was a lesson that lasted three days, with many practical demonstrations and stinging criticisms. Ram Pari didn’t talk back, shrugged off Mata-ji’s homilies,
performed at high standards for two bowls and maybe a plate, and then went back to her usual cheerful sloppiness. Her quick sweeping technique, which was efficient and fast but which left snaggles of dust in corners and ignored the spaces underneath almirahs, altogether drove Mata-ji into crescendos of outrage. Meanwhile the two brothers of Prabhjot Kaur fell over laughing and sniggered, not too quietly, about ‘Badboo Pari’. Prabhjot Kaur laughed along with them, to show solidarity, but privately she thought the smell wasn’t a badboo at all, more like a fierce-boo. Ram Pari was small, with a wiry threadwork of muscles across her stomach, which Prabhjot Kaur saw when Ram Pari lifted her kameez to wipe her mouth, her old woman’s wrinkled face. She did that sometimes, in the late afternoon, instead of using the dupatta from over her head, and Prabhjot Kaur thought it was mainly to get cool, get a little bit of breeze on her skin, but it released a huffing breath of smell, round there in the air, as real and inescapable as a cloud of heated sparks from the fire in the chaunka. Prabhjot Kaur flinched from it, but tried also to keep herself still, to experience the sting of it against her skin. She looked forward to it, and was shamed by this, and kept it a secret. It was her most secret secret, more hidden than the one-rupee coin she had found under the cushion of the sofa in the front room, which she had known to be Papa-ji’s, but which had gone to school the next day in her pencil box, which had been good for a week’s worth of kesar kulfis, not only for herself but also her two best friends, Manjeet and Asha. She told nobody of her hesitating hunger for Ram Pari’s smell, the thick tang and savour of it, not even the others of the Terrific Trio, who wore their double plaits in exactly the same neat style, who had sat together in the second row since Class I.

  That day in April the Trio were swaying in the back of Daraq Ali’s tanga, with Manjeet in the middle as usual. She was the unquestioned leader, in spite of the other two’s better marks and fathers with better jobs. Manjeet’s father was only a hotel manager, but she had a tall, lean body and a muscular force of personality and a directness that Prabhjot Kaur and Asha admired but couldn’t imagine emulating. They were content to shelter under its somewhat risky shade.

  ‘Chacha, go faster,’ Manjeet said now to Daraq Ali, with her arm over the back of the seat. ‘Go faster, please, or we’ll become blackened cinders here on Larkin Road itself. We’ll get seared and disappear in a flash of smelly smoke. Go faster, faster.’

  It was after three-thirty and hotter than Prabhjot Kaur could ever remember, and the sun caught them all directly in the back of the tanga, and the road was endless ahead, and Daraq Ali was the oldest and slowest tanga driver in the entire city. He picked them up individually in the morning and trotted, no, ambled them over to school, and then waited for them at three in the afternoon for the endless, draggy, creaking trek back. He thrust his bushy hennaed beard over his sweaty shoulder and said what he always said, ‘Bibi, she’s been working hard all day in this sun. See how tired she is. I’ll ask her to go faster and she’ll try, but it’ll break her heart.’ And then, to the bony brown haunches that rose and dipped under the reins, ‘Oh, Shagufta, faster, faster. Faster, Shagufta, for the great Mems who wilt in the hot hot sun.’

  ‘That nag of yours is older than you, Chacha,’ Manjeet said. ‘Sell her to the knackers and get a strong new mare.’

  ‘But see how hard she’s trying,’ Daraq Ali said. ‘See how she goes. How can you say such things, bibi? You’ll break her heart.’

  Manjeet snorted and held her basta in front of her face to keep off the sun. ‘Oh, yes, we’re speeding along now. Just risking our lives in a fantastic chase. I’m really really scared.’

  Prabhjot Kaur giggled and then instantly wanted a long glass of water from the surahi which Mata-ji kept wet through the whole day. She thought of it, of tilting the surahi, its clay neck round in her palm, and the water in a smooth stream dropping into the glass with a deepening circular gurgle, and the black road slipped away between the dusty tips of her shoes, and the dreary plonk-plunk plonk-plunk of Shagufta’s hooves beat slowly at her temples. She shut her eyes, but she knew they were passing Kalra Shoe Emporium on the right, with its sharp-tipped tree of Lady’s Pumps, then Manohar Lal Madan Lal Halwai, where at the back there were Family Booths and a huge mirror etched with a turbaned man and a woman sitting by a stream, and then Kiani Fine Furniture, which had a long red sofa in the front window and had been At Your Service for Fifty Years, not the sofa but old Mr Kiani and his three sons. Prabhjot Kaur made a bet with herself and opened her eyes and yes indeed they were directly opposite the Tarapore Bakery, which was a heaven of cakes and fizzy drinks, visited by Prabhjot Kaur only once in her entire life, on her ninth birthday, and she remembered the loud pop of the glass ballstopper falling into the strawberry-soda bottle under the weight of Papa-ji’s palm. The sides of Prabhjot Kaur’s mouth ached, actually hurt her as the memory came fully back, the flood of pink eruptions into her mouth, the tingling on the inside of her lips, and Shagufta pulled ahead, drew them beyond the Tarapore Bakery, and right then Prabhjot Kaur saw Ram Pari. She was walking along the side of the road, with her dupatta flapping behind her and her arms straight by her sides. Prabhjot Kaur squiggled back into the seat, unaccountably ashamed. Something about seeing Ram Pari on this wide road, next to the two white ladies with their hats like lacy gardens and gleaming white strappy shoes and astonishing gauzy dresses from deep in the mysterious foreign regions of Perreira’s Ladies Wear, something about Ram Pari’s wide-legged walk made Prabhjot Kaur not want to know her right now. And so she turned her head, as if she was looking at something on the far side of the street, but the side of her neck burned, not from the sun but from what she thought was Ram Pari’s gaze, and she was unable to resist a quick glance backwards. Shagufta was slowly drawing away from Ram Pari, whose face was taut as a sheet billowing under a hot summer wind, whose eyes were hard and unseeing, even though she was looking straight at Prabhjot Kaur. The angry hunch of her shoulders receded slowly into the glare on Larkin Road, and finally Prabhjot Kaur lost sight of her altogether, just before they took the left turn on to Fulbag Gali and into Chaube Mohalla, where Manjeet jumped off and ran ahead to her house, her two thick plaits jiggling and jogging behind her.

  When Prabhjot Kaur got home, her father was sitting in his baithak with his friend Khudabaksh Shafi, who was drinking tea out of a cup that was kept especially for him. Prabhjot Kaur always thought of it as the Muslim teacup, and there was always trouble with Mata-ji when Papa-ji carried it inside and washed it himself under the hand-pump. Mata-ji always made a face and Navneet-bhenji and Mani always rolled their eyes and said she was being horribly silly. Prabhjot Kaur liked Khudabaksh Shafi, who had a great straight moustache across his face and who never came without gifts. Today he had brought a basket of leechies. ‘Especially for you, beta,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Eat them after dinner. And don’t let those two mustandas inside cheat you.’ Her two brothers were sprawled on charpais in the courtyard, in cricket whites, drinking enormous brass tumblers of khari lassi. Iqbal-veerji jumped up and picked up his bat – which he seasoned every other day with special oil – and showed her how he had hit three sixes in a single over, off that Shahidul Almansoor, who thought he was the best bowler in the entire province. Prabhjot Kaur rocked forward and back on her toes, trying to be interested, but as soon as she could she shifted sideways away to her mother’s room, leaned against the door until a triangle of light opened on the floor. She slid herself through and sat on the end of the bed, on Papa-ji’s side. The bed was high enough that she had to use both her hands to climb up, and then the shape of her mother’s side was a ridge in the close darkness. A table-fan swept the air to and fro.

  ‘What is it?’ Mata-ji said finally, still facing away.

  ‘Is there some trouble with Ram Pari?’

  Mata-ji took a long breath. ‘These people.’

  ‘Did she do something, Mata-ji?’

  ‘No, no. Her husband.’

  ‘She has a husband?’

  ‘
Beta, nine children she has. He’s not been home in a year and a half. She was sure he had another wife somewhere. Then yesterday he came back. Like a laat-saab he spread his legs and shouted for his dinner. It’s my house, he said.’

  ‘Is it his house?’

  ‘He hasn’t earned ten rupees in his life.’

  That was very conclusive, somehow. Mata-ji’s shoulder shifted and settled and her breathing changed, and Prabhjot Kaur let herself down slowly to the floor, her cheeks stinging. Ram Pari was still trudging away somewhere, in a line as straight as fate, but all Prabhjot Kaur could think about was that she herself had never earned a rupee in her life, only stolen one. She stood in the shadow of the fluted pillars at the edge of the courtyard, watching her brothers and the red stains on their pants from the cricket ball, their pleasant exhaustion, and wondered if this house was hers. It slid away from her all evening, the feeling of home that she’d had from the first day she had seen the rising beams and the hole in the ground half-lined with bricks. Even as the sun walked up the pillars and she sprinkled water in the courtyard and the smell rose of fresh evening, she was not able to plant herself in the place. She slept fluttering and light, wafting and skipping and windblown in her dreams over the white rooftops of Sabhwal city, where she had been born.