Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Why? Why be quiet? I’ll shout it out loud. These Muslims are bhenchods and maderchods. If all their women were standing in front of me, I would hang them up and cut them open like goats. I would pull out their intestines with my own hands. With pleasure I would do it. Bhenchods. Maderchods.’

  Prabhjot Kaur ran. She dropped the clothes and ran away. Her mother’s words followed her: ‘Kill them.’ She tripped over tent-ropes and skinned her palms on the black gravel, and she ran past children kicking a piece of wood from one side of the pathway to the other, past women squatting in the doorways of tents repairing torn shirts, past bubbling pots on makeshift choolas of six bricks, past everything until she was finally at the edge, beyond all habitation. Ahead there was a brown path, and on the other side of that a bare maidan strewn with rocks, and then endless fields, green and thick. She stopped and held her sides, bent over until the sweat fell straight from her forehead to the ground, making dark circles on the earth. She straightened up. She wanted to go away. She wanted a place to go to, somewhere very far away, hundreds of miles from her family, thousands of miles from everyone. Haven’t you heard? A girl is born into a house, but her home is somewhere else. This house doesn’t belong to you. Your home is elsewhere. If I could keep walking, she thought. But she knew her geography too well, those lessons she had learned with the Trio, the ones she had written down in fair handwriting in books covered with brown paper. And now, now she knew more. There were seas to one side, mountains to another, nowhere to go, and fear everywhere. You would have to cross fear to get nowhere. The maidan was still, and the fields waited, silent. Prabhjot Kaur stood alone, at the edge of the city of refugees. Then she turned and went back to her father and mother and brothers and sister.

  Finally they managed to go to Delhi. Mata-ji took out from underneath her clothes some of the jewellery she had carried, and this time they went by train. The two brothers deposited the rest of the family in the house of Gunjan Singh Parvana, who was not really a relative, but the son of a man from the village Khenchi. There was an ancient story about how Papa-ji’s father had saved Gunjan Singh Parvana’s policeman father from summary dismissal and unemployment, and so now he took them in. They had two tiny rooms and a veranda at the back of the house. Then the two brothers went to what was now the border, and beyond, to a foreign country. They had not wanted to go, but Mata-ji now said, for the first time, ‘Go and find my daughter.’ Prabhjot Kaur heard this while she pretended to sleep. Nowadays there were many discussions among the elders of the family that she and Mani were kept out of. Mani was really asleep, and even whimpering a little, but Prabhjot Kaur kept herself awake every night. She wanted to know, had to know. Staying awake got easier and easier. There were certain practices that kept you from an unknowing slide into yourself, from a feathery fall into the vacuum of rest: you paid attention to details, you kept the mind working and turning and racing, you listened. And Prabhjot Kaur heard Mata-ji’s voice, low and full of phlegm and fierce: ‘Go and find my daughter.’ The other murmurs were all run together and powdery and hard to catch, but Prabhjot Kaur heard the command: ‘Go and find my daughter.’ It brooked no resistance. So they went. What Prabhjot Kaur couldn’t understand was why they were reluctant to go. Of course they should go, she thought, why don’t they want to go? and felt instantly a hurt in her stomach, a fist that grew upwards and twisted her heart so that she thought she would cry out loud. But she was silent, silent and awake, night after night, and she waited.

  They returned a month and a half later, forty days and forty-one nights later, to be exact. Prabhjot Kaur, who now kept strict track of time, jerked out of a sleep that she was sure was only a few minutes old, and knew they had come back. The door to Mata-ji’s room was shut, and the tones were very soft, but she heard them nevertheless, and she was certain. She got up and stood next to the door for a minute, and rested her head on the rough grey wood, and the voices passed into her forehead. She had no hope. Night after night she had imagined it, the happy moment, that sliding swish of salwar-bottoms over ground, that sound she knew so well, how she would cling to Navneet-bhenji, with her head buried in the soft comfort of home, and the beloved blood singing in the arms that held her. Now she knew this would not happen. She turned away, walked out on to the veranda. There was a wire fence, and beyond that a line of gulmohar trees, and in the distance a rising ridge. This was all the Delhi she knew. Next to the fence there was a woman crouching, and Prabhjot Kaur knew right away who it was: Ram Pari. She knew that squat, that comfortable ease so close to the ground, that position she could hold for hours.

  ‘Is that Ram Pari?’ Mani came out on to the veranda and ran down to the fence. She bent down to Ram Pari, and then Prabhjot Kaur saw Ram Pari’s upturned face. She was an old woman. The skin hung off her cheekbones in limp whorls. She had a dupatta wrapped over her shoulders, a red one, and Prabhjot Kaur remembered it well from before. Now it was tattered and faded to a rusty brown. ‘Where did you come from?’ Mani said to Ram Pari.

  ‘Iqbal-veerji, I saw him at the bus station,’ Ram Pari said, and it was a shock to hear her husky voice, with the familiar village rhythms. ‘We had come across the border. Walking.’

  ‘And…and where is everyone?’

  Prabhjot Kaur wanted to shout something at Mani. It seemed an unbearable question to ask, and she had no wish to hear it, or wait for an answer. But she stood absolutely still, unable to move.

  Ram Pari shook her head. Slowly, she shook her head. To one side and then another.

  There was the creak of the door, and Papa-ji came past Prabhjot Kaur, and then the brothers. The three men stood in the veranda, uncertain, it seemed, of what to do or where to go next. Mani had a hand on Ram Pari’s shoulder. Prabhjot Kaur willed movement into herself, she turned and went into the house. In the small airless room to the right, her mother was weeping. She was sitting on the ground, next to a charpai, with her arms thrown over the sheets, and her head was down and she was sobbing. The sound was small and infant-like. Not angry, or outraged, just surprised. Prabhjot Kaur went in and stood next to Mata-ji, her knees feeling a small rattling from the bed, and sensed in herself a large anger, felt herself swell with it, become as hard as a rock, and also a sharp, cutting river of pity, a helpless overflowing of it. Her mother’s head had grey hair, very dry and broken and ugly, and a balding patch at the back, and underneath, scalp as young and smooth as a baby’s. Prabhjot Kaur shut her eyes for a moment, and then reached forward and put her hand on her mother’s head. Mata-ji’s body arced, and she came towards Prabhjot Kaur like a blind, nuzzling animal and held her around the waist with both arms, and leaned on her, and Prabhjot Kaur steadied herself, and patted her gently on the shoulders and neck, and tried to comfort the woman in her grief.

  Burying the Dead

  Sartaj woke at seven. Ma was already sitting at the dining table, reading a newspaper through thick bifocals. She was bathed, dressed in a crisp white salwar-kameez, her hair neatly combed. He never in his life had managed to wake up before her, and sometimes he wondered if she ever slept.

  ‘Sit,’ she said. She brought out a plate, a cup. He read the paper: the cross-border peace process was picking up momentum. But twenty-two men had been killed in Rajouri by Kashmiri militants, maybe foreign mercenaries. The militants had stopped a State Transport bus on a main road, lined up the Hindu men on one side, and fired at them with AK-47s. One traveller had survived, under the bodies, with a bullet in his groin. There was a photograph of the corpses, lined up in a lumpy row. Sartaj smelt cooking eggs. He thought, why do we always line them up? Why not put them in a circle? Or a V? Or just anyhow, this way and that? It was one of the things you did when you had lots of victims, line them up, as if this controlled and contained the chaos of the event, metal exploding through living flesh. Sartaj had himself dragged limp bodies into ordered ranks, and felt better for it.

  ‘These Muslims will never let us live in peace,’ Ma said as she put down an omelette in front of him. It wa
s the way he liked it, very fluffy with lots of chillies but no onions.

  ‘Ma,’ Sartaj said, ‘this is a war. It’s not like all Muslims are monsters or something.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. But you don’t know.’ She had taken off her glasses, and was polishing them now with her dupatta. When she looked at him, her face was absolutely expressionless, closed up like a steel-shuttered window. ‘You don’t know these people. They are just different from us. We will never let them live in peace either.’

  Sartaj turned to his omelette. There was no arguing with her, she was set in her ways, and finally she would bring out heavy, simple assertions that she treated as unquestionable, and would hold to them like anchors. It was annoying and useless, any attempt to have this discussion, and it would just raise her blood pressure. Sartaj turned the page, and read a long human-interest story about a paan-wallah and his luxuriant moustaches.

  In the crowded calm of the gurudwara, later, he watched his mother. She was sitting with her knees up, holding her arms around them in a way that he always thought of as girlish. As the massed voices rose and soared in a kirtan, she was lost in memory. He knew that look, soft, with half-drooped eyes gazing into the middle distance, that inwardness. She was very small, very fragile, and looking at her thin wrists he was full of fear and thought again that he should take her to live with him. How long do we have them, he thought, our parents? How long? But she was very stubborn, and clung to her house like a soldier fighting a war. The last time they had argued about this, she had said, this is my home. I will only leave it one way, when the time comes. And he had seen suddenly how alone one could be in this gigantic world, when time took your father and mother from you, and he had said, spluttering, don’t talk like that.

  ‘Tarai gun maya mohi aayi kahan baydan kaahii,’ the singers sang. We are walkers on this journey, Sartaj thought, and we drop one by one. On the other side of Ma there was her oldest brother, Iqbal-mama, swaying from the shoulders to the hip. He was a very religious man, a trustee of the gurudwara, occupied always in good works and charity. Sartaj liked him, but found his constant piety stifling. There had been another mama, Alok-mama, who all the children had liked a lot more. Sartaj still remembered with awe how much that elephantine sardar used to eat, roasted chickens for breakfast, rogan josh for lunch with fresh jalebis afterwards, dinner was an epic struggle, with Scotch whisky added and Alok-mama’s face glowing red. The children, all the cousins, used to joke that there was a trapdoor inside Alok-mama which led to an enormous cave where all the food disappeared, it was incredible that one man should eat so much. He used to wheeze going from one room to another. His wife found him dead one morning in the bathroom, with water from the tap falling on his face. This was when Sartaj was fourteen.

  Iqbal-mama was very religious, and Mani-mausi was not at all so. There had been fights, shouted quarrels, when she had been sarcastic about Iqbal-mama’s eternal worshipping. Ma always offered sisterly counsel to Mani-mausi, tried to keep her from baiting their brother. But nobody could rein in Mani-mausi when she was in one of her moods. She was quite the scandal of her family, with her divorce and her fiercely communist political beliefs and her vocal atheism. Sartaj didn’t know how much he himself believed any more. He of course kept his beard, the hair, the kara, but he hadn’t prayed of his own accord for years. There were pictures of the gurus in his house, but he no longer asked them for advice, or expected miracles from them, or even an easier day. The colours in the pictures seemed too bright to him now, the absolutely pristine whites of Guru Nanak’s turban too far from dirty life. Still, Sartaj thought, it was good to come with his mother to this place. There was good light, and companionship in the aligned shoulders of the worshippers, and comfort.

  Ma adjusted her salwar over her feet, and Sartaj thought then of the woman in Gaitonde’s bunker, the long sprawl of her legs in her stylish pants. They had found no evidence of religion in her apartment, no cross or bible or rosary. So perhaps she was irreligious, or maybe just indifferent. But she had consorted with Gaitonde, whose long prayers and donations to religious causes were legendary. For a while during the late nineties, he had projected himself in the media as the Hindu Don, brave defender against the anti-national activities of Suleiman Isa. Sartaj remembered a Mid-Day interview in which Gaitonde had predicted the early demise of Suleiman Isa. ‘We have teams active in Pakistan, looking for him,’ Gaitonde had said. There had been an old file photograph at the top of the story, a very young Ganesh Gaitonde wearing a red sweatshirt and dark glasses. Sartaj had been impressed by the look. He had his own style, Ganesh Gaitonde did, but finally he had been the one who died, without any intervention – it seemed – by his old enemy. Why? It was an interesting mystery, somewhat pleasurable to contemplate, and Sartaj gave himself to theorizing about it for the rest of the morning.

  He was still speculating when he and Ma finally got home, late in the afternoon. After leaving the gurudwara, they had spent two hours at Iqbal-mama’s house, amongst a swirling welter of nieces and nephews. Sartaj had grown up an only child, and he rather liked – in small doses – the comfortable chaos of large families. Now Sartaj was pleasantly tired, but his mind was lazily ticking along, building stories about Ganesh Gaitonde. He was lying in bed, in a curtained darkness, wondering whether there had been a failed love affair between Gaitonde and Jojo Mascarenas, some tangled tale of fleshly desire and betrayal which had led to a murder-suicide. That was likely, he decided. Men and women did that kind of thing to each other.

  ‘Sartaj, I want to go to Amritsar.’

  Sartaj jerked up. Ma was standing in the doorway. ‘What?’

  ‘I want to go to Amritsar.’

  ‘Now?’ Sartaj rubbed his eyes, swung his feet to the floor.

  ‘Arre, no, beta. But soon.’

  Sartaj pulled back a curtain, letting in a spill of light. ‘Why suddenly?’

  Ma straightened the sheet. ‘Not suddenly. I have been thinking about it for a while.’

  ‘You want to see Chacha and all those people?’

  ‘I want to go to Harmandir Sahib once more before I die.’

  Sartaj stopped, his hand on the wall. ‘Ma, don’t talk like that. You’ll go many times.’

  ‘You just take me once.’

  A heaviness had settled in Sartaj’s chest, squeezing away his voice. He came around Ma, picked up his empty suitcase and touched her awkwardly on the shoulder. ‘I’ll see when I can get leave.’ He coughed. ‘Then we can go.’

  While Sartaj packed, Ma brought in a pile of freshly ironed clothes. She sat on the bed and watched him. She had never done this, in all the hundreds of times he had prepared to leave home, and he felt her gaze slowing him. He had always been a neat packer, but now he tucked his socks into the rectangular slot between his shirts and pants with fanatical care. Ma told stories about Amritsar relatives, and by the time Sartaj had the suitcase closed, he knew he was late starting out for the station. Still, he lingered by the front door, and repeated his peri paunas, and tried not to think of the last time he had said goodbye to Papa-ji, at this same door.

  Sartaj made it on to the train, but barely, and he was unable to sleep through to Dadar station as he usually did. Through dirtied glass, he watched the familiar darkening ridges slide by, outlined against the shape of his own face. He had made this journey many times, and loved it well, the long tunnel from Monkey Hill to Nagnath which had so excited him as a child, the steep inclines and the sudden turns that swept back hillsides like stage curtains to reveal the astonishment of plummeting green valleys, and you felt an exhalation and wonder in your chest, and were glad you were going somewhere. He got it still, that little puff of excitement, but now it had inside itself a little twinge of loss and nostalgia. Maybe this was why people had kids, so that when you could no longer travel with your parents, your children made all train trips new again. Then you could watch the lights of Mumbai appear, and be fully happy that you were home.

  ‘Yes, bring in Bunty,’ P
arulkar said. ‘By all means, bring him in, indeed.’

  ‘I should do it, sir? Not one of your people?’ Sartaj meant one of Parulkar’s picked men who dealt with gangs.

  ‘No, Bunty probably trusts you best. If I send one of my inspectors, he’ll get frightened.’

  ‘Right, sir.’ They were sitting in Parulkar’s car at Haji Ali. Parulkar was on his way to headquarters and had asked Sartaj to meet him on the way. Sartaj thought he was joyless, that he looked worn down. ‘You have another meeting, sir?’

  ‘Yes. I have nothing but meetings nowadays.’

  ‘With DIG Saab?’

  ‘Not only him. Everyone I can. The government is bent on pushing me out, Sartaj. So I have to see who can help me stay in. So I run from here to there.’

  ‘Sir, you will take care of it. You always have.’

  ‘I am not so sure. This time, even the money I am prepared to spend is making no difference. There is too much old history. They hate me personally, they think I am too pro-Muslim.’

  ‘Because of Suleiman Isa?’

  Parulkar shrugged. ‘That, and other things. But mainly they suspect me of helping Suleiman Isa. They are fools. They don’t seem to understand that to operate successfully against this gang, you have to exchange information with that one. They just know who they hate. They are politicians and gangsters themselves, but they see the world like this. Stupid.’

  ‘That’s why you will outsmart them, sir.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure, Sartaj,’ Parulkar said, jabbing a hand towards the rising arc of buildings, ‘nowadays, stupidity is what wins here.’ Behind him, the sea lay flat and quiet. His driver and bodyguards were standing close by, shading their eyes from the glare. ‘The times have changed.’

  There was no arguing with this simple truth, the times had indeed changed. ‘If there’s anything I can do, sir,’ Sartaj said, ‘please tell me.’