Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  Sartaj paused at an intersection. The narrow lane directly ahead led to Bengali Bura, and the wider one to the right towards the main road. He brushed the crumbs from his fingertips, and said to Katekar, ‘Let’s go and see Deva first.’

  Sartaj had an old contact in Navnagar, a Tamil named Deva. Sartaj had met him nine years ago, when he had arrested a gang of four tyre-thieves in Antop Hill. Deva had lived with the thieves, in the little closed porch at the entrance to their kholi. He had protested his innocence, said that he was just a tenant, he had nothing to do with the burglaries, he was just in from his village and new to the city, he had thought that having tyres stacked in the house was normal urban practice. Sartaj had liked Deva’s cheerfulness, his humming of weird-sounding Tamil songs, his resolute nineteen-year-old attempt to muster up courage, despite the twitching in his skinny, pole-like legs. So Sartaj had decided to believe him, and looked after him, he had not put his name in the FIR and had spoken to a couple of people about a job for him, and now Deva was very respectable, settled, married, he had a son and another one on the way, and he had grown a small moustache and a paunch. He ran an ironworks in Navnagar, where a sweaty cadre of Tamils made enormous iron wheels for use in hand-loom mills, and fences and fittings, and all kinds of special-order items.

  So Sartaj took the right-hand turn, and called Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad as they walked, to tell him they would be delayed. The road had been recently tarred and maintained, and there was a constant traffic of cycles and scooters. The houses in this part of Navnagar were old and well-established, all of them had good water connections and electricity. Many of them were two and three stories tall, with shops and workshops on the ground floor fronting the street. A face floated above the staggered roofs, huge, luminous brown eyes that went and came from behind the parapets, larger than any of the windows, and there was a gleaming brow touched by blue light, half-open lips and swirling hair, all of it somehow completely weightless and paradisiacal. Sartaj knew that she was only a cunningly lit model on a vast billboard across the main road, but it was distracting to be watched so intently by her. He turned his eyes down and went on.

  Deva called for refreshments as soon as he saw them, and wouldn’t accept a refusal. A boy came around the corner with two Limcas, which Sartaj and Katekar drank standing near the door of the workshop, just outside it. There were no lights inside the workshop, just two livid streams of sunlight pouring through the roof, heating the glow of the molten iron as it slushed into the moulds and the faces of the nearly naked men who worked the bellows with their feet, stepping up high and then down in a slow and endless climb.

  ‘Haven’t remembered me for a long time, saab,’ said Deva.

  ‘The Tamils have been behaving themselves, Deva.’

  Deva roared. He leaned in through the doorway and shouted a translation to his workers. There was a quick winking of gleaming smiles among the sparks. It was possible to live in Navnagar and never speak anything but Tamil. A shouted answer came back over the blaring rush and banging of work. ‘He says,’ Deva said, ‘that we’re so well-behaved now that even the Rakshaks love us.’

  There had been a time when the Rakshaks had demonstrated son-of-the-soil Mumbai patriotism by hounding Tamil immigrants. Sartaj put his empty Limca bottle down, next to the door. ‘Sure. They’re chasing other people now.’ Muscular chauvinism still won votes, but you had to be canny in your selection of enemies. So now the Rakshaks protested about the Bangladeshi menace, and told ‘unpatriotic’ Indian Muslims to leave the country. Same game, different targets. Sartaj motioned Deva away from the door and its exhalations of heat, and they walked down the lane a little, stepping over a gutter. Katekar followed close behind.

  ‘You’re investigating that murder,’ Deva said. ‘The boy who was killed by his friends.’

  ‘Yes. Know anything about it?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know any of them.’

  ‘Ever heard of a social worker named Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad?’

  ‘Yes, yes. That bastard. He’s a sharp one.’

  ‘How sharp? What are his dhandas?’

  ‘His father is a local butcher. The son does mostly social work, I think. But he has a lot of cousins, these cousins have garages. Two around here, one somewhere in Bhandup. They are a well-settled family.’

  ‘And these garages, are they crooked or straight?’

  ‘Medium, saab. I hear they do business in second-hand parts.’ Deva had an extraordinary smile, he thrust his jaw forward and his eyes narrowed and a bank of sparkling teeth split his face in half. Second-hand parts could come from anywhere, from legitimate sources or some poor fool’s car. ‘One or two of these cousins have been in trouble. Never arrested, saab, but little things here and there.’

  ‘You know the names of these cousins?’

  ‘No. But let’s see.’ Deva led Sartaj and Katekar around the corner, to a bakery, a large tin-roofed hall with towering ovens at one end and ranks of men kneading dough. At the very far end, there was a small cubicle, almost filled by a portly owner. He gathered up his lungi and his bulging stomach and walked amongst his workers while Deva used his phone. Sartaj listened to the nasal southern rhythms, which reminded him as always of Mehmood and childhood laughter, and tried not to breathe too deeply. The smell of the fresh loaves of bread was good but overpowering, too rich, too dense in the stifling heat. Deva made two phone calls, and Sartaj knew he was tugging at his Tamil connections across Navnagar, strumming them and listening to what came back. The Tamils had once been the feared newcomers into the city, the ones denounced and hated by the Rakshaks as the threatening outsiders who supposedly stole jobs and land. Now they were old Mumbaikars.

  Deva sat back and settled into his chair. He held up his fingers in a little cone, and said, ‘Ready, saab? Write down.’

  He gave Sartaj five names, and their exact genealogies, how they were related to Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad, and estimations of his involvement in their work, both legitimate and otherwise. It was solid intelligence.

  ‘Good work, Deva,’ Sartaj said. Katekar nodded benevolently. Sartaj put two five-hundred-rupee notes on the desk next to Deva. They were old friends, but it was better in the long run that they conduct their business professionally. You could only do favours for each other for so long before resentment set in on both sides. Cash for information assured a future flow.

  Sartaj and Katekar left Deva and walked over towards the Bengali Bura. Sartaj looked over his shoulder as they came up the slope, and the endless mud-brown and white roofs of Navnagar made a vast serried crescent, horizon to horizon, under the falling sun. The tableau impressed Sartaj as always with its gory reddish gigantism and melodrama, with the pressing energy of its very being, it was incomprehensible that such a thing should exist, this Navnagar. And yet here it was, astride Sartaj and towering, crimson-mouthed and real. He turned away. He noticed now that Katekar was carrying a large paper bag full of fresh pavs, to eat with his family over the next few days. Much of what Katekar and everyone else ate came from or through Navnagar, and other nagars like it. Navnagar made clothes and plastic and paper and shoes, it was the engine that pumped the city into life.

  Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad was waiting near Shamsul Shah’s kholi, surrounded by a thick cluster of supplicants. His mobile phone glinted in his hand as he waved to Sartaj and Katekar. A woman tugged at his elbow, and he spoke to her in rapid Bengali, and extracted himself with many gestures of assurance.

  ‘Saab,’ he said. ‘Sorry, these people, once they get hold of me, they don’t let me go.’

  ‘You speak Bengali?’

  ‘A little, a little. Their Bengali has quite a lot of Urdu in it, you know.’

  ‘And what other languages do you speak?’

  ‘Gujarati, saab. Marathi, some Sindhi. You grow up in this Mumbai, you pick up a little of everything. I am trying to improve my English.’ He held up a copy of Filmfare. ‘I try to read one English magazine every day.’

  ‘Very impressive, Ahmad Saab.�
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  ‘Arre, sir, I am younger than you. Please call me Wasim. Please.’

  ‘All right, Wasim. Have you talked to Shamsul Shah’s family already?’

  ‘No, no, sir. I thought you would want to do that yourself. But one of these people said the father is not at home, he is working. The mother is here.’

  ‘Inside?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Keep these people away while I talk to her.’

  The dead boy had purchased a better home for his family, you could tell that just from the substantial frontage of the property on the lane. Sartaj knocked. Standing at the door, he could see four rooms, a separate kitchen and cupboards finished with Formica. The dead boy’s mother sent his sisters into the back rooms, and stood very straight and waited.

  ‘You are Moina Khatun?’ Sartaj said. ‘Shamsul Shah’s mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Moina Khatun’s daughters were kept in strict purdah, but her own regime had been relaxed a little by old age, at least while she stood in the doorway of her own house. Sartaj thought she looked to be about sixty, although her real age could have been at least a decade less. She wore a blue salwar-kameez and a white dupatta over her head.

  ‘This is a good kholi that your son got for you.’ Sartaj couldn’t tell if Moina Khatun’s inscrutability was a tactic or a trait. He couldn’t read her at all. ‘He was a good boy. How did he get mixed up with those other two?’

  She tipped her head to one side. She didn’t know.

  ‘Did you know this Bihari friend of theirs, this Reyaz Bhai?’

  Moina Khatun slowly moved her head again.

  There was a hush in the lane, and under that silence a vast chasm of loss. Sartaj felt like he had stumbled over an edge, and he didn’t quite know what to do next, where to press, or whether pressing was a good idea. Into this quiet, Katekar spoke.

  ‘It is against nature, that a son should die before his parents. It is impossible to accept. But He’ – and here Katekar pointed upwards – ‘gives and takes for his own reasons, he writes our destinies.’

  Moina Khatun began to weep. She dabbed at her eyes, and her shoulders rounded. ‘We must accept,’ she said hoarsely. ‘We must accept.’

  Katekar had his hands clasped in front of him, and he tilted forward slightly from the waist, completely solicitous and not in the least bit threatening. ‘Yes. How old was Shamsul?’

  ‘Only eighteen. Next month he would have been nineteen.’

  ‘He was a fine-looking boy. Did he want to get married soon?’

  ‘There were already proposals for him.’ Moina Khatun was animated now, brightened under her tears by the memory of past arguments. ‘But he said he wanted to get all his sisters married first. I told him, the youngest is nine, you will be an old man by the time she has her mala badol. But Shammu, he said, getting married too young is a stupid thing we do. Let me get settled first, have a nice house. What is the use of getting married and lying at your parents’ house, having fights between the wife and the mother-in-law? He wouldn’t listen to us. First them, then me, he always said.’

  ‘He was a good boy. He set up a good kholi for you.’

  ‘Yes. He worked very hard.’

  ‘Did you know what work your son was doing?’

  ‘He worked for that company, taking parcels.’

  ‘Yes. But he was doing some work with Bazil and Faraj also, no?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  Sartaj could see that Moina Khatun wasn’t trying to hide anything, she really didn’t know anything about her son’s dealings with the murderers. This made sense, there was no reason for the boy to talk to his mother about his criminal activities. But Katekar didn’t want to give up yet.

  ‘They were good friends, the three of them. They grew up together, in this basti?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did they fight?’

  ‘That Faraj was always jealous of my son. He didn’t have a job, he did no work. Even when they were young he was always fighting with Shammu.’ Her face flushed dark, and she shook her fist, and spoke Bengali. The angry stabbing gestures she was making slipped the dupatta from her head, her voice cracked and rose, and now she was shouting. Her grief cut across Sartaj’s throat, and he stepped back and looked for Wasim.

  ‘She is cursing Faraj and his family, saab,’ Wasim said. ‘She is saying they are devils. Just everything like that.’

  Moina Khatun’s face had dissolved from its angular rigidity into something that Sartaj found difficult to look at directly. He cleared his throat. ‘Nothing useful?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Wasim said.

  ‘All right. Let’s go.’

  He walked away. Katekar raised a hand at the woman, and followed. They were almost around a corner when she called after them in Hindi. ‘Don’t let them escape,’ she said. ‘Get them. Don’t leave them.’

  Sartaj looked back at her, and went on. The lane widened as they came near the main road, and he could feel Katekar behind him. Sartaj slowed, let Katekar catch up and gave him a nod. They came down to the main road, towards the Gypsy.

  ‘Wasim,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Yes, saab.’ Wasim scudded up beside them, unruffled and slick and brimming with sincerity.

  ‘Okay, listen to me, bastard,’ Sartaj said. ‘About this Birendra Prasad…’

  ‘Saab, truly, he will be no problem. Like I told you, the two sons make him the problem.’

  On their left there was a wall covered with painted advertisements for cement and face powder. Sartaj stepped up to it and unzipped his pants. ‘Listen, you said I was older than you. So let me give you a bit of advice. Don’t think you are smarter than the people you want to work with. Don’t hide things that they need to know.’ Sartaj’s stream spattered loudly against the bottom of the wall, and he only now realized how pent-up he had been. ‘Don’t surprise me. I don’t like surprises. I like information. If you know anything, tell me. Tell me even if you don’t think it’s important. More information is better than less information. Understood?’

  ‘Saab, really, I wasn’t trying to fool you.’

  ‘If you think I am a fool, then maybe I am the kind of fool who will have to look into certain businesses in this area, investigate certain people. Let me see, what were their names, your cousins? Salim Ahmad, Shakil Ahmad, Naseer Ali, Amir…’

  ‘Saab, I understand. It will not happen again.’

  ‘Good. Then maybe we can have a long relationship.’

  ‘Saab, this is exactly what I want. A lasting association.’

  Sartaj squeezed and shook, jogged his hips back, tucked and zipped. ‘You can play the politician elsewhere. Not with us.’

  ‘Of course, saab.’

  Sartaj reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, and turned, and Wasim was holding up his copy of Filmfare.

  ‘Please take, saab.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is good information inside this magazine, saab.’

  Wasim’s smile was very sly and small. Sartaj took the Filmfare and thumbed it open, and the pages fell apart naturally to a black-and-white picture of Dev Anand, partly hidden by a thin, paper-clipped stack of thousand-rupee notes, neatly staggered from right to left.

  ‘It’s just a small nazrana, saab. With hope for our future friendship.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Sartaj said. He rolled up the magazine and tucked it under his arm. ‘I’ve told Birendra Prasad to bring his sons to the station tomorrow. In case he doesn’t, keep track of the boys tomorrow, so we can get them if we need to.’

  ‘No problem, saab. And saab, if you could also mention my name to Majid Khan Saab, and give him my salaam…’

  ‘I will,’ Sartaj said. ‘But for four thousand rupees, don’t expect to become the honoured guest of the station. This is only chillar.’

  ‘No, no, saab. As I said, this is only a nazrana.’

  They left Wasim there, and Sartaj was satisfied now that the man truly understood t
he nature of their mutual dependence. In the Gypsy, he unrolled the Filmfare and peeled off one note and handed it to Katekar, who tucked it into his breast pocket. Sartaj would also give some to Majid. He was under no obligation to pass any money upward, small amounts like this – under a lakh – were the field officer’s prerequisite, and the senior inspectors and DCPs only shared if there was a respectable cake to cut. Still, he would give Majid the greetings from Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad and offer a thousand, which Majid would laugh off. They had known each other for a long time, and a thousand – or even four thousand – was really only pocket change.

  ‘Saab,’ Katekar said. ‘About this evening?’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ Katekar had asked for an evening off, to take his family for an outing. ‘Drive to Juhu now, I’ll drop you and go.’

  ‘Sir, there’s no need…’

  ‘It’s all right. Drive.’

  Sartaj felt a warm uprush of affection for stolid, dependable Katekar. Megha used to say that Katekar and he were like an old married couple, and maybe they were, but Katekar was still capable of springing surprises. Sartaj said, ‘I thought you didn’t like these Bangladeshis.’

  ‘I like Bangladeshis in Bangladesh.’

  ‘But that woman? Moina Khatun?’

  ‘She lost a son. It is very hard to lose a child. Even if he was a thief. What was that dialogue from Sholay? Hangal’s line? “The heaviest burden a man can carry on his shoulders is the arthi of his son.”’

  ‘Very true.’ And true to filmi logic, this particular Bengali son had committed robbery to marry off his poor sisters. They went over a flyover, over a clattering train with its late-afternoon crowds already swelling from the doorways. The dead boy had wanted more than marriage for his sisters, he had wanted a television set and a gas range and a pressure cooker and a larger house. No doubt he had dreamed of a brand-new car, one exactly like the brilliant silver Toyota Camry that was overtaking them now. What he had dreamed was not impossible, there were men like Ganesh Gaitonde and Suleiman Isa, who had begun with petty thefts and had gone on to own fleets of Opel Vectras and Honda Accords. And there were boys and girls who had come from dusty villages and now looked down at you from the hoardings, beautiful and unreal. It could happen. It did happen, and that’s why people kept trying. It did happen. That was the dream, the big dream of Bombay. ‘What was that song?’ Sartaj said. ‘You know, the one that Shah Rukh sings, I can’t remember the film. Bas khwab itna sa hai…’ Katekar nodded, and Sartaj knew that Katekar understood why he was asking, they had spent so much time together, on these drives across the city, that they followed each other’s leaps and conceits.