Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘So, Bhonsle Saab,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He put his teacup down and sat forward on his chair, very eager. ‘Bhai, first we need help with the campaigning. They intimidate our workers when they go out to canvass, only yesterday they pushed around some of our people and grabbed our posters from them. They took two hundred and fifty posters. Later we heard they made a bonfire out of them.’

  ‘And you Rakshaks are so helpless? I’ve never heard of you people needing to hire anyone. You have your own boys and your own weapons.’

  He heard my sneer, and didn’t like it. But he was still soft and polite. ‘Bhai, we aren’t scared of anyone. But I am very junior in our organization, this is my first election, and anyway this constituency is not considered that important. All the resources will go elsewhere. And I know those Congress and RPI bastards have brought in a lot of muscle. Even those Samajwadi fellows, I hear, are planning to strengthen up.’

  ‘All right. So?’

  ‘Once the campaigning stops, on the voting day, those are the crucial hours. We want to make sure that certain people don’t vote.’

  I laughed. ‘Okay. You want the election given to you.’

  He wasn’t embarrassed. He smiled, and said, ‘Yes, bhai.’

  ‘I thought you Rakshaks wanted to clean out corruption in the country.’

  ‘When the whole world is dirty, bhai, you have to get dirty to do any cleaning. We can’t fight their money without tricks. Once we are in power, it will all be different. We will change everything.’

  ‘Don’t forget me then. Don’t forget and clean me out with the general cleaning.’

  He held out both his hands towards me. ‘You, bhai? No, no, you’re our friend, one of us.’

  He meant that I was a Hindu, and a Maharashtrian. I didn’t care for any of those things, not where business was concerned, but he was reassured that I was Ganesh Gaitonde. I shook his hand, and said, ‘We’ll meet in a day or two. We’ll talk then about how much money will be needed.’

  ‘Bhai, money can be managed. Please take your time to think about it, and just tell us what your requirements are. I think we will need fifty, sixty boys.’ He stood up and folded his hands. ‘Let me know when to come.’

  After he was gone, I said to Paritosh Shah, ‘Level-headed chutiya.’

  ‘He’s a little mad, like all those Rakshaks.’

  Paritosh Shah believed fiercely in profit, and gain was his god, so anyone who let religion interfere in money-making was quite obviously crazy to him. The Rakshaks believed in a golden past, and blood and soil, and all such things, which made no sense to Paritosh Shah. I said, ‘Not so mad. He’s hiring us as much because he doesn’t want us to work for one of his opponents as he is hiring us for our help.’

  ‘That is true. I didn’t say he was stupid. These Marathas are mad but cunning. You know that.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I said. ‘From Bombay?’

  ‘I was born here. My great-grandfather came here from Ahmedabad, we still have relatives there.’ He was puzzled. We had known each other for many years but I had never asked these questions. But now since I had asked, he did also. ‘And you?’ he said. ‘Where are you from?’

  I waved my arm over my shoulder. ‘Somewhere.’ I stood up. ‘How much do we charge them for an election?’ And so we talked about money. It seemed to me that to give somebody an election was to make them a raja, or at least a minor nawab, and so our help was worth a lot. But it seemed that this business of giving and taking elections was an old-established one, and there were already set rates, not princely ones. Twenty-five thousand to each boy, maybe fifty for the controllers. So for only twenty-five, thirty lakhs to us, Bipin Bhonsle would become a member of the Assembly. ‘You can buy democracy for that much?’ I said to Paritosh Shah.

  ‘Now you want to become a politician yourself.’

  ‘Not even if they were giving away seats.’

  ‘Why?’ He was smiling indulgently.

  I shrugged. I had a congestion in my throat, a swelling of memory and anger, and I didn’t trust myself to speak. So I spat out of the window, dismissed the whole filthy business of it, the lying posters and the whorish speeches and the pretended humility, and he knew me well enough not to ask more. Anyway, he was happy to talk about business.

  After he left I turned to my English books. I was teaching myself, with children’s books and the newspapers and a dictionary. Only Chotta Badriya knew, because he had bought me the books and the dictionary. I closed my door when I studied English because I didn’t want anyone seeing me squatting on the floor, one uncertain and slow finger on the letters, which I had to laboriously knock together with moving lips until they adhered into a word: ‘p-a-r-l-i-a-m-e-n-t…parliament’. It was humiliating, but necessary. I knew that much of the real business of the country was done in English. People like me, my boys, we used English, there were certain words we used with fluency in our sentences, without hesitation. ‘Bole to voh edkum danger aadmi hai!’ and ‘Yaar, abhi ek matter ko settle karna hai,’ and ‘Us side se wire de, chutiya’. But unless you could rattle off whole sentences without having to stop and struggle and go back and build them bit by bitter bit, unless you could make jokes, there were whole parts of your own life that were invisible to you yourself, gone from you. You could live in a Marathi world, or a Hindi colony, or a Tamil lane, but what were those hoardings speaking, those towering messages that threw their sharp-edged shadows over your home? When you bought an expensive new shampoo ‘Made with American Knowhow’, what was that it said in red on the label? What were they laughing about, the people who skimmed by smoothly in their cushiony Pajeros? There were many like me, born far from English, who were content to live in ignorance. Most were too lazy, too afraid to ask how, why, what. But I had to know. So I took English, I wrestled with it and made it give itself to me, piece by piece. It was difficult, but I was persistent.

  At four in the afternoon I closed my books and lay myself down on the floor and took a nap. I had a good bed, soft pillows, but of late I had been sleeping badly at night. An uncontrollable twitching in my limbs woke me as soon as I settled into slumber. I sometimes managed an hour in the afternoon, but today I thrashed about, full of plans, angles for the future, thoughts of expansion, suspicions about this man and sudden insights into that one. I ruled my corner of the island but couldn’t still my mind. The cool pressure of the floor seemed to help, its rigid discomfort drew me to the surface of my skin and kept me there, in a hazy doze. When a boy knocked on the door at five, I jerked up with my heart squeezing hard. I washed my face, took deep breaths and then we went out. Once a day, at different times but always once a day, I took my boys and walked through my area. We took different routes, I wasn’t stupid, but I wanted to show myself, to be seen. I won’t tell you that there was no fear in me, but I had learnt to bury it, to layer it over with thick sheets of indifference. Ever since that bullet had hurled into me, I knew how real death was. I had no illusions. I had seen that a woman can be alive one day, eating mutton and sneering and joking and thrusting out her chest, her eyes humming with laughter and hunger, and then the next day can find her unconscious in a hospital bed, her mouth open and gasping. I knew I was going to die, I was going to be killed. There was no escape for me. I had no future, no life, no retirement, no easy old age. To imagine any of that was cowardice. A bullet would find me first. But I would live like a king. I would fight this life, this bitch that sentences us to death, and I would eat her up, consume her every minute of every day. So I walked my streets like a lord of mankind, flanked by my boys.

  And so I maintained my grip, my reign. Fear was part of it, the fear the shopkeepers felt when they looked at me, the fear in the eyes of women who stepped back into doorways to let us pass. But that was not all, not at all. There is of course an excitement in the exercise of power, but there is also a safety in the bending to it. I tell you this is true. I felt it when they gave me chicken tikka and bhakri, and asked me if
I wanted a cold drink or tea, I knew it in the widening pools of their pupils when they dragged out their best chair for me and dusted it with their pallus. The truth is that human beings like to be ruled. They will talk and talk about freedom, but they are afraid of it. Overpowered by me, they were safe, and happy. Fear of me taught them where they could live, it made them a fence, inside which was home. And I was good to them. I was fair, and didn’t ask for so much money that it would hurt, and I taught my boys restraint, and above all I was generous. A factory worker had his leg broken under a tipping loader, and I supported his family for six months; a grandmother needed an operation to widen her veins and save her heart, and I gave her life, a chance to play with her children’s children. ‘Ganesh Bhai,’ said a printer to me one afternoon, ‘let me make a first-class business card for you.’ But I didn’t need any card. My name was known in my raj, and there were many who blessed it.

  That evening, after my conversation with Bipin Bhonsle and my walk, I went to Paritosh Shah’s house. His eldest daughter, first of four, was to be married in seven days. The house was sparkling already, three storeys of cascading lights, red and green and blue, blinking happily. It was a big house, finished only a year ago by him and his two brothers, and they lived in it all together, wives and cousins and countless visiting mamas and kakas, a whirling Gujarati chakkar. Dandia raas before weddings was definitely out of style, but for all his business innovation, Paritosh Shah was a firm traditionalist. So there were excited eddies of young girls in the courtyard, swirls of heady silk. They were waiting for me to start the dancing, and once I was seated in an armchair, all the men and women fell into four circles, the children in the inner two, and the singer raised a declamatory hand and began, ‘Radha game ke game Mira’, and the circles whirled slowly, and then faster, and the steady clap-clap of hands echoed out the happy beat. When they brought out the sticks for dandia I stood up and asked for a pair. They laughed to see me tripping clumsily, unable to keep time inside the circles moving against each other, unable to find the clicking rhythm. I think at first this was equally the fault of the other dancers, especially the men, who were afraid to be dancing with me, stripped of their grace by my presence. They hesitated to knock their dandias against mine, they were scared of putting in too much force, they shrank from my strokes. But when they saw how I laughed at myself, and when my boys, who were leaning against the pillars, shook their heads and smiled, everyone relaxed, and the disco-dandia song tumbled on gleefully, and I found my hips loosening, and my shoulders were easy, and I was flowing, falling into step without effort, and the dandia rose and fell, a flourish here and click, another swing and click, a round face spinning to me and click, and I was dancing.

  At home Chotta Badriya had a woman waiting for me. I was happy from the dancing, humming away and doing a step here, another one there. But she brought me down. There’s nothing more depressing than a depressed randi. She was nicely plump and with a little round nose, and nineteen, but she lay there with a swollen batata-wada face, and I tried to liven her up with a few nips and pinches and squeezes, but she winced and set her jaw, so I took her by the hair and threw her out. Then I drank some milk, lay on my side wrapped around a pillow and tried for sleep, but it larked away from me and my head was full of the dandia and Paritosh Shah and the lights skidding down the side of his house and up again, and I turned to the other side, and now I thought of the men I had killed. I stood them in a row and compared them for character and strength and I decided I was better than any of them, and then I made plans to have the approaches to my house checked and tested, and to put more boys in place at the head of the lanes, just in case. It was late now, very late, and for the first time in many months, I used my hand on myself, and all the women I had known came and slid over me and also Rati Agnihotri with her malai skin. After I was finished I turned again, back to the other side, settled down into comfort and took regular, deep breaths. But finally I threw off the covers and cursed and reached for the clock. Three forty-five. I would have drunk then, anything, a bottleful of whisky or rum, but there was nothing in the house, and I would have got the boys to bring some, but the thought of what they would think and not say made me ashamed, and I lay on my back and decided to see it through. I would get up from bed at six and have an early day. I watched the fan gleam in its flight and then suddenly I was waking up and it was bright day, and I could hear the street fully alive outside. Noon. I had slept for six hours, maybe seven, but I was tired.

  My exhaustion deepened as the days passed, as we fought the elections. My boys went out with the Rakshaks, and we pushed their campaign into every nook, their posters harangued the voters from every surface for miles. Two of my boys, armed with pistols, with a group of Rakshaks was enough to keep the peace and let them do their work calmly, no bhangad. A reputation for ruthlessness can do wonders for peace. For us, it was easy money. Meanwhile, it was almost time for the wedding. Even before the ceremony I went to Paritosh Shah’s house for the mehndi party, and I could see that he appreciated it, that I was so much a part of his joys and sorrows. Even in the midst of the thousand things he had to do, food and gifts and hotel arrangements for the groom’s relatives, he noticed my wobbliness, how I was holding on to wakefulness with effort. ‘Your doshas are out of balance,’ he said. ‘I’ll set up an appointment for you with my Ayurvedic man.’

  ‘I won’t put myself in that bastard’s clutches,’ I said. ‘It’s just insomnia. It’ll pass.’

  ‘Nothing is just anything. The body is speaking to you. But you won’t listen.’

  Then he had to go and sit with the women, and the jewellers. There was some question of how many tolas of gold were to be used in the wide necklaces and bracelets and earrings for the dowry, how much payment for the making. I watched him step delicately down the steps to the courtyard and wondered what his body was speaking. How did one read those sheets of fat that surged and billowed on his frame? I rubbed my eyes. He had been good to me. He had never lied to me about money, he had never pretended to lay aside his self-interest, he had backed me as far as possible, to the risk of his life and then a little further, and he had shown me how in this world one thing connects to the next, where business comes together with politics and bhaigiri, how one must live. In this way we had been friends. He was a good man as far as he could be, he had grown fat with hard work, and so his bulk was his virtue. That was why his fat was light on him.

  The whole house was fragrant from the cooking. I was hungry, but very tired, and eating would tire me more, I knew this. But to leave without eating would be an insult, so I took a thali and touched some food, and then pushed myself to my feet, and waved up the boys, and told Paritosh Shah to take care of his guests while he tried to see me to the door, and after a little argument, finally off we went. I was looking for my shoes in the great sprawl of footwear near the front door when Dipika came to me. Dipika was Paritosh Shah’s second-oldest daughter, a serious-faced, quiet one with big-big eyes. She held out a thali piled with puris, and a glass, and said, ‘But you haven’t had any ras, Ganesh Bhai.’ I had, but I was willing to take another puri from her, polite as she was. As I reached out she whispered, with her head still down, ‘Can I please talk to you, Ganesh Bhai?’ On the edge of the thali her thumbs were white.

  So I took her, thali and glass and all, outside to the car and we talked. ‘They’re already talking about my marriage,’ she said bitterly. ‘And my sister’s not married yet.’

  ‘They’re your parents,’ I said. ‘Of course they will. And you’ll be happy, it’s a good thing.’ I knew that she was going to college, and I thought that she must have some modern-girl fashionable objection to marriage, some idea of job and career, all got from some silly magazine, so I started lecturing her on her duty, what real life was. She shifted about restlessly, rustling her red and green ghagra and gold chunni.

  ‘But, Ganesh Bhai,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t do but-this-and-that,’ I said. ‘Your parents are right.’
r />   ‘But, Ganesh Bhai,’ she said, with a little wail to her voice, ‘I want to get married.’

  And right then, from the small, painful furrowings on her smooth forehead, I knew this was going to be a lot more trouble than just girlish fantasies about a career. ‘What?’ I said. ‘You have someone in mind?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you meet him? In college?’

  She shook her head. ‘NN College is all girls. His sister is my friend. She goes to NN.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  At least she still had the grace to be shy. Two tries, and a lot of blushing, and she got it out. ‘Prashant.’

  ‘What’s the trouble? He’s not Gujarati?’

  ‘No, Ganesh Bhai.’

  ‘What then? Maratha?’

  A rapid shake of the head, and now she had her frantic grip on the thali again.

  ‘Then what?’

  She had her face almost in the thali now. ‘Dalit,’ she said. ‘And he’s poor.’

  Her problem was gigantic, as elephantine as her father. I had always found the Gujaratis to be more advanced, more tolerant than other communities, but this would strain her father’s understanding. He would do business with anyone, but marriage was another matter. He had sent her to college, but not for this, not to marry some gaandu who was not only a Dalit but a poor Dalit. Maybe a very rich Dalit could have been approved, but I could hear Paritosh Shah saying it already, ‘This is the family you want to marry us into?’ Her mother and aunts would be harsher, more violent in their disapproval. Young Dipika had set herself to a hard battle. ‘Why do you want to do this to your family?’ I said. ‘This is not some film. Your father will have this Prashant of yours torn to pieces.’

  She looked directly at me then, and her back straightened, and her neck was graceful in its anger. ‘I know it’s not a film,’ she said. ‘I’ll die, Ganesh Bhai. If anything happens to him, I’ll kill myself.’