Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  We sped over to Paritosh Shah’s. I would rather have gone slowly, I still had no plan, no tactics of persuasion worked out. But I couldn’t say it to Chotta Badriya, go slow, don’t go, never go, because I am helpless. I was, after all, Ganesh Gaitonde. I had taken the role, now I had to play the part. So hero-like I got out of the car, walked to Paritosh Shah’s door, which was auspicious still with flowers and vines, and into the house. By the time I was barefoot in the courtyard I had lost all my swagger and style. I entered Paritosh Shah’s office quite humbly.

  He was on the phone, in one of his interminable dealings, arranging for money to go from here to there, breeding the currency notes with each other as they swept past him, and keeping one subtle, careful hand in the stream. Money leapt to him, and he delighted in its antics. He started to put a hand over the mouthpiece, and I waved him on. Talk, talk, I signed at him, my hands at my mouth, and I sat down and watched him. Behind him there was a gold-framed painting of Krishna with his flute. The top of Paritosh Shah’s desk was gold, and he had five phones on it. The walls were a darker gold. I looked at Krishna, at his easy, turning stance and his slanty smile, and I hated him. You are arrogant, god. I changed seats, but Krishna’s eyes followed me. I couldn’t get away from him.

  Paritosh Shah put his phone down, all bright from the thrill of money. ‘Namaskar, my friend,’ he said. He rubbed his hands together and rocked back in his chair and looked happy with the world. And Krishna smiled at me from above his shoulder.

  Paritosh Shah had remembered by now our conversation from the day before. ‘So, bhai,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter? What can I do for you?’

  In that moment I realized what Krishna was smiling at. I realized the limits of my power. And I told Paritosh Shah everything I knew and had found out about Dipika and her lover, that his name was Prashant Haralkar, that his father used to work for the sanitation department, that the mother had taken the children and left this alcoholic father twenty years ago. And also that Prashant Haralkar had been a dedicated student, that he had studied by the light of streetlamps and had gone to night college, that he now had a permanent job with the BMC, and that he now lived in a small but good-enough house in Chembur and supported his mother and younger sisters.

  Paritosh Shah covered his face with both of his hands.

  I walked around the corner of the desk, and sat on the couch close to him. I put my hand on his knee, patted clumsily. He flinched away from my touch. ‘Who will marry my children?’ he sobbed through his fingers.

  I had no answer. I had promised Dipika happiness, but what about Paritosh Shah’s two other daughters and two sons, what were they to do? I could win elections, I could move men up the steep ladders of success and kill them in the next moment, I could burn down houses, seize land, bring half the city to a standstill with an arbitrary proclamation of a bandh, if that was my pleasure. But who would fight the rows of meek matrons who had sat primly, heads covered, at the wedding of Paritosh Shah’s daughter? Who would push their portly husbands into enlightenment? Paritosh Shah’s natevaik would declare themselves busy in response to his invitations, they would forget to ask him to their functions, and their sons and daughters would be engaged and married elsewhere, no matter how much money he had or how close he was to me. And he would feel shame every time he saw some acquaintance, each time he walked in the street. Sitting next to Paritosh Shah, abased by his tears and unable to look at him, I knew how helpless I was. I would have beaten all his relatives, thrashed each of them with my shoes, broken all their smug, snug heads open to the modern air, if only that would have made any difference. But custom floats between men and women, it hides in the stomachs of children and escapes and expands and vanishes in every breath, you cannot kill it, you cannot hold it, you can only suffer it.

  ‘Have you met that bastard maderchod?’ Paritosh Shah asked. He was angry now.

  ‘No, I haven’t. Listen, I didn’t come to you for him. He matters less than an ant to me. But Dipika asked me.’

  ‘Kill him,’ he said. ‘Just kill him.’

  ‘Easily done,’ I said. ‘I’ll give the order now. In an hour he’ll be gone, no part of his body will ever be found, not one fingernail. But then what? He’ll be gone and so she will be able to love him the rest of her life. And also hate you for the rest of her life.’

  ‘She is young. This is foolishness. She will cry for a week and then she will forget him.’

  ‘Is that how much you know your daughter?’ His cheeks were burnished wet, and his jaw clenched and opened and shut, sending little rushes of torment up into his eyes and forehead. ‘She told me she would kill herself, and I believed her. Do you understand? I believed her. You’ll find her dead.’

  ‘Then what?’

  He was walking in small circles now. ‘Let her marry him,’ I said. ‘Marry them quietly and send them away. Settle them in Madras, in Calcutta. Amsterdam, if you want.’

  ‘That won’t change anything,’ he said. ‘Everybody will still know. If she suddenly goes, disappears, they’ll ask questions, they’ll make up stories. Everybody always knows. You can’t keep something like that a secret for ever. I am a well-known man.’ That he was. ‘Bhai,’ he said, ‘what do we do, bhai?’

  ‘You won’t marry her to this fellow?’

  ‘No. I can’t. You know that.’

  So here we were. He was trapped, and I could do nothing. ‘Marry her today to someone else,’ I said. ‘Marry her this hour. Find a boy and get a pandit and marry her off now. Then send them away. Somewhere. Maybe she won’t kill herself. Maybe she will, but maybe she won’t.’

  He was panting. ‘Yes,’ he said, and picked up the phone.

  I left by the back door to the house. I had betrayed Dipika, and I could not face her. They married her that afternoon, to a boy who was flown down from Ahmedabad. Dipika and her husband went by the next morning’s flight back to Ahmedabad. The in-laws told Paritosh Shah that after a few days of gloom, she seemed to have adjusted, she began to smile and laugh. Paritosh Shah was satisfied that the reality of the marriage had already erased the silly illusion of romance. The boy’s parents told him, over the phone, that Dipika was talking a lot to the younger girls in the family, and had been to the cinema twice with her husband and her devars and their wives. So, two months later, Dipika and her husband were sent on their honeymoon to Switzerland. On the fifth night of the honeymoon, in Bern, she left the hotel suite while the husband was sleeping. She walked out of the lobby, and out of the gates and on to the road beyond. She was hit by a car that came fast around a curve. The driver said later that she was walking in the exact middle of the road, on the painted dividing lines, and he never had a chance to swerve, he didn’t even know what he had hit until he came to a halt and reversed. Dipika was killed instantly. The husband said she had seemed happy, that their relations were joyous, as between any new husband and wife. In the Swiss records they put it down as an accident.

  Three months after Dipika’s death, I was watching one of Bipin Bhonsle’s American movies when Paritosh Shah came to me. I had been awake all night, so excruciatingly awake that I could hear the creaking of the settling joists, the click of a passing dog’s toes on the concrete outside. I watched the red second-hand of my bedside clock scything smoothly around its eternal circle, and I felt it tearing at something inside my head. So I popped in one of Bipin Bhonsle’s tapes, switched on the television and pressed buttons on the control, and where there had been black fuzz a lion appeared, stretching its mouth in a yellow-toothed yawn. I watched, and the first time I understood very little. But I used the rewind button, and by morning I understood the story, who wanted what, what was standing in the way, and who must be killed. It was a good story, but it was the words that were the pleasure for me. I ran one scene back and forth, and the hero raced backwards under fine white lines, jerky and clown-quick, and his mouth twisted, and sounds came out glistening with his anger, and I ran it back, and forward, and back, and the syllables fell on my ear
s like pattering drops, and suddenly they fell together and the sense came to me, he was asking, ‘Where did he go?’ He had his pistol ready and was asking, ‘Where did he go?’ And in that moment there was a humming joy in every part of me. ‘There,’ I shouted in English at the hero. ‘He went there.’

  When that film was over, I put in another one, and learned. Paritosh Shah came at nine o’clock, and sat on the bed and watched with me, watched another hero and his men move down a jungle river with water to their chests, their faces blackened. ‘These are commandos,’ I said. ‘Their country’s secret missile has been stolen by one bastard. So they are going to get it back from his jungle den.’

  Paritosh Shah smiled. ‘A jungle den? It would be expensive to supply and maintain. That’s what I always wonder about. How do they get the oil and atta and onions to it, for so many henchmen?’

  I switched off the tape. ‘You’re just too much of a bania,’ I said, ‘to appreciate a good story.’

  ‘I just don’t understand these foreign films.’

  ‘I can see that. Everything all right at home?’

  After Dipika’s death, his wife had taken to bed with palpitations of the heart. She was still weak, and given to fits of crying. ‘We are going along,’ he said. ‘And you? Did you sleep?’

  He knew that I lay awake at night, that I watched television in the grey hours of the morning, that I fell fitfully asleep in the car on journeys. I shook my head. ‘I’ll take a pill tonight.’

  He made a sweeping motion in the air between us, like a man wiping a window clean. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘About sleeping pills? Your ved-maharaj has some new recipes?’ I had tried his Dhanwantri’s pills, had got indigestion and gas and no sleep, and had gone back to the allopathic doctor for his strongest medicines.

  ‘No. Not that,’ he said, very serious. ‘Listen, bhai, I think you should get married.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Look at you. You’re not happy. You can’t sleep. You’re distracted, you do this and that, nothing works. You’re restless. A man needs to settle down. You have everything now, you need to become a grahastha, start a family, everything has a place and time.’

  ‘Marriage doesn’t bring happiness to all of us.’

  ‘You mean Dipika. Bhai, she was my daughter. It wasn’t the marriage that was wrong, it was the other thing. Once she had gone past all boundaries, where was the chance for happiness? But you need to get married. All the scriptures say a life has its stages. First you are a student, then you are a householder. But you, you live like you’ve given up the world already. Look at this.’ He meant the room, the bare walls, the white sheets, the crusted thali from dinner on the floor. ‘Chotta Badriya and the boys are all very well, but they can’t be your life. You need a woman, she will make a home for you.’

  ‘Who will marry me, Paritosh Bhai? Which respectable girl?’

  ‘You worry too much, bhai,’ he said. ‘We have money. Everything is possible.’

  Everything is possible. Yes, he and I had created possibilities, we had snatched dreams out of the air and snapped them into solidity. Everything was possible. And yet Kanta Bai and Dipika had died. Looking at Paritosh Shah, I was reminded of the smile of the god above his shoulder, the blue conjuror who had regarded me with his sleepy eyes. He had had a family too, many families. Now he was trying to trap me into one. Yes, I now knew that certain things were impossible, even for me, and it was true that money made marriages possible. Most of our boys had chavvis, and some of these chavvis became wives. Sometimes the parents objected, made a fuss about the boy’s profession, but always finally agreed. After all, the boy was earning, and earning good money. ‘Yes,’ I said sourly. ‘Money can bring a bride. At least it can do that.’

  ‘Do you have somebody to love-marry?’ Paritosh Shah said with the satisfaction of a player moving rapidly towards checkmate.

  ‘No.’ I had women aplenty, bar-girls, whores, would-be actresses. Certainly no one to marry.

  ‘Then don’t refuse me, bhai,’ he said. ‘You came to me that day and asked me for something. And I couldn’t give you what you wanted. But don’t say no to me today. I am asking you for something. Say yes, bhai.’

  I knew in that moment that we are trapped for ever in the connections that wrap us from head to foot and bind us to each other, as invisible as gravity but as powerful. From this net there is no escape. I had come to this city alone, to be alone, but my solitude was illusion, a story I had told myself to convince myself of my strength. I had found a family, a family had found me. This Paritosh Shah was my friend, and he was my family. All the rest of them, Chotta Badriya and Kanta Bai and my boys, they were my family. I was a part of this family, and they wanted me married. I couldn’t fight them. I was defeated. I nodded. I said, ‘All right. I’ll do what you want.’

  While we looked for a girl we fell into a war. Paritosh Shah wanted my janampatri, he wanted to know about my parents and my gotra and my village. ‘Only by knowing a man’s past,’ he said, ‘can you settle his future.’ And I said, ‘Forget all that. I have none of that, I have money. Past is passed. Future is future, so make it for me.’ I believed then that a man can become anything he wants. I wanted it to be true: no past, any future. But Paritosh Shah, that fat bastard, that slippery Gujarati schemer, that faithful friend of mine, he looked at me as if I was crazy, and then dreamed a past for me. He ordered up a janampatri, a long roll which unfurled across the room, sprinkled with stars and secret hatchings and vermilion Sanskrit and all good things. ‘But not too perfect,’ he said. ‘Otherwise no Papa will believe it.’ So, according to Paritosh Shah, there had been bad times in my early youth, poverty and danger and near-death because of a rising Shani, but I had overcome these malign inevitabilities, I had faced down fate itself through the strength of my will and my single-hearted devotion to Krishna-maharaj, I had turned destiny through the energies of my uncountable devotions. This too he invented, all this, my God-fearing daily poojas, my temple-building, my love of Krishna. ‘It is good publicity, bhai,’ he said. ‘So give up your godless ways, nobody likes that stuff. People will think you are a communist, and anyway your children will need a good, God-fearing household.’ His special-order janampatri predicted many sons for me, and a daughter or two, and a long life of rising power and stability and eminence. Only one or two periods of illness were foreseen, like beauty-marks on a perfect face, and even these were easily surmounted through wearing of the right stones. Paritosh Shah rolled up the scroll with quick, practised little twirls of forefingers and thumb, his underarms jiggling, and smiled at me. ‘You are a very eligible boy. You’ll get a queue of candidates, you wait.’

  I had my doubts. We might have moved the planets to shine a golden light on my future, but the fact remained that men had died at my hands. The newspapers called me ‘Ganglord Gaitonde’. I was hated and feared. I knew this. And yet, the photographs came in. The Papas sent in pictures of their daughters, through intermediaries and marriage-brokers. Paritosh Shah spread a sheaf of them on his golden desk, like a pack of playing cards. ‘Choose,’ he said.

  I picked up the first one. She was sitting in front of a red backdrop, wearing a silky green sari with a gold dupatta, with her sleek hair pulled tightly back from a long forehead. ‘This one looks like a schoolteacher,’ I said.

  ‘So don’t choose that one. Make a shortlist. Then we’ll consider family background, education, nature of girl, horoscope, and move on from there.’

  ‘Move on?’

  ‘See the girls, of course.’

  ‘We’ll go to her house? And she’ll bring in tea while her parents watch?’

  ‘Yes, of course. What else?’

  I flicked the picture back on to the table, where it slid smoothly into the rest. ‘This is completely mad,’ I said.

  ‘What, marriage is mad? Bhai, the world does it. Prime ministers do it. Gods do it. I mean, what else are you going to do with your life? What else is a man born
for?’

  What is a man born for? I had no answer to this, and so I took the photos back home and laid them out on the floor of my room in rows of ten. They shivered in the draught from the air-conditioner, these faces patted smooth with powder, softly gleaming with hope. It was April, and without the blast of frigid air, even with the fan on ‘Full’, I sweated into my mattress, left damp stains on chairs. My blood was hot, and needed wintry air, more cold than this city could ever exhale. Outside, under the sun, my trousers stuck to my thighs and drove me into rages of restlessness, my shoes left red rings around my ankles. In these moods I was capable of rash anger and carelessness, so the boys had special power cables laid, and they knocked a new window into my bedroom wall for the machine, and so I was cooled. I was now comfortable and calm, and yet those faces on the floor were all the same to me, each was as good or bad as the next one. They were pretty enough, not phatakdi beautiful –who would want that in a wife? – but pleasant and welcoming and shy. They were sufficiently educated, well-cultured, no doubt each knew cooking and embroidery, they were all qualified, so why pick this one, and not that one? I waited for a sign from one of them, a wink of the eye as they fluttered in the chill blast. And there I was, Ganesh Gaitonde, leader of my own company, master of thousands of lives, death-giver and generous benefactor, completely and wholly unable to make a decision.

  ‘Bhai, there’s trouble.’ Chotta Badriya was knocking urgently at the door. I called him in and he said it again. ‘Very big trouble.’