Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  And then I was sitting on a bed, a bed strewn with rose petals. A song played somewhere, a flute threaded through it. On a corner of the bed there was a huddled red tent of a sari, holding within it a trembling, skinny body. My wife. I was married. My head was floaty, as if I had just woken from a long dream. I asked: how did this happen? There was no answer.

  Old Pain

  Mary Mascarenas was ready to talk. Sartaj waited for her, alone, across the road from the Pali Hill parlour in which she worked. The road down the slope was alive with expensively dressed teenagers, boys careening through in sleek cars bought by their rich fathers, girls in swirling groups of three and four. Sartaj was waiting next to a cigarette stall, near a row of servants and drivers having their evening smoke and gossip. He had called Mary that morning, told her gently that he would like to speak to her. After work, she had said, and there had been no more anger in her voice, just resignation. So Sartaj was confident that he would get good information: she would need to explain now, to herself, what had happened, and why. He had come a little early, and now the drivers were talking about stock prices and the fortunes of companies. Drivers knew more than anybody else, they listened in on Saab and Memsaab’s conversations in the car, they knew their movements, they carried documents and cash. Sartaj watched the flirtations between the boys and girls, and tried to keep an ear on the stock conversation, for Katekar’s sake. Katekar didn’t gamble, but he insisted that the market was logical, you only had to know the rules. If you could feel the rhythms, you could be king. All you needed was information and education. So Sartaj listened, but the drivers knew more than him, and he could make no sense of their lively arguments. Their very glossy memsaabs came out from the salon, and the little flock of drivers contracted and expanded, but their banter never flagged. They smoked cigarettes and ate from little packets of channa. They were well-paid, these drivers, and smartly turned-out, in keeping with the status of their employers.

  It was past seven when Mary came through the blue glass door of the salon. She was wearing a black T-shirt, a slim black skirt to the knee and black flats. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and Sartaj was suddenly struck by her elegance. She was all quietness, and if you stood her in a row next to these teenage queens strutting past her, you wouldn’t notice her. Not unless you were looking for that straight back, that symmetry of the shoulders with both hands on a black purse. She saw him, and he raised a hand.

  He walked over to her side of the road, to the gleam of expensive shops, Gurlz, Expressions, Emotions. ‘I’m late, sorry,’ Mary said. ‘There is some big party at the Taj tonight. I had three extra appointments.’

  ‘Taj party definitely needs extra-fancy hair.’

  ‘I have never been, so I don’t know. But I can do the hair.’

  Her Hindi was accented, functional and fluid, but improvised, it stumbled confidently past feminine possessives and tenses. Sartaj was sure her English was better, but his own English had rusted into awkwardness. They would get by in some knocked-together mixture, some Bombay blend. We’re all right in these khichdi tongues, he thought. ‘My car is over there,’ he said. On the phone she hadn’t wanted him coming to her place of work, and he had reassured her that he wouldn’t be in uniform, he wouldn’t be driving a police jeep, that he would be alone. He reversed out into the road as the drivers watched, and then waited for Mary to get in. ‘We’ll go down to Carter Road,’ he said, and she nodded. She wouldn’t want her neighbours wondering either, about visits from policemen, or strange Sikhs.

  He found a curve far down on the sea-wall, a gravelly shoulder a little less occupied by hawkers and strolling lovers and beggars. ‘That ship’s gone completely,’ he said. ‘Not even a little bit left. What was it called?’

  There had been a foreign freighter that had been forced aground with a dead engine by a monsoon storm. It had become something of a tourist attraction for a while, its hull far up out of the water. Very late one night, Sartaj had sat on a bench facing the ship and kissed Megha. They had separated not long after.

  ‘It was the Zhen Don,’ Mary said. ‘They cut it up for scrap. It’s been gone for years.’

  ‘I thought they were going to turn it into an offshore hotel.’

  ‘It was worth more as scrap.’ The sky was the same indeterminate grey it had been for two days, and under it were the vague shapes of foreign ships, skimming the horizon. Mary turned her head towards Sartaj. ‘I read in the papers you were supposed to have a policewoman present when you interrogated a woman.’

  ‘I’m not interrogating,’ Sartaj said. ‘You’re not a suspect. Nobody is a suspect. I’m just trying to understand what happened, why your sister was there. And I didn’t think you would want to talk in front of more people. This is just a sort of private conversation. What you tell me remains with me.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to tell you.’

  ‘You don’t have anything to say about your sister?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for a long time. Not talked to her for, for years.’

  ‘Why? You had a fight?’

  ‘We had a fight.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Why do you need to know?’

  ‘It might show me what sort of woman she was.’

  ‘Which will show you how she got to that place?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘She was not a bad woman.’

  She was anxious, squeezed up as far from him as she could get on the grimy blue seat. Looking at her little black bag, which she had placed between them, Sartaj realized that she was afraid of him, of the parking on the sea-wall, of what she thought he might demand of her. That’s why she had asked about the policewoman. He was used to people being afraid of his uniform, but the idea that this woman thought that he might assault her sickened him. He fumbled for the ignition, and changed gears with a metallic scraping. He drove fast down the road and stopped near the thick of the evening walkers, right next to a boisterous group of teenagers eating ice-cream. Mary was watching him wide-eyed.

  ‘I need some narial-pani,’ he said. ‘And understand, I’m not going to harm you. I just want to talk to you. Clear?’

  She nodded, and watched him intently as he beckoned to a hawker and paid for two coconuts. She held hers in both hands and drank from it in great thirsty gulps until it was finished. Sartaj held out his. ‘Want more?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and she was relieved, not quite easy yet but not cringing away from him any more.

  Sartaj sipped at his narial, and watched her, and waited.

  ‘My sister was fifteen when she first came to Bombay,’ Mary said. She was looking out of her window, towards the slow rumbling of the sea. ‘I lived in Colaba with my husband. She came to stay with us. We grew up on my mother’s farm outside Mangalore. Our father died when I was eleven. I got married, moved to Bombay. So Jojo came to stay with John and me. She was young, but she said she wanted to be a nurse, and the school in our village was just a village school. She had passed her tenth exams, first class. She wanted to learn English and be a nurse. We had only a tiny place, but she slept on the sofa, and after all, she was my little sister. She was so small and thin, in those days. She used to wear three little ponytails. I thought she was watching too much television, I told John that. She used to sit in front of it, cross-legged, all day and night. But he said it was good for her, she needed to learn English and Hindi. He used to tease her and make her laugh, telling her that she knew only the jingles, Vico-Vajradanti! He said she could only talk about teeth and hair. But she was very intelligent, you know. Day by day she picked it all up. After a while she wasn’t scared to do all the shopping. I had a full-time sales job at a leather-goods store, so having her there at home helped a lot. She was suddenly so confident. And she stopped wearing those print skirts, her hair changed, her walk became different. In six months she became somebody else. A Bombay girl. Then one day she started talking about acting. She used to imitate the heroines of the movies and serials, and th
e VJs. I can do that, she said. At first I just laughed and forgot about it. Then she said it again and again. John paid attention. He said, she’s right, you know. Look at her. She’s as good as any of them, better. Why shouldn’t she be able to do it? He was right. She sparkled. I hadn’t seen it, she was my little sister, but without her ponytails she was a star. She stood in front of the mirror on the cupboard, and she watched herself in the apartment windows. Now I saw how the neighbours watched her, when she ran down the stairs to get bread in the mornings. The boys from down the street waited for her in the evenings, just for her to walk by. I started to believe it too, that summer. Every heroine came from somewhere, after all. Nobody was born with the lights on their faces. This one was from Bangalore, that one from Lucknow. Some of them had come from very ordinary families. Now they had money, they had fame. So why not Jojo? Why not my sister? We were all caught up in it, in that fantasy. We had seen it come true for other girls. So why not Jojo? John had a friend who worked for MTV, as an accountant only. But this accountant knew people at the channel. So John took an afternoon off work and took Jojo to Andheri East, to meet some people at MTV. They caught the train, and then an auto-rickshaw. They came back all excited. The MTV executive, an Englishman, said that she was charming and beautiful. Imagine. She didn’t get a job out of that, but just getting a meeting with somebody so important was thrilling. Such a huge distance, from our little flat to MTV, and they had crossed it all in one afternoon. The impossible was possible. So then the summer was over, and Jojo was enrolled in school, but school didn’t seem that important. She was taking dance classes, and acting classes. She was talking to producers, directors. John took her sometimes, often, to these meetings in Bandra, in Juhu, in Film City. At his work they were concerned, then they were upset. I worried. But he said, big rewards need big risks. We need to see far ahead, and not be afraid. Don’t be afraid. And I tried not to be afraid. But I was. I was afraid for Jojo. I saw how much she believed in her future. Everyone struggles, she said. You have to struggle. Aishwarya struggled, even Madhubala struggled. So I have to struggle, Jojo said. But finally I will win, she said. I will.’

  A luxurious breeze came in from the sea, fluttered the sari of a walking woman in a swell of purple, stirred Mary’s hair across her eyes. But she was far away, speaking not to him but to herself.

  ‘We were all caught up in the struggle. I saved money for Jojo’s lessons. John was always phoning his new MTV-type friends, keeping in touch. He was a new John also. I hadn’t seen such excitement in him for a long time. I went with them, John and Jojo, to one or two of these filmi and television parties. Parties with the famous faces of television. Archana Puran Singh here, Vijayendra Ghatge there. I saw how John shook hands and laughed, how he hugged and thumped backs. That night in bed he held me and explained to me. This is how it works in this business. This is how you get jobs. It’s all about contacts, it’s all about goodwill. That’s how it goes. That’s how we spent that year, on the edge of something big. That’s what it felt like. Jojo got one modelling job, and then a second. The first one was a small television ad for Dabur shoes, she was dancing with two other girls on a divider in the middle of a highway. We had the television on, waiting on a Tuesday night to see it. How we screamed when suddenly she was there. Jojo on television, dancing. We danced, and John had got a small airline bottle of champagne from his accountant friend, he opened it and we all drank straight from the bottle. After that dance on the highway, we were so sure. Nothing can stop us now. Only a matter of time. John said that all the time, only a matter of time. But nothing came. Jojo was tantalized by endless meetings, “Come back and see us again, we are still thinking,” but then somehow it was always the other girl. She used to think and talk about it endlessly, why not me? She and John talked about clothes, make-up, attitude. Next time we’ll do this. Next time it’ll be like this. They planned and planned. Next time. And then I caught them.’

  She stopped short, and wiped the hair away from her face. She was looking away from him, but she was with him now, no longer in memory.

  ‘Caught?’ Sartaj said very quietly.

  She cleared her throat. ‘I was at work. I started feeling very sick, weak. There was a viral fever going around at that time. Everyone had it. You could feel the temperature on my skin. The shop-owner said, go home. So I went home. They were in my bed.’

  There was danger always in this moment, when the subject first revealed her or his humiliation. Too heavy a touch, even of sympathy, and you would lose them as they curled up around their exposed pain, closed up and hid all the essential detail. ‘I understand,’ Sartaj said. ‘He must have tried to say it was all right, that nothing had changed.’

  At this she was faintly startled, surprised by him, and now he could see the glisten of her pupils. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think he had some idea that we could all live happily together. That I would keep working for them, making the money to dress both of them and send them to their meetings.’

  ‘And she?’

  ‘She…she was angry at me. As if I had done something wrong. “I love him,” she said. She kept saying that. I love him. As if I didn’t. I finally said that. He’s my husband, I said. And she said, no, you don’t love him. You can’t. She was screaming. And I was so angry. To hear my sister say that. To know what my sister and my husband had done. Get out, I said to her. Go away.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘He left with her. He came back two days later to get their clothes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then we divorced. It was very difficult. I couldn’t pay the rent. I tried to get into the women’s hostel, but they had no space. For a while I stayed at the YWCA. Then I had to live in a jhopadpatti, in Bandra East. All kinds of places I’ve seen.’

  ‘You didn’t want to go home?’

  ‘To my mother? To that house I grew up in, with Jojo? No, I couldn’t live there. I couldn’t go back.’

  So even a slum was better, better than that home left far behind. ‘You have a good place now,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘It took a long time. I started in this salon cleaning the hair from the floor, washing the scissors and combs.’

  ‘Did you see her again?’

  ‘Two, three times. The judge makes you go to counselling before they let you get a divorce. She was there to meet him afterwards. I didn’t speak to her. Then I saw her when the judge granted the divorce.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘I heard about them once or twice, from relatives and friends. They were living in Goregaon. Still trying to get her into films, anything. I saw her on television once, some advertisement for saris. Bas, that was it.’

  ‘You never spoke to her again?’

  ‘No. My mother was very angry at her also. Ma was sick, and Jojo tried to get in touch, but Ma said no, she didn’t want to speak to her, to that sinful, shameless girl. She died without ever speaking to Jojo. And I didn’t really want to know anything about Jojo.’

  ‘So, not even a little news from somewhere?’

  She shook her head. ‘Once. Maybe two, three years ago. I have an aunt in Bangalore. My mother’s sister. She said she saw Jojo at the airport.’

  ‘Your aunty spoke to her?’

  ‘No. She knew what she had done.’

  ‘Jojo was getting on a plane?’

  ‘Yes. She must have made money. I don’t know how. I don’t know anything about her. About what happened to her.’

  What happened to her. How an ambitious, lovelorn teenager became a trader in bodies, how she ended up dead, murdered by a suicidal bhai. He didn’t know how, but he could imagine it, the descent from filmi parties into many kinds of underworld. ‘We also have very little information about her,’ he said. ‘She worked in television, produced some shows. There were some other activities.’

  ‘Activities?’

  ‘We are investigating. When we know more, I will tell you. If you hear anything, anything at all, please call me.’ She would, Sartaj thought. S
he had a certain hope in him now. From these little scraps, these fragments, maybe she could reconstruct her sister, and forgive her, and herself. ‘I’m glad you spoke to me,’ he said.

  ‘She was a sweet girl,’ Mary said. ‘When we were small, she was scared of thunder. She used to crawl into my side of the bed late at night and push her head into my stomach and sleep.’

  Sartaj nodded. Yes, Jojo was also that scared little girl, holding on to her sister. It was a good thing to know. He drove Mary home. From the car, he watched her climb the stairs to her room. The light went on inside, and he reversed out into the main road. On the way home, as he veered left into the curve at Juhu Chowpatty, it began to rain.

  Iffat-bibi called Sartaj just as he was finishing his dinner of Afghan chicken and tandoori roti from the Sardar’s Grill down the road. ‘Saab, I have an answer.’

  ‘To my question?’

  ‘Yes. Bunty was thokoed by two freelance shooters.’

  ‘Working for whom?’

  ‘Nobody. It was personal. Bunty took a girl from one of them some three, four years ago.’

  ‘Took?’

  ‘She liked Bunty’s money better than the freelancer. This idiot freelancer was in love with her.’

  So Bunty had died for a woman, not land or gold. Or for anything to do with Ganesh Gaitonde. ‘Okay,’ Sartaj said. Bunty had wounded a lover, and the lover had waited and nursed his anger and been patient until Bunty’s fortunes fell into steep decline. ‘Okay.’

  ‘You want them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The freelancers. We know where they are right now, where they will spend the night. Where they will be tomorrow.’

  ‘You want to give them to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Think of it as just a gift between new friends.’ Her Urdu was impeccable, and her voice could go cushiony and soft.

  Sartaj got up, stretched and walked to the balcony. He leaned over the railing, and watched the treetops swaying in the damp breeze. The lamps threw the shadows of their leaves across the smooth surfaces of the cars.