Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Saab?’

  ‘Iffat-bibi, I am not worthy of such a gift. You have an old relationship with Parulkar Saab. Why don’t you give it to him? I don’t handle these bhai and company and shooter matters.’

  ‘Is this true? Or do you think I am not worthy of giving you something?’

  ‘Arre, no, Bibi. I am just afraid that when the time comes, I will have nothing equal to give you in return. I am a small man.’

  She made a smacking sound full of exasperation. ‘The son is just like the father. All right, all right.’

  ‘Bibi, I meant no offence.’

  ‘I know. But really, I used to tell this to Sardar Saab also, how will you get ahead if you don’t make the big deals? And he always said, “Iffat-bibi, I have flown as high as I can. Let my son go further.”’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yes, he spoke about you often. I remember when you passed your twelfth, he distributed sweets. Pedas and burfis.’

  Sartaj remembered the pedas, the saffrony taste of them that contained all the future. ‘Maybe I am like him also, yes. Parulkar Saab moved ahead.’

  ‘Yes, with Sardar Saab’s help all the time. Parulkar was a sharp one from the beginning, see. Always thinking, thinking. There was this case, a robbery gang on the docks.’

  She told him then about this gang, which had people on the inside and outside of the docks. They pilfered goods, of course, but they also took equipment and fuel, anything worth a little money. Parulkar had broken the case, with lots of Sardar Saab’s help, his contacts and sources, all of which Sardar Saab was glad to give him. But when the time came for arrests, Parulkar let a senior inspector take the apradhis in and enjoy all the credit. ‘It would have been a big case for Parulkar, but he saw ahead, see? Lose some heavy arrests now, but profit later.’

  ‘He’s fast like that.’

  ‘How fast, you don’t even know. But you haven’t learnt much from him.’ He knew she was smiling, and couldn’t help smiling back.

  ‘What to do, Bibi? We are who we are.’

  ‘Yes, we are as Allah makes us.’

  They said their farewells, and Sartaj went back to picking at his chicken. He was craving a peda, but it was late and he was tired. He comforted himself with another shot of whisky, and promised himself two pedas at lunch. He was sure it was going to be a good day.

  By the next morning the rain had turned into one of those endless monsoon drenchings that felt as if the sky had collapsed under the weight of water. Sartaj ran from the car to the station, and by the time he was under cover his shoulders were drenched. He could feel the water inside his shoes.

  ‘Your girlfriend’s waiting for you, Sartaj Saab,’ Kamble said from his perch on the first-floor balustrade above. He was leaning out, head close to the smooth fall of water from the roof, a cigarette in one hand.

  ‘Kamble, my friend,’ Sartaj said, ‘you are full of bad habits and bad beliefs.’ He had to raise his voice to be heard above the drumming of the water on the bricks. Kamble grinned back at him, very comfortable with his badness. By the time Sartaj got up the stairs, he was lighting another cigarette and he had his answer ready.

  ‘Sometimes you need a bad one like me, Sartaj Saab,’ he said, ‘for all the bad work that has to be done in this world.’

  ‘Since when have you become a philosopher, chutiya? You never needed any excuses before, so don’t start blaming the world now. Who is waiting?’

  ‘Arre, your CBI girlfriend, boss. You have so many you don’t know which one is coming to visit?’

  Anjali Mathur was at the station. ‘Where?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Parulkar Saab’s office.’

  ‘And is Parulkar Saab there?’

  ‘No, he got a call, he had to rush to a meeting with the CM at the Juhu Centaur.’

  ‘With the CM. Very impressive.’

  ‘Our Parulkar Saab is a very impressive man. But I don’t think he likes your chavvi very much, Sartaj Saab. I just see something in his look. Maybe he wants her also.’

  Sartaj thumped Kamble on the shoulder. ‘You have a very dirty mind. Let me see what this is about.’ He walked down the corridor. Kamble was indeed dirty, but maybe it was just that he took more pleasure in the same dirt that everyone was swimming in. He certainly understood the politics of the station, and knew everything that went on in it. Sartaj nodded at Sardesai, Parulkar’s PA, who waved him towards Parulkar’s door. Sartaj knocked and went in. Anjali Mathur was sitting alone on the sofa at the rear of the room, at the end furthest from Parulkar’s desk.

  ‘Namaste, madam,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Namaste,’ she said. ‘Please sit.’

  Sartaj sat and told her what he had learned from Mary, which was very little. As usual, she took in the news, such as it was, and then stayed perfectly still. She was deliberating. Today she was in a dark red salwar-kameez. Wine-coloured, Sartaj thought. An interesting hue on her dark-brown skin, but it was loose, and covered her quite impersonally. There was no cut there, no personality. She carried her face the same way, shut off. Not hostile, just guarded, closed.

  ‘Shabash,’ she said. ‘Every little thing is important. You know that. You never know what will open up a case. Now, I have two things to tell you. One, that Delhi has decided to halt this investigation. We were interested in Ganesh Gaitonde’s return to Mumbai, the reasons for it, what he wanted here. But from what we have found out so far, Delhi doesn’t think there’s enough there to justify further enquiries. Frankly, nobody cares. They say, Gaitonde is dead, he’s finished.’

  ‘But you don’t think he’s finished.’

  ‘I don’t understand why he was here, why he killed himself, what he was looking for. Who he was looking for. But I have been called back to Delhi. There are more important things to work on, it is felt.’

  ‘At the national level.’

  ‘Yes. At the national level. But I would appreciate it very much if you would continue looking into the matter a little. I appreciate very much your hard work. If you could continue, maybe we would have some answers to our questions.’

  ‘Why are you so interested in Ganesh Gaitonde? He was a common gangster. He’s dead.’

  She thought for a moment, considered her options. ‘There is not much I am allowed to tell you. But I am interested in him because he was connected to certain very important people, to events at a national level. Whatever brought him back here, that could have an effect on future events.’

  And you want me to risk my head under these huge juggernauts, Sartaj thought. You want me to put my golis in the path of those oncoming, grinding wheels. You want to involve me in Research and Analysis Wing matters. International intrigue, derring-do in foreign lands, desi James Bonds. He knew the agency existed somewhere, he had been told it did exist, but it was all very fantastic and very far from his very ordinary life. He had never really felt it was real, all that sinister spy stuff. And yet here was serious, small Anjali Mathur, in her dark red salwar-kameez, sitting on the sofa a few feet from him. And she was interested in the death and life of Ganesh Gaitonde.

  The next question was obvious, but Sartaj kept himself from asking it: why does RAW have an interest in our friend Ganesh Gaitonde at all? Maybe some of the important people that Gaitonde had connections with were in RAW, maybe some mutual dealings had existed between the agency and Gaitonde, but Sartaj didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to be in this room any more, with quiet Anjali Mathur. He wanted to be back in his own life. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very true.’ He was quiet. These RAW things happened far away from him, as they should. He didn’t have any questions, he didn’t want answers. He was done.

  ‘I have to go back,’ Anjali Mathur said finally. ‘To Delhi. But I would be grateful if you would continue to investigate this issue. For you to do so would be completely logical, expected. If you learn anything, here is my number in Delhi. Please call me.’

  He took the card, and stood up. ‘I will,’ he said.

  She nodded, but he knew
she saw his nerviness, his desire to be out of the room, away. Outside, Kamble was sitting on the visitor’s bench, one leg crossed comfortably over the other. ‘So what happened, boss?’ he said with his customary leer.

  ‘Nothing,’ Sartaj said. ‘Absolutely nothing. Nothing happened. Nothing will.’

  Ordinary life had its own savoury pleasures. Sartaj was eating a very hot chicken Hyderabadi with Kamble when his mobile rang and began to skid slowly across the table. Sartaj nudged it back with a knuckle, and saw that Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad was calling. ‘Arre, tissue, tissue!’ he called to the waiter and thumbed the phone. ‘Hold,’ he managed to get out before a cough caught at his throat.

  ‘Saab, take a sip of water,’ Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad said paternally when Sartaj finally got the phone up to his ear.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You are eating lunch, saab. I have your dessert.’

  ‘The Bihari and the boys?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where? When?’

  ‘They are coming tonight after midnight to collect money from a receiver.’

  ‘After midnight, when?’

  ‘I only know that the meeting is after midnight, saab. Maybe they are being careful. But I have an exact address.’

  Sartaj wrote down the street and the landmarks and the name of the receiver. Wasim was very exact indeed. ‘Saab, there are many kholis on the track side of the road, and there are always people moving around there, even late at night. So you must go in carefully, otherwise there will be trouble.’

  ‘Chutiya, we have done a thousand of these arrests. This one will be nothing special.’

  ‘Yes, yes, saab. Of course you are the master of these matters. I didn’t mean…’

  ‘All that matters is that the information should be good. Is the information good?’

  ‘Saab, it is solid. You don’t even know what I went through to get it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Keep your mobile on tonight.’

  ‘Yes, saab.’

  Sartaj put down the phone. He took up his tandoori roti and ate a large mouthful of chicken. It was delicious. ‘What are you doing tonight?’ he said to Kamble.

  Sartaj and Katekar were waiting. They were in disguise, in tattered banians and dirty pants and old rubber-soled keds. Sartaj had an old patka draped loosely over his hair and tucked behind his ears, and thought that he looked like a rather debonair, dashing thela-wallah. They were sitting, reclining, under a thela pushed up on the pavement, across the road from a barred iron fence that edged the railway tracks. Katekar was complaining about the crowds on the trains. ‘This country is hopeless,’ he said. ‘People push out babies with no more thought than street dogs making puppies. That’s why nothing works, all progress is eaten up by new mouths. How can there be development?’ This was one of his favourite themes. Any moment now he would start advocating a scientific dictatorship, universal registration and identity cards, and a strict birth-control policy. But now they were both silent as a train clattered by, going up the line, almost empty. During the day pods of men hung from the doors, swelling out over the rushing tracks, suspended by fingertips and toes. ‘Almost one hour since the last train,’ Katekar said. It was almost two-thirty. ‘You watch. One heavy rain and trains will stop. This chutiya central line, if ten schoolboys stand in a row and piss on the tracks, bhenchod service is disrupted.’

  Sartaj nodded. All this was true, and it was a restful pleasure to lie under a thela and complain. They had already complained about the municipality, corporators, transfers of honest civil servants and policemen, expensive mangoes, traffic, too much construction, collapsing buildings, clogged drains, unruly and uncivilized Parliament, extortion by Rakshaks, bad movies, nothing worthwhile to watch on television, American interference in subcontinental affairs, the disappearance of Rimzim from soft-drink stands, inter-state quarrelling over river waters, the lack of good English-language schools for children whose parents didn’t have truckloads of money, the depiction of police on the movie screen, long unpaid hours on the job, the job, and the job. When you had complained enough about everything else, there was always the job, with its unspeakable hours, its monotony, its political complications, its thanklessness, its exhaustion.

  Sartaj yawned. Near the iron fence, there was a rank of kholis with tin roofs. Some of the kholis were two-storeyed, and had leaning ladders, posts with pegs really, to allow access to the upper levels. There was a sturdy-looking pucca house about two-thirds of the way down the row, new and unfinished. A light burned behind a newspapered window in one of these upper stories, and that room was where the apradhis were expected tonight. Not far from the lighted window, at the far end of the kholis, PSI Kamble and four constables were wrapped in sheets on the pavement, trying to look like tired labourers deep and fast in their sleep. Sartaj was quite sure they were complaining. On that side of the kholis, there was a sloping ridge of rubbish, its top higher than a tall man’s head, banked up against a brick wall. Sartaj had passed it many times over the last few years, this noisome mountain, and it had grown and shrunk many times but never disappeared, and now at this far distance, he could see the bright neon blue, green and yellow of plastic bags winking from its archaeological layers. As senior officer on the operation he had the privilege of avoiding the gigantic stink, so Kamble and his fellows lay directly under its influence, and Sartaj knew they were cursing him. The thought of Kamble holding a perfumed handkerchief to his nose gave Sartaj a smile.

  Now Katekar stopped in mid-complaint. Two men were coming up the street, leaning against each other’s shoulders. ‘Drunks,’ Katekar said, and he was right. These men were only two, and it was unlikely that the actual apradhis would stagger drunk to a meeting with a receiver to collect money. Still, Sartaj stiffened, watched. The drunks went by, giggling. Down the road and three lanes to the left there was a country bar and a gambling den. Men went from one to the other and then went home. These two were happy, which only meant that they would wake up in the morning to find out what they had lost. Sartaj watched them go, feeling the warm tingle of anticipatory satisfaction moving up his shoulders. He would get the apradhis tonight. He would take the bastards in, and then he would sleep well afterwards. He had done well by Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad, and now it was his turn to gain.

  Katekar had, for the moment, run out of things to complain about, so now he was telling a police story. In the old days, he said, during the very early part of his service, he had known a hoary old inspector named Talpade. This Talpade was wizened and gnarled, stained not only by the paan he chewed incessantly, but also by the four corruption cases he had fought off and survived. It was said – and generally believed – that he had killed more than a dozen innocent men during his career, shot them dead during riots and encounters. He had once beaten an apradhi to death in the lock-up, and had been suspended for eleven months before he managed to extricate himself from the blood-spattered mess, mainly by scattering money up and down the chain of command until even his most ardent admirers and enemies marvelled.

  Two years before his retirement, Talpade fell in love with a dancer. There was something admirable about a man that age gripped by a great passion. Of course he was ridiculous: he had new clothes tailored, his mehndi hair now was suddenly jet-black, his teeth gleamed an unearthly white. But you had to recognize and respect the completeness of his devotion. He went every night to worship at the altar of his beloved, he brought her home from the bar where she worked, he gave her messages from her lovers. Yes, she had other men, younger ones and more handsome, but Talpade accepted this pain as the price of his proximity to her, and suffered it with humble gratitude. He was transformed. There was something new moving under the age-old creases on his face, under the bitter valleys – you only had to spend a minute with him to know it was joy.

  The force laughed at him. It was not his aged-rooster’s walk or the new dark glasses he sported. The problem was that he loved Kukoo (‘just like that actress from long ago’), and as Talpade t
old anyone who would stop and listen, Kukoo was as beautiful as a Kashmiri apple, and nobody could deny the fragile and fatal charm of Kukoo’s nakhras. But she was a man. She said she was nineteen, but she had danced at various bars for the last five years, so it was more likely that she was twenty-five, at the very least twenty-two or so. She had luxurious straight hair to the small of her back, lightened to a striking almost-golden, a pert bottom of astonishing roundness, and opulent lips that deserved a poem of their very own. But there was never any doubt that Kukoo was a man. She never attempted to hide this. She had a slim, long chest, and her voice was husky. But she still accumulated a following as she moved from bar to bar, increasing her earnings each time.

  So why had Talpade become such a majnoo for Kukoo? Was he, after all – despite his long marriage and three children – a gaandu, literally? Most of the men and women in the force believed so. But his friends, and those close to Kukoo, knew that Talpade never touched her. Not that she would have refused, no, Kukoo had a finely developed sense of how far you could tease a man, and above all she was practical. She knew when to be shy and when to be very forward. But Talpade didn’t want to catch her and squeeze her and take her, he was content to sit at his regular table, just to the left of the dance floor, and look at her. On the sparkling silver of the dance floor, she was indeed something to look at, floating on the whirling lotus of her ghagra, her waist turning like a slender fall of water. Under those cunning black and red lights she was more beautiful than any other girl in the bar, more graceful than any woman on the street outside. Talpade sat and drank Old Monk and watched Kukoo. He gave her money just before he left, never called her to his table to take the cash like other men, never expected anything but an occasional glance and smile. He was happy to talk to friends who came into the club, he joked with the waiters, his concentration on Kukoo was not one-pointed or obsessive enough to be frightening, but it was obvious that he cared only about her.