Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Brain shots,’ Chotta Badriya said.

  He was right. Both of them were head shots. I was wondering if they were both Muslim. The board on the lintel said the shop was the Zuleikha Shoe Emporium. We crunched down the street, over splinters of glass, shoes, sticks, I saw a child’s ruled notebook fluttering its pages. Subhadra had her eyes shut. Now we took the familiar turn to the left, down to the basti. This road had been smooth, I had had it rebuilt and resurfaced just two months ago. Now it was covered with loose stones, rocks, bricks. Somebody had fought a battle here. A burnt box of a car leaned its charred metal against a lamppost. There was a shout to our left, and from the first row of Gopalmath houses a man appeared, pointing an accusing finger at us. In his other hand he held a sword, a dancing curve of silver.

  ‘Ey, Bunty,’ Chotta Badriya called, and Bunty ducked his head in amazement, and ran up to the taxi, followed by the boys of Gopalmath. Bhai, bhai, they shouted. They were all armed, festooned with swords and lathis and spikes and rods and knives and pistols. I asked, what happened here? The landyas came, bhai, from the basti of Janpura over there, they said that one of our boys had stabbed one of theirs, so we showed them, bhai, we ran them back into that smelly dump of theirs. And those two on the turn at Naik Road, bhai, the policiyas did those, dhad-dhad two straight in the head, even the police know what is right and what is wrong this time. And they were thumping each other on the shoulder, all of them, shoving and falling and laughing like they had won a match, all their faces alive with sweat and youth and victory. And I asked, what about the Muslims in Gopalmath, what happened to them, are they all right? On the eastern side of the basti we had maybe sixty Muslim families, mostly tailors and factory workers, some of their sons worked for me. But when I asked about them my boys shrugged. What, I asked again, are they all right? They’re gone, bhai, they said.

  ‘Where?’ I said. ‘Where have they gone?’

  Nobody knows, bhai. They’re gone. They ran away. They fled.

  ‘Did anybody do anything to them? What happened?’

  They just went away, bhai.

  ‘And their houses?’

  Taken up, bhai. Other people are living in them now.

  ‘Who? Some of you?’

  Yes, some of us, bhai.

  Chotta Badriya’s face was rigid. He was immensely respected in our company, and until now his religion had never mattered. I took him by the arm, walked him away. ‘Don’t listen to these fools,’ I said. ‘Don’t take it to heart. They’re young and their heads have been turned by all this. They don’t know what they’re saying.’

  But his eyes were full. ‘I would have given my life for any of them,’ he said. ‘But now I’m only a landya for them? Bastards. Will they want my house also?’

  ‘Badriya,’ I said, ‘this is a bad time. Don’t get angry. Keep your wits, keep cold. Listen to me. Just listen to me, only me.’

  I had my hands on his shoulder, and finally he let me hug him. I sent him to his home and family with four of my best boys, all armed, and told them if anything happened to Chotta Badriya or any of his family, I would shoot them myself.

  Then I looked about, at the homes of Gopalmath. During a lull in my own war I had left my home, and came back to find my home the battleground for a larger conflict. They, somebody, had drawn borders through my vatan. My neighbours were now refugees, they had fled from unsheathed swords, from brain-shot bodies. Here was my Gopalmath, the habitation of my heart, the town that I had caused to be built, brick and brick, where I had walked with my friends, arms on shoulders, with the smell of gajras and falling water in the air, where I had found my manhood, my life. Here was the bright quilt of its roofs, stretching from the bowl of the valley up the hill, this vibrant spread of brown and blue and red knit together by the arcing, threadlike lanes, here were the numerous angular reachings of the television antennae, catching their fierce glints from the hovering sun. All of it lay desolate. And at the very edge of the horizon, to the south, a smudge of smoke. Under that unbearably bright sky I took my bride home.

  The riots ended three days later. My impotence continued. We cleaned the streets, gathered up the wounded, I gave money to the families of those who were in hospital, and meanwhile Subhadra settled into my house and became ‘Mummy’ to my boys. Within days she was their confidante and sympathizer and whisperer and bringer to me of their problems, and mediator if I was angry. The house was suddenly clean, and gods and goddesses appeared in every room, and my stomach was suddenly lighter and happier from the food I ate, and all my shirts were in a neat ironed row in the cupboard, and still I was afraid all the time. When I heard her voice in the next room, kind and flowing and with a rhythm like bells, I feared that she was telling someone how useless I was, how I didn’t even go near her, how I lay on my side of the bed with my arms over my head, how I told her to keep talking until I dropped into sleep. No, she wouldn’t tell. But maybe it would slip out, some woman from the basti would make a remark, a teasing joke about Subhadra’s happiness, some little pun with a little naughtiness in it, about marriage beds and nights and cruel men and aching limbs, and Subhadra would laugh, complete innocent that she was, and she would burble, but oh we don’t do that. He won’t, he can’t. He can’t, can’t, can’t. I fled from her voice, from can’t, from danger, and spent the day being driven from meeting to meeting. I ate lunch in high and low restaurants, I sat in dance-bars and dully watched the girls pirouette. But I wasn’t moved by any of them.

  Chotta Badriya noticed this. He had been quiet, he had been upset by what had happened, by the masjid and the days that followed, I could see that. So I kept him close, I took him everywhere. And I could see that he was trying, that for my sake he was fighting himself. He tried to take care of me. ‘Bhai, these dance-girls are second-rate finally. I have much better for you.’

  ‘Much better? Where?’

  ‘Actresses, bhai. Stars.’

  ‘Every one of these wants to be a star, chutiya.’

  ‘No, no, bhai. Really, actresses. Promise.’ Those days, everyone was becoming a television producer. Oil traders and taxi-owners were suddenly making television serials. One of these was Chotta Badriya’s cousin, and he had told Chotta Badriya about a woman who was a model and actor co-ordinator, and also trying to be a television producer. Naturally this woman came into contact with many young girls, all lovely and fresh and young and new in the city, struggling to make their fortunes.

  ‘So she helps them to struggle a little with men, and make themselves and her some money?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly, bhai. Otherwise, you know how hard it is in this city. How can a young actress survive, alone in this city? She helps them, bhai, she helps them.’

  ‘Well, we must help them too. And what is the name of this saint?’

  ‘Jojo.’

  Jojo. A strange name, but the girls she sent were indeed a cut above the common randi. They were educated, and some of them English-speaking. With them I was successful. With them I was easily hard, and profoundly able. With them I acrobated and strong-manned and warriored until they collapsed on the field. But at home I was nothing. I examined my wife closely, took in her slightly crooked smile, the straight slash of her eyebrows, the small powder-and-toothpaste smell of her, and found her to my liking. I wanted her. But there was no having her. My strength vanished when I was in the safety of my own bed, and I had no recourse. I read the advertisements for clinics on billboards and at the back of magazines, the promises of vigour from tablets and potions, but I was unable to tell anyone, not even Chotta Badriya. I was shamed. I picked up the phone and called one of the clinics, asked to speak to the Vaid, but they wanted money and they wanted to know my name, and the woman on the line was quick and brusque, and I called her a gaandu and slammed the phone down. Subhadra came in then with a glass of milk, and I drank it, and I thought bitterly, yes, that randi on the phone I could have ploughed, but drink my wife’s milk is all I can do. So I went through Jojo’s girls, one after the other. />
  But I found that when I was far away from Subhadra, unable to hear her talking, I was even more afraid. Perhaps being at home was the better thing, perhaps my near presence would constrain her a bit, keep her from telling somebody about my failures. So back I went. And I found her happy in her house. That was the truth, she seemed happy, she was happy. Her marriage was a joke, at its centre it had a limp nothing, but she bustled about with her keys in her pallu and rattled pots in the kitchen and ordered servants about and nagged me about eating, and seemed content. She bloomed as we worried about the ruins of the mosque, as the newspapers unfurled ancient histories of bitterness and the convulsing speeches of politicians. The magazines published maps of the country festooned with spiky outgrowths of little cartoon explosions, each tiny detonation representing a riot, bodies, bricks, swords, and meanwhile I was unhappy, and she was happy. One night, she bustled into our bedroom and sat next to me.

  ‘I’ve been hearing about your friend,’ Subhadra said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your friend Paritosh Shah.’ She sat next to me, held on to the sleeve of my kurta. ‘All the boys keep telling me how he made you marry, what a good influence he was on you. Tell me about him.’

  So I told her about carrying gold to him, about his enormous paunch, his feeling for money, his love for the game of gain, our adventures together, his pleasure in festivals and rituals and celebrations, his need for high flight. She listened to me, her hand on my sleeve, head down but eyes shining and blinking up at me, with stray strands of her hair lit up by the lamp behind, each filament aglow, making a small wheel of light above her head. ‘And that motu friend of mine,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t do a thing without praying, if he had to go from Colaba to Worli he would pray, if he had to steal a crore he would pray. And then they killed him.’

  ‘Did you kill them?’

  ‘Kill who?’

  ‘The ones who killed him!’

  She spoke of killing men, this little virgin, as if she was speaking of cutting chickens. ‘We killed some of them.’

  ‘No, but the ones who actually did it?’

  How to explain to her that finding out exactly who pulled the triggers and who swung the hammers was not exactly easy? What would she understand of intelligence-gathering, safe houses, double and triple bluffs, setting fielding and lurkaoing men? She had asked the simple question, did you punish the men who actually did it? There was no simple answer. And then it came to me, looking at the sindoor in her hair and the full trust in her eyes, that she had asked the only question that was worth answering. I had failed Paritosh Shah. I had killed some of Suleiman Isa’s men, and considered that revenge. But to take random men and destroy them, that was no revenge. Paritosh Shah had worried about me, he had loved me, he had married and settled me down, and I had abandoned his memory, made excuses to his soul about the punishments I had exercised on his enemies, while his actual murderers ran free. This is why I was cursed within the marriage he had made for me. I could not consummate while his soul was unconsummated, while it searched for its rest. My incompleteness was a direct reflection of his. I laughed. It had taken Subhadra to show me this, Subhadra was also the name of the sister of the god Paritosh Shah had worshipped. It made a kind of sense, really it did. I jumped up. I bent over and kissed my wife. I was rejuvenated, reborn. I ran out to the meeting rooms, and called up my boys, woke up Chotta Badriya.

  ‘What have we done lately to find out which shooters came after Paritosh Shah? Have we offered money? How much? Who have we asked? Who have we captured?’

  In an hour I had made new plans, set new schemes into motion, doubled and tripled the flow of money that would ease men’s tongues, talked to policemen and company-men and shooters and khabaris, collected names and half-names and the shadows of names, addresses, rumours of dissatisfactions and intrigues. The house hummed and sang and I felt my force extending across Bombay like electricity, because of me women and men were talking, running, moving in patterns that I had set in motion, I had thrown the net of my self wide, and in it I would gather the assassins, I would take them in. They could not escape. Watch me, Paritosh Shah, bhai, fat man. You will have to restore me to myself. I will give you your murderers, and you will give me Subhadra, my marriage, you will give me back to me.

  And then the riots were upon us again. News of new murders came to us from the anguished lanes, from the roads still mourning old injuries: Muslim stabbed here, Hindu killed there, and then mathadi workers stabbed and killed, a family burnt to death, and the whirlwind took us again. Again the empty roads and the long silent afternoon and the rushing slap of many running feet on the ground and the sun rolling overhead, and screams, screams moving with tiny rattles up our windows, and news of men and women and children doused with petrol and burnt alive, and Subhadra huddled into a corner, and the abrupt tapping of gunfire lasting into the night. I put my boys on the peripheries of Gopalmath, in relays, and told them to sit tight, to watch, to guard. After three days Bunty came to me, bringing complaints. ‘I can’t control the boys, bhai,’ he said. ‘They want to do something.’

  ‘Do what?’ I snapped. ‘Go out there and kill old women? For what? For an empty old building?’

  He ducked his head. ‘They are killing us.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Bhai?’

  ‘You look like you have something more to say.’

  ‘The boys are saying…some of them are asking whether Bhai is with us, or with the Muslims.’

  So, inevitably, here it was: us or them. Was I us or them? ‘I’m with the money,’ I said. ‘And there’s no profit in this. Tell them that.’

  And yet the question stayed with me, through those nights of killing. Us or them? Who was I, who had always regarded the would-be attackers of the mosque and its defenders as equal fools? Now the mosque had come down, and everyone had become an attacker of that and a defender of this, you had to choose whether you were us or them. But what was I? I thought about it, waited for Paritosh Shah to tell me something, and held back from the bloodletting. Meanwhile some of my boys abandoned me. They were frustrated by my standing still, my doing nothing. Caught up in the frothy haze of rage that rose from the burning shops, from the bodies in the gutters, they went out armed with swords, and pistols. They took men from cars and slashed them to death, they raped women they found huddled inside hovels and then cut their throats, they used kerosene and kitchen matches and burnt stragglers alive, they shot children. So in those days of winter I lost my loyal soldiers to this massacre of us and them, this butchery that was not a battle. They left me and felt contempt for me, because I stood apart. I didn’t need Bunty to tell me this. I was losing izzat, I was losing power, I was losing the company I had built and defended against so many predators.

  Bipin Bhonsle offered me a way out. He drove up on a Sunday morning in a jeep festooned with saffron flags. He was followed by two Ambassadors, also packed with his Rakshaks, each variously armed. Bipin Bhonsle himself openly carried a sword, which he propped up on the side of his chair in my baithak.

  ‘An armed MLA on the open road,’ I said. ‘How the world has changed.’

  ‘Today we are going to change it back, bhai,’ he said, rubbing at his face. He was puffy, exhausted, and he stank. His purple shirt was stained and crumpled, hanging out at the front, and I could see the sweaty folds of his belly. ‘Enough is enough. We’re going to show these landya bastards.’

  I waited. But he seemed to have dropped off into an open-eyed sleep, with his chin on his chest. Lank strips of hair were plastered to his forehead, his usual puffy hairdo had been completely destroyed. What he wanted to show Muslims remained untold. Finally I said, ‘Bipin Saab?’

  He spoke without blinking, without moving from his statue-like sprawl. ‘The word came from the top: show the maderchods. So we showed them.’

  ‘The order came from the top?’

  ‘From the very top top.’ He yawned. ‘I cut a head off. I mean clean off, sattack! like that. I
had to use both hands on the sword. It bounced twice, the head. The funny thing is the blood. It goes far. Like from a pichkari, all over the place. The boys were all running, ducking away from the blood. The head didn’t look surprised or anything. The head had no expression.’

  ‘You showed him.’

  ‘Yes. But you’re sitting here, safe in your house, Ganesh Bhai.’

  ‘The word didn’t come from my top, Bipin Saab.’

  ‘The landyas killed Paritosh Shah. And still you don’t want to do anything.’