Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘I burnt it.’

  ‘Both videos? Everything they had sent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Madam, that is not so good. We could have learnt something from the tapes. Even from the envelope.’

  She nodded. The videos would have been too frightening to keep. The mention of them had made her a little watery, a little tremulous under the sheen. But now she showed some steel. She reached into her silver handbag and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She opened it out on the table, smoothed it down. ‘I kept a list of their numbers,’ she said. ‘Each time they called, I wrote it down. With the times.’

  ‘That is good,’ Sartaj said. ‘That is very good. And now if they send you anything, keep it. Try not to touch it too much.’

  ‘Fingerprints.’

  ‘Yes, fingerprints. You have to help us to help you. Where is Umesh today?’

  ‘He’s flying. He would have come with me, but you didn’t return my calls till today.’

  ‘I want to talk to him.’

  ‘I’ll give you his numbers.’ She wrote on the paper. ‘He wanted to go to the police the first time they called. I only didn’t want to come.’

  ‘You wanted it to stop.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They never stop. Until we stop them.’

  ‘That’s what Umesh said. But I didn’t want to tell anyone then.’

  ‘Why did you break it off with Umesh?’

  ‘Because I realized that he wasn’t interested in me really. He is a nice man, but he has too many girlfriends. He just wanted fun, and I was giving it to him. But then it wasn’t fun for me any more.’

  ‘So he’s very handsome, like a hero?’

  ‘Very.’ His handsomeness still evoked a fervour in her, tinged with an aftertaste of sadness. ‘Very.’

  ‘When did the blackmailers call you last?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘They will call today. Start listening to them carefully. I want to know exactly what they say. Take notes. Listen for sounds from near by. Anything at all. You have to start thinking like a police-wallah. A police-walli.’

  That amused her just a little, that she could ever be a lowly policewoman. ‘Police-walli,’ she said. ‘I will try.’

  ‘Tell them you need time to collect the money, that you’re getting it together. How was it delivered last time?’

  ‘I had to put it in a bag, a shopping bag, and drive to Apsara cinema in Goregaon in the evening, at six o’clock. The afternoon show was just letting out, and there were lots of crowds. I was told to wait on the road across from the gate. Then they called me. They told me that a chokra in a red T-shirt was going to come up to me, and a second later he was knocking on my window. I rolled the window down, he asked for a package, and he took the money and ran off into the crowd. That was it.’

  A crowded area, a street kid sent to collect the money – just standard operating procedure for the average blackmailer. ‘Umesh didn’t come with you for the delivery?’

  ‘No, they don’t know that he knows. They told me not to tell anyone, not a single soul. They told me that they would hurt me.’

  That was unusual, that blackmailers would threaten violence. There was no need for hurt if you had photographs. ‘And the chokra, what did he look like?’

  Kamala Pandey was confused. ‘The kid? I don’t know. He was just some urchin.’ A barefoot boy was just exactly like any other street savage, despite his red T-shirt. You could find a dozen at any street corner in Mumbai.

  ‘Try, madam. Can you remember anything at all about him? It’s very important.’

  ‘Yes. Yes…’ She paused. ‘His T-shirt. It was a DKNY round-neck T-shirt. It had the logo on it.’

  ‘Deekay NY jeans?’ Sartaj wrote in his notebook.

  ‘No,’ she said with the amused patience of somebody dealing with the lower classes. ‘The letters D, K, N, Y and then “jeans”. All capitals, one word. Like this.’ She reached for his pen, and wrote in large letters: DKNY JEANS. ‘The letters were very faded.’

  Witnesses had to be praised for the slightest achievement, and cajoled into further discoveries. ‘That is very good, madam,’ Sartaj said. ‘It will help us a lot. Anything else? Please try to remember. The smallest item can solve the case.’

  She made a disgusted little pout, and touched a tooth, two behind her elegant, perfect right canine. ‘His tooth, this one. It was all dirty-looking. Black, grey, instead of white.’

  ‘Excellent. On that side?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right,’ Sartaj said. ‘It’s good that you wrote down the numbers of the men who called. These are probably PCOs. Once you sign a complaint we’ll put a watch on some of them.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can’t what?’

  ‘I can’t sign a complaint.’

  ‘Madam, without a complaint, without an FIR, how can I proceed?’

  ‘Please understand. If any of this goes into writing, people will find out. People will know.’

  ‘Madam, I understand that you are afraid that your husband will come to know. But will you please understand that without a complaint the police have no jurisdiction. We have no reason to interfere, no grounds to act on.’

  ‘Please.’

  She was leaning into the table, both hands up by her cheeks. A practised actress, this one. ‘Madam, I can’t do anything,’ Sartaj said. He straightened his neck, loosened his tight shoulders. He was angry at her, had been angry for a while now. It burned through his chest. He didn’t know why.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Think about it. I’ll lose everything.’

  ‘You should have thought about that a long time ago, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ That stopped her, cut her off in mid-flow. ‘Yes.’

  She covered her eyes, and when she brought away her hands she was teary. A minute passed, then two. She dabbed away the tears. Sartaj was sure that an expert application of small pressure on her eyelids had helped start the tears, but now she seemed genuinely sad. There was a weariness that he recognized, an exhaustion from losing something built over long years. You had something that you valued very little, that you maybe had slighted and abused out of familiarity. Yet you then discovered that this thing itself, this connection, this very flimsy construction had spread its roots deep under your skin, and into the bone.

  Kamala Pandey gathered herself again. In preparation for a direct attack, she levelled her shoulders and straightened up a bit. Sartaj remembered the walking stick she had broken on her husband’s back, and he wondered if Mr Pandey had learned to recognize her cues and guard himself.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I will pay you.’

  Sartaj said nothing. She reached into her bag, reached deep, and brought out a long white envelope. She paused, and waited for him to react. Sartaj said nothing. She slid the envelope across the table, left it next to his water, close to his hand.

  Sartaj extended his index finger, nudged open the flap. Hundred-rupee notes. Two stacks. Twenty thousand rupees.

  He was now very angry. He pressed the envelope shut. He pressed until the fingernail turned white and red. ‘Listen,’ he rasped. ‘This is not enough.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. This is just a token. I would rather pay you than them. Just help me. Just stop it from happening.’

  ‘You have so much money of your own?’

  ‘I work. My parents help me now and then.’

  She kept separate bank accounts, and she had doting parents. ‘Your parents live in Bombay?’

  ‘In Juhu.’

  ‘Brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  She was the single, spoilt child of well-off parents, suddenly in a lot of trouble. She believed, quite completely, that she was owed her privileges. It would be a pleasure to take her money from her. But Sartaj was very angry. ‘Madam, I can’t help you without a complaint.’

  ‘How much do you want?’

  He shoved the envelope across the table. ‘I can arrest you
right now, for trying to bribe a police officer.’

  That shut her up. She put a hand on her mouth and began to weep. Sartaj could see that it was real this time. He stood up and walked away.

  Why had he been angry at her? It wasn’t just the money. He was quite used to taking money, to being bought. Things and people were bought and sold every day in this city. Sartaj bumped down the pitted lane to Katekar’s place, keeping the motorcycle as close to the centre of the road as he could. The gutters were clogged, and occasionally the tides of rubbish hid serious holes in the asphalt. In this patchy dark, the khuds in the road came swiftly, and could take a man down. There was still a lingering aftertaste of indignation in Sartaj’s mouth, a sour rancour that had nothing to do with what a spoilt, irritating little child she was. Was it only that she had been unfaithful, that she had done something a woman was not supposed to do? Men did it all the time, Sartaj knew this. Industrialists did it, and labourers did it. And sometimes women did it also. He knew this. He often saw, as he had done today, the aftermath. He had seen broken marriages and broken bodies, heard anguished sobs and screams. This was nothing new, in his job he had seen it all. So why had he been angry?

  Sartaj coasted down the last few feet to Katekar’s corner. The house was down an alley that narrowed and angled off to the left. Sartaj parked at the corner, and raised the rear seat to get at his packages. There was also a plastic bag crammed into the rear carrier. He shook away the anger, the question, and marched down the alley, turning his shoulders to slide by clumps of pedestrians. Some of them nodded at him. He had been a regular visitor for a few months, and they knew him now. He knew that some of them must still believe that he had got Katekar killed, but most of them were friendly now.

  Katekar’s sons were sitting near their kholi’s door, studying. The tube-light inside threw their shadows out on to the road, and Sartaj knew their familiar shapes well before he saw them. Rohit sat always to the left of the doorway, his back flat against the wall and a book held well out in front of him. Mohit was always moving, his head jigging up and down even as he wrote. As Sartaj came up Mohit went from a cross-legged squat into a kneeling arc above his notebook. He was making a blue mess of the page.

  ‘Hello, Rohit-Mohit,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Hello,’ Rohit said, grinning. Mohit kept his head down. He was writing furiously across drawings that slashed across the double spread of the notebook.

  Sartaj lowered himself into the doorway and sat with his back hard against the jamb. ‘Where’s your Ma?’

  ‘Aai is at her meeting.’

  ‘What meeting?’

  ‘There is a Family Welfare Group. She is a volunteer, so she has to go once a week.’

  This was certainly new. It had been a little over two weeks since Sartaj had last visited, and Shalini had a new routine. Life moved along. ‘Volunteer for what?’

  ‘They give information. Aai goes and talks to women around here.’

  ‘About health?’

  ‘Yes. And I think about saving money. And cleanliness. They are planning to clean up the lanes. There are some pamphlets somewhere here if you want to see.’

  ‘No, no.’ Sartaj knew the groups, and the NGOs that worked with them, usually with government or World Bank funding. The groups were rackets for somebody or other, for the NGOs or the government or the Bank, but they did good work sometimes. And Katekar had been a great one for cleanliness, so Shalini’s work was a fitting tribute. ‘Here,’ he said, and handed over the packets he had brought.

  ‘Thank you,’ Rohit said, in English. He had been working very hard on English recently, and planned to enrol in a beginners computer course in a month or so, immediately after his exams. Sartaj had made sure that a seat had been reserved in the Prabhat Computer Classes, which were reputed to be the best in the area. ‘Learn Computer and Internet For Only Rs. 999’, they advertised in multicoloured advertisements pasted on every other wall. Rohit was going through the bags, laying down the plastic pouches of dal, and atta, and rice. ‘Eh, tapori,’ he said to Mohit, and tossed him two comics. ‘Latest Spiderman,’ Rohit said. ‘Say thank you.’

  Mohit couldn’t take his hands off the comics, but he wouldn’t say thank you. Sartaj wondered what his neighbours had told him about his father’s death, who he had learned to blame. He was a strange boy, he had become a glowering little tyke, very opaque and very jerky, tightly sprung from within. ‘Our Mohit likes Spiderman,’ Sartaj said, ‘but he is a patriotic Indian. He doesn’t like saying thank-you-thank-you all the time, like those Americans.’

  Rohit laughed. ‘Yes, rudeness is our birthright.’ He tweaked Mohit’s nose, and Mohit made a spitting noise and ran past the partition into the other room. ‘He really does want to be Spiderman though. For two days now he’ll sleep with the books. Kartiya sala.’ Rohit tapped his forehead.

  Sartaj unbuttoned his breast pocket, brought out an envelope. ‘Ten thousand,’ he said. He handed it over, and scratched at his beard. It was getting hot, settling into the absolute grim stillness and dejection of the pre-monsoon months. His collar was soaked with sweat.

  This time Rohit didn’t say thank you. He got up, holding the envelope to his chest, and then Sartaj heard the metallic creak of a cupboard opening and closing. Rohit came back with a glass of water. Sartaj drank. He was a good boy, Rohit, and he was too young to be putting money in cupboards and thinking of how to raise his little brother. But then there were six-year-olds making a living on every street corner down to Colaba.

  They sat for a while, talking about computers, the Middle East, and whether Kajol would do any more films. Rohit thought Kajol was the best actress since Madhubala. Sartaj hadn’t seen a film for a long time, but he was glad to agree. When Rohit talked about Kajol, he grew intense and happy, and gestured emphatically with his hands at Sartaj’s chest while he described Kajol’s virtues. Kajol was not only a great actress, she was a good wife and mother. Sartaj found himself smiling, and was happy to listen, and agree, and let the night come on.

  The next morning, Sartaj met Mary at her sister’s apartment. As he had expected, it had taken several weeks to get Jojo’s apartment handed over to Mary, her sole surviving relative. But now, he had been glad to report to her on the phone, he had the key, everything was ready. Tuesday was Mary’s day off, and he had agreed to meet her first thing in the morning, before he went to the station. He had got himself up early, dragged himself into the shower, and was at the building punctually at six-thirty. She was waiting for him near the lift, as they had agreed. With her was a very tall, very thin woman, who was looking at Sartaj with mild amusement.

  ‘This is my friend, Jana,’ Mary said.

  Sartaj had not expected friend Jana, but it certainly made sense that Mary would bring a friend. ‘Namaskar, Jana-ji,’ he said.

  Jana took in the muted sarcasm, and grew more amused. ‘Namaskar, Sartaj-ji,’ she said.

  Sartaj grinned, and quite unexpectedly Mary smiled. Her jaw thrust forward a little, and her eyes narrowed, and her face quite transformed. The dragging seriousness went from her, vanished. Sartaj wasn’t quite sure exactly what she found funny, but it was a relief and a revelation to see that she could be diverted. ‘Shall we go?’ he said, pointing towards the lift.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mary said. ‘Jana has come to look after me.’

  Standing close to the two of them in the lift, Sartaj could see that Jana was very competent indeed. She wore a smear of sindoor in her carefully parted hair, and a dull red kurta over black salwars. Her shoes were sensible, and she carried a large, square shoulder-bag with wide shoulder straps. Inside it she carried a plastic bottle, no doubt full of boiled water. That was a mother’s bag, nice-looking but capacious and hardy. It would carry lunch, chocolates, medicine, vegetables and school books. It was a trustworthy bag.

  The lock to Jojo’s apartment was tightly bandaged with coarse canvas that took in the latch as well, and the layers were secured by a drippy seal of red wax marked by the Mumbai Polic
e. Sartaj handed Mary the key, and reached inside his gym bag for a pair of large black scissors. He had come prepared. The seal came off with a rip, and then Sartaj watched as Mary struggled with the key against the jammed lock. ‘Let me,’ he said, and Mary shook her head briskly and set her shoulders to the task. Jana gave Sartaj a rueful look over Mary’s head: this is what she’s like, let her be. They waited. Then the lock came open with a screech, and they were in.

  Jana rushed around opening windows, revealing the drawing room in sections. Mary was still near the door. Sartaj reached behind her and ran his hand down the row of switches. No lights, no electricity. ‘Yaar, this is a nice place,’ Jana called from the kitchen, mingling surprise and a fat dollop of outrage.

  Women were always outraged when officially bad women made money, had taste, enjoyed a little happiness, Sartaj thought. But Mary was unreadable. She walked through the apartment, paused in each room and took it in, and was very silent. Jana’s commentary rolled on: in the bedroom, Jojo’s lavish collection of footwear called up a moment of stunned silence, then two minutes of affronted references to Jayalalitha and Imelda Marcos, and then a long painstaking inventory. Mary was standing in the doorway, her hands by her sides.

  Sartaj pushed a window open. ‘There were some photo albums here,’ he said. ‘They must be somewhere in here.’ The room was a mess, and the scattering of shoes and clothes and magazines lay under a thick slough of dust. ‘Ah, there,’ Sartaj said, and came around the bed to the dresser. He picked up the top album, and thumped it. A fine ash ballooned off the cover, and Sartaj was suddenly aware of how loud his voice had been, how triumphant. The direct light from the window didn’t quite reach Mary, and he couldn’t see her face. ‘You should go to the BSES office, and have the electricity switched back on.’ He put the album back on the dresser. ‘There must be some outstanding bills. Okay, then, I must go.’ He nodded, took a step and stopped.

  Mary backed into the corridor to let him pass. Sartaj raised a hand at Jana, and she nodded, but she was watching Mary. Sartaj was all the way down the corridor when Mary spoke. ‘Thank you,’ she said.