Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  Every week, I went to the special court for my bail hearings. The jailers always put other prisoners in the van, anyone who had a hearing at court that day. So Dipu and Meetu went to court in the same van as I did, we arranged it so with the lawyers and the judges. It was me, these two brothers, and either Date or Kataruka. We alternated these last two, and so it was always one of them sitting to my left, on the bench that ran down the side of the van. At my feet, on the ground, among the general ruck of prisoners, Dipu and Meetu. And opposite me, facing us, on the other bench, men from other companies. It was always like this in the van: the bhais sat on the benches, and the ordinary prisoners on the floor. Date and Kataruka would have preferred that I was not there at all when we executed the plan, they didn’t want to expose me to danger. They tried to persuade me to leave it all to them, but I told them that it was crucial that I be there, that without me there was no need for this plan. Then I told them to shut up. And day after day, I waited in the van.

  The first two weeks, on the facing bench were men from other companies, not Suleiman Isa’s. The third week, Kataruka and I were already sprawling on our bench when the Suleiman Isa boys came into the van. There were four of them, none that I recognized, but Kataruka sat up to my left, flexing the rope on his wrists. We went to the courts bound like animals, roped to each other. But there was rope enough for what we had to do. The Suleiman Isa men arranged themselves, made themselves comfortable, and grinned at me. They were amused, and they were without fear.

  ‘What are you laughing at, maderchod?’ Kataruka said. He was very fair, my Kataruka, but very pock-marked. Quiet most of the time, but he spoke up then.

  ‘No need for tension,’ I said to him. I was very relaxed myself. I could feel my blood singing, but I felt calm. The Suleiman Isa boys were quite relaxed too, because they were four and we were two, because they had heard that I was really a coward.

  ‘Is your gaand still sore?’ one of them said to me. ‘We heard that Parulkar took it every night for months. He said that you were a good gaadi to mount, that you moaned like a girl.’

  I smiled back at him. ‘Parulkar is an honest policeman,’ I said. ‘What he says must be true.’ I shifted back on the bench and raised my knee, put my foot up on the bench, and scratched at my ankle.

  They were laughing, all of them. The front doors of the van clanked shut, and the engine creaked itself up into a long vibration that drowned out their giggles, and the van jerked forward, and I said very quietly, ‘Dipu.’

  He was fast all right, this Dipu. I barely saw his hand move, it passed, and the Suleiman Isa boy on the right, for a moment he didn’t even know he had been cut. He just sat, and then the blood sprayed across the van. And then we were on them, cutting. We were using blades, not the shaving kind but the heavier industrial ones that are used for cutting cardboard or tape, which we had smuggled from the jail workshop. We had split each blade in half, melted rubber on the broken side to make a kind of handle, and then we had slid the blades into the sides of our rubber Kitto chappals, into the heels. It took a second’s knocking with a fingertip to find the blade in the chappal and pull it gently out. And then we were on them, cutting.

  They were all sliced before any of them could raise a hand in defence. They were expecting two, and we were four. Make a man bleed and you will break his courage. And I had told my boys to go for their eyes. A razor blade will not kill, but it will put blood in the eyes and blind. So only two of them really fought back, the other two were shouting and panicking and trying to lose themselves in the howling mêlée of prisoners. I was calm. I dodged and waited and cut, and cut. There is a vast pressure of blood in a man’s head, a quantity that you cannot imagine. It squirts like a pichkari, in quick jets with the beating of the heart. Our attack must have lasted barely a minute, but in the pleasure of my stabbing and slashing, time expanded into a long emporium of opportunities. I tell you I could see through the confusion and know the opening before it existed, I could wait and weave and then come through precisely and cut. In my calm I knew the van was stopped and the havaldars and the inspectors were struggling with the doors. I swayed back from the struggle, back towards the bench, let myself sit. ‘Give me the lambi,’ I snapped out to Meetu.

  With a roll of his eyes he slapped it into my left hand, the lambi that he had carried inside his blue legal file, tucked behind the thick sheaf of papers and notices and reports. The lambi was actually a hinge from a bathroom door inside the barrack, carefully unscrewed and then shaped and sharpened on stone, given a handle by a wrapping of electrical wire. With it in my hand I went knee over knee, over the mass of men. I had seen the one I wanted, seen his face masked dark with blood. He put up his hands as I came towards him. There was a single twisting thrust, with my shoulder behind it, that I knew completely before I ever did it. I put the lambi in his neck. Then the policemen were on us.

  They dragged us out with a great shouting and hubbub, there were dozens of them. We were grinning at each other. There was a cut on the back of Dipu’s left hand. ‘I cut myself, bhai,’ he said. ‘But I cut them more.’

  ‘Chutiya,’ I said, smiling.

  Then they dragged us off to the anda cells. Into the high tanki-shaped building we went, and into the sunless cells. The others they shoved two by two through the low doors of the cells, but they took me down one level and made me bend and shoved me forward and then I was alone. It was dark, very dark. Finally I could make out two concrete slabs on either side of the circular room, and a hole in the ground between them. Two beds and a latrine. I was sweating. I felt my way around the walls, as high as I could go. No windows, not a shelf or a switch or a plug, nothing but the egg-smooth concrete. I sat on one of the beds for a long time. Then I took off my shirt and folded it and made a pillow. I lay down. Then I started laughing.

  They kept me in the anda cell for two weeks. They shoved food and water through the door, and I lived alone in that stinking hell. The dark, it is the dark that cuts your heart, that slices through your brain. I tried to keep track of the hours, I tried to walk around the cell in fast circles, to keep healthy. I tried to sleep, and keep awake during what must have been the day. But soon I couldn’t tell any more. I tried to calculate time by the meals, but they must have given me food whenever they felt like it, it came to me cold and congealed, and I could swear that many days and nights passed before I heard the door scrape open again. And there was the rasp of my own breath, in and out, in and out, for centuries. I would open my eyes and know that only a minute had passed, or two. Yet I had been walking for an eternity along a swampy seashore. Another long minute waited, stretching its chasm before me. And then another one. I tried to imagine a clock, I hammered a nail into the wall and hung up a gold clock, with one of those swinging weights, I thought I could have it keep time for me. But my clock yawned and melted and vanished, and its hands curled and looped. I had heard that the anda cells could drive men into madness, and now this black room was testing me.

  In this dark, women came to me. They walked through me with a cool tinkling of anklets. I lay flat on my back and they were floating above me, with their slim, red-patterned feet and dimpled ankles. The edges of their ghagras brushed softly across my cheeks, and I felt their footsteps on my chest, light as a blessing. In this indistinct dream, in the airy touch of their gauzes, I was delivered from my prison. They talked among themselves in a murmuring just under my understanding, in a whispering that became a faint music. I floated. I was gone.

  When they took me out of the anda cell I didn’t know how long it had been, two weeks or two thousand years. I shielded my eyes and asked nothing from the jail staff, or the policemen. Parulkar was there, abusive and puffed out in that strutting-cock way of his, and under his lead they dragged all of us through the compound and into the superintendent’s office. Then there was of course more abuse and threats, and warnings of added charges and long sentences. But all of it was an empty show, because they knew and we knew that it had been our win. It was
a small skirmish, but we had won. And however minor our conquest had been, it made a world of difference to my boys, and to me. Sometimes, that’s how it is. So, standing straight under the fuss that the jailers and Parulkar were making, I came back to myself. On the desk there was a calendar that told me the date, 28 December. I had been inside the anda cell for thirteen days and one night. Time fell into place around me, with the sound of metal falling on to metal. I stood up straight. I kept myself quiet, kept my face straight and my eyes lowered, but I grew strong again. From the commotion they were making, it was clear that they were trying to fight me back from my moral victory. I knew that all my boys, in the barrack and outside, had heard of our battle, and they were strong again. I kept quiet. I was satisfied.

  It was only back in the barrack that I learnt the details of our triumph. The bastard whose neck I had punctured was one of Suleiman Isa’s top controllers, directly reporting to the boys in Dubai. Miraculously, the maderchod had lived, but he was still in the hospital, covered with long arcs of stitches. The doctors were expecting him to suffer lifelong nerve damage. The others had come back to their barrack with their heads shaved and swathed in bandages, and there was much comedy whenever my boys were within shouting distance of their windows: ‘Anyone got a headache? Anyone need a champi?’ Our injuries were trifling: there was Dipu’s small wound, and Kataruka had a cut on his right calf, probably from Dipu or Meetu swinging wildly in the van. But they all looked dazed from the anda cell. Meetu was shivering, trying to keep it down but shaking nevertheless, despite the afternoon heat. I had to take command. ‘All right,’ I said to the boys clustering around. ‘We’ll celebrate later. Give us some tea. Then it’s a bath for everyone, and rest. Arrange water.’

  It was done. Finally we lay together in a circle, our feet pointing in, our bodies the spokes of a wheel, and the rest of the boys took turns to fan us. It was a pleasure to talk, to look up into the rafters and see light, to know the progression of a day. Dipu and Meetu were talking about women, about the prodigies of chodoing they were going to achieve when they got out. Kataruka was laughing at them. ‘You ganwars,’ he said. ‘You think those Lamington Road whores are women? They’re bhenchod worse than animals. You might as well chodo the next bitch you see nosing around in a garbage dump. You’ll never know the true pleasure of a woman unless you woo her, until she falls in love with you and gives it of her own will. A convent-educated girl, who has been brought up well, who is shy, who is reserved – that’s the true test of a man. But why tell you two about this, you’ll never in your life come within sniffing distance of a girl like that.’ So then of course they begged and whined to be instructed, my fine, dangerous dakoo brothers. I listened to Kataruka go on, and into the evening he imparted the secrets of seduction. ‘When you are courting her,’ he said, ‘you must be Kishore Kumar. And I don’t mean just that you sing Kishore songs to her, no. You have to let the voice of Kishore Kumar move through you, and become that effortlessly confident, that happy, that funny, that breezy. If you can do that, happily she’ll come to you, boss. Then, once that happens, once you’ve got her, then you’ve to sing Mohammed Rafi, and only Rafi.’

  ‘Why?’ said our Meetu, yawning. ‘If you’ve already peloed, why sing anything?’

  Kataruka sat up, reached over and rapped Meetu on the head with his knuckles. ‘Listen, gaandu. Listen carefully. You sing Rafi because otherwise you’ll never get to pelo her again. Rafi is your royal return road to her chut.’ He turned to me. I was laughing. ‘What are we going to do with these farmers, bhai?’

  I shook my head. ‘And after Rafi, what do we sing next?’

  ‘Ah, here’s a man who knows life,’ Kataruka said. He lay back again, stretched. ‘When it is over, after she leaves you, or after you leave her – are you listening, chutiyas? – when you feel like your heart is being pulled out through your throat on a hook, then you sing Mukesh. Then Mukesh is your only way out, the only way you’ll live to see another monsoon. Mukesh will heal you, so you can start singing Kishore again. So you have another chance. Understood, bastards? Kishore, Rafi, Mukesh.’

  Meetu and Dipu nodded, but I knew they had barely understood anything. They were too young to know that you needed Rafi, much less Mukesh. They were grinning though, with their huge rabbit teeth. ‘Let’s have some Kishore,’ I said. It was that kind of evening. We were all happy.

  It turned out that Date was the one with the voice. ‘Khwaab ho tum ya koi haqiiqat, kaun ho tum batalaao,’ he sang. And then, ‘Khilte hain gul yahaan, khilake bikharane ko, milte hain dil yahaan, milke bichhadne ko.’ The whole barrack grew quiet, and we listened to him. Each time he finished a song, there were calls for more, and requests for favourite numbers, and laughter. He acquired a team of backing singers and two tabla players, who used empty Dalda tins. When Date sang, he held his hand to his ear like a professional, and somewhere between songs I learnt that he had studied music as a child, that he came from a family of musicians, that his father played the trumpet in a wedding band until age took the power from his lungs, that Date’s dream had been to be a playback singer. He sang ‘Pag ghungru baandh Mira naachi thi’ and ‘Ye dil na hota bechaara’, and then it was time for dinner.

  Later that night Date came to me, nudged at my shoulder. ‘Bhai,’ he said. ‘Can’t sleep?’ I had been turning and curling, trying to find a stretch in my body, a repose that would let me drift off. I was trying to breathe long, evenly.

  ‘What, Kishore Kumar?’ I said.

  ‘The trouble is we need women, bhai.’

  ‘Of course we need women, sala. You’ll get me a woman, maderpat? From their barrack?’

  ‘No, no, bhai. Impossible. The jailers won’t risk it, there’s too much risk. The warders don’t have access. In any jail. Only once it’s happened – you remember that woman Kamardun Khan?’

  ‘Drug smuggler, yes?’

  ‘Yes, she was an independent, ran brown sugar. She was in Arthur Road jail, and her boyfriend Karan Pradhan was in the men’s barracks.’

  ‘From the Navlekar company?’

  ‘Yes, that Karan. Bhai, this Kamardun Khan was in love with Karan Pradhan. So she used to climb the nine-foot wall of the barrack, jump into the main compound. She bribed the sentries and the warders, and went to the men’s barrack and spent many nights in every week with her chhava.’

  ‘That’s a woman.’

  ‘Some say she gave the sentries a little taste too, just to get to Karan Pradhan.’

  ‘That’s love.’

  ‘After they got out, she gave him a car. A brand-new Contessa.’

  ‘He’s dead now?’

  ‘The Dubai boys got him, at his garage. They killed him in the Contessa.’

  ‘And her?’

  ‘She went crazy. Started trying to fight Suleiman Isa. She learnt how to fire a gun, got involved with a police inspector. She thought the inspector would help her get her revenge.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘The Dubai boys had her stabbed to death. Some say that the inspector sold her out to S-Company, told them where to find her.’

  ‘That’s tragedy.’

  He sighed. For a moment I thought he would sing a Mukesh song. Then he gathered himself, and said, ‘In this story there is drama, there is emotion, there is tragedy.’ And we burst out into long cackles of laughter. We guffawed until the boys began to laugh at our laughter, at our frenzy.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘the Navlekar company has boys who are so handsome and so daring that women leap walls for them. What are my boys going to do for me?’

  ‘I can’t get you a woman,’ Date said. ‘But there is the other barrack.’

  I knew of course which one he meant. ‘The baba room?’

  ‘There’s one boy there, bhai,’ he said, ‘who has a bottom like you wouldn’t believe, you see it and you’ll swear it was Mumtaz’s gaand.’

  ‘How much?’ I said.

  ‘Three hundred for the warder, five for the sentry. A hundred or so for the gaadi.’ />
  ‘Fine. Get five gaadis.’

  ‘Five, bhai. One each for you and Kataruka and me?’

  ‘And one each for the hero brothers.’

  ‘But Mumtaz is yours, bhai. You just wait and see.’

  Once I had counted out the money, it took less than half an hour to bring them over. Then there was a great huffing and humping in the darkness. Under my fingers the gaadi did feel like Mumtaz. In my early days in the city, when I had lived on the footpath and slept on cement, I had taken boys. But now I knew much more about women, and so I shut my eyes and saw Mumtaz. She moaned under me. Afterwards I was relaxed, and slept well.

  The next morning, in my tiffin, wrapped in plastic and hidden in rice, there was a phone. It was like a small brick, but dense and heavy, and came with its own plug. Date and Kataruka sat close to me as I peeled away the plastic. There was a small quill of paper rubber-banded to the phone. ‘PWR button makes it go on. Dial 022, then my number, then press OK,’ was what it said, in Bunty’s writing. We did, and he picked up on the first ring. ‘Who is it?’ he said.

  ‘Your baap.’

  ‘Bhai!’

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘It’s just off the boat, bhai. And very expensive. But fine, no?’

  ‘Very fine.’

  ‘You’re the first man in the city to get one.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Okay, maybe second or third.’

  He was exaggerating, of course. There were probably a few dozen rich bastards who already had mobile phones then, in those days long ago, but among the companies ours was the first to use them extensively. And this, in jail, was our first. I was very pleased with Bunty, and I told him so. He was the kind of man I liked, always looking ahead, moving with the times. We talked business. There was much to talk about. There was the ordinary business to take care of – our collections from various industries and businesses, our interests in real estate, our importing of electronics and computer parts, our cash investments in the entertainment industry. And then there was the uncommon project of arms smuggling, which took much care, we had to make the plans foolproof, pay much attention to detail. We moved only one shipment every six months or so, but each boatload ran into the crores, and the product itself was heavy and difficult to disguise and transport. Yet we had been completely successful so far, and our client was pleased. We used my old friends Gaston and Pascal, only their boat, and a minimal crew. And my company was better equipped as a result. We were confident in our strength. Bunty and I talked this back and forth, and were careful to code: AK-47s were jhadoos, and bullets were sweets, and a trawler was a bus. In all our dealings for these arms, our only client was Sharma-ji, who was always on time, always punctual with his substantial payments, always perfectly dressed in his perfect white dhotis. Bunty was satisfied with Sharma-ji, and so was I. And then there was also the matter of us providing support to a couple of small splinter companies in their movement of drugs through Bombay, to Europe and beyond. Bunty had in the past argued for us entering the drug-transit field directly, for the large money involved and to oppose the domination of the trade by the Pathans. But I had always resisted: since there was no local production here, the money wasn’t large enough to justify giving up the publicity value of saying, ‘We don’t touch drugs.’ And to oppose for the sake of opposing was a young man’s foolishness. I was old enough to know that expanding too fast and too rapidly could make a company sick. Consolidate, consolidate, I often told Bunty. So now I told him to go ahead and provide logistics and muscle to the drug-traders. But be careful, I told him, keep our distance.