Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  His mobile rang just as he was locking the front door. Today, he was confident. He was sure it was Mary, not somebody from the station. He thumbed a button and said, ‘Hello, hello?’

  ‘Hello,’ Mary said, and Sartaj laughed out loud. ‘You’re very happy today?’

  ‘Hello, Mary-ji,’ Sartaj said. ‘Sorry, sorry. I just heard a song on the radio, and some children singing it also.’

  ‘That made you laugh?’

  He could feel her smiling. ‘Yes. It’s a little crazy, I know. You know what they say about sardars.’

  She giggled, then stopped herself short. ‘It’s not twelve o’clock yet, though.’

  ‘You should see me then.’

  ‘I have seen you in the middle of the day, and you were not happy at all. You were frightening.’

  ‘I was investigating, I have to put on that face.’

  ‘Put on another face for Zoya Mirza, okay? Otherwise she’ll run from you.’

  ‘Zoya? You found an approach?’

  ‘Of course. And where she’s shooting today and tomorrow. Write all this down.’ Sartaj wrote, in his diary, the name of Zoya Mirza’s make-up man and his pager number, and the name of the production in-charge and his mobile number. ‘This make-up boy, Vivek, he’s your main contact. He knows you are coming, and he has talked to the production in-charge. All they know is that you are a policeman and you are a big fan of Zoya Mirza, that you really want to meet her.’

  ‘This is true.’

  ‘You are a fan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You and every other Indian man. You just remember who made it possible for you to meet your Zoya. So phone us as soon as you get back from your meeting with her. Today, not tomorrow. Don’t forget.’

  ‘I won’t. Thank you. It seems you are a fan also.’

  ‘We just want to know. Everything.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I will call you.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  Half an hour later, paused at a traffic light in Andheri, heated by a gushing of foul exhaust from a BEST bus, Sartaj was still thinking of Mary. She was eager to learn about the life of film stars. Everyone wanted to know about stars, about what they did and didn’t do. Even those who professed to hate films and filmi people, these anti-filmis criticized the stars with a venomous intensity that revealed much knowledge, both current and historical. And Mary had a personal curiosity, she had lost a sister, and perhaps Zoya Mirza would reveal something essential and illuminating about Jojo. So Mary had lots of reasons to wait for his phone call. But he had a day of work to get through, thefts and bandobasts to look into, before he could get to film stars, even though he really wanted to ask Zoya Mirza some questions. He wanted the information. But film stars and Mary would have to wait. Sartaj was sweating now, and now he believed in the bomb a little, it had come back and it hovered at some distance from him, like a needle-toothed rat lurking unseen in thick grass. He could feel it was close, he could feel it on his forearms and his back just below the neck. He cursed it sincerely, at length, and went to his work.

  As it turned out, Sartaj and Kamble were able to get out to Film City that evening, well before the end of Zoya Mirza’s afternoon shift. They drove up past AdLabs, and up the hill to a huge palace. Zoya was the main lead in a multi-star period movie, one of the first big-scale swordfighting and swinging-from-chandeliers extravaganzas to be made in decades. Vivek the make-up man sat them down on fold-out chairs behind the palace and gave them cutting-chais and told them about the project. ‘It’s very different, this film. It’s like Dharamveer, only it’s fully up to date and modern. Huge special effects. This whole palace is going to lift into the air and then fly and be seen in the middle of a lake. They have huge battle scenes planned, they are going to have them all generated by computer. The hero has a big fight with a giant cobra with a hundred heads.’

  ‘And what is Zoya playing?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Madam is a princess,’ Vivek said. ‘But her parents, the Maharaja and Maharani, are murdered when she’s young, and she grows up in the jungle with a chieftain’s family. Nobody knows who she is.’

  Kamble took a noisy sip of tea. ‘A jungli princess?’ he said. ‘Very good. What does she wear?’

  Vivek was bespectacled and thin and very serious, and he was now made distinctly uncomfortable by Kamble’s frank leering. Of course he couldn’t tell a policeman that he was a lewd gaandu, so he shrank a little and said, ‘The costumes are very good, Manish Malhotra is doing them.’

  Sartaj patted Vivek on the forearm. ‘Manish Malhotra is the best. I’m sure Madam looks wonderful. How is it to work for her?’

  ‘She is a very good person.’

  ‘Is she? She seems so,’ Sartaj said. Vivek regarded Sartaj through his very stylish blue-framed glasses, and Sartaj smiled innocently back at him. ‘Of course she’s beautiful. But I always thought that in her roles you could tell that she’s a good woman.’

  Vivek’s wariness ebbed, and he sat up. ‘Yes. She’s very generous, you know.’

  ‘She helped you?’

  ‘She gave me a chance. We met when she was doing an ad film. When she became a star she didn’t forget me.’

  ‘You’ve been with her a long time, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have a good job, travelling all over the world with a movie star. I’ve never been out of the country.’

  ‘Thirty-two countries till now,’ Vivek said, bright and eager. ‘Next week we go to South Africa.’

  Kamble asked softly, ‘You spent a lot of time in Singapore?’

  ‘Yes, yes, Madam has done a lot of shooting there.’ The question brought up no fear, no anxiety to mar Vivek’s devotion to his Madam. ‘It is a very beautiful place. We did a lot of fashion shoots there. Madam liked it very much, it’s so clean and neat. We stayed for holidays also, sometimes.’

  Sartaj finished his tea, and stretched. ‘She must have friends there, then.’

  Vivek was puzzled. ‘I don’t know. She and I didn’t stay in the same hotel. What do you mean?’

  Sartaj thumped his knee. ‘Nothing, yaar. I go to Pune sometimes, so I have friends there. Do you think she can see us now?’

  ‘I think her interview is still going on. But the shot is almost ready. I’ll go and see.’

  Sartaj kept up his expression of enthusiastic gratitude until Vivek disappeared round a corner of the palace wall. Three workmen were painting a portion of that wall an even gold. A dozen men sprawled on the grass next to them, and some women sat in a circle in the shade of a large van. Sartaj couldn’t tell that a shot was being prepared for, much less that it might be almost ready.

  ‘That chashmu bastard doesn’t know anything,’ Kamble said. ‘He talked too easily about Singapore.’

  ‘Yes. They would have been very careful, Gaitonde and her.’

  Kamble scratched at his chest. On his wrist he had a copper bracelet. ‘Gaitonde the great Hindu don,’ he said. ‘Of course he had to be careful about his Muslim girlfriend. Lying maderchod.’

  ‘Having a Muslim girl doesn’t hurt your reputation. And Suleiman Isa, he’s had girls from every religion. They aren’t marrying these girls, right? So maybe Gaitonde was trying to protect this Zoya. You can’t become Miss India if your boyfriend is a bhai.’

  ‘They’re all chutiya liars, hiding here and hiding there,’ Kamble said. ‘I had a Muslim chavvi, you know, two years ago. We didn’t hide anything from anybody. Yaar, she was beautiful. I would’ve married her.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I didn’t have the money to get married. A girl like that, she needs an apartment, good clothes, a good life. Her family found some chutiya who worked for a company in Bahrain. She’s there now. One daughter.’

  ‘She’s happy?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kamble leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, and looked out across the small valley to the rising hills. He was suddenly melancholy, lost in the memory of his lost girl.

  ‘Eh, De
vdas,’ Sartaj said. ‘You wouldn’t have married her anyway. You had about a hundred other chavvis to get through.’

  But Kamble refused to cheer up, and Sartaj thought he might break into a sad song at any moment. If you edited out the knocking carpenters, and the piles of wooden slats next to the palace, and the gossiping women, it was a landscape suitable for song, coloured a gentle saffron by the falling sun. There was grass, and trees, and hills that had been shot quite often to substitute for Himalayan peaks. Sartaj tried to think of a sad song suitable for Kamble, but could remember only lilting Dev Anand numbers: Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya. He had the fear around him again, the fright from the bomb, it lurked somewhere under the palace wall. Maybe it was just the subterranean anxiety brought on by being in Film City, not so far from where a number of adults and children had been killed and eaten by the park’s industrious complement of very wild leopards. Those were real leopards, yes, not filmi ones. Maybe that was why he was afraid. But he was also unaccountably cheerful. It was all rather curious.

  ‘Come, come, please.’ Vivek was waving to them from the gate. ‘Madam will be on the set in a minute. You want to see the shot?’

  Inside the palace, there was a buzzing stir of activity. Under the vaults and high-arched windows, men milled about and hammered and sawed. Sartaj stepped over nests of cables, and around thickets of metal stands. He had to bend low to step under a sheet of canvas, and a loudspeakered voice called ‘Full lights,’ and Sartaj came into a pillared audience hall ablaze with gold and green. There were life-size statues of warriors and maidens under the pillars, and the half-ceiling was covered with a dense latticework of sparkling crystal. There were two immense chandeliers, a crowd of satiny courtiers and a throne. Sartaj wound his way through yet another crowd of crew to a row of folding chairs, and then Vivek motioned: wait.

  ‘That’s Johnny Singh,’ Kamble said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The director.’ He meant a portly man who now sat in one of the chairs and peered intently into a monitor. ‘And that’s the cinematographer, Ashim Dasgupta.’

  ‘You’re a movie expert,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘The girls want to get into films, a lot of them.’

  Yes, Kamble’s bar balas would have wanted, many of them, to become Zoya Mirza. They would have done anything, risked everything to be here. Now that the glare of the lights had left his eyes a little, Sartaj could see that the statues were painted plaster, not stone. The gold paint on the pillars was thick, congealed. The crystal on the ceiling was probably some kind of cheap glass, or plastic. Above it, among the ranks of lights hanging from rickety catwalks, there were dangling legs, and peering faces. And yet, on the screen this would all crystallize into an unearthly glow, a perfect palace. Sartaj thought, Katekar would have loved this, he would have liked the dirty floor, and the cheap-looking diamonds on the noblemen’s turbans.

  ‘Silence! Silence!’ the loudspeaker roared, and in the abrupt hush Zoya Mirza descended on the set. She strode in, actually, from the left, but she may as well have floated down from the Technicolor heavens in a rain of fragrant blossoms. She was very tall, slim and strong, but hidden in a shimmering gold wrap, and her hair was loose and very long, and the long sweep of her neck made Sartaj breathless.

  ‘Baap re,’ Kamble whispered. ‘Mai re.’

  Yes, Sartaj believed in the enchantment of cinema all over again. They watched as Zoya talked to the director and two assistants, as Vivek fussed over her hair and face. A woman knelt and did something to the lower edge of Zoya’s skirt, which reached just half-way to the knee. Another pair of actors came up, an older couple in royal robes, and the director spoke to them and Zoya, making angular gestures with his hands. Kamble was whispering their names, the names of the actors and their pedigrees, their performances and their successes. Then Zoya shrugged off her wrap, and Kamble ceased altogether. It was the kind of jungli-princess outfit that Sartaj remembered seeing on calendars in his childhood, with a bikini top in some soft fawn leather held together by strings at the back, and a matching skirt which dipped far below her navel in front and swept back over her hips, really quite tight. The Maharaja and Maharani took up positions by the throne, and Zoya turned towards them and walked, and the endless curvature of her hip squeezed at Sartaj’s throat. Yes. The set was fake, but Zoya Mirza wasn’t. Of course Mary and Jana were right about the multiple procedures, the miracles of technology that had achieved her wondrous world-class beauty, but Sartaj didn’t care. Zoya Mirza was artificial, and her lie was more true than nature itself. She was real.

  This was the scene: the princess, who was unaware of her own royal descent, came to the grand capital city and the exalted court, in search of a mysterious warrior who had wooed her on the wild slopes of her own familiar mountains, and then disappeared. And here she was in the grand courts of the Maharaja, who was – unknown as yet to her – a usurper and the murderer of her own trusting parents. There were two lines of dialogue: ‘Who are you, kanya?’ and ‘I am the daughter of the Sardar Matho, who rules the forest to the west of your borders.’ The second line, which was shot first, took eight takes and forty-five minutes. Zoya said it striding forwards, up the shallow bank of stairs that led to the throne. She was quite heroic. Then there was a twenty-minute pause as the camera was shifted. Vivek offered more tea and biscuits. Madam didn’t want to be disturbed, still. She was working.

  ‘This story is like that show on television,’ Kamble said. ‘What was it? With all the rajas and ranis and double-crosses and spies?’

  ‘Chandrakanta,’ Sartaj said. ‘Good show.’

  ‘This is much bigger than Chandrakanta,’ Vivek said, with considerable pride. ‘The special effects in Chandrakanta were so cheap-looking. We have two Hollywood experts flying down for the climax. And anyway, the writers told me that they took much more from Bankim Chandra.’

  ‘Who?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Some old Bengali writer,’ Vivek said. ‘He wrote a novel called Ananda Math.’

  ‘I thought that had already been made into a Bengali film,’ Kamble said. He was crunching down the coconut biscuits.

  ‘Never heard of it,’ Sartaj said. It was pleasant to stand around a film set and discuss shots and special effects and dialogue and old Bengali novels. Even Kamble was no longer impatient. Looking at Zoya Mirza was more than time-pass, it was soothing in some deep way.

  The reverse angle shot, on the Maharaja, took only two takes. Then there was a great movement and shouting again, and lights and reflectors were moved about. Vivek followed Zoya off the set, and came hurrying back ten minutes later. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Madam will see you now.’

  In close-up, she was still extraordinary. The make-up was a little garish, but Sartaj understood that was for the lights and for the camera. Between the deadly keenness of her cheekbones and the plump fullness of her lips, there was a perfect tension that had nothing to do with make-up. Sartaj and Kamble sat next to each other in Zoya’s trailer, on a deep leather couch built into the wall. She had emerged from a private dressing room, a pristine white gown wrapped around her, and was perched on a chair. Vivek stood next to the stairwell, quite rosy with his admiration for Madam.

  ‘That jungli skirt looked wonderful,’ he told her, but with an eye on Sartaj.

  ‘Yes, very,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Didi, they are big fans,’ Vivek said. ‘They came to me through Stephanie, you remember her? All because they wanted to meet you.’

  Zoya wore the kind of smile that people used to attention and power put on to indicate humbleness. Sartaj had seen it a lot on politicians. ‘I’m going to play a police officer next year,’ she said, ‘in Ghai-sahib’s new movie. I am a fan of the police also. I appeared at a charity premiere for the Policeman’s Association when I was Miss India.’

  ‘I remember. We need your help again.’

  ‘Of course I will try to help in any way possible. But I am very busy over the next six months…’

  ‘We’r
e not here to ask for a personal appearance,’ Kamble said, very quietly. He didn’t move at all, but his shoulders seemed to swell up a bit, and he was suddenly dangerous. It was all in the dull flat of his eyes, in the rigidity of his jaw. ‘Or for a donation.’

  Zoya caught the change of mood instantly, but Vivek laughed through it. ‘They just want autographs, Didi,’ he said.

  Sartaj put a hand on Vivek’s forearm, pulled himself up. ‘We just want to ask you a question or two,’ he said to Zoya, taking a step up to her. She didn’t like him coming closer to her, but she refused to flinch. He whispered into her ear, ‘About Ganesh Gaitonde.’

  ‘Vivek,’ she said crisply, ‘wait outside.’

  ‘Didi?’

  ‘Wait outside. And I don’t want to be disturbed.’

  Sartaj nudged Vivek out of the door, shut it in his wide-eyed face and pulled the red curtain firmly over the inset window. Zoya had now figured out that she should be outraged, and she stood up. She drew back her shoulders, and looked very fine, but she had to duck her head, under the slope of the low roof. Sartaj thought it spoiled the effect a little.

  ‘Why would you ask me anything about a man like that?’ she said. ‘What do you mean by this?’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Kamble said. He had his hands on his thighs, and his feet planted wide apart. ‘We know everything. We know about that Jojo. We knew Gaitonde flew you out to various locations.’

  ‘Madam,’ Sartaj said, ‘we just need a little co-operation from you.’

  ‘Listen, I was a model, and I met lots of people –’

  Kamble’s sneer was magnificent, he looked to Sartaj like a cynical toad. He made a growling laugh that grated up Sartaj’s forearms, and levelled a forefinger at Zoya. ‘You listen,’ Kamble said. ‘You may think you are some big film star, you can get away with anything. We didn’t want to embarrass you by having you come down to the station, so we came here. But don’t imagine that you can escape us. Don’t think we are idiots. We sent Sanjay Dutt to jail, you can end up there also. Six months in a little cell without all this air-conditioning, and all your charbi will come off.’