Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  He reminded me then of Parshurama, that great sage who took up his axe to cleanse the earth. And of Rama himself, most perfect of men, who took up his bow and fought against all odds. ‘And what about the advice that Krishna gave to Arjuna on the battlefield?’ this strange guru said to me. ‘Arjuna wanted to be peaceful. He wanted to retire from the world. Should he have gone? Should Krishna have let him?’

  I had to agree with him, no, it was clear that Krishna was correct. I said so, and then Guru-ji told me about the great Shankaracharya, and his defeat of Krakaca’s kapalika army. And also about the Sanyasi Rebellion, during which sadhus and faqirs fought against the East India Company. ‘We must resist this so-called peace which emasculates spirituality and makes it weak, Ganesh,’ he said. ‘We must see the big picture. We must know when we have to fight to bring peace. We must be strong in our faith. Our entire history, thousands of years of it, gives us examples of this. And if I am a holy man, Ganesh, so are you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you.’

  I was too dazed and exhausted – somehow this conversation had tired me out – to tell him that I believed in no faith, no spirituality. I hung up, and tried to work, and was plagued that entire day by this conundrum, me as holy man, myself as mahatma. I dreamt that night of the great akharas of naga sadhus who came to Nashik during the Kumbh Mela, about their naked bodies covered with ash, their matted brown jatas curling to their shoulders and below, their tridents and swords. I dreamt of the great roar that went up when the regiments of naga sadhus swept towards the holy waters for their bath, and the ferocious gleam on the sadhus’ eyes as they ran. I saw a small man, a peaceful man, amongst these great and good sadhus, and I felt bitter contempt for him, and I woke up with my heart rushing. I turned my mind away from Nashik, but all night I was pursued by this question: what does it mean to be holy? Who is virtuous?

  The next time Guru-ji called, we talked about God. I told him that I had no belief in such a thing, and no need for such a belief. I said that religion was a tool with which politicians whipped their constituents and drove them in herds towards the slaughterhouse. I said faith was for men who had no faith in themselves. He did not argue with me. He listened quietly, and said, ‘Those are reasonable arguments. You are correct in your logic.’

  He stopped me short with that. I had expected him to dispute and quarrel and hector, maybe to curse me for a fallen man. But he did none of those things. He listened to me quietly and gave me respect. Then he said, ‘But, Ganesh, what about all the symmetries in the world?’

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but then he explained. He showed me how for every fire there is water, for every predator there is prey, for every love there is a hate. He talked about electrons and their charges, and strange attractions and repulsions. There were parts of what he was saying that came to me only as a sonorous hymn, but I understood instantly, profoundly, what he was talking about. Yes, for every Ganesh Gaitonde there is a Suleiman Isa. For every victory there is a loss. ‘Yes,’ I said to him, ‘I understand. Everything comes in twos, or repetitions of two and more. Everything clashes, and swings apart, and loops and comes around again.’

  ‘Of course, of course, Ganesh,’ he said, his pleasure booming through his voice, ‘see, you already have it. I didn’t even have to explain it. You already know. You already are on the path.’

  ‘On the path to this God of yours? No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘You must not think that I am arguing for Vishnu, or any other creator, Ganesh. You know I am not that simple. Listen to me: through these symmetries, lift yourself even higher. Can you see the patterns of the world, of the universe? The waves below you, under the boat, they may seem chaotic, but are they? No, only in a minor sense. There is an order that we sometimes glimpse, sometimes lose. But the order is there. Beyond the local and the immediate, there is this grand order. Ganesh, go ashore and look at a field of grass. See how the sun feeds the grass, and the earth sustains it. Observe how the grass shelters other creatures, and feeds them in turn. Do you see how everything fits together. Finally, after everything, Ganesh, do you see the beauty?’

  I tell you, my head was bursting then. I had my fingers on the skipping edges of his meaning, but it vanished from me with every breath. He knew this. He told me not to worry, but just to watch everything for the next week. ‘Deal with everything as normal. But also, simultaneously, try to see beyond that. And next week, tell me what you saw, just randomness, or a shape. Chaos, or order.’

  Five minutes after I got off the phone I was laughing at myself. I thought, you weakling, listening to the babblings of an old man. But he had planted something in me. I didn’t want to, but I found myself looking for connections and mirrorings. And I found them. I thought about the ways in which men and women needed each other, and how the human race rolled on, despite all the quarrels and the heartbreaks. This was obvious enough, banal if you stepped away from it for a minute. But that led me to conception and birth, the minuscule pin-headed worm thrashing its way up towards the enormity of the egg, and the mixing of their smuggled pieces of instruction, all to form a new creature that would one day be whole, and producing emissaries himself. Commonplace, and yet so complicated and amazing. I felt foolish at the wonder that swamped my head, at being able to see these mundane surfaces that hid whole universes of complication. But I kept quiet and kept on looking, as he had told me to do. Towards the end of the week, my mind turned from things to sequences. I had watched programmes on television about the dinosaurs and their extinction, the rise of mammals (while the boys groaned and begged for another television set, so they could go back to their prancing heroines), I had watched long-ago hairy apes make their first kills on the African plains. That was the arc of life on the planet, all the way to humans, and to me. This curve had direction and velocity, it swept upwards and it was still going, towards the moon and then to the stars. But there was my life. Did it have shape? Was there beauty in its progress, if you only distanced yourself enough to see? I thought about this, and worried about it. Could it really be that I was randomly tossed about by the surging waves of events? That one day came next to each other just because it had to, because of nothing. I couldn’t accept this. This buzzing blur of chaos caused me pain, I mean a stomach twisting and flexing, a headache, and again my piles caught at me and left me dizzy and shaking in the bathroom. My body was protesting against this assertion that my life meant nothing. No, my life had shape. I had started poor and alone, I had struggled, I had won, I had moved upward, I had found a home and many who loved me. And even now I was learning, I was progressing, I had a mission for my country, I had a teacher, I was going somewhere. I had a story.

  This is what I told Guru-ji the next time we spoke, and he praised me. ‘Your instinct is unerring, Ganesh. The atman knows the nature of the universe, it understands its intricate connections, from the smallest to the largest. The atman knows because it is the universe. But the mind interferes. This incomplete structure we call scientific logic blocks our view and, paradoxically, keeps us ignorant. Otherwise, how could you see this enormous network of connections, and not believe that there is an author?’

  ‘You mean God, Guru-ji?’

  ‘I mean consciousness.’

  That was where we had started, and he had helped me on my journey to knowledge. No, he had picked me up and carried me up the mountain of wisdom. He bore my weight with ease, and as we ascended he showed me these unborn truths, these eternal facts. He pointed out to me the cycles of history, and beyond those, the rhythms of evolution, of stars being born and sliding towards their inevitable dissolution, of the universe expanding and then racing to a point to explode again.

  And then, months after we first started talking, he revealed the power that these insights had brought him. He told me my future. I had read testimonials on his website from hundreds of people, that he could do this, and that he had done this for them. I had read through some of these pages, marvelling at the desperat
e need that humans have for reassurance and comfort. The testimonials were quite detailed, giving names and circumstances: here was a doctor from Siliguri whose daughter suffered from leucoderma and remained unmarried, and Guru-ji told him not to worry, that in the last three months of that year a solution to his problem would be found, and sure enough, in that very winter a German engineer came to work on an agricultural project, and was struck by the grace and white beauty of the girl, and he took her away to happiness in Düsseldorf. There was screen after screenful of this, and not only happiness had been predicted, Guru-ji was frank about bad times, about accidents involving water and divorces and business reversals. I decided that this was all nothing but the obsessions of small people who did not have the resources, internal or material, to fight with life and win. But then Guru-ji told me one evening, ‘Watch out for the Thais.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I see that you will attempt to close some deal with some Thai fellows in the next few days. Be careful. Do not trust them. They mean you harm.’

  Now it was true that we were about to tie up a sale with some fellows from Krabi province, we had brought in four million tablets of methamphetamine for the Thais, but Guru-ji could just have made a guess: at any given time we would be making some deal or other with some group of Thais, nothing especially insightful in that. So I didn’t take him too seriously, thanked him politely all the same and forgot about it until the morning of the exchange. Then, tickled uncomfortably by the recalling of Guru-ji’s prediction, I woke up and called the boys – who had already left – and told them to be careful, and to keep a shooter in reserve. And the Thais, the idiots, tried the most hackneyed, the most boring grab and run that any of us had seen in fifteen years. They had brought some extra personnel and hidden them in a house up the beach, and they thought that was enough to overpower our unit. Of course we cut them down, our reserve shooter caught their back-up as they came blundering out of the house on cue, and that was that.

  So it happened, leaving the question of Guru-ji’s prediction entirely up in the air, hovering over my head like a bomb suspended in mid-fall. I was afraid to accept, to let it come down, lest it explode my mind. The long cycles of creation and destruction were all very well, but – maderchod! – how was a man able to look into the future? It was impossible. Time ran one way, from before to after, and physically you couldn’t thrust yourself into what was to come.

  Guru-ji heard me out patiently. Then he said, ‘So you think you know what time is?’

  ‘Guru-ji, what is there to know? Time is time. It goes from here to there, and we live inside it. The road is marked, and you can’t do a U-turn.’

  ‘But do you know, Ganesh, that scientists have discovered particles that travel backwards in time? And do you know that time is not constant, that it bends and stretches and compresses? If there is a jet plane passing above your head, going fast, its pilot is ageing a little less slowly than you? For him, time is passing more slowly compared to your time.’

  ‘No. That can’t be.’

  ‘But it is. Even the scientists have known that for more than a hundred years. They have admitted that a travelling particle of light, which was born billions of years ago during the Big Bang, has not aged a second since then. So, Ganesh, if you could travel at the speed of light, you would be young for ever.’

  I didn’t understand any of this. I didn’t understand the articles he e-mailed me, or the videos he had me watch, all his Einstein and relativity and black holes and the universe curving round on itself, it all made me as dazzled as a small child looking into the sun. But he convinced me that the world I thought I knew was only a shallow illusion, that how things looked and felt was a dream, not inconsequential but not substantial either. And he convinced me that some people, some men and women, even some children, could look through the spiral of time. ‘It’s an inborn ability,’ he said to me. ‘The horoscopes, the readings of the palm, all those are props that enable this ability, make it move and energize itself. If you have this ability, and you train it and discipline it and exercise it, make it supple and strong, you can read the narrative of the universe, and sometimes see where the story is going, catch glimpses of the future plot, because this future already exists. If you are a true master, then nothing is hidden from you. Me, I have a modest gift. And if it makes you uncomfortable to be paying attention to a jyotishi, if you feel like you are in the grip of some wicked fraud, then just think of me as a friend who offers advice now and then, with the best of intentions. Don’t take me too seriously. I may be wrong now and then, I may misinterpret the scattered images and intuitions that I get. So take it for what it is worth, Ganesh. Maybe the information will be useful to you. Don’t trust it without corroboration, treat it like any other intelligence you acquire.’

  That’s what he said. And then he grabbed pieces of what was to come and dropped them into my lap. He didn’t do it every day, and he didn’t always have crucial, life-saving information for me. He told me that a delayed shipment from Rotterdam would arrive on such-and-such a day, and it did. Or he said that one of my boys would face health problems in late July, and of course one dirty fool nurtured some monstrous fungal infection between his toes that finally kept him from walking. Guru-ji made mistakes also, twice what he said didn’t come to pass. But the other fifty-two times it did. Yes, I counted, I made notes in a diary. The numbers taught me that what he was doing was true, that he had not lied. He had a talent. You can believe or not, as you wish, but I had resisted as long as I could. Now I believed.

  Now the Guru-ji phone buzzed. I wiped my hands on my pants, and picked it up. I put in my eighteen-digit encryption code, and he spoke to me.

  ‘I was thinking of you when I wrote today’s pravachan, Ganesh.’

  ‘Pranaam, Guru-ji. I was just reading it.’

  ‘I know.’

  He did that sometimes. He would know what you had been doing, what you were thinking, what you wanted but were afraid even to admit to yourself. Once, in long-ago days, I had been subject to fits of scepticism, but all my rock-like disbelief had been shattered and vanquished by the thunder of his insight. He knew you better than you, he saw into your life, he knew your future and your past, and he never made any judgements. That was the most amazing thing about Guru-ji, that he was himself the most sattvic man, more undesiring of the base things of life than the Buddha himself, but he never looked down on those of us who still thrashed about in the nets of wanting. I had asked him once whether my dhandas upset him, all the various businesses I ran to make a living. I asked him why he didn’t try to have me give up those activities the world called criminal. A tiger is glorious as a tiger, he said, a tiger who tries to become a vegetarian sheep is a pitiful abomination. In Kaliyug, there are no simple acts, he said, and there has never been a clear path to salvation. ‘So, Guru-ji,’ I said now, grinning. ‘You were thinking of me. What do you think? Am I ready for celibacy?’

  He laughed his usual glorious burble, as free as a baby in his mother’s arms. ‘Beta, you are a warrior. You are my Arjun. You need not only your Draupadi, but also the other gifts of the earth as you wander. To block your own nature would be a crime, and would make you incapable of the work you must do.’

  All this I had heard him say before, but I liked listening to him. There was something golden about the timbres of his voice, something dense, and they settled into my chest and comforted me. I grew calm listening to him, so sometimes I asked him questions just to hear him talk. But today I had a real question. ‘Did you look at the papers, Guru-ji?’ I meant six-foot Jamila’s charts and biodata, which I had faxed to him in Denmark. He of course had no problem with the fact that she was Muslim, but wanted to consider her stars and her future.

  I could feel him smiling. ‘You are impatient, Ganesh.’

  ‘No, no, Guru-ji. I know how busy you are. There’s no hurry.’

  ‘Ganesh, I understand. It has been a while. Too long.’

  It had been a while since I had a wom
an. Of course I didn’t partake of the common girls that were brought in for the boys. For me, Jojo only sent special cases, and all of those were approved by Guru-ji. But I wasn’t so weak that I would grow impatient with him. ‘Guru-ji, nothing like that. This one is more interesting than usual, that’s all.’

  ‘I agree with you, Ganesh. Her stars and signs and lines are very interesting indeed. This woman will go far. She has intelligence, but more than that she has luck. Every time she needs something, someone will come into her life who can provide. Her path will be smoothed and built for her.’

  ‘But is she lucky for me?’

  ‘I’m not quite certain yet. I’ve been looking at the charts, and in general they fit. But I am unable yet to get an image from them. Something is waiting to happen.’

  ‘No hurry, Guru-ji,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

  There were prime ministers and CEOs queuing up to consult with him, but he made time for me. He thought about me, he cared. Sometimes this realization caught at my throat, as now. He heard the thick emotion in my voice, and he said gently, ‘So what’s the news?’ By news he meant the ongoing drama of the boys and their lives. He enjoyed hearing about them, about their amusements and their passions, and even about the problems of their mothers and sisters, and the law-suit that one uncle had filed against a brother. He was a realized master, but he was interested in all of it, in the common ordinariness of their problems. I always told him their tales, and he listened with relish, and offered comments and suggestions. ‘Guru-ji, today I have a solid instalment. My slowpoke gadha Arvind has decided he’s in love with one of the randis. He wants to get married.’

  ‘Really? And what do you think?’

  ‘I’ve checked the charts. No big problems.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  I read off the dates and times and places, and even as I finished he had seen deep into the case. ‘This girl is very dynamic,’ he said. ‘This Arvind has strength and intelligence, but he is quite passive. A very tamasaic personality. This girl moves him, puts him in motion. You are right, there are no major problems here. But they will have only girls. And his liver will give him trouble. Otherwise the charts match. Let them do it, Ganesh. The other boys may make fun, but as leaders we must be forward-looking. This girl has paid her debts from her prior births, and it is time she is lifted from this life of selling herself. All of existence is a movement forward, from low to high, and it is our duty to help this evolution along. Marriage is an auspicious occasion, and this will be a good marriage.’