Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  Once he said it, it was obviously and shiningly true. And it was the exact line I took with the boys. That very evening, after I said goodbye to Guru-ji, I called Arvind and his Suhasini in and gave them permission, and a talk. I told them that they were setting out on a great journey, and they had to be doubly strong and discreet because of the gossip that would follow them. I tried particularly to impress on her the duty she owed to her husband, what a good and great thing he was doing. This Suhasini had Sonali Bendre’s slim height all right, those long legs, but her features were heavier, darker. She listened with her eyes downcast, but I could see in her what Guru-ji was talking out, this great energy. There was movement here all right.

  So it was all arranged. In less than a week they were married. Of course I called Jojo before the marriage and told her what I had decided, and she said, ‘Gaitonde, for once in your life you are doing a completely good thing.’ She gave her blessing also, and sent a gift to the couple, diamond rings for both of them, with decent-sized stones set in white gold. We arranged a hall, and a pandit was brought in from Bangkok. I had given the boys a good lecture, and told them to respect the solemnity of the occasion, but I could see that they were themselves calmed by the chanting of the shlokas. The determined seriousness of Arvind and Suhasini as they bound themselves to each other quietened even the drunken Ramesh. They sat cross-legged, in a little circle, and watched. Me, I grew melancholy. The flames hummed and I sank away into them, into memory. My chest ached for my Abhi, and I remembered again how he used to bat at my cheeks with his little fists, and how he would kiss me when I begged him to.

  This mood of mine persisted even after we had sent the happy couple off on their honeymoon, to a week in a cottage in Koh Samui. I meditated that evening, moved my breath in circles in my belly, and yet I was unable to shake off this shark-toothed bite of regret that swam just a little behind me, stabbing at my heels. I switched on the television and found an Indian channel. A blonde VJ spoke accented Hindi and introduced fast songs. I switched it off. I lay in bed awake, thinking that although my boys lived close to me, I was alone. They were feet away, separated from me only by lengths of metal and wood, and I was alone. With my boys I had to be strong always, to be their father, distant and powerful and sometimes wrathful. Those to whom I could tell the stories of my discontents and longings, they were all far away. I was close to them only in words, through broadcast and electricity. I was far from Guru-ji, and Jojo.

  He called then. My Guru-ji called. I leapt out of bed, got the phone on the second buzz. ‘Guru-ji?’

  ‘Meet me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have been a good student, beta. I have meditated on it, and now I think you are ready for more knowledge. But to take you further on this path, towards the secrets of Paramatma, I need to initiate you. I am in Bombay from next week, for Ganesha Chathurthi. I’ll be there for two weeks. I am conducting a very big yagna here, very important. The most important yagna of my life, actually. But after that I’ll be in Singapore for a week. Come and meet me in Singapore.’

  From our first conversation, through the months since, I had never met him. I had talked with him, maybe more than any of his other disciples, and I had seen him on television, but I had never sat with him, face to face. Now he was inviting me, and I was angry. Not at him, but at my life, myself. If he was doing the most important yagna of his life in Bombay, during Ganapati’s festival, why should I not meet him there? Why Singapore, that hell of cleanliness that bored me more than any other place on earth? Bombay was the earth I longed for, and it was dangerous for me, but it was also my Kurukshetra. And he was my Guru-ji.

  ‘Ganesh,’ Guru-ji said quietly, ‘can you come?’

  And in that moment I understood, it hit me like a bullet in the belly. I felt the truth blow into me and it rose into my mouth as laughter. He was testing me. This was my last test. I laughed and said, ‘Guru-ji, of course. I will see you, I will arrange it. In Singapore.’

  ‘In Singapore,’ he said. ‘I will be expecting you.’

  ‘Pranaam, Guru-ji.’

  I hung up, woke Arvind out of his honeymoon bed and began to make plans. Only Arvind, and Bunty in Bombay, knew where I was going. The rest of the boys thought that I was setting off on an emergency trip to Jakarta. And Guru-ji thought I was going to meet him in Singapore. But I had made up my mind. I was going to Bombay, to take part in his yagna. It was all meticulously planned. I was sure Mr Kumar, my wily Mr Kumar, had his people watching me. I was forbidden to enter India. I had become very valuable to Mr Kumar’s organization, and there was great risk to me inside the country, from Suleiman Isa and others. There was also risk to Mr Kumar and his people: if I was arrested inside India, maybe I would talk under police pressure, tell everyone of the deeds I had done for Mr Kumar. I knew these thousand-armed dangers, and so I planned with care. But even as I did, I was filled with admiration for Guru-ji, for his wanting to meet me. All I had to lose was my life. He was risking his great work, his position in the world, his connections with the small and the very large. If I was caught, if his relationship with me were known, he would lose his good name, his unstained honour. I was a gangster, and he was a saint. And yet he was risking everything for me, for my miserable, crawling worm of a life. Why? I wondered, and there was only one answer: he loved me. And so, even as Arvind and Bunty grumbled about the risk, about the police and my enemies and immigration officers and bullets, I was light-hearted. I was confident, I was fearless in the gentle cradle of my Guru-ji’s love. Three days later I flew into Bombay on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt, with a newly shaved head, a stubbled jaw, steel-rimmed spectacles, a new passport and a suitcase full of baby clothes for a non-existent niece. I had business papers and invoices, and my cover was complete, and they stamped me through at immigration without pause or question, and I was out on the sweltering sidewalk before I could bring myself to believe that I was back in Bombay. I raised a hand towards Bunty over the crowds waiting for relatives, and then he recognized me with a start. We didn’t say a word to each other until the car was out of the car park and we were zipping past the airport hotels.

  ‘This is mad,’ Bunty said. ‘Bhai, there’s nakabandi tonight. I was looked at pretty close twice on the way over here.’

  I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘At least say hello first,’ I said.

  He made a sound something like a laugh, full of nerves and edginess, and grabbed my hand. ‘Sorry, bhai. I can’t believe you’re back, and like this.’

  ‘How else would I come back, chutiya? On a magic carpet?’

  He shook his head. ‘This was too simple.’

  He was scared of being by himself, without his bodyguards. I had told him to come unarmed and alone. ‘Simple is best. What’s the nakabandi for?’

  ‘There were two big shop robberies over the last two days. I was told they have some information on the robbers, ex-employees. Small time, bhai.’

  So, nothing to do with us. Still, there were policemen gathered near metal grilles at some of the crossroads. We had to go through two of the inspections by the time we got to the highway. They peered into the slowing cars, and at the second blockade one of the policemen shone a torch directly into my face. He waved us on. The breath came out of Bunty in a thin wheeze.

  ‘Calm down, Bunty. They won’t know me because they all know I’m far away.’

  ‘You’ve lost weight, bhai, but still…’

  On the boat I had a good diet and regular exercise, I enforced a regimen on myself to purify my body, and so I had shed the pounds from jail and marriage. ‘And you’ve put it on,’ I told him. He had. We passed a small party of devotees dragging a five-foot Ganesha on a cart. They were dancing in front of Ganesha, men and women and children, to the beat of two drums. They were happy. I could feel that old racketing drumbeat in my neck, in my shoulders. ‘There are more jhopadpattis now,’ I said. ‘Look at this.’ The swarms of shacks had crept up right to the highway, where
I clearly remembered empty shoulders and scrubland.

  ‘Really, bhai? Looks the same to me.’

  I had been away for more than two years. Nothing looked the same to me. Under the orange light of the streetlamps the slums slept a convoluted sleep, browner and more numerous than I remembered. We passed a rank of hulking trucks painted bright red and green, and then went through a market with a hill of seeping vegetable rubbish at either end. The rubbish must have always been there, but I noticed it now. There was much new construction, taller buildings, one white one with gigantic concrete stilts built around it to support three new stories on top of the already existing four floors.

  ‘That’s one of the new extra-FSI jobs, bhai,’ Bunty said.

  Some builders had oiled some bureaucrats, who had found a chink in the regulations to finger the Floor-Space Index, so suddenly there were these strange crane-legged contraptions all over the city. ‘Three big new floors,’ I said. ‘That’s a lot of money.’

  ‘We know the owner,’ Bunty said, grinning. ‘He’s become a friend of ours.’

  He had contributed to my turnover, this FSI buyer, yet I was vaguely unsettled by this new trend. ‘I wouldn’t want to live on the ground floor of that thing,’ I told Bunty. ‘Those legs look like matchsticks.’

  He grunted out a long laugh. ‘If it goes down, bhai,’ he said, ‘all the better. Then you can build again, without that old building underneath. Maybe we should arrange it. He’ll build it at double the selling price, better for us.’

  ‘Chutiya,’ I said, but I was smiling. The billboards were all announcing internet companies and websites in flashy, forward-tilting lettering that promised speed. Clusters of auto-rickshaws sat nose to nose like bulbous insects. I caught myself thinking that, insects, and thought, I’ve been away too long.

  ‘Here,’ Bunty said.

  He had arranged a room for us at the back of a house in Santa Cruz. The street was very quiet, and the landlord was a furniture merchant with two school-age daughters, very orthodox and very respectable. We had two single beds, one coffee table and a clean bathroom. Bunty wrinkled his nose. ‘All right, bhai?’ he said, pretending concern for me. But it was he who had acquired high tastes, with his new incomes and his new stature.

  ‘Fine for me,’ I said. ‘Let’s sleep.’

  I woke him the next morning at six. He groaned when he saw the time, but I was merciless. I got him up, and out, and we walked down the road to a restaurant. We drank chai from their first pot of the day, and ate idlis. A line of office-goers waited at the bus stop in the dust-haze raised by the buses and cars. Schoolchildren went past us, swinging their bags. I was content to watch the scene, it was like a pageant to me. But at eight-thirty I sent Bunty to bring me a scooter. He protested. ‘Arre, why, bhai?’ he said. ‘I’ll just drive you in the car.’

  ‘You’re not going to drive me,’ I told him. ‘And I want a scooter.’

  He wanted to argue with me, but I gave him a look that shut him up. Off he went. Of course he was worried for his livelihood and his future, which would squeeze down considerably if I was jammed into a jail cell again, or killed. But he also loved me. We had walked together through many battles now, and I had made him a settled man, with a wife and two children and responsibilities and investments and money. So he hated me a little now, for making him risk it alone in a room in Goregaon with no guns and no bodyguards. But by nine-thirty he had a scooter for me at our room, a green Vespa with fancy silvered rear-view mirrors. ‘I had to borrow it from someone,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘The mamus will stop me just for those mirrors,’ I said. ‘Your friend thinks he’s on a racing motorcycle?’ But driving even a Vespa was difficult for me, it had been so many years since I’d done it. I skidded even as I started off, and Bunty ran after me until I waved him away. The first ten minutes were terrifying, but I grinned at the rush of it, and sucked in the wind between my teeth. I went by three mandaps with towering Ganeshas, all of them a bright, radiant orange. By the time I got to Juhu I was fine, I was slipping between the cars with complete confidence, and changing gears smoothly. I was sleek. I saw myself in the rear-views, and I was a purposeful man having a good time in the morning. I was in Bombay, and I was fearless. I was going to my Guru-ji.

  But once I got to the yagna-sthal in Andheri West I was stuck. They had police bandobast from two hundred feet away, and they weren’t letting any lone scootering taklus through. I had to park, and walk with a few hundred other devotees towards the mansion. This house belonged to a film-producer devotee of Guru-ji’s, a man with good political connections and lots of property in Bombay. The open ground in front of the house had been fenced and covered with a series of open-sided shamianas. The arrangements were all faultless, with wide, straight avenues between the shamianas and sadhus guiding the devotees to the proper seating places. There were television sets scattered through the shamianas, and good loudspeakers, so that you may have been seated far from the central dais – as I was – but you could see Guru-ji and what he was doing quite clearly. But he wasn’t there yet, just a group of his sadhus arranging the materials of the yagna on the dais. He appeared precisely at eleven, wheeling strongly down the central aisle, followed by a group of sadhus. They had built a ramp up to the dais, and up he went. I found myself standing, dancing, elbow to elbow with my fellow devotees, shouting ‘Jai Gurudev’. He let us fall into a chant, and then he raised his hands. We were silent. ‘Sit,’ he said, and all by himself went from the wheelchair to his seat in front of the microphones. He had strong arms, I could see that.

  He told us about sacrifice, about the altar. The dimensions of the altar had to be based on a measure of the sacrificer: the length of the middle joint of the middle finger of the sacrificer was one angula, and one hundred and twenty angulas made one purusha. The sadhus needed to lay out a square equal in length to two purushas, or two hundred and forty angulas. Who was the sacrificer? Guru-ji asked, ‘Who will be the sacrificer? We are merely the priests, but who will be the yajman?’ He paused, and then answered his own question: ‘In the old days, charkravartin emperors were the patrons of this sacrifice we are engaged in. But the day of the emperors is gone. Who is the emperor today? Who has power, who leads? It is you. You, the public. Power flows from you, from your votes. So, today, you are the sacrificer, the yajman. The public is the sacrificer. Each and every one of you is the sacrificer. So we have taken a scientific average. From a sample of two thousand Indian men from all over the country, from every state, our doctors have taken precise measurements, and we will use the average as our angula. You, my friends, are our purusha.’

  So, using cords and rods, and orientating by the sun, the priests laid out their square, and its peripheries, and its intertwining circles. Meanwhile Guru-ji talked to us about sacrifice. He told us how the universe was created through a sacrifice, how the gods sacrificed Purusha and from his limbs and his flesh all of creation was born. Everything that exists, everything that has ever been and will be is created by that first sacrifice. In any sacrifice, the sacrificer emulates that first great giving of the self, that first immolation. The sacrificer rehearses that sacrifice, and in doing so sustains the universe. ‘In sacrifice the sacrificer becomes Purusha, he becomes the original being who divided himself to create all things. Since this is so, properly speaking, at the end of the sacrifice the yajman should immolate himself. If he is Purusha, he should die to give life. But we will not ask this of you, and this is not how sacrifice has been conducted for many years. Instead of the self, we put into the sacred fire certain objects that are worthy of sacrifice. Instead of humans, once cows were sacrificed, and horses, and goats and rams. We will use certain cereals, certain flowers, certain grasses. But remember, as we fling these into the fire, what is being sacrificed is the self. If you are the yajman, all of you, then what you are sacrificing is your own selves, your bodies, you. What we put into the fire are merely substitutes, which the gods accept. What is being sacrificed is you. You are P
urusha. You must die, so that the universe may live.’

  Meanwhile the priests built the altar. We watched them over the televisions. At a point on the precisely measured and orientated ground, they laid a lotus. Over this they put a golden disc. These were the first waters and the sun. On this they gently balanced a small golden figure, who was Purusha, who was the yajman, who was us. Over Purusha they built the altar, in five layers of bricks, in the shape of a great eagle. ‘An eagle first brought the sacred soma from heaven to earth,’ Guru-ji told us. ‘And so, through sacrifice, we will drink of that divine bliss again. Through the flight of sacrifice, we will taste knowledge. We will know the self, and the universe.’

  Under the coloured canvas of the tents there was a white, lucid light. It was a cloudy day, quite cool for a day far after monsoon-end. There was a quietness in the crowd. People came and sat, stepped around each other with a friendly hand on the shoulder, left when they had to. Holding us all was Guru-ji’s calm voice, as deep as the sea, and the slow swells of the slokas, eternal and steady and unstoppable. Guru-ji translated and explained some of the slokas to us.

  Sacrifice is a loom

  Its many threads are these rituals

  The Fathers sit by the loom and weave the fabric

  They cry: ‘Lengthwise! Crosswise!’