Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  In the delicious cool of first morning, Sartaj knew he was dreaming. He was walking down an endless twisting lane in a basti. The corrugated tin roofs were glistening with black rain, and there was a man stretching a torn piece of polyethylene over his shack. Sartaj walked. Katekar was walking next to him. They were talking about the riots. ‘Those were bad days,’ Katekar said. They were both walking behind Kazimi. Kazimi was walking in front of them. They walked. Then they spoke of the bomb blasts. Sartaj told Katekar about the severed foot he had seen on the road, about the tree stripped of all its leaves. ‘He was lucky,’ Katekar said, pointing with his chin at Kazimi. Katekar looked sad. I am dreaming, Sartaj thought.

  Then Sartaj was awake. Mary was asleep next to him, and she was holding on to his forearm. Her breathing was slow and easy in the calm. Sartaj’s hip was stiff, but he didn’t want to turn over, the bed was narrow, he didn’t want to wake her. Kazimi was lucky, he thought. Those were bad riots. Those endless nights with the burning bastis, the fleeing Muslims, the men with swords. The screams. The gunshots echoing from the buildings, back and forth. Who had shot Kazimi, a Hindu or a Muslim? Or another policeman, shooting wild? Anyway, he was lucky. He was lucky, and he was lucky only to be limping, he was lucky that he was not in a wheelchair. If he had been crippled, he wouldn’t be able to walk down those bumpy lanes. Not unless he had a wheelchair like Bunty’s.

  Sartaj sat up. He was quite awake now, blood thudding in his head. Mary stirred beside him, he had jolted her.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  Sartaj was remembering Bunty’s wheelchair, the slick foreign styling of it. And he had a voice from long ago in his ear, a man preaching. A golden voice, confident of the truths it was telling. He couldn’t see the man directly, but there he was, on a television monitor. He was a great guru, a famous guru, and he had done a yagna. Mary’s television was dark. In it, Sartaj could see his own face. There had been a wheel on that other television screen, a wheel behind the guru’s head. A shiny wheel, long ago. The guru had been on a wheelchair. A fast wheelchair, an unusual wheelchair. Sartaj remembered the low electronic hum it made.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing. I have to get to work. I will call.’

  He kissed her, tucked a sheet high about her shoulders and gathered up his things. The landing was dark, and there was the slightest beginning of light at the sliver of horizon he could see between the buildings. He shut the door behind him, and then sat on the top step to pull on his shoes. His fingers were twitchy, nervous, as he tried to hurry. He took the steps in three loping leaps, and as soon he was on solid ground he reached for his mobile phone. The screen was a dead grey. Maderchod, he hadn’t charged it last night. And then he was on the motorcycle, speeding down the empty roads. He knew of an all-night PCO near Santa Cruz station, and he was there in less than ten minutes. He knocked at the window, got up the boy dozing behind the counter. Come on, come on. Then he was listening to clicks on the line as the call went through. On the green partition that separated the booth from the counter, a large heart had been scratched into the wood. There was an arrow through it, and ‘Reshma’ and ‘Sanjay’ in flowing script on either side. The heart was bleeding little drops of blood, a whole line of them arcing down towards the ground. Sartaj ran a finger over the arrow

  ‘Hello?’ Anjali Mathur’s voice was low and rough, but alert.

  ‘Madam,’ Sartaj said. ‘This is Sartaj Singh calling from Mumbai. You are sleeping, sorry.’

  ‘What happened? Tell me.’

  ‘Madam,’ Sartaj said, ‘I think I may know Gaitonde’s guru.’

  Ganesh Gaitonde Makes a Film

  ‘You dab the eye-shadow on, darker at the corners of the eyelids.’

  I was lying across a silver-framed, satin-sheeted bed, watching Jamila put on make-up. She had the lights on in a blazing circle around the mirror and was sitting up close to it, assaying her face with the calm detachment of a doctor. She was bare-chested, but when she worked on her face even I could only pay attention to her eyes, her cheeks. ‘Then you put the eyeliner on, Lakme charcoal black. You make a little tail on the outside of the eye. See? Like a little fish. It balloons up at the end. Which gives a false contour to the eye. Okay, so. If your upper lid is highly eye-lined, you don’t want to go heavy on the lower lid. You would lose definition on the upper lid. If you want your eyes to look big, you go a bit high on the outer edges of the lower lids. Use a pencil that you can smudge, and push it up a bit.’

  She was speaking loudly, over the disco music with its strutting beat, but enunciating very sharply. She practised clear speaking. She checked on me to see if I was paying attention, and I smiled. I was nicely tired, I had taken her twice that evening, once on the floor. There were six feet of her, all of it smooth and young and resilient and yielding, and I had explored the entire territory, every last bit of it. ‘Your eyes look huge,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, then. Cheekbones. You use blush on the cheekbones, get a shine. I like Bronze Blitz. See? Then you have to decide, do you want a soft look or a hard look? Where are you going, what’s the impression you want to make? If you’re going to be under lights, with cameras clicking, you might want a hard look, to stand out in the photographs. But we’re not going anywhere. So, soft. For a soft look, I like using this MAC lipliner, it’s German. You outline the lips. I’m using the Plum Preserved colour today. Now, you only want to outline the lips. If you used the lipliner on the whole lip surface, it would be too sharp. So, I use blush-on for lipstick.’

  ‘Very clever,’ I said. ‘You are one sharp Jamila.’ She didn’t even give me back a thousandth of a smile. About her work she was as serious as a pandit. Or a mullah, in her case.

  ‘You dab in the blush-on, then spread it with a finger. Like this. So, lips done. Now, mascara.’ She opened her mouth further to put on the mascara. I had noticed this every time I had watched her do her face, just as I had noticed it with every woman I had been with. They would reach towards their eyes with the mascara, but would open their mouths wide. They were a strange tribe, women. ‘With mascara, linger on the roots of the eyelashes as you go up. As you go up, shake the applicator a bit, do a little twist. See? Linger, shake, twist. And what do you get? Thick, lovely lashes. That’s what. Okay, now we’re getting done. But not finished. The secret is: blend, blend, blend! Everything has to blend. No sharp edges.’

  She blended. I watched.

  ‘Let’s see. What else? Okay, today, for the sultry look, I’m going to use some lip-stain. It gives a stained effect, sort of smoky. I’m going to use a purple MAC lip-stain. You should even out the stain. If you don’t have a brush, you can use the end of a pencil. Like this.’ Then she turned to me, held out her hands wide. ‘Finished. See? I’m done.’

  And yes, yes, she was done. She was transformed, from an interesting and stretchy piece of unpolished Lucknow steel into a translucent, weightless blooming of light. She stood up, to her full long height, and slipped a blue dressing gown over the delicate angle of her shoulders. Underneath, she wore only black thong panties and slim pumps. I had paid Jojo an unprecedented amount for this tall virgin, and then given lakhs to Jamila herself afterwards, and every time she stood straight and tall like this, I thought, paisa vasool. She walked away from me, down the length of the suite, hip-tilting against the Singapore skyline. At the end of the carpet, she struck a runway pose and gave me a long gaze over her shoulder. There was a little flash of upreaching nipple, erect and clearly silhouetted. And in that moment, with the bright blue behind and she all gold and darkness in front, we could have been on television, on Fashion TV or Star TV or Zee TV. She came back to me, doing that walk, and I felt that tearing pull in my chest that you get from rich, glossy, beautiful women. There was that mingled longing and hopelessness, of seeing something that swam in the heavens far above. The difference was that I could have this one kneeling before me in a second. Mine, I thought, she is mine. So there
was the pain, but also this pleasure. So I let her walk. She knew I liked to watch her, and she gave me a show. When I could stand it no more, I had her pose on all fours near the window, in the bronze waning of the light, and I knelt in front of her, at her mouth. This was the third time that day, I hurt and shuddered and finally found release.

  Afterwards we ate. I was hungry all right, but to watch her eat was frightening. She ate politely enough, with knife and fork and little pats of the napkin to the corners of her lips, but she put away enough food for three men. If you insisted on speaking to her, she would of course make good conversation, about the topics of the day. But left to her preferences, at mealtimes she was completely quiet. She ate her way through plates of chicken, followed up with a dish of lamb, or two, and finished with goblets of ice-cream. Instead of tea or coffee, she drank a glass of lassi, or milk if that was all that was available. The first time we’d eaten together, she had told me she didn’t need caffeine, that every cell in her body ran and sprinted by its own nature. She needed only five hours of sleep a night to look rested and rosy, and could get by perfectly with four.

  I, on the other hand, was exhausted from the day’s exertions, all within the confines of this flat. So I ate quietly, and then bathed. When I came out of the bathroom, Jamila had the covers turned down and a glass of warm milk on the night-stand. I had trained her well. While she showered, I sipped at the milk and talked to Arvind on the intercom. He was just downstairs from us, in the bottom half of this double duplex apartment with his Suhasini, who no longer looked like Sonali Bendre. Guru-ji had been right about their marriage: they had each become stronger in it. Arvind was still thoughtful, but he was now decisive and pragmatic. Suhasini had given up her flashy, trollopy ways, and was now placidly happy, and her energy fuelled her husband. I had made Arvind a controller in our eastern operations, and had established him in this fine apartment on Havelock Road, which was really two apartments. I met Jamila only here, in this upper penthouse, only in this one place. Our interaction was most secret, and not only because of the risk to me. It was obvious to all of us, to me and Jamila and Jojo, that a girl who wanted to be Miss Universe had better not be easily connected with an international lord of crime. So we kept it quiet. Just as the tall Jamila was quiet. Even when she showered she never sang, when she watched movies she never laughed or cried or clapped. Now, from the bedroom, I could hear the splashing of the water, and that was about all. I talked business with Arvind, and asked after the pregnant Suhasini. Then I hung up, and called Bunty in Bombay. More business talk, and by the time we had finished Jamila was done with her long evening ablutions. Her washbasin in the bathroom looked like a chemist’s shop, with ointments and lotions and shampoos arranged neatly in rows. Yet when she came to bed, with her hair up, she managed not to have that clammy, creamed-up look that so many women brought with them to sleep. She just looked clean, scrubbed and healthy.

  I switched off the light, and we lay next to each other. I knew she wouldn’t sleep for a while, for an hour or two at least, but she deferred to my schedule and was courteously pliable. She ate and slept and woke when I wanted. And I wanted to sleep now. But her body kept me awake.

  It was not only appetite that tickled and teased my mind into movement. I was sated, for the moment. What I was thinking about was the form of her body, its lines and arrangements and proportions. We had remade that form. Jamila’s bottom had been realigned. That is, the cheeks – which are naturally asymmetrical on all human beings – had been lined up. The fat inside the small rolls on her hips had been sucked out and inserted into her gaand, to make it properly plump and perky. The lower end of her thighs, the sides and the upper rear portions, just under her bottom, had all been liposuctioned. Her waist had been liposuctioned. As had her upper arms and the area behind her chin. She had new saline implants in her breasts, natural-shaped ones we had examined and handled and discussed at length. We had done all this at Dr Langston Lee’s house of wonders on Orchard Boulevard. He had a peerless reputation, a clean and very modern clinic and extravagant rates. But he was a master, that small-eyed and funny-speaking man, he was a maha-magician of flesh, he could move it and transform it and make it vanish and have it reappear. Jamila had found him through her extensive world-ranging research, and he had not disappointed. Even I, who had been a thoughtless consumer of bodies, a mostly undiscriminating chodu who knew what he liked but not why, even I had learnt from listening to their discussions. I understood now this language of beauty, its grammar and its sublime syntax. Listening to these two poets, I understood how a well-made song of curves and textures and spaces could effortlessly enchant the stoniest heart. It was magic that they had created together, this doctor and his subject. There was no defence against the cunning spell they had made out of her.

  This process had cost a lot of money already, and unimaginable pain. I hadn’t ever visited Jamila in the clinic, but I had spent time with her after the surgery, in our flat. She had never let out a groan, or complained, but I knew what effort it cost to make one journey from the bed to the bathroom when the tissues under her thighs had been ripped and assaulted by a probing nozzle. I saw the grinding strain in the sweat on her forehead. I felt it in her bruises, in the yellow-green welts across her breasts, in her clutch on the bed-cover. So much pain, so many days of it. And it was not over. We were going to do her face next. Dr Lee was going to carve hollows in her cheeks. He was going to put fat in her lips. He was going to work on her nose, sharpen it with an implant. He was going to raise her hairline. And the chin was to get an implant too, to lengthen it, to make it strong, shapely, exactly the right counterpoint to her brow. He was going to make her harmonious, flawlessly balanced, perfect. She was then going to be – according to her calculations – complete.

  ‘How did you begin?’ I said.

  ‘Saab?’ she said. Her reply was instant, and she was not sleepy, not fuzzy. But my question, it must be admitted, had been vaguely phrased.

  ‘When did you first think you wanted to be a star? When did you make a plan to come to Bombay? How did you manage it?’ There was no change in her breathing, or movement in her body, but she came into full alertness now. I could feel it on my forearms, at the back of my neck.

  ‘That is a boring small-town story, saab.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Yes, saab,’ she said. She was a good girl. She always called me ‘saab’, and was quiet and obedient. Now she spoke, in even tones. ‘The first time I saw models was when I was six years old.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. And as she spoke, every other minute I made a sound, a ‘yes’ to let her know that I was listening. And she went on.

  ‘I mean, I had seen them before in magazines and newspapers, and actresses in the films, but that time I saw models in real life, in our Lucknow itself. My mother had taken me to my chacha’s house, and on the way back we walked through Hazratganj. The models were walking out of a department store, they had come to Hazratganj for the grand opening. They walked out of the store, across the pavement, through a crowd held back by policemen, and climbed into an air-conditioned bus. That was it, thirty seconds, maybe a minute. With me standing squeezed between my mother and some man, looking up at them. They passed so close that I could have reached out and touched a skirt, a hand. But I didn’t. I held on to my mother’s burqa and looked up at the models. They were there, right there. In Hazratganj. But they looked like they were from another world. Like they were fairies. They were tall. Taller than me, taller than my mother. Thin and tall. Two of them spoke as they went past, in English, and I understood none of it. But even their voices had that feeling, that mood which was there on their red cheeks, their dark eyes. They were fairies. After that when anyone told me a story about princes and djinns and magic, I always saw the models. I never forgot them. That evening, I asked my mother who they were. She didn’t know. She was a pious woman who always wore a burqa, what did she know of models? I tried to tell my father when we got home, and he laughed and asked
my mother what I was talking about, and she shrugged. Some shameless cut-haired foreign girls, she said.

  ‘They weren’t foreign, they were Indian enough, a troupe of top models from Bombay. But that was foreign enough for my mother. We found out the next day who they were. My father was a small man, he owned a small restaurant in the Chowk Bazaar, and he was pious. He thanked Allah every day for the success of the restaurant, which was famous even beyond Lucknow for its kakori kababs. But he was also progressive. In the restaurant he took not only two Urdu papers but also the Times of India. He couldn’t read English himself, but he hoped that his children would learn, move up in the world. Actually, his hope was mainly for his sons, my elder brothers. But I – who was the youngest and his pet then – also used to flip through the papers and magazines that he bought for them, and listened to his discussions with them. That morning my eldest brother, Azim, who was most fluent in English in the family and was preparing for the UP State Services exam, he laughed and said, here are Jamila’s foreign women. And there they were, in a photograph on the third page of the paper, floating down a long raised walk. I recognized the one right in front, she had been part of the conversation I had heard. Azim explained to my father that they were models who had come from Bombay for a fashion show at a five-star hotel, which had been attended by all the rich people of Lucknow, and also the DIG and the collector. That was the first time I think I had heard the words “fashion show”. I hardly knew what they meant. I imagined a crowd, like that on the pavement in Hazratganj, and the beautiful models walking above them all. Nothing else, just drifting by. And all the people looking at them.