Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  Navneet is beginning to realize that she has said something maybe a little silly, and is confused. She stutters, and blushes again. Ram Pari wants to reach out and touch her, but she doesn’t. She knows that Bibi-ji may come in at any moment, and shout at her for wasting time. But she can shrug off Bibi-ji’s bellowing for all eternity, and just now, just in this moment, she loves this Navneet. She says, ‘Tell me what Kismet is about,’ and she settles down to listen.

  III

  Rehmat Sani watches the night sky emerge from the fading bloom of a flare. He is comfortable and dreamy, settled into a hollow in the earth he has come to know well after using this route for almost three months. He is sixty yards from the fence, on the Pakistani side, and he is in no hurry. He has five hours before first light, and he has patience. The first time he crossed the border was when he was a boy, and back then you could just walk across, being careful to avoid the patrols and the minefields. Then, the bribes for the Rangers and BSF men had been smaller, and the mines more scattered, and the fence hadn’t been put in. But no matter. Rehmat Sani knows every inch of ground for a hundred miles south and north, and the border is many thousands of miles long. Even if it is all fenced, he will still get across. He has business on both sides, and of course family.

  He has done well this trip. Instead of the usual quarters of rum, this time he had carried two big bottles of foreign whisky for his cousin on the Pakistani side. Mushtaq has a captain who wanted the whisky, and a captain could be very useful, so Rehmat Sani had acquired the whisky from Aiyer and taken it across. Aiyer is small and dark and wears very thick glasses and looks quite unlike an intelligence man, but he is no fool. He knows when to be flexible. So Rehmat Sani has profited from the captain, from the money he has carried for his cousin the havildar, and also from a bottle of rum he took across for his own private gain. He has no new information for Aiyer, but Aiyer will wait until the captain can be developed. Aiyer is young but he is learning well. Rehmat Sani has high hopes for him.

  Rehmat Sani stretches, easing his muscles. Maybe he is getting too old for this. He can smell the damp from the deep, watery nullah which he will use to get to the fence. The crawl through the twisting defile will leave him soaked and cold, and it is this last bit of this route that makes him wish, every time, that he had sons who were earning already. But his first wife had given him only four daughters, and the younger wife had become pregnant only after three years, after he had gone to Ajmer Sharif and tied a thread and wept and appealed to Khwaja Sahib. Only then had Khalid been born. He is in school now, in the fifth standard, and Rehmat Sani intends to educate him fully. Rehmat Sani understands the demands of the time, he knows that a man without education – like himself – will not get far, or live well. But it is hard to bear the burden of two daughters married, and two still sitting at home. When Rehmat Sani was Khalid’s age, he had already travelled with his father as far as Lahore. He cannot remember much before that first journey, but he remembers the rooftops of Lahore glowing in the morning sun.

  Rehmat Sani shakes off the nostalgia and readies himself for the descent into the nullah. It is dark again, and the singe of the flare has faded from his eyes. He does not need to raise his head to check for threats. He can tell from the loud silence of the night, from the steady pinging of insects, from the ease of his own body. Against his chest, he can feel the plastic packet he has tucked away under his banian. The Pakistani captain paid for his whisky in crisp new Indian notes, which is convenient for Rehmat Sani. At home, he will take the money out of the plastic and give it to his senior wife to deposit in his bank and get his passbook updated. He cannot read the passbook, but he likes looking at the notations when she returns from her half-day trip to the bank. The scribbling makes him feel safe. Now he wonders where the Pakistanis get so much new Indian money. It’s strange that the freshly minted notes are taken over the border one way and then come back the other way with him. But this has been his whole life, going one way and the other, over this immense line in the ground, under the fence and around it. He doesn’t think much about why it winds its way across the fields, but it exists, so he has made his living from it. He yawns, and turns over. Time to go. It will take him two hours to get to the fence, another two hours before he is over to safety on the other side. Then he will stand up, shake off the mud and go home.

  IV

  Dr Anaita Kharas is squatting, emptying vermiculite into a pot. She has already put in the soil and the sand and the peat moss, in carefully measured proportions, and now she sifts the mixture through her fingers and enjoys its roughness. She could use a trowel – her sons tell her that her hands look like a labourer’s, not a doctor’s – but the weight of the earth on her palms settles her every morning before she sets out to work. She comes up here every morning, to the terrace of her house in Vasant Vihar, and works on her garden. She grows ficus and bottle-brush plants, bougainvillea and herbs, yellow champa and juhi. The December cold is biting into her fingertips, but even that is good. She has found that she needs this time alone, and putting suva seeds in a pot prepares her for the day of patients and disease. She is thinking, as she finishes her planting, about K.D. Yadav, who died three days ago. He was a good patient, even before his tumours turned him silent and unmoving. He suffered his loss of ability and comprehension with dignity. Only once she found him weeping, standing next to the window, and then he accepted her usual doctorly exhortations with a smile. He was much older than her, and very old-fashioned with his namastes and standing up when she entered the room, or at least wanting to, but he always listened to her intently. A time or two she found herself telling him things that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with her own life. He had that way of asking questions, of probing without seeming to, so that you gave him information without knowing you were. Days later, he would say, ‘Yes, I must have been in Calcutta when your father was posted there,’ and then you would remember that you had told him about living in Calcutta for a year at the age of eleven. He was a smart man, K.D. Yadav, for someone who had worked many undistinguished decades in the Ministry of Human Resource Development.

  Anaita stands up, flexes her knees. She walks around the periphery of the roof, examining the plants closely. She had fought an infestation of powdery mildew two months ago, and had lost two gulmohars, and had decided to be more vigilant in the future. Disease comes fast, and takes everything. But today her plants look well. They sweep in a conflagration of colours across the terrace, and the vines climb to the top of the water tanki a full floor higher. It is a large house, one that she and Adi would never be able to afford to buy or build today. Adi’s parents had bought two big plots in the sixties, when Vasant Vihar was still a wilderness beyond the Ridge. They had sold one plot twenty years later, and built a house on the other, and so now Adi and Anaita and their sons live in this colony of plenty. They are very lucky, but still prices are crazy in this locality. The boys don’t realize how expensive it is to put the food they love on the table, the meat and good bread and fruits. They are at that age when it is very important for them to keep up with their friends, and their friends – many of them classmates at Modern School – are the sons of industrialists and businessmen. Anaita thinks back to her long-ago days of ten rupees a week pocket money, and worries yet again for her sons. People have too much money nowadays, and they throw it about as if it meant nothing. Their children wear sunglasses worth thousands of rupees, and birthday parties cost lakhs. Many of their neighbours in E-block have three and four cars parked in their driveways, and maybe one more outside. So the boys sometimes resent Anaita and Adi, and think of them as stingy parents.

  Anaita has finished her inspection, and she walks to the middle of the terrace, near the stairway, and looks down into the courtyard. Adi’s father had insisted on building a small open space in the centre of the house, and no argument from his wife had persuaded him for even a moment. ‘I want to see light,’ the old man had said, and after the house was built, he had put
an armchair in the gallery abutting his precious courtyard and read the paper there every morning, no matter whether it was June or the chilliest of Januaries. Anaita had rather liked him for that. Now she can see Adi carrying a tray out of the kitchen. Any moment now he will call out for her, and then go and wake the boys. She will go down and drink the chai that he’s made, joke with the boys and eat some eggs. Adi is a good man. They have had their quarrels, sometimes severe ones which left both of them feeling ragged for weeks, but they have persevered and have survived. Adi says sometimes that they have worn the sharp edges off each other. He makes her laugh often, he takes part in the daily drudgery of raising a family and they are content together. She needs to go down now, she doesn’t like to leave the house too late, the traffic starts to congeal along the avenues, but she is still thinking about that K.D. Yadav.

  Why? She isn’t sure. She liked him, but she has liked other patients and has lost them. Death is nothing new to her, she deals with it every day, she is familiar with its onrush, with the sound of it, and the inertia and smells of its aftermath. She knows it is coming for her, for Adi, and she can even imagine – almost without flinching – the death of her children. Why, then, does K.D. Yadav stay with her? She strokes the leaves of a tulsi plant and breathes, and the chill is almost painful against her nostrils. How terrible it would be to lose the distinction between cold and hot, between inside and outside. At the end, when K.D. Yadav had gone completely still, he had looked neither happy nor sad. Had he still been able to tell whether it was day or night, whether he was alive or dead? Anaita had told his young friend or colleague, whatever she was, that Anjali Mathur, ‘Don’t worry. It’s all quite painless, he is not suffering.’ But now, she thinks of what it must be like not to suffer, to exist in some kind of vast void, and she shudders. Poor man, she thinks. He had liked so much to read, and finally the letters and the page must have melted together, become one thing that was nothing. Poor, poor man.

  ‘Anaita!’

  Adi is standing in the courtyard, holding a frying pan. Anaita giggles at the sight of him, completely ridiculous in that tacky Chinese dressing gown with the dragon curling its claws, which he absolutely refuses to give up.

  ‘What are you doing, yaar?’ he says. ‘Please go and take a bath, otherwise you’ll make me late.’

  ‘Coming, baba, coming,’ Anaita says. She takes one last look around her garden, and goes down to her life.

  V

  Even as he savours his victory, Major Shahid Khan worries about defeat. He is clipping his beard, and in the mirror he can see that none of this anxiety shows on his face or in his eyes. He has trained himself to be impassive. He has his Ammi’s clear Punjabi skin, but none of her easy expressiveness. His wife sometimes wonders how two closely related people could be so unlike. But Shahid Khan knows that he has inherited all of Ammi’s melancholy, her gargantuan rage, her sudden, bitter sarcasm. But he has learnt to control himself. He gives nothing away, ever. For all her sadness, Ammi sometimes laughs until her face goes red and you have to worry a little about her, but are unable to warn her because you have to hold on to yourself to keep from falling over. Her love for Shahid and his brother and their sister is so openly all-consuming that other mothers joke about it. Her sacrifices for these children are legendary. But Shahid Khan has tamped down all this emotion which swirls up from his genes, he has learnt early – in the ragged lanes of his childhood – to wear the armour of impassivity. This ability has served him well in his profession. He has this ability, and his faith, which stands him on unshakeable bedrock, which gives him the strength to endure anything.

  But today he is worried. He is in London, and late last night, just before leaving his office at the Pakistani embassy, he learnt about a death on the other side of the world. One Gurcharan Singh Bhola had been killed by the Indian police in Gurdaspur District, in a village called Veroke. Gurcharan Singh Bhola was the commandant of the Khalistan Tiger Force, which had been relentlessly whittled down by the Indian forces over the last year. And now Gurcharan Singh Bhola is dead. Shahid Khan had met him once, in those days when he was a lieutenant and cutting his teeth in the fields and villages of Punjab. Gurcharan Singh Bhola was a tall man, impressive with his muscular wrestler’s build and his burning commitment to his Khalistan. But Shahid Khan had only met him once, on a night when Bhola had passed through his picket, and it is not grief for the sardar that weighs Shahid Khan down this morning. He is now very far from Punjab, but it is obvious that the Indians are crushing the Khalistan movement. They are brutal, ruthless. With support from the central and state governments, their army and the paramilitary forces are hunting down the revolutionaries one by one. Shahid Khan knows exactly how much it cost – in money and effort and lives – to build up and support the movement. Now, it is finished. This reverse is humming in Shahid Khan’s veins. He has been trained to accept losses. He believes in ultimate victory like he believes in the fact of this mirror in front of him, as something that just exists, but the humiliation of loss is something that has always maddened him. He knows it is weakness, this anger. It clouds his judgement. He had hoped that with age he would learn equanimity, but passion lingers. He tries to think of his successes, in particular the recent operation in the ruins of the USSR, which operation he resuscitated and rescued after the Indians almost succeeded in killing it. For decades, during the years of cosy allegiance between India and the USSR, the Indians had had much of their high-value national currency printed in the Ukraine. After the fall of the Soviet empire, Shahid Khan’s agency had sent operatives into the Ukraine, to probe at the press where this currency was printed. These operatives had succeeded in setting up a deal – for a substantial sum paid in hard currency, the Ukrainians would give them the original plates for the Indian notes. That would have been a triumph indeed, to be able to print counterfeit Indian money from the original plates. But the Indians had got wind of the deal – everything was rotten in the Ukraine – and had claimed the original plates, and had got hold of them. Out of this complete disaster, Shahid Khan had brought a kind of victory and some dignity. He had come in after the fact and acted fast. The plates were gone, yes, but the paper was still there, sitting in huge warehouses, lightly guarded. Shahid Khan moved quickly, he made deals, he arranged logistics, he had a minor Indian embassy official picked up by local thugs and held for two days. And while the Indians were distracted, he stole their currency paper. Now the notes printed on this original, completely genuine paper – which Shahid Khan had obtained at some personal risk – are in circulation throughout India, and Shahid Khan knows that he is well on his way to becoming a lieutenant-colonel. Yes, there is that, even though the personal triumph cannot rescue him entirely from the national failure.

  He shakes himself out of his reverie, puts the scissors down and runs the water. He bathes efficiently, and as he towels himself dry he can’t help thinking, yet again, that the huge fluffy length of cloth is an absurd luxury. He has been able to afford such things for a while, and doesn’t begrudge his family these conveniences, but he has been shaped in a harder school. After he prays and eats, he straightens out his papers and pays some bills. It is a Sunday, and the women in the household – his mother, his wife, his daughter – have gone to East Ham to visit relatives. He is alone, and finally, after all responsibilities have momentarily been discharged, he feels that he can take an hour off. He goes to his bedroom and shuts the door. The front door is locked, and he knows nobody will disturb him, but he is compelled to make sure that his privacy is secure. Until now, only his wife knows he does what he is about to do.

  He sits in his favourite armchair, which faces the window. Good light is essential. He puts a pillow over his lap, the balls of yarn to his right. Then he begins to knit. He is making yet another scarf. His wife donates them, usually to a madrassa or an orphanage back home. The needles click, and click, and Shahid’s Khan’s shoulders ease and drop. He has been doing this for the last two years, since a doctor in Karachi told him
that he had better learn to relax, or his ulcers were going to kill him. ‘Learn how to really take a holiday,’ the doctor said. ‘Get a hobby.’ At first Shahid Khan played squash. He had always wanted to learn, and it looked like a good workout. But he found that he needed to win. He took extra coaching lessons, and began reading books on technique. When he found that he was dreaming of rematches, he gave it up. He was then sent to Ukraine, and there he took up chess. Wary of playing against another person, he invested in a handheld chess machine. The cleverness of the thing was delightful, how it folded out and clicked softly into a complete board, the recessed compartments for the pieces, the little red lights with which the machine told you which piece it wanted to move, and where. While he was learning to use it, his insides felt better. But then he wanted to play it at the harder levels, and the pains flared up. Anyway the martial metaphor was too obvious, its viziers and its pawns and black-and-white battleground made him think too much of the real world. He gave the machine to a friend, and suffered for a while in silence. Then he tried riding, but that lasted only until he met a recalcitrant horse.

  He called the Karachi doctor from Moscow, and almost hung up when he heard what the man had to suggest. It took him two months to buy the yarn, and another three weeks to begin. But he found, even that first time in the hotel room in Tallinn, that his hands fell naturally into the rhythms. He understood the taut opposition of knit and purl, and did not need to think. He did not need to knit faster, or better, or even competently. He just made something, something red and oddly shaped and large, and decided later that it was a scarf.

  So Shahid Khan sits facing the noontide sun. His eyes are wide open, and there is only a small burning within his belly, and he does not mind it. In a little while it too will be gone. He is breathing. The white yarn stretches against his skin, and then relaxes. The needles sound against each other. The warp and weft form, and flow. His mind, his heart fills with the radiant glow of Allah’s mercy. The fabric grows, and he is at peace.