Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  He meant that trip we had made for Guru-ji’s shipment, that final and very special one he had asked for. I said, ‘They ate some bad fish, the stupid bastards.’

  ‘Gaston’s hair is falling out, bhai.’

  ‘It has been for years.’

  Bunty said nothing. He was very grim. That he had taken the time to go to the clinic was in itself quite unusual. He was a busy man, I made sure of that. And now he wasn’t laughing, this Bunty who made jokes every day about men getting shot in the golis. Gaston’s condition must indeed be serious, too serious. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘listen, get them good doctors. If money is needed, give it. Take care of them.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, bhai. They’ve been with us a long time.’

  He hovered over them for the next two days, pushing the doctors to cure our friends. Meanwhile, I called Inspector Samant in Bombay and organized two encounters for him, gave him two Suleiman Isa controllers in Bombay. He killed these controllers on the same night, one after the other. The Dubai bastards hadn’t claimed credit for the hit on Arvind, but I wanted them to know we weren’t sleeping, that we were very capable of replying in a language they understood. The encounters gave satisfaction, especially because Samant e-mailed me morgue photographs of the dead bastards, with their heads split open by bullets. But the comfort passed quickly, and the fear maintained its steady, muffled drumbeat.

  ‘Shall I send you a girl?’ Jojo asked that Sunday evening. ‘I have one or two new ones that may entertain you.’

  ‘Arre, I’m finished with all that.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Gaitonde. You don’t believe that yourself. You’re never going to take a girl again? In your entire life?’

  ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. But it isn’t an important concern any more. I have gone beyond all that.’

  She made a squeaking groan, like a puppy in piercing pain. I thought she was maybe suddenly ill too. Then she erupted into a helpless torrent of laughter. I held the phone away from my ear, and said, ‘Jojo, maderchod, listen to me.’ She was far beyond listening, and I put the phone down and waited. I let a minute pass, and two, and then I picked up the phone. She was giggling now, but as soon as I said her name she was off again. ‘Crazy chutiya,’ I said, and hung up. At that moment, I wanted her in front of me so I could put my hand on her throat and choke off that dirty sound, I wanted her to rattle into red-faced silence while I squeezed and squeezed. I strode around my cabin, went out on to the deck and came back again. Kutiya. I had let her become too familiar, too informal with me. Maybe she needed to be taught a lesson. Right from the start I had let her get away with too much.

  I was thinking this when she called. ‘Saali,’ I began.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said. ‘Truly. Gaitonde, you have to forgive me. It was just such a surprise. You of all people. You who enjoy women so much. It is hard to believe, that you are saying this.’

  ‘Gaandu, you are just afraid of losing my business. You want me to spend money on another Zoya, build her up, so you can get your cut.’

  ‘I’m just trying to calm you down, Gaitonde. You have never been like this. And you told me once that to run a company you have to be calm and cold. You are not calm now.’

  She was right. I was not calm. I was agitated, afraid, angry. ‘A girl isn’t going to cool me now,’ I said. ‘Try something else.’

  ‘Want to hear some letters?’

  We hadn’t amused ourselves with her application letters for a long while. ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘That’s good. Read one.’

  She had a few ready, right there at her desk. They came in a steady drizzle, ebbing and flowing with the Face of the Year and International Man contests on television. ‘Okay. Listen. Do you want to hear one from village Golgar, post office Fofural, district Dhar, Madhya Pradesh? Or do you want one from Kuchaman City, district Nagaur, Rajasthan?’

  ‘Fofural? No, I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Fofunal. His English writing isn’t that clear. The address is in English. Shall I read his postcard?’

  So they were writing English in village Golgar, post office Fofu-maderchod-something. The thought made my head whirl. ‘No, leave the bhadwaya in Golgar. We don’t hear that often from Rajasthan. Let the Rajasthani speak.’

  ‘Yes. His name is Shailendra Kumar. He writes…’ She slowed down now, as she ploughed through the Hindi. ‘He’s got one of those things at the top of the postcard, Om evam saraswatye namah. With little curlicues underneath.’

  ‘So, our Shailendra is a pious boy. Very good.’

  ‘He writes “Dear Sir/Madam”. That’s written in English. Then he switches to Hindi. “My name is Shailendra. I am currently a student in the twelfth class. I am choosing modelling as my career. I am eighteen years old. My height is five foot eleven. I have an impressive personality. I have taken part in many school plays.”’

  Jojo paused. I knew what she was waiting for: I was now supposed to say something cutting, something funny about Shailendra the gaon actor who dreamed of walking a ramp in the big city. Then we would laugh together, we two who had escaped our own gaons, and then we would read some more. But today I just felt sad, at the thought of Shailendra the hero of the district, with the personality that the girls talked about as they walked through the fields, maybe he even rode a motorcycle sometimes, his uncle’s motorcycle. He was tall, and so he thought he should come to Bombay. To become bigger. ‘Jojo,’ I said. ‘I’m feeling quite tired. I think I should try to sleep.’

  ‘This early?’

  ‘Let me see,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll feel better in the morning.’ I hesitated, then asked, ‘How are you, Jojo?’

  It silenced her for a moment, my asking. I never had done that before. ‘Arre, Gaitonde, I’m tip-top. Business is down a bit, but then the economy is down, nobody has money. I am surviving.’

  ‘Do you have a thoku?’

  ‘Of course. I have two. You may be finished with women, but I have one or two uses for men still.’ She laughed her laugh, and this time she raised a small smile from me. ‘Although they are so much trouble, Gaitonde. Always wanting this and that. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. No man can satisfy me like my vibrator, anyway.’

  Now I had to laugh. ‘You are shameless.’

  She was. Later that night, I thought of my friend Jojo. Others had come and gone, they had died, they had left, but Jojo – the one I had never met face to face, the one I had never eaten a meal with, the one I had never touched, had never taken – she was still with me. Sometimes days passed without my talking to Jojo, but always she was there with me, in me. She was fearless, she told me what she thought of my actions, she advised me, she listened to me. She knew me, and in these recent days of my terror, she was the one person who I never suspected of betrayal. It just never occurred to me to think that she may have passed information to the shooters, even though it was true that she knew my life more intimately than many. I forced myself to think objectively of Jojo now, to remove her from myself and look at her as I would at a stranger: she was a businesswoman, a producer, a madam, a woman loose in her ways and thoughts. Untrustworthy by any logical evaluation, but I trusted her. Nothing that I could imagine – she did it for money, she gave me up under threats from my enemies, she did it on a whim, she did it by mistake – nothing could shake the rock of my trust. I gave up the attempt. She was Jojo, and she was in my life, threaded into it like sinews looped through bone. I didn’t know how this had happened, or when exactly, but I knew that without her I would collapse into an arid, rattling heap. She had to stay, she had to be with me.

  I couldn’t sleep that night, and called her twice. She told me more about her thokus, and made me chortle. Then it was four in the morning, and I was awake, and it was too late to call her again. Guru-ji was travelling, and unavailable. I thought of going up to the deck, but I was exhausted, so tired that I could trace each twitching of my calves up into my thighs. The clock at the bedside had slowed its blinking to a slow, leisurely pul
se, and then paused altogether. Time had dissolved itself into a gummy deep of moonlight, and I floated in it, a transparent, lifting form swayed back, and back, by its billows. I am walking fast behind Salim Kaka, through a clicking swamp. Mathu is to my right. We have the gold, and we are away. We are happy. There is water ahead of us, a small stream that cuts through the mud. Salim Kaka is at the edge. I am glaring at Mathu, trying to see his eyes. Salim Kaka has a foot down, into the water. There is a pistol in my hand.

  Up, I flung myself up out of bed. I threw open the door and went down the corridor, knocking. I woke up the boys, and took them upstairs. ‘Let’s watch a picture,’ I told them. They were confused, and sleepy, but they didn’t ask any questions. In ten minutes we were seated in front of the television, and they were arguing about what to watch. They offered me Company, which I still hadn’t seen. But I knew its story already, its betrayals, and I knew the real players, Chotta Madhav and his old friend in Karachi. This morning, I didn’t want any of its bullets, its blood. So they rummaged around, in the boxes of tapes and DVDs, and finally we settled on Humjoli.

  We watched Jeetendra and Mehmood bounce around the screen, thrashing their enemies as they sang One, two, chal shuru hoja, and I was nicely distracted by the laughter that filled the room. The vivid seventies colours were restful to look at, and even the tightness of Jeetendra’s white pants was comforting. This past was a foreign country that I could escape into, a haven that had already happened and that nothing could disturb. Over the next two days we watched Dil Diya Dard Liya, and Anand, and Haathi Mere Sathi. When the call came in from Mumbai, I was watching that scene near the end of Guide, that scene where Rosie comes to see the guide as he fasts to death. ‘Bhai, it’s Nikhil, from Mumbai. Bunty’s assistant.’ I wiped the tears from my face, and took the phone. I rarely spoke to this Nikhil, who had worked with Bunty for four years now. Nikhil reported to Bunty, and Bunty reported to me, that was the chain.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘They shot Bunty, bhai.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He was swallowing again and again, hiccuping into my ear, and I knew he was about to vomit. ‘Nikhil,’ I said. ‘Sit down. Are you sitting down? Sit. Don’t worry. I have boys on the way. Just tell me what happened.’

  It took me twenty minutes, and he did dribble up twice, but I got the story out of him. Bunty had gone that morning to the Juhu Maurya, where he got a massage from a specialist in the Thai temple technique. He then had a breakfast meeting in the coffee shop, and got some chocolate cake packed for his children. He waited in the lobby for his car to pull up, and then walked down the stairs to it, flanked by three bodyguards. In the driveway, there were three tall, turbaned and liveried gatemen, opening and closing doors, and also four hotel security guards in grey safari suits. The four security guards now reached under their shirts and pulled out Glocks, and they shot Bunty and his boys, two bullets for each target. It was deadly efficient, and crisply done. The bodyguards were blown down, dropped to the road and dead. Bunty had bent to get into his car, and he was knocked through the open door. That was what saved him, the bending, and his driver. The bullets hit him in the back and neck, instead of the back of his skull, and when he fell face forward on to the seat, his driver stepped on the accelerator and skidded away. Bunty dangled and dragged along, and he lost four toes on his right foot, but he lived. The driver got him out of the hotel gate, even as blasts blew through the rear window and the left-hand windows. One of the Sikh gatemen charged the shooters, and got a bullet in his belly for his troubles. But by then the real hotel guards were running up to the front of the building, and there were police constables lumbering up from the chowki at the intersection, and the shooters had to go. They went.

  They got away, and Bunty was alive. They had him in the Lilavati Hospital, tubed and wired. He was hanging on. He was fighting. But my boys were afraid, they were angry and confused and lost. I tasted their panic in the air, the promise of it like the first faint tinge of rot. I did what I had to, I managed them. I moved people around, I moved in money, I moved influence. To give my boys the illusion that we were fighting back, I organized two encounters over the next two days. The Suleiman Isa boys who were killed were low-level functionaries, riff-raff, but morale depends sometimes on the necessary deaths of small men. So it was done.

  But I knew the truth, that we didn’t know who we were fighting against. Even if the Suleiman Isa bastards took credit – which they did – there was no reason to believe that it was actually their operation. No, they were maderchod liars, and if they said they had shot Bunty, it was definite that they hadn’t, that someone else had watched him, learnt him and his habits, and had tried to execute him. But who? Who?

  I knew who. I spoke to Nikhil the next day, and then directly to one of the investigating police officers on the case, who read to me from the eyewitness testimonies. Every last one of them reported short haircuts on the shooters. One of the Sikh doormen used the word ‘fauji’ when he described the bastards. And I remembered the two in the corridor in Singapore, the ones who stopped me and questioned me even as their friends did their bloody work in Arvind’s apartment. They were the same crew, I knew this, I could tell. Maybe they were even the same men, flown from Singapore to Bombay by their bosses, by an organization which watched me and knew everything about me. They knew where I lived and where I went and what I did, they were hunting me. They wanted to eliminate me. They had used me, I had served a function, and now – because I had served my own interests in a manner that they disliked – they wanted to wipe me away, rub me out so that there wasn’t as much as a small stain left on their files. I would cease to be, and they would pretend I had never been.

  I was sure, almost sure that I knew my killers. To be absolutely certain, I needed to consult Guru-ji. I needed him to see the truth and tell it to me. But he was travelling, I was told, he was unavailable, even to me. I left urgent messages, asking and beseeching that he get in touch. But he didn’t call, and I was left to myself. I was astonished. I had always been able to reach him, even just to ask him if the next Tuesday was a good day to start a new diet. Now, in the hour of my greatest crisis, when my allies were hunting my men and me, Guru-ji was gone. I was patient as long as I could be, and then I cursed the sadhus I spoke to on the phone. ‘Do you know who I am?’ I said. ‘Do you know how close I am to him? I will have you thrown out, exiled to an ashram in Africa, bastard.’ But they insisted that they did not know where he was. Ten days after he first became unavailable, a message appeared on Guru-ji’s website explaining that he was in retreat at an undisclosed location, that he was deep in meditation, that he could not be disturbed, but he would be back soon, that he would bring back new and deeper wisdom to his disciples, who were his beloved children.

  But I am your eldest son, gaandu, and where are you? Yes, I cursed him directly. I needed him, and he had vanished without a word to me. He knew everything, he must have known that he was going even as he said goodbye to me in Munich, a sign would have sufficed – a hand on my shoulder, a single touch on my cheek. But he was gone.

  Four days after Bunty was shot, I became even more alone: Gaston and Pascal died, one in the morning, one in the night.

  ‘The doctors said they know what it was now, bhai,’ Nikhil told me. ‘They know what they died of. The doctors say it was radiation sickness, bhai.’

  I had to ask what it was, this ‘radiation sickness’.

  Nikhil explained it to me, what he had learnt from the doctors. ‘They wanted to know if Gaston and Pascal had visited an atomic power plant recently, bhai. Like maybe Trombay. Or if they had drunk water from a well near Trombay, or eaten fish caught in Thane creek. Or gone anywhere close to the Tarapur plant. I told them, of course not. Why would Gaston and Pascal visit Tarapur?’

  ‘Did you tell them anything, Nikhil?’

  ‘No, no, nothing. Nothing at all, bhai. I told them the truth, that Gaston and Pascal are respectable bus
inessmen and family men. That they haven’t been anywhere dirty like that.’

  But they had been on a trip recently, into the open sea. The ocean was not dirty, but maybe you could catch radiation sickness from what you brought back from the waves. I called Guru-ji again, and this time when there was no reply I had boys go to his offices in Delhi, and his homes in Noida and Mathura. His servants didn’t know where he was, his sadhus didn’t know, his mother said she didn’t know. He was gone, vanished, as if he had suddenly transcended his body and become one with the universe. But the sadhus closest to him had gone too, Prem Shantam and all the others in the inner group, the ones who travelled with Guru-ji and tended to him and took care of him. They were travelling. Guru-ji had not left this earth, he was going somewhere? But where? Where did his journey end, and when?

  I tried to reason this out, to remember my conversations with Guru-ji and deduce my way into his intentions. But even as I tried, I knew my attempts were useless, that my ordinary mind was incapable of holding – even for a moment – his extraordinary understandings. And my thoughts felt ragged, frittered away by fear and the thousand concerns of my reeling company. My attention was shredded, there were too many problems to address, too many matters of reorganization to think about and implement, too many wounded men and widows to take care of. I couldn’t keep focused on any subject, and found myself floating in fuzzy dreams during the day, and unable to sleep at night. I knew I was in bad shape, and there was nothing I could do to make myself better. Guru-ji was gone. I was afraid. I dreaded going to the bathroom because I winced and writhed and left streamers of blood on the porcelain. Pascal had bled from ulcers around his mouth, I had seen photographs of his face, his glazed eyes. I spent more and more time in the computer room, getting the boys to help me find information on radiation and burns and death. I had of course read in the newspapers that our country had incredible new weapons, and missiles that would deliver them, but I had never known much about Trombay, or uranium, or Nagasaki, but now I learnt, I learnt fast. I spoke to Jojo about all this, about the danger in the world, at our borders.