Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  And with that, they let Sartaj out and left him swaying in the exhaust of their several Ambassadors. He felt completely alert, but quite dazed. There were orange lights burning over the terminal building. A trickle of sweat, released by the gathering heat, moved down his collarbone. Review the information, he told himself. But there was very little: the apradhis maybe included a famous guru in a wheelchair and a yellow-haired foreigner, they were maybe in a house that had a terrace, the house was maybe large enough to hold a large machine, maybe there was a truck near by. That was it, that was all. On this, everything depended. Don’t worry, Sartaj told himself. Just go to work. Just work.

  So he hurried to his motorcycle, slung a leg over it. Then he was unable to move. Had the last few minutes really happened? In his memory now, everything that had happened in the car had the feeling of jerky, speeded-up film. Sartaj tried to slow his breathing and parse the conversation, recall it bit by bit, but all he could find was a jumble of sentences and words: ‘It is not a small device’; ‘intended consequences’; ‘payload’. How were Anjali and her boss able to speak so calmly and efficiently of such things? Maybe people like that were used to speaking of unspeakable things. Maybe international spies used that language all the time. Sartaj had thought of this thing before, this device, he had encountered it in fictions and newspaper reports, but now that it was inside his city, in his home, he was unable to imagine it. He tried to see it, some sort of machine in the back of a truck, but all he could see was an absence, a hole in the world. What came out of this void was an avalanche of regret, a knifing pain in his gut for everything left undone and for all the memories of the past. He bent over. In the bulge of the silvered handlebar there was the shine of the streetlamp and a thousand faces, a boy he had fought with in Class Three and humiliated in front of the whole school, Chamanlal the paan-wallah from the main road corner, a beautiful girl that Katekar had once told him about who worked for Gulf Air at the international terminal, that lame beggar who worked the crossroads at Mahim Causeway. Everything would be gone, not just loved ones and enemies. Everyone. This was the unbearable promise of this device, now made real. It was ridiculous but it was true. Sartaj sat in the car park and tried to comprehend this, to hold it in his head so that he could think about it, and decide what to do next. Finally – he did not know how much time he had passed, just sitting – he gave up. Better to leave it as a blank, and think around it. At least then you could work. Yes, work. Go to work. He started the motorcycle, and began.

  Three days of work brought no breakthroughs, no revelations, no arrests. The alert had gone out, but there was too little substance. There was not enough to ask informants, only this: have you seen a group of three, maybe four men? One blond foreigner, one guru in a wheelchair, maybe, maybe? Leads had come in, hundreds of them, but they led inevitably to innocent old men in creaky wheelchairs, and to outraged foreign executives with hair just a shade lighter than brown. There was no progress. And life went on. On Tuesday evening, Sartaj visited Rohit and Mohit and Shalini. He gave Shalini an envelope, ten thousand rupees, and sat in their doorway and drank a cup of chai.

  ‘You look very tired,’ Shalini said. She was sitting inside the house, near the stove, starting dinner for the boys.

  ‘Yes,’ Rohit said. He was leaning against the wall, next to Sartaj. ‘You do.’

  ‘I have not been sleeping well,’ Sartaj said. ‘Too much work.’

  Rohit brushed at the collar of his sparkling white T-shirt. ‘But you are very thin, also.’

  ‘I still haven’t found a good cook.’

  Shalini smiled. She was wearing a glossy green sari, and she looked well. She gave Sartaj a sly, knowing look. ‘What, that Christian girl doesn’t cook for you? Or you don’t like her food?’

  Sartaj started, splashed his chai all over his chest. ‘What girl?’ he sputtered, brushing at his shirt.

  Rohit clapped his hands and laughed. ‘Don’t bother, don’t try,’ he said. ‘Her spies are on all four sides, really. She knows everything.’

  Shalini’s shoulders shook. Sartaj couldn’t remember when he had seen her laugh like this, even back when her husband had been alive. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know how I know.’ She waved a powdery belan at him, looking supremely satisfied. ‘And don’t think it was the easiest way. No policeman told me.’

  Shalini was not about to entertain any denials of the Christian girl. Sartaj gave in, with what he hoped was a modicum of grace. He ducked his head and asked, ‘So who told you?’

  ‘I can’t give away my khabaris. No, no.’

  Sartaj tried to think who it could be, who would know about Mary, who would have talked. Kamble knew about her, and he may have told somebody at the station, who may have told a civilian. Or maybe Shalini had a friend who worked near Mary’s house, who would have seen Sartaj coming and staying and going. Or maybe it was somebody at Mary’s salon. There were a thousand and one ways that Shalini could have heard the story of Sartaj and Mary, countless connections that slipped through the city and bound each person to everyone else. Sartaj had used this inescapable network many times himself, and now he was found out. ‘Your mother is really a pucca professional,’ he said to Rohit. ‘The department should hire her.’

  Shalini laughed and flung a handful of some brown spice into a pot, and there was a great hissing and fizzing. ‘So tell us about this girl.’

  ‘But you already know everything,’ Sartaj said. He was about to say more, something general about how men could never hope to escape the vigilance of women, when he saw Mohit come stumbling down the end of the lane. There was blood on his shirt.

  ‘What happened?’ Rohit said, and knelt to take his brother by the shoulders. ‘Who did this?’

  There were rings of crimson around Mohit’s nostrils, and a blackish smear across his chin. In a swirl of sari, Shalini came past Sartaj. ‘Beta,’ she said, ‘what happened?’

  But Mohit was grinning. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We did much more to them. It was those bastards from Nehru Nagar.’ He was triumphant, satisfied. ‘We showed them, they ran away.’

  Shalini was holding Mohit’s shirt at the shoulder, where it had been ripped at the seam and into the back. ‘You fought with those boys again?’ She grabbed his face, tugged it up towards hers. ‘I told you not to go near them. I told you not to go even near that side.’ Her anger forced her teeth back, and Sartaj could see her nails digging into the boy’s cheeks. But Mohit was not afraid. ‘I’ll tell Saab to take you to the remand home,’ she said, turning him towards Sartaj. ‘He’ll beat you.’

  Sartaj stood up. ‘Mohit, you shouldn’t –’

  ‘Maderchod sardar,’ Mohit said, and his hatred squeezed past his mother’s fingers. ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll cut you.’

  Shalini gasped, and then slapped Mohit on the back of the head, hard. She dragged him into the house, past the already gathering audience of neighbours and slammed the door. But Sartaj could still hear Mohit’s low growl, grim and unrelenting.

  ‘I need to go,’ Sartaj said to Rohit, and took him by the elbow and walked away. ‘I have an appointment.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Rohit said. He fingered, nervously, the key that hung from his neck. ‘Mohit is getting spoilt, in spite of everything we do. He is keeping bad company. He has a gang of four, five boys. They keep fighting with these other, older taporis from Nehru Nagar. I have even beaten him myself, but he keeps getting worse. His marks in school are terrible.’

  ‘He is young,’ Sartaj said. ‘It’s just a bad time. He’ll come out of it when he gets older.’

  Rohit nodded. ‘Yes, I think so also. But very sorry.’

  Sartaj thumped Rohit on the chest, said, ‘Don’t worry, there is plenty of time, he’ll realize sooner or later,’ and kicked the motorcycle into heaving life. As he edged up the pitted slope, it came to him that perhaps Mohit would never come out of this blood-flecked spiral, even if there was plenty of time. Maybe he was lost already, lost to his brother and his mot
her and to himself. Sartaj had played his part in pushing Mohit towards this hard path, into this pit from which there was no return. Every action flew down the tangled net of links, reverberating and amplifying itself and disappearing only to reappear again. You tried to arrest some apradhis, and a policeman’s son went bad. There was no escaping the reactions to your actions, and no respite from the responsibility. That’s how it happened. That was life.

  Rachel Mathias was waiting at the station for Sartaj. She was sitting in the corridor outside his office, squeezed up at one corner of a bench next to a row of impassive Koli women. She was hot and unhappy, but when she rose he was impressed by the elegant fall of her blue sari and the simple silver bracelet on her right wrist. She was not at all crumpled by the squalor of the station, and now she stood very straight and looked him directly in the eye.

  ‘How long have you been waiting?’ he said.

  ‘Not very long at all. This is my son Thomas.’

  Judging from how sullen Thomas was, they had been at the station at least a couple of hours. ‘Come,’ Sartaj said, and led them into the office and sat them down. Thomas sprawled back in the chair, and then straightened up after a cutting glance from his mother. He was fifteen or so, good-looking and confident and muscled. All the boys were lifting nowadays, and Sartaj was sure that Thomas had been an early starter.

  ‘About what we talked about the other day,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Yes?’ Sartaj said. He knew now that she was not guilty of blackmailing Kamala, but everyone was guilty of something. It had happened before in his career, that the threat of a policeman’s pressure had made people confess to something that he wasn’t looking for.

  ‘Thomas has something to tell you.’

  Thomas didn’t want to say anything, he had his eyes down and his fists clenched, but his mother was implacable. ‘Thomas?’ she said.

  Thomas worked his jaw, cleared his throat. ‘What happened was –’ he began, and then was unable to go on. He wiped his hands on his jeans, and flushed, and Sartaj felt a surge of sympathy. Thomas had built his biceps and gelled his hair, but he was a child still.

  ‘Maybe,’ Sartaj said, ‘Thomas can talk to me alone.’

  Rachel nodded. ‘I will wait outside.’

  She swung the doors shut behind her, and Sartaj tapped the table. Thomas managed to look up now. ‘Tell me,’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Sir, about our video camera…I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for?’

  ‘For making the video.’

  Sartaj felt a daze settle over his shoulders like a fine mist. ‘The video. Yes.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea.’ Thomas managed to tell it all now, in fits and starts. It wasn’t his idea. It was Lalita’s idea. Lalita was his girlfriend, a year older than him. They had been in a relationship for a year. When Thomas had got his new video camera they had taken it out and shot footage of all their friends, and of the city, and of random people on the streets. For a few days they had shot a short film written by Thomas, but they abandoned it half-way because they were bored. Then Lalita wanted to shoot them, the two of them together, just hanging about in Thomas’s room. Then once the camera was on, they forgot it was on.

  ‘Forgot?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Yes.’ For a while they forgot. When they remembered, Lalita didn’t want to switch it off. So there was a shot of them kissing.

  Sartaj rubbed his eyes, and pinwheels spiralled and disappeared. He dropped his hands, and Thomas was still there, young and handsome in his tight white T-shirt, with his string of small beads around his neck. Still there, and inexplicable and yet real and present. ‘Only kissing?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘Yes, yes. Our clothes were always on.’ So their clothes had stayed on, but still his mother had been furious when by chance she had picked up the camera and switched it on and seen them on the LCD. Yes, one or two of Thomas’s friends had seen the video, but that was all. And Rachel Mathias had immediately destroyed the footage. And that was the end of it, until Sartaj showed up, asking questions about video cameras.

  Sartaj knew he should say something, maybe shout at the boy, terrify him. He was certain that shooting the video had been Thomas’s idea, not Lalita’s. Or maybe not. Maybe the Lalita that Thomas was describing did exist. Yes, Sartaj was sure she did. What did Sartaj know about the world these boys and girls lived in, with their video cameras and their internet and their relationships at fifteen? Who were these people? He lived next to them, along with the thousands of other lives in the city, and he knew them and didn’t know them. All of it existed together somehow. Sartaj made an effort, and finally managed to be stern with Thomas. ‘If you do this kind of thing at this age,’ he said, ‘you will ruin your whole life.’ He went on, but he didn’t know if he believed any of it himself. As he walked Thomas to the door, a hand on his shoulder, Sartaj surprised himself. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘look after your mother. She’s all alone, and she works very hard for you and your brother. Be good. Don’t give her trouble.’

  He hadn’t planned on asking for virtue for Rachel Mathias’s sake, but Thomas seemed to be affected by it, more so than by the warnings and admonitions that Sartaj had just delivered.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Thomas said, his eyes wet. ‘Sorry, sir. I will.’

  Sartaj woke up from a deep, dreamless sleep, to a fan making a hazy white circle over a green ceiling. With a great effort, he turned his head. Mary was sitting on the floor, flipping through a magazine. The sound was down on the television, and a great, silent herd of gazelles leapt over a rise and vanished into yellow grass. ‘What time is it?’ Sartaj said. It was dark outside.

  ‘Nine-thirty. You were very tired.’

  ‘I was. What are you reading?’

  ‘It’s a travel magazine. There is an article about diving in the Andaman islands. It’s so beautiful under the water. Look.’ She got up and sat on the bed next to him. Orange and red fish swam in water that was so blue that it jumped from the page.

  Sartaj propped himself up on an elbow. ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said. ‘You should take a vacation.’

  ‘Will you come?’

  ‘Me? No, I don’t even know how to swim.’

  ‘I am saving for Africa anyway.’

  ‘Yes. But, meanwhile, take a vacation. How about Kodaikanal?’

  ‘I’ve been there.’

  ‘Then go to your village.’

  ‘There’s nothing there to go back for. Why are you trying to send me away?’

  Sartaj sat up. He took the magazine from her, and held both her hands in his. ‘It’s very dangerous here in the city, right now. We are expecting a big terrorist action. They are going to do something, we know that. So maybe you should go away.’

  Mary’s shoulders hunched. ‘Will you come?’

  ‘I have to stay here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘To find them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are they going to do?’

  ‘Something, something very bad, very big.’

  She burst out laughing. Then she stopped herself, and was very serious. ‘Sorry. I believe you completely. That’s why I’m laughing. What else can you do but laugh?’

  ‘You are very brave.’

  ‘No. Not brave at all. I’m afraid. But it’s too crazy to think about.’

  ‘So will you go?’

  ‘No. Not alone. What is the point? Everything I have is here.’

  Her eyes were moist. He kissed her then, and she curled into him. She kept her lips on his, and her tongue was warm and supple, and she moved up over him. They laughed together as he winced and moved his thigh from under her knee. She kissed him, on the corners of his lips, and then she reached down and took his hand. She drew it up, put it on her breast. For a quiet moment, they were still, and Sartaj saw how the flecks in her eyes moved in the lamplight, and behind those there was a soft, unknowable darkness. They smiled at each other. Sartaj began to undo the buttons on her blue shirt, on
e by one. The buttons were very small, and he had difficulty with each one. He felt quite clumsy. Mary chortled at him, and arched her back as he went lower, to help him. He imitated her giggling, and she came back to him, her cheek against his beard, and they laughed together. She drew the shirt off her shoulders, revealing a lustrous sweep of brown skin, and slipped down beside him. Sartaj leaned over her. She put a palm on the back of his neck, and drew him to her.

  Lying with Mary under a sheet, skin against skin, Sartaj told her about his childhood. She wanted to know his life from the beginning. ‘Tell me,’ she had said. They were now up to his teenage years. It was very late, long past midnight, but Sartaj felt alert and strangely content. His body was relaxed, the pleasant ache in his muscles was the memory of their sex. He had been clumsy, and insecure, and too solicitous afterwards, but somehow none of that mattered. It had been good to be embraced by her, to feel the living pulse inside her. It was good to lie with her, to move her hair behind her ears, and answer her questions. Now she wanted to know, ‘So what was her name?’

  Sartaj had been telling her about his first girlfriend. ‘Sudha Sharma. She lived two buildings down, and her brother was my best friend at the time.’

  ‘Later he found out about you and his sister and beat you up?’

  ‘No, no, he never found out. He would have killed me. But we were very careful.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Fifteen! At fifteen I knew nothing about sex, absolutely nothing. You were so bad at fifteen?’ Mary pinched the skin on his shoulder, hard.

  ‘Arre, I didn’t say we had sex. Where was there to have sex? In her father’s bedroom? There were so many aunts and grandmothers in that house you couldn’t turn around without having some woman ask you what you were doing.’

  ‘But you corrupted that poor girl anyway.’

  ‘Me, corrupt? Ha. I wouldn’t have had the courage to look at her, even. She was three years older, and she was the one who gave me extra aampapad to eat every time I went over there. And held my hand under the table. I was so scared I couldn’t drink my glass of water.’