Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘Okay, bhai,’ Nikhil said to me. ‘We can go in.’

  We drove along, past sadhus walking purposefully in small groups. There was an infinite hush over these gardens, a quiet removed from time, so that even the gathering flocks of evening birds spoke only in mild tones. There were children strolling in the meadows, but they walked in orderly columns and bowed their heads with a namaste when an elder passed. I had seen this ashram on video, but now in life it looked a little smaller than I had imagined it. But it was perfect in its shape, it was quite balanced and square. At the other end of the campus there was another blue gate, and two more at the east and west, and exactly half-way between all of them, at the geometrical dead centre of the grounds, there rose a massive stepped pyramid of white marble, a pillar pointing at heaven. This was the main administration building. We parked in front of it, and went through another cordon of secretary sadhus. Then we were shown into a lounge lined with low couches, and here we waited.

  It was Nikhil who finally said what we were all thinking. ‘Bhai,’ he said, ‘there’s a lot of cash here. Maybe we’re in the wrong game.’

  ‘It’s never too late,’ I said. ‘You want to start a religion?’

  ‘Let’s do it.’ He scratched at his golis. ‘You be head godman. I’ll manage the finances.’

  ‘Meaning I do all the work and you get the largest cut, you greedy maderchod. At least come up with the rules for this new faith. What is our philosophy?’

  The chutiya didn’t have any trouble coming up with a creed. He sprawled back on his sofa, folded his hands over his comfortable little belly and put his feet on a table. ‘There’s only one rule. You gain grace by giving Bhai money. The more you give, the more karma you get rid of. Give everything you’ve got, and you are granted moksha.’

  The boys all grunted and rattled with laughter, and I smiled too. But it hurt me in my heart, this smooth cynicism, this easy sneer. Guru-ji had no doubt made a lot of money, but I didn’t believe that money alone was his objective. I knew this. I didn’t pretend to understand how his mind worked, but I knew there was a plan beyond the cash, that there was a further coherence behind the faultless order of the ashram. I just didn’t know how to read the meaning of this mantra, I couldn’t speak this tongue, I couldn’t grasp what this square with its circles inside was trying to tell me.

  As I grappled with these conundrums of religion and aesthetics, Anand Prasad’s secretary summoned us into his office. I let Nikhil go ahead, and came in last behind the others. Nikhil did the talking, he was supposed to be the head of an NRI association interested in donating money to Guru-ji’s charities. As I listened, I was struck by how comely this Sadhu Anand Prasad was. His skin was a polished chocolate, agleam against the white robes he wore, and although he must have been at least fifty, his long dark hair fell over an unwrinkled forehead. He had a slight southern accent, and in all my life I had never seen such a handsome Tamil. His secretary was a very tall Dutchman, blond and sharp-featured enough to be an actor. The secretary stood behind Anand Prasad’s chair, and together – in that airy office full of silk-covered furniture – they were like an advertisement for Guru-ji’s methods. They were beautiful.

  Nikhil was pushing for a meeting with Guru-ji. He told Anand Prasad that his organization had millions to give, that our members were Indian businessmen and computer programmers and doctors spread out all over the world, and that they were eager to contribute. But they were followers of Guru-ji, and to give to him they must necessarily meet him. If not in person, then why not a video conference? Or at least a phone call to start with.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Anand Prasad said. ‘But Guru-ji is in retreat. Even before he left, he gave strict instructions. He is not to be disturbed, not even for emergencies. In fact, I can’t even get in touch with him. I don’t know where he is, or how to communicate with him.’

  ‘He calls you, then?’ Nikhil said.

  Anand Prasad’s shrug was as elegant as a dance. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘He has really gone.’ He made a magician’s gesture with both his hands. ‘You could say he has vanished. He will only come back when he wants to.’

  ‘He won’t even come back for a million dollars?’ Nikhil said. ‘Even for poor children? And starving women?’

  He was trying hard, but I could see that it was useless. Anand Prasad didn’t know, and what he did know he wasn’t going to tell. ‘Forget it,’ I told Nikhil. ‘This maderchod is a flunky. He doesn’t know anything.’

  Anand Prasad was shocked. He was full of his holiness and his exquisite good looks, and nobody had ever spoken to him like that. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  I took two steps up to his desk. Next to an elaborate pen-holder and three phones, there was a golden model of an altar in the shape of an eagle, the size of two hands across. I picked it up. It was quite wonderfully detailed, down to the bricks and the samagri inside the altar, ready for burning. And it felt profoundly weighty in my hand, it fitted into my palm with an impressive density. The smoke of sacrifice was in my nostrils, that fragrance that signals both life and death. I was suffocated by yearning, I was drowning in it. Where was Guru-ji? Why wouldn’t he speak to me? What had I done wrong?

  ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Gold?’

  ‘You listen,’ he said.

  He puffed up from his chair now, very righteous and indignant. I took another step, and in that motion I swung the altar and cracked his forehead. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You listen.’ The metal rang like a bell, and a sprinkle of blood appeared on the clear glass of the window. ‘It’s hard,’ I said with satisfaction. ‘It’s not gold.’ Anand Prasad was jerking about on the floor next to his chair, his robe up around his hips. I straddled the bastard, took hold of his shoulder and raised him up, and went to work with the altar. I found a calm in the hitting, a concentration that came into me like a wash of clear water. The blows came out of me in an even rhythm, with my breathing, as if I were meditating. I was lost in the relief of it, nights of fear and anger all gone into this satisfaction. Then the altar was covered with blood, and Anand Prasad was dead.

  I let go of him, and his skull clunked softly on the marble. The boys were watching me, wide-eyed. Nikhil had his ghoda pointed at the Dutchman, who was crouched in a corner. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No bullets. This is a message. Do it like this one.’ I let the altar drop.

  The Dutchman had time to scream only once before they were on him. I opened a door, and inside there was a sparkling toilet, a full-fledged executive bathroom. These upper-echelon sadhus didn’t begrudge themselves any of the benefits, no, they surely didn’t. I clicked on the light, and saw myself in the mirror: blazing eyes, blood on the face. I washed, and in the other room the Dutchman died in a flurry of thumps and moans. When I came out, the boys were straightening themselves up.

  ‘Better wipe down that thing, bhai,’ Nikhil said, his chest heaving. ‘Fingerprints.’

  The altar had hair stuck to it, and little pieces of flesh. ‘Bring it,’ I said. ‘We’ll get rid of it.’

  When the boys were cleaned up, we left. We walked out, cool and easy and slow, and went down to the car and got in and drove at an even pace to the gate. We waved at the sadhus and we were away.

  We had our exit route already laid out. At our safe house we had a change of clothes and a black Sumo waiting. I had trained the boys well. In less than fifteen minutes we had the rooms swept clean and the Sumo loaded. We wiped down the Maruti Zen that we had driven to the ashram, and then we left. We went south, towards Delhi. We passed columns of passenger buses and laden trucks, and for a while we drove behind a marriage party. I felt very calm now, in this twilight. Now Guru-ji would have to talk to me. I had done something very wrong, and he would have to punish me. He would have to call me to scold me. I would of course apologize, but I would tell him why, and he would understand. He would forgive me.

  We had left behind the industrial estates and the shops and the dhabas, and now the fields of sarson and wheat stretc
hed to the blackening horizon. The electricity posts rushed up, raising and lowering their cables over our heads. When I was a child, travelling on a rattling bus from Digadh to Nashik, I used to imagine these posts calling out to me as I left them behind, as they swept behind me into the past. But in those long-ago days I had never seen so many prosperous farms, these pucca houses with the TV dishes and antennae reaching towards the sky. Everything had changed.

  But nothing had changed. I observed this truth all over the country. Over the next many weeks I travelled with Nikhil and the boys, and we did a zigzag bharat-darshan. We went to Guru-ji’s ashrams, his offices and his places of business. We followed clues, rumours, hunches and whim. So we went from Chandigarh to Delhi to Ajmer, from Nagpur to Bhilai to Siliguri. Then back to Jaisalmer, and then to Jammu and Bhopal and Digboi. Then we stopped for a week in Cochin, so Nikhil could dose himself with antibiotics to ward off a watery flu that had him groaning at the toilet every half-hour. We rented a tourist bungalow near the waterfront and watched the Chinese fishing nets rise and fall out of the water. Meanwhile Nikhil struggled, and the doctor prescribed test after test. After eleven of these tests, I told the bastard that I was on to his cut-practice. ‘What is cut-practice, saar?’ he said in his Malyali accent.

  ‘Maybe you call it something else down here,’ I told him, ‘but it’s the same thirty per cent cut you get from the laboratory. I’ll bet you a lakh on that. You want thirty per cent? I’ll give you thirty per cent.’ And I showed him the back of my hand. After that he became quiet and compliant as a whipped randi, he gave his capsules and bowed his head and went away. I couldn’t resist showing the bastard his place, but it was bad tradecraft. We needed to keep a low profile, I knew this. But the gaandu had annoyed me. He wore jeans, and drove a Capri, and kept talking about how he was dispensing the ‘latest-latest’ medicines, but he conducted business just like any village doctor giving water injections to illiterate shepherds. It was the same all over India – we met farmers who carried mobile phones and murdered their daughters and sons for marrying out of caste, we bought bottles of mineral water from scabby, bare-footed chokras whose arms were covered with ringworm. Nikhil had been complaining bitterly every night about the scratchy phone connections he got when he tried to have his laptop dial in and collect e-mail, and finally in Coimbatore an unearthed power plug roasted his sleek Sony Vaio and killed it quite dead. And now he was shitting twelve times a day, and he said he was very afraid he was going to keep huggoing until he died on this bhenchod white throne in this maderchod Malyali city in this harami cesspool of a country.

  Even Guru-ji’s ashrams were infiltrated by confusion. I had seen this. Chaos seeped in past his steel fences, his blue gates, his protective mantras. All over the country, the ashrams were laid out according to the same exact plan. Whether it was big or small, in a city or in the countryside, each ashram had the same north-south layout, and the same four blue gates. The buildings and distances increased in size, or decreased, but the layout remained precisely the same. Once we had been to a couple of the ashrams, we knew how to navigate them, we knew that the first building on the left after the main gate was the arts and crafts shop, that the laundry was always hidden away in the north-east corner. And always, always, there was the pyramid at the centre, which was always the most sacred, the most powerful, the headquarters. As we went from one identical ashram to the next, looking for information about Guru-ji’s whereabouts, I began to see the sense of the geography, the meaning of the design. It was like having a conversation with Guru-ji, looking at these sites that had been blueprinted in his mind, and created wholly by his insight and imagination. The whole landscape focused always on the marble pyramid, which resembled our old Indian temples but wasn’t quite like them. Here, in this building completely devoid of images, there was the work of the mind, and what lay beyond the mind. Here there was administration and meditation, dharma and moksha. Far from this central point, at the very outskirts, there were the menial buildings, the laundries and the generating plants, the public toilets and the arts pavilions. Arranged in the middle there were the schools for the children and the dormitories for the married couples, and the medical clinics and the communications facilities. Closer to the centre, away from the buildings where ordinary lay devotees could freely enter, there were the curving residences and viharas and halls of the sadhus, of those who had given up the world. These made a precise circle around the white pyramid itself, beyond which there was only liberation.

  I could see the logic and progression here, the movement from the outside to the inside. The relationships of these points and angles, the architecture of these constructions, this was the geometry of time and life itself. I had heard, many times, Guru-ji speaking of the ages of man, the proper affiliations of castes and groups, the place of women in a just society, the education of children – and here, in these ashrams, it was all laid out for the discerning eye to see. There was an order here that was the order of Guru-ji’s intellect. Reading these landscapes was like listening to a sermon, and I could now see very clearly his vision, his idea for what the country should be, then the whole world. He wanted to transform and uplift all of India into this green-gardened peace, to move it into perfection. Some parts of Singapore had the cleanliness that he wanted, but there was no city on earth that had this symmetry, this internal consistency that exactly balanced shops and meditation centres, and let you see the central temple through the precisely aligned arches of the library and the laundry. These buildings and the blue gates looked like the past, like the golden sets on the mythological television serials, but they were Guru-ji’s future. This was the tomorrow that he wanted to bring to us, the satyug he wanted to create.

  But the present was resisting. In Coimbatore, near the east gate of the ashram, an ancient banyan tree had tipped over one morning and crushed eleven metres of the fence, and so let in a flock of goats that ate through three gardens of roses before they could be rounded up and expelled. In Chandigarh, there was a sex scandal involving the head sadhu, three teenaged girl devotees and a local assistant police commissioner. I saw, myself, the condition of the administrative offices at Allepy, which had suffered a persistent infestation by both termites and red ants. And then there was the matter of our handling of the haughty Anand Prasad and his Dutchman, which had sparked off a power struggle in the hierarchy of Guru-ji’s organization. The Asian Age had headlined its story ‘Brutal Double Murder in Guru’s Mysterious Absence’, and had gone on to speculate that Anand Prasad had been eliminated by a rebel coterie of sadhus. Now we noticed hired guards at the ashrams, and even more stringent security procedures, and rumours reached us of arguments and scuffles between the leading candidates for Anand Prasad’s position. The Asian Age had got it half-right: the sadhus were innocent of Anand Prasad’s execution, but there was now indeed ferocious squabbling and infighting within the organization. None of the sadhus knew who we were, so each group thought my reappearing and disappearing search party were goondas hired by another faction, and accused each other of murder. So we pressed on in our quest, using money and intimidation impartially. We killed no one else, but in Bangalore we had to break one computer programmer’s arm, so that the other programmer – his girlfriend – would give us the password for an e-mail system. And so it went on.

  We found nothing. There were rumours aplenty about what had happened to Guru-ji. Some really believed that he had gone into samadhi, if only temporarily, and others said that he was dying of cancer. Everyone had something to say, but nobody could give us the smallest bit of hard information. My boys grew despondent. The travelling was hard work, and they were away from their normal money-making activities. They hadn’t seen their wives and chavvis in weeks. The boys in Mumbai were complaining of police pressure each time we called them, and our shooters and operatives were getting encountered with a distressing regularity. And then Nikhil got his own smelly dose of chaos, and so I called a rest halt in Cochin. I told the boys to rest up, I told th
em that we would set off soon. But I was starting to think that we would never find Guru-ji, that he had escaped me after all.

  After ten days in Cochin, Nikhil finally shook off his illness. He was fully ten pounds lighter, and looked exhausted. The locals had a carnival that night, and we sat on the second-floor balcony of our bungalow and watched them pass in an endless parade of tableaux and noisy re-enactments. There was an elephant, a real one, wearing a gold headdress. He was followed by a group of men wearing pink satin dresses and false breasts and garish make-up. Then there was a truck with a representation of the products and people of Kerala, including a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew and a blonde tourist on a beach chair. A little while later, on another truck, there was a scene out of the Mahabharata, with the heroes wearing shiny armour and dancing to a disco beat. My boys were out there somewhere, in the watching crowd of thousands. Nikhil sipped at a beer, and I drank pineapple juice, and we watched.

  ‘Bhai,’ he said. ‘Not to question you or anything, but I am thinking of the boys. They are getting a little restless. Why are we searching so hard for this Guru-ji?’

  ‘You are questioning,’ I said.

  ‘Not with any disrespect, bhai. But, you know, Bunty said you always told him that morale is important. And the boys…’

  ‘Your morale is down also? You miss your wife that much?’

  ‘I miss the children, bhai. And business…If we’re here, we aren’t concentrating on business.’