Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  The next morning they went to Maqbool Khan’s house. ‘Mir saab,’ Noor Mohammed said to him, ‘our family has been yours for generations.’ Maqbool Khan was sitting at a desk, talking on three phones simultaneously. His land holdings were much reduced, but he now owned seven trucks and three tempos, and had interests in the dusty trades of gravel quarrying and brick-making. He wore a spotless white kurta, though, and sported a luxuriant, up-curling moustache worthy of his lordliest ancestor. Noor Mohammed had taken up his squat next to the desk, and Aadil hunched beside him and listened to Maqbool Khan make deals. Other men came in and sat on chairs and talked to Maqbool Khan and left.

  After an hour Maqbool Khan leaned back in his chair, smoothed back his hair, and looked down at Aadil and said, ‘Boy, so you want to study? What will you read?’

  ‘Biology.’

  For some reason Maqbool Khan found that very funny. He burst out laughing, showing red-stained teeth. ‘Horses and cows?’ he said. ‘Noora, your son will go to college to learn chickens. Why don’t you teach him at home?’

  Noor Mohammed stayed quiet. After a few minutes, when Maqbool Khan seemed to have forgotten them, he whispered out his old refrain, ‘Mir saab, our family has always been with you.’ They stayed until Maqbool Khan got up for his lunch. As he walked past them, without looking, he put some notes into Noor Mohammed’s cupped hands. Noor Mohammed thanked him with many a ‘Mir saab’, and tucked the money inside his shirt, and did not count it until they were out on the road, shaken by the turbulence of passing lorries. Maqbool Khan had given eighty-one rupees.

  The next day they went to Kurkoo Kothi. Nandan Prasad Yadav was too busy to see them. In fact, Noor Mohammed and Aadil didn’t even get inside the house. They waited with a herd of supplicants at the freshly painted rear gate. Workmen had erected scaffolding to repair the tops of the walls, and put new coats of blue and white on the brick. Four guards armed with fearsome rifles lounged by the gate and spat occasionally into the grass. After Noor Mohammed and Aadil had waited for three hours, a secretary emerged from inside the house and sat on a chair in the shade and took requests. When Noor Mohammed and Aadil got up to him, he listened to what Noor Mohammed had to say, and interrupted him brusquely: ‘Write a request.’ That was all. Father and son retreated to the back of the queue. Aadil had a pen, and a small notebook, but Noor Mohammed thought that such a request should be written on a grander paper. The next morning, he delayed going to the fields, and watched Aadil write a letter on a clean sheet of foolscap paper. Of course Noor Mohammed couldn’t read what was being written, but he made Aadil read the whole letter to him three times. Then he told Aadil to take it immediately to Kurkoo Kothi, and give it to secretary saab. Aadil set out, past the nullah and on to the road. The sun burnt his shoulders and thighs. He squinted, and plodded on, fighting against the reluctance that weighed him down. He went past the left turn that led up to the haveli, and now there was a beat inside his head that matched his feet, a steady pulsation of self-loathing. Aadil walked through the bazaar, and down to the right, near the railway station, he could see Maqbool Khan’s office. His stomach heaved, and he wanted to stop, to vomit. But he made himself go on. He exercised his will again, this instrument he had honed since childhood, and conquered his body. He went all the way to Kurkoo Kothi, and sat in the crowd until early evening, and handed the letter to the secretary, and came back.

  Noor Mohammed went to Kurkoo Kothi once a week after that, to ask after his letter. Aadil had already started attending college, without new clothes and without a bicycle, and he despised himself for needing the money, and despised his father for asking for it. At Diwali, Nandan Prasad Yadav himself appeared at the gate, and Noor Mohammed – at last – came back with a hundred and one rupees. So Aadil made his way through intermediate first year and second year and then the three years of his BSc in zoology, with money earned and scrounged and begged, with debts trailing behind him. Zoology was his consolation. To think about two thin metres of DNA tucked into the infinitesimal space of a single cell was to vanish into wonder. Aadil prayed, he believed, but the only times he now felt an absolute balm of consolation and healing and Allah’s love was when he contemplated the beauty of phyla and classes, when he studied photographs of phagocytosis and pinocytosis. Five years slipped by, five hard years that were very long and yet fleeting. Aadil knew he had to keep doing zoology. He would complete his BSc, and he wanted an MSc, there was no question about it. There was also no MSc to be had in Rajpur, not in zoology and not in anything else. Sixty kilometres away there was a zoology department at Nav Niketan University, but Aadil wanted to go to Patna. The city was very far away, but the distance was precisely what Aadil wanted. He needed to go far away from Rajpur, and he imagined Patna as a sprawling criss-cross of lighted boulevards, a haven of anonymity where nobody would know him or his family. He had no doubt that he could get admission in Patna. He had worked hard, and his professors were pleased with him. His marks were not spectacularly good, but he had managed low and middling first divisions all along. The question, as always, was money. From where was it going to come, the two hundred rupees a month, maybe two hundred and fifty, which it would take to survive and study in Patna? There were no scholarships available to him. No high-level contacts were going to exert their influence to get him funding from Patna Science College, no politician was going to give him an education as a gift. Aadil would have to do it on his own.

  Aadil went to Maqbool Khan. ‘Make me a driver,’ he said.

  Now Maqbool Khan suddenly wanted to defend the dignity of Aadil’s learning. ‘How can an educated boy like you be a driver?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you give tuition or something?’

  ‘The Hindus won’t hire me to teach their children,’ Aadil said. ‘And there are not enough Muslims in Rajpur, not enough who can pay.’

  Maqbool Khan scratched at his chest thoughtfully. ‘I have need of an assistant. I can’t keep all these numbers in my head. You are honest, help me with sums and bills.’ But Aadil asked who got paid more, a truck driver or a number-adding assistant. ‘It’s not that simple,’ Maqbool Khan said. ‘You have to apprentice as a cleaner first. Only later you make more money.’

  ‘I will be a cleaner,’ Aadil said simply. ‘When do I start?’

  So Rajpur was treated to this new spectacle, the great brainy Dibba as a truck cleaner. The day after he got his BSc, he started working for Maqbool Khan. ‘Arre, what else did you expect?’ the knowledgeable ones of the bazaar said. ‘Noora’s son, was he going to be the prime minister?’

  Aadil wore his new uniform of grime and grease with equanimity. His parents were hard to console, though, and he had to persuade them that this work was only a temporary condition. Education made you unfit, it seemed, for work done by hand. Aadil felt twinges of this distaste himself, but he told himself that this work was also a kind of education. Maqbool Khan’s trucks plied the rough roads around Rajpur, and Aadil saw all these hundreds of kilometres. He rode along with loads of gravel, and came back with timber and cement. Once a week he helped Maqbool Khan with accounts, and made sense of his bank passbooks. By the end of the first year he was allowed to drive, and sent on trips that lasted as long as a week.

  Aadil’s hair, on the left side of his head, began to turn grey. His mother blamed his education, the long nights spent peering at books in flickering lamplight, his unmarried state, the stress of driving week after week. His father advised him to colour in the grey flecks with mehndi, or even some of the expensive new dyes that were just starting to become available in the bazaar. Aadil liked his grey. He thought it gave him the mature look of a great scientist. Still, it was startling sometimes to catch glimpses of himself in a cracked rear-view mirror, and wonder who the lined face belonged to. At the end of two years, by which time he had collected enough money to go to Patna, his whole head, front to back and left to right, was silver-flecked. He came to Patna University prematurely whitened, and full of renewed energy.

  Patna was not as
he had expected. It was large, bigger than any town or city he had ever seen. It did have wide roads here and there, and some gardens, but there were parts of it that looked like villages clustered together, or Rajpur compressed and made more expensive. There were the same untidy shacks, the winding lanes, the piles of rubbish. The area around the university, though, had some impressive old buildings, some built in colonial times and others given by later benefactors. There were old trees, and Aadil liked sitting on the ghats in the evenings and watching the far shore of the river. The number of students, at the university and in the neighbouring colleges, was staggering. There was a kind of relief in going to some large function, a rally or a lecture or a commemoration, and seeing the rows and rows of faces, in knowing that there were hundreds and thousands of others who had followed the same path, that at least there were some others who had endured the same hungers. Far from his family and the Ansari Tola, Aadil felt a loneliness he had never known, but he welcomed it as a growing pain. I am in the city now, he thought, and I must learn to live in a modern way. This is necessary.

  Amidst the laboratories and the cheap restaurants of Patna, Aadil tried to remake himself, but his other selves kept catching up with him. Somehow, his classmates knew about Dibba, his ancient nickname. Maybe one of his old professors from Rajpur had mentioned it to a Patna friend in the zoology department, maybe some Rajpur boy had come up to another college and seen him in the streets. However it had happened, Patna knew who Aadil was, who his father was. They knew he had driven trucks, and cleaned them. There was some praise for this unusual history, and one of Aadil’s professors said to him – privately, in the professors’ common room – that he should be an inspiration to aspiring scientists everywhere, that such a poor boy should go so far, but Aadil felt an inexplicable undercoating of contempt in the remark. After delivering his high-minded compliment, the professor offered him no other attention, no help, no advice, no grant money or fellowships. Aadil worked on alone. Three times, after completing his own namaaz, he went to meetings of Muslim student organizations, but he was stifled by the constriction of their discussions, which narrowed everything down to the faith and its history. So he kept to his work, and stayed in the laboratories until late into the evening, and read while the hostel rang with raucous laughter, and then settled into sleep.

  In the first month of his second year, Aadil met Jagarnath Chaudhury. Jaggu, as he was known, was a Bhumihar Brahmin from Gopalganj, far north and west. He rode a motorcycle and wore dazzling red and yellow jackets, and he sang film songs in a mellow baritone as he swaggered down the halls. He was sitting, that afternoon, on the pillion of his motorcycle, one foot up on the wall that ran around the hostel. With a great deal of shouting and banter with his cronies, he was making plans to see a play put on by the Kala Manch that evening. Aadil edged past them, holding a stack of books to his chest, and he was almost at the stairs when Jaggu called, ‘Arre, what’s-your-name, you come too.’ Aadil tried to decline, but Jaggu dismissed his protests about studying to do and preparation to complete. ‘Don’t be such a sadial,’ Jaggu said. ‘The tickets are already bought. You’re coming, harami.’ Being affectionately cursed by Jaggu was somehow persuasive, and Aadil quietly went along. The play was disastrously bad, even Aadil, who had never seen a play before, could see that it was a badly acted melodrama about persecuted daughters-in-law with a hammered-on happy ending. And yet, it was delicious to sit in a darkened room on hard wooden benches, and pass witty remarks and chortle and eat greasy samosas. Afterwards, they went to a restaurant and ate chicken and tandoori rotis. Aadil turned down the offers of beer, but he allowed himself a Coca-Cola. The astringent taste of it relaxed him somehow, and he laughed at Jaggu’s jokes, and told a story himself, about old Ramdas, a farmer in Rajpur who refused to accept that anyone had landed on the moon. They stayed out late, and walked home through empty streets, and yet Aadil woke up refreshed the next morning. He went to his day with an inexplicable lightness in his heart, and the work went easily. When he came back to the hostel, he sat near the gate with Jaggu and the others for an hour.

  This became Aadil’s daily routine. He was disciplined about getting out and to classes early every morning, but in the evenings he sat with the boys and talked about politics, corruption, films, international events, the changing climate, women, cricket. The conversation moved fast, in a mixture of Hindi and Bhojpuri and Magahi with English sprinkled over it all. Sometimes Aadil kept quiet, when the allusions escaped him, or when the slang flew so fast that it left him quite behind. During and through these sessions, because of the nights at restaurants, he was realizing how much there was that he didn’t know about the lives of his new friends, about people who didn’t live in the Ansari Tola. Despite all his reading, his world had been limited, and not only because of the smallness of Rajpur. Now that he was friends with boys who had grown up with televisions in their homes, who took motorcycles and trips to Calcutta for granted, whose parents subscribed to newspapers and magazines, Aadil understood that poverty was a country of its own, that he was a foreigner stepping clumsily through unknown landscapes. But he was a good learner, and he applied himself. He had a terror of embarrassing himself, and so he was shy, and always reluctant to assume familiarity. But Jaggu always knocked on his door, and included him in all the group’s plans. ‘Wake up, Dilip Saab,’ he would say, ‘time to go.’ Jaggu insisted that Aadil was an exact duplicate of the young Dilip Kumar, down to the soft voice and the tragic mumbles. ‘Put a rifle in your hand,’ he had said, ‘and you’re straight out of Ganga Jamuna.’ Aadil understood that this, in Jaggu’s lexicon, was high praise. But since Jaggu thought that he himself was the spitting image of Jackie Shroff, and modelled himself with nitpicking precision on his namesake, Aadil didn’t take the compliment too seriously. Jaggu’s generosity was exactly equal to his self-deception. He believed sincerely that he had fully repudiated his Bhumihar medium-sized-zamindar ancestry by studying history and getting involved with theatre and poetical circles in Patna, but he lived on fat monthly money orders from home. He said he didn’t believe in caste or creed, but he once confessed to Aadil – late at night, after many bottles of beer – that he thought people from the lower castes were unclean. ‘They don’t bathe,’ he whispered confidentially. ‘It’s not in their sanskars, you see. That you can’t deny.’ He never told Aadil whether Muslims bathed or not, but he especially favoured patriotic films about combat with Pakistan. He ate tandoori chicken avidly, and believed that the narrative of history must be deduced from corroborated facts and archaeological evidence, but he grew wildly furious when he read in the paper about a professor who had published a book proving that Vedic Indians ate beef. ‘This is all a plot,’ he had muttered, his face crimson, ‘a maderchod plan.’ He didn’t say whose plan it was, and Aadil didn’t ask. It was understood.

  And yet Jaggu was an affectionate and faithful friend. He went out of his way to help Aadil and his other hostel-mates, he organized outings, he went on his motorcycle and fetched medicines when someone was sick. Even though he wasn’t in Aadil’s department, he collected gossip about Aadil’s professors, and advised him on the subtleties of academic politics. He was a constant support, and Aadil was glad to have him as confidant. It was impossible to admit, even to Jaggu, but university was very hard for Aadil, and getting more difficult. It wasn’t just the studies and the research, which took hours and effort and the energy from Aadil’s body. This he could manage, even though he was now competing with boys who were truly gifted, and not just the ragged lot of Rajpur louts. It was the chronic shortage of money that wore him down. How could you read, and concentrate on what you were reading, when your stomach twitched and ached from hunger? As the weeks passed, Aadil’s small reserve of cash in the bank was being whittled down. There were always unexpected expenditures, fees and hostel collections and antibiotics for a sudden fever. There were books that were not on the curriculum but which professors casually declared to be essential pre-exam reading. And th
ere were new hungers, for a play, for dinner at a restaurant and maybe a Coca-Cola. But the rupees vanished rapidly, and Aadil struggled, and tried to reduce his spending. But there was no excess to trim away, and he felt as if his discipline were cutting into his own flesh. He suffered, and he hid his suffering.

  ‘Beta, what is happening to your hair?’ Jaggu said to Aadil one evening, tugging him down by the shoulder so he could peer closely at Aadil’s head. They were sitting on top of the wall, outside the hostel, waiting for the group to gather for an expedition to the Ashok cinema.

  ‘My hair? Nothing,’ Aadil said. He patted down his parting, and was reassured of the fullness of the growth.

  ‘Yaar, it’s going completely white.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m telling you.’

  ‘It’s the same. It has been like this for a long time.’

  ‘No, no. Full white, I’m telling you. Come and look.’

  They went back into the hostel, upstairs to Jaggu’s room, which had many mirrors. Jaggu positioned Aadil in front of one on the wall, and held another one behind his head. ‘Look,’ he said.

  Aadil looked, and he saw that the back of his head was indeed quite white. From behind, he was an old man.