Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  It was Ammi who spoke. ‘Beta, your Daddi passed this afternoon.’

  Now Sharmeen saw that Abba had tears on his face, and her legs shook and she trembled. Ammi rushed forward and held her and helped her to a chair. Both Abba and Ammi fussed over her then, and made her drink chai, and hugged her. During the funeral, and afterwards, the story went around that Sharmeen had almost fainted when she heard about her Daddi, and people she didn’t know came to her and talked to her about acceptance and Allah’s will and a long, long life and eternal love. Sharmeen never told anyone that what had frightened her that day, what had driven a spike of abject terror through her chest, was not the news about Daddi but the child’s sadness on Abba’s face, the wounded yearning and loss and uncertainty she had never seen before and never wanted to see again. Sharmeen kept her head down and kept very quiet and waited for all of it to stop.

  There was one other thing that Sharmeen never told anyone, not even Aisha.

  For the month after Daddi died, Sharmeen’s sleep was broken several times each night. She slid into wakefulness flushed and sweating, and her head reeled from a torrent of thoughts about Daddi, a song that she had sung, and the time she had gone three times to exchange sandals at the Crystal City Mall and the saleswomen had started to shake their heads as soon as they saw her hobbling down the corridor. Sharmeen would sit up in bed, drink water, lie down and try to get back to sleep. But it felt as if there were thin black hooks in her heart that pulled her awake with tiny pinpricks of guilt. The gritty little scrapes of pain didn’t just come from the feeling that she, Sharmeen, had not spent enough time with Daddi ever since she had turned thirteen, that she had been too preoccupied with her studies and Aisha and Chandrachur Singh. No, not that only. There was also this bitter realization for Sharmeen, that now Daddi was really gone and now she would never know all there was to know about Daddi. Not so long ago Sharmeen had felt bored by Daddi’s talk, by her accounts of lighting laltens in monsoon storms. Now it seemed like a whole world had blinked out on that Tuesday afternoon in the American spring, a whole universe extinguished just like that, so easily. And Sharmeen had no chance to get it back.

  It was a Tuesday night again, one month to the day from Daddi’s death, and Sharmeen woke up. She tried not to open her eyes, not to think about being awake. Lately she had decided that it was the uncertainty about falling asleep that actually kept her awake. So she tried to remain still, and breathed deeply. She tried to think good, pleasant thoughts, and against the rush of memory she built the bulwark of an imaginary landscape, a forested hillside, no, a beach and a green-blue sea stretching away. Then, with a sigh, Sharmeen gave up. She was awake. She opened her eyes, and Daddi was sitting on the bed, at the very foot of it. She had on her favourite dark blue pashmina shawl, the one she had got just three years ago, but she was very young and beautiful. Her forehead was high and the black hair tumbled down in luxuriant, old-fashioned curlicues. I am dreaming, Sharmeen thought. I can wake up. Wake up. But she couldn’t, and it was unmistakably Daddi still sitting there, with the window and the moonlight behind her. Sharmeen thought, if I sit up and drink some water, this will stop. But her arms and legs lay against her sides as heavy as white stone, and despite all her straining she could not move. Now it occurred to her that she should pray, but then she felt a twitch of guilt in her heart, for being afraid of Daddi. She looked directly at Daddi and felt terribly sad, for Daddi and herself. And then Daddi said, in a low voice, not unhappy but brimming with tenderness, ‘Nikki, take me home.’

  Then Sharmeen was awake. She could move, and she sat up and cupped her face with her hands. She felt relieved and ridiculous all at the same time. She thought, tomorrow I will tell Aisha about this funny, filmi dream, and how real it felt. Maybe I will tell Abba and Ammi too. She could imagine herself telling them, and the expressions of wonder and concern they would have on their face. She could see herself telling them, and Aisha, and other people in the future.

  But she never told anyone, not ever. In a few months, her own memory of the dream began to fade, and the vivid, living black of Daddi’s hair and the blue of her shawl became dusty and indistinct. On Sharmeen’s next birthday, Aisha gave her a pink diary with a small golden lock. Late that night, Sharmeen remembered her dream about Daddi, and thought she should write it down. But she couldn’t remember what Daddi had said, exactly, in the dream, and after a few minutes she gave up and wrote about Aamir Khan instead. She wrote about his films, and his acting, and when she had finished she locked the diary and tucked it under her mattress. Then she slept, and never dreamed of Daddi again.

  Mere Sahiba

  The lilting voice over the speakers asked, ‘Mere sahiba, kaun jaane gun tere?’ Sartaj had no answer to this question. He was sitting cross-legged in a veranda of the Golden Temple, at the edge of the parkarma. To his right was the shrine of Baba Deep Singh, and straight ahead, the Harimandir Sahib flushed a delicate, reddish gold in the early sun. Sartaj and Ma had arrived punctually at the temple gate at three in the morning, and had come in and watched the procession that carried the Guru Granth Sahib over the water, to its seat. Sartaj had made his way through the crowd, and for a few seconds he had put his shoulder to the palki and had helped carry the holy book, and then he had come back to Ma, longing for the surges of excitement and certitude that he had once felt on this holy ground. Now they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, and the sun had come up, and the parkarma was busy with people, and the singer asked his question.

  Sartaj and Ma had arrived in Amritsar the day before. She had been very tired when they reached her mausa-ji’s son’s house, and they had stayed up late, for a long dinner with many cousins and aunts and almost-forgotten distant relatives. But still she had told him to set the alarm for two-thirty, and they had set off for the Harimandir Sahib in the darkness. Now she had her hands folded in her lap, and she rocked back and forth gently as her lips moved.

  ‘Are you hungry, Ma?’

  ‘No, beta. You go and get something to eat.’

  ‘No, I’m all right.’ Sartaj was all right, more or less, but he was worried about Ma. She was closed off in some private world of memory and grief and prayer, very far from him. Her eyes were wet, and she dabbed often at the corners of her mouth with her chunni. And she prayed, so softly that he could not make out what shabad she was reciting. He did not know what or who she was mourning, or how to make her feel better. ‘Are you remembering Papa-ji?’ he said.

  She slowly raised her head and turned to him. Her eyes were brown and enormous and surprised, and he had the sense suddenly that he was looking at someone he didn’t know.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Papa-ji.’

  But she was not telling him everything, there were things she wouldn’t speak of. Sartaj knew this, and was embarrassed, as if he had intruded into some dark room he was not meant to see. ‘I am hungry,’ he said. ‘You’ll stay here?’

  ‘Yes. Go.’

  So he left her, and walked around the rippling pool, along the parkarma. There were pilgrims sitting in the verandas, and two little boys ran out ahead of Sartaj, chased by their mother. She held them by the shoulders and walked them back to their father, and the older one grinned at Sartaj, revealing a missing front tooth. Sartaj smiled, and strolled on. The stone was warming under his bare feet. His earliest memory of Harimandir Sahib was of cold toes, of Papa-ji holding his hand and guiding him swiftly through the foot-bath just outside the complex. He had skipped down the chilly marble stairs, dazzled by the gold reflection in the water of the sarovar. He knew he had been brought here earlier, as an infant, but that was what he remembered now, that winter morning, walking between Papa-ji and Ma, holding their hands. He had then been unable to read the names of martyrs and fallen soldiers on the marble plaques set into the walls and the pillars. Now it was hard for him to avoid the names of the dead, to look away from the lists put in place by Indian army regiments and grieving families. Here was a plaque, on the wall just next to the causeway that led to t
he Harimandir. A captain from 8 JAK Light Infantry had fallen at Siachen. Two years after his death, his wife – also a captain – had donated Rs 701 and put up the plaque in his memory. Now more than a decade had passed, and Sartaj wondered if the wife still grieved. He was sure she did. Sartaj imagined the husband, far above jagged peaks, climbing a mirror-like wall of ice. The husband was very young, and brave, and he was far higher than any human habitation, and he was climbing towards death. And Sartaj could see the wife, in her military uniform, her face turned up to the rising sun. Sartaj walked, and wept.

  What was he crying for? He was mourning the dead, the captain, but also his enemies, who had waited for him on that frozen battlefield, gasping for air and wasting away their lungs. He was crying for all the names on all the plaques, and for the Sikh martyrs in the paintings in the museum upstairs who had stood in defence of their faith and had been tortured and mangled and executed. He cried for the six hundred and forty-four names on the list in the museum, for the Sikhs killed when the army had besieged the temple in 1984, and he cried for the soldiers who had been knocked down by bullets on these very stones. Sartaj walked. He wiped his face, and came in a full circle around the sarovar. Ma was still there, her back against a pillar, her eyes shut. He went past her, and started around the parkarma again. An old man looked at him curiously, gently, and Sartaj realized he was weeping again. There was no calculation that could determine exactly how much had been sacrificed or what had been gained, there was only this recognition of loss, of pain endured and absorbed. The heat came into Sartaj’s feet now, and he welcomed its sting and walked on. In this circling around the Pool of Nectar, there was a kind of peace. He did not expect Vaheguru to forgive him, or even if his fragmented, doubting belief in Vaheguru entitled him to ask for forgiveness. He did not know whether he was a good man or a bad man, or whether his actions were rooted in faith or fear. But he had acted, and now this walking hurt him and comforted him. So he walked on, in a circle, past the Dukh Bhanjani Ber, which cured all afflictions, and past the platform of the Ath-sath Tirath. He came around, and then again. He forgot how many circles he had taken, and that he was walking, and there was only the movement of his body, the shining water and the song.

  ‘Sartaj?’

  Ma had a hand on his elbow.

  ‘I was just walking,’ Sartaj said. He wiped at his face with his sleeve, and led her back to the shade of the corridor.

  ‘What happened?’ she said. She reached up, straightened his collar. She was his mother again, with her little worried frown and her desire to see him completely neat and smart. That stranger he had seen in her a while earlier was gone. Hidden, perhaps.

  ‘Nothing, Ma. Are you ready to go?’

  She was, and they walked along the parkarma towards the exit. But then Sartaj stopped. That winter morning long ago, when he had come here with Papa-ji and Ma, Papa-ji had wanted him to take a dip in the pool. Papa-ji had taken his own shirt and trousers off, and in his blue-striped kachchas had gone into the water. ‘Come, Sartaj,’ he had beckoned. But Sartaj had hidden behind Ma, and refused to go. ‘A sher like my son doesn’t mind a little cold,’ Papa-ji had said. ‘Come.’ But it wasn’t the cold Sartaj had been afraid of. He had become suddenly shy. He was aware of the bulk of Papa-ji’s brown shoulders, and he felt skinny and small, not a sher at all. He didn’t want all those people looking at him. So he shook his head and clung to Ma, and she’d indulged him, ‘Leave the boy alone, ji, he’ll catch cold.’ And Papa-ji had laughed and emerged from the pool, cascading water on to the steps, his kara bright against the width of his wrist.

  It was summer now, and Sartaj had no shyness left in him. ‘I think I’ll take a dip,’ he said to Ma.

  She was pleased, but practical as always. ‘You don’t have a towel or anything.’

  He shook his head, and shrugged. She waited by the Dukh Bhanjani Ber for him, holding his clothes neatly folded over her forearm. He went down the steps, turning his feet sideways on the wet stone. The water was surprisingly cool, and it pressed up against his sides. There were many men in the water about Sartaj, and the murmur of prayers. He folded his hands and lowered his face into the water, and the sounds softened. Far underneath, there was an ancient spring that led to the breathing centre of the world. A long swell, a slow shifting in the water, came up against his chest, picked him up and held him. A gentle rumbling was in his ears, a rustle, like waves on a beach heard from very far away. It was inside him, this sound. For a moment, all of Sartaj’s weight receded, he felt his ageing arms and his slackening stomach lift, and he was floating. He came up, and the sparkling drops fell from his eyelashes, and he smiled at Ma.

  She raised her free hand, palm towards him, and smiled back.

  In the compartment on the way back to Mumbai, their travelling companions were two sisters, one eighteen and the other twenty, and their parents. The girls both wore elegant salwar-kameezes in red and green, and played Kishore Kumar songs on a portable cassette player. They were very polite, though, and asked Ma first if she would mind. She didn’t, and so they all sped across the Punjab countryside to the cadence of Geet gaata hoon main and Aane waala pal, with the steady drumming of the wheels underneath. Ma was soon in a deep conversation with the girls’ mother, about everything from how much Amritsar had changed to a jeweller they both knew in Andheri. Sartaj talked to the father.

  ‘I came to Bombay twenty-three years ago,’ the man said. His name was Satnam Singh Birdi, and he was a carpenter. He had come to the city with only his skills and the name of an acquaintance of his father’s on a piece of paper. The village connection hadn’t worked, his father’s friend had been indifferent, so in those early days Satnam Singh had slept on footpaths and gone hungry. But he was a good worker, he had found jobs working for other carpenters and interior decoration companies. His speciality was fancy cupboards, ornate tables, executive rooms. After seven years he had left to form his own carpentry service with two of his brothers, and they had prospered. The youngest brother had spent half his life, nearly, in the city, and he was always well-dressed, he carried a mobile and spoke English. He was their front-man, he brought in business and negotiated the contracts. They had expanded, and hired many carpenters themselves. Vaheguru had blessed the family, and now Satnam Singh and his wife had a nice apartment in Oshiwara. The girls had grown up, and they were top students, first-class students.

  ‘This one,’ Satnam Singh said, ‘wants to be a doctor. And the young one says she wants to fly planes.’

  The young one reacted immediately to the tolerant sigh in her father’s voice. ‘Papa,’ she said tartly, ‘lots of women are pilots nowadays. It’s nothing unusual.’

  And they plunged immediately and happily into what was obviously a long-running family argument. Ma – Sartaj’s mother – took the young one’s part, to the surprise of her new friend, the other mother. ‘This is very good,’ Ma said. ‘Why should girls be kept back?’

  Sartaj listened to them all talk, to Satnam Singh Birdi and his wife Kulwinder Kaur and their daughters Sabrina and Sonia, and he was surprised by an infusion of joy that spread like warm syrup through his chest. He resisted, because there was no basis for this hope. This was just one family, one story. And yet, here it was: this man and woman had travelled far, and they had worked, and they had made a life. Now their daughters looked forward to more. It was not so much. No doubt there had been tragedy and tribulation already, and Sabrina and Sonia would come, in time, to their own disappointments and defeats. But Sartaj could not keep a smile from his face, and he laughed aloud at Sabrina’s sallies at her mother.

  They all ate lunch together, shared paraunthas and bhindi and puris, and fruits bought from the stations. After lunch, the elders slept, and the girls wanted to hear policing stories about famous people. Sartaj told them a few suitable to their age, about film stars and tycoons, and grew drowsy. He had to accept, finally, that he was one of the elders, and he climbed up to his berth and slept heavily, lulled by the rocki
ng of the train.

  The smell of chai woke him, chai and pakoras. He lay still for a few minutes, luxuriating in the promise of the moment, in the pleasure of his own rested body, in the rising urgency of the whistle and the speed, in going home and Mary waiting for him. Then he clambered down, and ate. The girls brought out two packs of cards, and dealt out a hand of rummy, including everyone. Ma said she hadn’t played in years, that she was too old to play well, but then revealed herself to be an adept and wily player. She took in the hands she won with a gleam in her eye, and trumped ferociously, thumping her card down.

  ‘Vah, ji,’ Kulwinder Kaur said, ‘you are a complete expert. What cards you throw every time!’

  Much later, after dinner and when the Birdi family was asleep, Sartaj sat at the end of Ma’s bottom berth. He knew she wouldn’t sleep till much later. She was lying back, her knees drawn up. Behind her head, the fields sped by, uncanny and beautiful in the wash of moonlight.

  ‘Ma?’ Sartaj said softly.

  ‘Yes, beta?’

  ‘Ma, there is this girl…’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know?’

  She giggled. Sartaj couldn’t see her face, but he knew the look, when she bent her chin down and nodded her head from side to side.

  ‘I am a police-walli also,’ she said, ‘I have friends who tell me things. I know a lot of things.’

  ‘That’s true. You do.’

  She shifted over on to her side, with a hand below her cheek. ‘This is good, beta.’ Now she wasn’t joking at all. ‘A man should be with a woman. That is how it is. You can’t get through life alone.’

  ‘But you like being alone,’ Sartaj said. Perhaps it was the darkness which made it possible for him to speak to her so bluntly, to point to how diligently she guarded her own independence.

  ‘That is different,’ she said. ‘I have seen all of life, Sartaj. I have done my duty.’