Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘What’s the matter, bhai?’ Chotta Badriya said finally. ‘Don’t like his face?’

  ‘No, I think the bastard’s got an ugly face.’ I tapped Vilas Ranade on the cheek lightly, and I stood up. ‘What a game you played, Samant Saab,’ I said. I took Samant by the hand and shook it violently. I thumped him on the shoulder, and I laughed, and all of them, every one of them, laughed with me. But in me it was all acting. I was making big motions and roaring and celebrating, but inside, inside I was bewildered: what did it mean that Vilas Ranade and I looked alike, and why did none of the others see it? What did it mean that he and I had hunted each other, like ghosts seen in mirrors, and then killed? Where did this coincidence point me, where was it taking me?

  I was still dazzled when we got into the cars. Again we drifted through the long, unlit night, and by the time we were near the highway I had solved the conundrum. I had decided it had been a trick of the light. If he had looked so like me, Chotta Badriya would have seen it. Samant would have said something. I was tired from the days in the lock-up. I needed sleep, rest, good food. There was nothing to worry about.

  Shooter Vilas Ranade Killed in Encounter, some of the afternoon papers reported the next day. Parab Gang Warlord Dies in Encounter. And then we destroyed the Cobra Gang. We ambushed their boys, we took their money, we intimidated their businessmen, we strolled down their streets. We lost four more of our boys, and one of them was my Sunny, who by now was so fervent in his worship of pistols that he carried two of them. A bullet fired from behind broke something in his back and left him pissing out his life into the road. But we shattered the Cobra Gang, and took their territories. We were still smaller, but now that seemed an advantage. We hit and ran, and then circled back and hit again. They were confused and old, like their Rajesh Parab, who at the last tried to seek help from the bigger companies, he went here and there, to Dubai even, and everyone gave him assurances, and promises, and nothing else. We were the winning team, and we had a bright, burnished shine about us, and those watching the battle saw this, and placed their bets. They knew the practical lesson, had learnt it already: a small band of fighters, knit by hardship into brotherly love, will easily beat a large, unwieldy organization with its courage failing and its belief vanished.

  Rajesh Parab died of a heart attack six weeks later, in his bed, in his sleep at night. Paritosh Shah said, ‘He must have dreamed you coming through his door.’ But I was glad I didn’t have to kill him. I would have felt like a dog-catcher putting down a tired, yelping cur, and there was no pleasure even in the thought of it.

  I caught a fever that winter. A dry, jittery whistling in my head and a jerky restlessness tossed me about my sweaty bed. Movies did not calm me, nor music, nor the girl Chotta Badriya brought in. I spat and spat, trying to rid myself of a rush of bitter saliva. I swallowed the pills, drank the salty water, ate the plain white rice. The fever stayed with me.

  So I was wide awake at two in the morning when Chotta Badriya tapped at my door. ‘We found Mohan Surve,’ he said.

  ‘You have him here?’

  ‘Outside in the car.’

  ‘Get him in.’

  I got up and dressed. Since he had betrayed us, Mohan Surve had vanished from Bombay. After that night when I had seen his face outside the Mahal Bar, lit red by the neon, he had just gone, phut, away. Once the bullets had started flying, nobody had seen him, ever, not in Bombay and not in Wadgaon, where his sister stayed with her husband and children.

  Chotta Badriya came in and helped me with my shoes. ‘We watched the sister,’ he said. ‘The postman was showing us her letters.’

  ‘Good. And then?’

  ‘And then nothing much. Surve thought he was being very smart. Money orders every month from a Manmohan Pansare in Pune. Finding out which post office the money orders came from was simple enough. Then we just watched the post office. He had grown a beard.’

  The beard was soft and very thin on Mohan Surve’s face and didn’t much disguise him. He still had fat cheeks, beady squirrel eyes. I would’ve known him from fifty feet. He began babbling as soon as he saw me.

  ‘Bhai, I just got scared because of the shots and ran and hid,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to be part of all this any more, I can’t take it, I’m a coward, forgive me, bhai, but that’s how I am, forgive me. Sorry, bhai, sorry.’

  He kept using that English word ‘sorry’, and that irritated me, angered me even more sharply than what he had already done.

  ‘How much were his money orders?’ I asked Chotta Badriya.

  ‘Five thousand, six thousand, like that. The first one was ten thousand.’

  And I looked at Mohan Surve. ‘Don’t try it, Mohan. Just don’t try it.’ My voice was a calm whisper, a surprise even to myself.

  Then he broke, and threw himself on the ground, and clutched at my ankles, and fell loose. I smelt the piss spilling from him. Chotta Badriya had tied his wrists together with green electrical wire, and now as he twisted and turned, his skin chafed and blood seeped over the wire. On and on Mohan Surve went: the Cobra Gang had come to him first, he had said no to them, but they had threatened to kill his sister and her husband and the children, Vilas Ranade had threatened him personally with a sword. So he had told them I would be at Mahal that night, and they had prepared their ambush.

  I had Chotta Badriya peel him away from my legs, and then I went back into my room. I sat on my bed. I thought of my boys who had died first, Krishna Gaikwad, Pradeep Pednekar and Qariz Shaikh with his stories, and I remembered how it felt to run down the side of the building, run from death with the shadows flailing towards me, and the pump of blood down my chest. Mohan Surve was making a wail in the next room now, it had all the force of a scream but not the loudness, and yet it penetrated the wall, this querulous long moan. I called Chotta Badriya in. ‘Shut him up,’ I said. ‘I don’t want him making noises. Make him calm. Give him something, whisky, something. And get the boys together. Anyone who is around or is available, tell them to be here in half an hour.’

  So Chotta Badriya untied Mohan Surve’s hands, gave him nimbu pani with three Calmpose crushed in. By the time the boys were together, Mohan Surve was lying curled on the ground, one arm over his head. The boys picked him up, hauled him up at the wrists and ankles and his head fell back and his eyes rolled, all glassy, dark and moving. I walked out of the house, and they followed. They carried Mohan Surve at four points, four of them, and brought him behind me. He was quiet now. We took him through the empty lanes and left the houses behind, and went up the hill above Gopalmath. I had a large Eveready torch, and I lit the way. I turned around only when we were at the top, at the small upturned bowl. While they all came up, the trailing line of my company, I was looking out at the haze of lights. My fever softened the diamond points into circling halos, and the horizon swam under this swarming, gleamy flux, the breathing of this undulating city.

  ‘We’re all here,’ Chotta Badriya said.

  I turned to them. ‘Stretch him out,’ I said. And they did. The four who had carried him sat above and below him and pulled him into a wide cross. Mohan Surve lay still, illuminated by the round beams from electric torches. ‘You know what he did,’ I said to the company. ‘Many of us died.’ I held out a hand to Chotta Badriya, who snuggled into it the cold handle of a sword. I walked around Mohan Surve until I stood directly over his head, facing the floating fire of the city, and hefted the blade in my hand. It was curiously heavy for such a slim, long thing. Good dense steel. There was a scar high on my shoulder, which I felt as a slight stiff tug sometimes, near my heart, but the strength was back in my arms. I widened my stance, raised the sword above my head, took a breath and dashed it down, into Mohan Surve’s right arm, just below the shoulder. At this he raised his head and looked around, turning his eyes from side to side. I had the sword up again, and with the second stroke I separated his arm away from his body. The boy holding his right wrist fell backwards, and there was an immediate thick jet of black blood into the
jiggling light. And a sound like a groan came from the company, and Mohan Surve began to talk. A confused jumble of syllables that sounded no sense, that’s what it was. Mohan Surve babytalked even as Chotta Badriya took off his left arm with a single sweep of the sword, and I heard the clang of metal on the rock and saw a jumping shower of white sparks, and Mohan Surve’s voice rose higher and his head was still up when somebody stepped up from the ranks and took the sword and attacked his left thigh. Then he screamed. But when it came to his right leg he was quiet, and his head was turned to the side. I think he was already dead.

  ‘Take the pieces,’ I said, ‘and throw them somewhere. And I never want to hear his name again.’

  Then I walked down my hill, to my basti, to my home. In the mirror in the alcove immediately to the right of the door, I saw that my shirt was ruined, splashed all over with blood. I took it off, and also my trousers, soggy to the front, and my damp shoes. I took a bath, with hot water. I ate a little sabudane ki khichdi, and drank a glass of milk with almonds in it. Then I slept.

  Investigating Women

  The next day, Sartaj joined Parulkar on his morning constitutional. They walked in circles around Bradford Park, which was a small circle at the intersection of seven roads near Parulkar’s house. It was five-thirty, and the grass underfoot was a little damp. Parulkar was wearing red keds under his flappy white pyjamas and speeding around the circumference, overtaking the other walkers and then lapping them. Sartaj was putting in serious effort to keep up.

  ‘I don’t understand the teaching at these new schools,’ Parulkar said. ‘How can Ajay be five and a half and not be able to read? They call themselves the best school in Mumbai. We had to use a dozen contacts to get the boy in, you know.’

  Ajay was Parulkar’s grandson, who was in upper KG at the very new and very modern Dalmia school. ‘It’s a new system of teaching, sir. They don’t want to put pressure on the children.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but at least teach them to read “cat” and “bat” by now. And you and I had pressure, and we didn’t come out so badly.’

  They went past Parulkar’s bodyguards now, and then into another lap. ‘I didn’t do so well under all that pressure, sir. I was terrified by those exams.’

  ‘Arre, you were not so bad. Only you had other things on your mind always, cricket and movies and then later, my God, girls.’ Parulkar grinned. ‘You remember that time I had to stand guard while you were studying?’

  That was when Sartaj was fifteen. He had taken to jumping out of the window during mugging hours at home, and finally Parulkar had volunteered to keep a watch over him the night before his maths exam. They had a fine time actually, with regular dosages of whipped-up Nescafé, and oranges and small bananas, and Parulkar had shown a talent for reducing complex problems to simple questions. Sartaj had passed the exam with a fifty-eight per cent score, which was the highest he ever achieved in maths. ‘Yes, sir. And we saw the chowkidar sleeping.’

  They had thrown orange peels at the slumbering chowkidar, and now they laughed as they had then.

  ‘Business now, Sartaj.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ This meant they were coming to the end of the walk, which was meant to be mostly free of work distractions.

  ‘I have a contact for you from the S-Company. Her name is Iffat-bibi. She is Suleiman Isa’s maternal aunt. For a long time, she has been one of his main controllers here in Mumbai. She’s old, but don’t be fooled by that. She’s very intelligent, very ruthless, she has been one of his main assets.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘This is the number you can reach her at.’ Parulkar slipped a folded note to Sartaj. ‘She’s always there in the afternoons. She will expect your call.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. This is a big connection, sir.’

  Parulkar shrugged, flapped a dismissive hand. ‘And be careful. Whatever information she gives you, it’s not for free. Sooner or later she’ll ask something of you. So don’t promise her anything you can’t deliver.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘Interesting woman. There was a time, I was told, that men were killed over her. But when I first met her she was already old. And you know, I thought then that she may have been beautiful once, but she was never any man’s trophy. If a man was killed over her, she made it happen. No doubt about that. No doubt at all.’

  ‘I’ll be careful, sir.’

  Parulkar’s walk was over, but he went to his car at the same speed. Sartaj watched him go, and thought that he had never truly repaid Parulkar for everything he had been given. ‘Nothing in life is free’ had been one of Parulkar’s first lessons, but Sartaj had never felt that he had returned equal value. Maybe some day it would all become due.

  That morning, Sartaj and Katekar followed Manika’s lead to the glossy-pictured Kavita, who had once danced at a bar called Pritam but had made that very rare leap into the lower rungs of show business. Her name was actually Naina Aggarwal, and she was from Rae Bareli. The manager at Pritam Dance Bar looked at the photograph and told them the name of the serial she was acting in: 47 Breach Candy. He watched it every Thursday, he was very proud of her, even though she had never contacted him once she had started appearing on television. The owner of Jazz Films, which produced 47 Breach Candy, gave Sartaj her phone number and address and told him to watch the show, which was doing very well, very high TRPs, very good reviews, it was very entertaining, based on an American show but completely Indianized, completely of our culture. Naina Aggarwal lived not in Andheri East any more, but in an apartment in Lokhandwalla with three other girls, who all worked in television. She was small, prettier than her picture, and she started weeping even as Sartaj asked her where she was from, what her father did, if she had any brothers or sisters. Her mascara had blackened her face all the way to her chin by the time he said, ‘We know you’ve been involved in some very bad activity. But we are not about to harass you. If you help us.’

  She nodded fast, holding her hands clasped in front of her mouth. She sat on her bed, curled small, and she was very afraid of them, in that room she had managed to earn for herself. There was a shelf above the bed, bolted to the wall, and it was crowded with photographs of Rae Bareilly people in bright shirts, and Sartaj recognized her school-principal father. She came from a very respectable family, and she had danced at the bar only for two months, when she had first come to the city, when her money had rushed from her hands faster than she had imagined possible. She nodded eagerly. She was desperate to get the police away from her room before her flatmates and neighbours knew that she was involved in such nasty police business, that she had once danced in a sleazy bar.

  ‘Here,’ Sartaj said. He put the photograph of the dead woman on the bed next to Naina. ‘You know this person?’ She was terrified now, but couldn’t look away from the photograph. ‘It’s all right. Just tell us her name.’

  It took several swallows, three tries, before she could get it out. ‘Jojo.’

  ‘Jojo? J-o-j-o?’

  ‘Yes. What has happened to her?’

  ‘She is dead.’

  Naina curled her legs up on the bed and looked very young. The serial she acted in was full of intrigue and adultery and murder, but Sartaj could see that she couldn’t bring herself to ask how Jojo had died.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Sartaj said. ‘We are not going to involve you in any of this, if you are honest with us. What was her surname?’

  ‘Mascarenas.’

  ‘Jojo Mascarenas. And you worked for her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  Without raising her head from her knees, Naina tried a small shrug. ‘She is a model co-ordinator and producer. She recommended me to agencies, she put me in videos.’

  Sartaj was very soft and gentle now. ‘But that wasn’t everything, was it?’

  Katekar was leaning against the door, letting Sartaj handle the interrogation. He and Sartaj had worked out, over the years, that in certain situations with women Sartaj’s solicitousness and ca
re worked better than the blunter tools of intimidation and loud voices. They used each skill impartially, depending on the context and the case. So now Katekar was shrinking himself into the corner and being very still.

  ‘Naina-ji,’ Sartaj said, ‘this is very serious business. Murder. But I can’t protect you if you are not completely honest with me. Don’t worry. I promise I will not involve you in this at all, your name will never come up. I am just trying to find out about this Jojo. I am not interested in you at all, you are in no danger. So please, tell me.’

  ‘She, she found clients for me.’

  ‘Clients.’

  She wept hard now, doubled over, shaking. They left ten minutes later, with Jojo Mascarena’s phone number and office address, and certain facts: Jojo was a model co-ordinator, and she also owned a TV production company, she produced programmes, and if there wasn’t a production under way, roles and campaigns to go around, she could connect supply and demand, send the young, beautiful and needy to the rich and demanding, it was all a matter of a couple of glossies and a few phone calls, it was simple, it was efficient and everyone got what they wanted.

  Sartaj and Katekar waited for the lift in a shadowed hallway. ‘So crying Naina got the serial,’ Katekar said. ‘After all that dancing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sartaj said. ‘But what happens if the serial flops?’

  ‘Back to Rae Bareilly.’

  The unlit lift came and they stepped in, and after Katekar had rattled the folding metal gate shut three times, hard, they dropped, through fleeting bands of light. ‘Nobody ever goes back to Rae Bareilly,’ Sartaj said. And even if she went, Sartaj thought, would Rae Bareilly take her back? She had come all the way to Lokhandwalla, and to 47 Breach Candy, and to Jojo, and Jojo had sent her to other places.