Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  A platoon of Assam Rifle boys arrive two hours later and explain they were delayed by a landslip three kilometres down the road, they had to detour. K.D. listens intently to the subedar’s strange Hindi, and asks, how far are we going? The subedar grins, and says nothing. He has a pair of boots for K.D. The boots are too big, but that’s better than too small. K.D. puts on three pairs of socks and walks. He walks for twenty-one days. On the third morning his legs are so tightly cramped that he can’t squat to ease himself, and he leans against a tree and weeps. It’s an oak tree, he knows this, and in that recognition he feels better. When he found out he was coming to these mountains, he bought a book about the flora and fauna, and studied it in spare moments. So he knows these are magnolias, and scattered poplars, and a chestnut. They have been following the line of the river, walking steadily upwards along a path that twists and backbends through the forest but always moves higher. In those early days of the walk, in that first week, they pass pairs and groups of stilted houses surrounded by patches of cultivation, rice and millet still surrounded by the charred ashes of burnt forest. Women sit in front of these houses, weaving, and the soldier-boys make sneering remarks about the nose-plugs they wear. The local men all wear straight blades at their waists, and the subedar tells him that they used these daos to take heads until not many years ago. These men look athletic enough to swing the daos and lop off limbs, but it’s not them he’s scared of, not their alien, slanting eyes under conical bamboo helmets. No. It’s the breath of the forest that terrifies him, that creaking sigh of the bamboo that threads under the junipers. There is a belling and a booming that stretches through the long blue light under the canopy. The jungle speaks to itself, long calls and answers that surprise K.D., make him jerky, nervy. The soldiers laugh at him when a shrieking directly overhead makes him start, despite himself. ‘It’s only a monkey,’ says the youngest one of them all, hitching his rifle to shoulder. His contempt is clear, and K.D. feels the justice of it. He knows it’s only a monkey, and yet each night he huddles inside his blankets, pulling them over his head. He wakes up each morning more exhausted than the day before. In the mornings, the mountains hulk far above, black and engulfed by the thick cover, shoulder upon shoulder into the pinking sky.

  They cross a ridge and descend, go down towards another threadlike river that fattens itself into a thrashing torrent. They wade across it, straining, and eat lunch on the far bank, the flank of a deer the subedar had shot two days ago. The mountains on both sides are precipitous, like walls, and the sky is a distant reflection of the river, a narrow twisting ribbon far above. Then they begin to walk again. They climb, and K.D. knows they are going much higher now. They hump through a forest of blue pines, their heads lowered against the weight of their packs, and K.D. is too tired to be amazed by the unearthly orchids that gleam up white and white from the grass, there is sweat in his eyes. In a long, sighing field of green bamboo the birds flutter above his head. Then they are edging through a last stand of poplars, and a meadow swoops out in a narrow crescent above them. Across it they walk, higher and higher, and looking behind him, to the south, K.D. can see the ridge they have crossed already, and ranged behind it, dozens of others, under the huge red sky. They camp that night in the meadow, and K.D. sleeps at an incline, asleep as soon as he pulls the blanket over his head. The next morning they eat a cold breakfast and walk on, and reach a saddle notched like a big V into the ridge. It has taken them two days, the trek up just this last immense slope. They come through the defile single-file, with K.D. exactly in the middle. He steps around a massive fortress of a boulder, watching his ankles against the cracks that run through the rock, and then he looks up and gasps. There are more meadows across the valley, but above those slopes, beyond them, the jagged white runs to the heavens, canopied by white clouds. The great silver peaks are very far away, and yet K.D. can feel their immense inhumanity, their indifference. He tries to steady his breath, and feels the frigid exhalations of the white crests like a claw in his throat. The next man in line nudges him, none too gently. ‘What are you looking at, Raja Saab? That’s Tibet over there.’

  ‘China,’ the subedar calls from below, without turning around. ‘China.’ The subedar is thirty-nine years old, the veteran of recent battles with the Chinese not far from here. He has skin the colour and toughness of old oil-paper. His name is Lalbiaka Marak, which is a name that K.D. has never known before. Among the jawans, there is a Das and a Gauri Bahadur Rai, but the rest of them have names like Vaiphei, Ao, Lushai and the exotically foreign Thangrikhuma. K.D. has no doubt that they find him oddly alien. They have taken to calling him Raja Saab, he doesn’t quite know why. He doesn’t feel very royal, with his stubble, his cracking lips, his blistered and oozing feet. Standing at the threshold of this great, deathly landscape, facing it with these men who are supposed to be his compatriots, K.D. Yadav feels completely alone. Ginzanang Dowara is standing very close behind him, and K.D. can smell the milky sweat on him. K. D. shrugs his pack higher, lowers his head and walks on. And after twenty-one days of walking, they reach their base.

  A hundred and sixty men live in this little settlement of rough wooden cabins and tents, all of them from the Assam Rifles. There are two lieutenants and a captain on deputation from the army. ‘We are a bit under-officered,’ the captain tells K.D. ‘But these are hard times.’ The captain’s name is Khandari, and he has grown up amongst other mountains, in Garwahl, but he hates these hills. ‘In Garwahl the mountains have a soul,’ he says. ‘Here even the mountains are junglees.’ K.D. laughs at him, points out that these are the same mountains, part of the same rippling chain that writhes over the subcontinent from east to west. But although he doesn’t admit it, K.D. knows exactly what the captain means: these valleys which fall away from their feet are foreign in some profound way, they are very far away from anything he knows. Captain Khandari has seen combat in the recent war, in the far northern reaches of Ladakh, and he hates Nehru virulently, for all the men he says died fighting without ammunition, without support, without hope. Captain Khandari drinks mightily every evening, vast quantities of army-issue rum, and every evening he and the two lieutenants – Rastogi and DaCunha – play flush in the captain’s hut. K.D. joins them, declines to join them in their wagering, in their violent throwing down of the cards, but he does share in their tippling. The rum takes away the awful feeling of isolation, that desolation of being cut off by mountains and impenetrable darkness. It feels cosy to be inside the firelit cabin, warm and woozy, telling stories. In four nights K.D. knows his new friends, his cronies, he knows of DaCunha’s hopeless love for Sadhana, for her magnificent Technicolor behind, he knows Rastogi’s love of obscure mathematical facts and riddles and tricks, and he has listened – very late at night – to Khandari’s slurring and barely comprehensible accounts of terror-filled retreats across barren high plateaus. When K.D. leaves to pick and stumble his way back to his own cupboard-like hut, he can see the dying embers of campfires across the parade ground, the shadowy shapes of tents in orderly rows. And beyond them, the absolute black of immense rock walls under a cool, star-pierced sky.

  On the fifth afternoon, K.D. feels recovered enough from the exhaustion of the long trek to make his way to the command tent, to face the impossibility of his job. He has been tasked primarily to investigate the Chinese presence in the area, to establish a network of informants and a fund of information, to make sure that the Chinese have in fact withdrawn and are engaging in no further incursions, to determine future Chinese intentions and the intentions of all and sundry in this sensitive border area. K.D. has no knowledge of the Chinese, or their language or history or politics, he has no experience or knowledge of this area or its peoples or geography. He is quite bewildered, but he makes his way to Captain Khandari. The captain, he is sure, will know where he should start. But the captain is very hung-over and surly, and finally K.D. is able to work out that only one patrol is sent out every week, they go four kilometres along the same route to the nor
th-east, to an unoccupied bunker on a knoll. This constitutes the full effort of this unit to establish a presence in this area and collect intelligence. The shock is plain enough on K.D.’s face, but Captain Khandari shrugs and says, ‘There’s nobody out there, you know. Nobody at all. The Chinese are gone. It’s all bhenchod empty.’ K.D. is silent. He is trying to work up his courage to say something. Finally Khandari cocks his head and breaks the silence. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘What do you want to do?’

  Three days later two patrols leave the base, with routes that K.D. has picked out on one-inch maps. Now K.D. feels the hostility of men who have had their comfort disrupted, and he lives in silence. Even Marak – his friend the subedar – will not speak to him except in grunted monosyllables. K.D. finds a dead rat under his bed. Rastogi and DaCunha bring the patrols back earlier than expected, Rastogi by three full days out of the planned seven. Of course they report seeing nothing, absolutely nothing, and K.D. is sure they have gone around the next ridge and camped for a few days of rest and relaxation. The week after, he puts together another patrol for DaCunha and Marak and a platoon, and walks along himself. His feet twinge for the first mile, but he has a good pair of boots now, and after his muscles ease up, he enjoys the effort. He has lost weight, and he feels strong. There is pleasure in employing his new map-reading skills, and he examines the distant ridges through his binoculars at every halt. The men watch his binocularing with amusement, and DaCunha is barely civil. K.D. bears it quietly, he is doing his job, and he intends to do his job well. On their fourth day out they make camp in the lee of a rock wall that glitters in streaks of metallic silver, and K.D. opens his backpack and pulls out a book, hurrying because these are the last few moments of sunlight. He has been thirsting for books, for anything to read. He has long ago finished The Riddle of the Sands, which he brought with him into NEFA, and has been reduced to reading the labels on bottles of medicine, the fine print at the bottom of army requisition forms, and as even these have run out he has started to experience a kind of panic, as if he is slowly drowning. Then, just before they leave for patrol, in the corner of the command tent, behind a stack of food and supply files, he finds two books, left behind by some long-gone officer, who is now quite possibly dead. So he is now reading, within sight of Tibet, The Benham Book of Palmistry: A Practical Treatise on the Laws of Scientific Hand Reading. He is reading it very slowly, savouring each sentence, because it must last him. So he is lingering on the absurdities of each page, which find the shape of the future in the lines of the past, which locate meaning in these fleshy hieroglyphics of the palms. It must last, because in his backpack he has the other book, Palmistry: The Language of the Hand by Cheiro, and it is less than an inch thick, and to face these mountains with nothing to read would be unbearable.

  Marak leans over him suddenly, cutting off the light. Marak is looking down at the open pages of the book, in which Benham is describing the proportions that obtain between the various mounts and the fingers. Marak is transfixed. He squats, with his arms resting on his knees, and faces K.D. squarely. ‘You read the future?’

  ‘Yes,’ K.D. says quickly. ‘Yes.’

  Marak shoves his hand towards K.D.’s face. ‘Read,’ he says.

  K.D. holds Marak’s craggy hand in both of his own and tells a tale of the future. It’s not so hard really. He uses some of Benham’s strange prescripts, but mostly he lets Marak talk about his anxiety about his wife’s health, his farmland struggles with his brothers, and from these he extrapolates and guesses. ‘Your father was a very hard-working man, until the end of his life he worked every day from morning till night,’ K.D. tells Marak, who looks at him with a new awe. Which is entirely misplaced, because there is no Benhamite reading involved in this assertion, just simple deduction from the clues that Marak has scattered about in his very questions, in his eagerness to know the shape of his happiness to come, to have a talisman against the depredations that will come surely, by and by. K.D. leads him along gently, then senses that it will not do to give too much, that you must leave the subject wanting, pleasured and reassured but not satiated. ‘Enough for today,’ he says authoritatively. ‘I am tired.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Marak says. ‘I will bring you some tea.’

  And he does. Meanwhile, K.D. has been studying the dramatic fall of light on the mountain that faces them, the deep swathes of red and black. He takes the mug of tea and says, idly, ‘We will see Chinese.’ He is not quite sure why he says it, except that he has been telling the future, and he is rather hoping they will see Chinese. Not that he is eager for confrontation, or fighting. He is not sure of his physical courage, and knows from his three brief training sessions with pistols that he is a very bad shot. But to see Chinese would make his training meaningful, would give substance to his inductions, make the enemy real. And since he hasn’t talked to anyone in days, he lets this slip, ‘We will see Chinese.’ And they do. The next day, just past three o’clock, Thangrikhuma – who is on point – calls back, ‘Dushman.’ They edge up to the ridge line and peer across the dry valley at a scattering of grey dots on the grey rock. It is, yes, the enemy. Thangrikhuma has very good eyesight, K.D. can hardly see the dushman, but in his binoculars they become recognizably men, a section’s worth of Chinese soldiers moving slowly west. The boys move up with K.D., and they lie close next to each other, watching. DaCunha is rustling a map, and now he declares, ‘They’re on their side. I think.’ Their side is indistinguishable from our side: in this waste, here there are no markers, no fences. But there they are, and here we are.

  For the next two days, K.D. and his men move along the ridge, paralleling the Chinese. They are careful to stay out of sight, and the Chinese lead them to what is clearly a new outpost, three bunkers built on a spur overlooking a pass, and a dugout for a heavy mortar. This is very good intelligence, but the men are more impressed by K.D.’s prediction, which they attribute not to sagacity, or training, or tactical knowledge, but to mystical insight. They each come to him along the route of march, one by one, and so he soon has an intimacy with their lives, and not just their public selves, but with their fears and hauntings, which he breathes in as they huddle in close to him. Even DaCunha succumbs, so that as they head back to base, K.D. knows about his retarded sister, and about Violet who waits for him in Panjim. As they break their last camp before base, Marak helps K.D. roll up his sleeping bag, and smiles confidingly. ‘Saab,’ he says, ‘on the first day out there was a big discussion. The common opinion was that it would be very easy to nudge you over a cliff. New officer fell off, he was inexperienced, what could we do?’ Marak laughs as he tugs hard at straps. K.D. grins back, but he is terrified, and he spends the whole day edging away from the drop, brushing his left shoulder on rock and shale. The possibility of his own death has never occurred to him with any force, with any response in his flesh, which hasn’t ever been able to imagine its own disintegration. In the stories of success he tells himself, he is always victorious, sometimes wounded but still alive. But here are these real strangers, who have contemplated his real death. Some of them have killed before, and will again, and it would have been of no great account to them, his demise. One quick push and he would have been gone. He lies in bed that night, in his cabin, and shakes. He is afraid to close his eyes.

  He awakens in darkness. He raises his hand, but there is no watch, no luminous numbers. He must get up, shave, bathe, write up his report, raise Captain Khandari from his hung-over stupor, get him to radio the report in and up the chain of command. What time is it? There is much to do. K.D. turns the sheet aside and raises himself, and his head plunges with nausea, and he gags. Why is he so weak? He hadn’t been tired enough last night for this fluttering of muscles in his chest, this quiver that lowers him to his pillow again. The white ceiling crushes him into the present again, and he knows with a terrified groan that he is not in his youth, in that first ecstasy of a job well done on the barren peaks of the north, he is in a hospital bed in Delhi, losing his mind.

&nb
sp; He considers the phrase: to lose your mind. What would be left, if you misplaced your mind? If there is no mind, is there still a self? He remembers the parable, that to know the I there must be another I, an eye that watches the birds of the self feasting on the nectar of the world. But will there still be a watcher if you take these mind-structures away, these façades of language, these foundations of logic, these narratives of cause and effect? What will be left when it all comes crashing down? Bliss, or numbness? A presence, or an absence? ‘The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.’ He throbs suddenly with rage, with anger against the violence being done to him. I did my best. I did what was asked of me. The incensed tightening of his tendons becomes a spasm, and he thrashes for a moment, with a pulse dinning in his ear like a Mishmi drum. He gropes up through the darkness that is drowning him. I am lucid. I can remember my life, I can trace its histories. I learnt my trade in NEFA, by creating an intelligence network where there was none, by creating sources and cells and routes. I did this better than any of my colleagues anywhere else, I worked harder and riskier and more sincerely than any of them because I was a Yadav and they expected me to do otherwise, I knew some of them did. They were Brahmins, and they had their very certain opinions about OBCs. I never spoke of this to anyone, not even to Bloody Mathur. I just worked. After NEFA, there were the rice fields of Naxalbari where I travelled as a trader and drew out the killers of policemen and judges and district collectors, where I pursued the illusion-ridden boys who left behind their comfortable middle-class homes in Calcutta and came up-country to make revolution. I killed one of them, too, this would-be Maoist who was trying to kill me. I remember his name still, Chunder Ghosh, and the blood that pumped from his ears when I shot him in his forehead. I can recall, exactly, the operations in Kerala against the communist parties, against their electioneering and spread and scheming, against their very infrastructure. For Nehru’s daughter we did this, quite illegally but gladly, because we knew from where these parties drew their ideology and direction, and we were on the ramparts, pushing back these hordes run by Peking and Moscow. And then I was in East Pakistan, debriefing the Bengali soldiers who had fled their Punjabi masters. The information I put together caused whole airfields to disappear into broken rubble under the precise fall of bombs. After Bangladesh, back to Delhi, to the manoeuvring with foreign diplomats, the lunches with embassy employees, the slow development of relationships that finally yielded sputters of information. Then London, Punjab, Bombay. My life, spent in this struggle. This constant long war, with its hidden and unsung victories. I did the work. I can remember every payment, every source, every attack by the dushman. I defended. And so this India still stands.