She is evaluating him. She is trying to decide whether to tell him something, or not. He understands he is a risk now, that he cannot be trusted with information. He is not himself, he may tell Dr Kharas, the nurse, people passing in the corridor. And yet he wants to know. ‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘If you tell me, maybe I can help. Maybe if you tell me, it’ll help me to remember.’ He is not sure whether this is true, whether the tatters of his once-vaunted memory hold together enough that results can be produced from small cues, from careful direction and prodding. But she has to gamble. Calculated risks are the everyday work of the game, and K.D. has trained Anjali in these small steps through danger: at that very last moment when you are walking towards a drop point, unsure whether you are under surveillance, do you keep walking or reach for the bag? You have come to know that one of your officers has been selling information to the other side, to many other sides, so a number of your sources may have been compromised, and you have a man in a defence research establishment near Islamabad, a physicist, do you call him in or not? Calculate the payoff, and the punishment that failure will inflict, and decide.
She has decided. She speaks fast and low. ‘We found Gaitonde in a house in Bombay. The house was built like a very deep bunker, with hardened walls. We found the builder and the architect who built it for Gaitonde. They told us that it was done in ten days, from plans faxed in by Gaitonde. He told them not to worry about money, just finish it. They did. We have a copy of the plans. The title page and some other identifying labels had been removed or erased, but there was enough text to allow us to trace the plans to the source. They were downloaded from the internet, from a North American survivalist website entitled “How You Can Survive Doomsday”. We examined the structure in Bombay. Gaitonde built a nuclear fallout shelter.’
Her eyes are silvery black and sparkling and frightened. Outside, night settles with the sigh of thousands of beating wings. The groaning rush of the city’s traffic is still alive, far below. There is a certain formless vacuity to this nuclear threat, K.D. thinks, an ultimate white blankness which stops all thought, all motion. Anjali cannot think past it, he can see this. He prompts her. ‘So Gaitonde broke cover, he ran?’
‘Yes, he came back to Bombay. He was looking for three sadhus. He was found dead from a self-inflicted wound. In this shelter.’
‘What was in the shelter? Did you find anything?’
‘There was another body, of a woman. A woman named Jojo Mascarenas, a madam who had supplied women to him. Gaitonde killed her with the same pistol he shot himself.’
K.D. had known about the women, the girls that Gaitonde had consumed in a steady flow. He had never bothered to ask where the supply came from. Now he knew. ‘And what else?’
‘There was an album of photographs, of these girls. And money. One crore twenty-one lakhs, in new notes from the Central Bank.’
‘You followed up on this woman?’
‘Yes. We found her apartment, searched it. Found nothing interesting. There was some cash. Some of it must have been from Gaitonde, it was the same series of new notes, in plastic wraps. She operated on the fringes of the television and film industry, there is a lot of black money in that business. There were tapes, photographs of actors. Nothing else.’
She waits. She is allowing herself a little bit of hope, but K.D. has nothing to tell her. No explanations have become dislodged from the whirl of his confusion, no clues have come floating up from the drifting masses of his past. ‘Let me think about it,’ he says. ‘I’ll have to think about this one.’
She eats dinner with him, from a partitioned steel tray. He spoons up his khichri and tries to think. The nuclear threat has been present on the subcontinent for decades, and they have dealt with it. The organization has run many ops to extract information about technologies, doctrines, tactics, locations, some of them very successfully. They have data, and they know the capabilities and intentions of the Pakistanis and the Chinese and the Americans. K.D. has seen some of these analytical reports and papers, and the reddish-brown satellite photos which show missile complexes and air bases, and knows there are real weapons at the ready, aimed at his cities, at him. And yet the reality of a nuclear explosion has always seemed unreal to him, very far away from the dirty night-time business of waiting in a freezing hut for a Pakistani informer, sitting on a broken crate with feet up to avoid snakes and scorpions. To put a man under a double barbed-wire fence, through shifting fields of wheat, under the night-scoped guns of Pakistani Rangers and past sleeping cattle, that was craft and labour and vocation, well-known and well-practised. But nuclear destruction, that belonged in the thrillers that K.D. read on long journeys and at bedtime, that he still reads. In the stack of books at his bedside, among the Roman histories and CIA autobiographies, there are these fictions that he reads for pleasure, often to laugh at the wild extremities of the scenarios that they create, the millions of dead and the dastardly plots and the brave, selfless heroes. In these books, and only in these books, bombs sometimes explode, taking whole cities. Only in these books is there the smoking aftermath, that silence without birds. But you always shut the book, you put it back on the night-stand, you drink your little sip of water, you turn over and go to sleep. No need to build grim little bunkers in the middle of Bombay, no need for gangsters to run from their safe foreign refuges and into danger, no need to look for three sadhus. No need at all. But Gaitonde is dead. Why?
K.D. doesn’t know. But he is thinking. Anjali is clearing up the trays and glasses and spoons. She looks exhausted. ‘Go home,’ he says. ‘The ward-boy will do that.’
‘I don’t mind. Actually I asked them if I could stay here. They said they could bring in a cot.’
‘Anjali, you don’t have to. Really. You need your rest.’
‘I can rest here. I just need to sleep, and I’ll be very comfortable in their cot.’
He understands that she is concerned for him, but also concerned for her operation, her world which she believes is threatened somehow. She wants to stay close to him, to his fading memory and mind, in case he rants out a name, a place, a word, that will lead her into Gaitonde’s bygone life. She loves her uncle, yes, but she is doing her job. She is following her training and her instinct, she is a good student. K.D. is dying, he knows it, she knows it. Most likely, the dying will lead her only to the country of the dead, but she is being careful – perhaps K.D. will give her something useful before he slips into silence. He smiles at her. ‘All right, beta. As long as you are comfortable.’
‘I even brought my toothbrush,’ she says, holding it up. She is again the little girl he knew once, and they grin at each other. It is cosy to have someone in the room, splashing in the bathroom. Anjali settles into the cot. They say ‘Goodnight’ to each other, and K.D. switches off the lamp above his bed. She sleeps, falls into long, even breathing almost immediately. He watches her, the shape of her shoulder. She doesn’t have anyone to call, to tell that she will not be coming home tonight. She once had a husband, a Kannadiga boy she married against the wishes of the concerned parents, in the idealistic throes of a metropolitan Delhi love affair. The husband had studied economics at Zakir Hussain College, had gone on to a career in the IAS and had left her four years after the wedding, complaining of her incessant travel and obsession with her career. K.D. doesn’t know if she has found anyone else, she certainly never speaks of it, even of the desire, of the longing. Has she come to prefer solitude, like K.D. himself? He has asked himself sometimes if solitude is preferable to boredom or betrayal, which seemed to be the inevitable end of all happy love affairs, of all happy marriages. People clung to one another out of fear. K.D. has preferred the integrity of being alone. He was a realist, he is. He has the strength to face death alone.
In the upper half of his visual field, his sight is sensitive and keen, he can see the fine shadow of Anjali’s hair on the far wall, the slender, upstanding stalks thrown up on the grey. In the lower half, a man named Palash is walking on a bund between fields of rice. He is
wearing a torn banian and a dhoti, and the skin on his neck is creased and dark. K.D. has watched the sweat sweep across it for ten miles. The man’s neck is more real in this present, in this hospital, in this darkness, than it was on that afternoon long ago. It is a sheeny chocolate, and the grey hair that straggles over it is distinctly stranded, picked out by the failing sun into bright, glittering filaments. The path rolls down off the bund, and into the distance, straight as an arrow. The fields are flooded, and the young green shoots are mirrored in the still surface of the water. An elegant preying bird is making its slow, taut circles overhead, inflecting only the very last spread feathers at wingtip. K.D. can see its rich golden-brown belly, the white chest and head, and he knows it is a Brahminy Kite. He knows this bird, he knows this day. Ahead, there will be gunshots. By dusk, Palash will lead him to a hut on the outskirts of the village of Ramtola, where a young man named Chunder Ghosh is spending the night. Chunder Ghosh will say his name is Swapan, but K.D. will recognize him from Jadavpur University photographs, from birthday pictures at Kadell Road. That plump-cheeked boy is gone, but this gaunt revolutionary sitting cross-legged is Chunder Ghosh all right. Ghosh will ask K.D. many questions, probe K.D.’s cover, which is resilient and whole: K.D. is Sanjeev Jha, small-time jute trader and Naxalite sympathizer and possible provider of information about bigger, capitalist jute merchants who need to be eliminated in the class war. K.D. will answer questions about Patna, about the various qualities of jute, and a lantern will fuzz and flicker under Palash’s pumping. K.D. will massage his right heel, where he has been bitten by some unknown insect, some slithering attacker. The flesh is raw, pushed up in a lump. Chunder Ghosh is a veteran of many bites, many fevers, but even he will spare a glance for this sudden wound. The questions will continue, go on. The questions will go on too long. K.D. will get up to relieve himself. He will take his hard-bottomed blue shoulder-bag with him, which has been searched and found to contain a thermos, a shirt, a packet of peanuts, two newspapers and one thousand six hundred rupees. Outside, K.D. will actually urinate. He will be able to, despite the constriction coming in steady swells through his belly. He will breathe, and reach into his bag, and find at the very bottom a fold of cloth which he will take up carefully with a small stripping sound. He will find a hidden compartment, and inside it a Polish .32 automatic, loaded and chambered. He will walk back into the hut, his hand by his side, the briefcase held before him. He will shoot Chunder Ghosh in the right eye, and Palash in the chest and in the back of his head. In his fast search through the hut, the only thing he will find is an ancient Colt .38 revolver, which Chunder Ghosh was holding cocked in his right hand, under his thigh. He will take it and flee. But all that lies ahead. What K.D. can see now is Palash walking ahead of him, the incandescent green of the rice, the kite swooping low overhead.
What lies ahead, in that first purple shimmer of dusk, at the far edge of the world? From different directions, K.D. Yadav and Chunder Ghosh are walking towards the same dismal hut, with its collapsing roof and cracked walls of mud. One is still doing his best for Nehru, the other has left behind his comfortable life of club and convent and theatre group for another vision equally grand and equally crazy. Both believe that somewhere on the other side of the hut, on the other side of the horizon, there is happiness. Just that, simply that: happiness. But K.D. sees clearly now, he sees from the great clarity of his illness that they were both betrayed, that they were betrayed before they ever began their journeys. A great knot of contempt uncurls in K.D.’s chest for those young men, so confident in their own health, in the rude heartiness of their dreams. What fools. What egotists. What could either of them have built that would not end in more murder, more loss, more sickness? ‘The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.’ And yet we schemed, and tore at each other, and killed each other. And we continue to do so, and we will never stop. We will lurch from massacre to pogrom, all in the name of some future heaven. K.D. feels a vast irritation, an exasperation at the entire species, at everything it has ever done. This life is a sickness, he thinks. Let it end. Let it all end. Gaitonde had been afraid of falling white light, an explosion and a blasting wind that would tear away everything that had been built on the surface of the watery marsh. K.D. Yadav turns himself on to his back and imagines it, the huge climbing explosion, the sudden death, the silence afterwards. Finally there will be quiet. A vanishing, like the blowing-out of a candle. He thinks of it and he feels the peace of it, feels the necessity of such an end. He smiles, contented, and sleeps.
Anjali is sitting by the bed, dressed, when he awakens. She smiles. ‘Did you remember anything.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
She nods. Behind her there is a young man, a sharp young fellow with a foxy face, a clipped moustache. ‘This is Amit Sarkar,’ she says. ‘He has just joined the organization, he is my trainee. He will stay with you today.’
‘Good morning, sir,’ Amit Sarkar says, vibrating with the proper enthusiasm of a recent inductee in the presence of a legend.
Anjali is keeping up the surveillance, going with her intuition on this long shot. K.D. doesn’t mind. He is finished with it all. ‘Right,’ he says, settles back into his pillow. He wants to be easy, to float away, but something is working at him. Gaitonde’s money. There is something about Gaitonde’s money that is nettling, the image of it sticks and scrapes through his head, one crore and twenty lakhs of Central Bank stacks. K.D. shoves the memory of the money away, he wants none of it. He fixes on the wall, on the slight vibration of light across it from the fan overhead. He passes into a comfortable drowsiness, a light-feeling awareness that skips across memory and image and thought without attachment. His mind feels weightless, freed of gravity. The lower half of K.D.’s vision is still visited by ghosts from the past, soldiers long dead, informants, agents, victims. He watches it all with a sublime detachment. And in the upper half, visitors come and go, old colleagues with their grandchildren. Dr Kharas and her interns. Nurses and attendants. Finally, in the evening, Anjali comes back to relieve Sarkar. They whisper to each other, and then she comes to sit with K.D. in the dusk. K.D. eats because she insists and he wants no fuss. Or he would turn away from the food, also with no fuss. It’s all the same to him now. A night passes, and then a day. He watches it all, life and the life inside his eyes, and they are all equally insubstantial, all phantoms, Dr Kharas and her pricking needles and diagnoses, Anjali, the MIGs yawing and screaming down towards a Pakistani airfield, two men walking through fields of rice. They are all illusions, these unreal men and unreal women, and they live by illusions and suffer for them and die because of them. Let it all end tomorrow, this meaningless cavalcade of ghosts, in an inescapable white flash of light. Tomorrow it is over. K.D. is content with this thought, and he is comfortable.
He dreams. He knows he is sleeping, and he knows he is dreaming. He is aware of himself as the sleeping watcher, and yet he feels the thumping impact of his feet through the thick bottoms of his keds as he runs. They are playing football on the high plateau they have levelled into the side of the mountain. Everyone is there: Khandari in his green Garhwali sweater with its sprays of rough wool, Rastogi on the far left, DaCunha with his incessant calls of ‘Put-tru, put-tru, man!’, and Ginzanang Dowara, who keeps trying to put through but always loses the ball. It is Sunday, and they have divided all the off-duty men into two teams, forty men to a side, and they play a hectic, savage football on what they think is the highest football ground on earth. They have hacked it out of the mountain in two months of high-altitude labour, widened a natural, almost level slope. This ball has come up all the way from Calcutta, through a chain of personal requests and favours called in. So now they play. Thangrikhuma has the ball, he is small and compact and very quick, he slips through a chain of half a dozen defenders with a leaning and a side-step that is so fast that it looks like some sort of cinematic flicker. K.D. gives a great shout
of admiration and chases him. Thangrikhuma is fast, so fast. He knows K.D. is coming and doesn’t care, he is grinning. K.D. runs hard. The valley beyond is green and grey, and the white clouds are puffy overhead. Thangrikhuma is running. Then Marak the subedar is in place, near the goalkeeper and the two rough stakes of wood which are the goal. Marak is old and slow, and he hangs back near the goal always, and then manifests himself at crucial junctures. He is experienced. He waits, he waits. Thangrikhuma is jinking and jiving, tempting him. Marak attacks now, he slides, our wily Marak. He misses Thangrikhuma but reaches back with an unerring hand as he falls and hooks a handful of jersey, and down goes Thangrikhuma. Foul, foul, but this is a man’s game, and it’s too late to cry foul, K.D. has the ball and is speeding it back into enemy territory. His boys are with him, shouldering aside the defenders, and K.D. has speed, such speed, he grins at the lovely jounce of the ball and it sits perfectly on his instep and comes back to him, he has perfect control of it, he takes it past Rastogi easily, past the gasp of breath and the spray of sweat, and he is running free now, down the field, and he can hear DaCunha on his left, and Ginzanang Dowara is keeping up nicely on the right, and the ball glitters black and white in its bounce, K.D.’s chest pains him and he is happy and the air is cold in his throat, and the goal is ahead.
K.D. wakes, and he is weeping. There is a burning in his heel. Long ago, as he sat on the unfinished mud floor of a hut with Chunder Ghosh, sat cross-legged with his shoes off, he was bitten on the left heel by an insect. He remembers now, remembers how he rubbed the angry red stain with his thumb, and how Chunder Ghosh had for a moment stopped his questions and peered at the bite curiously. K.D. remembers and feels a sob come racking out of him. Anjali stirs, in her bed, and K.D. tries to hold down his convulsions, to make them stop. The men and women he is weeping for are mostly dead now, but he is crying for their lives, for the brevity of their struggles, for their brief agonies and joys. He is sobbing for the burning in their stings, for the momentary flaming of their desires.
Sacred Games Page 43