Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘But we know that Jojo sent girls to Gaitonde. This girl is just one of those.’

  ‘But do you know who this girl is?’ Jana said.

  ‘Jamila Mirza?’

  ‘She was that. Then she became Zoya Mirza.’

  ‘Miss India? The actress?’

  ‘Yes. That one.’

  Sartaj could see a resemblance, but he was doubtful. He pointed to Jamila Mirza’s waist. ‘This one’s too fat.’

  ‘Liposuction,’ Jana said. ‘Maybe the last ribs were taken out.’

  Mary ran her finger over the portrait. ‘Definitely had her nose done. And the hairline’s been taken up.’

  ‘There was work on the chin too,’ Jana said. ‘See how it’s longer. And the jaws have been narrowed. So now that we’ve found this early Zoya, we give you to her. You have to tell us what happens with her, okay? Whatever you find out, you have to tell us. Promise?’ She was an old-time and very regular Stardust reader for sure, this Jana, she was ravenous for nippy star natter.

  ‘But are you sure this is her?’

  ‘Yes,’ they both said together.

  They spoke with the certainty of experts, and they were very sure. This was their work. Sartaj had to believe them. ‘Amazing,’ he said. ‘I could never have seen it.’

  Mary laughed, and touched his hand, near the wrist. She said, ‘That’s all right. Men never do.’

  Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited Again

  I was arrested on a Thursday afternoon. They came for me in Gopalmath, at my home. Policemen were a familiar enough sight in my darbar, they knew very well my exact address, where I lived. I had never hidden away. They came sometimes to look for one of our boys, sometimes to ask me questions, sometimes even to ask for a favour on the quiet. I welcomed them always, gave them chai and biscuits and answers and then sent them on their way. This time it was the muchchad Majid Khan and three sub-inspectors I didn’t know, and ten constables, all in plain clothes. ‘Sit, sit,’ I said. ‘Arre, some cold drinks for them,’ I called.

  But Majid Khan didn’t sit. His boys spread themselves about the room, and Majid Khan said, ‘Parulkar Saab got a warrant issued this morning. I have to arrest you.’

  ‘Your Parulkar Saab is mad, the maderpat,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t have a single proof against me. Not one witness.’

  ‘Now he does,’ he said. ‘We lifted that chutiya Nilesh Dhale from Malad last week. He had a pistol on him, and another one in his suitcase. So Parulkar Saab has you for harbouring criminals and complicity in criminal acts, and also for being in possession of illegal weapons. And it being in the suitcase means it was being transported, so movement and selling of armaments also. He’ll add on anti-national activities. What else does he need? After two slaps across the face, Dhale is singing like a bird. By tomorrow Parulkar will have you involved in the conspiracy to kill Mahatma Gandhi.’

  ‘I didn’t hand any pistols to that bastard Dhale, did I? For this loose change you’re going to arrest me? Parulkar can’t make any of it stick.’

  ‘There’s no need to make any of it stick, you know this. All he needs is you inside for a while, you know that.’

  I knew very well: I lived under TADA, and under TADA a while could last a decade. Under this act they could keep me inside for the entire duration of any trials, no bail, nothing, not even if it took six years, or ten. At the end of it all you could be completely acquitted, but you had still spent years behind bars. This is why Suleiman Isa and his main lieutenants had gone abroad, for fear of TADA and fake encounters. This Majid Khan was respectful enough, because he was a small inspector, and he knew my connections to the Rakshaks, who could be in power as early as the next elections, the next year. But right now there was a Congress government in the state, and his Parulkar Saab was close to them, and so I was to go in.

  ‘Come quietly,’ Majid Khan said very deferentially. ‘I have ten more men in plain clothes outside, all armed. And two more vans around the corner, two minutes from here. Any trouble and we’ll have a war neither of us wants.’

  He was saying this because Bunty and two of the boys were standing at the door, facing off with the policemen. From my expression they could see something was wrong. I could hear anxious shouting from outside, and running feet. Bunty and the boys could resist, but I would be dead. Looking at Majid Khan I knew this. He was being careful out of concern for his future, but if it came down to it he was his boss’s man, and he would draw his pistol. There were many who would be very happy if he shot me dead: Suleiman Isa, Parulkar and his friends in the police, a Congress administration filled with Isa’s allies, a dozen industrialists who were paying us month by month. No, resistance was silly, and in this life, whoever I was married to, jail was my sasural. I would live through it, and with ease, because I was Ganesh Gaitonde. So I calmed Bunty down, and told him to take charge, and be careful. I said a quick goodbye to my wife and son, and went.

  The police had a remand order for fourteen days, and they extended and re-extended it six times. For eighty-four days they kept me in the police lock-up in Savara, near Kailashpada. There was one room, ten by ten, a dirty mattress, a matka of unfiltered tap water, a bucket, a stinking hole in the ground for a latrine, and me. Parulkar kept me alone, away from any of my boys who might be passing through the lock-up on the way to jail, away from friends as well as enemies. They took me to court with a hood over my head, manacles on my feet and wrists, only me in a jeep with five riflemen. ‘You’re our special guest,’ Parulkar told me. ‘Our VIP guest.’ The drives to court were the only time I felt the sun, and even then I was afraid because if they were going to encounter me, it would be during these trips. The story would run: Gaitonde’s boys tried to rescue him, Gaitonde tried to escape, so we had to shoot him. I had spent years surrounded by my boys, by the comfort of their weapons, and now I learnt all over again what it means to be truly alone. Every day I awoke to the fizzing of the tube-light in the corridor outside my cell, and expected to die. Death had been close to me for a long time, but now I felt that I was walking, moment by passing moment, on the edge of an enormous chasm, that the difference between the sunlight and the abyss was just one quick nudge from one of Parulkar’s men. Every night I was afraid to sleep, because I didn’t know if I would wake up.

  And every day, they interrogated me. On the days that it was Majid Khan or one of the other inspectors, the interrogation passed quickly, with rounds of tea and me making up stories about dead shooters. They pushed me, they asked quick questions, they tried to catch me out in contradictions and errors. ‘But you said yesterday that Sandeep Aggarwal took the money to Bada Badriya in June, how could he have paid off his debts in April?’ They were clever, but not as clever as me, I enjoyed telling them stories. I had a very good memory, I remembered all the connections between the tales I made up, and so I remained consistent, and I frustrated them and I intrigued them. It was better to be in the interrogation room with its windows and the treetops outside and the fresh air than in my stifling grave of a cell. And for all their policemen’s curiosity, and their urgent desire to know everything I knew, they never laid a hand on me. They had lives to build, careers to worry about. If my Rakshak friends were to become tomorrow’s ministers, and I remembered these small policemen with malice tomorrow, tomorrow itself they might be transferred to Aurangabad. So we were men together, and they brought me good food from the hotel across the road, and paan, and fresh clothes. For my stomach-aches, which had started on my first day in the lock-up, they brought me podhina tablets and jaljira.

  But when Parulkar led the interrogations it was a different game altogether. It was always at night. He sat in an armchair, his shoes off, quite relaxed. He had me stand in the middle of the room, directly under the hanging light, and he always had two of his inspectors standing behind me. He asked his questions as if he was talking to a friend about their trip to Lonavla next Saturday, easy and quiet. But then the blows would follow, sudden whipping gusts against my calves that staggered me forward, d
eep thumps on my back that emptied me of breath. I was driven to my knees time and again, and panting on the floor, I hated him. They lifted me up each time, and he started again. Questions, questions. His face hidden beyond the circle of light, his belly lifted up towards me. I endured. It was the insult of barking cuffs to the back of my head I could not bear, the slaps that stung tears from my eyes, the numbing flares that lit up my eyes from the inside. When Majid Khan was present during one of Parulkar’s sessions, I felt his hate in his punches to the small of my back, all that anger he hid for survival’s sake. When he was freed by Parulkar’s direct orders, he hit me hard. During the fifth interrogation, that fat bastard Parulkar began to laugh at me. ‘Look at the great Ganesh Gaitonde crying like a little girl,’ he said. ‘Look at him bawling.’ I wasn’t. I wasn’t crying. I was wiping tears from my cheeks, but they were from the sharp cracks on my ears, which started the tears instantly. It was automatic, my body reacting like it would to coal-dust in the eyes, and had nothing to do with me weeping. But that maderchod Parulkar was sure. He leaned forward in his chair to laugh at me, and looking at his fat pig’s nose, his little teeth, I knew he would kill me. He was Suleiman Isa’s man, and he was bound to his political masters, and unlike his subordinates, he was quite willing to hurt me, he would snap my bones, he wouldn’t stop at the slaps and the patta, he would beat my feet with lathis and attach electrodes to my golis. He was too far gone down his road with his allies to be afraid of me. Between him and me there could be no accommodation, and he would make me suffer.

  So I decided to cry for him. I had to play it exactly right, he was an old, old khiladi, and he had questioned thousands of men, broken each of them. He had come up through the ranks because he was wily as an old crow, he had tip-toed through a lifetime of traps, watching with these squinty steel eyes of his. If I wept too hard, or too easily, he would see it, know it for fraud. So I acted the opposite, that I was ashamed, that I was trying to hold it in, that I was reaching for courage. That I was flinching despite myself from the blows, and splintering under them. I gave him his victory, an easy one but one that he worked for nevertheless. When I finally begged, he was burstingly greasy with pride and satisfaction. ‘Give me something then,’ he said. ‘Give me something and I’ll send you back to your cell. Tomorrow you can even visit the doctor and get medicine for your stomach. Show him all your aches and pains.’ I did. I gave him two shooters, small freelancers you could hire for three thousand rupees. They worked for everyone, for Suleiman Isa, for us, for anyone else, they were buyable. So I sold them to Parulkar for a little peace, for a radio in my cell, and for visits to the doctor. He was very pleased when I told him the three places they slept, and even more pleased when they picked them up that same night and encountered them before the sun was up. They must have had the reporters already tipped off that evening, because the story was in the next day’s afternoon papers, complete with photographs of the dead men.

  So then he trusted his power over me. The very next afternoon they sent me down to the doctor, a doctor who came to the station and met me in the room next to Parulkar’s office. He prodded at my stomach, wrote out prescription slips, told me I had too much tension and left. I handed the slip to the constable who had brought me into the room and had watched over the examination. This was a man named Salve. I talked to Salve. I told him to get my medicine, and that my lawyer would give him the money. And that my lawyer would help him with anything that he needed, that Salve could depend on me. That we could be friends. That friends were a good thing to have in this world, in this kaliyug we lived in. Salve was scared, but he listened. My lawyer paid him for the medicines, and added about ten times more than that as a tip. Here, he told Salve, a gift from Bhai. A man like Salve, with his three children and wife and long and broad family of mother and retired father and widowed sister and her children, a man like that needs money. He must have it. So Salve took my money, and then I had a link to my boys outside. My lawyer had carried messages before this, and brought news, but it was good to have Salve. He was in the lock-up every day, he escorted me from there to here, he brought me food and water and batteries for the radio, and also reports from the company, and questions, and requests. We were wary of using him at first, but as he took more from us, he became ours. By the end of my remand days, between him and my lawyer I felt that I was leading my company again. I was connected, reconnected.

  But all these passed messages didn’t save me from the four walls of my cell, from the night-time quiet when footsteps on the far stairs walked across the back of my skull and made me twistingly uneasy and unable to sleep. In the afternoons I lay sweating on the stone floor, trying to cool my shoulders, my hips. I had forgotten how to be alone. I had lived for so long with my boys and my wife and my son, so close to them, that in this cell I felt that I was dropping through a void, drifting endlessly in a cloud of shadows. They had put me at the end of a blind turn in the corridor, behind an outer door that shut me off from the other prisoners. I was alone. The radio sputtered and caught, and I positioned its aerial with a thousand fine adjustments, I held it against a part of the wall that gave it greater voice. And then, when I could coax a song from it, I was eaten by nostalgia. To the thin, crackling warbles of sixties songs I relived my own days from a decade ago, from a month ago. And when the songs stopped, I felt questions come alive in my head, like a nest of parasites: what lies in the future? What had gone wrong in the past, to bring me to this? Why was I not more powerful than Suleiman Isa, more famous? Why was my company only third or fourth in power and prominence? Would my weapons-smuggling bring me more power, more connections? Would I grow bigger? Since I had started working with Bipin Bhonsle and his Sharma-ji, I had felt that I was participating in a very large game, a game so big that despite my recent growth I was dwarfed in it. I had become small again, and this was frightening and thrilling at the same time. In this huge, spinning battle, Bhonsle and Sharma-ji were my allies, and I had made my bonds with them, chosen them as they had chosen me. They were my side, my team. But what was the purpose? Where was the end of the war? Why? Why? This ‘why’ ran in my head, round and around, like a rat trapped in an iron box. Why? And in its wake this ‘why’ left behind a hole carved by its scuttling claws, an emptiness sharp and hurtful. The only thing that filled this cavity, that healed it until the next morning, was love.

  Every week, Subhadra visited the station with my son. She would have come every day, but Parulkar used her visits as leverage. He only gave me these weekly visits after I began feeding him information, and said that he would let me see my wife and son more often if I co-operated more fully. But I wouldn’t give him too much, he thought he was crafty, but I was his baap. So we played our game, Parulkar and I, and I waited from Monday to Monday for my family.

  I loved my son. His name was Abhijaya, and he made me helpless. I thought I had loved other people before, but now I found that I had either wanted them, or had depended on them, that was all. I had never known what love really was. When they had talked about love in the films, gone on about how true love meant wanting nothing for yourself, desiring only the happiness of the other, I had dismissed all that as poetic babble put about by weak men and women who hadn’t the strength to take what they wanted. But now, holding this squirmy little bundle in my arms, I knew it was all true. He was a year old, very confident, and he reached up for my face and rubbed his hands over my stubble and giggled. I felt an irresistible soft gushing force crack open my chest and reach into me, and a low laugh came out of me, a feeling up and down my spine: a man has a bond with his own blood that goes down to the beating core, to the nerve and the bone. I had become a father absently, in passing, but nothing I had known before was like this storm-like current of connection that passed from this tiny brat to me. I would let him do anything to me, and I would do anything for him. With him I had no statesmanlike grandeur to protect, no power to extend.

  But I told Subhadra that she must be careful of her dignity in these filthy
holes filled with police, that she had to learn to be strong, to be mother to the boys, that aside from our own Abhijaya she had these other hundred sons, hundreds of sons, the whole strength of the company. I told her that she had to protect my izzat both inside the lock-up and outside it, that she had to be strong. She looked more mature now, not older but now with layers of experience under that still-girlish face. There was just more of her there now, as if the floating particles of the flighty girl she had been had settled against each other, become more dense and strong, and now there was this Subhadra who listened quietly and gave good advice and would go out and tell my boys what to do. Bunty was my main support, but Subhadra was no less, and everyone knew this. The boys took this as somehow natural, but she had surprised me, I who took pride in never being surprised had been astonished by her and her son, and I didn’t mind that somehow my wicket had been clean-bowled by these two frail creatures.

  They were playing a game now. Subhadra was hiding her face behind her hands and revealing herself, and Abhi was laughing each time. I was content to watch them. ‘How is your stomach now?’ Subhadra said, from behind her hands. She was a good girl. She had been trying to get me to eat basketfuls of plums, which she insisted would get rid of all my aches. I bantered with her, and rocked my boy, and I was happy.

  And when my wife and son were gone, when Parulkar had finished with his attentions to me, when Majid Khan had put away his poisonous politeness, when Salve had left with his cringing obedience, when I was alone and pacing my ten feet of space, I was haunted by that bastard Salim Kaka, who had once taken me on a boat to find gold. I had killed him so long ago, and had never worried about it, but now I couldn’t get away from him. He was there in my cell, walking next to me, taking one of his huge strides for every two of mine, handsome in his red lungi. I had shot him, yes, and taken his gold to start my life, but what of it? He had been stupid to have me behind him if he didn’t know enough about me to trust me absolutely. He had not implanted fear and loyalty carefully in me, as I did with my boys. He had been careless, and so he had died. Why was I remembering him now? I didn’t know, but I kept remembering how he had taught me to shoot, and his filthy jokes, and his sudden gifts of money. ‘Here’s a hundred, bachcha, go and see a picture, get a woman,’ he would say. And I would. But now I needed no money from Salim Kaka, but here he was.