Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  Then the police let me out at last, and away I went to jail. I cared little for the long charge sheet they were putting together – murder, giving shelter to criminals, extortion, issuing threats – and was mostly glad to see my boys again. It was the solitary confinement that had addled my mind, I thought, and brought on this attack of useless memory. Because I had been taken away from my home, from my entire web of closeness, I had been driven into the companionship of Salim Kaka. Now I was to be held in judicial custody, and from the court itself I was taken to jail. They didn’t keep me waiting in the car park in the basement, like they did with the hundreds of other prisoners on their way to prison. They had a special escort for me, and a vehicle all to myself. All through this, I dreamed of Salim Kaka. In the van, on the way to jail, I grinned and grinned at my own silliness. Majid Khan and the other escorting inspectors were puzzled. ‘Don’t be too happy,’ the muchchad said, putting aside his carefulness for once. ‘You’re not getting out in a hurry.’ What he didn’t know was that I was getting out, getting out of myself. In solitary I had known my own prison too well. I was ready to be smothered by the proximity of my boys again, by their love. The jailers and Majid Khan took me through the big red double doors of the jail, through the small inset gate. They signed me into the jail, and then there was a long wait in the superintendent’s room until he showed up. He was a wiry old bandicoot named Advani who gave me a lecture on co-operative living. My boys were in Barrack Four, he told me, and the Suleiman Isa crowd was in Barrack Two. He was depending on me to keep the peace, he said. There had been too much trouble lately, too much fighting, even though he tried to keep old enemies apart as much as possible. Since we all had to make the best of our situation, he said, it was best to live in peace. And so he was depending on me.

  I listened quietly. I agreed with everything he said. Despite all the stories I had heard about jail, this was a new world to me, and until I knew my ground I was quite willing to be a silent mouse. Advani was very satisfied with himself, the balding bastard thought he had impressed Ganesh Gaitonde by the force of his personality and the strength of his logic. ‘If you have a problem,’ he said, ‘don’t fear to come to me.’

  ‘Yes, superintendent saab,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ Of course he must have heard that the famous Gaitonde had been broken by Parulkar, that the fearsome don was really just a scared little roadside dog, dirty and scarred, who might run to him at the first outbreak of trouble. I bore his condescension, and lowered my gaze, and was led out by the warders into the jail. We passed through three great slotted metal doors, and then into the long inside court, where the barracks stood sparkling white inside their respective walls. Superintendent Saab had them painted recently, one of the warders told me, Superintendent Saab was keen on cleanliness. There was white trim along the paths, and flowerpots at the corners. In this late afternoon the prisoners were confined to barracks, and so there was nobody on the paths, or in the yards that lay between the barracks, or under the eight trees that marched up the expanse. But when we walked by Barrack Two, there was a great eruption of catcalls and cries and jokes. ‘Please, please, Parulkar Saab,’ they shouted. ‘Don’t make me dirty my pants, Parulkar Saab,’ they called. They had heard, Suleiman Isa’s bastards. No matter. I walked on.

  In Barrack Four they were waiting for me, my boys. They had put together a garland from saved gulmohar flowers and neem leaves. I let them put the garland on me, I hugged them all and then I put them to work. Clean this place up, I told them, you’re a disgrace. They grinned and laughed and set to work. Bhai doesn’t put up with a mess, they said. They were glad to be ordered, to be directed. There were fifty-eight of them, known and accredited members of the company, out of a total of three hundred and nine in this barrack, which was one of the smaller ones, built originally to house a hundred. My boys ruled the barrack, owned the most space and all the best beds, ran the games, and controlled what went in and what went out. A small band of committed men loyal to each other will always rule a large, disorganized majority, and with me there, their force was increased tenfold. It is in the mind that cowards are overpowered, and the mass of men is always full of fear. My boys set about cleaning and straightening, and the whole barrack followed them, without having to be told. Soon the long room, with its double rows of thin blue dhurries lining either wall, was swept and ordered and clean. There wasn’t much we could do with the shirts on the dangling wires, and the drying underwear strung on the walls, and the little piles of papers and photographs and magazines. But still, here was a place I could live in, that had my impress on it. The boys had a bed for me at the far end of the barrack, the furthest from the main door and therefore the safest. They arrayed themselves on all sides of me, in a protective series of rings, and in the centre they put three new dhurries piled on top of each other to make a mattress, and a pillow, and a little shelf made out of plywood taken from the jail workshop. They were good boys.

  Their leaders were Rajendra Date and Kataruka, both of whom I knew from operations outside. Both had been senior shooters, and though I had been distanced from their activities by their controllers, I had spoken to both on the phone, and rewarded them. Both were serving murder sentences, and so both were jail veterans: Date had finished five years, and Kataruka seven. But neither had broken, or given up their controllers or anyone else, and they were doing their duty with honour. So we had supported their families outside with regular monthly salary packets, and bonuses, and had seen to weddings and hospital bills and property debts. Now they sat with me, knee to knee, and told me everything about the daily routine in this jail.

  Date did the talking, mostly, with Kataruka nodding along and grunting occasionally. ‘Inside the campus, bhai, inside the big wall, there are eight barracks, bhai, each with its own chotti wall. First barrack is for new prisoners, which you skipped. That’s the most crowded, maybe seven, eight hundred men in it. From it they move prisoners into the other barracks. Number Two barrack is Suleiman Company, bhai. Number Three is the baba room, all young boys, children. Four is us. Five has the old ones in it, all white-haired. There’s one chutiya there who is eighty-four, he suddenly killed his wife, finally couldn’t stand her snoring. Barracks Six and Seven is all the general lot, your average prisoner is put in there. Behind the barbed wire, over there, is eight, for women and girls. Very close, but no traffic goes from here to there.’ He grinned. ‘Only the maderpat jailers and inspectors exploit, not the common citizen. But here, in our barrack, we have settings for all other things. We can get oil, tea, masala, all kinds of food through the warders. We’ve already made the setting for you to get tiffin from home, bhai, so you don’t have to eat this dirty jail food. In a day or two that should start. But if you’re ever hungry, we can make a handi out of tin cans, burn coconut oil and cook with that. But if the constables see the fire they shout, bastards, and sometimes they put offenders in chains. But they don’t trouble us, bhai, we can make you chai any time. Anything else you want, you let us know. The warders are all ours in this barrack, all doing life terms. And through the lawyers, we have a setting with many of the sessions court judges, we can usually get court dates moved around. Sometimes if a judge is paid enough, we can get emergency decrees for bail. But not for you, bhai.’ My case was too heavy, too much in the news for quick bail. That we all knew. ‘It’s hot in here, bhai, in the summer, and cold in the winter. On the other end, close to Barrack One, there is a hospital, where there are actual beds with real mattresses, and fans. We have a setting with the doctors, for a small amount you can get admitted for a few days. The food is better there, too. If you want, you can go to the hospital for a holiday. That’s easy.’

  I didn’t want a holiday. I wanted Suleiman Isa, or a few of his men. ‘I want to hit those bastards in Barrack Two,’ I said. ‘They’re happy that I’m in here. Let’s show them what it means.’

  ‘That’s not so easy, bhai. They only let them and us out into the yard at different periods. When we’re locked up, they�
��re out. After a riot last year they started doing that. It’s a jail rule, the warders can’t go against it, or the staff. Or we would have done it already.’

  They were both glad to see me ferocious, Date and Kataruka. Of course they had heard the rumours too, that I had broken under Parulkar’s pressure. They were my men, pillars of my company, but I was sure a little doubt had seeped through their protective walls of faith. It was time to make things orderly again, set the world back to rights. I quizzed them some more, about jail procedure and customs, and then I told them to let me sleep. It was only early evening, hours still to go before the eight o’clock lights-out. But Date and Kataruka hushed the barrack, and I lay on my dhurries, and turned on my right side, and put an arm over my head, and fell instantly into black sleep. After weeks of trying to twist myself into rest, and thrashing awake from shallow dozing, I slept deep and long.

  I awoke to the morning whistle, at five o’clock, feeling fit and fine, and ready for my war. The boys knew my need for cleanliness, so they had seen to it that the latrines had been rescued from their usual filth, and in the bathrooms full buckets of water were waiting, and a fresh towel. I was quick, and then Kataruka and Date came to get me. ‘The mamus are here,’ Date said. The constables were waiting by the door, and they led us outside in rows of two for the counting. Under the greying sky they walked up and down, counting, and while this ginti was going on, I discussed my plan with my two controllers. I had a plan already, the beginnings of a plan. Through the ginti and over breakfast we talked it through, and filled it in, and stretched it out, and I began to see it could really be done. After breakfast, the havaldars saw us back into the barracks, where the mass of the prisoners now queued and quarrelled over the bathing and washing. A great hubbub arose under the rafters, a noise of men telling stories and arguing and playing cards and praying. At the north end of the barracks there was a makeshift temple, with bright pictures of Rama and Sita and Hanuman pasted on the wall, and here men sat in rows and sang bhajans. At the south end, the Muslims knelt in namaaz, facing a clean white wall. And through the long room men sat in clusters, and saw each other through the long hours until lunch. The warder and four of his assistants sat in pride of place, near a big radio turned up to full volume, and the songs trickled and floated to the far ends of the barracks: ‘Mere sapnon ki rani kab aaye gi tu, aayi rut mastaani kab aaye gi tu…’

  In three weeks I was able to execute my plan. And in those three weeks, I learnt the rhythms of this new life: the whistle at five in the morning; the drowsy rows outside for the ginti; the rattling of aluminium plates and bowls and the crackling of the tari on the dal, for which tari you paid extra; the long hours of the morning, and then the smell of cooking from the bissi where they kneaded the atta with their feet and threw rotting vegetables into huge bowls; after lunch at ten, the murmur of conversation and the snores and the smell of hundreds of men sweating; the smokers with their precious little balls of charas and their long rituals of burning and crumbling and rolling; the shifting games of chess, and teen-patti, and Ludo, and the curses and the laughter over the rattle of the dice; my boys ranged around the only two carrom boards in the barracks, feeding their passionate following of the championship league they had set up, complete with blackboards for singles and doubles ladders; the tussles and sudden enmities that flared between men packed together, that spread like winding fire through the rows of beds; the shouting and threats as two men faced each other under the eyes of a hundred, each too afraid of shame to back down; the brawny kalias from Nigeria selling tiny fifty-rupee packets of brown sugar in the yard; and their clients, hunched knee to knee in tight little circles over their chaser-pannis, breathing in the smoke with the devout expression of men who had seen another, better world. And the long wait for five o’clock and the dinner of the same watery dal, and the lumpy, coarse rice, and the rubbery chappatis, and then sleep at eight.

  We lived this life, and dreamed of the outside. But this is the life we had to live, the only one. So I told Date and Kataruka something of my plan, and told them I needed two fresh men, two men unconnected to our company. But these needed to be two hard boys, capable of action, not the type who would boast and preen but then be paralysed by the sight of blood. Date and Kataruka complained, they shook their heads and said it was impossible to depend on men who had remained untested, untried. That’s exactly why we make it hard to get into the company, they said, so we can see if the applicant has the belly for the job. That’s why we send them on errands first, a minor beating or two, so they can prove themselves, make their way up in the proper manner. But no, I insisted. I want new faces, two with no earlier connection to us.

  So they found me two, Dipu and Meetu. These were brothers originally from up north, they had come to Bombay with degrees from some college in gaandu Gorakhpur. They were twenty-two and twenty-one, real bhaiyyas, farmer’s sons. They had stayed with some taxi-driving fellow Gorakhpuri, and tossed about from job to job. Dipu had sold detergent door to door, Meetu had worked as a salesman in a bathroom fittings shop. They were eager lads, full of energy, and they had gone up and down the length of the city, hanging from the trains, seeing all the sights. Just when they had been broken a bit, when they had begun to understand that all dreams didn’t come true in this Mumbai, that not every fool from UP became Shah Rukh Khan, they got a call from a second cousin in Lucknow. He had a scheme, a project. He said he was going to start a business in Lucknow, with some buying and selling to do in Bombay. For that he needed to open a bank account in the city, have some funds available and ready there. So Dipu and Meetu were to start a joint account. He would send them the money to deposit in the account, and further instructions about who was to be paid and so on. A week later they received, by courier, a bank draft for a lakh and a half. The draft went through, and as instructed, they took forty thousand for expenses. A high time they had then, and a week later, another draft arrived, this time for two lakhs. The bank manager told them that the formalities would take a day, that the funds would be released the next morning. So back to the bank our two brothers went. They went to the counter, grinning, and the next second, they were down on the ground, with policemen’s pistols pushing into their necks.

  ‘Unmarked jeeps, bhai,’ Dipu said. He was the one telling the story. ‘And so we were trapped. The drafts were stolen, they told us while they beat us at the station. We had been betrayed by our own cousin.’

  ‘Listen, bhenchod,’ I said. ‘You act innocent in front of the judge. If you tell me lies, I’ll tear off your golis. You mean to tell me that you opened an account and deposited drafts out of innocence? What kind of business was it supposed to be?’

  He swallowed. ‘I don’t know, bhai.’

  ‘You didn’t know, and you obeyed your cousin blindly? And you thought you were getting forty thousand for going to a bank in a clean shirt and pants? Maderchod, don’t lie to me. You knew quite well those were stolen drafts.’

  He and his brother had the same broad face, as homely as a shovel. He blinked, thought and then gave up. ‘Yes, bhai. Only we thought one more draft wouldn’t hurt.’

  They were jumped-up peasants who thought they knew more than they did, and so they had fallen easily into the hands of the police. Dipu told me the rest of the story. The police had thrashed the name and address and phone number of the cousin out of them, but of course the cousin had flown his Lucknow coop. Then the policiyas beat them some more, on the bottom of the feet with pattas, on the hands with canes, in the kidneys with fists. They threatened them with encounters, told them they were going to drive them to the seaside and put bullets in their heads. They told them they were going to send the UP police to their father’s farm, to their mother’s kitchen. ‘Bataa re,’ the inspectors said. ‘Kaad rela.’ But these brothers had nothing more to tell, and the cousin was gone, so finally the investigation was closed, and Dipu and Meetu were in jail, awaiting trial. The inspector on their case had told them that if they paid him a lakh, he would not ob
ject in court to them getting bail, and for fifty thousand, the public prosecutor would also keep quiet, and so then their lawyer’s notice would sail through the court, and they would be out on bail. And even though they were in on serious charges, not just 420 for cheating, but also 467 and 468 for forgery, the inspector could manage bail for them. For a higher price, even, the whole case could be managed. But Dipu and Meetu had already spent whatever they had left of the forty thousand on their lawyer, and they had spent whatever little their father could come up with. So here they were, in judicial custody, waiting for their trial, waiting for their dates. They had been inside now for six months. There were men who had been waiting for a year. There were some ragged bastards who had waited for three years, and for four, and – so I heard – even a few for seven. So Dipu and Meetu, who had acted like fools but were capable of learning, had made approaches to my boys. And now they were talking to me, in the bathrooms of Barrack Four, long after nightfall.

  I took them in. They told me they were capable of bloody work, that growing up in Gorakhpur had hardened them, that student union politics there meant canvassing with knife and lathi, that their district had produced several famous dakoos, that it was in their blood. I hadn’t the opportunity of testing them, because they had to stay quiet, stay unnoticed, stay separate from my company. But they were mine.