Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  ‘I am aware of your present difficulties. But I appreciate the effort you have put in against this Suleiman Isa, and against his Pakistani friends.’

  He was waiting for me to say something. I gave him a response: ‘Yes, saab. That bastard is a traitor. He is a dog who lives on the Pakistanis’ waste.’ He nodded. ‘He is anti-national,’ I said.

  ‘And you, Ganesh Gaitonde? Are you a patriot?’

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  I am. It was as simple as that. In that moment, I realized that a patriot was what I am. I had once been an ignorant boy, interested only in money, in my dream of fame and luxury. But since then I had learnt much, understood much. In this world there is no man who can stand alone, and say I am free of everything but myself. I was a patriot. Looking at this Mr Kumar, I recognized in him a patriot, and knew myself to be one.

  ‘I can help you,’ he said. ‘If you help us.’

  ‘How do I help you?’

  ‘If you stay in India, you will keep suffering violent attacks. Besides, all these legal troubles will continue. Now there is no TADA, but for you TADA will remain alive for ever. One day you’ll arrange to get out, and then go in again. Maybe they will make a new, more ferocious law, and slap that on you as well.’

  ‘Yes. No doubt.’

  ‘So, go abroad.’

  ‘I have thought of that. But my base is here. I do have some connections and facilities outside, but not enough, saab. It would take a lot of money and effort and time to set up operations anywhere else.’

  ‘That is where we can help you. We can provide information, help. Initial arrangements, of course, and logistics. Maybe money.’

  The man was offering a lot. And he offered as if he had the ability to provide what he promised. But I needed to pin him down. ‘And, saab, what do you want from me?’

  ‘Your co-operation. You will give us information on anti-national activities. What they are doing, what they are planning. Sometimes we may have certain tasks that we may want you to complete. We need a partner who can do work of all types.’

  Yes, work of all types. No doubt they needed someone to do the really dirty things that they could not get done legally themselves. They needed a strong arm, but one they could disown in public. It was time to let him know that he wasn’t offering help to a fool. I leaned forward. ‘But, Kumar Saab,’ I said, ‘you already have Chotta Madhav working for you.’ Chotta Madhav had been one of Suleiman Isa’s boys, but had split off and formed his own company after the bomb blasts. He operated now out of Indonesia, and fought against Suleiman Isa, and because he was an enemy of my enemy, we had maintained cordial relations, not hatred but not friendship either. And we knew he had some kind of relationship with the organization called RAW. This is what I wanted this Mr Kumar to know, that it didn’t take very much thinking to fathom who he was.

  Mr Kumar was amused. His smile was like a thin ripple that passed quickly across his skull. ‘Is he working for us?’

  ‘That he is. Just like Suleiman Isa is working for the ISI.’

  ‘Maybe Madhav is working for us. But this is a time of extreme danger. We need more patriots.’

  I nodded. ‘What do you want me to do, saab?’

  He told me. The rain fell outside. We made our plans. And so I became a warrior for my country and my people.

  Meeting Beauty

  Zoya Mirza was a hard woman. She was hard to find, hard to speak to on the phone, hard to meet. Sartaj tried to explain this to Anjali Mathur, who seemed to think that a police inspector armed with the awful majesty of the law and incriminating photographs ought to be able to interrupt a film star’s life of glamour and travel and subject her to an interrogation. ‘Maybe I could do that,’ Sartaj said, ‘if any of this were official. Are we official yet?’

  ‘No, I don’t have anything I can take to my boss yet,’ Anjali said. ‘Just the vague possibility of a connection between a gangster and a film star. Nothing special.’

  Sartaj couldn’t argue with this. That filmi people were often connected to bhais was something that children in distant villages knew. This wasn’t news. The information would damage Zoya Mirza’s impeccable image of chaste sexiness if it got out, yes, and maybe twist her career out of its steadily rising arc, but there was no explanation yet as to why Ganesh Gaitonde had come back to Bombay. And not the faintest smoky beginnings of a story that would explain why he had built a concrete cube in Kailashpada, why he had shot Jojo and then blown his own head in half. ‘You still want me to investigate quietly. So I can’t ask my boss to call her to the station. You want me to go and talk to her privately, just go in and harass her. These film star types have high connections,’ Sartaj said. ‘If she calls some minister and gets me suspended, you won’t be able to take that to your boss either.’

  ‘She won’t. You have the photographs.’

  ‘It’s a risk.’

  ‘A small one.’

  The risk is still larger than my profits from conducting this investigation, Sartaj wanted to say. He had called Anjali Mathur at the Delhi number she had left him, and she had picked up on the first ring. Her telephone manner was brisk, and she had listened to his report and quietly suggested that he talk to Zoya Mirza. Very simple, very efficient. Sartaj took in a deep breath, let it out. ‘Maybe everything looks small from Delhi, Miss Anjali. But I am truly a small man. And even small risks are big for me.’

  She was quiet for a moment. She was a quiet woman altogether, restrained in her person and her dress. But now Sartaj could sense her making a decision, and when she spoke there was a decided urgency in her voice. ‘I understand, but there is some background you need to know.’

  ‘I need all the background. I have been told absolutely nothing.’

  ‘I am telling you now. Listen. That house you found Gaitonde in, that was a nuclear shelter.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A shelter to protect from a bomb. An atomic weapon. The building was constructed according to a well-known architectural model. It is in books, and you can find it on the internet.’

  ‘Why would he need that? Here?’

  ‘That is what I want to know.’

  The handset was warm against Sartaj’s ear. He was sitting at the back of a small café in the main market street in Kailashpada, and the morning traffic was passing. A school bus lurched to the right and drew close to the footpath where a line of blue-uniformed girls picked up their book-heavy bags. An auto-rickshaw squeezed past the bus. Ordinary life, on an ordinary morning. Sartaj thought about Gaitonde’s cube, on that plot two streets and three turns away, and felt dread settle into his chest, like a drip of cold water. He coughed his throat clear. ‘Is there a threat? Do you know?’

  ‘There has been a generalized threat perception, that some militant group could use a portable weapon in an urban area. One of the Kashmir groups. Or from the north-east. But no, there is no specific information. No particular threat.’

  There had been a film. Sartaj hadn’t seen it, but he had watched the advertisements on television. A militant group planted a nuclear bomb in Delhi. The hero warded off disaster by seconds, stopped the neon-green countdown timer just as it ticked down to zero. That was a movie, but Gaitonde’s cube had been real. Sartaj had rested his hand on it. He sat up, eased his shoulders. He tried to think. ‘Madam,’ he said. ‘Madam, if Gaitonde knew something about a threat, why didn’t he tell your department? Our understanding is that there was a connection.’

  ‘There was no connection.’ She was curt, and quick. Sartaj understood that he had overstepped the bounds of departmental propriety, that she couldn’t and wouldn’t admit to running Gaitonde, especially not on an open phone line. ‘We tracked his movements,’ she said. ‘We found out that he was running weapons into the country. And then we lost track of him. Then he showed up in Bombay.’

  ‘In that house?’

  ‘Yes. Talking to you. Maybe he was trying to tell you about the threat, before you went in.’

  So maybe he was re
sponsible if there was a real bomb in his city. A real bomb in this real city. Was that what Gaitonde had been trying to tell him at the end, when Sartaj walked away to send the bulldozer in? Sartaj had cut off Gaitonde in mid-sentence, had cut off his story and then found him dead. But it had been very hot, and Gaitonde had been very arrogant, behind his steel door. ‘But it’s been many months,’ Sartaj said. ‘Nothing’s happened. You said there was no particular threat.’

  ‘Yes. But I would still like to know what he was doing there. Why he built that house.’

  Sartaj was starting to feel oddly cold. ‘I’ll talk to Zoya Mirza,’ he said. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Good. I’m sure you can do it. There is one other interesting point.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The cash you found in Jojo’s apartment is fake.’

  ‘Those notes? All of them?’

  ‘Yes. They are very good quality counterfeits. They are produced across the border, in Pakistan. They have been introduced into the country in sizeable quantities over the last eight, ten years. They are often used to fund operations that their people run here. And they are in widespread use.’

  ‘Jojo had a lot of them. In unbroken packets.’

  ‘Right. Interesting in itself. But we’ve also noticed that the inks and the paper are very much better in recent notes. Jojo’s notes were all from one of these new batches, which are as yet not that common. One of the only other places where a big batch of these new notes has been picked up was during an IB and Meerut police raid on people involved in arms smuggling. What happened was this: a Matador van was hit by a State Transport bus outside Meerut, the driver of the van was killed. The local police found one other passenger still alive, and twenty-three assault rifles in the back, under the floorboards. They interrogated the passenger the next day, and he told them he didn’t know who he was working for, he was just supposed to pick up the van in Delhi and bring it to Meerut. He didn’t know anything more. But he could give them the whereabouts of the men who had hired him in Delhi for the job. So, the police raided a Delhi house. They got three more men, a hundred and thirty-nine AK-56 rifles, forty pistols, almost eighteen thousand rounds of ammunition and ten lakhs in cash.

  ‘Interrogation of all the apradhis revealed other names, other connections. When these leads were followed, and after several layers had been penetrated, it was finally revealed that the original supplier of the arms in Bombay was Gaitonde. That was the extent of that case, it led us to Gaitonde’s arms smuggling. After his death, in my investigations, I was reading that case file. I thought of taking a new look at the seized cash. And yes, all ten lakhs were in these new Pakistani notes.’

  ‘And who were these men who were arrested in Delhi?’

  ‘They belong to an underground Hindu organization called Kalki Sena, which we had never heard of before. They are getting ready for a war, they said in their statements. I read some of the literature that was found on the raid. They are going to set up a Hindu rashtra, it seems. After the war, which will be the frightful end of Kaliyug, there will be a perfect nation, run according to ancient Hindu principles.’

  ‘Ram-rajya.’

  ‘Ram-rajya, yes.’

  ‘And this war, who is it going to be against?’

  ‘Muslims, communists, Christians, Sikhs. Anyone else who doesn’t like this perfect nation. Militant Dalits also. The rifles were on their way to Bihar, to some right-wing private army run by landlords.’

  ‘You think Gaitonde was part of this organization also? But he always presented himself as the secular don.’

  ‘Yes. So maybe he was just doing business with these Kalki Sena-wallahs, nothing more, he had no involvement in their politics. The apradhis in Delhi couldn’t tell us anything more, they were just one cell with a specific job. Whoever is running this is doing it well, putting in many cut-outs. So Gaitonde was maybe involved on an ideological level, or maybe he wasn’t. I want to know. And I want to know, that nuclear shelter, why?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll talk to the actress.’ Sartaj was now wanting to know as well, he wanted some answers to all these questions, some reason for that cube. If somebody was going to wage war against him and his family and his people, he wanted to know who the bastards were, and how they were connected to Ganesh Gaitonde.

  ‘Good.’

  Sartaj said a quick ‘Okay, bye,’ and walked out into the sunlight. It was good to be warm in the morning. He had an aching back from the night’s sleep, a crimped shoulder, but even the discomfort was welcome. It was good to be alive. He felt a benevolence towards the shopkeepers with their handy calculators and their shrines to pot-bellied Ganesha, the billboards with their lists of goods and services, the sturdy Maratha women in bright greens and blues striding energetically to work, the three urchins playing cricket with a red rubber ball and a stick. Sartaj squinted, and tried to see the aftermath of a nuclear blast, what it would leave of this bazaar. He couldn’t. He remembered the images from the bomb-thriller movie, the brown cloud they had shown in a film within the film, the deadly wind. But it was hard to make it real, here on this street. Impossible to imagine, impossible to believe. And yet, it was here. Here in Kailashpada.

  The shops in the market on Rajgir Road were thronged by legions of young women buying clothes for the nine nights of Navaratri. Sartaj slowed down and tilted the motorcycle towards the left, where he drove at the road’s edge, relishing the excitement and joy of the girls who dodged past him on their way in and out of the boutiques. Surely Devi would be pleased by all this youthful energy, this feminine happiness. It revived Sartaj anyway, delivered him from the bomb. Someone laughed, and the sound made a sudden song that floated above the grunting and heaving of the traffic. Sartaj turned to look for the laugher, and caught sight of enormous dark eyes reflected in a car window, a moving flash, just that, and then the motorcycle was inches away from the back of an auto-rickshaw and he swerved wildly towards the pavement. The engine died, and Sartaj came safely to a stop, and could see nothing on the road-ward side but the long red side of a bus, and to his left a billboard rose some sixty feet above him, carrying the very foreshortened face of a blue-lit model up to the sky. He sat still for a moment, grinning at his own idiocy, his heart thumping a bit from the close call. A stanchion supporting the billboard made a downward-pointing triangle with another metal post, and through the triangle Sartaj could see the top of his own head in a shop window. Oy, Sardar-ji, he said to himself, get control, yaar. What’s wrong with you?

  He drove on, determined to think only professionally now, and calmly, and logically. He was on his way to meet Rachel Mathias, the Rachel who was an ex-friend of Kamala’s and a potential enemy armed with too much intelligence. He hadn’t quite decided yet how he was going to play the meeting. There was no official case, and he had no evidence to accuse the embittered Rachel with, so the intent of the visit was only to gather information, and to perhaps stir the muddy waters a bit and see what came bubbling up. He could be an aggressive, frightening policeman, or he could be a discreet new friend trying to serve Rachel’s interests, not the crazy Kamala’s. Detection was often a matter of playing several parts, sometimes simultaneously. If you could fit yourself into the suspect’s prejudices, present yourself as a solution to her problems, she would talk. Sartaj had done this often enough, so he now didn’t need to prepare too much, to think it all through in advance. A quick run-through of the essential facts as he drove was enough: two friends, one married, the other very lonely; a man; a quarrel. Very simple. But Sartaj knew women’s quarrels well enough to know that they were never as simple as they might seem in a summary. Maybe the beautiful Umesh had just been the flash-point that set off this particular war, maybe tensions had been brewing for years. Maybe the hostilities were really about something else altogether. Assume nothing, he cautioned himself as he parked. Stay alert. Stop thinking about Navaratri and Durga and Lakshmi and Saraswati.

  But the goddesses were well-represented in Rachel Mathias’s drawing room,
which was crowded with what was clearly expensive art, some of it antique. There were sculptures and paintings and, on the wall furthest from the window, a gigantic wooden double door that must have been taken from some great haveli. It leaned against the wall at a sharp angle, cut out from its context but still breathtakingly beautiful with its vibrant blues and reds and yellows and crossing bands of dark iron studded with rivets. Sartaj knew that each of the paintings on the wall, even the modern ones, would cost more than his annual income. Megha would have known the artists, all of them, but the only art that Sartaj recognized was a Raja Ravi Varma print of a bejewelled Lakshmi, graceful and voluptuous. A long time ago, on one of their first dates, Megha had taken him to an art exhibition and told him about the Raja and his works, and Sartaj had loved that Lakshmi ever since.

  Now it was clear that Lakshmi had blessed this house, this duplex apartment in Juhu. It gave Sartaj an idea for the angle of his attack. When Rachel Mathias appeared, he introduced himself and said evenly, ‘We are looking into people who seem to have assets disproportionate to income.’

  ‘Black money, you mean? Tax matters?’

  This Rachel was generously built, but did not give the impression of being lazy or indisciplined. Her bulk was honestly come by, from heredity and from age. She was rather attractive, with her short, efficient hair and well-groomed hands. She looked steadily at Sartaj, giving nothing away. Yes, this was a woman who would have self-control but also deeply felt emotions, this was a person who would feel an insult down to her bones, and then have the courage to avenge it. ‘Yes, madam,’ Sartaj said, ‘these are just preliminary steps, you see. We give people a chance to clear themselves.’

  ‘You’re saying I have too many assets? That I spend too much money?’

  Sartaj swept his arm around and up. ‘This apartment, madam. All these paintings and objects. Your life-style.’

  ‘My life-style? My ex-husband is putting you people up to this, yes? He’s still trying to make me suffer because he had to give us this apartment. After leaving me and his two children for some twenty-year-old whore, he thinks I should sit at home every night?’