Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  But Anand Agavane was in a stupor, with knotted eyes and rigid jaw. Sartaj had seen it before, this cornered conjuring-up of courage. Anand Agavane was going to try to be honourable, he wanted to save his friends. He would break, but it would take some effort, questioning, a beating or two. They would have to take him somewhere, work on him.

  Kazimi nodded at Sartaj, then slapped Anand Agavane again, a lazy backhand. It was only a punctuation mark, with not much force behind it. ‘He asked you something,’ Kazimi said. ‘Answer.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about any money,’ Anand Agavane said.

  ‘What about the mobile?’ Sartaj said. ‘Where is it?’

  Kamble took a white shirt from a hook, dropped it. Then he dug into a pair of white pants and came up with a wallet. ‘An auto driver’s packet, with so much money? And you don’t even own the auto, bastard.’ He flung the pants at Anand Agavane, bounced them off his face and on to the floor.

  Sartaj tipped boxes from a kitchen shelf. On the far side of the stove, a black shelf held images of the Tuljapur Devi and Khandoba, and a framed black-and-white marriage picture, a man and a woman with a vague resemblance to Anand Agavane. That must be Veena Aatya, bejewelled and shy for her wedding. Sartaj swept the metal clean, and glass crunched on the floor. Kazimi planted a foot on Agavane’s pants, and reached down and pulled the belt loose. He doubled it over, and slashed at Agavane’s shoulders, his hips.

  ‘If you make me angry,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to spend the night with me, bhenchod. Not with your aatya. And I tell you, I will have a lot of fun, but you won’t. Where is it, this maderchod mobile?’

  Sartaj turned away from the shelves, back to the room. The kholi looked as if it had been suddenly destroyed, as if a hard wind had taken the bright calendars off the wall and gashed them in half, and spilt a canister of good rice across the floor. Sartaj tried to think across the thwacking of leather on skin, and Kamble’s steady cursing. Anand Agavane had been sitting on the floor watching television, right there. He would not be far from his mistress’s voice, the phone must be near the door. Somewhere over there. There was a shuttered window, but the scarred, twisted wood left only space enough on the sill for a packet of Wills and matches. Sartaj shook open the folded mattress that Agavane had been sitting on, and that yielded nothing but a musty smell and a faint sprinkling of fuzz. Sartaj stepped over the phone and its stool, and then there was nowhere to go. That was the room, this much was the kholi.

  In the corner, at the height of Sartaj’s head, a wire basket hung from a white rope. The basket was empty. Maybe Aatya was off buying atta, and potatoes, and mutton, which she would hang in the basket, away from the inescapable rats. She kept a neat house, even if her nephew was an apradhi. Anand Agavane was crouched over now, his head between his knees and arms wrapping around tight. His shoulders were flushed red now, and his head was bald and sweaty. Stubborn bastard. Sartaj knuckled the basket, and it swung gently against the wall. The rope went up to a hoop on a rafter. There was a picture on the wall, a recent studio portrait, all bright colours and dramatic lighting for a young couple. Aatya’s daughter, maybe, in a red sari, with dark glasses pushed back on her head. Her husband stood next to her in a leather jacket, hands on hips, in a sleek model stance. The jacket was probably rented from the photographer, who had posed them as a modern young couple in front of a night-time city. The lights swept up and down, and sparkled on water. It could be Marine Drive, or New York. The black-framed photograph hung from a protruding brick. All down this front wall, a foot above Sartaj’s head, there were paired bricks that angled out into the room. Aatya must have had them built in, every two feet or so. A practical woman. Sartaj reached up to the first one, and ran his hand over the top, and found only the rough surface and the twine that held up the photograph. He did the second one, and then kicked aside the mattress, took a step. He reached up, and felt the rush of confidence even as he did. Yes. He felt the smooth plastic at the tips of his fingers. It was the phone.

  ‘I have it,’ he said.

  Kamble flung aside a tin biscuit box he had been investigating, and buttons and spools and needles rattled against the far wall. ‘Show, show,’ he said, holding out a hand.

  But Sartaj held on to the phone, it was his, for the moment at least. This was that moment when a case opened up, when he felt he was ripping through a dark curtain, when there was that sharp rush of triumph and further appetite. He let it rush through him, and he could feel the grin on his face. He pressed keys on the phone, then held it up to Kamble. ‘Last ten numbers dialled,’ he said. ‘All the same number, the other mobile.’

  ‘Got you,’ Kamble crooned. ‘Caught you, bastard.’ He took the phone, tapped the screen with his forefinger. He was as happy as a little boy with a softie cone.

  But Kazimi was disgusted. He kicked Agavane, and then tottered away and sat on an upturned crate. ‘Maderchod,’ he said to Agavane. ‘For this you made me work this much? You think we wouldn’t have found the gaandu phone up there? You’re sitting in a kholi as big as a mouse’s hole, bhenchod. Stupid. Now we’ve got you.’ He flapped out a big blue handkerchief, and wiped his face and the back of his neck. ‘Finished now, hero? You ready to talk?’

  Agavane’s face came up to the light. He was weeping. ‘Saab,’ he said. ‘Saab.’

  It was eleven when Sartaj got to Mary’s. He pulled up, suddenly aware of how loud the motorcycle was. The staircase was far from the single flickering light bulb at the end of the lane and very dark. Sartaj toed his way up, noticing for the first time the creepers on the wall to his left, the thick cushiony covering of leaves and vine. He knocked on the door twice, and was just starting to think of going down the stairs when it creaked open. Mary was fuzzy-eyed and very slow. She mumbled something, and shuffled backwards to let him in.

  ‘I fell asleep,’ she got out finally, through a huge yawn. There was a mother duck and little ducks on her very large yellow T-shirt.

  ‘Sorry,’ Sartaj said. ‘I couldn’t get out until now. I can go.’

  ‘No, no.’ She shut the door. ‘I was just watching television, I closed my eyes.’

  On the screen, a line of zebras, brilliant black and white, went leaping over a ridge. Sartaj reached out and touched Mary’s cheek.

  ‘Sartaj Singh,’ she said, ‘you are smelly.’

  Sartaj stepped back. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘A whole day of work, you see.’ He was aware suddenly of his own reek, of the awful petroleum-tinged seams of dirt and sweat that had settled over his body, forehead to ankles. ‘I should go. My plan was to go home first, but it got very late.’

  Mary laughed. ‘You’re blushing,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that policemen could blush. Listen, you don’t have to go. Why don’t you take a bath?’ She tipped her head towards the door behind Sartaj.

  ‘A bath?’ She was right, he had blushed, Sartaj could feel the flush on his chest and neck. He had never been shy, but now the thought of taking his clothes off behind that thin plank of wood made him feel unbearably exposed.

  But Mary became brisk and efficient. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a towel. I’ll warm up the food, it’ll be ready when you finish.’

  Sartaj bent over near the front door to take his shoes off, and then changed his mind and took them off outside, on the landing. He tucked the brown socks far back into the shoes, and smiled back at Mary.

  ‘Do you take off your, your…?’ she asked, holding out a green towel.

  ‘Pugree. Usually.’

  ‘So?’

  He sat on the chair at the foot of her bed and unwound his pug. She watched him intently. It had been a long time since he had done this in front of a woman. His heart was squeezing fast, and his face felt warm.

  ‘It’s very long,’ Mary said. ‘That’s a lot to carry on your head.’

  ‘You get used to it.’ Sartaj was wrapping the long swathe of blue cloth from elbow to hand as he took it off his head. ‘Like a woman with a sari, no?’

  Mary nod
ded. ‘So did you catch her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The woman who was blackmailing that girl.’

  Sartaj froze. Anger and an inexplicable tincture of shame burned through his belly. Men are bastards, he thought, rakshasas. He didn’t want to tell her who the apradhi was, but knew he had to. He took up another turn of cloth around his arm, and drew in a breath. ‘No, we caught one of the low-level boys. But now we know who the blackmailer is. The bastard we caught, he told us everything.’

  Mary clapped her hands, once, twice. ‘Come on, tell. Who is it?’

  Sartaj shook his head, and unclamped his jaw. ‘It’s the boyfriend,’ he said.

  ‘Which boyfriend? Whose?’

  ‘Kamala’s old boyfriend. The pilot. Umesh.’

  ‘Wait, wait. The good-looking one? The one you met?’

  ‘That one.’ Sartaj stood up, ceremoniously laid his folded-up turban on the chair. ‘This fellow we found today, his mother used to work for the pilot’s family before she died. So the pilot recruited him for this job. To make the calls, to get the money.’

  Mary’s face had settled into an opaque blankness. ‘Blackmailing this woman who,’ she said, ‘who…’ She turned towards the wall, and her neck was taut.

  ‘Umesh has expensive tastes,’ Sartaj said. ‘I think he saw too much cash in Kamala’s purse, decided he needed some of it.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. We can’t arrest him. There’s no official case. We haven’t decided yet.’

  Mary picked a fragment of thread from her T-shirt, flicked it aside. ‘Beat him,’ she said. ‘Beat him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sartaj said, and then he didn’t know what to say. Mary’s shoulders were hunched under the fine yellow cloth.

  ‘You can use my shower cap,’ she said. ‘If you want.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sartaj was glad to be able to escape to the bathroom now. He had trailed the sewer-smell of crime into Mary’s home, and had upset her. In her anger there was the pain of her own history. He wasn’t being a very successful suitor, he thought as he shut the door to the tiny bathroom. On the sill, under the ventilator, there was a row of shampoos and lotions and soaps. There were two hooks on the back of the door, both laden with towels and clothes. He didn’t want to put his clammy shirt on top of her nightie. He moved the gown – soft, very soft – to the other hook, and the towel underneath, holding by the very tips of the fingers. He unbuttoned his shirt. Kamble had wanted to beat the pilot also, when Anand Agavane had told them who the blackmailer was. Kamble had been furious. He had wanted to pull the bastard pilot from his cockpit right then, or go to his house and beat him in the middle of his bhenchod movie-theatre room. Kazimi and Sartaj had both been surprised by Kamble’s vehemence, and Kazimi had finally said, ‘Why do you want to beat, bhai? The bastard has lots of money.’ And Sartaj had nodded.

  Sartaj put Mary’s shower cap over his patka, and turned on the tap. There was no shower. Sartaj waited for the red plastic bucket to fill, watched the water froth. Kamble was very young. Under that cynicism, which he wore like armour, there was a romantic after all. ‘Arre, I have lots of girls,’ he had said to Kazimi and Sartaj, ‘but I don’t make money from them. I spend maderchod money on them, as much as I can, more than I have. This pilot is a badhwa.’ It had taken a while before they could calm him down, before they could convince him that beating was only a temporary pleasure, that it was no real punishment for a man like the pilot. He was still muttering when they had left each other. ‘She had love for him,’ he said, using the English word ‘love’ and stabbing at them with a forefinger, ‘and he just exploited her. Bastard.’

  Sartaj dipped mugs of water from the bucket, over his shoulders and belly. He was sitting cross-legged on a white aluminium stool, facing the tap. They had been so sure the apradhi was Rachel Mathias, scorned and insulted and vengeful. But it had turned out to be the beautiful lover himself who had wronged his beloved. Kamble, the amazing man, believed in the unspotted ecstasy of unadulterated love, in the dreams they sang about in the songs. ‘Gaata rahe mera dil, tu hi meri manzil.’ Sartaj hooked the mug on the edge of the bucket, and sat with his hands on his thighs, eyes closed. Was it possible to come back to belief again, to leave behind too much knowledge and the comfortable distances of exile? Sartaj thought of the woman on the other side of the door, just so close, and how strange and unexpected it was that he was in her home, in her bathroom. He rubbed a bar of Lux over his shoulders, and thought of that other woman, the woman who had loved the pilot. Umesh was not a good man, but Kamala wasn’t so good either. But Sartaj didn’t want to remind Mary that Kamala had a husband, that she was selfish and frivolous and unfaithful, he didn’t want to argue the point. Not here, not now. He wanted, just now, only quiet, and Mary close. There was always the possibility of arguments in the future, of betrayal and pain and damage, but this evening he needed a small enclosing circle of faith. The future wasn’t here yet, and the past was gone. He turned the tap to full, and splashed large mugfuls of water on to his head, his chest, his thighs. He was grinning. He hummed the song: ‘Kahin beetein na ye raatein, kahin beetein na ye din.’

  He was towelling himself dry when Mary knocked on the door. ‘Here,’ she said. He opened the door a crack, enough so that she could put her arm through. ‘You can wear this.’

  ‘This’ was a well-worn white kurta. He shut the door, and held it up. It was a little short in the sleeves, but it fitted him quite well at the shoulders and chest. He wondered if it was her ex-husband’s, or a boyfriend’s, but he put the thought away. What did it matter? The kurta was clean, it had that crisp laundry smell of starch and ironing. He rolled the sleeves up his forearms, pinching down the edges of the folds to get them sharp and straight. His patka was easily retied, but there was nothing he could do about the hollows under his eyes, and the gaunt fall of his cheeks. He patted his beard down, and nodded at himself in the mirror, and went out.

  Mary had dinner waiting for him on the small table near her bed. This was what they had originally decided on the phone, that he would eat her machchi kadi and rice after work. ‘I hope you ate,’ he said. ‘I was very late.’

  She had a small stove lit, and steam burbled from a pot. ‘I was too tired to eat,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’

  They ate sitting cross-legged on the floor, with the table between them. Mary’s machchi kadi was fierce, but not malicious. Sartaj gasped as he ate, and drank a lot of water, and told her stories about his childhood. He told her about eating so much chole-bature at a roadside shop in Shimla that he had to be carried home by Papa-ji, and about his teenage passion for Royal Falooda from a particular Irani restaurant in Dadar, and about Gokul in Santa Cruz, where you could get a mango ice-cream so creamy that it took you back to long-ago summer mango-eating debauches, when you dipped for Dussheries in big buckets of cold water. He told her about afternoons when the June heat pressed through schoolroom walls, and seventy boys in white uniforms grew surly and restless, and the most dashing and popular of them – Sartaj and his friends – just had to jump through a window to eat kulfi on the street corner. She laughed at his stories, and filled his plate with more rice.

  ‘I didn’t know you had such a weakness for sweet things,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any kulfi. Maybe some old toffees. I had some chocolate, but it’s finished.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Sartaj said. ‘No, no more.’

  But he ate some more. After he had finished, after he had washed his hands and discreetly scrubbed his teeth with a dab of Mary’s neem toothpaste, he sat with his back against the bed, sucking at an orange-flavoured sweet. This was one of three she had found far back on a shelf. She was washing dishes and pans, and the clanky music of it was comforting. Sartaj sighed, settled his shoulders, swallowed the last sliver of the sweet and closed his eyes. Just a minute or two, he thought, of rest.

  He woke to a darkened room and Mary’s hand on his face. ‘Sartaj,’ she whispered. ‘Get into the bed.�
��

  He had been dreaming, dreaming of Ganesh Gaitonde. The story of the dream fled from him as he pushed himself up on an elbow, but the last image remained with him: Gaitonde talking to him through a wall. Listen, Sartaj.

  He had been curled on the floor, next to the bed. There was a cushion under his arm. ‘I fell asleep,’ he said, feeling quite foolish.

  ‘You were tired too.’

  He couldn’t see her eyes or her face, but he knew she was staring at him. He got up, and sat on the edge of the bed, next to her. She moved, and lay on the far side of the bed, next to the wall. ‘If I am here too much,’ he said, ‘and stay, won’t your neighbours say things? Your landlord?’

  She reached out, pulled gently at his wrist. ‘Don’t worry. You’re a big Punjabi policeman. They’re too scared of you to open their mouths.’

  He arranged himself next to her, and they were still, shoulders touching. Sartaj took a breath, and turned on to his right side, and found her facing him. They kissed. In the darkness her lips were full and supple, different from before. She settled into the arch of his arm and collarbone and pressed her mouth to his. There was the tip of her tongue, an agile prickle that pierced him. Her breath moved through him.

  A sound came from Sartaj, a low rasp, and he was hard against her. He spread his hand over the small of her back and brought her to him, her hips and belly. He had half-rolled on to her when he knew she had retreated, gone away somewhere. Her arm lay stiff against his back. He moved back.

  ‘Sorry, I,’ she said, ‘I…’

  Sartaj could feel her agitation, her anxiety. He tried to gentle her, stroked fingers through her hair. He was painfully erect, and there was a hunger in him that wanted to take her, but he was somehow content to lie close with her. Their breathing came together, and after a while he could see the gleam of a smile. He smiled also, and they kissed. He thought now she was different from the other women he had been with, not inexperienced exactly, but shy. She nuzzled tentatively at his chin, as if she was testing out something she had learned recently. He held her lower lip between his teeth, played with the corners of her mouth. She laughed, and he with her. They lay together. The baby-shampoo smell of her hair was the last thing Sartaj knew, and he settled gratefully into it.