Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  The platoon leader said, ‘Professor, do you know what this is?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And you still stand so close by?’

  ‘Comrade Jansevak told me that you were an expert.’

  The platoon leader grinned. Then Aadil helped him unreel a black wire back from the road, up the side of an addah and then behind it. Two men from the platoon went along the wire, kicking dirt over it. Then they all lay behind the rise, the PAC men cradling their rifles. The sun came over them and they waited. Aadil’s head was pounding. The platoon leader told him about the raid on a mine in Singhbhum that had netted them twelve hundred gelatin sticks. They waited. At two-thirty a scout signalled from the east.

  ‘The jeep is coming,’ the platoon leader said. ‘You want to do it?’ He held up the end of the black wire, separated out into two strands. In front of him there was a red car battery. ‘You have to do it with exact timing. Too soon or too late and it won’t hit.’

  Aadil shook his head. He wanted to do it, but he wanted to be sure. His hands were shaking and he wasn’t sure that he could manage the calculation, of moving object and distance and the near-instantaneous speed of electricity. The jeep bumped along the road and came closer and now Aadil could hear it. It appeared that it had passed the spot which Aadil had marked as the location of the mine, but then it vanished in a white and brown spasm of the earth that shut Aadil’s eyes. When he blinked them open there was a gout of black dust and smoke and then a blackened metal hulk crashing far from the road, on the near side towards the PAC platoon. The men cheered and hooted.

  ‘Forty feet,’ the platoon leader said. ‘It flew at least forty feet.’

  Aadil ran behind them, his ears still ringing, as they went forward. A small shower of paper came drifting down, and the air smelt of petrol. Then Aadil saw a policeman’s body, but only half of it. The boots and the legs were quite intact, and the brown leather belt still held its polish. But above the waist there was a dirty tangle of innards, and nothing else. Aadil’s throat clutched, and he had to turn away. Control yourself, he told himself. You have performed many dissections. This is nothing new.

  ‘First time is always hard,’ the platoon leader said. He kicked away a smouldering metal strut and bent over to get a look at another body underneath. The chassis of the jeep, behind them, was covered with a fine layer of lapping blue flames. ‘Don’t worry. The habit will get into you. Some day you’ll do it yourself.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ Aadil said. The nausea he had just suffered was just a spasm of the body, his mind knew better. The policemen were class enemies, and they had to be executed. There wasn’t really a choice.

  As he expected, Aadil got used to the killing. He operated mainly in Bhagalpur and Munger. Comrade Jansevak thought he was too well-known around Rajpur, and there were now too many informers and enemies who would take a personal interest in doing him harm. So Aadil fought his war far from home. He carried a rifle and a Rampuri knife, but his main work was education and indoctrination. He went from village to village, moving mostly at night and never crossing an empty field during the day. He conducted classes for the peasants, gathering them at midnight by the light of a single lantern. He taught them their own history, and offered them a vision of the future: equality, prosperity, no landlords, no debt, each person the owner of his own fate.

  With each passing week, Aadil became more depended on by the commanders of the PAC. Since he was the Professor, he never commanded a squad, but he rose rapidly through the ranks and became a trusted tactician. The landlords had their armies, and the police their power and brutality, and so the game was played out across the hills and the riverine mazes of the diara. Aadil planned the operations, the executions in response to massacres, the ambushes of police convoys and kidnappings of engineers and doctors. He discovered an instinctive feeling for feint and counter-blow, for subterfuge and evasions. He delighted in the success of his schemes, and he was not impervious to the admiration of his comrades, and so he trained himself to be a good soldier. He was no longer sickened by the smell of human blood. He took part in a few operations, most notably the ambush of an eight-vehicle police party that was returning from an investigation of the killing of a sarpanch. There was a hot exultation in the firing of an SLR at the khaki-clad figures scuttling about the road below, confused and terrorized by the mines which had blown their three lead trucks. The plan had been entirely Aadil’s. The sarpanch, who had been an informer and a reactionary right-winger, had been executed in a particularly public way, by beheading in the middle of the village market on a busy Tuesday. Since the sarpanch had been close to the local MLA, Aadil knew that the police would send out a substantial convoy to investigate and reassure. So Aadil and two squads had waited for them on the road, and found them. The final bag was thirty-six policemen killed, many injured, for not one PAC casualty. The Professor again won high praise, but what Aadil valued the most, afterwards, was the memory of the rifle jumping against his cheek, the smell of the powder. The sensations told him that he was not useless, discarded. He had tilted his shoulder against the leaning of the world, and he would shift it on its axis.

  The years passed. The battles came and went, one after another. Aadil’s parents passed, one after another in less than a month during one cold winter. His mother died content, knowing that her son was at last married. Aadil’s wife was much younger than him. Her name was Jhannu, and she was a Musahar girl educated until the tenth class, a fiery ideologue of the party and a canny, experienced fighter. Aadil met her when he outlined an operation for her squad in Singhbhum. She pointed out the flaws in his plan, but was moved by his white hair and his reputation for dedication to the cause. They married, and he was overwhelmed by the heat in Jhannu’s lean, brown body and his hunger for a certain soft place at the bottom of her throat, just next to the hard muscle of her shoulder. But in less than two years they drifted apart. She was assigned to lead a squad in Hazaribagh, and seeing her required an elaborate passing of messages and risky journeys. Aadil wondered also if she had begun to question the quality of his commitment to the struggle. He worked as hard as ever, but he found that knowledge had lessened his ability to indulge himself in simplicities. He was not quite a cynic, but in bed, maybe a little relaxed by the feel of her hair against his cheek, he had let slip a remark or two about the leaders of the party. For instance, he had complained to Comrade Jansevak when Jhannu was being sent away from him, and Comrade Jansevak had said, ‘A worker of the party must take such things in his stride. Aadil, my friend, maybe marriage itself is not such a good idea for soldiers. We must sacrifice everything.’ But Aadil knew that Comrade Jansevak himself had not one wife but two. There was one he had been married to long ago, in his childhood. And there was another, barely out of childhood herself and renowned for her blossoming beauty. Comrade Jansevak kept her in a house in Gaya, in a three-storeyed pink mansion equipped with a satellite dish and a television in every room, and two Kirloskar generators. Aadil knew this, and maybe he said something to his own wife. And once, only once, very late at night, he had whispered to Jhannu about all the killing, the executions and the retaliations. She quoted Chairman Mao. ‘The country must be destroyed and re-formed,’ she said, and grew stiff against him.

  Aadil also knew where the money for Comrade Jansevak’s mansion came from: it was taken from the levies and taxes the PAC extracted from farmers and businessmen. Aadil had learnt the business of revolution. Much of the money passed through his own hands, as it went from bottom to top. He appreciated that the logistics of war demanded funding, he knew the price of an AK-47 and the cost – per thousand – of bullets. There were other expenses, for salaries and pamphlets and travel and medicine. He knew all this, but there were times when he couldn’t help thinking of what he was doing, of what he was directing, as nothing less or more than extortion. He took money. He gave guns to boys and girls and told them to bring back money. He tried to teach history to his soldiers, but he knew that many of them
mouthed his lessons exactly as they had chanted religious hymns, without curiosity and without understanding. Jhannu quoted Chairman Mao in every conversation, and practised dialectical materialism every day, but for every one of her there were ten boys to whom Chairman Mao was only a hazy yellow god who gave them weapons. Some bastard zamindar had taken their land with the force of his lathaits, and so now they had a rifle and much ammunition. That was all they knew and all they wanted to know.

  So Aadil knew all this, and spoke about it briefly to his own wife, and so lost her. And yet, he was no counter-revolutionary, no recidivist. His ideology was as clear as mountain water. He believed sincerely and completely, he trusted still in the promise of the future. The revolution would chip away at all forms of exploitation, until a truly classless and stateless world communism was achieved. This was inevitable. The revolution would continue. There was no liberation without revolution, and no revolution without a people’s war. What could look like an imperfect practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was often merely practicality. Perfection was to be sought with imperfect means. The virtues of the oppressed were cunning and subterfuge and deception. The duty of the cadres was to obey the dictates of the party. All this Aadil accepted and believed. He had no doubts about the purity of the party’s aims – no matter how many green sofas Comrade Jansevak bought for his wife – and he would continue to serve with the utmost enthusiasm and vigour. He would give his life to the party, to the workers of the coming years. He had known only struggle, but they would know happiness. For them, and their future lives, he was willing to live with Comrade Jansevak’s perks, with the burdens that were placed on peasants and small shopkeepers, he would put up with the executions of backsliders, and all the blood.

  Killing was commonplace to Aadil now. Keeping score through the chaos and noise of ambushes was hard, but Aadil calculated that he himself had killed a dozen men, maybe twenty, maybe a few more. No more than that. He had seen many more than that killed, by bullet and explosion and axe and lathi. He couldn’t remember all the dead bodies he had seen, the small piles of flesh and rags that he had stepped over. He had gone on, face always to the front, leaving the dead behind. At first, each death that Aadil had witnessed had been a momentous event, a change in the world that struck him with the force of a revelation. He had paid close attention to the symptoms, a twitching arm, an open eye with the shine gone off the sclera, leaving it blackish-yellow. The retina gone grey. Then, long ago, each of these transfigurations had promised a great transformation tomorrow, each dying had presaged the coming light of the worker’s dawn. Now the corpses fell, and Aadil did not count them. Death was the ground he stepped on, the country of his existence. Aadil lived inside death, and so no longer noticed it.

  It was life, finally, that unhinged him and sent him fleeing from the revolution, from Comrade Jansevak and the PAC, from Bihar. The platoon leader who had taken Aadil on his first ambush was now an area commander, and Aadil was allowed to know his name, Natwar Kahar. Natwar Kahar operated in Jamui and Nawada mostly, aided by a second-in-command named Bhavani Kahar. This Bhavani, who was just twenty-four, was a distant relative and special protégé of Natwar Kahar’s. Natwar Kahar had inducted Bhavani into the party when he was a young boy, and groomed him as a soldier and potential party leader. The boy had charisma, and he was fearless. On Diwali night, young Bhavani was picked up by the police in the village of Rekhan. Bhavani was deep in a drunken sleep in the house of a woman, a widow, when the police found him. And so handsome Bhavani disappeared into the grinding jaws of justice, and Natwar Kahar was left raging. The police had obviously received a tip-off, a very specific one. Natwar Kahar examined his suspects, all the villagers, and he finally settled on Bhavani’s woman. She was the only one who knew that Bhavani would come to her bed that Diwali night, that he had a weakness for good rum. She had sent her two children to her mother’s house, and that on Diwali night. So Natwar Kahar had her seized and brought up to his camp. He asked for her name – which was Ramdulari – and then he asked her for a confession. Ramdulari protested, she was innocent, she would never do such a thing, and especially she would never betray Bhavani. She was a tall woman, Ramdulari, not beautiful but with a long, lush body and a fast walk. Her husband had died of kalazar during a flood some eight years ago. She had raised her two boys, and maintained her house and survived. When she spoke to Natwar Kahar, she had her head covered but she looked very directly at him and did not beg, or tremble, or look afraid. Natwar Kahar insisted on a confession, and she shook her head, and spoke back at him impatiently, saying that Bhavani was dear to her, as much as he was to Natwar Kahar.

  So Natwar Kahar convened a people’s court that very same evening. Ramdulari was tried, the evidence was examined and she was convicted. She again refused the chance of confession and self-criticism. The sentence was, of course, death, as it always was for betrayal. But Natwar Kahar wanted to make an example of Ramdulari. Instead of proceeding with the customary beheading, he cut her a little at a time. The next morning he called the squad together, and in front of them he cut off all her toes and fingers. He did it with a small kulhadi which was kept about the camp for stripping poles and saplings. She screamed, and bled, and Natwar Kahar laughed and had the camp doctor attend to her. ‘Keep her alive,’ Natwar Kahar said. The doctor was not really a doctor. He had once been a compounder, and he had never encountered multiple amputations. But he had some experience with bullet wounds and cuts, and Ramdulari survived. She was very strong. They kept her in a pit behind Natwar Kahar’s shack. She was given food regularly, and it became something of a camp amusement to watch her try to eat with the pads of her hands, and bend double to lick up grains of rice from the dirt.

  Aadil saw Ramdulari three weeks after her trial. He hadn’t believed the story when he had first heard it, about Natwar Kahar’s punishment of the informing whore. He thought it was good propaganda, effective in preventing the Bhavani Singh situation from occurring again. Even when Aadil came to Natwar Kahar’s camp, to pick up a delivery of cash, he did not think to mention the woman. He thought she was dead and the matter closed. He had finished putting the plastic-wrapped stacks of notes in his jhola when Natwar Kahar asked, with a grin, ‘Do you want to see Ramdulari?’

  Aadil didn’t know whose name that was, and Natwar Kahar explained with a proprietary pride. Aadil followed him, the bag heavy over his shoulder. The stench from the pit pressed at Aadil’s face, but Natwar Kahar walked on, unconcerned. They stood overlooking the sloping hole. At the bottom, in the moist yellow and brown mess, there was a large moving object. Aadil couldn’t make out what it was. It was neither human nor animal, nothing that he had ever seen before. It moved in sideways jerks and spasms, something like the little crabs that popped up from the sand on the river’s edge. Then Aadil’s head swam softly and lifted, and the sun shifted its arc, and he saw that below him was a woman, but strangely attenuated. She was not complete.

  ‘We cut her at knees and elbow four days ago,’ Natwar Kahar said, chopping at his arm with the edge of his hand. ‘I thought for sure she was gone. There was too much blood. But the bitch won’t die.’

  Ramdulari was looking at Aadil. He felt himself swaying, unable to look away. Her eyes were enormous and dark and remote, and he could read nothing in them, not pain or sorrow. The dark hair wrapped around her face and her lips drew back. She was saying something. But what? He was sure she was speaking. He couldn’t hear her, not past the roaring that came from inside his body, everywhere, his arms and legs and stomach, like the flapping of a thousand wings. Natwar Kahar was saying something. What?

  ‘If we put food and water on the other side, over there, she crawls. It takes hours, but she gets there. She just won’t die.’

  Hearing Natwar Kahar’s voice, hoarse and low, broke Aadil’s trance. He was able to look away. Natwar Kahar was watching Ramdulari, and he was almost admiring, almost respectful. He was rubbing his chin. Aadil heard the scrape of his fingers over his white stubble. Natwar
Kahar said, ‘She’s as strong as a horse.’

  Aadil reeled away. He found the support of a tree, and vomited at its roots. He finished, and Natwar Kahar was waiting for him, one arm folded across his chest, the other smoothing out his moustache.

  ‘It was the smell,’ Aadil said. ‘Very bad.’

  ‘Arre, Professor,’ Natwar Kahar said, smiling widely, ‘after all these years you’re just the same.’

  Aadil didn’t assert his toughness, his many ambushes, his operations, he did not argue. All he wanted was to be out of Natwar Kahar’s camp. He left within the hour, even though it was long before darkness. He took his bodyguards and left, and pushed hard all night, down the paths and across the nullahs. They reached their safe house in Jamui town early. The boys slept, but Aadil sat by the window and watched the road. He was afraid to shut his eyes, because when he did so a crawling began under his skin, a jerky sliding that terrified him. He wondered whether he had remained the same, or whether he had changed. At two in the afternoon, when the heat came off the ground in billowing breaths, he slipped out of the door. He left the bag of cash he had collected from Natwar Kahar on the floor of the front room, and took nothing with him, not even a pistol. In his pocket he had eight thousand rupees, his Rampuri knife and a driver’s licence in the name of Maqbool Khan. He went to the station, bought a second-class sitting ticket for an express train, and was in Patna at a little past six-thirty. He went straight to the ticket counter, paid four hundred and forty-nine rupees, and sat on the platform until his train got in at eleven-twenty. He did not have a reservation, so he squatted in the corridor in an unreserved coach, squeezed in tightly amongst a wedding party. At Jhansi, he got out of the coach, and bribed a sleeper berth out of the ticket collector. Then he slept. The motion of the train somehow countered the agitation in his body, and he was able to doze whole afternoons away, getting up only to use the bathroom and drink water. In a little more than fifty hours, he was in Mumbai.