Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  Mumbai was very far from Jamui, from Bhagalpur and from Rajpur, and it was vast and anonymous, and Aadil wanted to hide in it. But it frightened him. This city was more of an unknown wilderness than any jungle ridge. That first day, he got off the train and walked along the railway tracks, and a heavy odour seeped down his throat, and he had no idea where he was. There were makeshift homes along the tracks, and children playing just feet from the rails. They laughed at him when he flinched at passing trains. The taller buildings behind the huts were stained grey and black, and festooned with wires. Aadil passed an enormous pile of rubbish flecked with plastic bags, and then a very old man sitting against the iron fence that bordered this section of track. The old man had a white beard, a sunken chest under a torn kurta, and a little white bag on the ground next to him. He was staring at something far away, even further than the far fence and the buildings behind it, further than the dim hills. Aadil shuddered as he walked past the old man. He walked faster. He was very hungry. He stopped, counted the money he had, then found a gap in the fence and went through. He was afraid to cross the wide road with its endless stream of traffic, but finally he found his way across and plunged into the city.

  Aadil lived first in Thane, then in Malad, then Borivili, and then near Kailashpada. He avoided bastis with settlements of Biharis, and he moved often. A glance of recognition made him anxious, and at night he dreamed about Natwar Kahar and a band of riflemen hunting him down in the streets of Mumbai. Two months after he arrived, on a street corner in Andheri, Aadil saw somebody he knew from Rajpur, a boy named Santosh Nath Jha – otherwise known as Babloo – who had been three years junior to him through school and college. Babloo was counting out coins to pay a paan-wallah, and he didn’t see Aadil start and back up behind the wall, into a lane. Aadil looked once again, to make sure it was Babloo, to satisfy himself that such a long coincidence could and did happen, and then he hurried away, staying close to the side of the road and ducking his head. He moved kholis again the next day, to a smaller room in Borivili. His kholi was at the end of a very narrow lane, butted up against the wall. Aadil breathed in the miasma of refuse, from a dump on the other side of the wall, but he felt safe here for a while. He recognized the appalling squalor of his surroundings, compared to which a PAC camp was luxurious, but he had nowhere else to go. Within a month he moved again, because his Tamil neighbours were too curious, and because they had friends and visitors from everywhere, even Bihar. This time he found a kholi in Navnagar, in the Bengali Bura. Here, the inhabitants were all Bangladeshis. Here, finally, Aadil felt safe. These Bengalis were all illegals, with purchased documents and falsified places of birth. They were careful, and they kept to themselves. They were slow to trust Aadil, they fell into silence when he passed by, and he felt comfortable within the wariness. Inside their alien Bengali, he was safe.

  He did not like to leave the basti, so sometimes he gave money to the boys who lived down the lane, to bring him food and razor blades and medicines for his headaches. He now suffered from pain in his temples, agony so intense that for two or three days on end he would lie inside his kholi, newspaper taped over every crack and chink, sweating and naked and shaking. The boys brought him packets of Advil from the chemist near the highway, and gave him cups of chai. There were three of them, Shamsul, Bazil and Faraj. They were eighteen years old, all of them, uniformly equipped with tenth-class educations and dreams of wealth. Shamsul and Bazil worked as messengers for a courier company, and Faraj hung around the basti and occasionally did odd jobs for merchants in the market. They were all keen film-fans, and each had a personal favourite hero he tried to emulate in his speech and cadences. They had all come to Mumbai at about the same time, and now, some fifteen years later, they were quite citified, and regarded their parents with the tolerant affection of urban sophisticates for well-meaning bumpkins. Aadil listened to the boys talk. They liked to sit on the ledge next to his door, holding hands and holding forth on the world, paying attention to the citizens passing by, especially the girls. They knew Aadil as ‘Reyaz Bhai’, and his kholi was a nice little establishment for them. Faraj hid his cigarettes there, and all of them appreciated the small money he gave them, for running his errands. They had tried to cheat him only once, in the beginning, but then he had taken up Bazil by the throat, and his flat, whispery voice had frightened them, and they had returned the few rupees they had kept back from his payment for rice and cooking oil. They had kept away for a few days after that, but he had beckoned them over and given them another task, a request for onions and a newspaper. Since then they had treated Aadil with a careful respect, and he let them come and go into his small room.

  It amused him how they hankered for cars and mobile phones and convent-educated girls, and how they spoke endlessly about what big apartments they would buy when they had made their fortunes. They were full of desire and they had no viable plan. Sometimes they whispered, and Aadil knew they were trying to talk themselves into some petty crime, some pilferage to afford them money for cinema tickets or hair cream. Their parents were quiet, hard-labouring people who were terrified of the police, but the boys had ambition. They told stories to each other, excitedly, about the great gangsters of the city, about Suleiman Isa and Ganesh Gaitonde and Chotta Madhav. They enacted the plot of Company for Aadil, all of it from Africa to Hong Kong, in the four feet of muddy lane before his door. But Aadil knew they had never stolen anything more than some scrap metal from a dealer in Kailashpada, and that they were never going to get to Singapore. Not without him leading them.

  ‘Stop babbling,’ he told them, ‘and listen. If you want to make money, you need discipline. And four choppers.’

  Aadil had called them in one April night when the heat lingered long after sunset. They sat on his floor in a row, like wide-eyed, damp puppies. When they understood he was talking about a robbery, they shrank into themselves and became very quiet. Aadil had seen this, of course, in new recruits who had just realized that the combat they were about to go into was real. He outlined his plan, and finally Faraj said, ‘You have done this before?’

  Aadil let them know that he had, many times, and he gave them no details. But they were satisfied. He had been a mystery to them, and now they knew just enough about him to make up more stories. Like most young men, they wanted to be led, and they slipped easily under his command. He gave them tasks, and praised them, and they were his. They needed no ideology, because they were already convinced that they needed money, and it was theirs to take. They had no need to believe in a future workers’ heaven because they believed in a present paradise of cash. In any case, Aadil had no ideology left to give. He felt all higher purpose had been burned out of him, leaving behind a purity of vision. His money was running out, and he needed to eat, and to have a small place to live. He could work, perhaps as a driver, or as a labourer, but he would not. He was incapable of it. He did not trouble himself with anger at the enormous hoarding of wealth in this city, or the daily violence of poverty visited upon millions and millions. All that was as it was. Aadil only wanted this much – food, room to sleep in, and to be left alone, and he would take these necessities.

  Two weeks later, Aadil and his boys mounted their first operation. The target was a third-floor apartment in Bandra, near Hill Road. Shamsul had three times delivered packages there, addressed to the daughter of the house, a thirty-year-old woman who was an executive in an advertising agency. During the day only her parents were at home. The father was a frail man, much troubled by asthma. The mother was the one who opened the door of the apartment to Bazil, who was wearing a courier service uniform especially commissioned from a tailor. Bazil held up a large brown package. Faraj and Aadil were waiting in the stairway. Aadil had told the watchman at the building gate that he was an electrician, and Faraj his assistant. The old woman opened the door, Shamsul gave her a piece of paper to sign and then Aadil was at her side, the chopper held up for her to see. They pushed her inside, woke the husband from his sleep. Faraj re
ached into his electrician’s bag and handed Aadil a thick loop of rope. As Aadil tied the parents to chairs, he talked to them. ‘Don’t worry, Mata-ji,’ he said. ‘Nothing will happen. I will look after you. No noise, no trouble, and I will look after you.’ He had told the boys that the threat of violence was always more effective than the practice of it. Terror, he had told them, gives you power. Their choppers had cost them only nineteen rupees each, but they were effective. Aadil put one on the table in front of Mata-ji and Papa-ji, and said, ‘See, if you are good, I won’t have to use my patra. Just give us twenty minutes, and we will be gone.’

  Aadil sent Shamsul down first, with his courier bag stuffed with jewellery. In precisely twenty minutes, he and Faraj left with the cash, both Indian rupees and an unexpected roll of dollars recovered from the back of a godrej safe. Faraj wanted to kill the old couple before going. ‘They have seen our faces,’ he said. ‘It would be safer.’ Aadil cuffed him on the back of the head, and pushed him to the door. He spoke quietly to Mata-ji again, and then loosely gagged her and Papa-ji.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘that we know where your daughter works. Be quiet.’ He had no idea where the daughter worked, but he was sure that was enough to keep them quiet until he and Faraj were down the stairs, past the watchman and out on the road. And so it went. They all got out safely, and there was no noise, no fuss and no killing.

  The boys were overjoyed with the takings, which amounted to sixty-seven thousand in cash, two hundred dollars and the jewellery. Shamsul knew a receiver, and he had the transaction all set up. They moved the jewellery the same day, for a lakh and forty thousand. The dollars were in small bills, ones and fives and tens, so they got a low rate. But after all, the boys had never seen so much cash before all in the same place, in their hands, and they were suddenly kings. Aadil tried to convince them that they must be careful, that to be suddenly flush with cash and new clothes and sunglasses and shoes might invite suspicion, maybe a visit from the local beat constable. They agreed, and promised to be careful, but Aadil could see that they were little children with new toys, making promises that they could not keep. The next day, he moved again, to a room on the far side of Navnagar. His room here had a smooth tiled floor, which had been put in by the prior tenant, and running water. He forbade the boys from coming to see him, and met them only outside the basti. They protested at first, Bazil especially, but Aadil explained to them the need for security and discretion. ‘If you want to continue,’ he told them, ‘you must be invisible, you must move like fish in the sea. And do what I tell you, if you want to continue.’ The boys did want to continue, even then, when their pockets were heavy with money. They needed more.

  Aadil wanted very little. He had his room, he cooked his own food, he drank cups of very sweet chai through the day. This was his only luxury in his new life, apart from books. He spent his days reading zoology. The books were second-hand university texts, mostly, bought from pavement dealers. He was surprised by how much of the material he remembered, and how easily it all came back to him. There was no direction or purpose in his reading other than the comfort it gave him. To follow the species to the phylum, to trace the structure in one direction and then back again, this provided meaning enough. There was no need for politics. So Aadil lived on, and lived quietly, and every month he and the boys planned and executed another job. Shamsul wanted to do more, but Aadil counselled patience and stealth. The boys wanted not only to rebuild their kholis and buy new stoves for their mothers, they now dreamt of cars. But for the moment, at least, they obeyed. One good job a month, the target carefully selected, based on good intelligence, brought in enough to satisfy them. For seven months they worked. Aadil was now occasionally reading chemistry, interspersed with the zoology. He had gone through many books on organisms and cells, and now he wanted to watch substances act against each other and make something new. There was an obscure pleasure in the elements coming together, making heat and fire and life. As far as he could see, there was not any grand purpose in these interactions. They happened, that was all. This fitted perfectly with his sense of his own life now. He had thought sometimes of suicide, in a distanced, theoretical manner, but had discovered that he wanted to live. He was not quite sure why, other than the sweetness of chai and the palliative effects of facts. Probably the reason for wanting to go on was very simple, he thought. A virus wanted to reproduce, and an insect ran from danger. So Aadil wanted to live.

  So Aadil survived, in quiet and in hiding. He was, apart from his headaches, quite content. He was surprised that he did not feel lonely, after the camaraderie of the camps, but the books were consolation enough. He felt a tenderness towards himself, towards his prematurely aged body, and sometimes he allowed himself little luxuries: a new mattress, two sets of sheets, a bottle of shampoo. He did not worry too much about the future, although he had the sense that somewhere close by, disaster lurked under the deceptive ease that Mumbai had given him. He was sure of this, but when the catastrophe finally came, it was from a flank that he had grown complacent about. The boys, he thought, had settled down nicely. During operations, they were no longer jittery, they conducted themselves with professionalism and calm watchfulness. After their first big extravaganzas of spending on clothes and televisions and women, Shamsul, Bazil and Faraj had grown into careful businessmen, and invested their money in small businesses run by cousins and aunts, and took in high rates of return. They all gained weight, and looked generally prosperous. Aadil began to believe that he had, all by chance, collected a good and reliable squad. The boys were friends, bound to each other by shared interests and experience and danger.

  Then Faraj and Bazil killed Shamsul. Aadil was in his room that afternoon, sleeping, when Bazil knocked. Aadil was shaken out of a dream of childhood by Bazil’s frantic thumping, a dream in which he walked over a culvert and the roofs of low huts swam in the evening haze. Then he was awake, his hand on his chopper.

  ‘Bhai,’ Bazil said. ‘Bhai?’

  Aadil opened the door and found Bazil shaking against the wall, spattered with blood. Aadil pulled him in. ‘What?’ he said.

  Bazil told him. For many weeks, months actually, he and Faraj had been suspicious of Shamsul and his dealings with the receiver who bought their goods. Shamsul always did the buying and selling by himself, and was reluctant to discuss exactly what prices had been paid for specific items, and he wouldn’t discuss what the buyer said during a meeting, or even what the buyer said he might be able to move easily. It was all very strange. Bazil and Faraj had observed for months that Shamsul had more money than either of them, more – yes, it was true – than both of them put together. Faraj had joked with Shamsul, and had even asked him if he saved more than anyone, but Shamsul had always ignored the implications. He refused to defend himself, which made Faraj even more suspicious. Then last week Shamsul had bought a second kholi, a perfectly new place with four rooms and a double-sized water tanki. He hadn’t told them, the bastard, about this grand new house, but Bazil had found out because his mother sometimes took in embroidery work from the builder’s wife. Bazil told Faraj, and Faraj got very angry. Faraj had made a plan. They would get Shamsul drunk, and take him out near the nullah, behind the big water pipes, and confront him. They would use threats if necessary. But they would find out what was going on. Enough was enough. Bazil was to come prepared. So they invited Shamsul, very casually, to share a bottle of excellent vilayati rum. He was eager, of course. Shamsul had a liking for drink, and after some rum he always grew sentimental and sang. But this time the session was awkward from the very beginning, with Faraj fairly vibrating with tension from the moment he welcomed them into his new kholi. He had boiled eggs and salt and pepper all ready, and a plate of tangdis, and he poured them tall glasses as soon as they came in. After that everything blurred into a confusion of loud talk and lewd jokes and anger. Shamsul started to sing but then wanted more tangdis. Faraj told him, you pay for your own, you have too much money. Shamsul laughed it away, and
for a while Bazil and he talked about girls. They talked about Rani Mukherjee and Zoya and Zeenat Aman, and then Shamsul mentioned Faraj’s younger sister, whose name was also Zeenat and who was said – in the basti – to have a resemblance to beautiful Zeenat from the seventies. What he said was very innocent, that our Zeenat was ready for her first starring role now. But Faraj had been sitting silent in the corner, drinking glass after glass. ‘You bastard,’ he said, ‘you have our money.’ Bazil now realized that he was himself drunk, probably more drunk than Shamsul. He tried to stand up, to get in front of Faraj and remind him of the plan, of the walk out to the nullah. But it was too late. Faraj and Shamsul were shoving at each other already. Then Bazil was flabbergasted to find Shamsul shouting at him, who had done nothing and said very little. Shamsul refused to confess, and Faraj pulled out his chopper from behind the bed, and Bazil grabbed his own, and Shamsul was hitting out at them, thrashing his hands, trying to get out of the kholi. There was blood on his chest now. Then he was running down the lane, and they brought him down once, and again. He tried to get into someone’s house. Maybe he thought it was his own. They hit him again and he fell. And it was done.