Sacred Games

by Vikram Chandra

  Aadil wiped Bazil’s face clean of the tears, gave him a clean shirt and shoved him out. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Run.’ But Bazil stood as helpless as a blind ox in the lane, and Aadil had to give him instructions: go home, get money, get out, find a lodge far away and stay there, and we will meet on Sunday at the Maharaja Hotel in Andheri East, at one o’clock. Being told what to do got Bazil into motion, and he went. Aadil cleaned out his own kholi. He took cash, two shirts, two pairs of pants and a pair of shoes. He was out in ten minutes, and he walked at an even pace, never looking back.

  Aadil stayed at a lodge near Dadar station that night, and then moved again to Mahim the next day. He had no intention of going to the Maharaja Hotel on Sunday, and he knew well that he should leave Mumbai. But where else was there to go? There were other cities, other huge masses of men and women in which to lose himself, but he was here in Mumbai and it had taken him in. He did not have the vigour to stir himself again into motion, to journey again to some new place, to find new languages and new people. This was home, and he was here. This was decided. In two days he had a room near Film City, and on Sunday he did go to the Maharaja Hotel. Maybe it was a mistake, but the boys were his team. They brought in his living. Finding others would be work, and take time, and the end of the month was near. Almost time for another job. So he found a corner near the Maharaja Hotel, and he watched. Faraj and Bazil came just before one, in an auto-rickshaw. They went in, and Aadil waited. He had been trained in patience by his instructors, and then by all his ambushes. An hour passed, and then another. There was no sign of lurking policemen, but still Aadil waited.

  Just after three, Faraj and Bazil walked down the steps of the hotel, looking disheartened. They walked down the road, and Aadil followed. He let them get far ahead, then crossed the road and closed in again, on the other side. No policemen, as far as he could see. But Faraj had his arm over Bazil’s shoulders, and Bazil seemed to be crying. Aadil came back over to them, took Bazil by the elbow. ‘Be quiet,’ he said to Faraj. ‘Walk.’

  Aadil took them to a little patch of garden in the middle of the road, on a traffic circle. There was a single tree in the circle, and he squatted under it. The boys sat uncomfortably, cross-legged and shifting from side to side. Aadil let them sweat in the sun and told them what idiots they were. He didn’t let them talk, and told them that there were no excuses for what they had done. They had jeopardized him and the entire unit and their operations. Their actions had been irresponsible, and their drinking irreligious. They had understood nothing of what he had taught them about the use of force.

  Bazil began to weep again. Faraj swallowed, and said, ‘I know it was wrong.’ Aadil let them talk, and extracted promises that they would never touch alcohol again. Then he led them from the circle, through the rings of cars, and bought them a water-melon juice each. They discussed the next job. Their best source of intelligence had been Shamsul, who people had trusted because of his mildness and reedy body. Householders and chowkidars had thought him harmless, and talked to him. Now the team was handicapped, but there was nothing to do but adapt. In less than a week they had a target, and a plan. The address this time came from Bazil, for a family near Sahar Airport. They had a son working in Dubai, who sent them frequent parcels. Aadil delayed the job by four days, just so that they could make sure they had their information right. They walked the area, penetrated the building compound and came out again. The operation went smoothly, the boys were calm, they walked away with sixty thousand in cash and a bagful of gold jewellery, including biscuits. The Dubai boy had been preparing for his sister’s wedding. Aadil was pleased.

  Faraj had been detailed to find a trustworthy receiver, and had located one along Tulsi Pipe Road. The contact had been made over the phone, and arrangements finalized, and they were now on their way to make the delivery. Aadil had decided that all of them were to go, to prevent future misunderstandings. They walked along the railway tracks, skirting the shacks that had been built along the fence. The meeting had been set up for the late evening, but Aadil had been hit by a headache that swirled up his spine like a storm. He had been unable to see past the bursts of sharp fire that arrived in his eyes. Even now, when midnight had long passed, and he was recovered, the streetlights burnt hotly with a spectral glow of orange around them. A train sped by, and each rattle and knocking stood out against the darkness and hurt Aadil’s ears. The boys were quiet and solicitous, and they walked on either side of him.

  Aadil felt alive, awakened by the pain. The crunch from the ground under his feet recalled to him some far memory, something that came to him and retreated, came to him and went. The earth was breathing, he could feel it.

  The shouts came from behind and ahead, and they were very loud. A flare from a flashlight came at Aadil, and with it, ‘Police’. Aadil twisted to the left and ran, crouching low. There were men ahead of him. Directly against his right shoulder there was a tin shack, a closed door. Then a small gap before the next shack. Aadil went into the hole, and brought up against the bars of the fence. The tracks were on the other side, but the fence was high. Aadil reached up, and his hand slipped against the iron. He turned. His chopper was in his hand.

  ‘Out, bhenchod. Throw it out.’

  The policeman had a pistol. Aadil could see the barrel, the line of light along it, and the heavy shoulders of the man behind. He threw the chopper out low, on to the road. A small clang. The policeman was waiting, and the barrel of the pistol lowered just a little. Aadil inhaled a long, sweet swig of air, and had the absurd thought that maybe they could stay like this for ever, at bay and at peace. But his hand had already found his knife, swirled it open, and then his body was moving. The policeman never fired, maybe he lost Aadil in the shadow. Aadil went at him, and he struck as he had been taught, as he had learnt, as he had practised.

  Aadil was running. The policemen were behind him and he was running. He still had the knife in his hand and he wanted to let go but he couldn’t. He ran. Then he was no longer moving. He shut his eyes, opened them, and knew that he was on the ground, face down. The surface of the road arced away from him, and a trickle of water shone softly. There was no pain, but he felt very dreamy and soft, as if he were just waking up. I think I killed that man, he thought. Then it occurred to him that he was himself dying. He was not afraid, not afraid at all. But he felt enormously sad, but he did not know why, or what for, and he wondered and waited. Then he was dead.

  II

  Sharmeen defended her hero loyally. ‘The trouble with you, Aisha Akbani,’ she told her friend, ‘is that you change your opinion every five minutes. One day Chandrachur Singh is everything to you, one week later you say you wouldn’t even look at him if he showed up under your window with roses. You know what you are? You are fickle.’ Sharmeen had read the word ‘fickle’ recently, in one of her eighth-grade texts, and she used it with huge satisfaction.

  Aisha tilted her admittedly very pretty nose and dismissed Chandrachur Singh with a decisive wave of her hand. ‘Sharmeen Khan, if it was a matter of one week or one month, then okay, you would have a point. But that guy is so over. It’s been so long since Maachis, and not a single good film. Okay, maybe one or two. And it’s not about films anyway. I keep telling you, I just don’t like him.’

  Sharmeen and Aisha were lying on Sharmeen’s bed, in her bedroom on the second floor of a house in Bethesda. Sharmeen loved the sharp drop in the Maryland countryside outside her window, which caused a medium-sized oak to hang over what she called a ‘cliff’ and what Aisha described as a ‘little drop’. Aisha was sometimes infuriatingly contrary, she would argue for the sake of argument, but Sharmeen adored her anyway. She had been her first friend when Sharmeen had arrived in America nearly two years ago, when she still in her half-Punjabi, half-London accent had spoken of ‘Amrika’. Aisha – who hadn’t been quite as pretty then – had been sympathetic and kind, and now, even when she had blossomed, even in eighth grade, she still stuck to Sharmeen. They were best friends, and they wer
e inseparable. Aisha liked to pretend that she was an anti-romantic, a cynic, and so she refused to admit that the view from Sharmeen’s window was really quite dramatic, especially when it was all covered in January snow, as now. There was the oak, the cliff and a long, rolling meadow that ended in a snarl of tall bushes. On full moon nights it all sparkled and looked quite wild, and Sharmeen lay with sleepy, half-open eyes and imagined Chandrachur Singh on a white horse, galloping through the brambles and up the cliff.

  ‘You’re dreaming again,’ Aisha said, and pinched Sharmeen’s arm.

  Sharmeen pinched her in turn, and said, ‘Turn the page.’ They were sprawled face down on the flowered bedspread, heads away from the pillows, chins leaning on the very bottom rim of the bedstead. They had a new issue of Stardust open on the floor, where it could be slid speedily under the bed at the first warning creak on the stairs. Sharmeen’s parents were strict about what she read, and Stardust was so not allowed that it had never even been mentioned in this house. Sharmeen’s father especially had disciplined and encouraged her from an early age to guard her values and family izzat. His name was Shahid Khan, and he was a colonel, and he had been posted at the embassy in London, and he had travelled all over the world, but he had never slackened in his observances and prayers, and he was known among his friends and colleagues for his piety and simple living. So Sharmeen didn’t talk or read about Pakistani films and actors, much less the hideously shameless industry across the border. But Sharmeen and Aisha read Stardust anyway. They were mildly interested in home-grown talent like Noor and Zara Sheikh, but they were passionate about Indian films. A three-page article about Chandrachur Singh, with colour photographs, had sparked off this last argument, which had gone exactly the way it had the time before, and the time before that. Sharmeen was always steadfast in her devotion to Chandrachur Singh, she defended him against Aisha’s unfair accusations and attacks, and finally she drifted off into a Chandrachur Singh reverie. There she would stay, until Aisha jolted her out of it with a pinch. Aisha turned the page, and now they were looking down at a double-page spread of Zoya Mirza.

  ‘Wow,’ Aisha said, ‘she’s beautiful.’

  There was no doubt she was. She was curled up on a red divan, wearing a red satiny mini-dress that left her long, golden legs quite bare, and her chest pressing against a low-cut neckline. Sharmeen said, ‘Um.’ She had a complicated reaction to Zoya Mirza. She liked Zoya’s height and some of the roles she was so good in, like the crusading lawyer she had played in her second film, Aaj ka Kanoon, but she thought that a Muslimah showing her body like this was not a good thing. It made her uncomfortable. There had been a time when she would have thought it was a very bad thing, she would have agreed wholeheartedly with Abba and Ammi that this was unquestionably an evil. But she had spent a lot of time with Aisha, and Aisha thought Zoya Mirza was cool. So Sharmeen said, ‘She’s all right,’ and left it at that, and tried to turn the page.

  But Aisha put her hand down, over Zoya Mirza’s very flat stomach. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘She’s as good-looking as Chandrachur Singh. Much more. You can’t say she’s not.’

  Sharmeen didn’t want to talk about this, because she knew where the discussion would go. Aisha’s parents prided themselves on being modern. Her mother worked as a real-estate agent, and her father ran a software company. Aisha’s eldest brother had married a white American girl, who hadn’t converted even after the marriage. And Aisha’s sister and she both went about with their heads uncovered. Aisha was very proud of her long brownish hair, and Sharmeen knew that she pitied her, Sharmeen, for having to wear such conservative clothing outside the house. She refused to accept Sharmeen’s assertion that she felt safer with her hair covered, and closer to Allah. Aisha said that was all social conditioning, and Allah had never said anything about covering yourself head to toe. So arguing with her was useless, but an argument was going to happen anyway. Sharmeen could see that. So she sighed, and said, ‘She just always looks so cheap to me.’

  Aisha rolled over, clapped her palms over her eyes and burst out, ‘Cheap? Cheap? Sharmeen Khan, after all this time in America, you’re still such a fundoo.’

  ‘I am not a fundoo.’

  ‘Yes, you are a fundoo.’

  This time around, they had reached their customary impasse with unusual swiftness. Before leaving Pakistan, in Rawalpindi and Karachi, Sharmeen had never been called a fundoo, not by a friend or an enemy. She had always gone to army schools, where many of her classmates had dressed like her and the older girls had worn hijaab and mostly everyone had agreed about what was proper and what was not. But that had been an eternity ago, when she was eight and nine. Now she was almost fourteen and on the other side of the world and Aisha was her best friend and everything was different. Now she had to defend herself, and deny that she was a fundamentalist. ‘Being modest,’ Sharmeen said, ‘doesn’t mean that you are a fundoo.’

  Aisha came back instantly with, ‘And being proud of your body doesn’t mean you’re cheap.’

  Sharmeen felt her own body contract into itself. She hated this eternal argument which set off this constriction centred at her belly. ‘Fine,’ she said, and tried to turn the page.

  ‘Fine what?’

  ‘Fine, she’s not cheap. Oof. Can we move past Zoya Mirza now?’

  Aisha turned the page, to another two pictures of Zoya Mirza. It was her Stardust, and she’d brought it in her black bag, so she had proprietary rights. She was allowed to read Stardust at home, in front of her parents, who no doubt thought of Sharmeen’s parents as fundoos. Sharmeen waited patiently for Aisha to finish reading the article about Zoya Mirza, and thought about her father and mother and their religiosity. Abba was the more observant, the more rigorous. His forehead was marked with a namaaz ka gatta, the testimony of his five kneelings and five prayers daily, and every time Sharmeen had flown in an aeroplane with him, she had been comforted by his readings from a small, exquisite Koran during take-offs and landings. He had told Sharmeen about how his faith had sustained him, how it had made it possible for him to rise despite all the difficulties. He had battled poverty and dispossession, family troubles and discrimination, and had studied hard and prayed and come up through the ranks of the army. Now he was attached to the embassy in Washington in a very important position, and Sharmeen admired and loved him very much. Despite anything Aisha or her emigrant parents might think of him. Sharmeen didn’t care.

  ‘Okay,’ Aisha said. She’d finished the article, and was ready to go on to the next. But she couldn’t let Zoya Mirza go without a last admiring, ‘I tell you, she’s so smart.’

  Sharmeen held her tongue, and they settled into a long perusal of an article about Anil Kapoor’s career, and then an analysis of older heroes. Sharmeen watched films only at Aisha’s, on DVD, and so her knowledge of heroes and heroines and their histories wasn’t as wide and deep as Aisha’s, but she had an astute sense of what was going to be a hit and what wasn’t, and she could remember entire songs after hearing them only once. Of the black-and-white heroes, from long before either she or Aisha had been born, Sharmeen liked Dev Anand. After that she had a partiality to Amitabh Bachchan. Aisha was quite agreeable about these two preferences, it was only over Chandrachur Singh that they parted company. Sharmeen had often wondered why it was that modern times divided them more than olden times. Now they agreed about Feroz Khan – both thumbs down – but disagreed about Fardeen, whose first film hadn’t been released yet but whose photographs were suddenly everywhere, who Aisha thought was cool but Sharmeen pronounced a dork. ‘Dork’ was one of Sharmeen’s new words.

  ‘Sharmeen,’ came the call. ‘Beta?’

  They had plenty of warning. When Ammi opened the door, the Stardust was safely deep under the bed, and Sharmeen and Aisha were seated in the middle of the bed, facing each other. Looking, Sharmeen hoped, like two obedient girls having a respectable discussion about something suitable.

  ‘Salaam alaikum, Khaala-jaan,’ Aisha said. She was adept at t
hese sudden transformations. She suddenly had her hair tucked behind her ears, her arms wrapped around her knees, and she looked as sweetly innocent as one of those forties heroines simpering at an approving elder.

  And Ammi did approve. ‘Waleikum as salaam, Aisha,’ she said, dabbing at her mouth with the end of her chunni. ‘Are you well?’

  ‘Yes, Khaala-jaan, very well.’ Aisha did a little side-to-side nod of the head that she brought on when she was being good for aunties and uncles. ‘You look very pink. The cold weather brings out your cheeks.’

  The flattery wasn’t strictly necessary. Ammi had been at first surprised and then charmed by Aisha’s good Urdu and modest manners. She didn’t approve of Aisha’s family, but was quite comfortable with letting the sweet girl into her own house and being her daughter’s sweet friend. Aisha was quite safe, but she never missed a chance to lay on the butter. Ammi smiled, and succumbed once again to Aisha’s acting. ‘It is just the heat in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Sharmeen, go and watch Daddi for a while. I can’t keep running up there.’

  ‘Now, Ammi?’

  ‘No, next year.’

  ‘Ammi, we were just talking about exams.’

  ‘So go and talk up there. That poor old woman is not going to stop you.’

  Sharmeen couldn’t tell Ammi that she hated the musty smell of that room, that it scared her to be in the presence of that supine, wizened body that had once been her Daddi. She made a face, and then winced as Aisha pinched her toe.