Sacred Games (114 page)

‘No, there is not much. There is a reference to a house in Mumbai. The exact sentence is, “I hope Guru-ji is enjoying the terrace at the house,” and the implication is that this house is inside the city. That is all.'

‘Why are they doing this?'

Kulkarni took off his glasses and polished them. ‘We are not sure. On the hard disk,' he said, ‘there are also files from a publishing program. These include the text and images and fonts for three pamphlets. The pamphlets are supposed to be the product of an extremist Islamic organization named Hizbuddeen.' He put his glasses back on, with the air of an absent-minded professor. ‘We ourselves have collected printed copies of these pamphlets during raids on various banned organizations. Our impression was that Hizbuddeen was a fundamentalist organization with Pakistani links. We knew Hizbuddeen funded other such organizations, and was perhaps planning a big terrorist operation. Now, this new information would suggest that Hizbuddeen is actually a false front, a fake organization created by this Guru Shridhar Shukla and his people. Our theory now is that their plan is to set off this device and blame it on Islamic fundamentalism. So, the evidence we have so far collected on Hizbuddeen is a false trail, laid by this man Shukla and his organization. The idea being that, after a nuclear incident, Hizbuddeen would claim responsibility, and would be believed.'

‘But why? What do they hope to gain?'

The light fell flat on Kulkarni's glasses, making little half-moons of them. He shrugged. ‘We are not sure of the intended consequences, or the motives. Perhaps they want heightening of tension, escalation, perhaps retaliation.'

Sartaj didn't want to think about what retaliation might mean in this instance, but he couldn't stop himself from asking about the first looming disaster. ‘If they set this, this device off,' he said, ‘what will happen? How big is it?'

Kulkarni deferred to Anjali with a tilting of his glasses. Apparently she was the detail person on their team. ‘From what we can gather,' she said, ‘it is not a small device. The construction may actually have taken longer because they wanted to deliver a larger payload. And they don't care about miniaturization at all. It was probably driven into the city in the back of a truck. If it goes off…' She swallowed. ‘Probably much of the city.'

‘Everything?'

‘Almost. If they plan carefully and place it well.'

Sartaj had no doubt that they would place it extremely well. They had calculated the instrument, and their purpose, and they would make sure of the destruction. There was only one question left. ‘What do we do?'

Kulkarni had something like a plan. ‘We are setting up a working committee right now,' he said, ‘at the Colaba police headquarters. We will issue an alert in the next two hours. But there will be no mention of the device. We will just say that there is a reliable tip on a big terrorist operation. Any mention of the device may cause widespread panic, people rushing to leave the city, that sort of thing. We don't want that. It would be impossible to control.'

Sartaj could well imagine the rush, the highway clogged with cars and trucks, the desperate shoving to get on to trains, the screams of lost children. And he could also feel the need, in some other corridor of his mind, to warn Mary, to get Majid Khan's children out of the city. But he nodded, and said, ‘Yes, yes.'

‘If information about the device leaked to the general public,' Anjali said, ‘then the people in charge of the device might also learn about it. They may set it off then, to prevent discovery and prevention. The whole investigation has to proceed with that in mind. It has to be very tight.'

‘Fully tight,' Sartaj said. ‘But what are they waiting for?'

‘We know nothing about their timetable,' Anjali said. ‘We would like to continue what you have been doing for us. You have done very well. Use your resources to investigate.'

And with that, they let Sartaj out and left him swaying in the exhaust of their several Ambassadors. He felt completely alert, but quite dazed. There were orange lights burning over the terminal building. A trickle of sweat, released by the gathering heat, moved down his collarbone. Review the information, he told himself. But there was very little: the apradhis maybe included a famous guru in a wheelchair and a yellow-haired foreigner, they were maybe in a house that had a terrace, the house was maybe large enough to hold a large machine, maybe there was a truck near by. That was it, that was all. On this, everything depended. Don't worry, Sartaj told himself. Just go to work. Just work.

So he hurried to his motorcycle, slung a leg over it. Then he was unable to move. Had the last few minutes really happened? In his memory now, everything that had happened in the car had the feeling of jerky, speeded-up film. Sartaj tried to slow his breathing and parse the conversation, recall it bit by bit, but all he could find was a jumble of sentences and
words: ‘It is not a small device'; ‘intended consequences'; ‘payload'. How were Anjali and her boss able to speak so calmly and efficiently of such things? Maybe people like that were used to speaking of unspeakable things. Maybe international spies used that language all the time. Sartaj had thought of this thing before, this device, he had encountered it in fictions and newspaper reports, but now that it was inside his city, in his home, he was unable to imagine it. He tried to see it, some sort of machine in the back of a truck, but all he could see was an absence, a hole in the world. What came out of this void was an avalanche of regret, a knifing pain in his gut for everything left undone and for all the memories of the past. He bent over. In the bulge of the silvered handlebar there was the shine of the streetlamp and a thousand faces, a boy he had fought with in Class Three and humiliated in front of the whole school, Chamanlal the paan-wallah from the main road corner, a beautiful girl that Katekar had once told him about who worked for Gulf Air at the international terminal, that lame beggar who worked the crossroads at Mahim Causeway. Everything would be gone, not just loved ones and enemies. Everyone. This was the unbearable promise of this device, now made real. It was ridiculous but it was true. Sartaj sat in the car park and tried to comprehend this, to hold it in his head so that he could think about it, and decide what to do next. Finally – he did not know how much time he had passed, just sitting – he gave up. Better to leave it as a blank, and think around it. At least then you could work. Yes, work. Go to work. He started the motorcycle, and began.

 

Three days of work brought no breakthroughs, no revelations, no arrests. The alert had gone out, but there was too little substance. There was not enough to ask informants, only this: have you seen a group of three, maybe four men? One blond foreigner, one guru in a wheelchair, maybe, maybe? Leads had come in, hundreds of them, but they led inevitably to innocent old men in creaky wheelchairs, and to outraged foreign executives with hair just a shade lighter than brown. There was no progress. And life went on. On Tuesday evening, Sartaj visited Rohit and Mohit and Shalini. He gave Shalini an envelope, ten thousand rupees, and sat in their doorway and drank a cup of chai.

‘You look very tired,' Shalini said. She was sitting inside the house, near the stove, starting dinner for the boys.

‘Yes,' Rohit said. He was leaning against the wall, next to Sartaj. ‘You do.'

‘I have not been sleeping well,' Sartaj said. ‘Too much work.'

Rohit brushed at the collar of his sparkling white T-shirt. ‘But you are very thin, also.'

‘I still haven't found a good cook.'

Shalini smiled. She was wearing a glossy green sari, and she looked well. She gave Sartaj a sly, knowing look. ‘What, that Christian girl doesn't cook for you? Or you don't like her food?'

Sartaj started, splashed his chai all over his chest. ‘What girl?' he sputtered, brushing at his shirt.

Rohit clapped his hands and laughed. ‘Don't bother, don't try,' he said. ‘Her spies are on all four sides, really. She knows everything.'

Shalini's shoulders shook. Sartaj couldn't remember when he had seen her laugh like this, even back when her husband had been alive. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘You don't even know how I know.' She waved a powdery belan at him, looking supremely satisfied. ‘And don't think it was the easiest way. No policeman told me.'

Shalini was not about to entertain any denials of the Christian girl. Sartaj gave in, with what he hoped was a modicum of grace. He ducked his head and asked, ‘So who told you?'

‘I can't give away my khabaris. No, no.'

Sartaj tried to think who it could be, who would know about Mary, who would have talked. Kamble knew about her, and he may have told somebody at the station, who may have told a civilian. Or maybe Shalini had a friend who worked near Mary's house, who would have seen Sartaj coming and staying and going. Or maybe it was somebody at Mary's salon. There were a thousand and one ways that Shalini could have heard the story of Sartaj and Mary, countless connections that slipped through the city and bound each person to everyone else. Sartaj had used this inescapable network many times himself, and now he was found out. ‘Your mother is really a pucca professional,' he said to Rohit. ‘The department should hire her.'

Shalini laughed and flung a handful of some brown spice into a pot, and there was a great hissing and fizzing. ‘So tell us about this girl.'

‘But you already know everything,' Sartaj said. He was about to say more, something general about how men could never hope to escape the vigilance of women, when he saw Mohit come stumbling down the end of the lane. There was blood on his shirt.

‘What happened?' Rohit said, and knelt to take his brother by the shoulders. ‘Who did this?'

There were rings of crimson around Mohit's nostrils, and a blackish smear across his chin. In a swirl of sari, Shalini came past Sartaj. ‘Beta,' she said, ‘what happened?'

But Mohit was grinning. ‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘We did much more to them. It was those bastards from Nehru Nagar.' He was triumphant, satisfied. ‘We showed them, they ran away.'

Shalini was holding Mohit's shirt at the shoulder, where it had been ripped at the seam and into the back. ‘You fought with those boys again?' She grabbed his face, tugged it up towards hers. ‘I told you not to go near them. I told you not to go even near that side.' Her anger forced her teeth back, and Sartaj could see her nails digging into the boy's cheeks. But Mohit was not afraid. ‘I'll tell Saab to take you to the remand home,' she said, turning him towards Sartaj. ‘He'll beat you.'

Sartaj stood up. ‘Mohit, you shouldn't –'

‘Maderchod sardar,' Mohit said, and his hatred squeezed past his mother's fingers. ‘I'll kill you. I'll cut you.'

Shalini gasped, and then slapped Mohit on the back of the head, hard. She dragged him into the house, past the already gathering audience of neighbours and slammed the door. But Sartaj could still hear Mohit's low growl, grim and unrelenting.

‘I need to go,' Sartaj said to Rohit, and took him by the elbow and walked away. ‘I have an appointment.'

‘Sorry,' Rohit said. He fingered, nervously, the key that hung from his neck. ‘Mohit is getting spoilt, in spite of everything we do. He is keeping bad company. He has a gang of four, five boys. They keep fighting with these other, older taporis from Nehru Nagar. I have even beaten him myself, but he keeps getting worse. His marks in school are terrible.'

‘He is young,' Sartaj said. ‘It's just a bad time. He'll come out of it when he gets older.'

Rohit nodded. ‘Yes, I think so also. But very sorry.'

Sartaj thumped Rohit on the chest, said, ‘Don't worry, there is plenty of time, he'll realize sooner or later,' and kicked the motorcycle into heaving life. As he edged up the pitted slope, it came to him that perhaps Mohit would never come out of this blood-flecked spiral, even if there was plenty of time. Maybe he was lost already, lost to his brother and his mother and to himself. Sartaj had played his part in pushing Mohit towards this hard path, into this pit from which there was no return. Every action flew down the tangled net of links, reverberating and amplifying itself and disappearing only to reappear again. You tried to arrest
some apradhis, and a policeman's son went bad. There was no escaping the reactions to your actions, and no respite from the responsibility. That's how it happened. That was life.

 

Rachel Mathias was waiting at the station for Sartaj. She was sitting in the corridor outside his office, squeezed up at one corner of a bench next to a row of impassive Koli women. She was hot and unhappy, but when she rose he was impressed by the elegant fall of her blue sari and the simple silver bracelet on her right wrist. She was not at all crumpled by the squalor of the station, and now she stood very straight and looked him directly in the eye.

‘How long have you been waiting?' he said.

‘Not very long at all. This is my son Thomas.'

Judging from how sullen Thomas was, they had been at the station at least a couple of hours. ‘Come,' Sartaj said, and led them into the office and sat them down. Thomas sprawled back in the chair, and then straightened up after a cutting glance from his mother. He was fifteen or so, good-looking and confident and muscled. All the boys were lifting nowadays, and Sartaj was sure that Thomas had been an early starter.

‘About what we talked about the other day,' Rachel said.

‘Yes?' Sartaj said. He knew now that she was not guilty of blackmailing Kamala, but everyone was guilty of something. It had happened before in his career, that the threat of a policeman's pressure had made people confess to something that he wasn't looking for.

‘Thomas has something to tell you.'

Thomas didn't want to say anything, he had his eyes down and his fists clenched, but his mother was implacable. ‘Thomas?' she said.