Sacred Games (121 page)

The boys looked dejected. They were draped over the sofas and the beds, looking bleary. Bonus or no bonus, it was hard on them to fail miserably time and time again. I was acting the cheerful leader, but my own feeling of hopelessness was bound to infect them. I knew I should be talking to them about our next operation, but my eyes were bloodshot and scratchy, and an ache had seized the left half of my head, and I just didn't have the energy. Nikhil was leaning back in his chair, his feet up on a balcony railing, leafing listlessly through an old Tamil film magazine that someone had left in the bathroom. He didn't seem very impressed by the round-faced southern starlets, or the incomprehensible advertisements with bicep-baring men. He put down the magazine on the table, and I picked it up and flipped it open at random.

Zoya looked up at me from a full-page picture. She wore white and was lit with a silvery glow that made her look very fair and completely innocent.

She must have been shooting a southern film recently. She was doing
films everywhere, actually, and I could see why. She was beautiful. But, oddly enough, I didn't want her. I no longer felt that agonized twist in my stomach that she once had called forth by merely sitting still. I looked at her now and I saw that she was perfect, that she had achieved the proportion we had worked so hard towards, that balance of top and bottom, that fine play of light and dark. Even on the cheap paper of the magazine, through the blurry printing, I could see this. And I felt nothing. I didn't want her, I didn't love her or hate her. I was indifferent.

A longing for a talk with Jojo rose through my chest. I felt myself flush, and I got up. ‘I have to make a phone call.' I left them all behind, and shut the door to my bedroom, and dialled Jojo. She woke from sleep, husky-voiced and bad-tempered.

‘What do you want, Gaitonde?' she said. ‘In the middle of the night?'

‘It's eight in the morning. And I want to talk to you.'

‘Talk about what, Gai-ton-de?' she said, with a little wail at the end.

I didn't really have a subject that I wanted to talk to her about, I just wanted her voice, her breath. But Jojo's mornings were just suffering until she had had her three cups of tea, and I knew that if I didn't give her a good reason for waking her up, she would slam down the phone and curse me besides. I needed to make something up. ‘I am looking for a woman,' I said.

‘Bastard,' she growled. ‘So call me in the evening.'

‘Wait, wait,' I said. ‘I don't want a woman, like that. I mean we're looking for a missing woman. She stole some of our money and ran. We can't find her. For months we've been looking.'

‘I know her? What's her name?'

I had to come up with a name. The Tamil magazine was lying on the table, fluttering its pages under the swirling fan. ‘Sri,' I said. ‘Sridevi.'

‘What? Sridevi ran away with your money?'

‘No, no. Not Sridevi the film star. This is another woman. With that name.'

‘So why can't you find her? You watched her family?' Jojo yawned.

‘She doesn't have any family. Not married, nothing. We've been everywhere she worked, but there's no sign.'

‘So you are stuck, Gaitonde.'

‘I am.'

‘So then you turn to me.' She was very smug. ‘Did you try kidnapping her boyfriend?'

‘She doesn't have a boyfriend. Or even a girlfriend.'

‘What kind of monster is this? No friend, boy or girl.'

‘We've interrogated people she worked with. No use.'

Jojo was rattling about now, she was up and moving. I knew her routine, she was shuffling into the kitchen where the maid had put a pot of water on the gas the night before. Jojo would light the gas without opening her eyes hardly, and reach for a mug of milk that was kept ready on the top shelf of the fridge. There it was, the click of the gas-lighter. ‘Okay, so you have no other information about this Sridevi. After all this searching, your entire company has found nothing.'

‘Nothing.'

‘I told you your employees are fools.'

‘Yes, yes. Many times.'

‘Give a boy a ghoda, doesn't make him smart. Just makes him a chutiya with a gun.'

‘Saali, this is how you help? Get back to Sridevi.'

‘Okay.' She was leaning on the counter, I knew, waiting for the water to boil. She was cracking elaichis now, three of them. ‘What is her native place?'

‘She doesn't have one.'

‘Everyone has a native place.'

‘Hers is gone. It's in Pakistan. But why?'

‘Your brain is also turning into falooda, Gaitonde. People are fools, you know that. They all want to go home. They always do it, even when they know they shouldn't.'

This was true. Keep an eye on a man's village, and sooner or later you got him. Plant an informant in his locality, and one day you could put a round in the back of his head. The police did this all the time, and I had done this. Jojo was right, human beings were stupid, they circled round and around and finally came back to where they started, as if pulled back by the steady tug of an inescapable cord. But what if your home was gone, if there was nowhere to go to? Where would you go? ‘I'll think about it,' I said. ‘That's not a bad idea. It's a possibility.'

‘Fine,' she said. ‘You think about it. Now let me drink my chai in peace.'

But I didn't let her go, not yet. I kept her on the phone and talked to her about her production troubles, and her bai who had an alcoholic husband, and the increasing pollution in the city. ‘I'm hanging up,' I finally said a full half-hour later, by which time she had finished her chai and was ready to bathe and work. I was feeling more settled, now that I had a direction. I called Nikhil in, and we got to work. We had accumulated papers and
documents during our raids, and had seized two laptops. We had information. There was too much of it, actually, two suitcases full and whatever else was on the computers. I explained to Nikhil, and instructed him, and we began to sift through everything. The problem, of course, was that we didn't know what we were looking for. ‘Home,' I told Nikhil, ‘any place where he would go home to.' He looked puzzled, but only as much as I was myself. Where would a man like Guru-ji go? Chandigarh? But we had already been there, and had found nothing. So where would he go? And for that matter, where would I go, or Jojo? Where do you go when home has become impossible? I had no answers, but we kept looking. It took us five days of searching, and then Nikhil found it.

In Guru-ji's personal account ledgers for the current year and the year before, there were entries for ‘Bekanur Farm'. Eighty-four thousand and one lakh thirty-four thousand, on the credit side. We didn't have the records for the five years before that, but there was another entry in the one prior year we could find, for a cheque written – again on Guru-ji's personal account – for a ‘Tractor for Bekanur Farm'. And there was a letter on one of the computers, from the current year, to the Punjab State Electricity Board about arrears for Bekanur Farm. This letter was signed by none other than Anand Prasad, our recent sadhu friend. What was a high-up in the organization, a supremo like Anand Prasad, doing writing to PSEB about a matter of two lakhs and some odd thousand? What was this farm anyway? We searched all the public literature available about Guru-ji, and found nothing. There was no mention of a farm fifty miles south of Amritsar, not a word about any farm at all. Certainly he had never said anything to me about owning a farm. There was of course his interest in rural development, in agricultural progress, but that was handled by another sub-division altogether. Their agricultural department had a separate organizational structure, a separate chain of command and separate bank accounts. This Bekanur was something else altogether, it was handled by Guru-ji himself and his very closest associates. And it was kept, as much as possible, a secret.

We went to take a look at this farm. I told the boys that this was our last leg on this journey, that whether we found success or not, we would call a halt to the mission afterwards. They were cheered and relieved, and we landed in Amritsar energized and ready to go. We followed our usual procedure and proceeded to the prearranged safe house in two groups, had a late breakfast, and collected our car and were ready to go. The morning was bright and hot, and I was dozy in the front seat of the car.
Nikhil was driving. Behind us, the boys were arguing about the gold in the Golden Temple, how much exactly there was and what it was worth. Jatti, who was a Punjabi but who had only been to Punjab once before, was telling them with authority that the gold was worth arabs, not crores. The others were scoffing, and Chandar wanted to go to Jallianwalla Baug. ‘Since we're here anyway,' he said.

We're not tourists, I wanted to tell him, but it would have taken too much energy to make the words emerge from my half-sleep. Besides, I was being a bit of a tourist myself. I found myself entertained by the handsome swagger of these Punjabis, their aggressive stares, and their loud voices. There was a sardar outside a garage that was on our left now, his hair piled up into a big uncovered knot on the top of his head, talking into a mobile phone. He raised his kurta to scratch at his navel as we passed, revealing a full and hairy belly. He was smiling. Maybe that was his garage, and the big pink-and-green house behind it was his, complete with satellite dish and Toyota in the driveway and a watchman with a rifle. Amritsar was a dingy little provincial town, but there was money here, and a lot of guns. A police jeep overtook us, and the three constables in the back all cradled jhadoos in their laps, with double magazines taped together. I hadn't seen so many automatic weapons on the street, on any street, not ever. In my car there was the smell of mogra. I closed my eyes, and opened them to find us racing through sarson fields, behind a truck brimming with steel rods. There were tigers painted on its back panels, and a goddess in the middle.

‘We're almost there, bhai,' Nikhil said.

He turned off to the left, down an embankment. The road narrowed now, and we bumped and swayed over a flowing canal. ‘We're in the proper dehat now,' Chandar muttered. ‘Look at the dehatis.' There were two men walking in the middle of the road, leading a bullock. Nikhil honked, and very slowly they moved aside to let us squeeze past. They bent a little to stare into the car as we went by. Villagers all right, and prosperous ones. The land here was lush and ripe, and I could hear a water-pump thumping not far away. We drove on. We had to ask for directions once, at a fork in the road, from a young couple on a motorcycle. The wife kept her red dupatta tight on her head by biting down on one end of it, but I could see she was a fine, strapping piece. The boys thought so too, I could tell from the strained, attentive silence behind me. The husband was stringy and unkempt and altogether unimpressive, but his directions were good. We got to Guru-ji's farm just after two.

There was no steel fence around these fields, and no gates. Just green swathes of wheat, and well-kept bunds lined with trees. A house glimmered white through an orchard. ‘Mango,' said Jatti as we neared the orderly rows. The road was smooth now, unfinished gravel that crunched under the tires. A peacock called, and I saw a hint of its sudden rush through the trees. Then we turned around a thick, ancient neem, and we were at the house.

It was a single-storey building, sprawling and wide. There were no windows along the front wall, which was broken only by a tall archway that led into a small open veranda. The doors in the archway were green and massive and heavy, with a smaller portal let into the one on the left, only wide enough to let a single man through. This was open, and Nikhil rattled the lock-chain hanging next to it. ‘Arre,' he called. ‘Koi hai?'

But the only reply came from the pigeons walking along the rafters in the archway. I leant in through the door. A cow and her calf munched happily in a stall to the left. Straight ahead, four brick steps led to a landing, which faced a single room. I could see an old-fashioned takath and two chairs, and a big round clock. The air was fresh and heavy with that old smell of cow-dung and bhoosa. The plaster on the walls facing the landing was cracked, and the bricks in the veranda were worn smooth. This was an old house, old and also old-fashioned. Near the cow-stall, water dripped from a hand-pump and tapped steadily on the iron drain-cover below.

‘Are you sure we're in the right place?' I said to Nikhil.

He pointed to the far end of the landing. Behind a pillar, a ramp went up the stairs, just wide enough for a wheelchair. So yes, this was maybe Guru-ji's place, but it was nothing like anything else that he had built, that we had seen. What was it, exactly? Nikhil rattled the chain again.

A blast from the car horn made us jump. Jatti was standing next to the car, grinning. He sent up a series of blaring honks, and I shouted at him. ‘Enough, maderchod,' I said, and he stopped with a hurt look on his face. The quiet was astonishing, after that din, and the pigeons fluttered nervously in the veranda. Then we heard a shuffle, and a man turned the corner of the building.

He was old, at least seventy, this I could tell straightaway from his stiff-kneed gait. When he came closer I realized he was eighty, if anything. He was wearing baggy white pyjamas, a tattered orange sweater and a grey scarf wrapped tight up to his ears. He peered at us through thick, black-rimmed glasses. There was a crack straight through the middle of the left lens.

‘Hain?' he said.

‘Namaskar,' Nikhil said. ‘Namaste. Are you the malik of the house?'

That was obvious flattery, this budhau was far from being the owner of anything. But the old man took it in with a smile. ‘No, no,' he said. ‘I am the manager.'

‘The manager,' Nikhil said, mocking the man's Punjabi – ‘munayjer' – but only gently. ‘Yes. Can we have some water? We've driven all the way from Amritsar.'