Sacred Games (127 page)

She came after me. ‘Shall I tell you the truth, Gaitonde? You are a coward. You used to be something, you used to be a man, but now you are a trembling little madman hiding in a pit.' She was standing right behind me, and I could feel her sour breath on my shoulder, the smell of her panic.

I turned, and in the same motion I gave her the back of my hand. It landed hard, and I felt her teeth snap and she reeled back. ‘Ah,' she said, ‘ah.' Blood pumped from her nose.

‘Randi.' I followed her around the room as she staggered back. ‘You want to see what kind of man I am? Let me show you. No, come, come. Here, you want some more? Who's trembling, han? Who's shaking?'

Her teeth shone white through a mess of dark blood. ‘You, you're not a man,' she said. She spat laughter at me, and stood her ground. ‘You bought women, so you think you're a great hero. None of them even liked you, you bastard. Without your cash, you wouldn't even have been able to come near them.'

‘Bas,' I warned her. ‘Enough. Be quiet. Understand – I am trying to help you. I am trying to save your life.'

‘They laughed at you, gaandu. They made jokes together, about what a pathetic, weak little rat you are. You think you're anything in front of a woman like Zoya? She told us that she never got one good night in bed out of you.'

‘That's a lie. Zoya liked me.'

She threw her head back and howled. ‘Zoya liked me,' she crowed. ‘Zoya liked me.' She bent over and put her hands on her knees. ‘Zoya
liked
me.' Blood slipped and dripped on to the ground, but she was only amused. ‘Zoya liked
me
.'

‘She did.' The voice coming out of my throat was strange to me, small and forlorn. ‘The first night we were together, she told me that. She said I was amazing. She did. We did it all night. That's the truth.'

‘Gaitonde, you idiot.' She was triumphant now. ‘You fool. She made a chutiya out of you. It wasn't you, you simpleton. She gave you a glass of milk and badams. And in that she gave you one crushed-up Viagra, one full big blue tablet. She was going to give you two, but I was afraid we'd kill you. I told her, it's okay to want to get ahead, you want to go to the moon, I understand, but don't burst the rocket that's going to get you there. And it worked. It wasn't you, saala. It was the Viagra.'

A blue haze of rage came across my eyes. Through it I saw her, standing straight up, laughing. She was not afraid of me.

‘
Zoya
liked me,' she said. ‘Gaitonde, you fool, you think she was some virgin you impressed with your huge manliness. You chutiya. She had had a dozen men before you, and many afterwards, and you were the most pathetic. You were, you were smallest.'

‘Liar. She was a virgin. You told me. She told me.'

‘A virgin?'

‘Yes.'

‘You idiot. How do you think she survived in this city before she came to you? You bhenchod men always pay more for virgins, so she became a virgin for you.'

‘No. I saw the blood.'

She laughed so hard she had to hold on to the side of a table. ‘Gaitonde, of all the pompous, gaandu men in the world, you are the blindest. Arre, inside ten miles of here there are twenty doctors who will make any woman a virgin again. The operation takes half an hour, it costs twenty-five, thirty thousand rupees. And in three weeks the renewed virgin can be ready to spread her legs on a white sheet, so some tiny little Gaitonde can see all the blood and think he's big.'

I shot her.

The Glock was in my hand. There was the smell of some flower in the air, some leaf with bitterness underneath. I didn't remember the sound, but my ears were stunned.

She had fallen in the doorway leading to the beds. I looked down at the comforting black metal in my grip, then came up to her. Yes, she was dead. There was blood, still moving. A flutter in her eyelashes, from the silent breeze of the air-conditioning. Her pupils were quite still. And there was that hole in her chest. I had not missed.

I sat. I let myself down, and sat next to her. Jojo. Jojo. In front of me, there was the back of a computer, a white cable dangling. Beyond that, a white wall. I shut my eyes.

When I awoke, I was on the floor, her foot was in front of my face. There was no respite for me, no avoiding what I had done. I came into consciousness suddenly and cleanly, and there was no gap of knowledge. I knew that I was lying next to Jojo, on the hard ground, and that I had killed her. But what I noticed all new, all keen and fresh and as if for the first time, was how complicated a thing a human foot is. It has little pads, and arches, and a convoluted network of muscles and nerves, it has bones, so many bones. It flexes and moves and walks and endures. Its skin takes on the colour of the years it passes through, until the cracks in it form a net as complicated as a life itself.

I held Jojo's foot. I cupped its ankle and held its cold inertia. On my wrist, my watch blinked out the hour at me. Six thirty-six. We had had lunch at two. Had I only slept for a few hours? But I felt rested, and my head was clear. Then I saw it, I saw that the day had changed. I had slept for more than twenty-four hours.

Get on with it. But get on with what? More money-making, more women, more killing. I had already lived that, I had no appetite for more. So, get on with what? Lying on the ground, next to Jojo, I asked myself that. I felt whole again, delivered from fuzziness and distraction and exhaustion by this long rest on this bloodstained ground. In this clarity, I could see that Shridhar Shukla – Guru-ji – had been right. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't stop anything. I was defeated. He had beaten me, because he knew me better than I knew myself. He knew my past, and he knew my future. What I did, or didn't, do was irrelevant. Or worse, it was entirely relevant. Whatever I chose to do would contribute to his plan, would end in fire. The world wanted to die, and I had helped it along. He had set up the sacrifice, and every action of mine was fuel. I couldn't stop it.

I softly rubbed the fissures on Jojo's heel with the very tips of my fingers. Was her death also foretold? She had not had an easy life, I thought. She had tried to take care of her feet with lotions, but the skin had cracked from all her walking. So much effort, so much striving, and to come to this. To be brought to this sudden end by her friend. But yes, I thought, this is what we can choose. You can't stop it, Guru-ji had said, you can't stop yourself.

But I can. I can stop myself. This is the only and last thing I can choose. In this, I can defeat even you, Guru-ji. I can stop myself.

Okay, Jojo. Okay. I sat up. Where was the gun? Here. Loaded and ready. One bullet is all it would take. I didn't want to look at her face. I kept my eyes on her feet and turned around, until I could rest my back on the wall. Okay.

But I couldn't do it. Not yet. Not yet. But why not? I wanted to. I wasn't afraid, I was eager. Maybe Jojo was waiting for me on the other side. Maybe she would curse me and hit me, but finally she would understand. I would talk to her and she would understand, as she always had. It was just a matter of talking, and time. And I would curse her for betraying me, for lying to me. But finally I would forgive her. We would forgive each other. But I couldn't do it yet, put the gun up to my mouth. Why? Because, because simply this: what would they say about me after I had gone? Would they say, Ganesh Gaitonde went mad in a secret room in Mumbai, he killed a girl and then himself? Would they say, he was a coward and a weak man? If I didn't tell them, they wouldn't understand. They would spread rumours, and lies, and invent reasons, and speculate about causes.

But who would listen to me? Jojo was gone, and Guru-ji was absent. I could call any reporter, and he would come running. But reporters were devious bastards, they wanted headlines and action, scandals and tales. There was that fellow at
Mumbai Mirror
, who was very good, but even he would think of me as Ganesh Gaitonde, crime lord and international crook. No, it had to be somebody good, somebody simple. Somebody who would listen to me as a man might listen to another man on a railway platform, with sympathy and kindness, just for an hour or two until the train came. Somebody who had seen me not merely as Ganesh Gaitonde, but a human being.

So that was when I thought of you, Sartaj Singh. I remembered my first meeting with Guru-ji, the first time I had sat with him, face-to-face. I remembered how you had helped me to that meeting, how you had talked to me and – on the very last day – taken me in, to my fate. I remembered that generosity, unusual for anyone, incredible in a policeman, and I remembered you. You have a policeman's cruelty in your eyes, Sartaj, in your swagger, but under that studied indifference there is a sentimental man. Despite all your sardar-ji preening, you were moved by me. Our lives had crossed, and mine had changed for ever.

So I knew what to do. I got up smartly, went to the desk and made some calls. In fifteen minutes I had your home number. I called, and listened to your sleepy mumble. And I said, ‘Do you want Ganesh Gaitonde?'

You came. I looked at you, peering up into the camera. You were older, harder, but still the same man. And I told you what had happened to Ganesh Gaitonde.

But you haven't listened to all of it, Sartaj. You too are not free of ambition. You want to take me in, to have my arrest added to the list of your triumphs. You sat in front of the steel door to the bunker, and you listened, but you called in a bulldozer. You've broken through the door, the second monitor on my right shows you edging forward, pistol ready. You are coming in. I'm still talking, but you aren't listening to me any more. Your eyes are afire. You want me, you and your riflemen. But listen to me. There is a whirlwind of memories in my head, a scatter of tattered faces and bodies. I know how they skirl through each other, their connections and their disjunctions, I can trace their velocities. Listen to me. If you want Ganesh Gaitonde, then you have to let me talk. Otherwise Ganesh Gaitonde will escape you, as he escaped every time, as he escaped every last assassin. Ganesh Gaitonde escaped even me, almost. Now, at this last hour, I have Ganesh Gaitonde, I know what he was, what he became. Listen to me, you must listen to me. But you are now in the bunker. I have left the trapdoor unlocked for you. Under each step of yours, I can see dozens of my years pass. I can see it all together now, from the very beginning to the first house I built for myself, my first home in Gopalmath. I remember it all, from a village temple to Bangkok. But you are already inside, in the shelter.

Here is the pistol. The barrel fits snugly into my mouth. I think of what Jojo would say:
Bastard, you're scared or what? You want me to do it for you?

No, Jojo. I'm not afraid.

Sartaj, do you know why I do this? I do it for love. I do it because I know who I am.

Bas, enough.

Parulkar was late the next morning. Sartaj sat on the bench outside his office and watched a quartet of sparrows fly through the rafters and around the pillars. They went from one side of the corridor to the other, and then out over the courtyard and to the wall beyond. Then back they came. One of them executed a lazy roll and sat at the end of the bench, dipping his head down and bobbing it back. He – or she? – fluffed his wings, hopped to the left and flashed tiny brown eyes at Sartaj. Then he was away. They are wary of us, Sartaj thought, and otherwise wholly indifferent. Our tragedies matter nothing to them. The thought was oddly comforting. So that bastard Ganesh Gaitonde had blown half his head off in a white bunker, so maybe there was a bomb in Bombay, so what? Life would go on. Sartaj tried to concentrate on this thought, and to follow the sparrows as they came to the ground and plummeted upward.

Parulkar's PA came through the doorway to the left, a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘Saab's escort radioed ahead. They'll be here in twenty minutes.'

‘Good, Sardesai Saab,' Sartaj said. ‘I'm here only.'

Sardesai nodded, and went down the staircase. Parulkar had a long list of appointments, all of whom were waiting on the other side of the staircase in a long queue that Sartaj had blithely walked past. Sartaj had called Parulkar at home, early in the morning, when he knew Parulkar would be sitting in an old armchair with his papers and his chai, and he had presumed on old acquaintance to wangle himself an early meeting. ‘It is very urgent, saab,' he had said. And so here he was, ahead of the queue. He was trying to practise his operational readiness techniques, which mainly consisted of trying not to think of what was to come shortly. After all, how hard could it be? He had lied to suspects, and to apradhis, to his parents, to Megha, to other women, to himself, to his superiors, to journalists, to many policemen. He was a master of lying, a veritable adept at it. But he had never lied to Parulkar. This is what tensed him up, and it was exactly this nervousness that Parulkar would pick up on. Parulkar was the guru who had taught Sartaj how to lie, and when to lie. He had given him the
craft. Would he detect Sartaj's hesitations, his over-eagerness? This is how you catch a suspect in a lie, he had once taught Sartaj, you watch not only for contradictions, but also if the story sounds too similar each time he tells it, if the language is the same, if it has been rehearsed. Sartaj had seen him reduce hardened men to tears in half an hour.

The four sparrows sat in a row on a power line loosely tacked above the pillars and shook their tails at Sartaj. Relax, Sartaj told himself. Don't over-think it. He jiggled his arms and loosened his shoulders. It's a job, it's just a job. Think about something else. He thought about Mary, about her small hands and the gathering of age at her knuckles, and a small swell of tenderness carried him into a vivid recollection of their love-making, her exhalation as he first went into her. Then he was afraid again: why wouldn't she leave the city? How stubborn she was in her fatalism. Now he was afraid again. Parulkar would know, like every other senior officer, about the details of the high-status alert from Delhi. He would be alert himself, and sceptical, and hard to fool. The anxiety sang in Sartaj's veins and drummed into his forehead. He felt weak and incapable.

But Parulkar, when he came bouncing up the staircase followed by his three bodyguards, was at the top of his game. ‘Sartaj Singh,' he boomed, ‘come in, come in.' He led the way into his cabin, ordered two cups of chai, karak and with adrak, and had the floor-to-ceiling curtains at the back of the room swept back so they could look down on the garden he had built in the years of his tenure. The air-conditioner was adjusted, a spray of air-freshener was squirted into the corners of the room, two vases of fresh flowers were brought in, and finally they sat, Parulkar and Sartaj, facing each other.

‘Okay, tell me,' Parulkar said. ‘What is so urgent?'

‘Saab,' Sartaj said, ‘yesterday Iffat-bibi asked to meet me. Actually, she insisted. She said it was top priority. She wouldn't tell me anything on the phone.'

Parulkar was looking down into his chai. He frowned, reached into the cup with a teaspoon and removed the film from the surface. ‘So where did you meet her?'

This was Parulkar at his most dangerous, when he was apparently casual and uninterested. ‘In Fort, sir,' Sartaj said. ‘Behind a seafood restaurant called Kishti.' This he had also learned from Parulkar, that when setting up a big lie it was important to be truthful in the small details. You wanted to give the interrogator a lot of specifics to check and cross-check and find correct. ‘In an accountant's office.'

‘Yes, yes. That's Walia's office. He handles a lot of their legitimate business for them. What did she want?'

Sartaj leant closer. Of course there was nobody in the office, but somehow it was necessary to whisper. ‘Sir, Suleiman Isa wants to talk to you.'

Parulkar put down his teacup, edged it back on the table. ‘Can't be done. My position is too sensitive. And nowadays you never know when and where the Anti-Corruption Bureau is listening.'

‘I told her that, sir. But she insists. I mean, she said that he insists. They said you choose when and how. By phone or satellite phone or however. You choose everything.'

‘Even if I choose my end of the connection, the other side is not safe. Who knows what agency is listening to them?'

‘They thought of that, sir. If you don't want to call Suleiman Isa in Karachi, you can talk to Salim in Dubai.' Salim was Suleiman Isa's top controller and long-time friend, he ran the day-to-day business of the company from Dubai. ‘They said you can have someone bring a fresh phone to Salim at a place you both agree on, and he will call from that phone to whatever number you designate in India. So there will be safety at both ends.'

‘So I should talk to Suleiman Isa's errand boy? These bastards have become too arrogant.'

‘If you have a contact in Karachi who can bring a phone to Suleiman Isa, sir, then you can talk to him directly. Whatever you want, Iffat-bibi said.'

‘Dubai or Karachi, that is not a problem. The problem is these gaandus who think they are masters of the world.'

‘I understand, sir. Shall I tell Iffat-bibi no, then?'

Parulkar rubbed his stomach, picked up his cup again. ‘What else did she say? Tell me the whole thing.'

So Sartaj told him the whole thing, from the summons on his mobile phone, the journey to the accountant's, finding Iffat-bibi in the tiny cabin, how she had asked for a conversation with Parulkar Saab, how Suleiman Isa was growing anxious to talk to Parulkar, how they understood Parulkar's delicate position with the current government but there was an unavoidable need to talk. ‘She said it was a matter of some money, sir, that Suleiman Isa wants to discuss.'

‘That bastard,' Parulkar said. ‘I have always given them a complete and clean accounting.'

‘Of course, sir.'

A gang of labourers were working on a renovation of the Hanuman temple behind the station. They were stripped down to their banians and blue-striped underwear, and were scrambling over the white dome of the temple. Parulkar watched them, scratching at his nose. ‘Do you have any ideas?' he said.

‘You want to talk to Suleiman Isa, sir?'

‘He is a cranky man. He has become almost crazy now, after all those years abroad. Better to talk to him, clear up whatever confusion he has. Bas, finish it, you know. No need to make him more suspicious than he already is. So, okay, I will talk to him. On a new phone, which can be delivered to him personally in Karachi a few minutes before he calls. My man will watch him dial on that phone only, and will confirm to me that security has been maintained. The question remains of where to receive the call.'

‘Yes, sir. Sir, I was thinking. Are you still going to Pune on Thursday?' Parulkar had a meeting with senior Pune policemen planned for that morning.

‘Yes, yes.'

‘Then, sir, why not after your lunch, you come to our house there? Don't tell anyone till the last minute, just say then that you want to go and visit Ma. I will be there, I will reach there on my own that morning. At two forty-five, I will call Iffat-bibi from my mobile and tell her to have Suleiman Isa call on Ma's land line at three. They can ask for me, I'll give you the phone. No problem, no fuss, and both ends safe. You can talk.'

Parulkar put down his teacup and wiped his hands on a napkin. He smoothed back the short hair above his ears, in a gesture that he must have acquired as a young man. It reminded Sartaj of some fifties film hero, but he couldn't think of which one. Parulkar nodded. ‘There is just one phone there?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Only your Ma uses it?'

‘Yes, sir. I have even stopped using it since I got my mobile, sir, it is cheaper to make calls on the mobile than on the land line. But Ma, sir, she doesn't like mobiles. She says they're too small and have too many buttons.' Sartaj was suddenly aware that he was saying ‘sir' too much. Calm down, he told himself. Look at the man. But don't stare at him. Drink your chai. Don't shake the cup.

‘All right,' Parulkar said. He always made decisions that suddenly. He weighed the alternatives, ran down the moves as far as he could and then
he jumped. He had the courage and faith of a good gambler, and the confidence that he would win. ‘All right. But tell Iffat-bibi that the call comes in at three precisely. If they are two minutes late, I leave. And we will keep the conversation short. Ten minutes maximum.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And Suleiman Isa is not to use my name during the call, or his.'

‘I will inform them, sir.'

‘Right. Shabash, Sartaj. Let us get this over with. And don't tell your mother I am coming. We will surprise her as well.'

‘Of course, sir,' Sartaj said. He stood up, saluted. He could feel his shirt wet against his lower back. The stain would be huge, despite the humming air-conditioner. He moved the chair aside, awkwardly, and backed away. He was almost at the door when Parulkar called.

‘Sartaj?'

‘Yes, sir?'

‘You look very tired. What is the matter?'

‘That alert from Delhi, sir. They have us all running around.'

‘All nonsense. Their intelligence is too vague, there is nothing specific. It is all very ridiculous. There is no bomb-vomb. You take some rest.'

‘Yes, sir.'

Outside, Sartaj nodded at Parulkar's guards and walked towards the staircase. He wanted very much to sit down on one of the benches and rest his wobbly legs, but he made it downstairs and kept walking, out of the station, past the crowds and the guards, through the high gate with its curving sign overhead, and stumbling along the street, through the preoccupied pedestrians and the swooping cars and the stray dogs with their scabied flesh. He stood at a corner, blinking. He did not know where he was. He turned to peer up at shop windows and street signs, and he realized he had somehow crossed a busy road. It was as wide as a black river, and the hungry eddies of vehicles swept by unceasingly. He did not know how he had come across, at the risk of his life, but here he was. His mouth was painfully dry, but he did not want a drink. He just wanted to get back to work. Far down to the left, there was a traffic light with a crossing. The bright circles flashed orange and green, green and orange. Sartaj made his way back to the station.

 

On Thursday, Sartaj drove out early. He told himself that he wanted to get to Ma's and prepare, that he wanted to travel in the cool of the early morning. But he had been unable to sleep, and finally it was easier to get
up and start the car and drive than toss about in the musty sheets. It was good to be up in the mountains, to twist and loop along the old road. If he went fast and recklessly, the danger pushed everything out of his head, and he roared through Matheran and Khandala with only a thin skirl of memories trailing behind him, Megha and college picnics and walking up a domed hill. And then he was in Pune, and there was nothing to do but go home to Ma.

She was squatting in the front room, surrounded by open trunks. ‘Look at these old sweaters,' she said to Sartaj. ‘I forgot I even had them.'

Sartaj bent low to her. ‘Peri pauna, Ma.' He lowered the battered lid of a black trunk and sat on it, his calves against the almost faded stencilling of Papa-ji's full name. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Beta, there are too many things here. If you also don't want them, what is the use of keeping them here?'

Ever since Papa-ji had died, she had gone on these cleaning binges every six months. She had given personal and household effects to cousins, aunts, uncles, servants, neighbours and beggars. She had shocked Sartaj sometimes with her ruthlessness, her detachment from old chairs and walking sticks and blue blazers. The only things that had seemed safe were old photographs and letters, but maybe even those would disappear in this round of vetting. Ma had an old photo close to her, on the floor. Sartaj knew it well, that blackened silver frame, as long as he could remember Ma had kept it in her cupboard, nestled close to her dupattas, where she would see it every morning. He picked it up, and there she was, held for ever in blooming youth, Ma's lost sister. She was lovely, she flung a flow of jet-black hair over her shoulders as she laughed, turning back to the camera, and her body was a taut curve leaning into the far horizon. Sartaj knew every detail of the picture, he knew her name was Navneet, and that was about all he knew. Ma hadn't liked to speak about her. Now, perhaps, beautiful Navneet would also vanish. Sartaj didn't like it, this slow erosion of the home that he remembered, that he carried within himself. It was terrifying sometimes to come back to Pune and find another few pieces of it gone. One day, he thought, all that will be left will be these white walls. And then, not even that.

But he couldn't stop Ma. How could you argue with generosity? And in old age she had become stubborn and independent. She did what she wanted. ‘Yes, Ma. That's true. But do you really want to give that cardigan? You really liked that one.'