Sacred Games (130 page)

Sartaj himself had no idea where Parulkar was. He had some idea of how to get word to him, and so he left discreet messages with a couple of khabaris, and with Homi Mehta the money manager. But there was no response. Twice that fortnight, his mobile had rung late at night. Both times, the caller had not spoken. Sartaj could hear slow exhalations, an old man's laborious inhalations. The second time he had said, ‘Sir? Is that you, sir?' But there had been no response, and no caller's number on the display. The morning after Sartaj's promotion was formally announced, his mobile rang while he was in the bathroom. He felt his way out, soap still on his face, and found the phone vibrating on his bed. ‘Hello?' he said.

Again, there was the same breathing. This time, Sartaj felt that this silent man was very angry at him. ‘Sir,' Sartaj said. ‘Sir, you have to listen to me. It was very important, I will tell you everything about it.'

But the caller put down his receiver. There was a click, and then nothing. That evening, Sartaj was just finishing his shift when Kamble came into the detection room. ‘Boss,' he said.

‘What?' Sartaj snapped. He had been overseeing the interrogation of an armed robber. Since his promotion, he no longer found it necessary to third-degree the prisoners himself. He merely instructed, and watched. The room smelt of sweat and piss.

‘You'd better come outside,' Kamble said. And then, in English, ‘Please.'

Sartaj followed Kamble outside, into the hallway that opened out into the compound. Kamble took him by the elbow and walked him to the edge of the pond. There were birds wheeling overhead. ‘They found Parulkar this afternoon.'

‘Good. Where did he give himself up?' Because if Parulkar didn't want to be caught, he wouldn't be.

‘No, not like that. They found him.'

Kamble said that just forty-five minutes ago, the detail watching Parulkar's home had been alerted by screams coming from inside the house. They had gone in and found two of Parulkar's granddaughters in hysterics. It turned out that Parulkar had been inside the house all along. In that ancestral abode, under a staircase, there was a wooden panel that hinged away to reveal a small ten-foot room wedged in behind the kitchen. Parulkar had been safely ensconced inside, and he could have stayed indefinitely, since food and other resources could have been easily provided to him, and the main thrust of the investigation was elsewhere, as far away as Pune and Cochin. But this evening, Parulkar had emerged from his hiding place and gone into his bedroom, without care for the daylight which he had been avoiding. He had shaved, bathed, changed into a fresh kurta. He had taken off his watch and placed it on the table by his bedside. Then he had taken the keys to the Godrej cupboard next to his bed, opened it and the locker inside, and had extracted his service revolver. He went into the bathroom, took off his chappals, stepped into the bathtub. The girls had heard the report of the pistol and had run in and found him.

‘Bas,' Kamble said. ‘That is all I know so far.'

Sartaj stepped away. Shadows moved over the water, and ripples
moved from opposite sides of the pond and ran across each other. This is all we know so far, Sartaj thought. And this is all we will ever know. We die for things we don't understand, we sacrifice those we love. ‘I should go there,' he said.

‘To his house? Boss, right now, no. Do not go there.'

‘Yes, you're right. Of course I shouldn't go there. Okay. I think I will stay here for a while.'

Kamble went back into the station. Sartaj stayed outside. He listened to the flapping of the flag on the temple, and watched the water. He had the sense that something was about to change. He was waiting. But he wasn't sure it ever would.

I

The Ansari Tola in Rajpur was on the eastern side of the town, on the other side of the nullah from the crossroads and behind a line of khajoor trees. There were just eleven huts, clustered together in an untidy circle. A muddy track went down from the culvert to the Tola, and the first hut, on the highest land, belonged to Noor Mohammed. He owned seven katthas of poor land, on which he grew potatoes and makkai, and he drove an ikka drawn by a rickety brown nag. His wife was named Mumtaz Khatun, and they had three children, one boy and two girls. Noor Mohammed was the least poor man in the Ansari Tola, which meant that he and his family just barely scraped by, and that his children hardly ever needed to go to sleep on a stomach-filling diet of chillies and water. Noor Mohammed and Mumtaz sent their sons to school, but intermittently, depending on the season and the work to be done in the fields. They did not have much to spare, not time and not food and not money. Still, they gave thanks to Allah when another son was born to them. They named him Aadil.

Aadil was curious and adventuresome from the very start. When he was two, he disappeared one rainy afternoon from under the noses of his two sisters. His mother came home to the Tola to find the whole community in an uproar, and the sisters weeping. Everyone searched in the fields, and a boy cousin was lowered down into the well. Noor Mohammed clenched his fists, and walked the near edge of the nullah. Finally, Noor Mohammed's brother Salim found Aadil where nobody had thought to look, on the road on the other side of the nullah. ‘He was just walking along,' Salim said of his nephew, ‘all naked but not tired or afraid at all.' Aadil had decided to explore the world, it seemed, and had just gone off on his own. His mother squeezed him close and asked him, ‘Where were you going? What were you looking for?' Aadil didn't say anything at all. He patiently suffered all the fuss, and looked around with big black eyes. He was a very serious boy. ‘If I hadn't been coming back from Kurkoo Kothi just then,' his uncle said, ‘our young adventurer here would have gone all the way to Patna.'

The distance to Patna was only one hundred and twenty-eight kilometres, but it took Aadil eighteen years to get there. Until then, he struggled against the limitations and confinements of Rajpur, a town of one and a half lakh citizens that lay untidily sprawled on the southern bank of the Milani river. The Milani was a minor watercourse which split from the Boorhi Gandak sixty kilometres before it emptied into the Ganga. A medieval Kali temple stood on a rocky outcrop next to the Milani, facing a white mosque on a nearby hill. During the summer, and late in the winter, the water in the river receded, revealing grey rocks covered with carvings of curving-limbed gods and goddesses from some ancient, forgotten time. To the south and east, on the highest hill in the immediate surroundings, the haveli of Raja Jadunath Singh Chaudhury crumbled quietly into a ruin that was haunted – according to the entire population of Rajpur – by mad ghosts and cackling chudails. Raja Jadunath had lost most of his land, and he could not compete in splendour or munificence with the local MLA, Nandan Prasad Yadav, who during Aadil's childhood built Kurkoo Kothi into a magnificent blue and pink extravagance, surrounded by a twelve-foot wall and armed guards. Noor Mohammed always said that the Raja had no head for modern politics, and Nandan Prasad Yadav was a past master at that dirty game. So one grew small, and the other big. Noor Mohammed was sometimes hired by the Raja, to drive his children to the railway station in the Raja's ancient buggy, and most of the men from the Ansari Tola worked as labourers on the Kurkoo Kothi.

Some of the boys in the Ansari Tola could read a little, and one had studied till the eighth. None of their fathers could read, and in the whole history of the settlement no member had finished high school. But Aadil, it was clear from the very beginning, was fascinated by the written word. Even before he could read, he traced the shapes of letters on old newspapers. At the two-room primary school near Prem Shanker Jha's mango orchard, Aadil paid attention with such rapt intensity that the other children noticed it right away. One of the Yadav boys said, ‘Eh, this Aadil looks like such a dibba when the teacher's talking,' and he made a deathly serious face with big eyes. ‘Aadil-Dibba,' he said, and puffed out his cheeks, and the three classes gathered on the chabutra of the schoolhouse all burst out laughing. From that day on, Aadil was known as Dibba, and became famous as a padhaku boy. Even the teacher – when he was in school and teaching, and not off trying to make a little money selling onions wholesale – noted Aadil's dedication and quietness, and tried to
keep the school bullies off him. This resulted, of course, in groups of strapping lafangas paying extra attention to Aadil on the way from and to school. Still, he persevered. He passed the fifth, and then went to the Zila High School. To make it into the sixth had been very hard, because Aadil's mother and father had no money for books or slates or pencils. Now it was harder, and not only because more books were needed, and pens, and a geometry set. There were many days that Aadil had to work in the fields, especially when there was planting or harvesting to be done, and there were other days when he laboured at brick kilns with his uncles and cousins. He was old enough to earn now, and so he did. There were mouths to be fed, and homes to be mended, and marriages to be paid for. But he was assiduous about his learning. Despite everything, he stuck it out. He read borrowed books, and spent evenings under the flickering bulbs of the Shivnath Jha Sarvajanik Pustakalaya. The library had been endowed by a renowned local Brahmin landowner, and named after his very learned father. There was a little discomfort evinced by the library staff at first, at having a Muslim boy come and sit so boldly under the garlanded picture of the old man who had spent his whole life bathing, purifying and sanctifying. But they soon grew used to the sight of Aadil sitting at a wooden bench, bent over a book or a newspaper. Times were changing, and the two rooms and dozen shelves of the library were after all supposed to be sarvajanik, and Aadil was definitely one of the people, if only a grimy and somewhat unpalatable one. So Aadil learned about Rajpur and what lay beyond. He located himself not only in space, but also in time. I am, he thought one day, part of the twentieth century.

Rajpur, though, stubbornly remained in some other time, in some era that wasn't quite the present and definitely not the future. The potholed main road that led out of town looked nothing like the Soviet highways that Aadil saw in black-and-white magazines, and the sight of whole villages in America with electricity and phones filled him with wonder. There was one phone now in Rajpur, at Nandan Prasad Yadav's house, but Aadil had never seen it. He had seen three films, two in a temporary outdoor cinema set up by an exhibitor who rode up in a jeep and unfurled a dirty white screen which turned a blazing Technicolor after dark. Then Prem Shanker Jha built a cinema house he named Parvati, in which Aadil saw
Bobby
. He sat on the ground, up front near the screen, and what he dreamed about afterwards was not Rishi Kapoor's sleek motorcycle, or Dimple Kapadia's glistening, almost naked body, but the clean, two-storeyed pucca houses, the phones, the roads, the water that fell
magically from taps. Aadil now began to recognize how dirty Rajpur was, with its open drains and lanes built to no plan, its wandering tribes of spindly dogs. The fields wandered to the horizon, a long, marching column of electricity poles stripped of their copper and wire stopped abruptly in the middle of a cracking wasteland, and the crows made their relentless clamour over the eaves of the Ansari Tola. Babies were born, marriages were made, old men and women died, but everything remained the same. Near Prem Shanker Jha's orchard, Aadil played football and gilli-danda with Brahmin and Yadav and Bhumihar boys, but he had never visited their homes, and they had never set foot in the Ansari Tola. No Paswan would ever enter the inner courtyard of a Brahmin or Bhumihar house, and even outside, the poor man would squat on the ground to talk to his upper-caste patron, who lounged comfortably on a khattia. The lowly were allowed no chairs, no pride, no dignity.

When Aadil was in class nine, his chachu, the gentle Salim – who had found him wandering down the road to Patna so long ago – died of a wrenching stomach ailment that emptied him out in torrents of diarrhoea. His mourning relatives laid out the frail body, cleansed it, wrapped it in its white shroud and carried it to the Muslim graveyard at the western end of Rajpur. But the maulvi who lived in the mosque there wouldn't let them in, and soon the Sayyids and Pathans who lived near by came running. You cannot bury anyone here, they said, you have your own graveyard. The men from the Ansari Tola protested in the name of Allah, and then they beseeched the mighty Maqbool Khan, who was the wealthiest Muslim in Rajpur, the son of a zamindar and the descendant – it was said – of amirs and nawabs. The dead man's relatives asked for sympathy, for compassion, for reham. They told Maqbool Khan and the Pathans and the Sayyids that their own graveyard was lost, that it had been covered by water when the river changed course after the monsoon. But there was no mercy that day in Rajpur, not even for the dead man, who had been a five-time namaazi and the most generous of men. Maqbool Khan gave the mourners five rupees, and told them that they had to construct a new graveyard. It took two days to bury Salim, because there was no free land lying around in Rajpur, even just a few feet of hard earth, enough to hold a man. Aadil's father found a scrubby slope, a rough triangle of sour, barren soil between the nullah and the road, and the men cleared and levelled this and made a graveyard, and buried Salim.

Aadil began to wake up with anger in his head. It was there, ready to greet him with its insistent monotone, even before he opened his eyes and
saw the muddy brown of the wall, before he heard his mother's sighs as she struggled through the constant pain in her back. The low grinding of the anger stayed with him through the day and burnt the flesh from his bones, so that he became very thin. He was tall now, and nothing like a dibba, although the nickname stayed with him. His mother began to joke about finding a girl for him. For Aadil, this early talk of marriage was another torture. The other boys his age in the Tola had flirtations with girls, and Anwarul – who had a broad chest and a dangerous walk – had an ongoing affair with a married woman from the Chamar toli. But Aadil's passion was his books, and he wanted nothing else but the swooning pleasure of learning. For this it was hard to find support in the Tola, even from the very few men and women who had travelled a little outside Rajpur. Noor Mohammed and Mumtaz Khatun had never been further than Alagha, which was forty-four kilometres from Rajpur. For them, Patna was a place out of legend, and they knew only vaguely of Delhi, and nothing of Peking. To be born, to labour in Rajpur, to survive – this was what they knew of life and expected from it. To persuade them that it was possible for Aadil to finish high school was a struggle, to convince them that it was desirable took a long, relentless campaign which was never quite won. There were many in the Tola who told them, educate this boy too much and he won't want to work on the land, so be careful. Somehow, despite all this, Aadil fought his way through to the tenth, and passed the finals. He missed a first class by two marks, but then no other student had studied with borrowed texts, without notebooks and pens and lamplight. There was no celebration in the Ansari Tola, but Aadil's parents were proud of him, and much of Rajpur now knew of him as something remarkable, like the five-legged calf that had been born to a cow in the Raja's stables. Aadil understood that he was being patronized when Brahmins and Yadavs and Pathans called out to him in the streets, and called him ‘Professor saab'. He shrugged it off. The laughter fed his anger, and his anger kept him moving.

But now he wanted to attend intermediate and college, and it was going to take more than anger to get him there. The fees were manageable, but there was a lot more to be paid for. He knew something now about education, and he understood that it required a lot of ready cash. You had to buy books, pens, application forms, you had to pay special fees for exams and graduations, you had to have a bicycle to go to the Lala Chandan Lal Memorial College on Jawaharlal Nehru Road, which was on the far side of Rajpur from the Tola. You had to pay for clothes,
for two pairs of pants and two shirts, so that you could sit on the benches alongside boys who wore jackets and shiny shoes. And still there were all the other things you couldn't pay for, for kachoris from Makhania the chat-wallah who set up his stall across the road from the college gate, for films at Parvati, for camaraderie and carefree laughter. The intangibles that were never named, but were education also, these you could never pay for. Aadil knew all this, and yet he wanted to go to college. He refused marriage and insisted on intermediate and then college. No argument by the elders in the Tola could sway him in the slightest. Aadil had told them that fees and books and exams alone would require seven hundred rupees, maybe more, every six months. They asked, where will that come from? But Aadil was adamant. He was not rude, but he put his head down and repeated one single sentence: ‘I want to go to college.' Finally Noor Mohammed took him to see the Raja.

Aadil had never been to the haveli before. He had seen the surrounding brick wall on top of the hill, and he had seen the Raja's children in their sparkling-clean clothes. He was surprised now by the headless statue in front of the house and the rows of broken windows, the splintered railings on the balconies. Still, it took his breath away, the haveli with its sheer size and expanse, the overgrown gardens that must have once needed a staff of fifty gardeners, the empty stables tall enough to have harboured elephants. The Raja met them on a patio behind the house. He took a long draw on his hookah and gazed out at the distant glint of the river. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue lungi, and seen up close he looked most unlike the pictures of royalty that Aadil had seen in his history books. Even the hookah was quite threadbare, with a cracked cup. Noor Mohammed squatted next to the Raja's armchair, and tugged at Aadil's sleeve until he lowered himself also. The Raja listened to Noor Mohammed, and said, ‘Noora, the boy is quite right. He should be educated. These are times for education. But my condition is very bad. Now those bastards have taken my land up to the orchard.' He made a gesture over his shoulder.