Sacred Games (19 page)

‘You've seen him?'

‘Never.'

I was quiet for the rest of our time up the steps and into the temple, and when we finally got up to Ganesha, I didn't ask him for anything. I just watched him, examined his noose and his goad and laddoos and broken tusk, and wondered how he would scheme his army of ganas out of defeat, how the remover of obstacles would remove an obstacle he couldn't find and pin down. We had to move on then, the pressure of oncoming worshippers was huge and unrelenting, but I carried his image with me all the way home. We were stuck in a monstrous traffic jam in Juhu, and Kanta Bai fell asleep next to me, clutching her prasad from the temple on her lap, and I listened to her snoring, and thought and thought. My shoulder was burning, quiet little eddies of stinging fire, but the endless circling in my head was more painful: I could see the players of the game, the lanes and the buildings they moved from and to, Gopalmath, Nabargali, all of it laid out before me when I shut my eyes, and I went endlessly round and around, looking for an opening, a way to tear it all apart and put it together again. And the traffic growled and choked outside, and here we were, still alive, still breathing.

‘Let me out,' I said. I leaned over and opened the door, and got out of the car. Chotta Badriya slid out from behind the wheel. ‘No, no, get back in.'

‘But, bhai…'

‘Listen to me, just get back in. I want to walk for a bit.'

He was afraid of a coincidence, of somebody from the other side out for a stroll among the evening walkers and bhelpuri-eaters. It was possible, but I wanted suddenly to be alone. I raised a hand at him, and I think I must have frightened him with the look on my face, because he got right back in.

I walked down the curving road to the beach, past the chat-stalls and on to the sand. There were families walking with me, children excited into laughter by the horses trotting at the edge of the water, by the toywallahs and their hovering, silvery clouds of balloons, by the tantalizing kulfi-wallahs and their cool boxes all filmed over with tiny pearls of moisture. Here there was no war. Here was peace. I walked lightly amongst the old couples out for their evening walks, and the ranks of restless young men. The sea rushed steadily up the land, and finally I sat on a half-built brick platform, facing the waves. I was tired, empty-minded, and it was good to have my hair stirred gently by the water's slow breathing. There was a movement to my left. I looked, and under a pile of refuse, palm fronds and soggy paper packets and coconut husks, there was a jerky squirming, quick little dashings and then alert stillness. In the shadows there were more shadows, moving fast, and I saw a white cardboard box shift in a zigzag line, trembling with the urgency of hunger. I got up and walked over, and stood over the box, and I could now smell the strong rot, all the last leftover food, everything that had been thrown away. But there was no movement now. I laughed. ‘Rats, I know you're here,' I said. ‘I know you are.' But they were too clever for me. They lay still, and if I wanted I could probably kill some of them, but finally they would survive my attack and me.

‘Bhai!' The shout came from down the beach. I raised my arm.

‘Here,' I called. They came running up, Chotta Badriya and two others.

‘Are you all right?' he said.

‘I'm fine,' I said. I was, really. There was something moving inside me, a faint scurrying I could hardly see. I knew I had to wait for it to emerge. ‘Let's go home,' I said.

 

I set up a meeting with Inspector Samant the next day. We met at a hotel in Sakinaka. ‘This Vilas Ranade,' I said. ‘I want his wicket. I have ten petis.'

He laughed in my face. He had a thick moustache, not very much hair on his head and big white teeth. He was sweating through his shirt, big wet dark patches. ‘Ten lakhs!' he said. ‘For Vilas Ranade. You're too hopeful.'

‘Fifteen then.'

‘Do you know who you're talking about? He was here when you were still drinking milk.'

I said, ‘True. But can you do it?'

‘It can be done.'

‘You know something. What do you know?'

His eyes were steady, opaque. He was right, it had been a very stupid question. He had no reason to tell me what he knew. I was nervous, over-eager. Then he said, ‘Why should I do it?'

‘I will be here long after he's gone, Samant Saab. You know that. You've seen my progress. If we can work together, think of what lies in the future. Those Cobra Gang chutiyas have no future, no vision. What they do, they do, but they won't do anything new. The future is worth more than cash.'

He was listening. He wiped his shining takli with a handkerchief. ‘Thirty,' he said.

‘I can do twenty, saab. And once this is all over, there will be much much more.'

‘Twenty-five. And I want it all in advance.'

Which was unprecedented, and insane. But – ‘Yes, saab,' I said, ‘I'll bring it to you in three days.'

He nodded, and took some saunf from the dish in the middle of the table. The bill he was leaving to me.

‘Also, then, in three days,' I said, ‘you had better arrest me.'

 

I didn't have any twenty-five lakhs in cash. I had five lakhs, maybe six and a half if I called in little loans I had made to citizens in Gopalmath, for medicine, for wedding saris. I couldn't do that, and I knew better than to ask Paritosh Shah for so bulky a loan. He was a businessman, and I was not currently a good risk, but he would find it very hard to say no to me, and it might have broken us apart. So I didn't ask that of him, but I did ask him for a big score. ‘A target?' he said. ‘Worth twenty-five lakhs? In three days?' I knew I was asking much, but he understood the urgency.

‘Never mind the risk,' I told him. ‘Just think about the prize.' He didn't have to think about it very long. Mahajan Jewellers, on Advani Road. It pleased me that it was right in the middle of Cobra Gang territory, a mile and a half from Rajesh Parab's house. We watched Mahajan Jewellers for one day and one night, and then I decided that we would do it during the day. Night might have been safer, but it would have meant getting in through the heavy sliding grille at the front, through the three locks, then through the shutter door they dropped down and locked also, and then through the glass doors. No, we went in at four in the afternoon, straight through the open door. There was one watchman out front, with the usual single-shot shotgun, and when he saw us coming
with our seven pistols and choppers he dropped it without hesitation. On our way out, he held the door open for us. We had two stolen cars waiting outside, and getting away was smooth. No problems.

So now we had the money. The property itself wasn't enough, Paritosh Shah gave us fifteen lakhs for everything we had taken, and he loaned us the rest. I let him give me the money. I had confidence again, I could see my path, and I knew he felt it. It wasn't a favour he was doling out now, but an investment in future earnings. I was now full, and he was adding to my fullness. I was good for his cash, and for more. So I had the money, and straightaway, a day early, I called in Samant and gave it to him. And he arrested me.

Into the lock-up we went, myself and three of my boys. We were arrested for suspected complicity in the Mahajan Jewellers robbery and remanded to custody, that's what it said in the newspapers. On the outside, my boys disappeared from the streets, from Gopalmath, and the Cobra Gang celebrated. G-Company was finished, over and done with, all very quickly and no trouble at all, that was what they said. I sat in my cell and watched the wall. I had my back to one wall and I watched the other. My boys sat on all sides of me. I could stand the narrow space easily, the heat, I forced down the brittle rotis and the watery dal, but the repose of it, not moving and working, the rest and stillness of it crawled just under my skin and made me want to tear myself open. There were busy, buzzing insects in my veins. But I taught myself patience. I watched the wall. I felt it watching me, strong in its blankness. It wanted to outlast me. It knew it could. I stared it down. And I waited.

It took nine days. When the constables came to get us, my boys stood guard and I pissed on the wall. I wrote circles into its indifference while they watched, and then I let them lead me out. There was an advocate who had done the paperwork waiting in the senior inspector's room, and he led us out of the station. Our bail had been posted. It was dark outside, a moonless night and cloudy. Chotta Badriya was waiting outside with a car. He looked very tired, and he had his hair tied back, held back with one of those bands that girls wear.

‘What's that in your hair, chutiya?' I said.

‘Just like that, bhai,' he said, blushing like a girl and twisting his head down and to the side. And he smiled. When he smiled I knew it was all right.

He drove us fast into the thick of the city, up the spine and on to the highway, past Goregaon, and I felt revived by the crowds, by the weaving
rows of trucks and cars, and the children running after a ball on the side of the road, and the ceaseless noise of it. I was quiet but completely awake, alert like a snake. Chotta Badriya wasn't talking, and I didn't want to ask him any questions, not yet. The promise sweltered in the air and it was delicious to hold in my mouth, the anticipation, the not knowing. We turned off the highway on to the slip road, and then off it, past a jhopadpatti, into darkness. Our beams conjured up a dusty road, trees sliding into existence and out again, it was like falling into a tunnel. I went eagerly into it. Then we took a sharp left, and the road changed, we crunched over dirt. There was a car parked at the end of the lane, and the hard black of a building through the overhanging branches, and we got out and walked towards it, around a corner, and now there was a single bulb above a door. And sitting on a crate next to the door, Samant, with his cigarette signalling red.

‘Took too long,' he said. ‘You're late.'

‘It was the lawyers and everything,' Chotta Badriya said.

Samant tugged on the door, which opened with a long metallic squeak. Just inside, there was a man face-down on the floor. A blue shirt and black pants, and his hips cocked up and stiff.

‘Vilas Ranade,' Samant said, with a little motion of his hand, palm up as if he was making introductions.

‘You did it alone?' I said.

‘He was a brown-sugar sniffer,' Samant said. ‘The stupid bhenchod. He thought nobody knew. Used to go by himself to get it. I know the dealer who sold to him.'

‘The dealer told you when Vilas Ranade would come to buy?'

‘He had to, if he wanted to keep dealing.'

‘You're sure this is Vilas Ranade?'

‘I've seen him twice at the Mulund station when I was posted there. He had friends there.'

‘I want to see his face.'

Chotta Badriya stepped over the body, tugged at the shoulder. Vilas Ranade's shirt was black at the front, soggy. Chotta Badriya got behind him, and then Vilas Ranade sat up into the light. He looked sleepy, eyelids half down. I know him, I thought. He looked just like me. I squatted in front of him, leaned closer. Yes, he was my duplicate. I waited for one of the others to remark on it, but nobody spoke.

‘What's the matter, bhai?' Chotta Badriya said finally. ‘Don't like his face?'

‘No, I think the bastard's got an ugly face.' I tapped Vilas Ranade on
the cheek lightly, and I stood up. ‘What a game you played, Samant Saab,' I said. I took Samant by the hand and shook it violently. I thumped him on the shoulder, and I laughed, and all of them, every one of them, laughed with me. But in me it was all acting. I was making big motions and roaring and celebrating, but inside, inside I was bewildered: what did it mean that Vilas Ranade and I looked alike, and why did none of the others see it? What did it mean that he and I had hunted each other, like ghosts seen in mirrors, and then killed? Where did this coincidence point me, where was it taking me?

I was still dazzled when we got into the cars. Again we drifted through the long, unlit night, and by the time we were near the highway I had solved the conundrum. I had decided it had been a trick of the light. If he had looked so like me, Chotta Badriya would have seen it. Samant would have said something. I was tired from the days in the lock-up. I needed sleep, rest, good food. There was nothing to worry about.

 

Shooter Vilas Ranade Killed in Encounter, some of the afternoon papers reported the next day. Parab Gang Warlord Dies in Encounter. And then we destroyed the Cobra Gang. We ambushed their boys, we took their money, we intimidated their businessmen, we strolled down their streets. We lost four more of our boys, and one of them was my Sunny, who by now was so fervent in his worship of pistols that he carried two of them. A bullet fired from behind broke something in his back and left him pissing out his life into the road. But we shattered the Cobra Gang, and took their territories. We were still smaller, but now that seemed an advantage. We hit and ran, and then circled back and hit again. They were confused and old, like their Rajesh Parab, who at the last tried to seek help from the bigger companies, he went here and there, to Dubai even, and everyone gave him assurances, and promises, and nothing else. We were the winning team, and we had a bright, burnished shine about us, and those watching the battle saw this, and placed their bets. They knew the practical lesson, had learnt it already: a small band of fighters, knit by hardship into brotherly love, will easily beat a large, unwieldy organization with its courage failing and its belief vanished.

Rajesh Parab died of a heart attack six weeks later, in his bed, in his sleep at night. Paritosh Shah said, ‘He must have dreamed you coming through his door.' But I was glad I didn't have to kill him. I would have felt like a dog-catcher putting down a tired, yelping cur, and there was no pleasure even in the thought of it.

 

I caught a fever that winter. A dry, jittery whistling in my head and a jerky restlessness tossed me about my sweaty bed. Movies did not calm me, nor music, nor the girl Chotta Badriya brought in. I spat and spat, trying to rid myself of a rush of bitter saliva. I swallowed the pills, drank the salty water, ate the plain white rice. The fever stayed with me.