Sacred Games (44 page)

At the Jivnani Nursing Home, at two forty-six a.m., Ganpatrao Popat Katekar was declared dead on arrival.

 

Sartaj felt old. From the paperwork he had learnt, remembered again, that Katekar was five years older than him. But he had always thought of Katekar as younger, young. Katekar had a complaint for every hour of the day, he had antic Marathi songs, he had obscure scientific facts, he had endless stories about the short lives of hard men. He took a paunchy pleasure in eating the aged-and-cured wickedness of the city, its piquant scandals, its bitter breakdowns, its ferociously musty unfairness, he made a meal of its resplendent and rotting flesh. Now, Sartaj had to write in a box on a form: ‘Cause of death'. He shaped the letters carefully, convinced somehow that good writing on a departmental form was a kind of respect for the departed. He inked in, slowly, all the way to a full stop,
and his hands started to shake. It was a vibration that started in the elbows, a pain drawn from the bone that went straight to his palms. Sartaj put his hands under the table, on his thighs, and waited for the shaking to pass. He clenched his fists, relaxed them. The shaking stopped, then came again. Sartaj looked about. Two constables sat just outside the door, he could see their shoes. The inspector on duty, Apte, was in the office across the hall to the left. He had left Sartaj alone out of concern, sympathy, given him his privacy. Sartaj breathed in, edged his chair back. The hands lay on the dirty white cotton, trembling. That was the word: tremble. Not twitch, not shake, but a small quivering that came from within to the skin. How melodramatic, Sartaj thought. He thought the word in English.
Melodramatic
. He remembered it. He made an effort and stopped the trembling. With a delicate, firm grip, he turned the form over. He picked up the pen again and poised the nib and then had to put it down. What strange things are hands. A belly cushioned by bulbous fleshy pads, fine fur patterning the back. Sartaj bent a finger back against the wood of the desk. If he leaned in with the weight of the shoulder, he knew the finger would break. The pain stood sharp against the humming haze of Sartaj's confusion, like a blue light in fog. Sartaj knew the sound a breaking finger makes. He had had Katekar do it once, break an apradhi's finger, a kidnapper's, the man had come to collect the money for a child, a businessman's daughter taken from her nursery school. The finger had been the kidnapper's little one, on his right hand. They had got the girl back, from a hotel in Bhandup. The sound of a finger breaking is not very large, but it is dry, sharper than you expect. It is a quick, creaky sound, a small firecracker bursting. Katekar had done it. Sartaj had made him do it, he had done it for the girl. Katekar had heavy hands. Sartaj remembered them and took the pressure off his own finger and stood up. This was self-indulgence, all of this, the hands, the memories, the form. He was avoiding what he knew he had to do next, what he had put off until morning: the visit to Katekar's family. He had said to Apte, let them sleep. Why wake them up now, in the middle of the night?

But light was inevitable. It was time to put his uniform back on.

 

Katekar's wife knew as soon as she opened the door. Sartaj saw this in her face. He had rattled softly at the hasp high up on the door, she had opened it still sticky-eyed and stumbling, and the sentence that Sartaj had prepared – ‘Bhabhi, please forgive me' – vanished into the sickening knowledge of his own responsibility. She closed the door behind her, and
folded her arms across the scalloped white lacy trim on the loose gown she wore. It had a rose pattern, the gown, complete with thorns on the green stalks. Sartaj had only seen her in slightly glittery saris, on very formal occasions. Maybe three, four times in as many years. She shut her eyes for a long moment, then opened them. Suddenly, she had changed. She set her bony face forward, like a prow, and reached out and touched his forearm. He realized then that he had been trembling again.

‘What happened?' she said.

 

They brought the body home at two the next day. They laid Katekar on his bed, and took off the sheet in which he had been wrapped after the post-mortem. Then they sat him on a chair, and bathed him. The wound, low on his neck to the left, had been stitched shut. It looked too small to kill a man with a respectable belly, with heavy shoulders. The long post-mortem cut had been closed with thick black thread. Katekar's skin now had the colour and texture of cardboard that had dried fast after a soaking in monsoon rain, and Sartaj tried not to look at him. Sartaj pressed himself into a corner and averted his eyes from the men and women pushing in through the door, and tried to read the labels on the stacked cassettes next to the player, across the room. He listened to Katekar's wife speak to a relative about how many bottles of kerosene were needed, how many cow-dung patties, how much wood. Now they were putting new clothes on Katekar, his heavy steel watch on his wrist. His wife knelt and slid his chappals on to his feet. She had to struggle to get them on, she held Katekar's heel and pushed and then gently moved his toes apart to get one through the leather hoop. She stroked gulal on to his forehead, dabbed on a red tikka. She tilted her head back, was concentrated, serious. Another woman brought her a steel thali, a match sizzled and made a flaring arc in the air and Sartaj smelt incense, burning oil. She moved the thali in slow circles around Katekar's shoulders, his head. She was weeping.

They walked to the shamshan ghat. A man, another constable, carried a matka full of water. Sartaj could hear the rhythmic gulp of the water as he walked. The thali full of flowers and gulal was carried by another constable, close behind. From the thali, the constable threw grain and gulal as they walked. They entered the shamshan through a tall black metal gate. Standing under the towering open-sided shed, with its corrugated tin roof, Sartaj could hear the traffic over the high walls. He could hear voices, schoolchildren shouting, a vegetable-wallah's high cries. At the
top of the wall, through drooping branches, he could see signs on the other side of the road, a tall commercial building. Katekar was laid on to the wood. A man stepped forward, this one Sartaj recognized, Potdukhe, a senior constable who had retired the year before. Potdukhe had a blade in his hand, a razor blade. He held Katekar's white sleeve with one hand, and with a swift motion cut the cloth from shoulder to wrist. Sartaj hunched his shoulders: the hissing pass of the blade came to him over all the sounds of the street. He swallowed and held himself still. Potdukhe slit the other sleeve, then opened the buttons on Katekar's pants: there must be no restrictions on the soul.

There was the distant mechanical growl of vehicles stopping, and a moment later Parulkar came into the shamshan ghat. He walked straight over to Katekar, stood for a moment over him, and then stepped back. He stood next to Sartaj, and put a hand on his wrist and squeezed. Then they waited.

The women stood at a distance, at the other end of the yard, near the wall. A rank of uniformed policemen turned, stamped, raised rifles to their shoulders and aimed high, at something far far above. Katekar's sons, who were still with the women, flinched under the roll of whiplash cracks. Then they were brought forward, through the cluster of men around the bier. Potdukhe put a hand on the older one's shoulders, and led him around his father, in a circle. The son – What was his name? His name? – carried the water-filled matka, and water dropped from a hole in it, spattered on the ground and danced up in quick, stammering splashes. A dhoti-clad priest now had a splintered fragment of wood in his hand, and it was flickering at one end. Sartaj suddenly wanted to see Katekar's face. He stepped to the left, but the wood was piled high, and what he could see was a coil of white cloth, a chin, the bridge of a nose. From this angle, close to the crown of Katekar's head, there was no Katekar, only some fragments. Sartaj shuffled to the right, it was important to see Katekar fully, but it was too late, the priest was holding the son's hand, showing him how to tap his father's head with a stick. It was a small tap, symbolic, but now the real blow, from the priest, would crack the skull. Sartaj swallowed. This was always the moment during funerals when he began to feel sick. It was necessary, he told himself yet again, or the skull would explode under the fire. But he felt the churning in his stomach begin. Somebody, it was Parulkar, took Sartaj's arm, and with the other men he moved back, three, four, five steps. Still, Sartaj heard the round crunch of the skull, when it came open, and Katekar was now open to the
sky, completely and fully open. His son leaned forward, holding the burning wood. There was a small shifting inside the pyre, a series of tiny, rapid, racing convulsions. There was this movement and the gentle smell of ghee, that childhood smell from weddings and festivals. Then with an urgent gasp the fire took the wood, the body, Katekar. Now there was all motion, leaping up, up, and heat slid across Sartaj's face. He watched the fire burn, and did not look away.

 

After the friends and relatives had left, after the ashes had cooled, after the ashes had been collected and taken home and hung in a matka near the door, after everything, Sartaj went home. There was whisky, almost a bottle full, and Sartaj brought it out and put it on the coffee table, and a bottle of water, but after he poured out a drink the smell of it made him gag. So he shut his eyes, lay back on the sofa. Katekar was dead, the murderer was dead, the murderer's friends were dead, it was all over. Nothing to do, nobody to pursue. Katekar's death was a murder, an accident, an act of fate. It was a simple story, the way Kamble and others would tell it: three apradhis cornered, we should've fired first, encountered the bastards, but it was Singh's operation, Katekar got too close and didn't shoot, so he died. Case closed. These things happen. It's the job. But after everything, after all, Sartaj was unable to rest with this story, to be comforted by the neatness of it, by its clean forward velocity and its final rest. He was beset by questions: where was Bangladesh, what was it? Where was Bihar? How do three men travel thousands of miles, to one city, to a particular stretch of road, to a constable waiting under a thela? We are debris, Sartaj thought, randomly tossed about and nudging into each other, splitting each other's lives apart. Sartaj opened his eyes, and the room was still the old one, the shadows outside completely known to him, known a thousand nights over. This was his corner of the world, safe and familiar. And yet here was this question, sitting on his chest: why did Katekar die? How did this happen?

‘The purpose, the meaning, the intent and the methodology of intelligence is the discernment of patterns.' The students are waiting, eager for the revelation that will grant them understanding, hone their edges into preparedness, allow them to survive and triumph. ‘The ability to sense method, orderliness, design, is the greatest talent an intelligence officer can possess,' K.D. Yadav proclaims, projecting to the back of the room. ‘The old saying goes: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. Remember that. If you can see the connections between data points, see the shape they make, read the story the data is telling, you will win. A patrol notices bootprints on a ridge in the Karakoram, a field officer on posting in Brussels writes a report mentioning the sale of miles of toughened communication cables. He who sees meaning in that, wins.' K.D. says ‘he,' but there is a woman in the first row, a girl. He has known her for years, he has seen her grow from a child into a serious-faced young person, and one of the great pleasures of his life has been observing that very distinct personality that gazed up at him from the pram growing into the self-possessed, independent woman who sits before him now. He likes to think he had something to do with that growth, with the nurturing of that courage. But what is her name? How can he not know her name? How could he have forgotten, when he has voiced that name for years, decades?

And then he knows. He understands how he has forgotten. He has not forgotten her name in that room in the house in Safdarjung, in the classroom they have hidden away in a nondescript bungalow. He has forgotten it now, in this hospital room he is lying in. I am here, I am Karpuri Dwarkanath Yadav, known always as ‘K.D'. I am in a small white room with drawn curtains. I am lying on a white metal bed. I am not teaching, not lecturing. I am ill, which is why I have forgotten her name. In the real classroom, years ago, I knew it. Now I don't.

She is sitting in front of him now, in the hospital room. She is reading a book. He remembers her as a child, always reading. She carried a book from one room to another, took a book to the dinner table and was always told to put it away by her mother. K.D. gave her books, he saw in
her his own desperate childhood hunger for books to read, and was drawn to her by her precocity. He gave her Classics Illustrated comics, Enid Blyton and then P.G. Wodehouse. She still reads with that same one-pointed concentration, curved over the book she holds with both hands. He remembers that tense arc, that need, as if she wanted to eat the words. ‘What are you reading now?' he says.

She looks up, pleased by the question, pleased that he is talking. ‘It's called
A Search in Secret India
.'

‘Paul Brunton.'

‘Is there anything you haven't read?'

‘I read it years ago.' He remembers exactly when he read it, in June of 1970 in an army mess in Siliguri. The book was an old leather-bound copy, with faded gilt lettering and three raised ridges on the spine. He can feel it in his hands now. He found it on a glassed-in shelf, above Ming vases from a long-ago punitive expedition to Peking. Outside the mess, there is a veranda which a lance-naik is sweeping. A barbed-wire fence. A cracking road and fields. But he still can't remember this woman's name, in this yellow hospital room. ‘They must have reprinted it. What do you think of it?'

‘Orientalist nonsense. White man looking for sadhus and enlightenment in a mysterious dark land. Same old fantasy.'

K.D. laughs. ‘Just because it's somebody's fantasy doesn't mean it's not true.' This is an old argument between them. He always tells her she has to be weaned away from her JNU-bred fantasies of world citizenship and anti-imperialism and eternal peace. She always tells him that his realism is a fantasy too. But the argument has become over the years a formal exercise, a ritual which looks like a quarrel but which is really a demonstration of affection. And he is aware that he has the advantage. After all, he has recruited her into the organization. She is one of us now, one of the shadow soldiers. She has no choice but to be a realist. I trained her, I taught her tradecraft, analysis, recognition, action. I drew her into the secret world, into our troubles, into the web of secret causes. He smiles at her. ‘Do you mean to say that sadhus don't exist? Or enlightenment?'

She puts her book down, draws her chair closer to the bed. ‘I'm sure sadhus exist.'

‘They do indeed. Real ones and fake ones. Both are useful.' She nods, and he is sure she understands, that she has not forgotten her lessons. He had insisted on a knowledge of the organization's history, of its antecedents, and so he had taught them about the Pandits, Nain and Mani Singh Rawat, and Sarat Chandra Das, and others, small and unsung men
who had a century ago plunged into the forbidden northern lands disguised as pilgrims, who had walked north and west of the Himalayas, who had measured out thousand-mile routes by counting their strides as they walked. Prayer-wheels hid compasses, thermometers were snuggled into walking staffs, and the distances the walkers had measured had resulted in the first survey maps of these wild territories. And a map is a kind of conquest, the precursor to all other conquests. K.D. had told his students: remember those prayer wheels, one kind of knowledge can conceal another. Information nests inside information. Watch everything, listen to everything. Useful hides inside useless, truth in lies. And so this girl, his student, is now reading an Englishman's quest for peace, which she believes is nonsensical. Good. She is a good student. She is a good reader. She is holding his hand now. K.D. says, ‘Why are you reading Brunton?'

‘Uncle,' she says quietly. ‘I need help. I need to know about Gaitonde. I need more. I need to know why he would be interested in sadhus.'

Ganesh Gaitonde is a bad man, but he was once an ally of the good men. K.D. had recruited him too. The organization needed bad men sometimes, for certain tasks, for specific missions. Only bad men had access to positive information in certain areas. So K.D. had found Gaitonde, in a jail, and recruited him. And Gaitonde had been a good source, his data had been cross-checked and corroborated and verified, and it had proved solid, and useful. He had executed commissions as well, performed jobs efficiently and with discretion. At the end he had gone renegade, he had betrayed the service and made up data and used their resources to expand his empire, but early on Ganesh Gaitonde had been a bad man on the right side, and K.D. had been his handler. To play this game well, you had to handle bad men, you had to have them do bad things which were finally good things. It was necessary. Only those who had never been on a real battlefield asked for unstained virtue and unblemished deeds. On the field, all actions were only provisionally moral, and the game was eternal. So was Ganesh Gaitonde a bad man? Was Nehru a bad man?

Hold on, cling tightly to lucidity. Don't think of Nehru, he is a distraction. Your mind is weaving, slipping. You are ill. K.D. clenches his fists, raises his head. The girl is intent, frowning a little. Just like her father. Her father's name was Jagdeep Mathur, and they had met each other early on a winter's day, in a conference room in Lucknow, on the campus of Lucknow University. The conference table has a green felt surface and is overlooked, from all four walls, by paintings of grand Europeans in academic gowns. There are seventeen men seated around the table, all of them in their early
twenties, all of them sharp-eyed, intelligent, educated. K.D. has never seen any of them before, each has been told to report to this room at nine a.m. sharp. They are not talking to each other, they are waiting, they are practising discretion because they all know they are being recruited for secret work, in an agency which has not been named to them yet, which most of them have never heard of. K.D. has been interviewed twice already, after a very quiet approach by the vice-chancellor of his university in Patna. He thinks he knows why: he has a BA Honours in History and an LLB, and a National Cadet Corps ‘C' certificate, and state-wide fame as a sportsman. He is tight, taut and very ambitiously educated. He has been thinking mainly of a career in law, but now he is vividly interested in this sequestered world, in these secret interviews and this promise of urgent and all-important work. So he waits at this table, with these other men who he recognizes as mirror-images of himself, from their strong forearms and alert glances he knows them to be sportsmen-scholars. The big double doors at the end of the hall swing open, and two men with military haircuts enter. Hard on their heels is an older man in a grey jacket, a professor perhaps, judging by his thick, wire-rimmed glasses. The professor walks towards the table, then turns back to the door, his neck bent forward expectantly. And Nehru enters. K.D. feels himself flush. It is unbelievable but it really is Jawaharlal Nehru. ‘Gentlemen,' Nehru says, and his voice is hoarse, almost cracking. All the young men spring to their feet with a tremendous scraping of wood and shoes, and he waves them down impatiently. He sits without ceremony, leans forward and puts his elbows on the table. His hands are white, and K.D. can see how clean the nails are. But he looks tired, this Nehru. His eyes are yellowed, his cheeks are puffy. It is 18 February 1963. ‘Gentlemen, you have all experienced the crisis India has struggled through recently. We live in dangerous times, we are struggling through an hour of crisis. Our borders have been invaded, our trust shattered. And that by the Chinese, who we thought were our friends. We must make sure such a thing never happens again. And so the nation must call upon its young men, its best and brightest. As I look at you I see the blessed light of an ancient past in your faces, and so I am confident again. I will ask much of you. In your work, your country will want the impossible from you. But you must endure. On your shoulders is our future. I trust in your strength, and in your unfailing dedication to your duty. Jai Hind.' He rises abruptly, and shakes hands with the man to his left. And then the next interviewee. K.D. has time to watch Nehru as he waits his turn to shake hands. He finds that he is breathing hard, as if he has just sprinted a quick mile. When his turn comes, Nehru reaches out
and says something. K.D. is startled: ‘Sir?' Nehru is already reaching for the next man's hand, but he says – without looking at K.D. – ‘Do your best, son.' There is a trace of impatience in his voice at having to repeat himself, but K.D. treasures the words, and he watches carefully, but Nehru doesn't say a word to anyone else, not even to the professor. Nehru leaves, the doors shut behind him. Nehru has only spoken to K.D., only him.

The professor waves them back to their chairs. ‘Gentlemen,' he says, ‘as the PM said, you have been picked because you are the best. Welcome to the organization.' It turns out that the professor is not a professor after all, but an additional commissioner in the Intelligence Bureau, which – he informs them – is the oldest intelligence agency in the world. And they, if they choose to sign their recruitment papers, will be members, workers, soldiers for this venerable organization. They all sign eagerly, they are dazzled by Nehru.

Later that morning five of them celebrate at Yusuf in the Chowk Bazaar, where they have been taken by Jagdeep Mathur, a fellow-recruit who has grown up in Lucknow. They eat what he tells them are the best kakori kababs in Lucknow, and they discuss the magical appearance of Nehru in their midst. Mathur blames Nehru for the recent débâcle in the Himalayas, for all the defeats and all the dead, and K.D. cannot help but agree, but finds himself defending the old man's idealism, his belief in a future of peace and rationality. ‘K.D., yaar,' Mathur says, ‘you're just like my mother, always going on about how bloody good-looking Pandit-ji is, how he means well, how Gandhi-ji loved him like a bloody son, what a good good man Nehru-ji is. I say a good man shouldn't be our bloody prime minister. Good men are usually fools. Good men get people killed. When we live in a world with the bloody Chinese and the bloody Americans and the bloody Pakistanis we don't need good men, we need men who eat kakori kababs and carry big sticks.' K.D. nods, and says, ‘Big lathis, actually.' Mathur laughs, he has a face like a perfect cube, with massive and ridged jaws, but he is quite striking with his fair skin and light-brown eyes. K.D. thinks he looks quite the Lucknow brahmin, and he is aware that Mathur has noted his own surname immediately it was uttered, has perhaps filed him in some slot reserved for Yadavs and other backward castes, as no doubt every other of his new colleagues has already done. K.D. has noticed this, that the organization is old, and like other old organizations it is indisputably Brahmanical, with a light sprinkling of Kayasths and Rajputs. And yet Mathur's grin is unfeigned, and there is not a moment's hesitation as he reaches across the table and
thumps K.D.'s shoulder and chortles. ‘Bloody big lathis,' he says. ‘Exactly right. Bloody big lathis. Are you a lathait, K.D.?' ‘I am,' K.D. says. ‘I spent many years in shakhas.' It's true, he has spent many evenings in a starkly lit sandpit, whirling the lathi over his shoulders, learning defences and attacks from khaki-wearing instructors. Mathur approves of this, K.D. can see. He has passed some kind of test. Mathur likes him.

And after that kakori morning Mathur is known affectionately by his colleagues as Bloody Mathur, all the way until his disappearance two decades later. He leaves behind, on a road sixty-three miles north of Amritsar, a white Ambassador with two blown tires, one dead driver and one dead bodyguard and one dead informant named Harbhajan Singh, all killed by close-range AK-47 fire from at least three rifles. On that day, that year, K.D. is very far away, on the other side of the churning world, in London. He learns of Mathur's vanishing, is informed of it by the Europe desk in Delhi, puts down the phone and looks out of the window at the evenly ordered rhythm of staircases in an English square, at the white and grey fronts of the houses under a shadowed autumn sky. There is a six-hundred-year-old hospital on one side of the square, and a museum on the other. K.D. has a meeting in fifteen minutes, in a pub three squares down, with a Sikh militant he has been courting for six months. He has to be alert and careful, because he knows that this militant is also being run by a Pakistani officer, an ISI man named Shahid Khan, but all he can do is think of Anjali, little Anjali.