Sacred Games (51 page)

‘Jobs aren't lying on the footpath,' Shalini said. ‘Let him keep his job at least.'

‘There's no income at all,' Arpana said. She meant apart from his salary. ‘And they'll never promote him and never raise his salary. They are Muslims after all.'

‘I thought his manager was a Brahmin? Some Bajpai, no?'

‘Yes, yes,' Arpana said. ‘But the company is owned by Muslims. And you know how they are.'

Shalini nodded. She had no arguments with this, but she doubted that Amritrao had anything in him worth promoting. Arpana settled back into her litany. She had tough, blocky shoulders and a thick neck, and she was nowhere near pretty, and over the last decade her cheeks had begun to droop. But still she and Amritrao Pawar returned to each other time and again, and tore at each other in rage and passion. The tragedy, of course, was that after all this, Arpana had no children. That is why she could never finally prove Amritrao Pawar in the wrong, and that was why he had another woman. All this painful need for each other, all this anger, and no children. Ambabai had her ways, her unknowable ways. ‘Time for me to put the boys to sleep,' Shalini said.

‘Yes. Are they all right?'

The women on the lane kept an eye on the boys, and Arpana especially took an interest in them, and sat with Mohit in the afternoons after school. ‘Yes,' Shalini said. ‘They are all right.'

They got up, nodded and went to the last chores of the day. Shalini tidied a little, chivvied the boys into bed, spread out the bedding and lay down. This was the hardest time of the day, when she missed resting her shoulder on his belly, when her bones could recall the curve her body made with his. In this waiting for sleep her mind moved sideways, twinkling-quick and unpredictable, his jokes and his laughter and little humiliations and joys from her own childhood came together and mixed up, bright, bright and painful. There was his filthy poem about Dev Anand and Mumtaz, and Shalini smiled, he had told it to her about a thousand times, all with the same glee. She drew in a deep breath, and then the hurt came. She wiped her face. At least she had his sons. His sons were sleeping close to her. She was drifting now. Muslims were like that. They killed my husband. One of them killed him, and now the murderer was dead. She sometimes wished the killer was still alive, so she could kill him again. But Sartaj Singh had shot the Bihari. Sartaj Singh was a killer too. They were all killers, and they had all killed her husband. The rage
felt like iron pushing through her throat, and against every last shred of will, it forced itself out, making a low howl that scraped against the walls and frightened Shalini. She waited, but the boys were already sunk in their dense sleep, and outside the open door there was only the murmur of a distant conversation.

Shalini sat up. She took a glass of water and rinsed her hands, face and feet as quietly as she could. Then she sat cross-legged in front of Ambabai and Bhavani. Are you awake, Ambabai? Bhavani, no more of your ferocity – there is nobody to punish – but give me mercy. Give me peace. You failed him, Bhavani, I begged you every day for his safe return and yet you failed him. I won't call you bad names any more, I won't ask you why. You give me no reasons, and I will accept your silence. But give me a little portion of peace, give me relief from this deafening tumult of pain. I need to be quiet, for my boys. Ambai, are you listening? Give me this boon. I mourn him, but give me strength. Bhavani is blinding blue light, even her mercy comes like cool moonlight, but you, Ambai, are fruitful fields and overflowing water, rich mud and baby's breath and wide-brimmed lotus, you are my mother, bring me back from this exile, let me live under your shadow again. He was a good man. He walked to Pandharpur when I asked him to, even though he didn't believe that piety would cure his back. He lived in pain, I saw how he held himself upright with a hand on his hip at the end of the day, but he took care of us and he did his job. He was strict but never harsh, and Rohit and Mohit never feared him. He put a gold chain on my neck on the day of his first promotion and kept it there through our bad times. He never questioned me about money. When we fought he never hit me, only once he caught my elbow in anger and left a bruise. We were young, Ambai, he rubbed away the pain with phatkari and heated haldi, he gentled me with his sorrow. He smelt of coconut hair oil and Shiva-ji bidis then, but later for us he stopped taking tobacco in any form. Later he took women, I knew that, I fought with him, and he said he stopped, but I knew when he really stopped, when he knew truly what it meant to be a father. He wounded me, Ambai, and I him. I know I battered him sometimes with my cold quietness. But I did my duty as a wife, gave the embraces that men want. I fed him. He sustained me. We were companions, friends, not quite without quarrels but without rancour. Aai, I earn money, I go from day to day, but at night a rough rope pulls at my stomach, I twist to his side of the bed, I see things. I see him coughing in bed, he has a fever and I bring him a newspaper and he takes it, and his hand is hot and I feel a stab of worry.
Then he is entering the kholi, and Mohit is crawling, his bottom wet. Him seated cross-legged, counting money. I am cutting onions, and the next day is Shayani Ekadashi. Ambai, where are you? Bhavani, are you here? I can feel you close, Ambai, but I am alone. Give me succour, Ambabai. I am alone.

‘Aai?'

Rohit was standing behind her. She let him put her to bed, listened to his attempts to comfort her, let him go back to bed to comfort himself. She was remembering, again, that night when she went to Arpana's, to borrow the two onions, how she had stood outside Arpana's door, close to the wood to get away from the dripping rain, and listened to the sounds Arpana was making, somewhere between bitter and sweet. With a determined effort Shalini turned her mind away, made herself not think of it, of any of it. But still there was a small, dull pain that moved with every breath. She bore it, and whispered Ambabai's name again and again.

 

Anjali Mathur was following money. She did this in her spare time, what little there was at the end of the day or very early in the morning. She had managed to get to work early this Tuesday, so she was reading old files. She had run a data check for forged money, for the large sums of counterfeit currency the Pakistanis were known to have produced. Even with an arbitrary cut-off date of 1 January 1987, the database had given her a list of incidents, of mentions in reports, running to seventy-four single-spaced pages. So she had, over the last four months, been making her way through the original reports, one by one. It was tedious, and it was probably a waste of time, so she hadn't told anyone about her search. She had no idea of what she was looking for, other than detail, some pattern in the detail. A connection would reveal itself across the breadths of geography and time, a string of causes would unwind backwards and reveal a beginning, no, not a beginning but a node where many stories came together, and somehow the death of Ganesh Gaitonde would fit into the stream of events. Anjali didn't want an explanation, she was suspicious of explanations. Any explanation, any solution, always left out too much. But she trusted associations and correlations and rhythms, and the twistings and contractions of time. That was what K.D. Yadav had tried to teach them, to feel the beat and swing of the enemy's intention, that was what allowed you to predict. And this was why, after all the analysis, the cross-referencing and the computers and the mathematics, it came down to this, to
reading old reports one by one. Finally it all depended on instinct. In her instinct, in her bones, Anjali felt a question about Gaitonde's return to the country, his death, about his bunker in the middle of Kailashpada, about the dead woman. None of it fitted together, none of it spoke a language that she could understand.

She had long ago learnt to decipher the particular vernacular of the reports, to imagine the event through the jerky telegraphese. She was reading one now, on plain unadorned paper.

Anjali knew the man who wrote this report. He had been her batch-mate during training. His name was Gaurav Sharma, he had been completely bald at twenty-six. In 1997 he had been posted in Jammu, and there was a little hint of him in that ‘high probability'. He had been full of chaos theory during the training days and had tried to communicate to his fellow trainees, over chai and samosas during breaks, the rapture of fractals and strange attractors. In this report, as they had been trained, he had taken himself out of the language, tried to make it impersonal and objective. This was how it worked, as information moved upwards. The
source was no doubt a sweaty villain, a border criminal, a smuggler and murderer who had fatalism bred into him by the artillery shells that armies had fired over his head for the last fifty years, that fell into his village and fields to kill uncles and aunts. He was the sort of man who knew how to cross the border on a moonless night, who would think nothing of traversing the shrapnel-sharp dangers of no man's land. He knew how to lie motionless for hours in a wheatfield under the probing, random fire of heavy machine guns, when to creep and when to stop. He had undoubtedly seduced his Pak army cousin into informing, tempted him first with easy loans for marriages and tractors, and then paid him outright. He made money at both ends, from his cousin and his handling officer. And no doubt the handling officer had given him cases of cheap rum, which he carried three at a time over the border into the ritually pure regions of Pakistan. The HO had met him in late January of ninety-seven, perhaps in some shack, some dhaba stinking of country liquor, paid him, and then reported to his supervisory office in Jammu. Where Gaurav Sharma had prepared a report for the consumer desk in Delhi. The information would form the basis for reports that would go up the chain, and perhaps finally a chief secretary had been made aware that all data indicated that the enemy was planning an early offensive in the spring. Perhaps the prime minister had released funds, asked for budgetary changes. At every step up the ladder, the information was abstracted. Details were leached out. Here, in Delhi at the consumer desk, there were names and places and trucks and crates and Rehmat and Yasin. Up high, nobody wanted to know how it was done. Your job, K.D. Yadav had said, is also to shield the people on top from knowing too much. They shouldn't know. They need to be able to act, and shouldn't be bogged down in details. They need to preserve deniability. So keep it clean. Tell them what they need to know. Bas.

Anjali put the report aside, and turned to her everyday work. In the organization, within her professional circle in Delhi, her trip to Bombay had been finally regarded as quite frivolous. That man Gaitonde had bumped himself off, after a long career of bumping off other people, and so what? Thugs like that were unstable by definition, and Gaitonde had had an up-and-down history of alcohol and women and much else. This was known. So he had built a safe house in Bombay. So what? The man was dead by his own hand, that was the only fact of any import. So what was the need for fact-finding, and what additional facts had been found? None. We told you so, the wise old men of the organization said, this is
why you can't trust women in the field. This is, after all, why Kulkarni had been assigned to run Gaitonde in the first place. He had learnt his tradecraft in Punjab, he had run operations in Kashmir. He had been adjudged tough enough and Maharashtrian enough to deal with the foul-mouthed gangster, and he had – with a fine crusting of condescension – done Anjali the favour of clearing her to read his reports. ‘I know you have an interest in the man,' he said, smiling toothily at her, ‘and a good analyst can always help.' So she had followed Gaitonde's subsequent history, his use by the organization and his use of the organization, his escape from assassination attempts and his mounting paranoia, his lies to his handler, his instability and his sudden disappearance. When he had reappeared as a corpse in his old neighbourhood, smiling Kulkarni had been kind enough to allow her to go down and investigate.

She had found nothing useful, and so now she was back at her analysis. Her desk was Islamic Fundamentalism, and her beat was the world. Today she was following a Scotsman. He had been born Malcolm Mourad Bruce in 1971, in Edinburgh, to a Scottish carpenter and an Algerian hotel maid. The father had left when Malcolm was seven, walked out without a backward glance, and the mother had moved to Birmingham to live with her brother and his family. At seventeen, Malcolm Mourad Bruce had become Mourad Chaker, passionate advocate of simple living, and had enjoyed a local celebrity in the mosques as the boy-preacher with red hair. At twenty-two he had appeared in Afghanistan, had fought the Soviets, had been wounded seven times. Four years later there were reports of red-haired Mourad fighting for the GIA in Algeria, killing journalists and bureaucrats and army officers and civilians. He gained renown as the most intransigent of the Salafist leaders, who refused to even speak to the moderate Djazarists in his own group. For fierce Mourad, whose belief burned in his eyes and in the flame of his hair, nothing less than a global Islamic revolution was acceptable. In 1999, Indian military intelligence had reported a new band of militants operating in the valley of Kashmir, led by a red-haired Mourad. It was of course the same man. But did his appearance in the valley mean that the GIA was now institutionally involved in the fighting, that they were going to send money and arms and men? Or was Mourad on his own, looking for another war, another mission? This was the question. And so Anjali read through the morning, through the afternoon, looking for connections, for histories of men and women and their ideas and the associations they formed, the journeys they made across borders. She read internal
organization reports from the Valley, think-tank papers from Washington, shared intelligence from the CIA, funnelled through a working group, three chapters of a book on the Algerian troubles by a German academic, Xeroxed copies of articles from Algerian newspapers and magazines, with photographs of the dead turned by the machine into flat black-and-white designs, and two years of field reports from organization operatives in Morocco, Egypt and Algeria. Her concentration submerged her like a diving-bell, and she was insensible to the passing office chatter in the corridor outside, the mounting glare of sunlight on the dusty window, the pigeon that stepped curve-clawed through the bars and glared at her. Occasionally she tipped a plastic bottle to the side of her mouth and drank water without a pause in the velocity of her reading. In graduate school she had acquired a note-taking skill that kept the lines steady and legible without needing more than an infrequent glance at the pad, and now she filled up the pages. The day passed. At one-thirty there was a small knock on the door, and Amit Sarkar tilted his head into the room.