Sacred Games (71 page)

In May, TADA lapsed, but I remained in jail. The law was gone for the rest of the citizens, but since I had been charged under it, I still writhed under its heel. My case was still to be adjudicated under its rules, which were no laws but arbitrary edicts. I cursed my lawyers, and threatened to get new ones. Do we live in a dictatorship? I said. Have I no rights as a citizen? What are you, top lawyers or bhangis? Why am I paying you these truckloads of money?

Finally, finally, they got my case before the Bombay High Court and fought a good battle, all the way to a victory. The judge said he would let me out, on the condition that I should not threaten or even attempt to make contact with the government witnesses in the other cases pending against me, and that I was not to leave the city limits, and this, and that. Agreed, I said, agreed to anything and everything, your honour. And suddenly I was out. I was in court one morning, and then it was over, and I was in a car on the highway, on my way home. It was that simple. Suddenly I was sitting in my bedroom, with Subhadra to my left and my son running around the bed. It was stunningly quiet, and the rooms seemed immense, much larger than I remembered them. There were visitors, but Kataruka kept them at bay. He was an old hand at going into jail, and coming out. He insisted that a party and visitors and noise was the wrong thing, appropriate as it may sound. And a quiet evening is what I wanted, true. I ate the dinner that Subhadra served me, I put Abhi to bed. When the door was shut to Kataruka and the others, I reached for Subhadra. She came to me pliantly, and I truly went home.

After she was asleep, I got up, put on a kurta and slid open the door. I went up to the roof, to my old perch by the water tank. The night was hazy, no stars, just a low glow from the scattered lights. I was twenty-seven years old and I was home once again. There was that old smell, oil and burning and refuse, slightly stinging in the nostrils but alive, so full of life. I took it in, and I called Jojo.

She picked up on the first ring. ‘Gaitonde.'

‘I'm out.'

‘I know.'

‘Will you meet me?'

‘No. How is Subhadra?'

‘She's fine. Don't talk about her.'

‘Okay. We won't talk about her.'

‘So you refuse to meet me?'

‘I completely refuse.'

‘I could have you picked up and brought to me.'

‘You could. Will you?'

‘All right, no.'

‘Good. I'll tell you what, Gaitonde – I'll send you a girl.'

‘You'll what?'

‘Don't act shy with me, Gaitonde. I know what you need. You'll like this one. High price, but good for you.'

‘You know what I need?'

‘See if I do.'

I did see. The next morning, she sent me the girl. Her name was Suzie, and she said she was eighteen, from Calcutta. She was half Calcutta Chinese and half Brahmin Bengali, and she had long straight black hair, long delicate arms that she crossed and folded when she laughed, and skin like thin white marble. I put her face-down and kissed the back of her neck while I was inside her. She moaned and drove back against me.

Afterwards, from the car, I called Jojo. ‘What did I tell you, Gaitonde?' she said. ‘Isn't she something?'

‘Yes, yes, you were right.'

‘In two years she'll have a show on MTV, you wait.'

‘That may be. But I was thinking of you while I was on top of her.'

‘You are on top of an eighteen-year-old, and you're thinking of an old woman like me? Gaitonde, you are an idiot, like every other man in the world.'

I had to laugh with her. I had waited for Suzie in a small hotel near Sahar, and now we were on the highway, going home. The traffic was moving fast, and the sun flashed off the roofs of the cars. I was free. ‘I feel good,' I said to Jojo.

‘Enjoy,' Jojo said. ‘Enjoy, enjoy.'

We were home by eleven. In jail I had got used to waking up early, so already I had done my yoga, eaten, had Suzie. I was feeling light. But some of the boys were yawning. I set them to work. I played for a while with Abhi, who was now speaking in babbles of words and nonsense sounds, who held my face and tried to tell me things. He had little grammar, and no understanding of past and future, and still I could listen to him completely fascinated, my heart yielding in love. At noon Kataruka came into the hall where I was sitting with some petitioners. He leaned close to me to whisper, ‘The nau-numberis are here. They say they have to take you to the station. Interrogation for another case.'

‘Who is it? Majid Khan again?'

‘No, I don't know these chutiyas. They say they are with Parulkar.'

‘Bastards. Tell them to send whatever questions they have to the lawyers.'

‘I did. They have an order from a magistrate.'

‘Yes, and the magistrate chodos their mothers in the gaand every night. Tell them to wait. Tell them I'll come when I can. And get one of the lawyers down here.'

‘Yes, bhai.' Kataruka was smiling. ‘These maderchods have no manners. I don't feel even like giving them chai.'

‘No manners?'

‘They parked their van right in front of the house and refused to move it. Very pushy, bhai. Get him here now, like that they're speaking. They are some special commando types, two of them are carrying carbines, and one has a jhadoo. Think they are heroes.'

And he went off, humming a song. I turned back to my petitioners, parents who wanted a job for their son. But I was distracted, and thinking about this new nuisance. Commandos with Sten guns and AK-47s meant that there was some new task force maybe, some government initiative set up so that they could look serious about organized crime. Which would amount to nothing in the long run, but which would be a botheration. I made my promises to the petitioners, told them to check back in a week. When one of the boys opened the door for them, we all heard clearly the angry voices, a shout and then Kataruka's reply. He was hoarse and very loud. Bhenchod police, they were bellowing in my house. Maderchods. I got up, and walked down the long corridor, brushing past the family of petitioners, mother and father and uncles and son. Even in that anger, I was aware of that smell of home, that smell of onions and haldi and oil from the lunch they were cooking in the kitchen. I breathed it in. ‘Get Gaitonde here
now
,' the policeman roared. Between him and me there was a scattering of my boys, and other visitors, all clustering around the argument, but through them I could see the policeman's shoulders and face, and behind him another one, and the long glint of an AK-47. ‘When he is ready, he will come and see you,' Kataruka answered, as loud and as bloody-eyed as the policeman. I squeezed through the press. I wanted to get to shouting myself. I could see two policemen, but no more. In front of me was Dipu, grown city-smart and polished after his service with us, with a new haircut.

I asked Dipu, going past him, ‘How many of them are there?'

Into my ear, he said, ‘Four, bhai.'

I could see a third policeman now, standing to the left. He had his car
bine shoulder-slung and ready, with a finger on the trigger. It came to me in the middle of my stride: four policemen, and only four, armed with automatic weapons and in a van, sent to fetch Ganesh Gaitonde. It made no sense. The shouting policeman leaned in even more towards Kataruka, and in that motion he saw me. Our eyes met. I turned and ran.

I went low through the blast from the guns, through and over the flailing bodies in the corridor, through the screams. Then I was in my bedroom, scrabbling and pawing behind the headboard for a pistol, and I had slammed the door shut behind me but the bullets fountained through the walls, scattering plaster, and I had less than a moment, and I went through the window to the right of my bed. I fell between the side of the house and the compound wall, and I knew I had broken something in my arm but I had to keep running. I ran out of the rear gate, and now two of my boys were with me, and they took me into the nearby lanes. We turned twice, and went into a house and the door shut behind us and we all three of us fell to the ground, dropped flat from exhaustion, as if we had run ten miles.

The firing was booming near by, but now with the hammering of the AK and the carbines, there were single shots in reply. Then, suddenly, it was over. No more shots, just screams now, desperate shouting flurrying across the basti. I was alive.

I came out into the lane holding my arm. Only now, when I started to walk, I felt a heated line of pain across my lower back, as if someone had drawn a molten wire across my buttocks. ‘You're bleeding, bhai,' someone said to me. I pushed him aside, went into the house. ‘We got one of them,' another boy said to me. We had got one, he lay near the front gate, his leg twisted up under his body. Inside the house, in the front hall, there was blood on the ceilings, smears of tissue on the walls. Dipu was dead, and so was Kataruka.

Seventeen men died in my house that day, and four women, and one child. But at the time, we had no count, only a tangle of bodies. It was only when we started picking them up, and carrying them out, that we found Subhadra and Abhi at the far end of the corridor, in the kitchen, curled up under the cover of her blue sari. They were both dead from the same AK-47 bullet, which had come through the door-jamb, and come through them. They were dead. My wife was dead. My son was dead.

 

I went back to jail. After I had my broken wrist plastered, and the graze on my backside stitched up, after we cremated our dead, we considered
our options. We knew now that the policemen who had done the firing were not policemen, but Suleiman Isa's men, that the uniforms had been bought from Maganlal Dresswallah's, that the van had been stolen – or so the real police said – from Zone 13 headquarters. We knew, reliably, that the supari given for this suicide mission was two crores, so that the four maderchods who came to my house walked away with fifty lakhs each. But two of them didn't walk away, one died right there in my courtyard, another covered the inside of the van with the blood that he coughed up. He died the same day. But still, my enemies almost got what they wanted. They couldn't say that they had killed Ganesh Gaitonde in his own basti, in his own house, but they did say that they struck at me in my lair, that I had run from them, that I was a coward with a wound in my gaand. They were ashamed that they had broken the unspoken rule of the companies against hurting family members, but they could say that was an accident, and they could say that they had taken my gaand.

But I was alive. That was what mattered. Whatever the world said, I was alive. And that is what finally matters. Honour and pride are the dreams that men feed on, and will die for, but my boys understood that, even for them, it was better that I had stayed alive. I was still here, to recoup, to plan, to take revenge. And I had to stay alive. So I went back to jail. It was easy to arrange. I got into a car with some of my boys and went up to Mulund. We stopped the car at the Mulund check-post, and the boys picked a quarrel with the constables there. I came out and shouted too, and the boys conspicuously addressed me as ‘Ganesh Bhai', just to make sure that the stupid mamus understood who I was. Then we all got back into the car and drove on, far beyond city limits.

So I had broken the conditions of my bail, and had to be put back in the one safe haven for me. I had understood that this time it had been fake police, but the next time it might be the real ones, come to take me for a ride in a black van, a ride that would end with a bullet in my head. Every door in the city hid an assassin, every day was a battle. I had become too big for them to leave me alive. And so jail was my impregnable castle, where the walls and the rules and the regulations made a home for me, where the jailers were responsible for keeping me from harm, and where I could continue to do business without hindrance.

I settled back into the old routine. There was a new set of faces in the barrack, but there was the same grouping of dhurries around my own, in order of seniority. Life went on as before. But I was alone, so very alone. My boys were my family, and they were kind as always, mindful of my
losses and my injuries. They took care of me, and I did business. But in my heart I was alone. So many had died, not just in this last attack, but through my journey, in all the battles. And I was still alive. Why? For what? I waited for an answer. I practised yoga in the mornings, in the afternoons I practised pranayama. But all my hard-won calm was taken from me by Abhi's laughter, which I heard floating in the afternoon sunlight. At night, I went eagerly to my pillow because I knew he would come to me in my sleep, but my very waiting chased sleep away. I was light-headed. I walked through the world like a man sliding weightlessly through a dream.

‘It feels so strange,' I told Jojo, very late at night, on the phone. ‘I feel like, like a lost ghost. Like somebody else's story. Like there's a projector going chat-chat-chat somewhere and I'm moving around on a screen.'

‘It'll pass, Gaitonde,' she said. ‘Pain passes. It always passes.'

She sounded so close, as if she were in the next bed. I had made her buy a new mobile phone, and had a new handy myself, and we spoke only to each other on these new connections. I had two other phones for business. My enemies hadn't been trying to kill my family, that I knew, but still I was afraid for Jojo. I told her that our connection needed to become even more invisible to the world, that it was bad for her media-industry image if it became generally known that she and I were friends. This she understood, and she became even more discreet than she had already been. We spoke late at night, only on the special phones.

‘Gaitonde?' she said. ‘Hello?'

‘Here,' I said. ‘I'm here.' But I wasn't so sure I was there any more. A son roots a man in the world. Take away that connection and you cut him loose. ‘You know what I miss? I miss the smell of his hair after a bath.'

‘I know. What do you miss about Subhadra?'