Sacred Games (83 page)

Very interesting, I thought. A woman with a systematic mind. ‘Fine,' I said. ‘Let me see this amazement. How much?'

‘Gaitonde, don't try anything funny with this one. If she thinks you're trying to give her a hool, she'll kill herself before she lets you do anything.'

‘Yes, yes. How much?'

‘Nothing for a meeting. You meet her and see. I'll pay for the air ticket.'

This was truly amazing. ‘Jojo, you sound like you're in love yourself. In your old age you've become a chut-chattoing sixty-six. Bidhu, for you I'll pay. Take her, take her.'

‘Gaitonde, stop talking like an idiot. If I liked girls, I would have told you. What I'm doing is also investing in her. Not just to persuade you. I believe this girl. She can sell herself.' Jojo used the English word ‘sell'. It had a sexy
ssss
sound to it, on her tongue. Like that other English word ‘sexy'.

‘You've bought her stock? Before the IPO even?'

‘Gaitonde, you buy too. If you're smart you will too. But there's one more thing.'

‘What?'

‘Are you as secular as you keep telling me you are?'

‘I put up with you, don't I? That makes me secular and tolerant.'

‘This girl is Muslim. Her name is Jamila Mirza.'

‘Jojo, I still have some Muslim boys working for me in India. And when have I had a problem taking Muslim girls?' I took girls of all shapes and sizes and creeds. I was impartial.

‘This is different, Gaitonde. Even your friend Suleiman Isa is secular like that, he doesn't have any problems taking Hindu girls, or Jain girls, or Christian girls. All men are secular down below. This is different. I'm telling you, investing in her means you have to really help her. You are connected to her. Not for a day or two or a week on the boat, but for the long run.'

‘True. I see that. Let me think about it. When was she born?'

‘You are going to do your astrology again?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're mad.'

‘Tell me the date and time and place.'

She gave me the birth details, I wrote them down. She was the hardened sceptic that I had once been, but Guru-ji had shattered my defences. Now I was remaking myself.

Jojo said, ‘What about for the boys?'

We discussed that for a minute or two, girls for my boys. Then Jojo had to get to a production meeting, and I went up on the deck. The boys were playing cards under a blue canopy. I had six of them on board, along with one accountant and one computer man, and one Maharashtrian cook and five Goanese crew (including three ex-Navy boys). The boys split the shifts, and there were always three of them awake and on guard, which meant playing interminable rounds of teen-patti for small stakes, as now. Arvind was taking his usual ten minutes to pick out his discards, and Ramesh and Munna were giving him gaalis. All was as usual. We were anchored within sight of the bright umbrellas on Patong beach.

The boys stood up as I came up to them. ‘Bhai,' they all said, and touched my feet.

‘Who's winning?'

‘This crawling gaandu here. Because of him, one game goes on for years.'

This also was usual, that Arvind won. He was slow and steady. But their mood was sour this morning, I could see that. When they were back home, in Bombay, all the boys begged for foreign service. They wanted the foreign jeans, and the foreign girls, and the salaries in foreign currency. They had competed with each other to come to Thailand, to my yacht and my overseas operations, and demonstrated their eagerness and hard work and commitment every hour. But after a month or two or five in these alien waters, they always grew sour. They became sullen. Their bodies missed Bombay. I know, because after a year away from Mumbai I still got attacks of yearning, I craved the spittle-strewn streets of that great whore of a city, while waking up I felt that pungent prickling of auto-exhaust and burning rubbish at the back of my nostrils, I heard that swelling rumble of traffic heard from a high hotel rooftop, that far sound that made you feel like a king. When you were far away from the jammed jumble of cars, and the thickets of slums, and the long loops of rail, and
the swarms of people, and the radio music in the bazaars, you could ache for the city. There were some afternoons when it felt like I was dying a little. Under the foreign sky I could feel my soul crumbling away, piece by piece. And I felt a loneliness I had never imagined, that I wouldn't have earlier believed could exist. Only after coming away from India did I realize that at home I had never been truly alone, that I had been secure in my web of family and company and boys. Even when I was by myself, I was still connected, still whole. Even when they had put me in the anda cell all by myself, I had been a part of this vast, invisible net, joined heart-to-heart. On Indian soil you couldn't be truly solitary, even when you were sealed in an evil-smelling tomb. Only after sailing away across these black waters had I known the meaning of this word:
alone
.

So we flew out these boys, and for these boys we flew out Indian girls, and Indian films, and Indian music, and gave them bi-weekly phone calls to India. Usually, in their first month, the new boys would be eager to mount every Chinki girl they could get their hands on. They spent all their cash on Thai and Indonesian and Chinese maal, and went mad for the German blondes showing their mangoes on the beaches. But once their first frenzy was quietened, they looked forward to the Indian girls like starving, flood-hit Biharis waiting for government food drops. It was comfortable to chodo a plump Ghaatan, it was comfortable to hum a Kishore Kumar song to a giggling Punjaban and have her understand, just understand without any effort. It felt like home.

So I told my three card-players about the girls coming in two weeks, and they brightened considerably. Now there was something to look forward to. ‘Don't go mad over them,' I said. ‘Don't become fools, these girls know how to take money out of a man. One chappan-churi will say, just buy me a few saris, won't that gold necklace look nice on me, and you'll be trying to act like a big bhai, and by the time they go home you'll have nothing in your pockets. Have fun, but keep a cold head.'

‘Yes, bhai,' they said like schoolboys to a teacher.

‘Chutiyas, however many times I say it, it is not enough. Let's see how smart you are four weeks from now.'

And four weeks later, slow and steady Arvind was married. In this lot of girls there was one Suhasini, who looked a little like Sonali Bendre, so she went by the stage name of Sonali and affected starry airs. We picked up the girls at the Phuket airport, and when the van arrived at the Orchid Seaside Hotel, our Arvind straightaway attached himself to this Sonali-Suhasini. It was quite usual for the boys and girls to pair up, these short,
holiday-type attachments sometimes happened of course. This one was Mukund's girl, that one was Munna's. Ramesh always wanted to do them all, but even he backed away if he saw that one of the other boys was fida on one girl only. So at least for a few days Munna or Mukund could pretend he had a real chaavvi, and feel safe. So this we had seen, but we had never seen anything like Arvind with this girl. Sure, she had nice skin, and a big nose that at a certain angle, in a certain light, could suggest Sonali Bendre, but finally she was one lanky thing from Ghatkopar. And she was a randi. There was no getting around that. Arvind knew this well. After all, he was getting his lauda lasoon-ed every night.

When he and the girl came to ask my blessings for the marriage, this was the main theory that the rest of the boys had, that she had a talented mouth and Arvind was a full, poora, akha idiot. She was bathing his chotta bhai every morning and night, and the resulting short-circuit was happening in his brain. I quietened them down, told them to shut up and not cause quarrels. Arvind had his blood up, and once he got started in his dragging way, he was dangerous. That's why we had hired him. I sat him down alone and told him, ‘Think about it. There are two types of girls, one type for mauj-maja and the other for marrying. It's one thing to have fun, even to go crazy over a girl for a week or two. That kind of thing happens to a man, the truth is that when you're getting it wet morning and evening, your brain does get hijacked by your lauda. But marriage is a big thing. You have to think about it with a level head. Think about your parents, society. You and your family have to live with your relatives after all. You can't keep this sort of thing secret for ever, who she is. Don't get carried away just because she looks like Sonali Bendre. Just have your aish and let her go.'

‘Bhai, I don't care about Sonali Bendre. To me she looks only like Suhasini. And I have thought about it. I know this is the right thing to do.'

‘How?'

‘I just know it, bhai. I feel it here.' He held his hand to his chest, a very young man in love, and in love with big dramatic gestures. He had no idea that he might seem like a comedy. Even if he had known, I think he wouldn't have cared.

‘After only, what, ten days, you know?'

‘When you know you know.'

He was proud. He was one of that select group who knew. He counted himself now in the fraternity of Majnu and Farhad and Romeo. He was calm. ‘All right,' I said. ‘Let me think about it. What are her details?'

He smiled a huge smile, and yanked a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. ‘I knew it, bhai. Here. All details are there, both hers and mine.'

I took the paper and sent him off. Being Guru-ji's follower, I had acquired a certain expertise in the science of astrology myself. Of course I was not one-thousandth of Guru-ji, but I had picked up some techniques here and there. Guru-ji himself had told me, ‘You're a fast learner. You have an instinct for the science, a knowledge that is inside you. Through me you're just rediscovering it.' He told me that this was why I had survived for so long, while so many others had died. I had a feeling for the future, I could see through the spirals of time and so I knew when danger was coming. So I had lived. I was now learning to control this knowledge, to add to it whatever Guru-ji saw fit to give to me. I practised on the boys, and they trusted me. Looking at Arvind and Suhasini's birth-dates and times and places, it seemed to me that the two of them matched, that the influences of their respective stars paralleled each other and fitted snugly together where necessary. They had ricocheted through the world, driven by their destinies, and they had found each other on my yacht. Who could say that a perfect couple wouldn't or couldn't come together on my boat, which was after all called the
Lucky Chance
? I felt good about Arvind and Suhasini, and it would be auspicious to have a wedding. But I wouldn't give consent, of course, without consulting with Guru-ji. None of the boys except Bunty knew about Guru-ji, but he knew everything about them. These ones were my inner circle, and since they were close to me it was important that they be looked at and vetted by a superior mind. This little bit of care could maybe save my life some day.

I usually waited for Guru-ji's call in my office at five p.m., and he called when he could. I had a satellite phone especially and exclusively for him, with a built-in scrambler. He had a scrambler he travelled with, and so we talked in complete security. I had learnt all this new security technology from my baldy friend Mr Kumar from RAW, all this high carefulness. He had given me a secure satellite phone, and through my own people I had sourced two more, one for Guru-ji and one for Jojo. So I was triply secure: in my patriotism, in my spirituality, in my sex. The
Lucky Chance
was also designed to be secure. My old friends Gaston and Pascal had found me this old, falling-apart khatara that belonged to a Gulf sheikh, and because he was an old degenerate who we supplied with Scotch and young boys, and because it bored him to argue about such trivial sums of money, he let us have it for the throwaway price of seven crore rupees. Gaston and Pascal had hauled it to a shipyard in Cochin, and refitted it
with gun lockers and security doors and special close-range radar, all under the technical advice of the mild-looking Mr Kumar. In Bombay everyone said that Gaitonde wanted a yacht because Chotta Madhav had had one for years, but that was completely untrue. I wanted to live on a boat because it felt safe. On a boat I knew who was coming, and when. A few men could make a boat secure. And Guru-ji had told me that on water I was safe, that my destiny grew and rolled on the waves.

Besides, Chotta Madhav had only an ordinary ninety-footer which he paddled around Malaysian waters. I took the ferociously-armed
Lucky Chance
wherever I wanted, through Indonesian straits if that's where we needed to go, and twice we had blasted pirate speedboats out of the water with heavy machine-gun fire. The stupid bastards thought we couldn't see them coming up in the dark. As long as I had technology and Guru-ji with me, nothing could touch me on the water. So I waited for Guru-ji's call.

As always, while waiting I spent time with my accountant. He was a full CA, my Partha Mukherjee, a good Bengali boy who had grown up in Bandra East. He had prospered with me, had moved his parents and sister into a flat in Lokhandwalla, and had already found a boy for the sister. The wedding was to be in November, with a five-star reception. I paid Partha Mukherjee well, with double bonuses, but that was exactly what he was worth to me. My company's annual turnover at that time was three hundred crores, and tracking that money and funnelling it from here to there, and investing it and expanding it, this in itself was a job and a half. Of course we still made money the old-fashioned way, from our taxes on businessmen and movie producers, from commissions earned from good middle-class householders who needed their retirement flats emptied of sticky tenants, from moving substances and materials across borders, from bookies and touts. But we had legitimate investments thrown across Bombay and into India, we had funds and stocks and real estate and start-up companies. All this Partha Mukherjee managed with his computers and his various assistants in various cities across Asia. I gave him half an hour every evening to summarize for me the worming of my money across countries. He showed me charts, and drew arrows on hand-drawn maps to explain to me where it was all going, from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Bombay. I understood, and directed its flow. Fat old Paritosh Shah would have been proud of me.