Sacred Games (86 page)

He laughed his usual glorious burble, as free as a baby in his mother's arms. ‘Beta, you are a warrior. You are my Arjun. You need not only your Draupadi, but also the other gifts of the earth as you wander. To block your own nature would be a crime, and would make you incapable of the work you must do.'

All this I had heard him say before, but I liked listening to him. There was something golden about the timbres of his voice, something dense, and they settled into my chest and comforted me. I grew calm listening to him, so sometimes I asked him questions just to hear him talk. But today I had a real question. ‘Did you look at the papers, Guru-ji?' I meant six-foot Jamila's charts and biodata, which I had faxed to him in Denmark. He of course had no problem with the fact that she was Muslim, but wanted to consider her stars and her future.

I could feel him smiling. ‘You are impatient, Ganesh.'

‘No, no, Guru-ji. I know how busy you are. There's no hurry.'

‘Ganesh, I understand. It has been a while. Too long.'

It had been a while since I had a woman. Of course I didn't partake of the common girls that were brought in for the boys. For me, Jojo only sent special cases, and all of those were approved by Guru-ji. But I wasn't so weak that I would grow impatient with him. ‘Guru-ji, nothing like that. This one is more interesting than usual, that's all.'

‘I agree with you, Ganesh. Her stars and signs and lines are very interesting indeed. This woman will go far. She has intelligence, but more than that she has luck. Every time she needs something, someone will come into her life who can provide. Her path will be smoothed and built for her.'

‘But is she lucky for me?'

‘I'm not quite certain yet. I've been looking at the charts, and in general they fit. But I am unable yet to get an image from them. Something is waiting to happen.'

‘No hurry, Guru-ji,' I said. ‘No problem.'

There were prime ministers and CEOs queuing up to consult with him, but he made time for me. He thought about me, he cared. Sometimes this realization caught at my throat, as now. He heard the thick emotion in my voice, and he said gently, ‘So what's the news?' By news he meant the ongoing drama of the boys and their lives. He enjoyed hearing about them, about their amusements and their passions, and even about the problems of their mothers and sisters, and the law-suit that one uncle had filed against a brother. He was a realized master, but he was interested in all of it, in the common ordinariness of their problems. I always told him their tales, and he listened with relish, and offered comments and suggestions. ‘Guru-ji, today I have a solid instalment. My slowpoke gadha Arvind has decided he's in love with one of the randis. He wants to get married.'

‘Really? And what do you think?'

‘I've checked the charts. No big problems.'

‘Tell me.'

I read off the dates and times and places, and even as I finished he had seen deep into the case. ‘This girl is very dynamic,' he said. ‘This Arvind has strength and intelligence, but he is quite passive. A very tamasaic personality. This girl moves him, puts him in motion. You are right, there are no major problems here. But they will have only girls. And his liver will give him trouble. Otherwise the charts match. Let them do it, Ganesh. The other boys may make fun, but as leaders we must be forward-looking. This girl has paid her debts from her prior births, and it is time she is lifted from this life of selling herself. All of existence is a movement forward, from low to high, and it is our duty to help this evolution along. Marriage is an auspicious occasion, and this will be a good marriage.'

Once he said it, it was obviously and shiningly true. And it was the exact line I took with the boys. That very evening, after I said goodbye to Guru-ji, I called Arvind and his Suhasini in and gave them permission, and a talk. I told them that they were setting out on a great journey, and they had to be doubly strong and discreet because of the gossip that would follow them. I tried particularly to impress on her the duty she owed to her husband, what a good and great thing he was doing. This Suhasini had Sonali Bendre's slim height all right, those long legs, but her features were heavier, darker. She listened with her eyes downcast, but I could see in her what Guru-ji was talking out, this great energy. There was movement here all right.

So it was all arranged. In less than a week they were married. Of course I called Jojo before the marriage and told her what I had decided, and she said, ‘Gaitonde, for once in your life you are doing a completely good thing.' She gave her blessing also, and sent a gift to the couple, diamond rings for both of them, with decent-sized stones set in white gold. We arranged a hall, and a pandit was brought in from Bangkok. I had given the boys a good lecture, and told them to respect the solemnity of the occasion, but I could see that they were themselves calmed by the chanting of the shlokas. The determined seriousness of Arvind and Suhasini as they bound themselves to each other quietened even the drunken Ramesh. They sat cross-legged, in a little circle, and watched. Me, I grew melancholy. The flames hummed and I sank away into them, into memory. My chest ached for my Abhi, and I remembered again how he used to bat at my cheeks with his little fists, and how he would kiss me when I begged him to.

This mood of mine persisted even after we had sent the happy couple off on their honeymoon, to a week in a cottage in Koh Samui. I meditated that evening, moved my breath in circles in my belly, and yet I was unable to shake off this shark-toothed bite of regret that swam just a little behind me, stabbing at my heels. I switched on the television and found an Indian channel. A blonde VJ spoke accented Hindi and introduced fast songs. I switched it off. I lay in bed awake, thinking that although my boys lived close to me, I was alone. They were feet away, separated from me only by lengths of metal and wood, and I was alone. With my boys I had to be strong always, to be their father, distant and powerful and sometimes wrathful. Those to whom I could tell the stories of my discontents and longings, they were all far away. I was close to them only in words, through broadcast and electricity. I was far from Guru-ji, and Jojo.

He called then. My Guru-ji called. I leapt out of bed, got the phone on the second buzz. ‘Guru-ji?'

‘Meet me,' he said.

‘What?'

‘You have been a good student, beta. I have meditated on it, and now I think you are ready for more knowledge. But to take you further on this path, towards the secrets of Paramatma, I need to initiate you. I am in Bombay from next week, for Ganesha Chathurthi. I'll be there for two weeks. I am conducting a very big yagna here, very important. The most important yagna of my life, actually. But after that I'll be in Singapore for a week. Come and meet me in Singapore.'

From our first conversation, through the months since, I had never met him. I had talked with him, maybe more than any of his other disciples, and I had seen him on television, but I had never sat with him, face to face. Now he was inviting me, and I was angry. Not at him, but at my life, myself. If he was doing the most important yagna of his life in Bombay, during Ganapati's festival, why should I not meet him there? Why Singapore, that hell of cleanliness that bored me more than any other place on earth? Bombay was the earth I longed for, and it was dangerous for me, but it was also my Kurukshetra. And he was my Guru-ji.

‘Ganesh,' Guru-ji said quietly, ‘can you come?'

And in that moment I understood, it hit me like a bullet in the belly. I felt the truth blow into me and it rose into my mouth as laughter. He was testing me. This was my last test. I laughed and said, ‘Guru-ji, of course. I will see you, I will arrange it. In Singapore.'

‘In Singapore,' he said. ‘I will be expecting you.'

‘Pranaam, Guru-ji.'

I hung up, woke Arvind out of his honeymoon bed and began to make plans. Only Arvind, and Bunty in Bombay, knew where I was going. The rest of the boys thought that I was setting off on an emergency trip to Jakarta. And Guru-ji thought I was going to meet him in Singapore. But I had made up my mind. I was going to Bombay, to take part in his yagna. It was all meticulously planned. I was sure Mr Kumar, my wily Mr Kumar, had his people watching me. I was forbidden to enter India. I had become very valuable to Mr Kumar's organization, and there was great risk to me inside the country, from Suleiman Isa and others. There was also risk to Mr Kumar and his people: if I was arrested inside India, maybe I would talk under police pressure, tell everyone of the deeds I had done for Mr Kumar. I knew these thousand-armed dangers, and so I planned with care. But even as I did, I was filled with admiration for Guru-ji, for his wanting to meet me. All I had to lose was my life. He was risking his great work, his position in the world, his connections with the small and the very large. If I was caught, if his relationship with me were known, he would lose his good name, his unstained honour. I was a gangster, and he was a saint. And yet he was risking everything for me, for my miserable, crawling worm of a life. Why? I wondered, and there was only one answer: he loved me. And so, even as Arvind and Bunty grumbled about the risk, about the police and my enemies and immigration officers and bullets, I was light-hearted. I was confident, I was fearless in the gentle cradle of my Guru-ji's love. Three days later I flew into Bombay on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt, with a newly shaved head, a stubbled jaw, steel-rimmed spectacles, a new passport and a suitcase full of baby clothes for a non-existent niece. I had business papers and invoices, and my cover was complete, and they stamped me through at immigration without pause or question, and I was out on the sweltering sidewalk before I could bring myself to believe that I was back in Bombay. I raised a hand towards Bunty over the crowds waiting for relatives, and then he recognized me with a start. We didn't say a word to each other until the car was out of the car park and we were zipping past the airport hotels.

‘This is mad,' Bunty said. ‘Bhai, there's nakabandi tonight. I was looked at pretty close twice on the way over here.'

I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘At least say hello first,' I said.

He made a sound something like a laugh, full of nerves and edginess,
and grabbed my hand. ‘Sorry, bhai. I can't believe you're back, and like this.'

‘How else would I come back, chutiya? On a magic carpet?'

He shook his head. ‘This was too simple.'

He was scared of being by himself, without his bodyguards. I had told him to come unarmed and alone. ‘Simple is best. What's the nakabandi for?'

‘There were two big shop robberies over the last two days. I was told they have some information on the robbers, ex-employees. Small time, bhai.'

So, nothing to do with us. Still, there were policemen gathered near metal grilles at some of the crossroads. We had to go through two of the inspections by the time we got to the highway. They peered into the slowing cars, and at the second blockade one of the policemen shone a torch directly into my face. He waved us on. The breath came out of Bunty in a thin wheeze.

‘Calm down, Bunty. They won't know me because they all know I'm far away.'

‘You've lost weight, bhai, but still…'

On the boat I had a good diet and regular exercise, I enforced a regimen on myself to purify my body, and so I had shed the pounds from jail and marriage. ‘And you've put it on,' I told him. He had. We passed a small party of devotees dragging a five-foot Ganesha on a cart. They were dancing in front of Ganesha, men and women and children, to the beat of two drums. They were happy. I could feel that old racketing drumbeat in my neck, in my shoulders. ‘There are more jhopadpattis now,' I said. ‘Look at this.' The swarms of shacks had crept up right to the highway, where I clearly remembered empty shoulders and scrubland.

‘Really, bhai? Looks the same to me.'

I had been away for more than two years. Nothing looked the same to me. Under the orange light of the streetlamps the slums slept a convoluted sleep, browner and more numerous than I remembered. We passed a rank of hulking trucks painted bright red and green, and then went through a market with a hill of seeping vegetable rubbish at either end. The rubbish must have always been there, but I noticed it now. There was much new construction, taller buildings, one white one with gigantic concrete stilts built around it to support three new stories on top of the already existing four floors.

‘That's one of the new extra-FSI jobs, bhai,' Bunty said.

Some builders had oiled some bureaucrats, who had found a chink in the regulations to finger the Floor-Space Index, so suddenly there were these strange crane-legged contraptions all over the city. ‘Three big new floors,' I said. ‘That's a lot of money.'

‘We know the owner,' Bunty said, grinning. ‘He's become a friend of ours.'

He had contributed to my turnover, this FSI buyer, yet I was vaguely unsettled by this new trend. ‘I wouldn't want to live on the ground floor of that thing,' I told Bunty. ‘Those legs look like matchsticks.'

He grunted out a long laugh. ‘If it goes down, bhai,' he said, ‘all the better. Then you can build again, without that old building underneath. Maybe we should arrange it. He'll build it at double the selling price, better for us.'

‘Chutiya,' I said, but I was smiling. The billboards were all announcing internet companies and websites in flashy, forward-tilting lettering that promised speed. Clusters of auto-rickshaws sat nose to nose like bulbous insects. I caught myself thinking that,
insects
, and thought, I've been away too long.

‘Here,' Bunty said.

He had arranged a room for us at the back of a house in Santa Cruz. The street was very quiet, and the landlord was a furniture merchant with two school-age daughters, very orthodox and very respectable. We had two single beds, one coffee table and a clean bathroom. Bunty wrinkled his nose. ‘All right, bhai?' he said, pretending concern for me. But it was he who had acquired high tastes, with his new incomes and his new stature.