Sacred Games (87 page)

‘Fine for me,' I said. ‘Let's sleep.'

I woke him the next morning at six. He groaned when he saw the time, but I was merciless. I got him up, and out, and we walked down the road to a restaurant. We drank chai from their first pot of the day, and ate idlis. A line of office-goers waited at the bus stop in the dust-haze raised by the buses and cars. Schoolchildren went past us, swinging their bags. I was content to watch the scene, it was like a pageant to me. But at eight-thirty I sent Bunty to bring me a scooter. He protested. ‘Arre, why, bhai?' he said. ‘I'll just drive you in the car.'

‘You're not going to drive me,' I told him. ‘And I want a scooter.'

He wanted to argue with me, but I gave him a look that shut him up. Off he went. Of course he was worried for his livelihood and his future, which would squeeze down considerably if I was jammed into a jail cell
again, or killed. But he also loved me. We had walked together through many battles now, and I had made him a settled man, with a wife and two children and responsibilities and investments and money. So he hated me a little now, for making him risk it alone in a room in Goregaon with no guns and no bodyguards. But by nine-thirty he had a scooter for me at our room, a green Vespa with fancy silvered rear-view mirrors. ‘I had to borrow it from someone,' he said apologetically.

‘The mamus will stop me just for those mirrors,' I said. ‘Your friend thinks he's on a racing motorcycle?' But driving even a Vespa was difficult for me, it had been so many years since I'd done it. I skidded even as I started off, and Bunty ran after me until I waved him away. The first ten minutes were terrifying, but I grinned at the rush of it, and sucked in the wind between my teeth. I went by three mandaps with towering Ganeshas, all of them a bright, radiant orange. By the time I got to Juhu I was fine, I was slipping between the cars with complete confidence, and changing gears smoothly. I was sleek. I saw myself in the rear-views, and I was a purposeful man having a good time in the morning. I was in Bombay, and I was fearless. I was going to my Guru-ji.

But once I got to the yagna-sthal in Andheri West I was stuck. They had police bandobast from two hundred feet away, and they weren't letting any lone scootering taklus through. I had to park, and walk with a few hundred other devotees towards the mansion. This house belonged to a film-producer devotee of Guru-ji's, a man with good political connections and lots of property in Bombay. The open ground in front of the house had been fenced and covered with a series of open-sided shamianas. The arrangements were all faultless, with wide, straight avenues between the shamianas and sadhus guiding the devotees to the proper seating places. There were television sets scattered through the shamianas, and good loudspeakers, so that you may have been seated far from the central dais – as I was – but you could see Guru-ji and what he was doing quite clearly. But he wasn't there yet, just a group of his sadhus arranging the materials of the yagna on the dais. He appeared precisely at eleven, wheeling strongly down the central aisle, followed by a group of sadhus. They had built a ramp up to the dais, and up he went. I found myself standing, dancing, elbow to elbow with my fellow devotees, shouting ‘Jai Gurudev'. He let us fall into a chant, and then he raised his hands. We were silent. ‘Sit,' he said, and all by himself went from the wheelchair to his seat in front of the microphones. He had strong arms, I could see that.

He told us about sacrifice, about the altar. The dimensions of the altar had to be based on a measure of the sacrificer: the length of the middle joint of the middle finger of the sacrificer was one angula, and one hundred and twenty angulas made one purusha. The sadhus needed to lay out a square equal in length to two purushas, or two hundred and forty angulas. Who was the sacrificer? Guru-ji asked, ‘Who will be the sacrificer? We are merely the priests, but who will be the yajman?' He paused, and then answered his own question: ‘In the old days, charkravartin emperors were the patrons of this sacrifice we are engaged in. But the day of the emperors is gone. Who is the emperor today? Who has power, who leads? It is you. You, the public. Power flows from you, from your votes. So, today, you are the sacrificer, the yajman. The public is the sacrificer. Each and every one of you is the sacrificer. So we have taken a scientific average. From a sample of two thousand Indian men from all over the country, from every state, our doctors have taken precise measurements, and we will use the average as our angula. You, my friends, are our purusha.'

So, using cords and rods, and orientating by the sun, the priests laid out their square, and its peripheries, and its intertwining circles. Meanwhile Guru-ji talked to us about sacrifice. He told us how the universe was created through a sacrifice, how the gods sacrificed Purusha and from his limbs and his flesh all of creation was born. Everything that exists, everything that has ever been and will be is created by that first sacrifice. In any sacrifice, the sacrificer emulates that first great giving of the self, that first immolation. The sacrificer rehearses that sacrifice, and in doing so sustains the universe. ‘In sacrifice the sacrificer becomes Purusha, he becomes the original being who divided himself to create all things. Since this is so, properly speaking, at the end of the sacrifice the yajman should immolate himself. If he is Purusha, he should die to give life. But we will not ask this of you, and this is not how sacrifice has been conducted for many years. Instead of the self, we put into the sacred fire certain objects that are worthy of sacrifice. Instead of humans, once cows were sacrificed, and horses, and goats and rams. We will use certain cereals, certain flowers, certain grasses. But remember, as we fling these into the fire, what is being sacrificed is the self. If you are the yajman, all of you, then what you are sacrificing is your own selves, your bodies, you. What we put into the fire are merely substitutes, which the gods accept. What is being sacrificed is you. You are Purusha. You must die, so that the universe may live.'

Meanwhile the priests built the altar. We watched them over the televisions. At a point on the precisely measured and orientated ground, they laid a lotus. Over this they put a golden disc. These were the first waters and the sun. On this they gently balanced a small golden figure, who was Purusha, who was the yajman, who was us. Over Purusha they built the altar, in five layers of bricks, in the shape of a great eagle. ‘An eagle first brought the sacred soma from heaven to earth,' Guru-ji told us. ‘And so, through sacrifice, we will drink of that divine bliss again. Through the flight of sacrifice, we will taste knowledge. We will know the self, and the universe.'

Under the coloured canvas of the tents there was a white, lucid light. It was a cloudy day, quite cool for a day far after monsoon-end. There was a quietness in the crowd. People came and sat, stepped around each other with a friendly hand on the shoulder, left when they had to. Holding us all was Guru-ji's calm voice, as deep as the sea, and the slow swells of the slokas, eternal and steady and unstoppable. Guru-ji translated and explained some of the slokas to us.

‘Each god covered himself with a poetic metre,' Guru-ji said, ‘and this metre became the source of their power as sacrificers. Agni was suffused by the Gayatri metre, and Savitar by the Usnih metre. Indra's energy came from the Trishtubh. The Jagati metre moved through all the gods. So from metre, through sacrifice, from this warp and weft, this weaving, this geometry, this form, this poetry, the universe was born.' Sitting cross-legged on the ground, anonymous and alone, I could see – in my mind's cinema screen – that moment of creation, the hymns sliding across each
other like ghee and sandalwood, the heated sparks of the metres, the flames of the universe being born. ‘When we sacrifice,' Guru-ji said, ‘when we chant, when we allow the metres to move through us, we weave the world. We are creators. We sustain all that is, we hold it up, we make it. We are the universe.'

 

Back at our room, Bunty had a good dinner waiting for me, brought from his wife's kitchen. While I ate we talked business, and I gave instructions and answered queries. By now the boys on the yacht had probably figured out that I wasn't in Jakarta, that I wasn't available on the phone there, but nobody would imagine that I was here, sitting at a yagna in Andheri or eating parathas in Santa Cruz. They sent me reports, and Bunty took my orders to be passed back. With reference to our job for Mr Kumar, our boys were already in London, in safe houses, waiting for the mullah. I told Bunty to secure our communications with them, to see to weapons and logistics. Me, I slept a deep, outstretched sleep, a sleep as confident and happy as a well-loved and well-fed child's who knows that he will wake to care and love and laughter. I was smiling even as I woke.

Back I went, back to Guru-ji. On this second day I was early, one of the very first few people on the maidan, apart from the policemen and the volunteers. I made my way to the very first shamiana, and found myself a seat right behind the VIP section, very close to the altar. The sadhus were seated about the fire, which had not gone out, which would not go out for twelve days. The yagna had continued through the night, staffed by teams of priests. But now, in the morning, they were only beginning to switch on the loudspeakers. At eleven, on the dot and dash of eleven, Guru-ji arrived. Now I was able to see him up close. Sometimes, when he appeared on television broadcasts, he wore Nehru suits, exquisitely tailored but simple jackets in linen and silk. I myself had had some made, similar in line and cut. But today he was wearing a white dhoti, and a sheer white cloth thrown over one strong shoulder, leaving the other one bare. His hair swept up and back. He was handsome. He was sixty-four years old, but his skin was taut and clear, his eyes were alert and alive.

‘This is a sacrifice that includes each type of person,' he told us that day. ‘This is not a sacrifice for rishis or munis or emperors only. Whether you are from the highest sections of society, or from the lowest, you can participate in our Sarvamedha sacrifice. We invite you all. You are the yajman. But you must give. That is the meaning of the Sarvamedha sacrifice. You must give everything. Sarvamedha is the universal sacrifice, it is
the all-sacrifice. In the old days, every type of animal was sacrificed to the gods during this sacrifice, and humans from every walk of life, from every profession, gave themselves to the sacred fire, they died during the Sarvamedha and were blessed. In the old days, brahmins and tailors, dhobis and warriors, all were immolated in the fire of the Sarvamedha. In the old days, the yajman of the Sarvamedha sacrifice gave all his possessions as the fee, everything he owned. When the father of Nachiketas hesitated at
everything
, Nachiketas himself reminded the father that his son was his last possession. Nachiketas gave himself to death, and so achieved heaven for his father, and through his confrontation with death revealed to us the secrets of death, and life. Wisdom belongs to those who can burn themselves, and so discover the true self.' There was an absolute silence in the shamianas, a breath-stilled pause as we listened. And Guru-ji laughed. ‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘I won't ask you to give up your sons, and I won't ask you to jump into this fire.' The fire was leaping above the heads of the priests. ‘The times have changed. We will complete the Sarvamedha, and we will sacrifice animals and humans, all that lives. But we will do it symbolically. We will substitute. You will burn, but only in effigy, only through a model of you. Like this one.'

He held up his hand, palm up, revealing a small model of a man. With the motion of his hand I noticed, across the flames and across the way, a policeman. I must have seen him before, in the bandobast outside and under the tents, but he caught my eye now. He was a sardar, wearing a tall khaki turban with a green patka underneath. He had just escorted someone to the VIP enclosure, and was backing away, but he turned back now to listen to Guru-ji. For a quick moment, the length of a snapping flame, the policeman and I held each other's gaze. And then we shifted back to Guru-ji.

As the priests chanted, Guru-ji gave the little figure to the fire. So, just like that, all afternoon and through the day, little casts of cows and bulls and men and women – made out of crystallized sugar or lime – were thrown into the sacred fire. The conflagration was fragrant and enormous. I was close enough to hear it. It had a steady rhythm, this music.

 

That evening, I waited late in a long queue for a meeting with Guru-ji. At eleven, he left the altar and retired to the film producer's house for the night. From eleven till midnight, he met members of the public in private audience. There was a queue that stretched from the gate of the house and wound around the maidan twice. I was somewhere in the middle. At midnight the policemen came through the maidan telling us that Guru-ji
had to sleep, telling us to go home. There was a great groan, but people dispersed easily, without protest. We could imagine how tired Guru-ji was, how even his massive strength must be taxed by a full day of talking to us, of taking us along on his journey. The policemen looked relieved. They were tired themselves, and they were used to the jostling, tumbling energy of the Ganapati processions, where thousands of young men in shorts and banians danced for Ganesha, drunk on sweat and brotherhood and surreptitious swigs of beer and bhang. But we went home in good order, all of us, Guru-ji's followers.

Bunty was waiting at our room, with food and his mobile phones. We took care of business. ‘Bhai, my wife thinks I have a woman,' Bunty said when we had finished with the calls. ‘I keep telling her it's just a busy time right now, special night-time jobs to do, but she saw me taking some of her adrak pickle for you, and now she's convinced that I feed my woman food from her kitchen.'