Sacred Games (95 page)

Kamble was laughing. Sartaj twisted to look, and Kamble was squinting at the back of the last truck. ‘
Gar ek baar pyaar kiya to baar baar karna
,' the fancy white Hindi script proclaimed under the usual Horn-OK-PLEASE, ‘
agar mujhe der ho jaye to mera intezaar karna
.' The mudguards had been painted red and orange, with an edging of a leafy pattern in green. ‘There's four spelling mistakes,' Kamble said. ‘In two lines.'

There were indeed. ‘Poor poet,' Sartaj said.

‘Not bad lines, either,' Kamble said.

The lights changed, and the trucks came to life with a great roaring of horns and engines. Sartaj rode behind the last poetic one, and thought about the troubles of poets and clever lawbreaking masterminds. You could carefully turn out the most elegant crime, and hide behind layers of mobile phones, but the trouble was that you had to work with idiots. It was hard to hire good help. Somebody always disobeyed the simplest of instructions, and made a mistake, many mistakes. Detection made detectives look clever, but often solutions were gifts from fools. Sartaj now remembered Papa-ji holding forth on the general decline of the criminal classes, expounding his theory that the newer boys were all muscle and no subtlety, that using an AK-47 instead of a sleek Rampuri blade made you a lesser villain and a smaller man. Papa-ji always had examples – reaching back to the nineteenth century – of legendary burglars and conmen who worked crimes of wit and bravura. A generation always gets the apradhis it deserves, he used to say.

It was deep evening by the time they came to their apradhi's two-room kholi at the back of the Satguru Nagar basti, at the end of a winding lane. They had followed an inspector named Kazimi, who had mehndicoloured hair and a stiff walk. Kamble rolled his eyes at Kazimi's pointy-toed prance, his high step as they went over a clutch of water pipes. Kazimi was a friend of a friend, and Satguru Nagar was part of his beat. He hadn't asked any questions about their investigation, and a thousand rupees had made him very flexible about accommodating their schedules. This was not a policeman in a very profitable posting, and Sartaj was sure that he had children, almost-grown children who needed to be settled. He had that harried air, those slumping, burdened shoulders. Kazimi was efficient, though. He had recognized the name, Shrimati
Veena Mane, right away, and now he was leading them through nameless alleys without hesitation.

‘How much more?' Kamble said. He had stopped, and had a hand out on a post, and was scraping the bottom of a shoe against an angle of a wall. ‘I hate coming into these places. Bhenchod.'

‘Not so far,' Kazimi said. ‘One, two more minutes.' He was rubbing at his hip.

‘What happened?' Sartaj said, meaning the hip.

‘I got shot,' Kazimi said. ‘During the riots. It hurts after a day of walking. Even after all this time.'

Sartaj didn't need to ask which riots, and he didn't want to ask how and why Kazimi had been wounded. Kamble was upright now, and they were moving.

‘This basti has grown a lot in the last two years,' Kazimi said, his profile lit up from the doors they were passing. ‘There are now almost five hundred kholis.'

Five hundred cramped little homes, brick and wood and plastic and tin making small spaces for many bodies. Kamble was probably one generation away from a home just like these, maybe two, but he had the superiority of the escapee, the emigrant. He was on his way to somewhere else, and he didn't like being drawn back. Sartaj was trying to be careful about his own Italian masterpieces, but if your shoes got dirtied, you had to accept the smear and deal with it. People lived here, and this was their life. Actually, this basti was better than many Sartaj had seen. Its inhabitants had progressed, they had escaped the tattered lean-tos that new immigrants built, the temporary arrangements made out of discarded cardboard boxes. Here, there was pumped water, and bricked-up gutters, and electricity in most of the kholis, and Shrimati Veena Mane had a phone. Sartaj had even seen a rank of five toilets near the front of the basti, with a blue NGO placard over them. These were people moving up, slowly but surely.

But they didn't like policemen, these inhabitants of Satguru Nagar. Two teenage boys sat on a ledge between two kholis, their arms intertwined, and they glared at Kazimi, and Sartaj caught the rest of their hostility as he walked past them. A balding grandmother sitting in a doorway, a thali laden with rice grains held between her knees, called out to them, ‘What sin are you going to commit today, inspec-tor?' There was enough stinging contempt just in her ‘tor' to curdle the milk that she had boiling on the stove inside.

‘I'm not after your son today, Amma,' Kazimi said, without looking back. ‘But tell him I said hello.'

She had more to say, but Sartaj lost it under the tinny blare of
Yeh shaam mastani, madhosh kiye jaye
, which came from a television to the left, turned up very loud. They were almost at the end of this lane, which stopped abruptly at a grey concrete wall. There was broken glass on top of the wall, and curls of barbed wire. There was empty space beyond, trees and empty land.

‘There,' Kazimi said. ‘Second door before the end, on the left.'

‘All right,' Kamble said, edging past Kazimi. ‘Let's go.'

‘Slowly,' Kazimi said. ‘Slowly.'

Sartaj put a hand on Kamble's back, to restrain him, and then drew it back from the sweat. ‘He's right,' he said, wiping his hand on his jeans. ‘We don't know who the apradhi is. Or if he's one of the taporis we passed on the corner. Go gently, Kamble. Gently.'

Kamble wasn't convinced, but he let Kazimi go on ahead. This second door on the left was freshly painted a gay orange, and had a Ganesha in white above the lintel. The door was open just a crack, and a faint electronic babble came through. Kazimi ambled up the lane, looking as if he was headed towards the very end. Then he turned abruptly, and put a hand on the orange door, and shoved.

There was a sharp crack, of wood on flesh, and a grunt of pain. Sartaj could see, past Kazimi, a hand clutching a knee, a bare back, skinny calves. There was a man on the floor. He had been sitting with his back to the wall and the door, watching TV. He came up to one leg, hobbling, and said, ‘Who? Who are you?'

Sartaj, who was half-way through the door, felt Kamble's warm exhalation on the back of his neck. ‘Bastard,' Kamble said. ‘It's Taklu.'

This was certainly possible, that this lean, hollow-chested specimen was the Taklu that little Jatin had described. He was of the right age, the right height, and his hair had retreated up to the very dome of his head. Kazimi had him backed up against a shelf.

‘You are new here,' Kazimi said. ‘Otherwise you would know me. What's your name?'

‘Who are you?' Taklu insisted.

‘We're your baaps,' Kamble said from the door. ‘Don't you recognize us?'

Sartaj moved past Kazimi, to the back of the kholi. There was another room there, with two wooden cupboards, and three steel trunks stacked
on top of each other. A fuzz of grey light came through a thickly-barred ventilator high up on the brick wall. Altogether it was a fair-sized home, well-kept and clean. The kitchen area, in the front room, had a suspended grill with rows of utensils, and a stove with two burners. To the left, near the door, a green phone sat resplendent on a white lacy cloth, on a small wooden stool.

Taklu was now quiet. He had let go of his knee, and he had his arms across his chest. Under his blue knit underwear, his legs were shaking, right next to the Sunil Shetty movie on television. ‘My name is Anand Agavane,' he said. He knew now that he had three policemen in his house, and his voice was shaky.

Kazimi took a step up to him. ‘Who are you, Anand Agavane? Why are you here, in Veena Mane's house?'

‘She is my aatya. This is my aatya's house. I come and stay here sometimes. I drive an auto for a seth who has his garage near here. Sometimes I have to return the auto late at night, so I come and sleep here.'

‘Your aatya is rich, eh?' Sartaj said. ‘She's got a phone and everything.' He was squatting next to the stool. The phone had a guard-lock on the dial, and a box full of coins and small notes next to it. Veena Mane took money from her neighbours, to let them make calls and receive them. ‘What's the number for this phone?'

‘The number?'

‘Yes, the number. You don't remember your own aatya's number? What is it, Kamble, the phone number?'

Kamble was in the back room now, and Sartaj could hear him tipping over trunks and flinging cupboards open. He called the number back, singing out the digits.

‘Is that it, chutiya?' Kazimi said. He was standing very close to Anand Agavane now, nose to nose. ‘Is that your aatya's number?'

‘I haven't done anything.'

Kazimi slapped him. There was a moan from outside, from the row of faces that now crowded the lane. Anand Agavane hunched against the television, holding his face.

Sartaj thrust his head out of the door. ‘Get away from here,' he snarled. ‘Or I'll take you bastards in as well. You want a lathi up your gaand? This is not some cinema show.' Veena Mane's neighbours retreated, and then turned away. But Sartaj knew that they would be listening, that what went on in one kholi was loud in the next. He came back into the room, turned up the television. A model in a green sari sang about exquisite coffee.

‘Look at this,' Kamble said as he came through the narrow passageway from the back room. He held up a cubical black plug and a dangling wire. ‘This looks like it should plug into a mobile phone. How many phones does your aatya have, after all? What is she doing, calling the Ambanis every ten minutes?'

Sartaj took the plug from Kamble. He put a comforting hand on Anand Agavane's shoulder, close to the neck. ‘Listen to me,' he said. ‘We're not after you. We know about the calls to the woman, we know that you sent those chokras to pick up money at Apsara.' Sartaj could feel Anand Agavane's pulse under his fingers, as high and fast as a bird's. ‘We just want you to tell us your boss's name yourself. Who do you call? Just tell me. It'll be all right, nothing will happen to you.'

But Anand Agavane was in a stupor, with knotted eyes and rigid jaw. Sartaj had seen it before, this cornered conjuring-up of courage. Anand Agavane was going to try to be honourable, he wanted to save his friends. He would break, but it would take some effort, questioning, a beating or two. They would have to take him somewhere, work on him.

Kazimi nodded at Sartaj, then slapped Anand Agavane again, a lazy backhand. It was only a punctuation mark, with not much force behind it. ‘He asked you something,' Kazimi said. ‘Answer.'

‘I don't know anything about any money,' Anand Agavane said.

‘What about the mobile?' Sartaj said. ‘Where is it?'

Kamble took a white shirt from a hook, dropped it. Then he dug into a pair of white pants and came up with a wallet. ‘An auto driver's packet, with so much money? And you don't even own the auto, bastard.' He flung the pants at Anand Agavane, bounced them off his face and on to the floor.

Sartaj tipped boxes from a kitchen shelf. On the far side of the stove, a black shelf held images of the Tuljapur Devi and Khandoba, and a framed black-and-white marriage picture, a man and a woman with a vague resemblance to Anand Agavane. That must be Veena Aatya, bejewelled and shy for her wedding. Sartaj swept the metal clean, and glass crunched on the floor. Kazimi planted a foot on Agavane's pants, and reached down and pulled the belt loose. He doubled it over, and slashed at Agavane's shoulders, his hips.

‘If you make me angry,' he said, ‘you'll have to spend the night with me, bhenchod. Not with your aatya. And I tell you, I will have a lot of fun, but you won't. Where is it, this maderchod mobile?'

Sartaj turned away from the shelves, back to the room. The kholi
looked as if it had been suddenly destroyed, as if a hard wind had taken the bright calendars off the wall and gashed them in half, and spilt a canister of good rice across the floor. Sartaj tried to think across the thwacking of leather on skin, and Kamble's steady cursing. Anand Agavane had been sitting on the floor watching television, right there. He would not be far from his mistress's voice, the phone must be near the door. Somewhere over there. There was a shuttered window, but the scarred, twisted wood left only space enough on the sill for a packet of Wills and matches. Sartaj shook open the folded mattress that Agavane had been sitting on, and that yielded nothing but a musty smell and a faint sprinkling of fuzz. Sartaj stepped over the phone and its stool, and then there was nowhere to go. That was the room, this much was the kholi.

In the corner, at the height of Sartaj's head, a wire basket hung from a white rope. The basket was empty. Maybe Aatya was off buying atta, and potatoes, and mutton, which she would hang in the basket, away from the inescapable rats. She kept a neat house, even if her nephew was an apradhi. Anand Agavane was crouched over now, his head between his knees and arms wrapping around tight. His shoulders were flushed red now, and his head was bald and sweaty. Stubborn bastard. Sartaj knuckled the basket, and it swung gently against the wall. The rope went up to a hoop on a rafter. There was a picture on the wall, a recent studio portrait, all bright colours and dramatic lighting for a young couple. Aatya's daughter, maybe, in a red sari, with dark glasses pushed back on her head. Her husband stood next to her in a leather jacket, hands on hips, in a sleek model stance. The jacket was probably rented from the photographer, who had posed them as a modern young couple in front of a night-time city. The lights swept up and down, and sparkled on water. It could be Marine Drive, or New York. The black-framed photograph hung from a protruding brick. All down this front wall, a foot above Sartaj's head, there were paired bricks that angled out into the room. Aatya must have had them built in, every two feet or so. A practical woman. Sartaj reached up to the first one, and ran his hand over the top, and found only the rough surface and the twine that held up the photograph. He did the second one, and then kicked aside the mattress, took a step. He reached up, and felt the rush of confidence even as he did. Yes. He felt the smooth plastic at the tips of his fingers. It was the phone.