Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Come in,' Anjali said. 'You can come in, Amit.'

'Madam, lunch?'

Amit Sarkar was newly married, and every week looked a little more prosperous from his wife's cooking. He no longer had that hungry graduate-student leanness from the early days of his training, and had taken to bringing in a three-decker tiffin, to share. He was unfailingly polite, but she felt his disapproval of her bad eating habits, and his solicitude for her solitary divorcee life. She snapped at him sometimes, irritated despite herself by his presumptions. But today she was glad of the interruption. To live always between threat and counter-threat, from aggression to response, was suffocating. With his dal and bhat, Amit Sarkar brought her a whiff of normal life, of home and kitchen. 'What is it today?'

'Chingri macher curry, ma'am. It's Maithli's speciality.'

Maithli was short and round, with a chin-thrusting smile that made her eyes vanish. Anjali had met her twice and found her quite conventional and devoid of conversation. But her prawns were indeed good. Anjali ate, and Amit talked to her about his current project. She had him following the flow of foreign money, mainly from Saudi and Sudan, to radical Islamic organizations within India. He had unearthed, two days before, a link between a student group based in Trivandrum and a seminary in Nagpur, a thread of connections between a student leader and a middleman trader and a fiery mullah. This was good work, and now Amit was developing the narrative. The student leader had a brother who worked in Dubai, and this brother was perhaps a conduit for money and information and ideology. Anjali ate, and listened. Maybe Amit had the makings of a good analyst: he was excited by detail, pleasured by conjunctions. He had a habit of assuming too much, of wanting his stories to work so much that he let his imagination produce texture and depth. But he could be worked out of that, that was her job, to wean him away from fancy. But he had the necessary fervour. She let him finish, and then took him down to bedrock, to the foundation of fact: the brother, Dubai, daily phone calls. That was all. 'Interesting, but not enough to suppose so much,' she said. 'We need more.'

'Can we request an operation?'

Anjali had to smile. He had all the enthusiasm of a puppy huffing after his first rat. She said, 'We can request, but we will never get. There are many higher priorities.' He nodded wisely, but despite his attempt at mature indifference, Anjali saw the small swallowing of disappointment. Every trainee had this fantasy, of moving a case from analysis to operations, of finding clues that would lead to a conspiracy so dangerous that it could only be tackled by desperate measures and heroic men and gunfights in the dark. That's what the trainees came in thinking, that's how they were recruited into the job. But the job was this, reading and reading, and finding fragmented stories, and understanding that some dangers might be fatal and yet not worth the allocation of resources. You watched some things, and let them go. So she tried to comfort Amit. 'But you never know. We'll keep them on a watch list. They may get ambitious and try something.'

Amit wasn't very mollified, but he put a good face on it and gathered up his tiffin. Anjali thanked him and gathered herself into her papers again. The pages smelt of haldi now, and adrak, and she wondered if years from now some other analyst would catch the scent, barely palpable, and be struck by a sudden longing for home. She read on. Amit's frown stayed with her. He chafed at the confinements of a Delhi desk, he wanted to get his hands mucky. Well, he would get action soon enough. Somebody, some dushman, always got ambitious and somebody always tried something. To sit in a small room in the bowels of the MEA and read reports all day was to be buffeted by the eternal agitation of humanity, by the ceaseless motion of desire and envy and hate. Nobody, it seemed, not one man or woman ever sat unmoving in the grove of contentment. Always, there was somewhere to go, someone to defeat, something to have. Well, it gave her a job, and a path in life. She read.

At six she gathered up her briefcase and purse, locked her safe and her filing cabinets, put her car keys in the outer pocket of her purse and walked briskly down to the garage. The two grandly moustachioed Delhi police constables on duty at the garage gate gave her an even stare as she drove past, that opaque and blankly belligerent gaze that was the routine burden of a single woman in Delhi. They didn't like the fact that she was a woman, that she was alone, that she had her own car, her own pay cheque. There was a time, when she had been younger, when she had looked back, when she had asked, what are you looking at? She had confronted businessmen, and bus drivers, and students, and labourers, and policemen. Policemen were the worst, protected by their authority and drunk on a daily diet of aggression and violence. But she had faced them too, goaded on by the memory of her father, who had laughed admiringly at her early tomboyishness, her courage, her refusal to back down ever. She still pushed hard, but somehow, one day, she had found herself too tired for confrontations. It wasn't the pace of her work alone. She felt worn down at her core, as if some steely metal spring had lost its early bounce. Let the young take their places at the barricades, these girls who traipsed around the college campuses with their bare midriffs and mobile phones. The pitted and weathered have other battles to fight.

Anjali took a wide turn down the boulevard, narrowing her eyes against the sunset, and grinned at herself. What an easy moderate age had made of her, all the early revolutionary fervour corroded away by – by what? – long hours, bills, this jangling traffic, the poisonous pollution that left films of black on her face and arms. And by professional defeats, a divorce and the abrupt amputation of love, a bone-deep realization that the future was not a limitless meadow, but only a narrow valley bounded by night. Looking at her mother's bow-legged, arthritic walk, her papery-skinned hands, Anjali felt the press of mortality. Her mother would die. K.D. Yadav would die, soon. Only her father was immortal, suspended somewhere in that endless youth of the missing. He was legally dead, but he was still alive. Anjali felt his presence in the very early mornings, when she was washing gently up through the wetlands of sleep. He came to her then, with that briny smell of sweat and Brylcreem, with his shoulder as solid against her cheek as the heating sunlight from the corner window. Then he was gone again, quite gone.

A silver Lexus came in close to Anjali's window, and then they all waited for the traffic to move. Behind the tinted glass of the Lexus, a teenage girl chewed gum steadily. She was flicking through a glossy magazine, fanning the pages fast from right to left. She looked quite bored, and she was beautiful. Her father was a minister, a tycoon, a famous doctor, one of those fixers who put deals together at the intersections of Delhi's many worlds. She lived in a Lexus climate, quite distant from Anjali, in a geography of Vasant Vihar and the Senso and farmhouse parties and teeny dresses. She felt Anjali's gaze and blinked up a glance and then went back to her magazine, quite indifferent. Anjali could see herself in the Lexus glass, sweaty and hot and very middlingly middle-class in her brown-red kameez and red chunni, unable to afford a replacement for her car's dead air-conditioning system. The traffic parted, and the Lexus slid away. Anjali mopped at her chin. How easy it was to be resentful, how easy it was to wish that a couple of angry policemen would stop the Lexus and ask for licence-registration, and make legalistic objections to the tinted glass, and accuse the gliding machine of unacceptable emissions. Anjali shrugged the thought away, sat up straight and brought herself back to facts, to what needed to be done, to work. Resentment was useless, all the more pointless because any hassling, sullen policemen would finally settle for a bribe of two or three hundred rupees.