Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

I stayed till morning, ignored Subhadra's sleepy summonings and went back and forth in that moment, from the chair to whatever lay beyond the camera's edge, until I felt his motion in my shoulders and hips, I knew what it was to move smoothly off a chair, to have reflexes that saw clearly a threat swinging close, a camera lens or a gun barrel, and muscles that stretched and sped with such grace, I was him, I knew why he did it. For the money, for advancement, for the anger of being forever a bodyguard, for the contempt he had for the man he was guarding, for his knowledge of his own big muscles, for his sense that he himself deserved something better. And Suleiman Isa had given him money, I knew, and promised him much more. Suleiman Isa had offered Bada Badriya a new version of Bada Badriya, bigger, better. And so Paritosh Shah had died. Looking at the tape, I knew this.

I ejected the tape, switched off the light and walked down the hall towards my bedroom. Half-way down I stopped, stood stunned, clutching the tape to my chest. I knew what I had to do with Bada Badriya, that was simple. It was as good as done already. But what about the young one, the younger brother, Chotta Badriya, my Chotta Badriya? What about him, the one who called me 'bhai' every day? Who was asleep this very moment in his house not fifteen feet from mine, from this house we had built together? I trusted him, I had not a second's doubt about him. What to do with him, the one who was loyal to me? When his brother died, when I killed his brother, he would know. Even if Bada Badriya was found decapitated in a ditch far away, in Thane, in maderchod Delhi, even if I told Chotta Badriya that Suleiman Isa had done it, finally he would wonder, he would look at my face and doubt me – Suleiman Isa would pass word to him, send him videotapes and photographs of Bada Badriya fraternally together with him in Dubai, and Chotta Badriya would remember Paritosh Shah and me, he would look at me and know I had no choice, that I had to do it, and he would loathe me. Maybe he would accept that his brother had done wrong, but for ever after he would stand next to me, behind me, and despise me. It couldn't be otherwise. This is how brothers are, this is what grows in the womb, this inescapable tie, this hate. Would he be loyal if I let his brother go? Would he stay with me if I forgave, forgot?

I closed the door to my bedroom. Subhadra said sleepily, 'Is it you?'

'Who else would it be, you idiot?' I snapped. 'Suleiman Isa?' I lay rigid next to her, unable to suppress the seething of my breath. She gathered herself in, timid, afraid. And I had the videotape under my fingertips, Govinda's dancing feet, and I knew in the pressured humming of my blood that all gifts are betrayals, that to be born is to be deceived, that nothing is given to us without something larger being taken away, that becoming Ganesh Gaitonde the Hindu bhai was itself an act of murder, it was the murder of a thousand and one other selves, and there was water in my ears, the moonlit bellow of churning water, and something came from my throat, a low groan.

'What's wrong?' my wife whispered.

I turned to her, I climbed on top of her, I yanked up her nightgown and I heard buttons pop and cloth tear, I forced into her. Her gasps, her cries were lost in the frantic exultation of my anger, in the growling grunts that came from my bitterness.

* * *

I had Bada Badriya brought to me the next day. My boys picked him up from his new petrol station in Thane. He had a reputation, he was known for his shoulders, for a trick he had of picking up a chair with a man in it and holding it over his head. So six of the boys went out. If he makes trouble, I told them, shoot him in the leg, but bring him to me alive. They waited for him in a little dhaba next to the petrol station, and he actually walked by them on the way to his car, with a bodyguard next to him. He had become a businessman, the bodyguard himself with a bodyguard now. Bada Badriya was bending down to get behind the wheel when my boys knocked down his gunman, laid him out with a three-foot pipe. And then they all had their pistols on Bada Badriya, at his legs, and if he had drawn he would have died then, his thighs chopped open by a dozen bullets. They were all trembling nervous. But he froze. The boys were cocky and contemptuous when they brought him in, very full of themselves, loud from the relief of having no bullets pass their way. Bunty, who had led them, clunked down a gun on the table and said to me in his Punjabi accent, 'Bhai, he had a Glock but he went nowhere near it. And the chodu called himself a bodyguard. He came quiet.'

Quiet he still was, Bada Badriya, sitting on a chair in the storage room where the boys had put him. He stood up when I walked in, and I had to look up at him.

'Why did you do it?' I asked.

'Do what?' he said, raising a hand towards me, palm up.

Until that moment I hadn't an exact plan. I had just wanted to look into Bada Badriya's eyes, and now, looking, seeing the shifty innocence he was trying to paste over his fear, this pathetic acting he was attempting, I grew huge with rage. It grew in my belly and my ribs hurt from it, and I shouted, I roared, 'I saw you. I saw you, maderchod. I saw you dancing.'

'Dancing? What, where?'

I couldn't stand him any more, his broad chest, his beefy life, his small boy's face. 'Kill him, Bunty. Kill him.'

And Bunty did.

* * *

Chotta Badriya was waiting for me in Alibag. I had sent him there the night before, to pick up four lakhs in cash that one of our controllers was holding for us. Go and get the money, I'd told him, and check on that controller, there's something slippery about him, I don't trust him. I have a feeling about that bastard, I'd told him. And I'd told him to stay in Alibag, I had a property there, a bungalow on the beach, I'd come to meet him there. I'd wanted Chotta Badriya out of the way, out of contact and touch, I didn't want somebody picking up a phone and calling him to tell him that his brother had been picked up. Stay at the bungalow there, relax, have a good time, I'd said. I'll come and join you. And he'd said, yes, bhai, come, you need the relaxation.

So I went out to the bungalow with Bunty, with three boys. We drove for three hours, through an afternoon thick with traffic and dust. I squeezed my eyes shut soon after we left Kailashpada. When I opened them, the fields had opened up, filled with new construction. I watched a hill roll through the powdery haze on my right. We turned to the east, along the highway, and then south again. I slept. And then the sea glittered ahead of us, a vast open plain shining with sharp, metallic points of sunlight.

Chotta Badriya called to us from the balcony of the bungalow. I got out of the car, stretched and grinned at him. He was wearing red swimming trunks, bright against the sloping white wall of the bungalow, and his stomach rolled gently over the red elastic. When had he become fat? When, in the last decade? We had seen each other so often and so closely that I had stopped noticing him. Do you really see the skin on your right hand? But now I saw his short hair, his belly, his marriage, his children, his love for the movies, his passion for good clothes, his loyalty to me.

Upstairs, he spilled the cash out on the bed. 'No problems, bhai,' he said. 'All of it is here. I don't think we have a problem with the fellow.'

'That's good,' I said. 'I need to piss.'

'Over there,' he said. And as I went into the bathroom, 'Do you want some chai?'

'Yes,' I said, and I shut the door. I heard him calling down the corridor, two chais, something to eat, quick, quick. The mirror over the washbasin was broken, one whole half of it gone, leaving only the raw wood underneath. I tried to piss, shook myself, but even after three hours there was nothing, I was dry. Still, I poured mugs of water down the toilet. Keep it normal, I told myself. Don't make him afraid. You owe him that much. I checked my pistol, then put it back under my shirt, in the small of my back. It had been years, literally many years, since I had used a gun. And my experience had been with revolvers, cheap revolvers, not the good Austrian automatic I now owned. Bunty had had to instruct me: this is how the cassette slides in, bhai, and then you pull the slide back, safety is here. He'd said, with a look of sympathy, you don't have to, bhai, you know I can do it, bhai. And I'd said, no. No.