Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

So they found me two, Dipu and Meetu. These were brothers originally from up north, they had come to Bombay with degrees from some college in gaandu Gorakhpur. They were twenty-two and twenty-one, real bhaiyyas, farmer's sons. They had stayed with some taxi-driving fellow Gorakhpuri, and tossed about from job to job. Dipu had sold detergent door to door, Meetu had worked as a salesman in a bathroom fittings shop. They were eager lads, full of energy, and they had gone up and down the length of the city, hanging from the trains, seeing all the sights. Just when they had been broken a bit, when they had begun to understand that all dreams didn't come true in this Mumbai, that not every fool from UP became Shah Rukh Khan, they got a call from a second cousin in Lucknow. He had a scheme, a project. He said he was going to start a business in Lucknow, with some buying and selling to do in Bombay. For that he needed to open a bank account in the city, have some funds available and ready there. So Dipu and Meetu were to start a joint account. He would send them the money to deposit in the account, and further instructions about who was to be paid and so on. A week later they received, by courier, a bank draft for a lakh and a half. The draft went through, and as instructed, they took forty thousand for expenses. A high time they had then, and a week later, another draft arrived, this time for two lakhs. The bank manager told them that the formalities would take a day, that the funds would be released the next morning. So back to the bank our two brothers went. They went to the counter, grinning, and the next second, they were down on the ground, with policemen's pistols pushing into their necks.

'Unmarked jeeps, bhai,' Dipu said. He was the one telling the story. 'And so we were trapped. The drafts were stolen, they told us while they beat us at the station. We had been betrayed by our own cousin.'

'Listen, bhenchod,' I said. 'You act innocent in front of the judge. If you tell me lies, I'll tear off your golis. You mean to tell me that you opened an account and deposited drafts out of innocence? What kind of business was it supposed to be?'

He swallowed. 'I don't know, bhai.'

'You didn't know, and you obeyed your cousin blindly? And you thought you were getting forty thousand for going to a bank in a clean shirt and pants? Maderchod, don't lie to me. You knew quite well those were stolen drafts.'

He and his brother had the same broad face, as homely as a shovel. He blinked, thought and then gave up. 'Yes, bhai. Only we thought one more draft wouldn't hurt.'

They were jumped-up peasants who thought they knew more than they did, and so they had fallen easily into the hands of the police. Dipu told me the rest of the story. The police had thrashed the name and address and phone number of the cousin out of them, but of course the cousin had flown his Lucknow coop. Then the policiyas beat them some more, on the bottom of the feet with pattas, on the hands with canes, in the kidneys with fists. They threatened them with encounters, told them they were going to drive them to the seaside and put bullets in their heads. They told them they were going to send the UP police to their father's farm, to their mother's kitchen. 'Bataa re,' the inspectors said. 'Kaad rela.' But these brothers had nothing more to tell, and the cousin was gone, so finally the investigation was closed, and Dipu and Meetu were in jail, awaiting trial. The inspector on their case had told them that if they paid him a lakh, he would not object in court to them getting bail, and for fifty thousand, the public prosecutor would also keep quiet, and so then their lawyer's notice would sail through the court, and they would be out on bail. And even though they were in on serious charges, not just 420 for cheating, but also 467 and 468 for forgery, the inspector could manage bail for them. For a higher price, even, the whole case could be managed. But Dipu and Meetu had already spent whatever they had left of the forty thousand on their lawyer, and they had spent whatever little their father could come up with. So here they were, in judicial custody, waiting for their trial, waiting for their dates. They had been inside now for six months. There were men who had been waiting for a year. There were some ragged bastards who had waited for three years, and for four, and – so I heard – even a few for seven. So Dipu and Meetu, who had acted like fools but were capable of learning, had made approaches to my boys. And now they were talking to me, in the bathrooms of Barrack Four, long after nightfall.

I took them in. They told me they were capable of bloody work, that growing up in Gorakhpur had hardened them, that student union politics there meant canvassing with knife and lathi, that their district had produced several famous dakoos, that it was in their blood. I hadn't the opportunity of testing them, because they had to stay quiet, stay unnoticed, stay separate from my company. But they were mine.

Every week, I went to the special court for my bail hearings. The jailers always put other prisoners in the van, anyone who had a hearing at court that day. So Dipu and Meetu went to court in the same van as I did, we arranged it so with the lawyers and the judges. It was me, these two brothers, and either Date or Kataruka. We alternated these last two, and so it was always one of them sitting to my left, on the bench that ran down the side of the van. At my feet, on the ground, among the general ruck of prisoners, Dipu and Meetu. And opposite me, facing us, on the other bench, men from other companies. It was always like this in the van: the bhais sat on the benches, and the ordinary prisoners on the floor. Date and Kataruka would have preferred that I was not there at all when we executed the plan, they didn't want to expose me to danger. They tried to persuade me to leave it all to them, but I told them that it was crucial that I be there, that without me there was no need for this plan. Then I told them to shut up. And day after day, I waited in the van.

The first two weeks, on the facing bench were men from other companies, not Suleiman Isa's. The third week, Kataruka and I were already sprawling on our bench when the Suleiman Isa boys came into the van. There were four of them, none that I recognized, but Kataruka sat up to my left, flexing the rope on his wrists. We went to the courts bound like animals, roped to each other. But there was rope enough for what we had to do. The Suleiman Isa men arranged themselves, made themselves comfortable, and grinned at me. They were amused, and they were without fear.

'What are you laughing at, maderchod?' Kataruka said. He was very fair, my Kataruka, but very pock-marked. Quiet most of the time, but he spoke up then.

'No need for tension,' I said to him. I was very relaxed myself. I could feel my blood singing, but I felt calm. The Suleiman Isa boys were quite relaxed too, because they were four and we were two, because they had heard that I was really a coward.

'Is your gaand still sore?' one of them said to me. 'We heard that Parulkar took it every night for months. He said that you were a good gaadi to mount, that you moaned like a girl.'

I smiled back at him. 'Parulkar is an honest policeman,' I said. 'What he says must be true.' I shifted back on the bench and raised my knee, put my foot up on the bench, and scratched at my ankle.

They were laughing, all of them. The front doors of the van clanked shut, and the engine creaked itself up into a long vibration that drowned out their giggles, and the van jerked forward, and I said very quietly, 'Dipu.'

He was fast all right, this Dipu. I barely saw his hand move, it passed, and the Suleiman Isa boy on the right, for a moment he didn't even know he had been cut. He just sat, and then the blood sprayed across the van. And then we were on them, cutting. We were using blades, not the shaving kind but the heavier industrial ones that are used for cutting cardboard or tape, which we had smuggled from the jail workshop. We had split each blade in half, melted rubber on the broken side to make a kind of handle, and then we had slid the blades into the sides of our rubber Kitto chappals, into the heels. It took a second's knocking with a fingertip to find the blade in the chappal and pull it gently out. And then we were on them, cutting.