Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

They were all sliced before any of them could raise a hand in defence. They were expecting two, and we were four. Make a man bleed and you will break his courage. And I had told my boys to go for their eyes. A razor blade will not kill, but it will put blood in the eyes and blind. So only two of them really fought back, the other two were shouting and panicking and trying to lose themselves in the howling męlée of prisoners. I was calm. I dodged and waited and cut, and cut. There is a vast pressure of blood in a man's head, a quantity that you cannot imagine. It squirts like a pichkari, in quick jets with the beating of the heart. Our attack must have lasted barely a minute, but in the pleasure of my stabbing and slashing, time expanded into a long emporium of opportunities. I tell you I could see through the confusion and know the opening before it existed, I could wait and weave and then come through precisely and cut . In my calm I knew the van was stopped and the havaldars and the inspectors were struggling with the doors. I swayed back from the struggle, back towards the bench, let myself sit. 'Give me the lambi,' I snapped out to Meetu.

With a roll of his eyes he slapped it into my left hand, the lambi that he had carried inside his blue legal file, tucked behind the thick sheaf of papers and notices and reports. The lambi was actually a hinge from a bathroom door inside the barrack, carefully unscrewed and then shaped and sharpened on stone, given a handle by a wrapping of electrical wire. With it in my hand I went knee over knee, over the mass of men. I had seen the one I wanted, seen his face masked dark with blood. He put up his hands as I came towards him. There was a single twisting thrust, with my shoulder behind it, that I knew completely before I ever did it. I put the lambi in his neck. Then the policemen were on us.

They dragged us out with a great shouting and hubbub, there were dozens of them. We were grinning at each other. There was a cut on the back of Dipu's left hand. 'I cut myself, bhai,' he said. 'But I cut them more.'

'Chutiya,' I said, smiling.

Then they dragged us off to the anda cells. Into the high tanki-shaped building we went, and into the sunless cells. The others they shoved two by two through the low doors of the cells, but they took me down one level and made me bend and shoved me forward and then I was alone. It was dark, very dark. Finally I could make out two concrete slabs on either side of the circular room, and a hole in the ground between them. Two beds and a latrine. I was sweating. I felt my way around the walls, as high as I could go. No windows, not a shelf or a switch or a plug, nothing but the egg-smooth concrete. I sat on one of the beds for a long time. Then I took off my shirt and folded it and made a pillow. I lay down. Then I started laughing.

They kept me in the anda cell for two weeks. They shoved food and water through the door, and I lived alone in that stinking hell. The dark, it is the dark that cuts your heart, that slices through your brain. I tried to keep track of the hours, I tried to walk around the cell in fast circles, to keep healthy. I tried to sleep, and keep awake during what must have been the day. But soon I couldn't tell any more. I tried to calculate time by the meals, but they must have given me food whenever they felt like it, it came to me cold and congealed, and I could swear that many days and nights passed before I heard the door scrape open again. And there was the rasp of my own breath, in and out, in and out, for centuries. I would open my eyes and know that only a minute had passed, or two. Yet I had been walking for an eternity along a swampy seashore. Another long minute waited, stretching its chasm before me. And then another one. I tried to imagine a clock, I hammered a nail into the wall and hung up a gold clock, with one of those swinging weights, I thought I could have it keep time for me. But my clock yawned and melted and vanished, and its hands curled and looped. I had heard that the anda cells could drive men into madness, and now this black room was testing me.

In this dark, women came to me. They walked through me with a cool tinkling of anklets. I lay flat on my back and they were floating above me, with their slim, red-patterned feet and dimpled ankles. The edges of their ghagras brushed softly across my cheeks, and I felt their footsteps on my chest, light as a blessing. In this indistinct dream, in the airy touch of their gauzes, I was delivered from my prison. They talked among themselves in a murmuring just under my understanding, in a whispering that became a faint music. I floated. I was gone.

When they took me out of the anda cell I didn't know how long it had been, two weeks or two thousand years. I shielded my eyes and asked nothing from the jail staff, or the policemen. Parulkar was there, abusive and puffed out in that strutting-cock way of his, and under his lead they dragged all of us through the compound and into the superintendent's office. Then there was of course more abuse and threats, and warnings of added charges and long sentences. But all of it was an empty show, because they knew and we knew that it had been our win. It was a small skirmish, but we had won. And however minor our conquest had been, it made a world of difference to my boys, and to me. Sometimes, that's how it is. So, standing straight under the fuss that the jailers and Parulkar were making, I came back to myself. On the desk there was a calendar that told me the date, 28 December. I had been inside the anda cell for thirteen days and one night. Time fell into place around me, with the sound of metal falling on to metal. I stood up straight. I kept myself quiet, kept my face straight and my eyes lowered, but I grew strong again. From the commotion they were making, it was clear that they were trying to fight me back from my moral victory. I knew that all my boys, in the barrack and outside, had heard of our battle, and they were strong again. I kept quiet. I was satisfied.

It was only back in the barrack that I learnt the details of our triumph. The bastard whose neck I had punctured was one of Suleiman Isa's top controllers, directly reporting to the boys in Dubai. Miraculously, the maderchod had lived, but he was still in the hospital, covered with long arcs of stitches. The doctors were expecting him to suffer lifelong nerve damage. The others had come back to their barrack with their heads shaved and swathed in bandages, and there was much comedy whenever my boys were within shouting distance of their windows: 'Anyone got a headache? Anyone need a champi?' Our injuries were trifling: there was Dipu's small wound, and Kataruka had a cut on his right calf, probably from Dipu or Meetu swinging wildly in the van. But they all looked dazed from the anda cell. Meetu was shivering, trying to keep it down but shaking nevertheless, despite the afternoon heat. I had to take command. 'All right,' I said to the boys clustering around. 'We'll celebrate later. Give us some tea. Then it's a bath for everyone, and rest. Arrange water.'

It was done. Finally we lay together in a circle, our feet pointing in, our bodies the spokes of a wheel, and the rest of the boys took turns to fan us. It was a pleasure to talk, to look up into the rafters and see light, to know the progression of a day. Dipu and Meetu were talking about women, about the prodigies of chodoing they were going to achieve when they got out. Kataruka was laughing at them. 'You ganwars,' he said. 'You think those Lamington Road whores are women? They're bhenchod worse than animals. You might as well chodo the next bitch you see nosing around in a garbage dump. You'll never know the true pleasure of a woman unless you woo her, until she falls in love with you and gives it of her own will. A convent-educated girl, who has been brought up well, who is shy, who is reserved – that's the true test of a man. But why tell you two about this, you'll never in your life come within sniffing distance of a girl like that.' So then of course they begged and whined to be instructed, my fine, dangerous dakoo brothers. I listened to Kataruka go on, and into the evening he imparted the secrets of seduction. 'When you are courting her,' he said, 'you must be Kishore Kumar. And I don't mean just that you sing Kishore songs to her, no. You have to let the voice of Kishore Kumar move through you, and become that effortlessly confident, that happy, that funny, that breezy. If you can do that, happily she'll come to you, boss. Then, once that happens, once you've got her, then you've to sing Mohammed Rafi, and only Rafi.'