Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Listen, my fine guru,' I said, 'I'm a don, I'm in jail, people are trying to keep me here, other people are trying to kill me. You want me to relax? How am I supposed to relax?'

'You think you have such a hard life.'

'Don't start that argument again. Suppose I agree with you, okay, I need to relax. How am I supposed to?'

So she got me to start exercising regularly, and two weeks later we brought yoga into the jail. Advani was quite happy with the idea. He got a story in the Bombay Times , with a full-colour picture and a blurb that described him as the 'most progressive jailer of our times'. Bunty and my boys were happy because two of the yoga teachers were women, and they got to look at them twist and reach and turn for a full hour. But I hushed their sniggers, and told them to concentrate and do what they were told. I had to trust and hope in yoga because my gaand was on fire. And I tell you, it worked. I felt calm, and relaxed. I relaxed not just in my muscles, but somewhere deep down in my soul. All that breathing in, breathing out, it eased some knot inside me. My piles got better. I won't lie to you and tell you that I was completely cured, but I was at least seventy per cent better.

'See, always listen to me,' Jojo said when I told her. 'Seventy per cent is large.'

'Yes. So I only feel like I'm passing large razor blades some of the time.'

'Gaitonde, for a hard man you complain a lot. Do you have any idea what it feels like to give birth?' And then she was off. This was one of her themes: that the world suffered, and in it women suffered the most, and the suffering of women passed unnoticed. 'Bastard men make suffering the duty of women,' she said. 'All those suffering mothers in the films. And women are also chutiyas for believing it.' Early on in our friendship, I had tried to argue with her. I'd said to her, do you think men don't suffer? Let me tell you a few stories of men torn up and dying and working all their lives for little pay and food a dog wouldn't eat. But she always had four stories for every one of mine, and I grew to enjoy listening to her, somewhere in all those woebegone tales there would be little tasty titbits about her. I knew that she grew up in a village, brought up by her mother – there was a sister somewhere, who she never talked to. The father had died early. When she had come to Bombay as a young girl, she had spoken only Tulu and some Konkani, no Hindi or English or anything else. Jojo's sister's husband had run off with young Jojo, told her that he would make her a movie star, but after months and months of doing the rounds of producer's offices, he had prostituted her to one of them. He told her all the girls had to do this, compromise was the price of fame and part of the business, everyone compromised. She had understood this by now, and had done it, but the film had never materialized. Then there had been another producer, and then another. He began to beat her, this boyfriend. She spoke Hindi fluently by now, and some English. So she ran away. The boyfriend found her, beat her. She cracked his jaw with a pestle, so he left her mostly alone after that. But there was the question of making a living. So she struggled, starved, then went back to one of the producers and compromised, and then another. Now she kept their money for herself, and saved. She got into the dancer's union, and worked in a few movies, as a dancer in the big production numbers. For a while she held on to the dream, that she would some day be an actress, a Mumtaz who worked her way up from the chorus line to a star's gigantic close-ups. But she wasn't stupid enough to believe it for long. And she was smart enough to understand both demand and supply: she knew rich men, and she knew young girls who needed a way to survive in the city. So she began her business. But her business wasn't only sex. She did get some of the girls acting jobs. And she herself, finally, became a producer. With some of her money, and some of mine, that year she started planning the production of a television serial, about two young girls who became friends at school, where one was the rich darling of the teachers, and the other a poor foundling, and these two came together to the city and suffered and suffered. Jojo was very clear about our partnership. 'Listen, Gaitonde,' she told me. 'This is a business deal, nothing more, nothing less. I want all the money in white, by cheque. And no funny business. All I owe you is money, nothing more. You offered first, I didn't ask.'

'Achcha, baba,' I said. 'You don't owe me anything else. Business, that's all.' She sent me the script of the pilot episode, and I read it. And then never wanted to read one of her scripts again. Bunty was right. As he had said, what man could watch scene after scene of women crying over rubbish and then hugging each other? I told Jojo that I liked it. If this crying was what she wanted to make serials about, if that was what women wanted to watch, let them have it. I knew that despite Jojo's cheerfulness, her jaunty cursing, there were days when she didn't get out of bed, when she couldn't speak to anyone, when the entire world seemed to her a jungle of ash, a cremation ground filled with walking corpses. These black moods took her sometimes, and she lived through them only by promising herself death. That's what she told me one morning.

'I tell myself that if it gets too bad, I'll kill myself. And I have the pills ready. And then I count up the things in life that are good. The pain still hurts, but I know it isn't endless, because I have the pills. Then I can go through another day. And then another.'

She frightened me. I tried to make her see a priest, or a magician, or a doctor. I had seen shows on television about depression. She told me to mind my own business. 'Read my serial scripts,' she said. 'Maybe you'll learn something about women, Gaitonde.'

I didn't read any more, but I did keep talking to her. Right from the start, she refused to come to the jail to see me. 'The only reason we can talk this way is because we haven't met, Gaitonde. Don't you understand that?' I knew she wasn't shy of men or of sex. In fact she was quite the opposite, she had men, she chose them and took them. 'Why should men always be the ones who select and chase and take? I make my own money, I take care of myself, I want my own fun. I'm not ashamed of what I want.' So she chose men sometimes, and she took them to bed. She told me this after we had become frank friends, and she told it to me with no fear, no shame. When she told me this, a twist of alarmed excitement came up my throat, as if I had just run off the edge of a roof in the dark. 'That's, that's disgusting, Jojo,' I whispered urgently into the phone. 'Why?' she snapped right back. 'You can chodo those boys of yours in jail because you're a man and need relief? And that's not disgusting? But I am? You make me laugh.' Of course I told her that was different, that she was a woman. And she said, 'Yes, I'm a woman, and a woman can have ten times as much pleasure as a man. Don't you know that?' That was true enough. Everyone knew that. I said, 'That's why saali women need to be locked up, randis that they are.' And she burst out laughing, and said, 'But, my bhai, you're locked up and I'm not. I'm free.' She was free. She took men, and she called them her thokus. She made me laugh with stories about them, about how they cried when she left them, and the size of their parts, and their vanities. And she refused to meet me. 'Not now,' she said, 'and not later. I'm not going to be one of your thokus, and you don't want to be mine. We're bhidus, bhidu.' It was true. We were friends.

In May, TADA lapsed, but I remained in jail. The law was gone for the rest of the citizens, but since I had been charged under it, I still writhed under its heel. My case was still to be adjudicated under its rules, which were no laws but arbitrary edicts. I cursed my lawyers, and threatened to get new ones. Do we live in a dictatorship? I said. Have I no rights as a citizen? What are you, top lawyers or bhangis? Why am I paying you these truckloads of money?