Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

I came out into the lane holding my arm. Only now, when I started to walk, I felt a heated line of pain across my lower back, as if someone had drawn a molten wire across my buttocks. 'You're bleeding, bhai,' someone said to me. I pushed him aside, went into the house. 'We got one of them,' another boy said to me. We had got one, he lay near the front gate, his leg twisted up under his body. Inside the house, in the front hall, there was blood on the ceilings, smears of tissue on the walls. Dipu was dead, and so was Kataruka.

Seventeen men died in my house that day, and four women, and one child. But at the time, we had no count, only a tangle of bodies. It was only when we started picking them up, and carrying them out, that we found Subhadra and Abhi at the far end of the corridor, in the kitchen, curled up under the cover of her blue sari. They were both dead from the same AK-47 bullet, which had come through the door-jamb, and come through them. They were dead. My wife was dead. My son was dead.

* * *

I went back to jail. After I had my broken wrist plastered, and the graze on my backside stitched up, after we cremated our dead, we considered our options. We knew now that the policemen who had done the firing were not policemen, but Suleiman Isa's men, that the uniforms had been bought from Maganlal Dresswallah's, that the van had been stolen – or so the real police said – from Zone 13 headquarters. We knew, reliably, that the supari given for this suicide mission was two crores, so that the four maderchods who came to my house walked away with fifty lakhs each. But two of them didn't walk away, one died right there in my courtyard, another covered the inside of the van with the blood that he coughed up. He died the same day. But still, my enemies almost got what they wanted. They couldn't say that they had killed Ganesh Gaitonde in his own basti, in his own house, but they did say that they struck at me in my lair, that I had run from them, that I was a coward with a wound in my gaand. They were ashamed that they had broken the unspoken rule of the companies against hurting family members, but they could say that was an accident, and they could say that they had taken my gaand.

But I was alive. That was what mattered. Whatever the world said, I was alive. And that is what finally matters. Honour and pride are the dreams that men feed on, and will die for, but my boys understood that, even for them, it was better that I had stayed alive. I was still here, to recoup, to plan, to take revenge. And I had to stay alive. So I went back to jail. It was easy to arrange. I got into a car with some of my boys and went up to Mulund. We stopped the car at the Mulund check-post, and the boys picked a quarrel with the constables there. I came out and shouted too, and the boys conspicuously addressed me as 'Ganesh Bhai', just to make sure that the stupid mamus understood who I was. Then we all got back into the car and drove on, far beyond city limits.

So I had broken the conditions of my bail, and had to be put back in the one safe haven for me. I had understood that this time it had been fake police, but the next time it might be the real ones, come to take me for a ride in a black van, a ride that would end with a bullet in my head. Every door in the city hid an assassin, every day was a battle. I had become too big for them to leave me alive. And so jail was my impregnable castle, where the walls and the rules and the regulations made a home for me, where the jailers were responsible for keeping me from harm, and where I could continue to do business without hindrance.

I settled back into the old routine. There was a new set of faces in the barrack, but there was the same grouping of dhurries around my own, in order of seniority. Life went on as before. But I was alone, so very alone. My boys were my family, and they were kind as always, mindful of my losses and my injuries. They took care of me, and I did business. But in my heart I was alone. So many had died, not just in this last attack, but through my journey, in all the battles. And I was still alive. Why? For what? I waited for an answer. I practised yoga in the mornings, in the afternoons I practised pranayama. But all my hard-won calm was taken from me by Abhi's laughter, which I heard floating in the afternoon sunlight. At night, I went eagerly to my pillow because I knew he would come to me in my sleep, but my very waiting chased sleep away. I was light-headed. I walked through the world like a man sliding weightlessly through a dream.

'It feels so strange,' I told Jojo, very late at night, on the phone. 'I feel like, like a lost ghost. Like somebody else's story. Like there's a projector going chat-chat-chat somewhere and I'm moving around on a screen.'

'It'll pass, Gaitonde,' she said. 'Pain passes. It always passes.'

She sounded so close, as if she were in the next bed. I had made her buy a new mobile phone, and had a new handy myself, and we spoke only to each other on these new connections. I had two other phones for business. My enemies hadn't been trying to kill my family, that I knew, but still I was afraid for Jojo. I told her that our connection needed to become even more invisible to the world, that it was bad for her media-industry image if it became generally known that she and I were friends. This she understood, and she became even more discreet than she had already been. We spoke late at night, only on the special phones.

'Gaitonde?' she said. 'Hello?'

'Here,' I said. 'I'm here.' But I wasn't so sure I was there any more. A son roots a man in the world. Take away that connection and you cut him loose. 'You know what I miss? I miss the smell of his hair after a bath.'

'I know. What do you miss about Subhadra?'

I had trouble conjuring up her face, remembering what she looked like. But of course I didn't say this to Jojo. 'She used to bring me milk at night,' I said, but I knew Jojo had caught the hesitation. She kept quiet, though, and didn't read me one of her lectures about men and women.

'Gaitonde. You never talk about your father and mother.'

'I don't.'

'Your mother, who was she?'

'A woman, what else?'

'What else? What was she like?'

'She was my mother. Forget it. All this maderchod talk.'

Of course she caught the growl in my voice, and was quiet. I hadn't meant to cut her off, and I didn't want silence, couldn't stand it. 'Tell me about your mother and father,' I said. I could hear her breathing. 'Jojo?'

'I am trying not to curse you. Because you already have a lot of tension.'

'If I didn't have tension, you would give me gaalis?'

'Anybody who speaks to me like that gets gaalis.'

I was lying on the floor, in a corner of the barrack. I liked the cold concrete on the back of my neck. Through a window I could see the black rise of a wall, the sparkling shards of glass on its rim, keen in the moonlight. I had to smile a little. Somehow Jojo's recklessness, her anger, it made me smile. In life I would have hated her, I think. But on the phone, me here, she there, she had me smiling. 'Listen, madam,' I said. 'Tension I do have. So forgive me. Tell me about your mother.'

Jojo told me about her father, who was a sea captain. He drove small boats for a big company, and was away for months at a time. When he came home he wanted the house to be quiet. The parrots in the orchards behind the house drove him into a trembling rage, he threw firecrackers into the tops of trees and finally bought a shotgun. All his murdering of koels and swallows wouldn't banish the birds, and they sat on the heads of his scarecrows, and nested in their bellies. Finally he retreated to the armchair in his bedroom, put red earplugs in his ears and a black scarf over his eyes. His daughters tiptoed around him, and tried to stay awake late to listen for scraps of conversation between him and their mother. They never heard anything that would make sense of him, not even at meals, when all he said was that there was too much salt in the fish curry and that there was no money for Easter dresses. And so it went until he left, again for a few months. When Jojo was eleven, this big-beard father died of a heart attack on the bridge of his latest ship, on a rainy day in the Arabian Gulf. He died sitting in his captain's chair, with his black scarf over his eyes, so that his men thought he was sleeping. Finally he had quiet, Jojo thought. But there was no quiet for them, because when it came to the matter of his pension it turned out to be not so much. They were poor. But Jojo's mother refused to be downcast, or frightened. I have my land, she said, I refuse to live meekly and full of tears because my husband was taken by God. God is merciful and he will look after us. And so she brought them up, with hard work and hardships and hard discipline. You have to buy your own food in this world, she said, remember that.