Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'No electricity, no television, I don't think we even had radio till I was fourteen or fifteen.'

'You're right,' Sartaj said. 'It sounds very peaceful, but I don't think I could live there.'

'You couldn't,' Mary said. 'That village isn't there any more, to return to. It is all completely changed.'

Sartaj stretched his arms over his head, worked his spine, sighed. 'It is late. I have some work to do at the station. We should go,' he said. 'Back to Bombay.'

'You didn't tell me about Zoya Mirza. Jana will be angry if I come back with no news.'

So he told her about the meeting with Zoya Mirza as they drove down, not fast, not hurried. The city crept up, not dramatic, just inevitable. The scattered shacks and houses and buildings gathered themselves together into a dense mass. Sartaj had the feeling of being drawn in by a larger gravity, and he was glad of it. This was home. Mary sat comfortably, her knees drawn up, not quite as far along the seat as before.

At her house, they stood in front of each other, suddenly awkward. Sartaj had one hand on the car, the other awkwardly at his side.

'Zoya, is she pretty?' Mary said.

Sartaj shrugged. 'She's all right. Nothing much.'

Mary reached out to nudge his forearm. 'You're smarter about women than you pretend. But really, she's beautiful, isn't she?'

'Arre, I am not just saying that. She's okay, bas. Tall and all that, but just okay. You know she's not even really six feet. Jojo made that up. She's only a little above five ten.'

'Ooooooh,' Mary said, quite pleased by the detail. 'Jojo liked doing things like that.'

They looked past each other, and the silence grew long.

'I should go,' Sartaj said.

'Okay,' Mary said. 'I, I liked the drive.'

'Yes, me also.'

'Okay, bye.'

'Bye.'

She took a step up to him. He was quite stopped for a moment, and then he stuck out his hand. She smiled, shook it. I should kiss her on the cheek, Sartaj thought, but by then she had turned and was away from him. He watched her climb her stairs, waved at her and drove to the station laughing at himself. Where was all that smoothness gone, those old Sartaj-the-deadly-Singh moves? Absolutely vanished, leaving him an absolute bhondu. I am not ageing well, he thought. But he was very cheery, and he hummed mehbooba mehbooba all the way to work.

* * *

Anjali Mathur called him at eleven that night, while he was still working at the station. 'There's no mention of a guru in all our files on Gaitonde,' she said. 'Was this woman sure about this?'

'Yes. She mentioned several conversations.'

'Odd. He must have kept it hidden.'

'Very hidden. He kept Zoya hidden. He must have kept a lot of things hidden. He was good at it.'

'Yes. I did a search in our databases for the word "pralay". I came up with nothing. So then I looked for "qayamat". I found it three times, all in literature from one outfit. This is a militant outfit called Hizbuddeen. They are very shadowy, we have never captured or killed any of their people. We don't even know where they are based, where they operate. But we've found their literature in raids on other Islamic groups in the Kashmir valley, in Punjab, in the north-east along the Bangladesh border. This Hizbuddeen has supplied money and arms to these groups, beyond that we don't know anything about them. They first seem to surface just around the time of the Kargil war. Now, their literature specifically promises "Qayamat", and talks about the signs of the last days. They quote verses from the Qur'an: "Closer and closer to mankind comes their Reckoning: yet they heed not and they turn away." Now, this is interesting. Mumbai is specifically mentioned, in each of the pamphlets.'

Sartaj could hear her leafing through paper. Through the open door, he could see the end of a bench, an empty hallway and a scrubby garden edged by a wall.

'Here,' Anjali Mathur said. 'It says, "A great fire will take the unbelievers, and it will begin in Mumbai." This line is repeated in the other pamphlets with minor changes. "A fire will begin in Mumbai and sweep across the country." But always, Mumbai is mentioned.'

Sartaj was outraged. 'What do these bastards have against Bombay? They don't mention any other cities?'

'No. They just talk about the nation of India as dar-ul-harb, and about its coming destruction. They insist on destruction. The name of the outfit comes from "hizbul", which is "army of", and "deen", which I think is used here in the sense of the Last Judgement. The word can also mean "religion" or "conduct", but in this case it refers to the third verse of the first chapter of the Qur'an, I think. So the Hizbuddeen is the "Army of the Final Day". Anyway, all this would be too little to propose a connection. But I thought the name of this organization sounded familiar. I had been analysing our records of counterfeit money which comes over the border, and I went back and did a cross-check in the databases. Hizbuddeen has been named five times as the source for large sums of counterfeit money. The samples we have from these incidents are exactly the same as the ones from the Kalki Sena, and the ones from Jojo's apartment, and what we found in Gaitonde's bunker.'

Sartaj's head was starting to hurt. What could be the connection between Jojo and rabid extremists promising annihilation? Between Gaitonde and this Muslim militant outfit? Maybe there was no connection at all. He pressed his fingers hard into his forehead, and said, 'It is all still too vague.'

'I agree. There is no reason to conclude that this money indicates any connection. We have only possibilities. Nothing yet that holds together. Only more questions. Who is this guru? What was Gaitonde's relationship with him?'

'I will work on it.'

'Yes. I will keep looking here.'

So they were to keep on working. Sartaj worked another hour at the station, and then went home. He put his feet on the coffee table and drank his whisky, only one glass today, a light one at that. He was aware that he was still working, thinking about Gaitonde and Jojo and thick chunks of money. This was one of the things Megha had hated, that he was unable ever to stop the job from working inside him. He would drink tea, talk about relatives, go and see a film, and somewhere inside him the fragments of some murder would be fitting themselves together. He had always tried to tell her that none of this was voluntary, that he would stop it if he could. That, somehow, had made it worse for Megha, that it was impulse, or instinct. But instinct had taught him its inescapable lessons, and he had learnt to trust it. Now instinct told him that these pieces somehow made a whole. You knew that sometimes, you had the truth in your mouth but no evidence in your hands. And sometimes you acted on this knowledge, you planted evidence, wrote an FIR leaving out certain facts and putting others in. Justice had sometimes to be manipulated into being properly blind.

In this Gaitonde affair, there would be no justice, no redemption. There was only a hope for some partial explanation of what had happened, and this creeping fear. Sartaj was afraid now, he truly was. Now that he was at rest, the fear came back, amplified by English-movie images of disaster, of entire cities being obliterated by special-effects fire. Work, he told himself, work on it. Do your job. So Sartaj closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the sofa and held his glass, and let the bits and shards of information fall through his head and body. He couldn't force anything, couldn't compel an answer. If he was easy enough, if he was fearless, if he opened his mind and heart and belly, a shape would form. He just had to be patient.

On the yacht we watched a lot of films. It was a hundred-and-thirty-foot boat (they had to teach me to call it a yacht) with three decks, and enough room for a sizeable separate drawing room. In that room I put the biggest TV we could fit, and a stack of movie players and a receiver. And in that room we watched movies, hundreds of videos and laser discs and DVDs. Not that we didn't work: I woke every morning at six and exercised and did my yoga and my puja and was at the phones by seven-thirty, eating my breakfast as I took my calls. Managing my company from a distance was at first a difficult education – I had to let go, to stop worrying about details, to give responsibility to others and not tell them how jobs should be done. I felt like a god, distant from the world but directing it from above. By ten-thirty or eleven I was usually done with the day's urgent work, and a little later Bunty called from Bombay with the news about collections and the added-up numbers from the day before. At noon I ate a light lunch with the boys, then took a half-hour nap. Depending on where we were, how close to a convenient shore, I sometimes had a girl to wake me up from the nap, Indonesian or Chinese or Thai. But in any case I was up by two, with the day stretching out in front of me.