Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'This is mad,' Bunty said. 'Bhai, there's nakabandi tonight. I was looked at pretty close twice on the way over here.'

I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. 'At least say hello first,' I said.

He made a sound something like a laugh, full of nerves and edginess, and grabbed my hand. 'Sorry, bhai. I can't believe you're back, and like this.'

'How else would I come back, chutiya? On a magic carpet?'

He shook his head. 'This was too simple.'

He was scared of being by himself, without his bodyguards. I had told him to come unarmed and alone. 'Simple is best. What's the nakabandi for?'

'There were two big shop robberies over the last two days. I was told they have some information on the robbers, ex-employees. Small time, bhai.'

So, nothing to do with us. Still, there were policemen gathered near metal grilles at some of the crossroads. We had to go through two of the inspections by the time we got to the highway. They peered into the slowing cars, and at the second blockade one of the policemen shone a torch directly into my face. He waved us on. The breath came out of Bunty in a thin wheeze.

'Calm down, Bunty. They won't know me because they all know I'm far away.'

'You've lost weight, bhai, but still…'

On the boat I had a good diet and regular exercise, I enforced a regimen on myself to purify my body, and so I had shed the pounds from jail and marriage. 'And you've put it on,' I told him. He had. We passed a small party of devotees dragging a five-foot Ganesha on a cart. They were dancing in front of Ganesha, men and women and children, to the beat of two drums. They were happy. I could feel that old racketing drumbeat in my neck, in my shoulders. 'There are more jhopadpattis now,' I said. 'Look at this.' The swarms of shacks had crept up right to the highway, where I clearly remembered empty shoulders and scrubland.

'Really, bhai? Looks the same to me.'

I had been away for more than two years. Nothing looked the same to me. Under the orange light of the streetlamps the slums slept a convoluted sleep, browner and more numerous than I remembered. We passed a rank of hulking trucks painted bright red and green, and then went through a market with a hill of seeping vegetable rubbish at either end. The rubbish must have always been there, but I noticed it now. There was much new construction, taller buildings, one white one with gigantic concrete stilts built around it to support three new stories on top of the already existing four floors.

'That's one of the new extra-FSI jobs, bhai,' Bunty said.

Some builders had oiled some bureaucrats, who had found a chink in the regulations to finger the Floor-Space Index, so suddenly there were these strange crane-legged contraptions all over the city. 'Three big new floors,' I said. 'That's a lot of money.'

'We know the owner,' Bunty said, grinning. 'He's become a friend of ours.'

He had contributed to my turnover, this FSI buyer, yet I was vaguely unsettled by this new trend. 'I wouldn't want to live on the ground floor of that thing,' I told Bunty. 'Those legs look like matchsticks.'

He grunted out a long laugh. 'If it goes down, bhai,' he said, 'all the better. Then you can build again, without that old building underneath. Maybe we should arrange it. He'll build it at double the selling price, better for us.'

'Chutiya,' I said, but I was smiling. The billboards were all announcing internet companies and websites in flashy, forward-tilting lettering that promised speed. Clusters of auto-rickshaws sat nose to nose like bulbous insects. I caught myself thinking that, insects , and thought, I've been away too long.

'Here,' Bunty said.

He had arranged a room for us at the back of a house in Santa Cruz. The street was very quiet, and the landlord was a furniture merchant with two school-age daughters, very orthodox and very respectable. We had two single beds, one coffee table and a clean bathroom. Bunty wrinkled his nose. 'All right, bhai?' he said, pretending concern for me. But it was he who had acquired high tastes, with his new incomes and his new stature.

'Fine for me,' I said. 'Let's sleep.'

I woke him the next morning at six. He groaned when he saw the time, but I was merciless. I got him up, and out, and we walked down the road to a restaurant. We drank chai from their first pot of the day, and ate idlis. A line of office-goers waited at the bus stop in the dust-haze raised by the buses and cars. Schoolchildren went past us, swinging their bags. I was content to watch the scene, it was like a pageant to me. But at eight-thirty I sent Bunty to bring me a scooter. He protested. 'Arre, why, bhai?' he said. 'I'll just drive you in the car.'

'You're not going to drive me,' I told him. 'And I want a scooter.'

He wanted to argue with me, but I gave him a look that shut him up. Off he went. Of course he was worried for his livelihood and his future, which would squeeze down considerably if I was jammed into a jail cell again, or killed. But he also loved me. We had walked together through many battles now, and I had made him a settled man, with a wife and two children and responsibilities and investments and money. So he hated me a little now, for making him risk it alone in a room in Goregaon with no guns and no bodyguards. But by nine-thirty he had a scooter for me at our room, a green Vespa with fancy silvered rear-view mirrors. 'I had to borrow it from someone,' he said apologetically.

'The mamus will stop me just for those mirrors,' I said. 'Your friend thinks he's on a racing motorcycle?' But driving even a Vespa was difficult for me, it had been so many years since I'd done it. I skidded even as I started off, and Bunty ran after me until I waved him away. The first ten minutes were terrifying, but I grinned at the rush of it, and sucked in the wind between my teeth. I went by three mandaps with towering Ganeshas, all of them a bright, radiant orange. By the time I got to Juhu I was fine, I was slipping between the cars with complete confidence, and changing gears smoothly. I was sleek. I saw myself in the rear-views, and I was a purposeful man having a good time in the morning. I was in Bombay, and I was fearless. I was going to my Guru-ji.

But once I got to the yagna-sthal in Andheri West I was stuck. They had police bandobast from two hundred feet away, and they weren't letting any lone scootering taklus through. I had to park, and walk with a few hundred other devotees towards the mansion. This house belonged to a film-producer devotee of Guru-ji's, a man with good political connections and lots of property in Bombay. The open ground in front of the house had been fenced and covered with a series of open-sided shamianas. The arrangements were all faultless, with wide, straight avenues between the shamianas and sadhus guiding the devotees to the proper seating places. There were television sets scattered through the shamianas, and good loudspeakers, so that you may have been seated far from the central dais – as I was – but you could see Guru-ji and what he was doing quite clearly. But he wasn't there yet, just a group of his sadhus arranging the materials of the yagna on the dais. He appeared precisely at eleven, wheeling strongly down the central aisle, followed by a group of sadhus. They had built a ramp up to the dais, and up he went. I found myself standing, dancing, elbow to elbow with my fellow devotees, shouting 'Jai Gurudev'. He let us fall into a chant, and then he raised his hands. We were silent. 'Sit,' he said, and all by himself went from the wheelchair to his seat in front of the microphones. He had strong arms, I could see that.

He told us about sacrifice, about the altar. The dimensions of the altar had to be based on a measure of the sacrificer: the length of the middle joint of the middle finger of the sacrificer was one angula, and one hundred and twenty angulas made one purusha. The sadhus needed to lay out a square equal in length to two purushas, or two hundred and forty angulas. Who was the sacrificer? Guru-ji asked, 'Who will be the sacrificer? We are merely the priests, but who will be the yajman?' He paused, and then answered his own question: 'In the old days, charkravartin emperors were the patrons of this sacrifice we are engaged in. But the day of the emperors is gone. Who is the emperor today? Who has power, who leads? It is you. You, the public. Power flows from you, from your votes. So, today, you are the sacrificer, the yajman. The public is the sacrificer. Each and every one of you is the sacrificer. So we have taken a scientific average. From a sample of two thousand Indian men from all over the country, from every state, our doctors have taken precise measurements, and we will use the average as our angula. You, my friends, are our purusha.'