Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'I see a yellow wall,' he said. 'I see blood, a thin stream of blood running down the wall and dripping to the bottom.'

I was crying. He knew, Guru-ji somehow knew, and I could not hide from him.

'But that is all I see, Ganesh. Tell me. What happened?'

So I told him about my father, Raghavendra Gaitonde, son of a poor temple priest in Karwar, poor Brahmin himself, married to Sumangala. I didn't want to linger on the hapless man or the deceitful woman, so I told the whole ugly story fast. Raghvendra was starving in Karwar, trying to officiate at marriages and pujas, not finding many opportunities because he was very young and mild and ineffectual. So he went when his cousin Suryakant called him to Nashik. This Suryakant Shenoy owned some farmland, did some civil construction and also dabbled in local politics. He had served as the district secretary at the local Congress office for a while. He had recently finished some school building for the government in a village called Digadh, and after the project was finished he donated substantial money for a new Lakshmi-Narayan temple there. So Raghavendra was installed as the priest in this temple, and he had a small but tidy and pucca house, also courtesy of his cousin, and the living wasn't rich but it was enough, and Sumangala was happy at last. The conditions of the villagers slowly improved, helped by an irrigation project that Suryakant Shenoy had sanctioned, and so Raghavendra and Sumangala also experienced a bit of comfort, as the donations to the temple increased. Besides, Suryakant Shenoy came often to visit, always bringing a bag full of vegetables, ghee, butter, a good half potli of rice besides. He had lots of work in the villages in the area, and was glad to see his cousins, and there was no need for formality, it was his duty to help. Under his benign protection life went on, and a year and a half later, a son was born in the house. Of course there were celebrations and rituals, and Suryakant was a part of all this. The boy was named Kiran, on Suryakant's suggestion. Kiran grew up bright and energetic. He walked when he was eight months and one week old, he was speaking by the time he was two, and at four he was reading, not just tracing the letters over his father's shoulders, but managing to make out whole words. But it was also in this year the boy lost some of his natural cheer, he became inward and watchful. He was old enough now to see how the outside world saw his father. In the children who were his friends, and in their parents, he recognized a jokey contempt for the pandit, a dismissal of him as a negligible force, not quite a fool but hapless, a subject of pity, not sympathy. Kiran had no words for any of this, but he knew it as surely as he knew that his mother was regarded as beautiful. It was in this year that the Kumbh came around to Nashik again, after its absence of twelve years. Kiran went, of course, with his mother and Suryakant Kaka and neighbours, to take a dip in the waters of the sacred river, to be dazed and astonished by the unimaginable number of pilgrims, to marvel at the musk glands being sold by the gypsy women. Suryakant Kaka bought ice-cream for Kiran, and this unprecedented treat filled Kiran with a plump joy, and he hung off Suryakant Kaka's broad wrist. Finally they made their way to Ramkund, where Shree Ram was said to have taken his daily bath, and here, through a moving thicket of elbows and hips, Kiran saw his father. Raghavendra was standing on the slippery wet stone that led down to the water, holding a thali piled with white kumkum in one hand, and a small metal stamp in the other. He was offering to put tilaks on the pilgrims, like the one he had on his own forehead. A pilgrim stopped, and Raghavendra put the naamam on him, and as his father reached up, Kiran saw how thin he was, how the skin on his arm was loose, how his stoop signalled a deference, a humility that filled Kiran with anger. The pilgrim dropped coins into Raghavendra's hand, and for the first time ever, Kiran's throat filled with the bitterness of contempt, of disdain for his father. This man was a weak man, he was an incapable man. Now Kiran knew why the neighbours laughed at his father, why they called out 'Ay pandita' as they did, and the knowledge nauseated him. He refused to go down any further towards the river, despite anything anyone said, and after that it was known in the family that Kiran was afraid of water. This story stayed, and Kiran's contempt remained, until one afternoon when Kiran came home from the first day of class two, and found a crowd around his house. Something had happened. Hands grabbed at him, but he pulled himself loose and kicked and bit his way through to the door. Inside, there were the elders of the locality, frightened and yet titillated. One of them was pointing up. Then Kiran saw what at: a stream of blood running down the wall, a puddle at the bottom. He screamed, raced up the stairs, punched at the knees of a man who was blocking the door and burst out on to the roof. What was dead on the roof was not Kiran's father, but Suryakant Kaka. He was lying face down on a charpai, naked to the waist. Kiran knew the breadth of the back, the bulk of the shoulders. But the back of Suryakant Kaka's head was a pulpy mix of black and red and some other colour, creamy with shards of white. Another unsteady step, and Kiran saw that Suryakant Kaka was all intact in front, he was staring down at the ground below with a concentrated wonderment, as if the pitted brick contained whole universes of meaning. Suryakant Kaka had told Kiran about the names of stars, and the shapes of constellations. Now he was half-destroyed.

A neighbour took Kiran by the shoulders, tried to lead him away. Who was this man? Kiran knew his smell, this yellowed shirt, these long hands, but he couldn't remember his name. 'Who did it?' Kiran said, although – somehow – he already knew. The man shook his head, tried to lead him away. Kiran screamed, jerked free and asked again, 'Who? Who? Who?' A gravelly voice said, 'Tell him,' and still there was a moment's silence. Then the man holding Kiran said, 'Your father. He is gone.' And then, as an afterthought, 'Your Aai is below. With the women.'

The police came, and the women left, and the men left, and the body was taken away, and Kiran was alone with his mother, who sat huddled against the side of a wooden cupboard in the bedroom, her hair matted about her face.

'So,' Gaitonde told Guru-ji, 'my father killed that Suryakant, and he left. Nobody ever saw him again. I don't know where he is.'

'And your mother?'

'I stayed till I was twelve. Then I ran away. I came to Bombay.'

'You don't know where she is?'

'No.'

They had been shunned by the village. Shunned, that is, except by the men, who came around and assured Sumangala that she need not fear, that they were there to look after her, that she would have a comfortable life. These men brought – as that other man had – vegetables and saris and money. She could not go home to her maike because her parents wouldn't have her. So she stayed in that same house, with its new coat of whitewash which was donated by one of her new clients. That's what they were, clients. And now Kiran felt the full force of the village's contempt. They called him harami to his face, and the older boys made lewd jokes about his mother, about her body, about her practices and proclivities. There was no day when his body was not marked with bruises, some old, some fresh. He was always beaten in every fight, but after he picked up a large rock and sent it skimming past a tormenter's head, the gang saw that he meant to kill one of them, and after that they shouted their insults at him from a little further away. He began to carry a knife, and they called him mad. He waited, and one day when he could overcome his fear of the huge unknown spaces, when the heft of the knife under his shirt made him strong enough, he walked to the railway station eight kos away, and waited for a train. He already knew the name of the train, and where it went, and its timings. It came, and he squeezed himself into a crowded carriage. Nobody paid any attention to him. There was nowhere to sit, and he leaned against the side of a stack of big metal trunks in the corridor and waited. The edges of the trunks bit into his ribs and legs, but this was a good pain. He was going away. At every station, he asked, 'Is this Mumbai?' When a man said, 'Yes,' he hopped off. But the man had fooled him. He wanted to stab the man, but the train was already away. Kiran waited for another train. He arrived in the city at last, and waited until the buildings grew big and crowded against each other, and the roads were filled with cars. He did not ask anyone again. When he was sure, he got off.