Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

She slipped forward on the seat, and gave me fully the blank threat of her gaze. 'You look too dirty to be a khabari. They try to look clean and trustworthy.'

'I'm not,' I said. 'I wouldn't know who to inform to.'

'Get in,' she said. She made room on the cracked red rexine, gave instructions to the auto-rickshaw driver and we went put-putting away through unfamiliar lanes. The buildings came closer to each other now, jammed together wall against wall, and the streets were close with people who stepped aside for the auto to pass. I peered out on the left, and then through the oval window in the canvas at the rear.

'Calm down,' the woman said. 'You're safe. If I wanted to harm you, that big ghoda in your pants wouldn't save you.'

I looked down. I had been holding the revolver through stained blue cloth. I let go of it and massaged my right hand with the other. 'I've never been here before,' I said.

'I know,' she said. She leaned over to me. 'What's your name?'

'My name is Ganesh. And yours?'

'I am Kanta Bai. What do you have for Paritosh Shah?'

I said, close to her ear, 'I have gold.' I came closer. 'Biscuits.'

'Be quiet, Ganesh, until we get out of the auto.'

The auto stopped on a busy bazaar square full of wholesale clothing shops, and she led me through rapid turns in narrowing lanes. She was known well here, and people passing greeted her by name, but she hurried by without a pause. At the end of a lane there was a wall with a break in it, a jagged hole lined with shattered bricks, and on the other side there was a basti. I watched my feet and followed her rapid walk. The shacks were closer now, and in some places the pucca buildings were so close to each other across the lane that it was like walking through a tunnel. Men and women and children stood aside to let Kanta Bai pass. There were boys, young men, sitting on ledges and in doorways and I felt their eyes on my neck, and I kept my back straight and kept close to Kanta Bai.

I smelt the overpowering round richness of gur first, and then the vomit. We turned right and passed by a low doorway, and I saw metal tables, and men sitting around them drinking. A boy put a plate with two boiled eggs down on the table nearest the entrance, and his customer shook out the last milky drops from a glass into his mouth. Kanta Bai angled around the side of the building, and the whine of an electric turbine deepened its pitch. She left me in a dark room filled to the ceiling with sacks of gur. 'Wait here,' she said, and so I waited. The warm smell settled on my shoulders, brown as river-bottom earth. Through the unceasing grind of the motor I could hear the highest notes from a radio in the front room, the bar, just the tinny tops of the song, coming to me like froth, and I wondered about the quality of Kanta Bai's product. There had been customers enough, maybe twenty on a work-day afternoon, sipping steadily at the eight and ten-rupee glasses of saadi and satrangi they distilled in the back. It was a good business, raw materials cheap and legally available, overheads low. And the demand for good desi liquor was steady and constant, as continuous and vast as the tramp of feet in the lanes outside. I leaned forward and through the curtained doorway I could see just the bare feet of Kanta Bai's workers and the dragging bottoms of sacks, and occasionally the round gleam of bottles. I recognized her sari, and so was able to turn away and be standing at the furthest end of the room when she turned aside the curtain. When I saw her eyes, burning white despite the sloughy darkness of the gur sacks, I was afraid.

'I spoke to Paritosh Shah on the phone,' she said.

I was unable to speak, buried by the abrupt terror of being alone, inexperienced, alone with gold. I nodded, and in the same motion leaned my shoulder against the doorway, very casual. I put a hand on my hip and nodded again.

Kanta Bai was faintly amused. A very small ripple of pleasure passed through her jaw, and she said, 'Let's see your gold.'

I nodded. I was still very unsafe, queasy inside, but this was necessary. I groped in my right pocket, moved the bars to my left hand, and held them out, two of them weighty in my palm.

Kanta Bai took the bars, tested their heft and weight, and gave them back to me. Her eyes were steady on my face. 'He'll see you now. I'll have one of my boys take you.'

'Good,' I said, now able to find my voice and confidence. The biscuits went back to my pocket, and I fumbled out a thin roll of notes, and fanned them out.

'You can't pay me.'

'What?'

'How much do you have?'

I turned my hand to the side, to the light. 'Thirty-nine rupees.'

At this she gurgled out a laugh, and her cheeks bunched and her eyes squeezed almost shut. 'Bachcha, go and meet Paritosh Shah. He'll owe me a favour if things go well. Thirty-nine rupees doesn't make you Raja Bhoj of Bumbai.'

'I'll owe a favour, too,' I said. 'If things go well.'

'Very smart,' she said. 'Maybe you're a good boy after all.'

* * *

Paritosh Shah was a family man. I waited for him on a second-floor hallway, near a staircase that exhaled occasional blasts of sharp urine-stink. The building was six storeys tall and ancient, with a bamboo framework roped and nailed to its tottering façade, and worrisome gaps in the ornate scrollwork on the balconies. The second floor was full of male Shahs, who passed by where Kanta Bai's boy had left me on the landing, and they called each other Chachu and Mamu and Bhai, and ignored me entirely. They walked by my dirty shirt and ragged trousers with the barest of glances. They were a flashy, gold-ringed lot who wore mostly white safari suits. I could see their white shoes and white chappals lined up in untidy rows near the uniformed guard at the door. Somewhere inside was the sanctum of Paritosh Shah, guarded by a hoary old muchchad perched on a stool with an absurdly long-barrelled shotgun. He wore a blue uniform with yellow braid, and his moustache was enormous and curved at the ends. After twenty minutes of passing Shahs and piss-stench, I was starting to feel quite insulted, and somehow my resentment focused itself on the ammunition belt the old man wore around his chest, on its cracked leather and three cylindrical red cartridges. I imagined pulling my revolver and putting a hole in the centre of the ammunition belt, just above the saggy stomach. It was an absurd thought, but there was satisfaction in it.

Ten minutes more went by, and that was enough. It was either now or the bullet to his chest. I had a pulsing headache. 'Listen, mamu,' I said to the guard, who was now investigating his left ear with a pencil stub. 'Tell Paritosh Shah I came to do business, not to stand out here and smell his latrine.'

'What?' The pencil came out. 'What?'

'Tell Paritosh Shah I'm gone. Gone elsewhere. His loss.'

'Wait, wait.' The old man leaned back and pointed his moustachios through the doorway. 'Badriya, come and see what this fellow is saying.'

Badriya came, and he was younger by much, and very tall, a quiet-moving muscle-builder, with a deliberate padding way about him in his bare feet. He stood in the doorway with his arms hanging away from his chest, and I was sure he had a weapon tucked away in the small of his back, under the black bush-shirt. 'Is there a problem?'

It was a challenge, no question about it, and the man was blank-faced and hard, but I was riding now on the thin-drawn craziness of the moment, on the exhaustion from the long day and the bracing leap of anger. 'Yes, problem,' I said. 'I'm tired of waiting for your maderchod Paritosh Shah.'

The old man bristled and started to climb down from his stool, but Badriya spoke quietly. 'He's a busy man.'

'So am I.'

'Are you?'

'I am.'

And that was all it took. The guard had panic in his shoulders. His grip on the shotgun was clumsy, far up the stock, and with one leg on the ground and the other on a cross-bar of the stool he was tilted wrong and unbalanced. I watched him and I watched Badriya. It was absurd to be near death in a sudden moment in a grimy corridor with nostrils full, unreasonable to be almost moneyed and not yet, ludicrous to be Ganesh Gaitonde, poor in the city and standing to the side always, there was no sense in any of it and so there was an exulting eagerness in me, a glad and crazy courage. Here. Now. Here I am. What of it?