Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

So we let it be, we let it go. It was frustrating not to take credit for a great victory, but I saw Mr Kumar's point. He had spent a lifetime not taking credit, but I can tell you it was hard for us. I gave a triple bonus to everyone involved in the operation, and sent them off to holiday in Bali. And of course I restrained myself from talking about the operation to Guru-ji, who was fascinated by the particulars of the event. 'These Israelis really observe the psychology of the target,' he said. Sometimes I was glad his clairvoyance was not total. But Guru-ji did see images of a group of violent men looking for him, hunting him, so he tightened his own security. I advised him on what he needed. After all, in Bombay, I had been able to get physically close to him without once being searched.

I didn't even begin to understand the psychology of Guru-ji, but here's what I knew about him: he was born near Sialkot, on 14 February 1934, at nine forty-two in the evening. He grew up all over western Punjab, transferring from one air-force base to another with his aircraft-technician father. They were thrown eastwards by Partition, but they made their journey safely, under the protection of the services, and settled first in Jodhpur, and then in Pathankot. Guru-ji soon became a famed sportsman, the captain of every cricket team he played for from the eighth class upwards. There were hopes, expectations, that he would play for the country. In Pathankot, on the day before his eighteenth birthday, he had borrowed his father's motorcycle to go to the cinema, to meet his friends. He spun off the road near the main entrance of the army cantonment, near the captured Pakistani tank with the drooping cannon. It was a bright sunny day, there was no water or oil on the road. Nobody ever knew why it happened. The military police picked him up and took him to the nearby military hospital, and they gave him immediate attention. But there was an injury to his lumbar vertebra, and he lost function in the lower part of his body. 'I woke up on my first day as a man,' he told me in Singapore, 'to find that I was only half a man. But then, Ganesh, there was the other thing.'

The other thing was his visions. Before the accident he had been a normal Punjabi boy, interested in cricket, fast motorcycles, good food, his yaars, his exams. He had a kind of general belief in fearless Hanuman, and he went to the temple with his mother, and gossiped at weddings while the priests chanted. That was the extent of his spirituality. But after his accident, he was visited by visions. He saw the past and the future. These were not dreamlike images, confused and fuzzy. He saw details, he could see the colour of a man's tongue, the embroidery on a woman's handkerchief. He could smell cooking oil, hear the splash of water on brick. Two days after recovering consciousness, he told a nurse, 'That man – Fred, Phillip? – who gave you a gold necklace is still thinking of you.' Hospital staff are used to dealing with raving patients. But this nurse had been in love with a much older cousin by marriage, and they had never told anyone, and she had certainly not told this injured boy. From that moment his reputation grew and unfurled across the city and beyond. And from that moment he began his great journey inward, his attempt to understand the nature of the self, of time and the universe. 'I had to try to understand what was happening to me, Ganesh,' he said. Right from that hospital bed he began his meditations and his reading, his meetings with philosophers and sadhus and tantrics and pandits. It had been a long, ceaseless search. 'In my injury I found myself,' he said. 'From the outside I was brought to the inside.'

Which didn't mean that he wasn't interested in the outside. He had a passion for science, for the new knowledge of today. He read every scientific magazine he could find, and thick books about what walked on earth before humans ever existed, and what would fly in the spaces of the future. He keenly followed all the latest inventions and innovations in computers, and talked to me about medicine, and lasers, and cloning. He had a wheelchair that could climb stairs by itself, and turn corners on two wheels, and balance on one. His eyes burned when he talked about gyroscopes and software and non-polluting power generation. He sat on the board of three universities. He was a secular man. He didn't have that unreasoning hatred for Muslims that I had encountered so often in India and abroad, that disgust for burkhas and beef-eating and dirty personal habits. Guru-ji welcomed them at his sermons, was glad to have them in his following. What he didn't like was a certain Muslim tendency to expand, to grasp, to want to rule always. He pointed out that they were the cause of societal trouble in whatever country they lived in, and said that they grated against the grain of time. He told me this only in private, of course. In his public speeches, he was circumspect. But when we were alone, he told me, 'After the fall of the masjid, and after the riots, Ganesh, they have been importing weapons.' This was true. I had confirmed it from my own sources. Huge shipments of automatic rifles had come in, and grenades. There were even stories about anti-tank weapons, and Stinger missiles. If they only lived as co-operative members of our culture, Guru-ji said, if they only knew their place, and tried to blend in, then there would be no problem. But there is a tendency in their religion that makes them dangerous. 'So,' said Guru-ji, 'we too must be prepared. We must arm ourselves too, despite the cowardice of our politicians.' So we prepared. We armed, and he continued to fund this secret work, and also his effort to inform and prepare the world for the coming cataclysm, the end of Kaliyug.

We were sitting on a rooftop in Singapore when he told me about his work with his universities, about his educational hopes for the future. This was Singapore, so I kept having to restrain my urge to spit past the railing, on to the street and the orderly Singaporeans below. But Guru-ji loved the place. He liked the hygiene and the rules and the strictness and the Singaporeans, and used the city as a hub between his travels. He had another rich devotee here, a property magnate, and Guru-ji had the use of a large penthouse apartment on Tanglin Road. The penthouse had a sizeable balcony, with full-sized trees and a thick carpet of turf. From this balcony we looked out at the sparkling skyline. Guru-ji enjoyed this high garden. 'If only our country was managed well, Ganesh,' he told me, 'we could have all this. What don't we have? We have the resources. And we have more than enough talent. But we don't have political will, and we don't have the right structure. We don't have discipline, external or internal.'

'You will bring us to Ram-rajya, Guru-ji.'

'Are you flattering me, Ganesh?'

He was crunching on carrot sticks and crinkling his eyes at me. 'Of course I am not, Guru-ji.' I was sprawled on an armchair next to him, my bare feet up. I had used a different passport and name to leave India, from Delhi, and I had shaved off my beard. I came every evening to Guru-ji, as a business consultant, and we had dinner in the garden. We talked of everything – the world, my life. I told him about the early days in Gopalmath, the death of my son. He knew me as well as anybody ever had, better than anyone.

'Are you getting impatient?' he said.

'Impatient, me?'

'It has been five days. You want to get through the initiation, go home to work.'

'No, Guru-ji, not like that. My work is always going on, and it's all over the phone anyway. And my time here with you is a peace that I have never had. But I am concerned.'

'About what?'

'Security. The longer I stay, the more risky it is. For me, for you. If someone recognizes me…'

'Yes.'

'And people are always looking for me.'