Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Badriya raised his left hand slowly. 'All right,' he said. 'I'll go and see if he's free now.'

I shrugged. 'Okay,' I said, liking the English word, one of the very few I knew then. 'Okay. I'll wait.' I grinned at the muchchad for the next few minutes, frightening the old man more and more, setting his hands trembling on the shotgun. By the time Badriya appeared again, I was sure I could stare the ancient soldier and his martial whiskers straight into a heart attack. But there was business to be done.

'Come,' Badriya said, and I pulled off my shoes and followed. The annexe led into a warren of hallways lined with identical black doors. 'Raise your arms,' Badriya said. I nodded, and raised the front of my shirt, and sucked in my stomach as Badriya gently took up my revolver. Badriya gave it a professional flip back-and-forth of the wrist, looking along its barrel. He raised it to his nose, intent. He was barrel-chested, heavy-necked. 'Been fired not too long ago,' he said.

'Yes,' I said.

Badriya reversed the revolver in his hand, and although I couldn't tell quite how it was done, it was a very stylish move. 'Turn around,' Badriya said. He patted me down quickly, with a series of fluttering taps under my arms and up my thighs, and no more than a very slight pause on the bars in the pockets. It was professionally done, no animosity, and I thought better of Paritosh Shah for having Badriya on his team. 'Last door on the left,' Badriya said with the last pat.

Paritosh Shah was lying on his side on a white gadda, propped up on a round pillow. The room was quite bare, panelled brown walls, smooth and shiny, with frosted white glass high up near the ceiling, all of it air-conditioned to a chill that I found instantly painful. There was a tidy row of three black phones next to the gadda. Paritosh Shah was very relaxed, and he raised a languid hand at a low stool. 'Sit,' he said. I sat, aware of Badriya behind and to the left, and the small click of the black door as it shut. 'You're the boy,' Paritosh Shah said. He wasn't very old himself, maybe six, seven, at most ten years older than I was, but he had an air of tremendous and weary confidence. 'Name?' he said, and somehow his limp drape on the soft gadda, his one leg bent under, his stillness, all of it warned, don't try and fool me, boy.

'Ganesh.'

'You're a rash lad, Ganesh. Ganesh what?'

'Ganesh Gaitonde.'

'You're not a Bombay original. Ganesh Gaitonde from where?'

'Doesn't matter.' I leaned back and brought out two bars. I laid them side by side on the edge of Paritosh Shah's gadda.

'You could've tried selling those to any Marwari jeweller. Why come to me?'

'I want a fair price. And I can get you more.'

'How much more?'

'Many more. If I get fair price for these.'

Paritosh Shah tilted, toppling upright like a child's doll with a weight in the bottom. I saw then that he had thin arms and shoulders, but a round ball of a stomach that he folded his hands over. 'Fifty-gram biscuits. If they check out, seven thousand rupees each.'

'Market price is fifteen thousand for fifty grams.'

'That's the market price. This is why gold gets smuggled.'

'Below half is too much below. Thirteen thousand.'

'Ten. That's as much as I can do.'

'Twelve.'

'Eleven.'

I nodded. 'Done.'

Paritosh Shah whispered into one of the black phones, and with his free hand he held out a silver box filled with silver-flecked paan and supari and elaichi. I shook my head. Money is what I wanted, money to hold and grasp, money in my pocket, I wanted thick wads of notes, the thickness enough for silver boxes, for soft gaddas and red bedspreads and record players and clean bathrooms and love, enough crisp paper for confidence and safety and life. My mouth was dry. I gripped my hands together tightly, and held them hard against each other through the discreet knock on the door, and then as it shut and Badriya put down a small scale and two stacks of currency, one fat and one thin.

'Just to check,' Paritosh Shah said. And he picked up the bars one by one, by the fingertips, and laid them on the scale against precise little weights. 'Fine.' He smiled. 'Very fine.' He was looking at me expectantly. The money lay on the gadda, and I moved my will like a vibrating steel spring and stilled myself and showed no sign of noticing it until Paritosh Shah stretched out slim fingers to slide the stack forward two inches. So I took it, with a hand that shook only slightly.

I stood up. The room swayed, the frosty oblongs of white light dipped into my eyes and there was a blinking flash of white sky, no horizon.

Then Paritosh Shah said, 'You don't talk very much.'

'I'll talk more next time.' Badriya had the door open, and the corridor was long, and I emerged from it with my cash in my pocket and dizziness tamped firmly down. I bent over easily to pull on my shoes, and when I came up I had the thin curl of thirty-nine rupees in my left hand. I tucked it behind the old guard's ammunition belt, put it in firmly with an extra little polishing motion on the leather. 'Here, mamu,' I said. 'And next time I come, don't keep me standing outside.'

The man stuttered, and Badriya laughed out loud. He held out the revolver, and raised an eyebrow. 'You kept one gold bar back.'

I checked my chambers with a quick motion of my wrist, crisp as I could make it. 'That one's not for sale,' I said.

'Why?'

I laid away the revolver, and raised a hand in farewell. 'Not everything is.' On the street outside, I was still very alert. I stood in front of a Bata store and watched the glass on the shoe display, looking for lurkers. The chances were high that I was being followed, that Paritosh Shah had made his swift calculations and sent out someone, perhaps Badriya, to shadow and discover, to uncover much gold. It was only logical. But no reflected pursuers appeared, and I left the window and wandered, ambling slowly and pausing often behind blind corners to watch the faces that passed. I was ready but relaxed, at home in these city streets like I had never been. I felt a lordly compassion for the pretty little bungalows I was walking by now, lit up in the soft evening twilight, for the happy, rich children I could see running in and out. None of it was alien now. And I tried hard to resist comfort, to keep alive the sharp edge of distrust against the euphoria of a profitable deal, the ecstasy of flinging out into the world one throw of dice that rolled fluently to the inevitable condition of victory. Don't be careless. Watch, watch. The numbers fell right but the board moves. What is white will be black. Climb high and fast and the long snakes lie waiting. Play the game.

I stood in front of a temple. I looked left and right and had no idea of how I had got there. There were apartment buildings on one side of the road, lower constructions on the other, the sloping tiled roofs of mill workers, shipping clerks, postmen. The temple stood at a corner, and it must have been the reverberating pealing of the bell that had drawn me to the courtyard, under the high saffron peak of its roof. I leant on a pillar and checked again for followers, for lethal shadows amidst the auto-rickshaws and Ambassadors. If they were out there, smelling of malice and greed, the temple was as good a place as any to wait them out. I had no use for temples, I despised incense and comfortable lies and piety, I did not believe in gods or goddesses, but here was a haven. I took off my shoes and went in. The worshippers sat cross-legged on the smooth floor, crowded together through the length of the long hall. The walls were an austere white, lit up by tube-lights, but the dark heads swayed in a field of bright saris, purple and shining green and blue and deep red, all the way to the orange statue of Hanuman flying, suavely holding the mountain above his head. I found a place against the back wall and sat, instantly comfortable with my feet tucked in under. A man in saffron robes sat on a dais in front of Hanuman, and his discourse came easily and strongly to me, that old story about Bali and Sugreev, the conflict, the challenge, the duel, with the ambushing god waiting in the woods. I knew the turns and tricks well, and I nodded along with the old action and the rhythms of the lesson. When the priest recited couplets, holding out both his arms, the congregation chanted behind him and the women's voices rose high in the hall. The arrow flew and Bali lay writhing on the ground, pierced, his heels scraping the forest floor, and I raised my knees and rested my head on them, and I was comfortable.