Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

He was towelling himself dry when Mary knocked on the door. 'Here,' she said. He opened the door a crack, enough so that she could put her arm through. 'You can wear this.'

'This' was a well-worn white kurta. He shut the door, and held it up. It was a little short in the sleeves, but it fitted him quite well at the shoulders and chest. He wondered if it was her ex-husband's, or a boyfriend's, but he put the thought away. What did it matter? The kurta was clean, it had that crisp laundry smell of starch and ironing. He rolled the sleeves up his forearms, pinching down the edges of the folds to get them sharp and straight. His patka was easily retied, but there was nothing he could do about the hollows under his eyes, and the gaunt fall of his cheeks. He patted his beard down, and nodded at himself in the mirror, and went out.

Mary had dinner waiting for him on the small table near her bed. This was what they had originally decided on the phone, that he would eat her machchi kadi and rice after work. 'I hope you ate,' he said. 'I was very late.'

She had a small stove lit, and steam burbled from a pot. 'I was too tired to eat,' she said. 'Sit down.'

They ate sitting cross-legged on the floor, with the table between them. Mary's machchi kadi was fierce, but not malicious. Sartaj gasped as he ate, and drank a lot of water, and told her stories about his childhood. He told her about eating so much chole-bature at a roadside shop in Shimla that he had to be carried home by Papa-ji, and about his teenage passion for Royal Falooda from a particular Irani restaurant in Dadar, and about Gokul in Santa Cruz, where you could get a mango ice-cream so creamy that it took you back to long-ago summer mango-eating debauches, when you dipped for Dussheries in big buckets of cold water. He told her about afternoons when the June heat pressed through schoolroom walls, and seventy boys in white uniforms grew surly and restless, and the most dashing and popular of them – Sartaj and his friends – just had to jump through a window to eat kulfi on the street corner. She laughed at his stories, and filled his plate with more rice.

'I didn't know you had such a weakness for sweet things,' she said. 'I don't have any kulfi. Maybe some old toffees. I had some chocolate, but it's finished.'

'That's all right,' Sartaj said. 'No, no more.'

But he ate some more. After he had finished, after he had washed his hands and discreetly scrubbed his teeth with a dab of Mary's neem toothpaste, he sat with his back against the bed, sucking at an orange-flavoured sweet. This was one of three she had found far back on a shelf. She was washing dishes and pans, and the clanky music of it was comforting. Sartaj sighed, settled his shoulders, swallowed the last sliver of the sweet and closed his eyes. Just a minute or two, he thought, of rest.

He woke to a darkened room and Mary's hand on his face. 'Sartaj,' she whispered. 'Get into the bed.'

He had been dreaming, dreaming of Ganesh Gaitonde. The story of the dream fled from him as he pushed himself up on an elbow, but the last image remained with him: Gaitonde talking to him through a wall. Listen, Sartaj .

He had been curled on the floor, next to the bed. There was a cushion under his arm. 'I fell asleep,' he said, feeling quite foolish.

'You were tired too.'

He couldn't see her eyes or her face, but he knew she was staring at him. He got up, and sat on the edge of the bed, next to her. She moved, and lay on the far side of the bed, next to the wall. 'If I am here too much,' he said, 'and stay, won't your neighbours say things? Your landlord?'

She reached out, pulled gently at his wrist. 'Don't worry. You're a big Punjabi policeman. They're too scared of you to open their mouths.'

He arranged himself next to her, and they were still, shoulders touching. Sartaj took a breath, and turned on to his right side, and found her facing him. They kissed. In the darkness her lips were full and supple, different from before. She settled into the arch of his arm and collarbone and pressed her mouth to his. There was the tip of her tongue, an agile prickle that pierced him. Her breath moved through him.

A sound came from Sartaj, a low rasp, and he was hard against her. He spread his hand over the small of her back and brought her to him, her hips and belly. He had half-rolled on to her when he knew she had retreated, gone away somewhere. Her arm lay stiff against his back. He moved back.

'Sorry, I,' she said, 'I…'

Sartaj could feel her agitation, her anxiety. He tried to gentle her, stroked fingers through her hair. He was painfully erect, and there was a hunger in him that wanted to take her, but he was somehow content to lie close with her. Their breathing came together, and after a while he could see the gleam of a smile. He smiled also, and they kissed. He thought now she was different from the other women he had been with, not inexperienced exactly, but shy. She nuzzled tentatively at his chin, as if she was testing out something she had learned recently. He held her lower lip between his teeth, played with the corners of her mouth. She laughed, and he with her. They lay together. The baby-shampoo smell of her hair was the last thing Sartaj knew, and he settled gratefully into it.

* * *

In the delicious cool of first morning, Sartaj knew he was dreaming. He was walking down an endless twisting lane in a basti. The corrugated tin roofs were glistening with black rain, and there was a man stretching a torn piece of polyethylene over his shack. Sartaj walked. Katekar was walking next to him. They were talking about the riots. 'Those were bad days,' Katekar said. They were both walking behind Kazimi. Kazimi was walking in front of them. They walked. Then they spoke of the bomb blasts. Sartaj told Katekar about the severed foot he had seen on the road, about the tree stripped of all its leaves. 'He was lucky,' Katekar said, pointing with his chin at Kazimi. Katekar looked sad. I am dreaming, Sartaj thought.

Then Sartaj was awake. Mary was asleep next to him, and she was holding on to his forearm. Her breathing was slow and easy in the calm. Sartaj's hip was stiff, but he didn't want to turn over, the bed was narrow, he didn't want to wake her. Kazimi was lucky, he thought. Those were bad riots. Those endless nights with the burning bastis, the fleeing Muslims, the men with swords. The screams. The gunshots echoing from the buildings, back and forth. Who had shot Kazimi, a Hindu or a Muslim? Or another policeman, shooting wild? Anyway, he was lucky. He was lucky, and he was lucky only to be limping, he was lucky that he was not in a wheelchair. If he had been crippled, he wouldn't be able to walk down those bumpy lanes. Not unless he had a wheelchair like Bunty's.

Sartaj sat up. He was quite awake now, blood thudding in his head. Mary stirred beside him, he had jolted her.

'What?' she said.

Sartaj was remembering Bunty's wheelchair, the slick foreign styling of it. And he had a voice from long ago in his ear, a man preaching. A golden voice, confident of the truths it was telling. He couldn't see the man directly, but there he was, on a television monitor. He was a great guru, a famous guru, and he had done a yagna. Mary's television was dark. In it, Sartaj could see his own face. There had been a wheel on that other television screen, a wheel behind the guru's head. A shiny wheel, long ago. The guru had been on a wheelchair. A fast wheelchair, an unusual wheelchair. Sartaj remembered the low electronic hum it made.

'I have to go,' he said.

'What happened?'

'Nothing, nothing. I have to get to work. I will call.'

He kissed her, tucked a sheet high about her shoulders and gathered up his things. The landing was dark, and there was the slightest beginning of light at the sliver of horizon he could see between the buildings. He shut the door behind him, and then sat on the top step to pull on his shoes. His fingers were twitchy, nervous, as he tried to hurry. He took the steps in three loping leaps, and as soon he was on solid ground he reached for his mobile phone. The screen was a dead grey. Maderchod, he hadn't charged it last night. And then he was on the motorcycle, speeding down the empty roads. He knew of an all-night PCO near Santa Cruz station, and he was there in less than ten minutes. He knocked at the window, got up the boy dozing behind the counter. Come on, come on. Then he was listening to clicks on the line as the call went through. On the green partition that separated the booth from the counter, a large heart had been scratched into the wood. There was an arrow through it, and 'Reshma' and 'Sanjay' in flowing script on either side. The heart was bleeding little drops of blood, a whole line of them arcing down towards the ground. Sartaj ran a finger over the arrow