Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Hello?' Anjali Mathur's voice was low and rough, but alert.

'Madam,' Sartaj said. 'This is Sartaj Singh calling from Mumbai. You are sleeping, sorry.'

'What happened? Tell me.'

'Madam,' Sartaj said, 'I think I may know Gaitonde's guru.'

'You dab the eye-shadow on, darker at the corners of the eyelids.'

I was lying across a silver-framed, satin-sheeted bed, watching Jamila put on make-up. She had the lights on in a blazing circle around the mirror and was sitting up close to it, assaying her face with the calm detachment of a doctor. She was bare-chested, but when she worked on her face even I could only pay attention to her eyes, her cheeks. 'Then you put the eyeliner on, Lakme charcoal black. You make a little tail on the outside of the eye. See? Like a little fish. It balloons up at the end. Which gives a false contour to the eye. Okay, so. If your upper lid is highly eye-lined, you don't want to go heavy on the lower lid. You would lose definition on the upper lid. If you want your eyes to look big, you go a bit high on the outer edges of the lower lids. Use a pencil that you can smudge, and push it up a bit.'

She was speaking loudly, over the disco music with its strutting beat, but enunciating very sharply. She practised clear speaking. She checked on me to see if I was paying attention, and I smiled. I was nicely tired, I had taken her twice that evening, once on the floor. There were six feet of her, all of it smooth and young and resilient and yielding, and I had explored the entire territory, every last bit of it. 'Your eyes look huge,' I said.

'Okay, then. Cheekbones. You use blush on the cheekbones, get a shine. I like Bronze Blitz. See? Then you have to decide, do you want a soft look or a hard look? Where are you going, what's the impression you want to make? If you're going to be under lights, with cameras clicking, you might want a hard look, to stand out in the photographs. But we're not going anywhere. So, soft. For a soft look, I like using this MAC lipliner, it's German. You outline the lips. I'm using the Plum Preserved colour today. Now, you only want to outline the lips. If you used the lipliner on the whole lip surface, it would be too sharp. So, I use blush-on for lipstick.'

'Very clever,' I said. 'You are one sharp Jamila.' She didn't even give me back a thousandth of a smile. About her work she was as serious as a pandit. Or a mullah, in her case.

'You dab in the blush-on, then spread it with a finger. Like this. So, lips done. Now, mascara.' She opened her mouth further to put on the mascara. I had noticed this every time I had watched her do her face, just as I had noticed it with every woman I had been with. They would reach towards their eyes with the mascara, but would open their mouths wide. They were a strange tribe, women. 'With mascara, linger on the roots of the eyelashes as you go up. As you go up, shake the applicator a bit, do a little twist. See? Linger, shake, twist. And what do you get? Thick, lovely lashes. That's what. Okay, now we're getting done. But not finished. The secret is: blend, blend, blend! Everything has to blend. No sharp edges.'

She blended. I watched.

'Let's see. What else? Okay, today, for the sultry look, I'm going to use some lip-stain. It gives a stained effect, sort of smoky. I'm going to use a purple MAC lip-stain. You should even out the stain. If you don't have a brush, you can use the end of a pencil. Like this.' Then she turned to me, held out her hands wide. 'Finished. See? I'm done.'

And yes, yes, she was done. She was transformed, from an interesting and stretchy piece of unpolished Lucknow steel into a translucent, weightless blooming of light. She stood up, to her full long height, and slipped a blue dressing gown over the delicate angle of her shoulders. Underneath, she wore only black thong panties and slim pumps. I had paid Jojo an unprecedented amount for this tall virgin, and then given lakhs to Jamila herself afterwards, and every time she stood straight and tall like this, I thought, paisa vasool. She walked away from me, down the length of the suite, hip-tilting against the Singapore skyline. At the end of the carpet, she struck a runway pose and gave me a long gaze over her shoulder. There was a little flash of upreaching nipple, erect and clearly silhouetted. And in that moment, with the bright blue behind and she all gold and darkness in front, we could have been on television, on Fashion TV or Star TV or Zee TV. She came back to me, doing that walk, and I felt that tearing pull in my chest that you get from rich, glossy, beautiful women. There was that mingled longing and hopelessness, of seeing something that swam in the heavens far above. The difference was that I could have this one kneeling before me in a second. Mine, I thought, she is mine. So there was the pain, but also this pleasure. So I let her walk. She knew I liked to watch her, and she gave me a show. When I could stand it no more, I had her pose on all fours near the window, in the bronze waning of the light, and I knelt in front of her, at her mouth. This was the third time that day, I hurt and shuddered and finally found release.

Afterwards we ate. I was hungry all right, but to watch her eat was frightening. She ate politely enough, with knife and fork and little pats of the napkin to the corners of her lips, but she put away enough food for three men. If you insisted on speaking to her, she would of course make good conversation, about the topics of the day. But left to her preferences, at mealtimes she was completely quiet. She ate her way through plates of chicken, followed up with a dish of lamb, or two, and finished with goblets of ice-cream. Instead of tea or coffee, she drank a glass of lassi, or milk if that was all that was available. The first time we'd eaten together, she had told me she didn't need caffeine, that every cell in her body ran and sprinted by its own nature. She needed only five hours of sleep a night to look rested and rosy, and could get by perfectly with four.

I, on the other hand, was exhausted from the day's exertions, all within the confines of this flat. So I ate quietly, and then bathed. When I came out of the bathroom, Jamila had the covers turned down and a glass of warm milk on the night-stand. I had trained her well. While she showered, I sipped at the milk and talked to Arvind on the intercom. He was just downstairs from us, in the bottom half of this double duplex apartment with his Suhasini, who no longer looked like Sonali Bendre. Guru-ji had been right about their marriage: they had each become stronger in it. Arvind was still thoughtful, but he was now decisive and pragmatic. Suhasini had given up her flashy, trollopy ways, and was now placidly happy, and her energy fuelled her husband. I had made Arvind a controller in our eastern operations, and had established him in this fine apartment on Havelock Road, which was really two apartments. I met Jamila only here, in this upper penthouse, only in this one place. Our interaction was most secret, and not only because of the risk to me. It was obvious to all of us, to me and Jamila and Jojo, that a girl who wanted to be Miss Universe had better not be easily connected with an international lord of crime. So we kept it quiet. Just as the tall Jamila was quiet. Even when she showered she never sang, when she watched movies she never laughed or cried or clapped. Now, from the bedroom, I could hear the splashing of the water, and that was about all. I talked business with Arvind, and asked after the pregnant Suhasini. Then I hung up, and called Bunty in Bombay. More business talk, and by the time we had finished Jamila was done with her long evening ablutions. Her washbasin in the bathroom looked like a chemist's shop, with ointments and lotions and shampoos arranged neatly in rows. Yet when she came to bed, with her hair up, she managed not to have that clammy, creamed-up look that so many women brought with them to sleep. She just looked clean, scrubbed and healthy.