Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'This was just after I had turned eleven. That year, after we got cable, I began to watch television in the afternoons, and grow. Until that summer I had been an ordinary girl, only my father paid me any special attention, everybody else thought I was plain, quiet, good. But then I began to grow. I grew, and grew. My mother had been a little tall for her times, maybe five-five. My father was maybe an inch taller. Azim was the tallest in the family, five-eight. But then I began to grow. While I watched the fashion-based shows on MTV and V, I lengthened. On Zee they did interviews with fashion designers, and choreographers, and photographers. I watched. At night I ached. My joints hurt, and my tendons pulled and stretched. I watched Fashion Guru , and practised my English, and grew. By the time I was fourteen I had overtaken all my brothers except Azim, and the next year I was taller than him. I was thin, so thin. The mohalla girls said unkind things to my face, and my mother muttered. My father's explanation was that he had a great-uncle who had been five-nine-and-a-half, and I had gone on him. But at the end of my sixteenth year, I was taller than even this uncle, and still growing.

'My family was worried. Where were they going to find a man taller than me? And even if they did, would this tall man want a wife who was long and stretched? But I wasn't worried. I knew where they wanted tall girls. I knew who I was. I had studied not only fashion, but myself. Even if nobody around me could see it, I knew I had potential. Two years after Aishwariya and Sushmita won, a beauty parlour had opened right by our mohalla. The young girls and wives used to go there, to get eyebrow plucking and facials and wedding make-up. But still, the girls who were considered pretty, who all my brothers mooned after, they were all fair and a little plump and demure-looking. I knew my colours and my lines, and I was nothing like them. I was considered ugly, I was dark. But I knew. In my mirror I could see what was there, and what needed to be done. I had read all about deportment and training and walking on the catwalk and that model look and plastic surgery. I knew where I could go. I knew where I had to go. There was only one place for me: Bombay. So I came.'

I had never heard her speak so much before, never this long at one stretch. I think it was the darkness, and my unexpected question, and my whispered affirmatives – finally she hadn't even been telling her story to me, but to herself. The rest of her journey I knew, Jojo had told me. Jamila had waited until the day after her eighteenth birthday. Late that afternoon, she left her house wearing a burqa, carrying only her purse in which she had seven thousand four hundred rupees, some of it saved painfully over the years, most of it stolen from her mother's almirah. She had three gold bangles, and some silver jewellery of no account. She caught a rickshaw to Nakkhas, via Kashmiri Mohalla, where she bought a cheap suitcase. She kept her face covered and walked hunched over, becoming a pious old woman to all who passed her. Even then her acting skills were unmatched. She carried this suitcase to a friend's house, where she had – over the past few weeks – carried articles of clothing to make a stash. Then she went to the railway station, where she waited for the Pushpak Express. She already had a ticket and a reservation for a sleeper berth, made two weeks before under an assumed name. She sat quietly in the train, and watched the miles slide by. All she left in Lucknow was a note, which her mother would find late at night in the kitchen. It said, 'I am going of my own free will. It is my choice. Please do not try to find me.' She wrote nothing about where she was going, and why, and what for. Since she had never said a word to anyone about her ambitions, about her direction, nobody knew where to look for her. Even the friend who had helped her thought she was aiding Jamila towards a secret, married boyfriend. But there was no man, no boyfriend, only her dream. In Bombay she had discarded the burqa, changed her name again and stayed at a little women's guest house near Haji Ali, a dormitory where every woman got one bed and a small table and a two-foot shelf. I knew how she had suffered the first few months, the little sales jobs, the grasping bosses, the three-hour bus rides to meet photographers, the indecent suggestions and the passes and the humiliations. I had heard all this, and yet I had never understood the strength of this Jamila until that night, when she told me how she had come to this understanding of herself, of what she was and who she could be. Jojo had been right, this Jamila was like me. There are some minds that can change the world. I had learned from Guru-ji that this earth we walk on, this sky that we huddle under, all of this is a dream. Those with tapas and enough willpower can move this universe, he had said. I had written my own life. Now I knew that Jamila also had this ability, this desire. We, those few who have this grand vision, can rewrite ourselves. Some time between sleeping that night and waking the next morning, in sleep or maybe out of it, I decided to make a film for her.

* * *

'So you have really fallen for the Egotistical Giraffe,' Jojo said decisively when I told her about my plan to produce a movie. I had made my usual afternoon call to her, in Bombay.

'Why do you assume that I've fallen for anything?' I said. 'I have been wanting to make a film for a long time.'

'Maybe, perhaps. But now is when you choose to make it. You are fida on her. Admit it. The Egotistical Giraffe has you hooked.'

Nothing would budge her from this belief, this certainty, and from referring to Jamila each and every time as the Egotistical Giraffe. This despite the fact that Jamila was her protégé, that she, Jojo, was the girl's best sponsor, that Jojo herself had brought her to me. 'Jojo, you are jealous of the poor girl.'

That got a big Jojo laugh out of her. 'Jealous that she has to put up with you sticking it to her every two minutes, Gaitonde?' I had, in a foolish moment of satisfied relaxation, told her how much I liked to arrange Jamila in aesthetic poses, how I took her in various positions and exotic locations. Giving a woman any information is a foolishness that I counselled my boys against. Whatever you tell will always be one day used against you. But with Jojo somehow I broke my own rules. We had known each other too long, we knew each other too well. Sometimes even during the act – chodoing Jamila in a limousine on the way to a restaurant, say – I was aware that I was looking forward to telling Jojo about it. That the telling was crucial, that the act was for the telling. I had to tell Jojo. And so she knew too much, including how much I enjoyed riding the Egotistical Giraffe. 'I have better things to do with my time than giving my gaand to you, Gaitonde,' she said.

'But Jamila's gaand is going to be on a big screen,' I said. 'And that burns yours.'

'Ten years ago it would have. Maybe even five. But now I am happy, baba. Do you understand that? Happy. I like my work, I like what I have. I have success at what I do. And I realize now that even if I had got a film, I wouldn't have lasted long in that business. I was just a little girl playing big games. I didn't know anything.'

'This Jamila has been studying the business since she was a child.'

'Yes. She worked very-very hard for a long time. That's because she is an Egotistical Giraffe.'

There it was again, that sting at the end of the unwinding compliment. 'Don't be a kutiya,' I said. 'You live off bachchas like her. And their studying and hard work.'

Jojo accepted this gracefully. She could be sharp as a Japanese chef's knife, but she was honest. 'That's true,' she said. 'And I send some of them to you, Gaitonde. For your enjoyment.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Read me a letter.' This, too, was one of my pleasures. For the last two or three years, Jojo had been receiving letters. They came in those brown envelopes they sold near post offices and in bazaars next to postings about government jobs and stacks of application forms.