Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

I awoke to the shaking of the saffron-robed priest. 'Beta,' he said, 'time to go home.' He had white hair and an impish face. 'Time for lock-up here. Hanuman-ji has to go to sleep.'

I rubbed the crick from my neck, hard. 'Yes. I'll go.' I was the last one in the hall.

'Hanuman-ji understands. You were tired. Worked long. He sees everything.'

'Sure,' I said. What fantastic stories the old and the weak tell to each other, I thought. I stretched out my legs, stood and stumbled to the locked donation box in front of Hanuman. Peeling off a five-hundred-rupee note from the thinner wad, I remembered that I hadn't counted the notes when Paritosh Shah had given them. Amateur-like and not to be done again. I slipped the money into the slit, and found the priest ready to my right with a thali full of prasad. I held out my cupped right hand, and ate the small sugary peda on the way out. My mouth flooded painfully with saliva, and I was rested, and life was very sweet.

Now there was no multitude for assassins to hide in, and walking fast down the road, with the crunch of my shoes loud, I felt I was safe. The streetlights left no darkness on this long stretch, and I was completely alone. I waved down an auto-rickshaw, and was at the station three turns and five minutes later. I paid, and was almost at the ticket window when a man leaning against the iron fence raised his chin in inquiry: what do you want? I looked a moment too long, but kept moving, and now the man was walking beside me, with that cheery, insinuating tout's whisper: 'What you looking for, boss? You want some fun, haan? Charas, Calmpose, everything I got. You want a woman? Look at that auto there. All ready for you.' There was an auto parked across the road, pulled in deep at an angle in front of a shuttered shop. The driver was leaning on it, and I saw the glow of his bidi, and knew that the man was looking straight at me. The bidi moved, and the driver motioned against the back window of the auto, knocking, and a figure moved inside it, and a woman's head leaned out on the left side, into the lamplight. All I could see of her was the black shine of her hair, and the strong yellow of her sari, but I didn't need to see any more to know what sort of raddled randi sold her chut at stations in the back of an auto. I laughed, and paid for my ticket.

But the pimp stayed with me. 'Okay, boss,' he whispered chummily on the way to the platform gate. 'I misjudged you, saab. You want something better. You're a man of fine tastes, my mistake. You just look a little, you know…But I have the girl for you, boss.' He kissed his fingers. 'Her husband used to work in a bank, was a big saab, poor fellow, then he had an accident. Complete cripple he became. Can't work. So she has to make a living for both of them, what to do? Very exclusive. Only for some gentlemen, you see, in her own apartment. I can take you straight there. You'll see what a high-class cheez she is, boss. Completely convent-educated.'

I stopped. 'Is she fair?'

'Like Hema Malini, bhidu. You touch her skin and you'll get a current. Like fresh malai.'

'How much?'

'Five thousand.'

'I'm not a tourist. One thousand.'

'Two thousand. Don't say anything. You see the girl, and if you think she's not worth the money, you give me whatever you want and I'll leave quietly and not a word more. Believe me, if you saw her outside her husband's bank you wouldn't believe she has to do this, poor woman. Like one phataak memsaab she looks.'

'What's your name?'

'Raja.'

I put the train ticket in my back pocket. 'All right, Raja,' I said. 'Just don't make me angry.'

Raja giggled. 'No, saab, no. Please come.'

She was fair, no question. She opened the door and even in the bleary light from the lift I saw that she was fair, not quite Hema Malini-pale but light like afternoon wheat. She sat on a brown sofa while Raja counted his two thousand and bowed himself out. She wore a dull green sari with gold borders, and round gold earrings, and sat very respectable and contained with her shoulders high and hands in lap.

'What's your name?' I said.

'Seema,' she said, not meeting my stare.

'Seema.' I shifted from one foot to the other by the door, not sure of what to do next. I was experienced all right, but in a different kind of establishment, and the shiny glass table with its vase of flowers and the painting on the wall with just colours dashed together and the short brown carpet, all of these stopped me altogether. But she stood and went further into the apartment, and I stepped up manfully, taking it all in, the stretch of her blouse across the sunken river of her spine and the white phone in its alcove in the wall of the passageway. She clicked on a lamp in the bedroom, and when she flipped back the bedcover I tensed: it was altogether too professional. I had seen the same folding down of the sheets before, the same towel.

'Hold on,' I said, and went back out into the hallway. The bathroom was clean, and I pissed into the western-style commode with some satisfaction, at length. But then I saw that there was no soap near the tap, no bucket. I zipped. The cupboards in the kitchen were empty, not a plate, not a pot, not even a gas or a stove, only two glasses drying upside down next to the basin. Now I was sure that I had been fooled. The apartment was nobody's home, not a bank saab's, not a good wife's, there was no cripple and no memsaab, only a whore got up and powdered. She lay on the bed, naked but for the earrings, her arms crossed over her small breasts and her belly rising and falling under the thin shadow of her hipbone, and one ankle over another. I stood over her, breathing through my mouth.

'Speak English,' I said.

'What?'

In her eyes there was real surprise, and I grew more angry. 'I told you. Speak English.'

She had a sharp little nose and a small retreating chin, and she was puzzled for another moment, and then she laughed, just a very little bit and bitterly amused. 'Shall I speak?' she said. Then she spoke in English, and the words rattled around my head, and I knew that they were really English, I felt it in the crack of the consonants. 'Bas?' she said.

'No,' I said. I was hard, vibrating deep at the root. 'Don't stop.' She spoke English while I took off my clothes. I turned around to take off my pants and hide the revolver from her. When I turned back she was staring at the ceiling and speaking English. I nudged her ankles apart. 'Don't stop,' I said. I ground and bucked on top of her and she turned her face to the side and spoke. I reared up and the skin on her neck was sandy under the lamplight and I could hear her words. I understood none of it but the sound of it was an angry excitement inside my head. Then I felt a distant overflow, far below, and I was still.

* * *

I was very tired, Sardar-ji. I leaned forward into my walk. I was going back to my gold. The momentum of nearly falling over at every step kept me moving, but at every exhausted buckling of my knees I grew more afraid. I was very close to the gold now, I recognized every intersection and the shapes of particular buildings and shadowed trees. There was no moon but it was a light night, and out in this unbuilt open ground I saw clearly the black direction of the road and the white of a milestone. The gold was gone, taken, I felt a hole in my chest. It was gone, vanished out of my life. I should give up now. It would be easy for me to find a patch of grass by the road, tip over into it, sleep. Stop it. Ganesh Gaitonde, keep going. You have won every game today. Win again. You know exactly where you are.

The calculation of the precise section of barbed-wire fence was not a problem. I counted off the posts, looked up and down the way, and rolled under. Under the trees I passed into disastrous black, and was lost. With one hand extended I went gliding, rustling through space, not sure of the distances now, but I felt and reached and at the right moment I stopped and turned to the right. A step, and there was the tree. I passed a hand down the trunk and the ground below was flat. All around the trunk I went, feeling with both hands. After two circles, maybe three, I leaned a shoulder against it and made a long bleating sound. Ganesh Gaitonde, Ganesh Gaitonde. I scrabbled to the next tree, stopped when I grazed my head on it. Around it, around it. And then the next one. My cry was high now, a constant shriek under the canopy and darkness. It went without rise or fall in a half-circle. Stopped abruptly, because I had both hands on a fatness. The swelling rose out of the earth and filled both my palms. I traced it softly, up to the tree and down to the bottom of the mound, making out its shape. I moaned and dug both hands into it. I went rooting furiously into it, and welcomed the pain in my fingers. The cloth came first, and then the heavenly, familiar shape of a rectangle. My shoulders shook and I moved my hand and it was all there. All and undisturbed and mine. Up to my forearms in earth, I let my head drop and gulped in the smell of grass and my armpits and my body and knew that the world was mine. As dawn came I wrapped myself around the mound and slept with my revolver under my breast.