Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

* * *

I sank into my sleep like a deep-sea diver seeking calm water under a storm. Every night, I slept long at night, and I woke up and then I slept again. Three months had passed, and I had settled back into my routine of exercise and work. I made money, I discussed intelligence and tactics with Kulkarni, I talked to Guru-ji and Jojo, I flew to Singapore twice to meet Zoya. I also slept a lot. I found that I needed nine hours at night, instead of my usual six, and also I took naps during the day. I curled up on sofas, and retreated to my bedroom after lunch. Once, in the middle of a web-surfing session, I even lay myself down under the desk for a quick quarter-hour doze. I just needed to sleep.

Jojo said I was depressed, and Guru-ji said I was just exhausted from the added strain and stress of a year and a half of filmmaking. Whether it was despair or anxiety or something else altogether, I slept. That evening in September, I had fallen asleep on deck, in the armchair that was placed in the bow of the boat for me. We were anchored off Ko Samui. I was reading some spreadsheets, and then I was asleep. In my sleep I knew I was sleeping. I knew I was on the Lucky Chance , that I was floating on quiet water, that the sky was vanishing away from me into the dark. I was asleep but not restful in my sleep. I wanted rest but I could not find it.

Then Arvind was patting me awake. 'Bhai,' he said. 'Come. You've got to see this.'

'What?'

'On television, bhai. It's amazing.'

'Gaandu, you're waking me up to watch a television show? How late is it?'

He was already half-way down the stern, and this was Arvind the ever-respectful. There must be something truly astonishing on television, I thought. 'A few minutes till eight o'clock, bhai,' he said, and hurried towards the door to the main cabin. I shoved myself up and followed, dizzy and reeling, through a dislocation of time. I felt unhinged from the day and night. The evening was unreal to me, even though I could feel the wood under my passing hand.

On the television, a building was burning. There was a city skyline, and a building was burning. I sat down. 'What's this?' I said.

'New York, bhai,' Arvind said. He was perched on the edge of a chair, crouched forward. The others were crowded into the room. A Thai voice spoke excitedly over the images.

'A film?'

'No, bhai. It's real. A plane flew into the building.'

It looked like a film, I thought. One of those big American disaster-and-adventure-and-terrorism movies. 'An accident?' I asked. Arvind didn't know, he raised his hands. 'Get to an English channel,' I said. My blood was humming.

Every channel we found was rolling the same images, of the smouldering tower and its twin. Then we found a Hong Kong channel which was running a Fox satellite feed. 'The North Tower continues to burn,' the reporter said. The smoke spilled out of the side of the building. Then another slim silver shape came skimming in at camera right. I was on my feet, breathless. The airliner disappeared behind the burning skyscraper, and then a spiky gout of flame grew out of the other tower. All in silence.

We were quiet. I knew then what this was. I just knew. 'It's not an accident,' I said. 'This is terror.'

* * *

I was in front of the television until three in the morning. I had food brought to me, and had the boys turn the sound up when I went to the bathroom, which I used with the door open. I watched until I could no longer keep my eyes open. Then I told the boys to stay awake in relays, and call me if there were further attacks or new revelations.

In my cabin, my solitude was unbearable. Water slapped at the boat, and I flung my clothes off and tried to breathe. Why was I so agitated? Yes, a lot of people had probably died, but people died every day. What was it then, that whipped me into this frenzy of agitation? The boys and I had decided that the attack had to be engineered by Muslims, yes, maybe Arabs. But so what? Yes, this was an escalation, and now America would attack with its giant strength, and make more enemies, but that was an ongoing affair. I had no answers, and I needed to sleep. I forced myself into the shower, and then I lay down and took a pill.

I kept falling into a light doze filled with smoke and dust, and gasping out of it. I saw, again and again, the true line that the plane made as it went to its meeting with the elegant vertical of the building. I turned on my side, tried to think about work, women, but that shape kept coming back to me. Yes, this was terror.

I sat up. Where was Guru-ji now? In Europe somewhere. Prague. Yes, I could call him. I picked up the phone.

He picked up on the first ring. 'Ganesh? Are you all right?'

'Guru-ji, did you see on television today?'

'Yes.'

'It was terrible.'

'Yes.'

'I mean, those bastard Americans act like they own the entire world, someone was going to hit them sooner or later. But still, that was…'

'Yes, Ganesh?'

What I wanted to ask was spinning in my head in a thousand fragments. I worried at my chin, rubbed my eyes and tried to bring it all together. 'You said the world was beautiful.'

'Yes.'

'It had a beginning.'

'Yes.'

'And that means…that it will have an end.'

'It must. Before it can be born again.'

So the tensions and struggles of the world would rise, in an exquisite arc, and then a stunning explosion, a culmination would follow, and then, nothing. I had heard people talk about the end of the world before, and had seen films about many disasters, but none of it had seemed real to me, ever. But here was that end, sitting in my belly as hard and heavy as a diamond. It was real. 'This will happen,' I said.

'It is inevitable. This is why all the great religious traditions speak of the destruction that must come. Pralay, qayamat, apocalypse. But, Ganesh, don't be frightened. This fear comes from the small ego that traps you. You are infinitely larger than that. From that larger perspective, there is no need for fear.'

I knew he meant well, but this was no comfort to me. Yes, I could maybe think of myself as a distant, dispassionate eye hovering far above the ground I walked on, reading – with pleasure – everything that lay beyond my body's knowledge and over the horizon, but I couldn't feel this. No. I said goodbye to Guru-ji and lay down, and imagined this great web of ricocheting events sweeping always forward, always towards fire and water, towards dissolution, and my mouth was dry. I propped myself up on an elbow, reached for my water. When I put the glass back down, it made a small clink against the gold coaster, and this ringing boomed through my head. I felt my hands shaking. All motion flowed together, every action drove the next one, and a ripple became a wave, and then a torrent hurtling over the unavoidable chasm. Maybe even that tiny jangling of the glass had in some way led us a small way towards echoing doom. A sound crashed into me, maybe my pulse, or maybe some resonance made of everything else, containing beginning and end, birth and life and all-consuming death.

I

Suryakant Trivedi is drinking a cappuccino in a café near the British Museum. He has been in England for almost two years now, and this is the only vilayati vice he has acquired. He has not given in to any other temptation or pressure. He dresses exactly as he did in Meerut, in long starched kurtas and sober pyjamas. In the winter he sometimes makes a concession and wears thermal underwear, which his America-based son sent him from St Louis. His eldest son, the one he lives with here in Hounslow, worries about him riding on the tube in such flagrantly foreign clothes, but Trivedi knows that putting on some fancy jacket is not going to make him look less Indian. And if he is attacked by some hooligans, well, he is not afraid of injury, or death. Guru-ji has asked him to live in London for a while and do what needs to be done, and Trivedi owes everything to Guru-ji. Even here, watching the tourists walk by in the bright May sunshine, he feels the presence of Guru-ji. This constant support is not just a comfort, but the basis on which he has built his whole life. Only one who has had such a guru can understand how this preceptor is also father and mother and friend, how merely thinking of him flattens obstacles and vanquishes dread. But right now there is no fear, the cappuccino is very hot, exactly the way Trivedi likes it, and the froth is delicious, with its little sprinkling of mocha. He savours it on the tip of his tongue, then lets it swirl back. He feels lazy and content, and allows himself to think of his wife, who died in 1987 of congestive heart failure, who gave him many children and suddenly left. With Guru-ji's help he was able to look past the illusion of death and the haze of hurt that descended, and now he is able to think of her with only fondness and joy.