Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

IV

Dr Anaita Kharas is squatting, emptying vermiculite into a pot. She has already put in the soil and the sand and the peat moss, in carefully measured proportions, and now she sifts the mixture through her fingers and enjoys its roughness. She could use a trowel – her sons tell her that her hands look like a labourer's, not a doctor's – but the weight of the earth on her palms settles her every morning before she sets out to work. She comes up here every morning, to the terrace of her house in Vasant Vihar, and works on her garden. She grows ficus and bottle-brush plants, bougainvillea and herbs, yellow champa and juhi. The December cold is biting into her fingertips, but even that is good. She has found that she needs this time alone, and putting suva seeds in a pot prepares her for the day of patients and disease. She is thinking, as she finishes her planting, about K.D. Yadav, who died three days ago. He was a good patient, even before his tumours turned him silent and unmoving. He suffered his loss of ability and comprehension with dignity. Only once she found him weeping, standing next to the window, and then he accepted her usual doctorly exhortations with a smile. He was much older than her, and very old-fashioned with his namastes and standing up when she entered the room, or at least wanting to, but he always listened to her intently. A time or two she found herself telling him things that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with her own life. He had that way of asking questions, of probing without seeming to, so that you gave him information without knowing you were. Days later, he would say, 'Yes, I must have been in Calcutta when your father was posted there,' and then you would remember that you had told him about living in Calcutta for a year at the age of eleven. He was a smart man, K.D. Yadav, for someone who had worked many undistinguished decades in the Ministry of Human Resource Development.

Anaita stands up, flexes her knees. She walks around the periphery of the roof, examining the plants closely. She had fought an infestation of powdery mildew two months ago, and had lost two gulmohars, and had decided to be more vigilant in the future. Disease comes fast, and takes everything. But today her plants look well. They sweep in a conflagration of colours across the terrace, and the vines climb to the top of the water tanki a full floor higher. It is a large house, one that she and Adi would never be able to afford to buy or build today. Adi's parents had bought two big plots in the sixties, when Vasant Vihar was still a wilderness beyond the Ridge. They had sold one plot twenty years later, and built a house on the other, and so now Adi and Anaita and their sons live in this colony of plenty. They are very lucky, but still prices are crazy in this locality. The boys don't realize how expensive it is to put the food they love on the table, the meat and good bread and fruits. They are at that age when it is very important for them to keep up with their friends, and their friends – many of them classmates at Modern School – are the sons of industrialists and businessmen. Anaita thinks back to her long-ago days of ten rupees a week pocket money, and worries yet again for her sons. People have too much money nowadays, and they throw it about as if it meant nothing. Their children wear sunglasses worth thousands of rupees, and birthday parties cost lakhs. Many of their neighbours in E-block have three and four cars parked in their driveways, and maybe one more outside. So the boys sometimes resent Anaita and Adi, and think of them as stingy parents.

Anaita has finished her inspection, and she walks to the middle of the terrace, near the stairway, and looks down into the courtyard. Adi's father had insisted on building a small open space in the centre of the house, and no argument from his wife had persuaded him for even a moment. 'I want to see light,' the old man had said, and after the house was built, he had put an armchair in the gallery abutting his precious courtyard and read the paper there every morning, no matter whether it was June or the chilliest of Januaries. Anaita had rather liked him for that. Now she can see Adi carrying a tray out of the kitchen. Any moment now he will call out for her, and then go and wake the boys. She will go down and drink the chai that he's made, joke with the boys and eat some eggs. Adi is a good man. They have had their quarrels, sometimes severe ones which left both of them feeling ragged for weeks, but they have persevered and have survived. Adi says sometimes that they have worn the sharp edges off each other. He makes her laugh often, he takes part in the daily drudgery of raising a family and they are content together. She needs to go down now, she doesn't like to leave the house too late, the traffic starts to congeal along the avenues, but she is still thinking about that K.D. Yadav.

Why? She isn't sure. She liked him, but she has liked other patients and has lost them. Death is nothing new to her, she deals with it every day, she is familiar with its onrush, with the sound of it, and the inertia and smells of its aftermath. She knows it is coming for her, for Adi, and she can even imagine – almost without flinching – the death of her children. Why, then, does K.D. Yadav stay with her? She strokes the leaves of a tulsi plant and breathes, and the chill is almost painful against her nostrils. How terrible it would be to lose the distinction between cold and hot, between inside and outside. At the end, when K.D. Yadav had gone completely still, he had looked neither happy nor sad. Had he still been able to tell whether it was day or night, whether he was alive or dead? Anaita had told his young friend or colleague, whatever she was, that Anjali Mathur, 'Don't worry. It's all quite painless, he is not suffering.' But now, she thinks of what it must be like not to suffer, to exist in some kind of vast void, and she shudders. Poor man, she thinks. He had liked so much to read, and finally the letters and the page must have melted together, become one thing that was nothing. Poor, poor man.

'Anaita!'

Adi is standing in the courtyard, holding a frying pan. Anaita giggles at the sight of him, completely ridiculous in that tacky Chinese dressing gown with the dragon curling its claws, which he absolutely refuses to give up.

'What are you doing, yaar?' he says. 'Please go and take a bath, otherwise you'll make me late.'

'Coming, baba, coming,' Anaita says. She takes one last look around her garden, and goes down to her life.

V

Even as he savours his victory, Major Shahid Khan worries about defeat. He is clipping his beard, and in the mirror he can see that none of this anxiety shows on his face or in his eyes. He has trained himself to be impassive. He has his Ammi's clear Punjabi skin, but none of her easy expressiveness. His wife sometimes wonders how two closely related people could be so unlike. But Shahid Khan knows that he has inherited all of Ammi's melancholy, her gargantuan rage, her sudden, bitter sarcasm. But he has learnt to control himself. He gives nothing away, ever. For all her sadness, Ammi sometimes laughs until her face goes red and you have to worry a little about her, but are unable to warn her because you have to hold on to yourself to keep from falling over. Her love for Shahid and his brother and their sister is so openly all-consuming that other mothers joke about it. Her sacrifices for these children are legendary. But Shahid Khan has tamped down all this emotion which swirls up from his genes, he has learnt early – in the ragged lanes of his childhood – to wear the armour of impassivity. This ability has served him well in his profession. He has this ability, and his faith, which stands him on unshakeable bedrock, which gives him the strength to endure anything.