Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Come,' he said, pointing to a chair by the bed. 'Sit. Tell me, when did you do this to your face? Why?'

So I told him. Of course he agreed with the security concerns I had, but he also said that I had felt the urge to renew myself because of the coming change. 'A new world needs a new man. And you have renewed yourself. You felt the need to do so, you listened to the calling of the times, Arjun. I think that is the correct new name for the new you. I shall call you "Arjun" from now. You shall be Arjun who fooled me.'

'Only for ten seconds, Guru-ji. You are the only one who recognized me.'

'It's a good face, Arjun. Nobody will know it. Now tell me why you wanted to meet.'

He followed me closely, as I told him about the recent disaster. I told him that of course no operation is ever completely foolproof, that I had insulated myself from the arms smuggling with several levels of delegation through the company, and used semi-independent groups. And we had fed the UP police some arrests, low-level men that we thought would satisfy them, cool them down. But they had more information than we thought they did, and they had pursued further investigations, and I had been finally implicated. My thought was that some of this relentless zeal was being funded and informed from Dubai and Karachi, by Suleiman Isa and his fellows. They were using their people in the police to prosecute a new campaign in their war against us. And so the police – both UP and Maharashtra – were pushing us hard.

'Yes,' said Guru-ji. 'Yes, Arjun.' In the face of all these calamities, he was still as a statue in a temple. 'Do they know about me?'

'You – no, no, Guru-ji. Never. You have been kept completely out of the operation, your name has never ever been mentioned. Nobody in my company knows about you, even. I have maintained full security. I have come only by myself on this trip, no boys, no cover. There is no threat to you from my side, I have made sure of that. But I think we must pull back on the arms movements. It is too hot right now.'

'Yes, Arjun. In general, I agree. But let me meditate on that.' He reached out, put a hand on my shoulder. 'You look tired. Sleep now. We will talk in the morning. There is a bed for you in the small room.'

He was right. It had been a journey across the world, and many days of conflict and bad news before that. I felt drawn out, thinned out, as if I was barely hanging on to wakefulness. He cupped my head with his hand, in blessing, and I felt as if I was sliding safely into sleep. His eyes were dark, opaque, huge. He raised me up, and embraced me. 'Go to sleep. I will think about it. In the morning we will decide how we will act.'

I staggered into the room to the side of the suite, collapsed into the bed. I barely had the strength to turn on to my side, and then I was asleep.

I woke up to the sound of mantras. I sat up, and was instantly awake. As I padded through the suite, I was suddenly aware of how hungry I was, how alive. My shoulders were strong and relaxed, I felt the blood moving in my chest, there was sandalwood in my throat. I laughed. I felt like I had been reborn. One night of sleeping close to Guru-ji and I was young again.

The big windows on the eastern side of the suite opened up on to a garden, and I could see Guru-ji and the sadhus performing a puja. They were seated in a hollow square, with Guru-ji at the centre facing a small fire. I sat cross-legged near the window, far from them, and watched. It was very early, and under the deep grey of this foreign sky a small glow lit up their faces. I didn't know the mantras. It must be some ceremony for sadhus only, I thought, and I was content to sit and listen.

But, afterwards, Guru-ji explained the ritual to me. At the moment of dawn, he said, they meditated on change. Through this small yagna, he said, they were working to bring about a change in the world. The universe was consciousness itself, in interaction with matter, which itself was just energy. The combined consciousness of the monks and Guru-ji's own tremendous spiritual power were moving the universal consciousness towards transformation. 'History has a shape, Arjun,' he said. 'The universe is a miracle of design. We have talked about this before. Look at this garden. For every insect, there is a predator. For every flower, there is a function. Some scientists still look at all this beauty, but insist that it is the result of mere random selection, of chance and nothing else. They are blind. They are afraid. Pull back from chance, look at it with the right vision, and chaos reveals patterns. The question is, are you able to read its signs, understand its language? The question is, can you look through the surfaces? You and I are sitting here, Arjun, talking to each other in a garden. The sun is coming up. Is all this just random, without meaning? Is there no direction to everything?' With a wide motion of his arm he took in the earth, us and the sky. 'Look into yourself, Arjun. Feel the truth inside you. And tell me, who is the creator of this direction?'

I knew the answer to this. 'Consciousness.'

'Undoubtedly. And do you know where this consciousness is? Where it lives?'

'Everywhere?'

'Yes. And in us. You are He, Arjun. Your consciousness is the universal consciousness. There is no difference. If you can know that, really know that, then there is nothing you cannot do. You can shape history itself. Leaving the mind behind, the vira can direct events. He can move time towards transformation.'

I nodded. 'I understand, Guru-ji. What do you want me to do?'

'We have to do one more run, Arjun, one last one.'

He wanted to do one trip, one consignment. The cargo wasn't very bulky, or heavy. There was some cash – rupees mostly, but also some dollars – which had been collected abroad and now needed to be transported into the country. There was some laboratory equipment, which Guru-ji's people needed to run some agricultural experiments in Punjab. These they could have brought in through normal channels, but customs clearance would take weeks, maybe months, and important work would be held up. And finally there was some computer equipment, which again was urgently needed. No arms, no ammunition. Very simple, and even clear of the specific activities that Kulkarni was raging about. 'I wouldn't ask this of you, Arjun,' Guru-ji said, 'if it was not vital. Without this cargo, our work of several years remains undone, incomplete. Of course I could easily move it through other channels. But you and I, we have a history. We have trust. I trust only you to do this for me. And in this shipment, there must be no mistakes. Arjun, I know there is great danger for you. So I will not tell you that you must do this for me. But I ask it of you, and leave the decision to you.'

Of course I agreed. I was bound to, as his disciple. And I owed him much, he had saved me time and again, in many ways. I told him I would do it, that I would begin to plan it as soon as I got back to Thai waters. Then I asked to spend another day with him. It was a risk for both of us, but I was compelled to beg this of him. I had a foreboding, a dense certainty that I would not see him again. I told him this, and he calmly agreed. 'Yes, that is true,' he said. 'I know it too.'

'You can see this?'

'Yes.'

'Why? What happens?'

'I don't know. I can't see that, but I do see this. That this is our last meeting.'

'How can we both know this? Has it already happened, whatever is going to happen? But how can that be?'

'Our small minds think that time is like a single railway track, Arjun, going forward always into the future. But time is much more subtle than that.'

'Are we already parted, in the future?'

Guru-ji shook his head. 'Every moment contains a number of probabilities. There are choices we can make at every minute. We are not machines moving along a track, no. But there is no such thing as full freedom. We are bound by our pasts, by the consequences of our actions. We can lean towards this choice or that, at the criss-cross of events. And sometimes the probabilities converge at a node, into something approaching a certainty. And then, if you are capable of listening, of seeing, you know.'