Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Shall I send you a girl?' Jojo asked that Sunday evening. 'I have one or two new ones that may entertain you.'

'Arre, I'm finished with all that.'

'I don't believe you, Gaitonde. You don't believe that yourself. You're never going to take a girl again? In your entire life?'

'Maybe I will, maybe I won't. But it isn't an important concern any more. I have gone beyond all that.'

She made a squeaking groan, like a puppy in piercing pain. I thought she was maybe suddenly ill too. Then she erupted into a helpless torrent of laughter. I held the phone away from my ear, and said, 'Jojo, maderchod, listen to me.' She was far beyond listening, and I put the phone down and waited. I let a minute pass, and two, and then I picked up the phone. She was giggling now, but as soon as I said her name she was off again. 'Crazy chutiya,' I said, and hung up. At that moment, I wanted her in front of me so I could put my hand on her throat and choke off that dirty sound, I wanted her to rattle into red-faced silence while I squeezed and squeezed. I strode around my cabin, went out on to the deck and came back again. Kutiya. I had let her become too familiar, too informal with me. Maybe she needed to be taught a lesson. Right from the start I had let her get away with too much.

I was thinking this when she called. 'Saali,' I began.

'Sorry, sorry,' she said. 'Truly. Gaitonde, you have to forgive me. It was just such a surprise. You of all people. You who enjoy women so much. It is hard to believe, that you are saying this.'

'Gaandu, you are just afraid of losing my business. You want me to spend money on another Zoya, build her up, so you can get your cut.'

'I'm just trying to calm you down, Gaitonde. You have never been like this. And you told me once that to run a company you have to be calm and cold. You are not calm now.'

She was right. I was not calm. I was agitated, afraid, angry. 'A girl isn't going to cool me now,' I said. 'Try something else.'

'Want to hear some letters?'

We hadn't amused ourselves with her application letters for a long while. 'Yes, yes,' I said. 'That's good. Read one.'

She had a few ready, right there at her desk. They came in a steady drizzle, ebbing and flowing with the Face of the Year and International Man contests on television. 'Okay. Listen. Do you want to hear one from village Golgar, post office Fofural, district Dhar, Madhya Pradesh? Or do you want one from Kuchaman City, district Nagaur, Rajasthan?'

'Fofural? No, I don't believe it.'

'Maybe it's Fofunal. His English writing isn't that clear. The address is in English. Shall I read his postcard?'

So they were writing English in village Golgar, post office Fofu-maderchod-something. The thought made my head whirl. 'No, leave the bhadwaya in Golgar. We don't hear that often from Rajasthan. Let the Rajasthani speak.'

'Yes. His name is Shailendra Kumar. He writes…' She slowed down now, as she ploughed through the Hindi. 'He's got one of those things at the top of the postcard, Om evam saraswatye namah . With little curlicues underneath.'

'So, our Shailendra is a pious boy. Very good.'

'He writes "Dear Sir/Madam". That's written in English. Then he switches to Hindi. "My name is Shailendra. I am currently a student in the twelfth class. I am choosing modelling as my career. I am eighteen years old. My height is five foot eleven. I have an impressive personality. I have taken part in many school plays."'

Jojo paused. I knew what she was waiting for: I was now supposed to say something cutting, something funny about Shailendra the gaon actor who dreamed of walking a ramp in the big city. Then we would laugh together, we two who had escaped our own gaons, and then we would read some more. But today I just felt sad, at the thought of Shailendra the hero of the district, with the personality that the girls talked about as they walked through the fields, maybe he even rode a motorcycle sometimes, his uncle's motorcycle. He was tall, and so he thought he should come to Bombay. To become bigger. 'Jojo,' I said. 'I'm feeling quite tired. I think I should try to sleep.'

'This early?'

'Let me see,' I said. 'Maybe I'll feel better in the morning.' I hesitated, then asked, 'How are you, Jojo?'

It silenced her for a moment, my asking. I never had done that before. 'Arre, Gaitonde, I'm tip-top. Business is down a bit, but then the economy is down, nobody has money. I am surviving.'

'Do you have a thoku?'

'Of course. I have two. You may be finished with women, but I have one or two uses for men still.' She laughed her laugh, and this time she raised a small smile from me. 'Although they are so much trouble, Gaitonde. Always wanting this and that. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. No man can satisfy me like my vibrator, anyway.'

Now I had to laugh. 'You are shameless.'

She was. Later that night, I thought of my friend Jojo. Others had come and gone, they had died, they had left, but Jojo – the one I had never met face to face, the one I had never eaten a meal with, the one I had never touched, had never taken – she was still with me. Sometimes days passed without my talking to Jojo, but always she was there with me, in me. She was fearless, she told me what she thought of my actions, she advised me, she listened to me. She knew me, and in these recent days of my terror, she was the one person who I never suspected of betrayal. It just never occurred to me to think that she may have passed information to the shooters, even though it was true that she knew my life more intimately than many. I forced myself to think objectively of Jojo now, to remove her from myself and look at her as I would at a stranger: she was a businesswoman, a producer, a madam, a woman loose in her ways and thoughts. Untrustworthy by any logical evaluation, but I trusted her. Nothing that I could imagine – she did it for money, she gave me up under threats from my enemies, she did it on a whim, she did it by mistake – nothing could shake the rock of my trust. I gave up the attempt. She was Jojo, and she was in my life, threaded into it like sinews looped through bone. I didn't know how this had happened, or when exactly, but I knew that without her I would collapse into an arid, rattling heap. She had to stay, she had to be with me.

I couldn't sleep that night, and called her twice. She told me more about her thokus, and made me chortle. Then it was four in the morning, and I was awake, and it was too late to call her again. Guru-ji was travelling, and unavailable. I thought of going up to the deck, but I was exhausted, so tired that I could trace each twitching of my calves up into my thighs. The clock at the bedside had slowed its blinking to a slow, leisurely pulse, and then paused altogether. Time had dissolved itself into a gummy deep of moonlight, and I floated in it, a transparent, lifting form swayed back, and back, by its billows. I am walking fast behind Salim Kaka, through a clicking swamp. Mathu is to my right. We have the gold, and we are away. We are happy. There is water ahead of us, a small stream that cuts through the mud. Salim Kaka is at the edge. I am glaring at Mathu, trying to see his eyes. Salim Kaka has a foot down, into the water. There is a pistol in my hand.

Up, I flung myself up out of bed. I threw open the door and went down the corridor, knocking. I woke up the boys, and took them upstairs. 'Let's watch a picture,' I told them. They were confused, and sleepy, but they didn't ask any questions. In ten minutes we were seated in front of the television, and they were arguing about what to watch. They offered me Company , which I still hadn't seen. But I knew its story already, its betrayals, and I knew the real players, Chotta Madhav and his old friend in Karachi. This morning, I didn't want any of its bullets, its blood. So they rummaged around, in the boxes of tapes and DVDs, and finally we settled on Humjoli .