Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Can I sit down?' Umesh said. Kamble stepped aside, and the pilot walked unsteadily to one of the big black chairs and sat on its edge, his head hanging down and his arms on his thighs.

Kamble pulled another chair up close and leaned back in it. He nudged Umesh's knee with the toe of his shoe, and said, 'What, you think you watch a few American movies and learn everything? You think you're some maharathi? Arre, cheap bastards like you, we catch them every day. And we bamboo their gaands. But you are worse than any maderchod, blackmailing your own girlfriend. Taking money from her.' Kamble leaned to the side, and spat on the ground. 'Bhenchod, I've seen many chutiyas who sold their own sisters for money, but they're better than you.' He spat again.

'Sorry,' the pilot said. 'Sorry.' He was crying now, and wiping at his eyes with his hands and his tight-biceped T-shirt.

Sartaj noted that Kamble had been careful to miss the white carpet with his expectorations, which meant that he had marked it for himself. Which was fine with Sartaj. A white carpet was a foolish bit of showiness in this city. You'd have to keep the windows closed, and run the air-conditioner day and night to keep the dust out, the grime from settling. 'Umesh,' Sartaj said. 'Here. Look at me. Look at me. Now tell me. Why did you do it?'

The pilot shook his head, stroked at his reddened eyes again. 'Daddy had an angioplasty,' he said. 'So much money. And Chotti, she's got to get married.'

Kamble cracked his knuckles. His sneer was ferocious. 'You're very poor, no? And your girlfriend, she just has too much money, no?'

Umesh was too emotionally wrought to catch the sarcasm. 'Arre, what expenses does she have? She lives with her husband, and he even pays for her petrol. Every month she puts away her' – and now he stretched his arms wide – 'this big pay cheque, and her parents give her money. And still she had me spending money on her. I bet she didn't tell you that. She wants gifts, she wants the best hotels. I tell you, that woman is expensive.'

Sartaj inhaled and said very softly, 'Yes, and besides you have to buy all this expensive equipment, so you need money. Good carpets cost a lot of money. How much a set of seven foreign speakers must cost, I don't even know.'

Umesh retreated into the chair, and when he came back up he had decided to be charming. He shrugged insouciantly, gave Sartaj a bit of roguish twinkle, one man of the world talking to another. 'Everyone has necessities, boss. Everyone. I am sure we can come to some understanding.'

'What?'

The pilot pushed himself up, rising out of the chair. The smooth rims of his teeth made perfectly resonant arcs with his curving lips. 'Kamala really has too much money, yaar. We could all share…'

Something like a sob came out of Sartaj's throat, and he smashed his fist into Umesh's mouth. A jolt of pain arced up into Sartaj's shoulder, and the hard crack of bone on bone was immensely satisfying. Sartaj swung again, and Umesh was falling off the chair, the chair was tipping over, Sartaj stepped around it and followed Umesh. He carefully aimed his kicks, and the third one flipped Umesh on to his back, and the pleasure of it throbbed in Sartaj's head. There was a screaming in his ears. A white-haired woman was huddling over Umesh, there was red smeared and speckled across the carpet, and Kamble had his arms tight around Sartaj's arms and chest, he was dragging him back. Sartaj tore himself loose, turned and shoved his way through a knot of shrieking women, through the door and then he was out. He was out on the road in the front of the building and his chest hurt and his hand, he held it up to the light, a gash oozed black across his knuckles. He wanted somebody else to hit, something, but the cars swept by, out of reach, and he could only hold the edge of a crumbling boundary wall, and curse and curse.

'If it happens in a film, it won't happen in life,' Jojo had said to me. When I'd told her about my fear of radiation burns and bombs and buildings being swept down by a roaring wind, she'd said, 'It's too filmi.' But I knew better, I knew more. I had seen scenes from my own life in two dozen films, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes reduced, but still true. I was filmi, and I was real.

I had known Jojo for years, and I knew that I was still slightly unreal to her. I was her friend, but I was also Ganesh Gaitonde, the crime lord, the ruthless international khiladi, the crorepati and arabpati who lived in palaces. For the overwhelming majority of people, gangsters and spies only existed as figures of light, as glittering and temporary notions thrown up by electronics and celluloid. But I was in fact a gangster and spy, and so I knew well what was possible. My own life had taught me what was real, and I knew that what men can imagine, they can make real. And so I was terrified.

I told myself every morning that there was no reason to be frightened. After all, perhaps Gaston and Pascal and the others on the boat had been exposed to radioactive material by accident on the docks or elsewhere. All kinds of materials passed through, some belonging to government agencies. Maybe something had leaked on the way to one of the big atomic power plants. And even if we had brought in some harmful material on the boat, it may just have been inside one of those machines meant for the agricultural work that Guru-ji was conducting. Yes, no doubt that was the case. It was an accident anyway. Then why was I so scared? No need to be like this. Maybe I had lived so long with the fear of my own death that it had fed on itself and grown larger and stronger until I had this monstrous dread inside me, this lurking, poisonous thing that threatened the death of the whole world.

All would be well, though. Guru-ji would come back from his secret meditation or journey or yagna, whatever it was, and he would tell me exactly what had happened to Gaston and Pascal, and that would be that. He would calm me, and life would settle into a routine again. I remembered all our conversations, I made an effort to trace – in my imagination – our history together. I brought out the files in which I had stored all his pravachans and read them again, and was once again entranced by his wisdom, soothed by his compassion. I watched recordings of his speeches and wept. I spent hours paging through Guru-ji's website, reading the hundreds and thousands of testimonials written by his disciples, and looking at the happy faces of those saved from despair and madness and disease. Every morning I felt that all would be well, that a man who cared for so many – orphaned children, destitute women, the aged and the abandoned – must be a dharmic man. If Guru-ji brought guns into the country, it was to protect morality, to strengthen right and hold off wrong. I was his disciple and I was protected under the umbrella of his love. I was safe. I laughed at myself, and berated myself for my lack of faith. I set to work. But soon I was again awash in horror, surrounded by flayed, stinking corpses, oppressed by a wind that whistled inside my head and left emptiness.

Like a worm, fear grew out of this void and fattened. I was afraid of assassins coming at me over water and under it. Arvind and Suhasini had been killed in Singapore, Bunty had been shot in Mumbai, many others had died. I knew that Suleiman Isa was trying to kill me, and I suspected that Kulkarni and his organization wanted me dead, and some mornings I thought they were running their operations co-operatively. But under these fears there was always this other thing, a quiet terror as bright as the blue on a morning wave. In the afternoons it lapped at the sparkling glass on the portholes as I tried to take a nap, as I shoved my face into white sheets and tried to find my way to oblivion. Food seemed a waste of time to me, dining with the boys a long tribulation, and women gave me no satisfaction. Yes, I turned virgins from my bed because the one final spasm of pleasure didn't seem worth all the work that went into the ridiculous act. I felt old, and empty. It took hours for me to find sleep, and when I did, I slept lightly, racked by dreams of empty wastelands, of burning cities.