Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Maybe you call it something else down here,' I told him, 'but it's the same thirty per cent cut you get from the laboratory. I'll bet you a lakh on that. You want thirty per cent? I'll give you thirty per cent.' And I showed him the back of my hand. After that he became quiet and compliant as a whipped randi, he gave his capsules and bowed his head and went away. I couldn't resist showing the bastard his place, but it was bad tradecraft. We needed to keep a low profile, I knew this. But the gaandu had annoyed me. He wore jeans, and drove a Capri, and kept talking about how he was dispensing the 'latest-latest' medicines, but he conducted business just like any village doctor giving water injections to illiterate shepherds. It was the same all over India – we met farmers who carried mobile phones and murdered their daughters and sons for marrying out of caste, we bought bottles of mineral water from scabby, bare-footed chokras whose arms were covered with ringworm. Nikhil had been complaining bitterly every night about the scratchy phone connections he got when he tried to have his laptop dial in and collect e-mail, and finally in Coimbatore an unearthed power plug roasted his sleek Sony Vaio and killed it quite dead. And now he was shitting twelve times a day, and he said he was very afraid he was going to keep huggoing until he died on this bhenchod white throne in this maderchod Malyali city in this harami cesspool of a country.

Even Guru-ji's ashrams were infiltrated by confusion. I had seen this. Chaos seeped in past his steel fences, his blue gates, his protective mantras. All over the country, the ashrams were laid out according to the same exact plan. Whether it was big or small, in a city or in the countryside, each ashram had the same north-south layout, and the same four blue gates. The buildings and distances increased in size, or decreased, but the layout remained precisely the same. Once we had been to a couple of the ashrams, we knew how to navigate them, we knew that the first building on the left after the main gate was the arts and crafts shop, that the laundry was always hidden away in the north-east corner. And always, always, there was the pyramid at the centre, which was always the most sacred, the most powerful, the headquarters. As we went from one identical ashram to the next, looking for information about Guru-ji's whereabouts, I began to see the sense of the geography, the meaning of the design. It was like having a conversation with Guru-ji, looking at these sites that had been blueprinted in his mind, and created wholly by his insight and imagination. The whole landscape focused always on the marble pyramid, which resembled our old Indian temples but wasn't quite like them. Here, in this building completely devoid of images, there was the work of the mind, and what lay beyond the mind. Here there was administration and meditation, dharma and moksha. Far from this central point, at the very outskirts, there were the menial buildings, the laundries and the generating plants, the public toilets and the arts pavilions. Arranged in the middle there were the schools for the children and the dormitories for the married couples, and the medical clinics and the communications facilities. Closer to the centre, away from the buildings where ordinary lay devotees could freely enter, there were the curving residences and viharas and halls of the sadhus, of those who had given up the world. These made a precise circle around the white pyramid itself, beyond which there was only liberation.

I could see the logic and progression here, the movement from the outside to the inside. The relationships of these points and angles, the architecture of these constructions, this was the geometry of time and life itself. I had heard, many times, Guru-ji speaking of the ages of man, the proper affiliations of castes and groups, the place of women in a just society, the education of children – and here, in these ashrams, it was all laid out for the discerning eye to see. There was an order here that was the order of Guru-ji's intellect. Reading these landscapes was like listening to a sermon, and I could now see very clearly his vision, his idea for what the country should be, then the whole world. He wanted to transform and uplift all of India into this green-gardened peace, to move it into perfection. Some parts of Singapore had the cleanliness that he wanted, but there was no city on earth that had this symmetry, this internal consistency that exactly balanced shops and meditation centres, and let you see the central temple through the precisely aligned arches of the library and the laundry. These buildings and the blue gates looked like the past, like the golden sets on the mythological television serials, but they were Guru-ji's future. This was the tomorrow that he wanted to bring to us, the satyug he wanted to create.

But the present was resisting. In Coimbatore, near the east gate of the ashram, an ancient banyan tree had tipped over one morning and crushed eleven metres of the fence, and so let in a flock of goats that ate through three gardens of roses before they could be rounded up and expelled. In Chandigarh, there was a sex scandal involving the head sadhu, three teenaged girl devotees and a local assistant police commissioner. I saw, myself, the condition of the administrative offices at Allepy, which had suffered a persistent infestation by both termites and red ants. And then there was the matter of our handling of the haughty Anand Prasad and his Dutchman, which had sparked off a power struggle in the hierarchy of Guru-ji's organization. The Asian Age had headlined its story 'Brutal Double Murder in Guru's Mysterious Absence', and had gone on to speculate that Anand Prasad had been eliminated by a rebel coterie of sadhus. Now we noticed hired guards at the ashrams, and even more stringent security procedures, and rumours reached us of arguments and scuffles between the leading candidates for Anand Prasad's position. The Asian Age had got it half-right: the sadhus were innocent of Anand Prasad's execution, but there was now indeed ferocious squabbling and infighting within the organization. None of the sadhus knew who we were, so each group thought my reappearing and disappearing search party were goondas hired by another faction, and accused each other of murder. So we pressed on in our quest, using money and intimidation impartially. We killed no one else, but in Bangalore we had to break one computer programmer's arm, so that the other programmer – his girlfriend – would give us the password for an e-mail system. And so it went on.

We found nothing. There were rumours aplenty about what had happened to Guru-ji. Some really believed that he had gone into samadhi, if only temporarily, and others said that he was dying of cancer. Everyone had something to say, but nobody could give us the smallest bit of hard information. My boys grew despondent. The travelling was hard work, and they were away from their normal money-making activities. They hadn't seen their wives and chavvis in weeks. The boys in Mumbai were complaining of police pressure each time we called them, and our shooters and operatives were getting encountered with a distressing regularity. And then Nikhil got his own smelly dose of chaos, and so I called a rest halt in Cochin. I told the boys to rest up, I told them that we would set off soon. But I was starting to think that we would never find Guru-ji, that he had escaped me after all.

After ten days in Cochin, Nikhil finally shook off his illness. He was fully ten pounds lighter, and looked exhausted. The locals had a carnival that night, and we sat on the second-floor balcony of our bungalow and watched them pass in an endless parade of tableaux and noisy re-enactments. There was an elephant, a real one, wearing a gold headdress. He was followed by a group of men wearing pink satin dresses and false breasts and garish make-up. Then there was a truck with a representation of the products and people of Kerala, including a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew and a blonde tourist on a beach chair. A little while later, on another truck, there was a scene out of the Mahabharata , with the heroes wearing shiny armour and dancing to a disco beat. My boys were out there somewhere, in the watching crowd of thousands. Nikhil sipped at a beer, and I drank pineapple juice, and we watched.