Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

The boys looked dejected. They were draped over the sofas and the beds, looking bleary. Bonus or no bonus, it was hard on them to fail miserably time and time again. I was acting the cheerful leader, but my own feeling of hopelessness was bound to infect them. I knew I should be talking to them about our next operation, but my eyes were bloodshot and scratchy, and an ache had seized the left half of my head, and I just didn't have the energy. Nikhil was leaning back in his chair, his feet up on a balcony railing, leafing listlessly through an old Tamil film magazine that someone had left in the bathroom. He didn't seem very impressed by the round-faced southern starlets, or the incomprehensible advertisements with bicep-baring men. He put down the magazine on the table, and I picked it up and flipped it open at random.

Zoya looked up at me from a full-page picture. She wore white and was lit with a silvery glow that made her look very fair and completely innocent.

She must have been shooting a southern film recently. She was doing films everywhere, actually, and I could see why. She was beautiful. But, oddly enough, I didn't want her. I no longer felt that agonized twist in my stomach that she once had called forth by merely sitting still. I looked at her now and I saw that she was perfect, that she had achieved the proportion we had worked so hard towards, that balance of top and bottom, that fine play of light and dark. Even on the cheap paper of the magazine, through the blurry printing, I could see this. And I felt nothing. I didn't want her, I didn't love her or hate her. I was indifferent.

A longing for a talk with Jojo rose through my chest. I felt myself flush, and I got up. 'I have to make a phone call.' I left them all behind, and shut the door to my bedroom, and dialled Jojo. She woke from sleep, husky-voiced and bad-tempered.

'What do you want, Gaitonde?' she said. 'In the middle of the night?'

'It's eight in the morning. And I want to talk to you.'

'Talk about what, Gai-ton-de?' she said, with a little wail at the end.

I didn't really have a subject that I wanted to talk to her about, I just wanted her voice, her breath. But Jojo's mornings were just suffering until she had had her three cups of tea, and I knew that if I didn't give her a good reason for waking her up, she would slam down the phone and curse me besides. I needed to make something up. 'I am looking for a woman,' I said.

'Bastard,' she growled. 'So call me in the evening.'

'Wait, wait,' I said. 'I don't want a woman, like that. I mean we're looking for a missing woman. She stole some of our money and ran. We can't find her. For months we've been looking.'

'I know her? What's her name?'

I had to come up with a name. The Tamil magazine was lying on the table, fluttering its pages under the swirling fan. 'Sri,' I said. 'Sridevi.'

'What? Sridevi ran away with your money?'

'No, no. Not Sridevi the film star. This is another woman. With that name.'

'So why can't you find her? You watched her family?' Jojo yawned.

'She doesn't have any family. Not married, nothing. We've been everywhere she worked, but there's no sign.'

'So you are stuck, Gaitonde.'

'I am.'

'So then you turn to me.' She was very smug. 'Did you try kidnapping her boyfriend?'

'She doesn't have a boyfriend. Or even a girlfriend.'

'What kind of monster is this? No friend, boy or girl.'

'We've interrogated people she worked with. No use.'

Jojo was rattling about now, she was up and moving. I knew her routine, she was shuffling into the kitchen where the maid had put a pot of water on the gas the night before. Jojo would light the gas without opening her eyes hardly, and reach for a mug of milk that was kept ready on the top shelf of the fridge. There it was, the click of the gas-lighter. 'Okay, so you have no other information about this Sridevi. After all this searching, your entire company has found nothing.'

'Nothing.'

'I told you your employees are fools.'

'Yes, yes. Many times.'

'Give a boy a ghoda, doesn't make him smart. Just makes him a chutiya with a gun.'

'Saali, this is how you help? Get back to Sridevi.'

'Okay.' She was leaning on the counter, I knew, waiting for the water to boil. She was cracking elaichis now, three of them. 'What is her native place?'

'She doesn't have one.'

'Everyone has a native place.'

'Hers is gone. It's in Pakistan. But why?'

'Your brain is also turning into falooda, Gaitonde. People are fools, you know that. They all want to go home. They always do it, even when they know they shouldn't.'

This was true. Keep an eye on a man's village, and sooner or later you got him. Plant an informant in his locality, and one day you could put a round in the back of his head. The police did this all the time, and I had done this. Jojo was right, human beings were stupid, they circled round and around and finally came back to where they started, as if pulled back by the steady tug of an inescapable cord. But what if your home was gone, if there was nowhere to go to? Where would you go? 'I'll think about it,' I said. 'That's not a bad idea. It's a possibility.'

'Fine,' she said. 'You think about it. Now let me drink my chai in peace.'

But I didn't let her go, not yet. I kept her on the phone and talked to her about her production troubles, and her bai who had an alcoholic husband, and the increasing pollution in the city. 'I'm hanging up,' I finally said a full half-hour later, by which time she had finished her chai and was ready to bathe and work. I was feeling more settled, now that I had a direction. I called Nikhil in, and we got to work. We had accumulated papers and documents during our raids, and had seized two laptops. We had information. There was too much of it, actually, two suitcases full and whatever else was on the computers. I explained to Nikhil, and instructed him, and we began to sift through everything. The problem, of course, was that we didn't know what we were looking for. 'Home,' I told Nikhil, 'any place where he would go home to.' He looked puzzled, but only as much as I was myself. Where would a man like Guru-ji go? Chandigarh? But we had already been there, and had found nothing. So where would he go? And for that matter, where would I go, or Jojo? Where do you go when home has become impossible? I had no answers, but we kept looking. It took us five days of searching, and then Nikhil found it.

In Guru-ji's personal account ledgers for the current year and the year before, there were entries for 'Bekanur Farm'. Eighty-four thousand and one lakh thirty-four thousand, on the credit side. We didn't have the records for the five years before that, but there was another entry in the one prior year we could find, for a cheque written – again on Guru-ji's personal account – for a 'Tractor for Bekanur Farm'. And there was a letter on one of the computers, from the current year, to the Punjab State Electricity Board about arrears for Bekanur Farm. This letter was signed by none other than Anand Prasad, our recent sadhu friend. What was a high-up in the organization, a supremo like Anand Prasad, doing writing to PSEB about a matter of two lakhs and some odd thousand? What was this farm anyway? We searched all the public literature available about Guru-ji, and found nothing. There was no mention of a farm fifty miles south of Amritsar, not a word about any farm at all. Certainly he had never said anything to me about owning a farm. There was of course his interest in rural development, in agricultural progress, but that was handled by another sub-division altogether. Their agricultural department had a separate organizational structure, a separate chain of command and separate bank accounts. This Bekanur was something else altogether, it was handled by Guru-ji himself and his very closest associates. And it was kept, as much as possible, a secret.