Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Nikhil was looking into the rear-view mirror. 'What do you think, bhai?'

'There's something there.'

'Yes. If it was just a farmhouse, that bastard wouldn't be threatening to bite us like that.'

We'd given the farmhouse a cursory going-over, and found nothing. Was it worth going back, and worth dealing with Kirpal Singh, to search it thoroughly? I felt strangely dispirited. The road rolled on, and maybe it was better to take it all the way back to Amritsar, and then catch a plane to Delhi and on to Bangkok, and go back to my life. But that was unbearable. I had no life to go back to, not until I had found Guru-ji. Even now, even after all my rage at him, all I wanted was to sit at his feet again. I knew this. I might curse him and call him a fraud, and say that I was done with him, but what I really wanted was to feel his hand cupping my head, and the blessing of his voice. I had questions, yes. I wanted to ask him why he had left, why Gaston and Pascal had died, what he had had us transport for him, what he was doing, what his plan was. The meaning of my life was somehow hidden in these questions. But if he refused to give one single answer, I would accept that, as long as he came back to me. As long as he didn't leave me like this, just me, without him, without guidance and care. I had to find him. But Guru-ji was too advanced for me, too realized. With all my lifetime's worth of learned lessons, and my cunning, I would never find him. I could let it go, and ride on, and away. But why was I afraid? If I had learnt anything from my life, it was to trust my fear. And yet: I was so tired. The road raised itself above the fields, and the deep waves of green came one after another. I could sleep. The power cables swept gently up, down. They came towards me, carrying diamonds of light from the dropping sun. The rats ate them. The rats ate cables.

'Stop,' I said.

'Bhai?'

The car was halted now, near the canal. Above the gurgling of the water, I could hear a very soft wind as it stirred slow waves through the bending stalks of wheat. I twisted in my seat and looked back down the road, at the electricity posts that disappeared into the distance. There was a string of them that angled off from this road towards Guru-ji's farmhouse, that marched through the fields and past the mango orchard. On the roof, yes, on the roof of the house there was a pole above that single room, a pole at which three power lines terminated. If the house was so old, with its creaky table-fans, why did it need so much power? I hadn't seen any power cables anywhere in the interior of the house, so what were those rats eating?

I turned to Nikhil, and told him all this. 'Yes, bhai,' he said. 'But maybe they need the electricity for irrigation. Water pumps and all that, you know.'

Maybe. Maybe. But there was this new house which only looked old. 'Turn around,' I said. 'Let's go back.'

So we went skimming back past the mango orchard, as evening came on. Kirpal Singh came out to meet us, this time. He stood in the middle of the road, legs apart. Nikhil stopped the car, and I got out. I heard the other doors clicking open behind me. 'Arre,' I said, 'did you find my spectacles? Black ones.'

'No,' he said. 'No spectacles.'

'Let's look,' I said. 'They may be on the roof.'

Kirpal Singh was confused. He didn't want us back here, but he didn't like the idea that something of mine was maybe in the house he was guarding. He was a nice brute. I took him by the arm. 'I can't see without my glasses, yaar. I'm half-blind.' I turned him back towards the gate. 'Just let's take a look.'

He was stupid, but he was fast. Chandar had come up on his right, and our timing was exact. We had done this so many times in the past weeks that we had practised it to perfection. I would talk to the mark, and distract him just enough so that Chandar could lay his iron-loaded leather cosh along the back of the head. But Kirpal Singh anticipated it, and flinched away from me and turned, so that the blow took him on the kan-patti and half-tore his right ear off. He fought like a demon then. There were five of us on him, and he took us down and gave us pain. He broke three of Chandar's fingers, knocked Nikhil back and almost out with a single punch that cracked his nose. Jatti stayed on the ground, hacking and coughing and clutching his neck. We fought him. I found myself sitting on the road, empty of breath and hurting in the abdomen, scrambling back away from the heaving welter of bodies. I got my pistol out, but couldn't get a clear shot. Then Kirpal Singh was coming at me. I had time for one squeeze of the trigger, and that knocked his collarbone and twisted his lunge to the side. He still got his right hand on me, though, and I felt his weight on me and his mouth was gaping, terrible and crimson. I felt the shots hit his body, the impact through the muscles, and he was lying on me.

They lifted him off, and I staggered to my feet. 'How many shots?' I said.

Jatti was wheezing, his face wet with tears. 'That gaandu was a commando or something.'

'Four shots, bhai,' Nikhil said. His white shirt was stained all the way to the waist with blood from his nose.

Four was a lot of shots, but it was a big farm. Maybe nobody had heard us. Maybe nobody would pay attention. 'Jatti,' I snarled, 'get into the house and keep the old man quiet.'

'Bhenchod,' Jatti said, his eyes going wide. He ran to the house.

The rest of us took hold of Kirpal Singh and dragged him through the gate. He weighed on all of us, weakened as we were by our sudden injuries. I could hear the shudder in Chandar's breathing as each step jarred his broken bones.

'Hold on, beta,' I told him. 'We'll be out of here soon.' We threw the body down by the cowshed. I told Chandar to kick some gravel over the blood on the road, and keep a lookout from the gate. Then the rest of us began our search of the house. Jatti had found Jagat Narain in the courtyard, blithely washing dishes next to the pump. He must have heard the shots, but apparently they didn't make much of an impression. We locked him inside one of the empty rooms, and told him to go to sleep. Then we looked.

I told the boys that we had to follow the power. From the roof, from the pole, we traced the in-wall connections that went down to the junction box on the ground floor. There was a separate small room at the back of the house that contained this junction box, with two steel locks on the door. We had to extract Jagat Narain from his cell, get him to give us the keys for the locks. By now he had understood that he ought to be scared. He was co-operative, and made no arguments, but his hands were shaking, and he whispered, 'Where's Barjinder? Don't leave Barjinder behind.'

'Who is Barjinder, kaka?' Nikhil said, patting him on the shoulder. 'What are you going on about?'

Jagat Narain shook his head. 'We have to get to Amritsar,' he said. 'Our house is burnt. We have to get to Amritsar.' He was still saying it when Nikhil shut the door on him.

I was shaking a little myself when we emerged again into the twilight, thunderous with calling birds. I thought, I am wound up from the excitement of the chase. I knew I was on to something, and I was even more sure when we opened this back room and saw the junction boxes and the circuit breakers and the meters. All the technology was up to date and beyond, clean and shining and working flawlessly. The numbers on the meters were moving, slowly but steadily, no doubt of that. Something was sucking up electricity.

We followed the cables. There had been an attempt to disguise the paths that they followed under the plaster and through the brick, so we had to arm ourselves with picks and shovels. We dug. There was one circuit that fed the house, but there were two others that looped off outside, two feet under the surface. It was hard, slow work, chipping at the packed soil under the gravel. We crawled slowly into the shadows under the mango trees. Nikhil went back to the house and came out with two Petromax lanterns, and we went forward in that dancing light. It was full night when we found the underground complex. There was an empty square in the middle of the grove, a shape that you only saw as an absence of trees. It was very innocent, unless you traced the PVC-sleeved cable that led to a T-junction and then went straight down. We padded about in circles. Jatti found a ventilator first, guided by the small hiss of air. Then, under an adjacent patch of thatch, a small metal panel painted in camouflage brown and dull green. Nikhil put his ear to it.