Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

I shot her.

The Glock was in my hand. There was the smell of some flower in the air, some leaf with bitterness underneath. I didn't remember the sound, but my ears were stunned.

She had fallen in the doorway leading to the beds. I looked down at the comforting black metal in my grip, then came up to her. Yes, she was dead. There was blood, still moving. A flutter in her eyelashes, from the silent breeze of the air-conditioning. Her pupils were quite still. And there was that hole in her chest. I had not missed.

I sat. I let myself down, and sat next to her. Jojo. Jojo. In front of me, there was the back of a computer, a white cable dangling. Beyond that, a white wall. I shut my eyes.

When I awoke, I was on the floor, her foot was in front of my face. There was no respite for me, no avoiding what I had done. I came into consciousness suddenly and cleanly, and there was no gap of knowledge. I knew that I was lying next to Jojo, on the hard ground, and that I had killed her. But what I noticed all new, all keen and fresh and as if for the first time, was how complicated a thing a human foot is. It has little pads, and arches, and a convoluted network of muscles and nerves, it has bones, so many bones. It flexes and moves and walks and endures. Its skin takes on the colour of the years it passes through, until the cracks in it form a net as complicated as a life itself.

I held Jojo's foot. I cupped its ankle and held its cold inertia. On my wrist, my watch blinked out the hour at me. Six thirty-six. We had had lunch at two. Had I only slept for a few hours? But I felt rested, and my head was clear. Then I saw it, I saw that the day had changed. I had slept for more than twenty-four hours.

Get on with it. But get on with what? More money-making, more women, more killing. I had already lived that, I had no appetite for more. So, get on with what? Lying on the ground, next to Jojo, I asked myself that. I felt whole again, delivered from fuzziness and distraction and exhaustion by this long rest on this bloodstained ground. In this clarity, I could see that Shridhar Shukla – Guru-ji – had been right. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't stop anything. I was defeated. He had beaten me, because he knew me better than I knew myself. He knew my past, and he knew my future. What I did, or didn't, do was irrelevant. Or worse, it was entirely relevant. Whatever I chose to do would contribute to his plan, would end in fire. The world wanted to die, and I had helped it along. He had set up the sacrifice, and every action of mine was fuel. I couldn't stop it.

I softly rubbed the fissures on Jojo's heel with the very tips of my fingers. Was her death also foretold? She had not had an easy life, I thought. She had tried to take care of her feet with lotions, but the skin had cracked from all her walking. So much effort, so much striving, and to come to this. To be brought to this sudden end by her friend. But yes, I thought, this is what we can choose. You can't stop it, Guru-ji had said, you can't stop yourself.

But I can. I can stop myself. This is the only and last thing I can choose. In this, I can defeat even you, Guru-ji. I can stop myself.

Okay, Jojo. Okay. I sat up. Where was the gun? Here. Loaded and ready. One bullet is all it would take. I didn't want to look at her face. I kept my eyes on her feet and turned around, until I could rest my back on the wall. Okay.

But I couldn't do it. Not yet. Not yet. But why not? I wanted to. I wasn't afraid, I was eager. Maybe Jojo was waiting for me on the other side. Maybe she would curse me and hit me, but finally she would understand. I would talk to her and she would understand, as she always had. It was just a matter of talking, and time. And I would curse her for betraying me, for lying to me. But finally I would forgive her. We would forgive each other. But I couldn't do it yet, put the gun up to my mouth. Why? Because, because simply this: what would they say about me after I had gone? Would they say, Ganesh Gaitonde went mad in a secret room in Mumbai, he killed a girl and then himself? Would they say, he was a coward and a weak man? If I didn't tell them, they wouldn't understand. They would spread rumours, and lies, and invent reasons, and speculate about causes.

But who would listen to me? Jojo was gone, and Guru-ji was absent. I could call any reporter, and he would come running. But reporters were devious bastards, they wanted headlines and action, scandals and tales. There was that fellow at Mumbai Mirror , who was very good, but even he would think of me as Ganesh Gaitonde, crime lord and international crook. No, it had to be somebody good, somebody simple. Somebody who would listen to me as a man might listen to another man on a railway platform, with sympathy and kindness, just for an hour or two until the train came. Somebody who had seen me not merely as Ganesh Gaitonde, but a human being.

So that was when I thought of you, Sartaj Singh. I remembered my first meeting with Guru-ji, the first time I had sat with him, face-to-face. I remembered how you had helped me to that meeting, how you had talked to me and – on the very last day – taken me in, to my fate. I remembered that generosity, unusual for anyone, incredible in a policeman, and I remembered you. You have a policeman's cruelty in your eyes, Sartaj, in your swagger, but under that studied indifference there is a sentimental man. Despite all your sardar-ji preening, you were moved by me. Our lives had crossed, and mine had changed for ever.

So I knew what to do. I got up smartly, went to the desk and made some calls. In fifteen minutes I had your home number. I called, and listened to your sleepy mumble. And I said, 'Do you want Ganesh Gaitonde?'

You came. I looked at you, peering up into the camera. You were older, harder, but still the same man. And I told you what had happened to Ganesh Gaitonde.

But you haven't listened to all of it, Sartaj. You too are not free of ambition. You want to take me in, to have my arrest added to the list of your triumphs. You sat in front of the steel door to the bunker, and you listened, but you called in a bulldozer. You've broken through the door, the second monitor on my right shows you edging forward, pistol ready. You are coming in. I'm still talking, but you aren't listening to me any more. Your eyes are afire. You want me, you and your riflemen. But listen to me. There is a whirlwind of memories in my head, a scatter of tattered faces and bodies. I know how they skirl through each other, their connections and their disjunctions, I can trace their velocities. Listen to me. If you want Ganesh Gaitonde, then you have to let me talk. Otherwise Ganesh Gaitonde will escape you, as he escaped every time, as he escaped every last assassin. Ganesh Gaitonde escaped even me, almost. Now, at this last hour, I have Ganesh Gaitonde, I know what he was, what he became. Listen to me, you must listen to me. But you are now in the bunker. I have left the trapdoor unlocked for you. Under each step of yours, I can see dozens of my years pass. I can see it all together now, from the very beginning to the first house I built for myself, my first home in Gopalmath. I remember it all, from a village temple to Bangkok. But you are already inside, in the shelter.

Here is the pistol. The barrel fits snugly into my mouth. I think of what Jojo would say: Bastard, you're scared or what? You want me to do it for you?

No, Jojo. I'm not afraid.

Sartaj, do you know why I do this? I do it for love. I do it because I know who I am.

Bas, enough.

Parulkar was late the next morning. Sartaj sat on the bench outside his office and watched a quartet of sparrows fly through the rafters and around the pillars. They went from one side of the corridor to the other, and then out over the courtyard and to the wall beyond. Then back they came. One of them executed a lazy roll and sat at the end of the bench, dipping his head down and bobbing it back. He – or she? – fluffed his wings, hopped to the left and flashed tiny brown eyes at Sartaj. Then he was away. They are wary of us, Sartaj thought, and otherwise wholly indifferent. Our tragedies matter nothing to them. The thought was oddly comforting. So that bastard Ganesh Gaitonde had blown half his head off in a white bunker, so maybe there was a bomb in Bombay, so what? Life would go on. Sartaj tried to concentrate on this thought, and to follow the sparrows as they came to the ground and plummeted upward.