Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

At six, his phone rang. 'Bhai was pleased,' Iffat-bibi said.

'Yes.'

'He said to give you a gift. Just a token. Five petis.'

'I don't want the maderchod's money. Just give me the address.'

'Are you sure? Turning down a gift from Bhai is rude.'

'You tell him exactly what I said. I want the address, okay? The address.'

Iffat-bibi sighed. 'All right,' she said. 'You young people are very foolish sometimes. Do you have a pen?'

* * *

The address was for a two-storey bungalow at the western edge of Chembur, set back from a middle-class neighbourhood by a well-maintained ten-foot wall. After Sartaj wrote down the address in his notebook in very careful block letters, he made Iffat-bibi repeat it three times. Then events moved very fast. He called Anjali Mathur, and he and Kamble met her and her people on a street near Vrindavan Chowk in Sion. Then they went north to Chembur, accompanied by an IG and a gaggle of very senior policemen and some tough-looking military officers who offered no job descriptions. Some local Chembur cops – none of whom Sartaj had met before – offered local information, and led them to the immediate neighbourhood of the bungalow. A discreet perimeter was set up, and a command post was set up over a dairy sixty metres away, behind a screen of trees. Sartaj never saw the bungalow. He and Kamble sat to one side of the very busy room, and watched it fill with radios and unrecognizable equipment and competent, confident men. Anjali Mathur huddled in conferences with her boss and others, and remembered to send chai to Sartaj and Kamble when it came around.

Kamble nudged Sartaj. 'Boss,' he whispered, 'go over and stand near them. They may want your advice. Or to ask you something. You found this maderchod house for them. You are the hero of the day. Go and behave like you deserve the credit, or one of those gaandu IPS officers will steal it.'

But Sartaj didn't particularly want to give advice to anyone. He was content to sit in the glow of the laptop screens and watch the skies change colour outside the window to the rear. Someone had once told him, he didn't remember who, that the fantastic colours in Mumbai's evening came from all the pollution that floated over the city, from all the incredible millions who crowded into a very small space. Sartaj had no doubt it was true, but the purples and reds and oranges were still beautiful and grand. You could watch them change and deepen and lose themselves in black.

At ten that night, Anjali Mathur came over and sat next to them. 'It is confirmed,' she said. 'There are seven men in the house. We have two distinct radioactive signatures, and there are two three-ton trucks in the back, behind the bungalow. We think they were going to drive the bombs to their ground zeros.'

'Two bombs? Now what happens?' Kamble said. He was rigid with excitement and anticipation.

'There is a team already here, in place. They will go some time in the night. That decision will be made by the operational commander.' She tilted her head towards the front of the room, to a military man leaning over a radio. She seemed to be waiting for a response from Sartaj.

He cleared his throat. 'I am sure your team will win.' Sartaj felt, inexplicably, like laughing. He restrained himself, of course, but she gave him an appraising glance as she got up.

Kamble followed her past the tables, and came back a few minutes later even more nervous and anxious. His eyes flared and he leant over and thumped Sartaj on the shoulder. 'The Black Cats are here, boss. With those black commando hoods and guns and everything.'

Sartaj tried to discover some enthusiasm within himself about the Black Cats, but he just felt sleepy. He noted his own curious lack of excitement about the prospect of being saved, and thought it was probably just exhaustion. It is the insomnia, he thought, and all the recent ups and downs, all the stresses coming together. Probably I will feel something tomorrow. But right now I think I will just sit here and feel nothing. Probably it is all the beer and the whisky, making up the weight that is crushing my thighs like black iron. Probably I am just very tired.

He awoke to a rough jostling, to insistent and heavy hands against his cheeks. 'Sartaj, wake up.' It was Kamble. 'Gaandu, you are the only man in the world who would snore through his own best moments. The climax is about to happen, boss. They are about to go in. Wake up. Wake up.'

Sartaj sat up, ground the sleep from his eyes. 'What time is it?'

'Four-thirty.'

A single bird hooted in the pre-dawn stillness. Inside the command post, there was an expectant silence, an absolute immobility that was filled with waiting. Sartaj wanted to ask Kamble how they would know that the team had gone in, that the command had been given, but Kamble had his hands over his mouth, his thumbs hard over his cheeks. He looked like a little boy waiting for exam results to be announced.

Nothing changed in the room, but then, from far away, came a series of pops, and then another, phap-phap-phap, phap-phap-phap-phap. And then a last little boom. A moment passed, and then from the front of the room, a cheer grew and spread. Anjali Mathur came running through the clapping crowd. 'We're safe,' she said. 'We're safe.'

Sartaj nodded, and made himself smile. He was surrounded suddenly by police officers and RAW men and Black Cats, all of whom jostled each other and hugged each other and shook hands with him. Apparently Kamble had made sure that they knew where the credit was due. Sartaj turned through the crowd and was able, slowly, to peel through it and get down the stairs. He walked away, to the back of the compound behind the dairy, which was crowded now with police vehicles and other unmarked cars. But it smelt mostly of milk, and Sartaj thought he caught the faint, good edge of gobar. But that was doubtful, how many dairies in the city really had cows any more? But it was rejuvenating to breathe in. His head was clearing.

So, with those little banging sounds far away, apparently the world had been saved. Sartaj didn't feel any safer. Inside him, even now, there was that burning fuse, that ticking fear. He leant against a post in a wire fence and tried to feel satisfaction. Our team won. Sure. Kamble had been dancing inside, he was happy. But Sartaj couldn't keep the question at bay: You want to save this ? For what? Why?

* * *

It took three weeks for Sartaj's promotion to come through. Nobody knew about his work on the Gaitonde affair, on the bombs, so there was no reason given for the extraordinarily expedited order and paperwork. At the dairy itself, that morning, Anjali Mathur had told him that the bombs did not exist officially, and that they never would. The decision had been made at the very top, she told him, for reasons of national security. And she had shrugged, and he had understood, because he was a policeman and he knew that successful operations sometimes could not exist officially so that some higher-up's reputation could be protected, so that some politician would not have to acknowledge how close disaster had wandered.

Sartaj wouldn't have minded the invisibility of what they had done that morning, except for the fact that rumours rushed in to fill the vacuum left behind by the lack of facts. The general understanding in the department was that Sartaj had somehow rolled over on Parulkar, that he had engineered Parulkar's astonishing downfall. In the version of the phone call between Parulkar and Suleiman Isa that was on the ACB tapes and the websites, the first few seconds had been clipped off. Sartaj's 'Hello?' had been cut, and the conversation only began with Parulkar picking up the phone and saying, 'I am here.' Nobody knew that the call had been taken at Sartaj's mother's house, and yet there was a tacit understanding throughout the force that Sartaj had had something to do with the circumstances of the call. It was known that the promotion was his reward, along with a gift of one full khoka from Suleiman Isa. There were rumours also that Sartaj had beaten up an innocent man, injured him very badly, and a belief that even this matter was squashed in return for the destruction of Parulkar. In the department, there was no bad feeling towards Sartaj about this, and in fact there was a renewed respect from many quarters. Parulkar was an old player, and he had made many enemies along the way. Many were not unhappy to see him fall. Even those neutral towards him felt that he had maybe tried to grab too much. Parulkar's friends and enemies now thought of Sartaj as a formidable strategist, someone to be cultivated.