Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Meanwhile, Parulkar was on the run. On the second day after the phone call was made public, questions were asked in the legislative assembly and also in parliament. That same evening, a warrant was issued for Parulkar's arrest. But his application for anticipatory bail had already come in, and he was already absconding. His lawyer told the papers the next day that the proceedings had been hasty and unprofessional, that the voice on the tapes was not Parulkar, who had dedicated many years of selfless service to the nation. Furthermore, there was no proof that the other voice on the tape was indeed one Suleiman Isa. And also, that the conversation which actually took place on the tape was in no way demonstrative of criminal malfeasance or anti-national activity.

But that same day the chief minister announced a massive reshuffling of senior police officers, and in response to questioning by reporters stated categorically that there was no question of himself or anyone from his cabinet interfering with the due process of the law. 'The enquiry is going along. We will have results very fast. You will see. DCP Parulkar should give himself up. We will be strict but fair.'

Sartaj himself had no idea where Parulkar was. He had some idea of how to get word to him, and so he left discreet messages with a couple of khabaris, and with Homi Mehta the money manager. But there was no response. Twice that fortnight, his mobile had rung late at night. Both times, the caller had not spoken. Sartaj could hear slow exhalations, an old man's laborious inhalations. The second time he had said, 'Sir? Is that you, sir?' But there had been no response, and no caller's number on the display. The morning after Sartaj's promotion was formally announced, his mobile rang while he was in the bathroom. He felt his way out, soap still on his face, and found the phone vibrating on his bed. 'Hello?' he said.

Again, there was the same breathing. This time, Sartaj felt that this silent man was very angry at him. 'Sir,' Sartaj said. 'Sir, you have to listen to me. It was very important, I will tell you everything about it.'

But the caller put down his receiver. There was a click, and then nothing. That evening, Sartaj was just finishing his shift when Kamble came into the detection room. 'Boss,' he said.

'What?' Sartaj snapped. He had been overseeing the interrogation of an armed robber. Since his promotion, he no longer found it necessary to third-degree the prisoners himself. He merely instructed, and watched. The room smelt of sweat and piss.

'You'd better come outside,' Kamble said. And then, in English, 'Please.'

Sartaj followed Kamble outside, into the hallway that opened out into the compound. Kamble took him by the elbow and walked him to the edge of the pond. There were birds wheeling overhead. 'They found Parulkar this afternoon.'

'Good. Where did he give himself up?' Because if Parulkar didn't want to be caught, he wouldn't be.

'No, not like that. They found him.'

Kamble said that just forty-five minutes ago, the detail watching Parulkar's home had been alerted by screams coming from inside the house. They had gone in and found two of Parulkar's granddaughters in hysterics. It turned out that Parulkar had been inside the house all along. In that ancestral abode, under a staircase, there was a wooden panel that hinged away to reveal a small ten-foot room wedged in behind the kitchen. Parulkar had been safely ensconced inside, and he could have stayed indefinitely, since food and other resources could have been easily provided to him, and the main thrust of the investigation was elsewhere, as far away as Pune and Cochin. But this evening, Parulkar had emerged from his hiding place and gone into his bedroom, without care for the daylight which he had been avoiding. He had shaved, bathed, changed into a fresh kurta. He had taken off his watch and placed it on the table by his bedside. Then he had taken the keys to the Godrej cupboard next to his bed, opened it and the locker inside, and had extracted his service revolver. He went into the bathroom, took off his chappals, stepped into the bathtub. The girls had heard the report of the pistol and had run in and found him.

'Bas,' Kamble said. 'That is all I know so far.'

Sartaj stepped away. Shadows moved over the water, and ripples moved from opposite sides of the pond and ran across each other. This is all we know so far, Sartaj thought. And this is all we will ever know. We die for things we don't understand, we sacrifice those we love. 'I should go there,' he said.

'To his house? Boss, right now, no. Do not go there.'

'Yes, you're right. Of course I shouldn't go there. Okay. I think I will stay here for a while.'

Kamble went back into the station. Sartaj stayed outside. He listened to the flapping of the flag on the temple, and watched the water. He had the sense that something was about to change. He was waiting. But he wasn't sure it ever would.

I

The Ansari Tola in Rajpur was on the eastern side of the town, on the other side of the nullah from the crossroads and behind a line of khajoor trees. There were just eleven huts, clustered together in an untidy circle. A muddy track went down from the culvert to the Tola, and the first hut, on the highest land, belonged to Noor Mohammed. He owned seven katthas of poor land, on which he grew potatoes and makkai, and he drove an ikka drawn by a rickety brown nag. His wife was named Mumtaz Khatun, and they had three children, one boy and two girls. Noor Mohammed was the least poor man in the Ansari Tola, which meant that he and his family just barely scraped by, and that his children hardly ever needed to go to sleep on a stomach-filling diet of chillies and water. Noor Mohammed and Mumtaz sent their sons to school, but intermittently, depending on the season and the work to be done in the fields. They did not have much to spare, not time and not food and not money. Still, they gave thanks to Allah when another son was born to them. They named him Aadil.

Aadil was curious and adventuresome from the very start. When he was two, he disappeared one rainy afternoon from under the noses of his two sisters. His mother came home to the Tola to find the whole community in an uproar, and the sisters weeping. Everyone searched in the fields, and a boy cousin was lowered down into the well. Noor Mohammed clenched his fists, and walked the near edge of the nullah. Finally, Noor Mohammed's brother Salim found Aadil where nobody had thought to look, on the road on the other side of the nullah. 'He was just walking along,' Salim said of his nephew, 'all naked but not tired or afraid at all.' Aadil had decided to explore the world, it seemed, and had just gone off on his own. His mother squeezed him close and asked him, 'Where were you going? What were you looking for?' Aadil didn't say anything at all. He patiently suffered all the fuss, and looked around with big black eyes. He was a very serious boy. 'If I hadn't been coming back from Kurkoo Kothi just then,' his uncle said, 'our young adventurer here would have gone all the way to Patna.'

The distance to Patna was only one hundred and twenty-eight kilometres, but it took Aadil eighteen years to get there. Until then, he struggled against the limitations and confinements of Rajpur, a town of one and a half lakh citizens that lay untidily sprawled on the southern bank of the Milani river. The Milani was a minor watercourse which split from the Boorhi Gandak sixty kilometres before it emptied into the Ganga. A medieval Kali temple stood on a rocky outcrop next to the Milani, facing a white mosque on a nearby hill. During the summer, and late in the winter, the water in the river receded, revealing grey rocks covered with carvings of curving-limbed gods and goddesses from some ancient, forgotten time. To the south and east, on the highest hill in the immediate surroundings, the haveli of Raja Jadunath Singh Chaudhury crumbled quietly into a ruin that was haunted – according to the entire population of Rajpur – by mad ghosts and cackling chudails. Raja Jadunath had lost most of his land, and he could not compete in splendour or munificence with the local MLA, Nandan Prasad Yadav, who during Aadil's childhood built Kurkoo Kothi into a magnificent blue and pink extravagance, surrounded by a twelve-foot wall and armed guards. Noor Mohammed always said that the Raja had no head for modern politics, and Nandan Prasad Yadav was a past master at that dirty game. So one grew small, and the other big. Noor Mohammed was sometimes hired by the Raja, to drive his children to the railway station in the Raja's ancient buggy, and most of the men from the Ansari Tola worked as labourers on the Kurkoo Kothi.