Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Some of the boys in the Ansari Tola could read a little, and one had studied till the eighth. None of their fathers could read, and in the whole history of the settlement no member had finished high school. But Aadil, it was clear from the very beginning, was fascinated by the written word. Even before he could read, he traced the shapes of letters on old newspapers. At the two-room primary school near Prem Shanker Jha's mango orchard, Aadil paid attention with such rapt intensity that the other children noticed it right away. One of the Yadav boys said, 'Eh, this Aadil looks like such a dibba when the teacher's talking,' and he made a deathly serious face with big eyes. 'Aadil-Dibba,' he said, and puffed out his cheeks, and the three classes gathered on the chabutra of the schoolhouse all burst out laughing. From that day on, Aadil was known as Dibba, and became famous as a padhaku boy. Even the teacher – when he was in school and teaching, and not off trying to make a little money selling onions wholesale – noted Aadil's dedication and quietness, and tried to keep the school bullies off him. This resulted, of course, in groups of strapping lafangas paying extra attention to Aadil on the way from and to school. Still, he persevered. He passed the fifth, and then went to the Zila High School. To make it into the sixth had been very hard, because Aadil's mother and father had no money for books or slates or pencils. Now it was harder, and not only because more books were needed, and pens, and a geometry set. There were many days that Aadil had to work in the fields, especially when there was planting or harvesting to be done, and there were other days when he laboured at brick kilns with his uncles and cousins. He was old enough to earn now, and so he did. There were mouths to be fed, and homes to be mended, and marriages to be paid for. But he was assiduous about his learning. Despite everything, he stuck it out. He read borrowed books, and spent evenings under the flickering bulbs of the Shivnath Jha Sarvajanik Pustakalaya. The library had been endowed by a renowned local Brahmin landowner, and named after his very learned father. There was a little discomfort evinced by the library staff at first, at having a Muslim boy come and sit so boldly under the garlanded picture of the old man who had spent his whole life bathing, purifying and sanctifying. But they soon grew used to the sight of Aadil sitting at a wooden bench, bent over a book or a newspaper. Times were changing, and the two rooms and dozen shelves of the library were after all supposed to be sarvajanik, and Aadil was definitely one of the people, if only a grimy and somewhat unpalatable one. So Aadil learned about Rajpur and what lay beyond. He located himself not only in space, but also in time. I am, he thought one day, part of the twentieth century.

Rajpur, though, stubbornly remained in some other time, in some era that wasn't quite the present and definitely not the future. The potholed main road that led out of town looked nothing like the Soviet highways that Aadil saw in black-and-white magazines, and the sight of whole villages in America with electricity and phones filled him with wonder. There was one phone now in Rajpur, at Nandan Prasad Yadav's house, but Aadil had never seen it. He had seen three films, two in a temporary outdoor cinema set up by an exhibitor who rode up in a jeep and unfurled a dirty white screen which turned a blazing Technicolor after dark. Then Prem Shanker Jha built a cinema house he named Parvati, in which Aadil saw Bobby . He sat on the ground, up front near the screen, and what he dreamed about afterwards was not Rishi Kapoor's sleek motorcycle, or Dimple Kapadia's glistening, almost naked body, but the clean, two-storeyed pucca houses, the phones, the roads, the water that fell magically from taps. Aadil now began to recognize how dirty Rajpur was, with its open drains and lanes built to no plan, its wandering tribes of spindly dogs. The fields wandered to the horizon, a long, marching column of electricity poles stripped of their copper and wire stopped abruptly in the middle of a cracking wasteland, and the crows made their relentless clamour over the eaves of the Ansari Tola. Babies were born, marriages were made, old men and women died, but everything remained the same. Near Prem Shanker Jha's orchard, Aadil played football and gilli-danda with Brahmin and Yadav and Bhumihar boys, but he had never visited their homes, and they had never set foot in the Ansari Tola. No Paswan would ever enter the inner courtyard of a Brahmin or Bhumihar house, and even outside, the poor man would squat on the ground to talk to his upper-caste patron, who lounged comfortably on a khattia. The lowly were allowed no chairs, no pride, no dignity.

When Aadil was in class nine, his chachu, the gentle Salim – who had found him wandering down the road to Patna so long ago – died of a wrenching stomach ailment that emptied him out in torrents of diarrhoea. His mourning relatives laid out the frail body, cleansed it, wrapped it in its white shroud and carried it to the Muslim graveyard at the western end of Rajpur. But the maulvi who lived in the mosque there wouldn't let them in, and soon the Sayyids and Pathans who lived near by came running. You cannot bury anyone here, they said, you have your own graveyard. The men from the Ansari Tola protested in the name of Allah, and then they beseeched the mighty Maqbool Khan, who was the wealthiest Muslim in Rajpur, the son of a zamindar and the descendant – it was said – of amirs and nawabs. The dead man's relatives asked for sympathy, for compassion, for reham. They told Maqbool Khan and the Pathans and the Sayyids that their own graveyard was lost, that it had been covered by water when the river changed course after the monsoon. But there was no mercy that day in Rajpur, not even for the dead man, who had been a five-time namaazi and the most generous of men. Maqbool Khan gave the mourners five rupees, and told them that they had to construct a new graveyard. It took two days to bury Salim, because there was no free land lying around in Rajpur, even just a few feet of hard earth, enough to hold a man. Aadil's father found a scrubby slope, a rough triangle of sour, barren soil between the nullah and the road, and the men cleared and levelled this and made a graveyard, and buried Salim.

Aadil began to wake up with anger in his head. It was there, ready to greet him with its insistent monotone, even before he opened his eyes and saw the muddy brown of the wall, before he heard his mother's sighs as she struggled through the constant pain in her back. The low grinding of the anger stayed with him through the day and burnt the flesh from his bones, so that he became very thin. He was tall now, and nothing like a dibba, although the nickname stayed with him. His mother began to joke about finding a girl for him. For Aadil, this early talk of marriage was another torture. The other boys his age in the Tola had flirtations with girls, and Anwarul – who had a broad chest and a dangerous walk – had an ongoing affair with a married woman from the Chamar toli. But Aadil's passion was his books, and he wanted nothing else but the swooning pleasure of learning. For this it was hard to find support in the Tola, even from the very few men and women who had travelled a little outside Rajpur. Noor Mohammed and Mumtaz Khatun had never been further than Alagha, which was forty-four kilometres from Rajpur. For them, Patna was a place out of legend, and they knew only vaguely of Delhi, and nothing of Peking. To be born, to labour in Rajpur, to survive – this was what they knew of life and expected from it. To persuade them that it was possible for Aadil to finish high school was a struggle, to convince them that it was desirable took a long, relentless campaign which was never quite won. There were many in the Tola who told them, educate this boy too much and he won't want to work on the land, so be careful. Somehow, despite all this, Aadil fought his way through to the tenth, and passed the finals. He missed a first class by two marks, but then no other student had studied with borrowed texts, without notebooks and pens and lamplight. There was no celebration in the Ansari Tola, but Aadil's parents were proud of him, and much of Rajpur now knew of him as something remarkable, like the five-legged calf that had been born to a cow in the Raja's stables. Aadil understood that he was being patronized when Brahmins and Yadavs and Pathans called out to him in the streets, and called him 'Professor saab'. He shrugged it off. The laughter fed his anger, and his anger kept him moving.