Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Aadil also knew where the money for Comrade Jansevak's mansion came from: it was taken from the levies and taxes the PAC extracted from farmers and businessmen. Aadil had learnt the business of revolution. Much of the money passed through his own hands, as it went from bottom to top. He appreciated that the logistics of war demanded funding, he knew the price of an AK-47 and the cost – per thousand – of bullets. There were other expenses, for salaries and pamphlets and travel and medicine. He knew all this, but there were times when he couldn't help thinking of what he was doing, of what he was directing, as nothing less or more than extortion. He took money. He gave guns to boys and girls and told them to bring back money. He tried to teach history to his soldiers, but he knew that many of them mouthed his lessons exactly as they had chanted religious hymns, without curiosity and without understanding. Jhannu quoted Chairman Mao in every conversation, and practised dialectical materialism every day, but for every one of her there were ten boys to whom Chairman Mao was only a hazy yellow god who gave them weapons. Some bastard zamindar had taken their land with the force of his lathaits, and so now they had a rifle and much ammunition. That was all they knew and all they wanted to know.

So Aadil knew all this, and spoke about it briefly to his own wife, and so lost her. And yet, he was no counter-revolutionary, no recidivist. His ideology was as clear as mountain water. He believed sincerely and completely, he trusted still in the promise of the future. The revolution would chip away at all forms of exploitation, until a truly classless and stateless world communism was achieved. This was inevitable. The revolution would continue. There was no liberation without revolution, and no revolution without a people's war. What could look like an imperfect practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was often merely practicality. Perfection was to be sought with imperfect means. The virtues of the oppressed were cunning and subterfuge and deception. The duty of the cadres was to obey the dictates of the party. All this Aadil accepted and believed. He had no doubts about the purity of the party's aims – no matter how many green sofas Comrade Jansevak bought for his wife – and he would continue to serve with the utmost enthusiasm and vigour. He would give his life to the party, to the workers of the coming years. He had known only struggle, but they would know happiness. For them, and their future lives, he was willing to live with Comrade Jansevak's perks, with the burdens that were placed on peasants and small shopkeepers, he would put up with the executions of backsliders, and all the blood.

Killing was commonplace to Aadil now. Keeping score through the chaos and noise of ambushes was hard, but Aadil calculated that he himself had killed a dozen men, maybe twenty, maybe a few more. No more than that. He had seen many more than that killed, by bullet and explosion and axe and lathi. He couldn't remember all the dead bodies he had seen, the small piles of flesh and rags that he had stepped over. He had gone on, face always to the front, leaving the dead behind. At first, each death that Aadil had witnessed had been a momentous event, a change in the world that struck him with the force of a revelation. He had paid close attention to the symptoms, a twitching arm, an open eye with the shine gone off the sclera, leaving it blackish-yellow. The retina gone grey. Then, long ago, each of these transfigurations had promised a great transformation tomorrow, each dying had presaged the coming light of the worker's dawn. Now the corpses fell, and Aadil did not count them. Death was the ground he stepped on, the country of his existence. Aadil lived inside death, and so no longer noticed it.

It was life, finally, that unhinged him and sent him fleeing from the revolution, from Comrade Jansevak and the PAC, from Bihar. The platoon leader who had taken Aadil on his first ambush was now an area commander, and Aadil was allowed to know his name, Natwar Kahar. Natwar Kahar operated in Jamui and Nawada mostly, aided by a second-in-command named Bhavani Kahar. This Bhavani, who was just twenty-four, was a distant relative and special protégé of Natwar Kahar's. Natwar Kahar had inducted Bhavani into the party when he was a young boy, and groomed him as a soldier and potential party leader. The boy had charisma, and he was fearless. On Diwali night, young Bhavani was picked up by the police in the village of Rekhan. Bhavani was deep in a drunken sleep in the house of a woman, a widow, when the police found him. And so handsome Bhavani disappeared into the grinding jaws of justice, and Natwar Kahar was left raging. The police had obviously received a tip-off, a very specific one. Natwar Kahar examined his suspects, all the villagers, and he finally settled on Bhavani's woman. She was the only one who knew that Bhavani would come to her bed that Diwali night, that he had a weakness for good rum. She had sent her two children to her mother's house, and that on Diwali night. So Natwar Kahar had her seized and brought up to his camp. He asked for her name – which was Ramdulari – and then he asked her for a confession. Ramdulari protested, she was innocent, she would never do such a thing, and especially she would never betray Bhavani. She was a tall woman, Ramdulari, not beautiful but with a long, lush body and a fast walk. Her husband had died of kalazar during a flood some eight years ago. She had raised her two boys, and maintained her house and survived. When she spoke to Natwar Kahar, she had her head covered but she looked very directly at him and did not beg, or tremble, or look afraid. Natwar Kahar insisted on a confession, and she shook her head, and spoke back at him impatiently, saying that Bhavani was dear to her, as much as he was to Natwar Kahar.

So Natwar Kahar convened a people's court that very same evening. Ramdulari was tried, the evidence was examined and she was convicted. She again refused the chance of confession and self-criticism. The sentence was, of course, death, as it always was for betrayal. But Natwar Kahar wanted to make an example of Ramdulari. Instead of proceeding with the customary beheading, he cut her a little at a time. The next morning he called the squad together, and in front of them he cut off all her toes and fingers. He did it with a small kulhadi which was kept about the camp for stripping poles and saplings. She screamed, and bled, and Natwar Kahar laughed and had the camp doctor attend to her. 'Keep her alive,' Natwar Kahar said. The doctor was not really a doctor. He had once been a compounder, and he had never encountered multiple amputations. But he had some experience with bullet wounds and cuts, and Ramdulari survived. She was very strong. They kept her in a pit behind Natwar Kahar's shack. She was given food regularly, and it became something of a camp amusement to watch her try to eat with the pads of her hands, and bend double to lick up grains of rice from the dirt.

Aadil saw Ramdulari three weeks after her trial. He hadn't believed the story when he had first heard it, about Natwar Kahar's punishment of the informing whore. He thought it was good propaganda, effective in preventing the Bhavani Singh situation from occurring again. Even when Aadil came to Natwar Kahar's camp, to pick up a delivery of cash, he did not think to mention the woman. He thought she was dead and the matter closed. He had finished putting the plastic-wrapped stacks of notes in his jhola when Natwar Kahar asked, with a grin, 'Do you want to see Ramdulari?'

Aadil didn't know whose name that was, and Natwar Kahar explained with a proprietary pride. Aadil followed him, the bag heavy over his shoulder. The stench from the pit pressed at Aadil's face, but Natwar Kahar walked on, unconcerned. They stood overlooking the sloping hole. At the bottom, in the moist yellow and brown mess, there was a large moving object. Aadil couldn't make out what it was. It was neither human nor animal, nothing that he had ever seen before. It moved in sideways jerks and spasms, something like the little crabs that popped up from the sand on the river's edge. Then Aadil's head swam softly and lifted, and the sun shifted its arc, and he saw that below him was a woman, but strangely attenuated. She was not complete.