Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'We cut her at knees and elbow four days ago,' Natwar Kahar said, chopping at his arm with the edge of his hand. 'I thought for sure she was gone. There was too much blood. But the bitch won't die.'

Ramdulari was looking at Aadil. He felt himself swaying, unable to look away. Her eyes were enormous and dark and remote, and he could read nothing in them, not pain or sorrow. The dark hair wrapped around her face and her lips drew back. She was saying something. But what? He was sure she was speaking. He couldn't hear her, not past the roaring that came from inside his body, everywhere, his arms and legs and stomach, like the flapping of a thousand wings. Natwar Kahar was saying something. What?

'If we put food and water on the other side, over there, she crawls. It takes hours, but she gets there. She just won't die.'

Hearing Natwar Kahar's voice, hoarse and low, broke Aadil's trance. He was able to look away. Natwar Kahar was watching Ramdulari, and he was almost admiring, almost respectful. He was rubbing his chin. Aadil heard the scrape of his fingers over his white stubble. Natwar Kahar said, 'She's as strong as a horse.'

Aadil reeled away. He found the support of a tree, and vomited at its roots. He finished, and Natwar Kahar was waiting for him, one arm folded across his chest, the other smoothing out his moustache.

'It was the smell,' Aadil said. 'Very bad.'

'Arre, Professor,' Natwar Kahar said, smiling widely, 'after all these years you're just the same.'

Aadil didn't assert his toughness, his many ambushes, his operations, he did not argue. All he wanted was to be out of Natwar Kahar's camp. He left within the hour, even though it was long before darkness. He took his bodyguards and left, and pushed hard all night, down the paths and across the nullahs. They reached their safe house in Jamui town early. The boys slept, but Aadil sat by the window and watched the road. He was afraid to shut his eyes, because when he did so a crawling began under his skin, a jerky sliding that terrified him. He wondered whether he had remained the same, or whether he had changed. At two in the afternoon, when the heat came off the ground in billowing breaths, he slipped out of the door. He left the bag of cash he had collected from Natwar Kahar on the floor of the front room, and took nothing with him, not even a pistol. In his pocket he had eight thousand rupees, his Rampuri knife and a driver's licence in the name of Maqbool Khan. He went to the station, bought a second-class sitting ticket for an express train, and was in Patna at a little past six-thirty. He went straight to the ticket counter, paid four hundred and forty-nine rupees, and sat on the platform until his train got in at eleven-twenty. He did not have a reservation, so he squatted in the corridor in an unreserved coach, squeezed in tightly amongst a wedding party. At Jhansi, he got out of the coach, and bribed a sleeper berth out of the ticket collector. Then he slept. The motion of the train somehow countered the agitation in his body, and he was able to doze whole afternoons away, getting up only to use the bathroom and drink water. In a little more than fifty hours, he was in Mumbai.

Mumbai was very far from Jamui, from Bhagalpur and from Rajpur, and it was vast and anonymous, and Aadil wanted to hide in it. But it frightened him. This city was more of an unknown wilderness than any jungle ridge. That first day, he got off the train and walked along the railway tracks, and a heavy odour seeped down his throat, and he had no idea where he was. There were makeshift homes along the tracks, and children playing just feet from the rails. They laughed at him when he flinched at passing trains. The taller buildings behind the huts were stained grey and black, and festooned with wires. Aadil passed an enormous pile of rubbish flecked with plastic bags, and then a very old man sitting against the iron fence that bordered this section of track. The old man had a white beard, a sunken chest under a torn kurta, and a little white bag on the ground next to him. He was staring at something far away, even further than the far fence and the buildings behind it, further than the dim hills. Aadil shuddered as he walked past the old man. He walked faster. He was very hungry. He stopped, counted the money he had, then found a gap in the fence and went through. He was afraid to cross the wide road with its endless stream of traffic, but finally he found his way across and plunged into the city.

Aadil lived first in Thane, then in Malad, then Borivili, and then near Kailashpada. He avoided bastis with settlements of Biharis, and he moved often. A glance of recognition made him anxious, and at night he dreamed about Natwar Kahar and a band of riflemen hunting him down in the streets of Mumbai. Two months after he arrived, on a street corner in Andheri, Aadil saw somebody he knew from Rajpur, a boy named Santosh Nath Jha – otherwise known as Babloo – who had been three years junior to him through school and college. Babloo was counting out coins to pay a paan-wallah, and he didn't see Aadil start and back up behind the wall, into a lane. Aadil looked once again, to make sure it was Babloo, to satisfy himself that such a long coincidence could and did happen, and then he hurried away, staying close to the side of the road and ducking his head. He moved kholis again the next day, to a smaller room in Borivili. His kholi was at the end of a very narrow lane, butted up against the wall. Aadil breathed in the miasma of refuse, from a dump on the other side of the wall, but he felt safe here for a while. He recognized the appalling squalor of his surroundings, compared to which a PAC camp was luxurious, but he had nowhere else to go. Within a month he moved again, because his Tamil neighbours were too curious, and because they had friends and visitors from everywhere, even Bihar. This time he found a kholi in Navnagar, in the Bengali Bura. Here, the inhabitants were all Bangladeshis. Here, finally, Aadil felt safe. These Bengalis were all illegals, with purchased documents and falsified places of birth. They were careful, and they kept to themselves. They were slow to trust Aadil, they fell into silence when he passed by, and he felt comfortable within the wariness. Inside their alien Bengali, he was safe.

He did not like to leave the basti, so sometimes he gave money to the boys who lived down the lane, to bring him food and razor blades and medicines for his headaches. He now suffered from pain in his temples, agony so intense that for two or three days on end he would lie inside his kholi, newspaper taped over every crack and chink, sweating and naked and shaking. The boys brought him packets of Advil from the chemist near the highway, and gave him cups of chai. There were three of them, Shamsul, Bazil and Faraj. They were eighteen years old, all of them, uniformly equipped with tenth-class educations and dreams of wealth. Shamsul and Bazil worked as messengers for a courier company, and Faraj hung around the basti and occasionally did odd jobs for merchants in the market. They were all keen film-fans, and each had a personal favourite hero he tried to emulate in his speech and cadences. They had all come to Mumbai at about the same time, and now, some fifteen years later, they were quite citified, and regarded their parents with the tolerant affection of urban sophisticates for well-meaning bumpkins. Aadil listened to the boys talk. They liked to sit on the ledge next to his door, holding hands and holding forth on the world, paying attention to the citizens passing by, especially the girls. They knew Aadil as 'Reyaz Bhai', and his kholi was a nice little establishment for them. Faraj hid his cigarettes there, and all of them appreciated the small money he gave them, for running his errands. They had tried to cheat him only once, in the beginning, but then he had taken up Bazil by the throat, and his flat, whispery voice had frightened them, and they had returned the few rupees they had kept back from his payment for rice and cooking oil. They had kept away for a few days after that, but he had beckoned them over and given them another task, a request for onions and a newspaper. Since then they had treated Aadil with a careful respect, and he let them come and go into his small room.