Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Sartaj went past the enquiry window, with its small cluster of anxious men who had come looking for missing relatives and friends. He went down a dark corridor and through the double glass doors marked 'No Entrance'. An attendant in brown shorts and shirt sat behind a scratched metal desk, under muzzy tube-lights. He salaamed Sartaj, who took a deep breath, blinked once and went through another pair of swinging doors, of green-painted wood this time. The room on the other side was quite large, big as a good-sized wedding hall, well-lit from two square skylights and two rows of tube-lights. The floor was smooth brown stone, sloping inwards to a square drain. There were two brown bodies, both male, naked on the stone tables to the left. The top of the far one's skull had been removed, with a precise round cut that made him a cartoon character whose head had come unscrewed. His brain sat in a tidy grey mound on a tray next to his elbow. And here, on the right, was Dr Chopra, analyst at the abyss, working efficiently. He was scooping out intestines into a large tray. Sartaj turned his head away.

'Dr Chopra?'

'Ah, Sartaj. Wait, wait.'

Sartaj watched the wall, followed the cracks in the grey plaster up to the ceiling and then back down again. And then the rusted bars on the closed window, he counted them and examined their thickness. Meanwhile there were small sucking sounds to his right, and a little wet grinding. The first of the many times Sartaj had come in here, into Dr Chopra's dissection house, he had made himself look, on the principle that a policeman must gaze steadfastly at everything, anything, what the world is truly made of, you must know it all unflinchingly, without repugnance or perverse fascination. And he had seen what Dr Chopra had exposed, had been able to look at it, and it wasn't that horrifying after all, just the complicated inner clockwork of the body, a fluid machinery possessed of an intricate, severe harmony. But the surfaces of the corpses followed him and stayed with him into his sleep, the light ring of skin on the third finger of a fisted hand, the tribal tattoo on a woman's chin, the crimson flecks of lipstick on a lower lip, faint but unmistakable. He accumulated fragments of the dead, tiny memories of their lives that cost something to carry, and finally he decided he no longer had a young man's pride, that he would save his will for work, for his own cases. So he no longer looked.

'Done,' Dr Chopra said.

Sartaj heard the snap of rubber gloves, and he turned, keeping his head tilted up. He saw the dead man's face, and stared for a moment. Then he saw the thick thatch of Dr Chopra's hair. The doctor was the hairiest man Sartaj had ever met. It was just past twelve, and Dr Chopra's cheeks and jaw were already shaded dark, and there was a thick black mat of hair that came up from his chest, half-way up his neck. He was washing his hands in a basin.

'Doctor saab,' Sartaj said, 'I need to see Gaitonde and his female friend.'

'Fine,' said Dr Chopra. 'They're in the cold room.'

'Post-mortem done already?'

'Arre, Gaitonde was a big bhai, yes? He and his friend got jumped ahead in the queue.' Dr Chopra laughed, and it was quite genuine, full of pleasure. 'You want me to get the boys to haul them out of the cold room? Quicker if we go there.'

There was a challenge in his stance, in the raising of his bushy, overhanging eyebrow: if you can take it, Mr Policeman. The cold room was what Katekar absolutely hated. He had been inside only once, when he and Sartaj had been looking for the body of a khabari. Katekar had stepped into the cold room, put a hand to his mouth and turned and walked out, walked out to the banyan tree. Sartaj had stayed inside and found the body they were looking for. Sartaj had done it before, he could do it now. He shrugged. 'Cold room is fine.'

A shaded walkway led to the cold room, through the obliterating afternoon glare. Sartaj squinted, and walked, and now there was no avoiding the smell. They passed through a door, into a long dark passageway, and it pressed up against his cheeks. The windows were closed against the heat, against the throbbing of the sun, and the air inside the entryway was engorged with the ripe, round exhalations from the two rows of bodies stacked against the walls, in sheets on double racks. The sheets were damp and the ground below the racks was slimy, slick.

Sartaj nodded at the attendants sitting at the desk at the end of the corridor. He could feel a hiccup curling itself at the back of his throat, and he didn't want to open his mouth.

'Inspector saab,' one attendant said, rising. 'After a long time.' He had been reading a Hindi novel, and his friend was writing a letter. They both stood up.

Sartaj spoke carefully, enunciating. 'It smells worse than last time,' he said as he went past the desk.

'Arre, saab,' the attendant with the novel said, 'wait until the air-conditioners break again. Then you'll really smell something.'

'Wait until it rains and the leaks start coming through the walls,' the other one said with large satisfaction. 'Then you'll really have fun.'

There is a certain pleasure we take in thinking about how bad it gets, Sartaj thought, and then in imagining how it will inevitably get worse. And still we survive, the city stumbles on. Maybe one day it'll all just fall apart, and there was a certain gratification in that thought too. Let the maderchod blow.

Dr Chopra nodded at his attendants. The door to the cold room was shiny steel, very sleek and new and promising high technology and sterility. The fiction-reading attendant touched the heavy door-handle, touched his throat and mouthed a mantra. He grabbed the handle and leaned back, and the door swung open. 'Come,' Dr Chopra said.

And inside there were the jumbled rows of bodies that Sartaj remembered. They lay naked on the tiled floor, jammed up against each other, shoulder to shoulder, shoulder over shoulder, from one side of the long room to the other. Each was stitched up the front, in broad looping knots in thick black thread, where the long incision had been made for the post-mortem. Rusty, dark skin, gone as densely opaque as mud, spiky, petrified pubic hair. Sartaj was thinking, it's not really cold in here. They call it a cold room but there are restaurants that are colder, the upstairs room of the Delite Dance Bar is colder. He could hear the dull, halting rush of the air-conditioner.

'Ladies are over here,' Dr Chopra said.

In this charnel, past all carnality, the decencies were preserved. The ladies were piled on top of each other in a kind of small cabin to the left, with its own metal door. The attendants reached in and shifted the bodies around, tugged and pulled, and something knocked on the door and made a happy bonging. Sartaj found himself concerned with the attendants' hands, they're handling all that without gloves, he hoped they washed their hands afterwards.

'Saab,' the letter-writer said. They had found her.

Sartaj stepped back. His shoes were sticking to the floor.

There was the usual long incision up her front. Her lips had turned the cracked pale blue of old candles, and had drawn back from her upper teeth. The autopsy photo in the file had flattened out her cheekbones, and had made invisible the sharp nose. But the nose had been broken once, there was a small dent in it. In death she was plain, but there was muscle on her shoulders and along her flanks, and Sartaj saw her in a dancer's jaunty stance, glowing and proud of her figure.

'Unknown female deceased,' Dr Chopra read from a long sheet. 'Five foot three and a half inches, 110 pounds, black hair to shoulder length, eyes black, four-inch scar on right knee, had last eaten about eight hours prior to death, cause of death single gunshot trauma to sternum, bullet passed upwards at an angle and exited at T4, causing extensive damage to lungs, spinal cord. Death was instantaneous.'