Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Daddi died at the beginning of spring, on a day when the newspapers were full of the early blooming of the cherry blossoms. Sharmeen came home from school and found Abba seated at the table in the kitchen, holding a cup of steaming chai. Ammi stood at the counter, her hands held over her stomach. Sharmeen knew instantly that something bad had happened. Abba was never home this early.

It was Ammi who spoke. 'Beta, your Daddi passed this afternoon.'

Now Sharmeen saw that Abba had tears on his face, and her legs shook and she trembled. Ammi rushed forward and held her and helped her to a chair. Both Abba and Ammi fussed over her then, and made her drink chai, and hugged her. During the funeral, and afterwards, the story went around that Sharmeen had almost fainted when she heard about her Daddi, and people she didn't know came to her and talked to her about acceptance and Allah's will and a long, long life and eternal love. Sharmeen never told anyone that what had frightened her that day, what had driven a spike of abject terror through her chest, was not the news about Daddi but the child's sadness on Abba's face, the wounded yearning and loss and uncertainty she had never seen before and never wanted to see again. Sharmeen kept her head down and kept very quiet and waited for all of it to stop.

There was one other thing that Sharmeen never told anyone, not even Aisha.

For the month after Daddi died, Sharmeen's sleep was broken several times each night. She slid into wakefulness flushed and sweating, and her head reeled from a torrent of thoughts about Daddi, a song that she had sung, and the time she had gone three times to exchange sandals at the Crystal City Mall and the saleswomen had started to shake their heads as soon as they saw her hobbling down the corridor. Sharmeen would sit up in bed, drink water, lie down and try to get back to sleep. But it felt as if there were thin black hooks in her heart that pulled her awake with tiny pinpricks of guilt. The gritty little scrapes of pain didn't just come from the feeling that she, Sharmeen, had not spent enough time with Daddi ever since she had turned thirteen, that she had been too preoccupied with her studies and Aisha and Chandrachur Singh. No, not that only. There was also this bitter realization for Sharmeen, that now Daddi was really gone and now she would never know all there was to know about Daddi. Not so long ago Sharmeen had felt bored by Daddi's talk, by her accounts of lighting laltens in monsoon storms. Now it seemed like a whole world had blinked out on that Tuesday afternoon in the American spring, a whole universe extinguished just like that, so easily. And Sharmeen had no chance to get it back.

It was a Tuesday night again, one month to the day from Daddi's death, and Sharmeen woke up. She tried not to open her eyes, not to think about being awake. Lately she had decided that it was the uncertainty about falling asleep that actually kept her awake. So she tried to remain still, and breathed deeply. She tried to think good, pleasant thoughts, and against the rush of memory she built the bulwark of an imaginary landscape, a forested hillside, no, a beach and a green-blue sea stretching away. Then, with a sigh, Sharmeen gave up. She was awake. She opened her eyes, and Daddi was sitting on the bed, at the very foot of it. She had on her favourite dark blue pashmina shawl, the one she had got just three years ago, but she was very young and beautiful. Her forehead was high and the black hair tumbled down in luxuriant, old-fashioned curlicues. I am dreaming, Sharmeen thought. I can wake up. Wake up. But she couldn't, and it was unmistakably Daddi still sitting there, with the window and the moonlight behind her. Sharmeen thought, if I sit up and drink some water, this will stop. But her arms and legs lay against her sides as heavy as white stone, and despite all her straining she could not move. Now it occurred to her that she should pray, but then she felt a twitch of guilt in her heart, for being afraid of Daddi. She looked directly at Daddi and felt terribly sad, for Daddi and herself. And then Daddi said, in a low voice, not unhappy but brimming with tenderness, 'Nikki, take me home.'

Then Sharmeen was awake. She could move, and she sat up and cupped her face with her hands. She felt relieved and ridiculous all at the same time. She thought, tomorrow I will tell Aisha about this funny, filmi dream, and how real it felt. Maybe I will tell Abba and Ammi too. She could imagine herself telling them, and the expressions of wonder and concern they would have on their face. She could see herself telling them, and Aisha, and other people in the future.

But she never told anyone, not ever. In a few months, her own memory of the dream began to fade, and the vivid, living black of Daddi's hair and the blue of her shawl became dusty and indistinct. On Sharmeen's next birthday, Aisha gave her a pink diary with a small golden lock. Late that night, Sharmeen remembered her dream about Daddi, and thought she should write it down. But she couldn't remember what Daddi had said, exactly, in the dream, and after a few minutes she gave up and wrote about Aamir Khan instead. She wrote about his films, and his acting, and when she had finished she locked the diary and tucked it under her mattress. Then she slept, and never dreamed of Daddi again.

The lilting voice over the speakers asked, ' Mere sahiba, kaun jaane gun tere ?' Sartaj had no answer to this question. He was sitting cross-legged in a veranda of the Golden Temple, at the edge of the parkarma. To his right was the shrine of Baba Deep Singh, and straight ahead, the Harimandir Sahib flushed a delicate, reddish gold in the early sun. Sartaj and Ma had arrived punctually at the temple gate at three in the morning, and had come in and watched the procession that carried the Guru Granth Sahib over the water, to its seat. Sartaj had made his way through the crowd, and for a few seconds he had put his shoulder to the palki and had helped carry the holy book, and then he had come back to Ma, longing for the surges of excitement and certitude that he had once felt on this holy ground. Now they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, and the sun had come up, and the parkarma was busy with people, and the singer asked his question.

Sartaj and Ma had arrived in Amritsar the day before. She had been very tired when they reached her mausa-ji's son's house, and they had stayed up late, for a long dinner with many cousins and aunts and almost-forgotten distant relatives. But still she had told him to set the alarm for two-thirty, and they had set off for the Harimandir Sahib in the darkness. Now she had her hands folded in her lap, and she rocked back and forth gently as her lips moved.

'Are you hungry, Ma?'

'No, beta. You go and get something to eat.'

'No, I'm all right.' Sartaj was all right, more or less, but he was worried about Ma. She was closed off in some private world of memory and grief and prayer, very far from him. Her eyes were wet, and she dabbed often at the corners of her mouth with her chunni. And she prayed, so softly that he could not make out what shabad she was reciting. He did not know what or who she was mourning, or how to make her feel better. 'Are you remembering Papa-ji?' he said.

She slowly raised her head and turned to him. Her eyes were brown and enormous and surprised, and he had the sense suddenly that he was looking at someone he didn't know.

'Yes,' she said. 'Papa-ji.'

But she was not telling him everything, there were things she wouldn't speak of. Sartaj knew this, and was embarrassed, as if he had intruded into some dark room he was not meant to see. 'I am hungry,' he said. 'You'll stay here?'

'Yes. Go.'

So he left her, and walked around the rippling pool, along the parkarma. There were pilgrims sitting in the verandas, and two little boys ran out ahead of Sartaj, chased by their mother. She held them by the shoulders and walked them back to their father, and the older one grinned at Sartaj, revealing a missing front tooth. Sartaj smiled, and strolled on. The stone was warming under his bare feet. His earliest memory of Harimandir Sahib was of cold toes, of Papa-ji holding his hand and guiding him swiftly through the foot-bath just outside the complex. He had skipped down the chilly marble stairs, dazzled by the gold reflection in the water of the sarovar. He knew he had been brought here earlier, as an infant, but that was what he remembered now, that winter morning, walking between Papa-ji and Ma, holding their hands. He had then been unable to read the names of martyrs and fallen soldiers on the marble plaques set into the walls and the pillars. Now it was hard for him to avoid the names of the dead, to look away from the lists put in place by Indian army regiments and grieving families. Here was a plaque, on the wall just next to the causeway that led to the Harimandir. A captain from 8 JAK Light Infantry had fallen at Siachen. Two years after his death, his wife – also a captain – had donated Rs 701 and put up the plaque in his memory. Now more than a decade had passed, and Sartaj wondered if the wife still grieved. He was sure she did. Sartaj imagined the husband, far above jagged peaks, climbing a mirror-like wall of ice. The husband was very young, and brave, and he was far higher than any human habitation, and he was climbing towards death. And Sartaj could see the wife, in her military uniform, her face turned up to the rising sun. Sartaj walked, and wept.