Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

The smell of chai woke him, chai and pakoras. He lay still for a few minutes, luxuriating in the promise of the moment, in the pleasure of his own rested body, in the rising urgency of the whistle and the speed, in going home and Mary waiting for him. Then he clambered down, and ate. The girls brought out two packs of cards, and dealt out a hand of rummy, including everyone. Ma said she hadn't played in years, that she was too old to play well, but then revealed herself to be an adept and wily player. She took in the hands she won with a gleam in her eye, and trumped ferociously, thumping her card down.

'Vah, ji,' Kulwinder Kaur said, 'you are a complete expert. What cards you throw every time!'

Much later, after dinner and when the Birdi family was asleep, Sartaj sat at the end of Ma's bottom berth. He knew she wouldn't sleep till much later. She was lying back, her knees drawn up. Behind her head, the fields sped by, uncanny and beautiful in the wash of moonlight.

'Ma?' Sartaj said softly.

'Yes, beta?'

'Ma, there is this girl…'

'I know.'

'You know?'

She giggled. Sartaj couldn't see her face, but he knew the look, when she bent her chin down and nodded her head from side to side.

'I am a police-walli also,' she said, 'I have friends who tell me things. I know a lot of things.'

'That's true. You do.'

She shifted over on to her side, with a hand below her cheek. 'This is good, beta.' Now she wasn't joking at all. 'A man should be with a woman. That is how it is. You can't get through life alone.'

'But you like being alone,' Sartaj said. Perhaps it was the darkness which made it possible for him to speak to her so bluntly, to point to how diligently she guarded her own independence.

'That is different,' she said. 'I have seen all of life, Sartaj. I have done my duty.'

She used the English word duty , and Sartaj remembered Papa-ji calling out, ' Arre chetti kar, dooty par jaana hai .' It was strange to think of love as duty, to imagine that Ma's salwar-kameez and red paranda had been a kind of uniform, that maybe her assiduous care of his and Papa-ji's health and cleanliness and nutrition had not been natural, but somehow cultivated and consciously sacrificed. So this familiar figure resting next to him had led her own private life in all the homes they had shared, she had her own history of every birthday, every journey. Again Sartaj had that unsettling feeling that this woman, his own mother, Prabhjot Kaur, was also someone he did not know. It wrenched his heart, just slightly, but out of that hurt came a new affection for this stranger he had lived with all these years. She had worked very hard, without recognition, without recompense. So maybe she was more like an underpaid police-walli than she knew. He smiled, and asked, 'Are your feet hurting?'

'A little.'

Sartaj massaged her ankles, pressed her feet. The train picked up speed, and went over a long bridge with that booming rattle which mixed exuberance and nostalgia. Whoever she was, this woman, Sartaj did not feel alone sitting at her feet, or lonely. She had been many things to him. They had been mother and son, but they were also Prabhjot Kaur and Sartaj Singh, they had been each other's support for many years, and they were friends. Outside the window, the river rose to the horizon in a vast spill of icy silver light. Sartaj held his mother's foot, and with the fragile weight of her bones against his hand, he thought, she is old. He allowed himself to think of her death, and he shivered suddenly, but he was not sad. Every connection came freighted with loss, every attachment with the possibility of betrayal. There was no avoiding this conundrum, no escape from it, and no profit from complaining about it. Love was duty, and duty was love.

Sartaj caught himself thinking these philosophical thoughts, and he grinned at his own fatuousness. I must be tired, he thought. He patted Ma's feet, then silently went up to his berth. He curled over under a clean-smelling white sheet, and a song from the afternoon came from under the rolling wheels. Was it a Kishore Kumar song, what was it? He could hear the tune, but what were the words? He pulled the sheet up to his chin and, very softly, hummed the song and tried to remember.

* * *

Mary wanted to put mud on Sartaj's face. 'It's not mud,' she said indignantly, but that's exactly what it looked like, mud in a small pink pot.

'Yes, it is,' Sartaj said. 'You went downstairs and got it from under one of the plants.' They were sitting facing each other, on his bed. This was the first time she had visited his apartment, and he had spent the afternoon tidying up and cleaning away the dust that had accumulated during his Amritsar trip. She had arrived at six-thirty, carrying a small blue backpack over her shoulder. He had teased her about how young she looked, like a stylish college student, and then they had made love. Afterwards, he told her about the journey, and told her about how grimy he had felt, despite being inside an AC compartment all the way. At which point she'd jumped off her bed and rummaged inside her backpack and come up with the jar of mud.

'It is a very expensive facial treatment, Sar-taj,' Mary said. 'At the salon, people pay how much for it, you don't know. Look, it has fruits and essences in it. It will rejuvenate your skin, take out all the impurities from the train, all that dust and grit. It's like multani mitti, only better.' She shifted forward, so that her thighs straddled his. She was wearing a sheet around her waist, and her hair fell to the curve of her bare shoulders. 'Arre, don't move, baba.' She dipped two fingers in the pot, and painted the stuff over his forehead. It felt cool going on, cool and smooth. 'Pull your hair back.'

She worked carefully and slowly, her tongue between her teeth. He craned up, and she laughed and let him kiss her, but only for a moment, and then she pushed him back with the heel of a hand on the shoulder. He leaned back against a pillow and watched her eyes, the shaded brown of her skin. There were shallow rimples in her lips, and he examined the curve of her eyelashes. When she had finished, and nodded with satisfaction, he took the pot from her and scooped up a dab and smoothed it along the line of her cheekbone. The stuff was red and softer than ordinary mud, very even and fine-grained, and it went on easily. He painted her face, working from the top down. When he was at her neck, he leaned his head back, feeling the clay pull at his own skin already, and there was a moment of astonishment when he saw her whole, because it was Mary but not quite Mary. The red made a mask on her, so that the features were those he knew well but the face was still and opaque and unknown. 'You don't look like yourself,' he said.

She nodded. 'We have to let it dry now,' she said. 'Fifteen-twenty minutes.'

So they sat, with her hands on his chest, and him holding her around the waist. He watched the red change colour, become lighter, and seams appear in it. It was like looking at an ancient stone statue, except there were her eyes at the centre, bright and glowing. It was disquieting somehow, this abstraction of Mary into something else, something impersonal, so he glanced away, over her shoulder. The door to his cupboard was open, and on the outside of it was the long mirror he had nailed up long ago, to check his style before he set out each day. He could see himself and Mary in it now, silhouetted and symmetrical, and part of his own face, the red cheeks under the loose flow of hair. There was a stranger there, a man equally unknown. He breathed, and he turned back to Mary, very calm, and held her very close.

Their breathing swirled in the silence and was louder than the streets outside the window, and the cries of birds fell faintly into their respirations. Mary had told him the treatment would rejuvenate his skin, but quite apart from the tightening of his skin, the mud seemed to be working its effects deeper. He was here with Mary, and he was not afraid of either the happiness or the heartbreak that lay ahead. He was newly alive, as if he had been freed of something. He did not understand why this should be so, but he was satisfied with not understanding completely. To be alive was enough.