Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Do you know any of them?'

She was quiet, and her hands had stopped moving. Sartaj knew that she was looking at the dead woman. 'Do you know her?' She shook her head. 'It's very important that you tell me if you know.'

'No, I don't know. What happened to her?'

'She was murdered.'

'Murdered?'

'Shot.'

'By a man?'

'Yes, by a man.'

She put the photographs face-down on the desk. 'Of course by a man. Sometimes I don't know why we care about you. Really I don't know.'

Sartaj could hear the buzzing of the tube-light in the corridor outside, and distant footsteps at the front of the station. 'You are right,' he said. 'Most of the time I don't know either.'

There was an appraising scepticism in her raised eyebrow, not hostility, just a certain weary disbelief. 'Can I go now?' she said softly.

'Yes. What name shall I write down?'

'Whatever you want.'

He started to write, but stopped when she got up. The chunni slipped from her shoulder as she turned, and he saw that the choli was held together at the back by black strings, exposing the fine turns of her shoulder-blades and the long brown column of her back. On the dance floor she must pirouette, he thought, and blaze those eyes over a shoulder at the men in the booths, at the staring men in the darkness.

'I'll tell you,' she said from the door. In the four steps from the chair she had recovered her grin, her jaunty irony.

'Tell me what?'

She came back to the desk, turned the photographs face-up and went past the dead woman, flicked others aside with a long red fingernail, while she held her chunni close with the other hand. 'This one,' she said.

'What about her?'

'You'll have to be very nice to me,' she said. 'Her name is Kavita, or at least that's what she called herself when she danced at Pritam. She got parts in some videos and stopped dancing. Then I heard she was on some serial. After she got the serial she lived in Andheri East, in a PG. She was very lucky always, that Kavita. Not many girls like us get that far. Not one in a thousand. Ten thousand.'

'Kavita. Are you sure it's her? Is it her real name?'

'Of course I'm sure. And you'll have to ask her if it's her real name. Are you going to be nice?'

'Yes, of course I am.'

'You're lying, but you're a man, so I'll forgive you. Do you know why I told you?'

'No.'

'The man who did this is a rakshasa. And don't feel too good, you're a rakshasa also. But maybe you'll catch that rakshasa. And punish him.'

'Maybe,' Sartaj said. The man who did it had been caught, and yet had escaped, and Sartaj had never been sure about punishment, because it always seemed too much or too little. I catch them because that's what I do, and they run because that's what they do, and the world keeps turning. But there was no explaining this to Manika, and so he said, 'Thanks.'

After she had gone, after they had put the lot of them into a van and sent them home, Sartaj dropped Katekar at the corner of Sriram Road, which was within comfortable walking distance of Katekar's place. Katekar raised his hand to his chest, and turned, and then Sartaj said, 'What does a rakshasa look like?'

Katekar leaned down to the window. 'I don't know, sir. On television they have long black hair, horns. And pointy teeth sometimes.'

'And they go around eating people?'

'I think that's their main job, sir.'

They both laughed. They had spent the day working, and they had made small progress in their investigations, and so they were happy. 'That would be nice to have during some interrogations,' Sartaj said. 'Horns, and teeth like wolves.'

But on the way home it occurred to Sartaj that most people he interrogated were so frightened that he might already have oversized canines. It was the uniform that terrified them, that brought back all those tales of police brutality collected over many generations. Even the ones who wanted help spoke warily around policemen, and the ones who didn't need help tried to be overly friendly in case they ever did. Policemen were monsters, set aside from everyone else. But Parulkar had once told Sartaj, 'We are good men who must be bad to keep the worst men in control. Without us, there would be nothing left, there would only be a jungle.'

A low, yellow haze flitted behind the buildings as Sartaj drove. The streets were quiet. Sartaj imagined the citizens sleeping in their millions, safe for one more night. The image gave him some satisfaction, but not nearly as much as it used to. He couldn't tell if this was because he had become more of a rakshasa, or less so. Still, he had a job to do, and he did it. Now he needed to sleep. He went home.

I took the land between N.C. Road and the hill which overlooks it. You know Gopalmath basti, from N.C. Road all the way up the hill and four miles wide, from Sindh Chowk to G.T. Junction? All that was empty land then, nothing but a wasteland of weeds and bushes – it was municipal land. The government owned it, and so nobody owned it. I took it.

You know how it's done, Sartaj. It's easy. You pay off three chutiyas in the municipality, oil them up properly and then you kill the local dada who thinks he deserves a percentage on your action, like it's his bhenchod birthright. That's it. Then the land is yours. I took it, and it was mine.

I had sold my gold, and I had money. Paritosh Shah, fat Gujarati that he was, told me I should put all my cash into business: buy this, sell that. 'I can double it for you within a year,' he said. 'Triple it.' He knew exactly how much I had, since he had bought all my gold from me.

I listened to him, as he sprawled elegantly on his gadda, one cushion under his shoulder and another under his knees. I thought about it, but I knew it in my bones, if you don't own land you are nothing. You can die for love, you can die for friendship, you can die for money, but finally the only real thing in the world is land. You can depend on land. I said, 'Paritosh Bhai, I trust you, but let me follow my own road.' He thought I was a fool, but I had already seen the land, and had walked up and down it, and knew it was the right place, near the road and not so far from the railway station. So we gave money to the municipality, to one clerk and to two officers, and the land was mine to build on.

But then there was the problem of Anil Kurup. We had the scrub cleared, and my contractor had his men digging out the foundations for the kholis, and we were expecting a truckload of cement, and Anil Kurup's boys stopped the truck on the way down from the main road, and took it to Gopalmath village, which was about a mile up the road. We never saw any cement, and instead they sent a piece of paper with a phone number on it. 'You're a bachcha from nowhere,' Anil Kurup shouted at me when I called. 'And you think you're going to come into my village and spit into my face. Maderchod, one hen doesn't get sold here without me knowing about it. I'll put a truckload of cement up your gaand and send you back to whatever gutter you came out of.' I kept calm and quietly asked for a day to think about it. He cursed me some more and finally told me to call him the next day. He was right, of course. He had grown up in Gopalmath, and this area was his, no question about it, he ruled it like a king. There wasn't much in his raj, just some small shops, a garage or two, but it was all his.

Four days later I went to see him in Gopalmath. I went with Chotta Badriya. You remember that big muscleman Badriya who was Paritosh Shah's bodyguard? This Chotta Badriya was his little brother. He was actually Badrul-Ahmed, and his elder brother's name was Badruddin, their father had been told by some Sufi pir that he should give all his sons names beginning with 'Ba –' for their success and well-being. So they had their fancy long names, but to us they were just Badriya and Chotta Badriya. Badriya and I saw each other every time I went to see Paritosh Shah, and we liked each other, and when I started my project he asked me to take his younger brother with me, to make his life. This Chotta was bigger actually, bigger than his big brother, as big as a mountain. He was a good boy, well-mannered and obedient, so I was glad to have him along with me. I said to his brother, 'If you ask, I give.'