Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Yes, bhai.'

'Now go and make some tea. And see if you can find something for us to eat.'

* * *

Business grows. I had the boys collecting hafta from the shopkeepers and businessmen around Gopalmath, all the way to Gaikwad Road, which was the border between my territory and the area belonging to the Cobra Gang. I'm not making this up, they were really called the Cobra Gang, like some outfit led by Pran and Ranjit in a movie from thirty years ago. They had the eastern area all the way to the fishing villages at Malad Creek, and so they had smuggling going also, and all in all they were strong, very strong, bigger than us and with a gushing cash-flow. I had never seen their top man, one Rajesh Parab, an old artiste, he had come up with Haji Mastan and must have been fifty, sixty by now. But I had seen his boys on the streets, and now and then in the bars. I went not for the drinking, you understand, after that first Johnny Walker night I never drank again, but for the women, the waitresses and the dancers. My boys followed me in this, none of them touched liquor, not so much as one beer. I never asked them for this, never made a rule, but when I stopped, Chotta Badriya stopped, and then it became a tradition in our ranks. I was glad of this: to give something up together brought the boys close, it made them a team. I hadn't thought of this when I stopped drinking, but I saw clearly how it worked, and I encouraged it. A man of the G-Company never loses his head, I told them, he keeps cold. He stays awake even when he sleeps. Have women, I said, that's a man's pleasure, a diversion worthy of a shooter, have five, have ten. But to pour poison down your own throat, to make yourself stupid and slow, that's a maderchod idiot's game. Let the Cobra Gang do that.

I knew a war was coming. It was inevitable. There had been some minor collisions between my boys and theirs, hard looks in passing on the streets, shoulders jostling in the lobby of a cinema, shoving, a whispered gali. But we were at peace. I sat on the roof at night, turning the future in my head, testing it. Whichever path I chose, and whichever one after that, the events led to conflict, and slaughter. They were big, we were small. The only peace we could keep was one in which they remained big and we small, and we took their leftovers, and stepped aside and bowed when they passed, and ate their shit, today and tomorrow and the day after. This was possible, this unequal calm, but then there was me. I was not made to be small. The G-Company was me, and I looked into myself, without deceit and without mercy, and I knew I could never be small. I was bigger than when I had been born, bigger than when I had come to this city, and I would grow bigger. So war would come. So, I thought, let us accept that fighting will come, and let us prepare for it. And when the day comes, we will fight without hate, without anger. We will prevail.

'Find me names, faces,' I told Chotta Badriya. 'I want to know who they are.' So we spent money, and in small ways helped small people, and before long we had our own network of khabaris, some deep in Cobra Gang territory. There was one paan-wallah who had his shop at the mouth of Nabbargali, where Rajesh Parab lived in the very highest apartment of a three-storey house, and this paan-wallah watched them going and coming all day long, and when in the evenings he walked home, one of our boys joined him for ten minutes, and so we had their daily roster. We paid the paan-wallah, but money alone was not why he did it. Six years before, very late one winter night, Rajesh Parab had driven up drunk in a brand-new Toyota, asked for paan and then told the paan-wallah that his maghai paan sat like a brick on the tongue, that he should go back to UP and relearn his trade. The next afternoon Rajesh Parab had stopped by again, sober and smiling, and had taken his paan as usual, and although he had forgotten what he had said when he was high on his new Japanese horse, an insult can live inside a man for a long time, burrowing like a tiny pin-headed worm and getting thicker and longer until it is wrapped through his gut and squeezing and squeezing. So the paan-wallah remembered, and he helped us, and others did as well.

Under Rajesh Parab there were four Number Twos, each handling different aspects of his business, and I knew their names and where they lived. In a black diary I had pages covered with the names of their controllers and their boys, who they were, their histories, and also listings of Rajesh Parab's business associates, his financiers, the builders aligned with him. I studied this black diary until my boys began to smile a little. 'Bhai is reading his Gita,' they whispered among themselves. I didn't mind. I was looking for an entrance, a chink where I could hurl an attack and break the Cobra Gang into fragments and eat it piecemeal. There was one name in my diary I didn't understand, one name I couldn't fit into the formation I saw arrayed against me. A man called Vilas Ranade had been with Rajesh Parab for a long time, nobody could tell how long, and yet this Vilas Ranade didn't do anything for Rajesh Parab. He didn't manage anything, not the smuggling, not the hafta, not the dealings with builders, and sometimes he wasn't even seen close to Rajesh Parab's house for weeks, months. Nobody knew where he lived. Nobody could tell me if he was married, if he had children, if he had a taste for gambling, nothing. And yet when he came to the house he walked straight up to Rajesh Parab's apartment, no queuing for him, and even if there was an MLA in deep mid-discussion, Rajesh Parab came out to meet Vilas Ranade. Vilas Ranade had never been in jail, and had been only twice mentioned in the newspapers. Finally I said to Chotta Badriya, 'I want to know what this bastard looks like. Get me a photograph.'

Meanwhile, there was the matter of weapons. I wouldn't trust my life to country-made guns, and those days a Chinese Star pistol cost ten, twelve thousand. I couldn't afford Glocks, of course, but we hid 9 mm ammunition and Stars in my house, in a dozen kholis in Gopalmath, and in Gopalmath temple, which at that time was just one small shrine and a room for the pujari. It took weeks, months, this slow build-up, and it took much thought, how much money to spend on arms, how much to pay the boys, how much for improvements in the basti so that the people were happy. So we prepared for war.

One evening Chotta Badriya came to tell me that we had successfully negotiated for and taken delivery of a load of ammunition. I was sitting in a bar called Mahal, down by the Link Road in Jogeshwari, with four of my boys, I remember clearly it was Mohan Surve, Pradeep Pednekar, Krishna Gaikwad and Qariz Shaikh. Chotta Badriya came into the bar, came straight to us, we were sitting at our usual table. He was grinning as he squeezed in at the end of the booth. 'Good deal, bhai,' he said. 'Three hundred kanchas. All good and guaranteed.' Now this was our own language, kanchas and gullels for bullets and pistols. The Cobra Gang and all the other companies might say daane for bullets, and samaan for pistols, but we said kanche and gullels. This too I encouraged, it set us apart from the rest, made us belong to each other more because we spoke a private tongue, and to become one of us you had to learn it, and in learning it you were changed. I saw this in the new boys as they worked hard, trying to pass from being mere neighbourhood taporis to respected bhais. They learned the language, and then the walk, and they pretended to be something, and then they became it. And so for American dollars, we said choklete, not Dalda like the rest of our world; for British pounds, lalten, not peetal; for heroin and brown sugar, gulal, not atta; for police, Iftekar, not nau-number; a job gone wrong was ghanta, not fachchad; and a girl so impossibly ripe and round and tight that it hurt to look at her was not a chabbis, but a churi.