Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

So we got Chotta Badriya a mango lassi, and Qariz Shaikh talked on. We were discussing the long-ago feud between Haji Mastan and Yusuf Patel, how they had been partners once, but how when betrayal and business rivalry had brought them to war, Haji Mastan had resolved to eliminate his friend. Qariz Shaikh had heard these tales from his father. 'Haji Mastan gave the supari on Yusuf Patel to Karim Lala,' he said. 'But Yusuf Patel survived the hit.'

'I saw that Karim Lala once,' Mohan Surve said. 'Near Grant Road Station. Two years ago.'

'Yes?' I said. 'What did he look like?'

'Big Pathan bastard,' Mohan Surve said. 'Real tall, and big. He has huge hands. He's retired now. Lives around there. But even now at this age he walks like a badshah. What a terror he must have been, in his days.'

I tried to imagine Karim Lala and his frontier swagger, that accent I remembered from the Pathan that Pran had played in Zanjeer . I had heard these old stories of bloodshed before, but now I listened to them with desperate attention. I was looking now for lessons, for principles about loss and victory, for the tactics that had been used by the ones who were still alive, those who had survived since those days when Haji Mastan and Yusuf Patel hunted each other through Mohammed Ali Road and Dongri. I listened to Qariz Shaikh, but I was restless. To be sitting and talking and thinking was not enough. I wanted to be back in Gopalmath, back in the lanes. I stood up.

'Chalo,' I said.

'Already, bhai?' Mohan Surve said. 'It's only eleven.'

Chotta Badriya upended his lassi glass and drank steadily and his throat bobbed up and down.

'I'm sick of this place,' I said. 'Let's go.'

I walked fast towards the door. Outside, the road sloped down to the darting lights of the highway. On the left, three rickshaws stood in a row. We were parked to the right, on the other side of the lamppost. It was a decrepit, ancient Ambassador taxi that Qariz Shaikh's father drove during the days. I wanted a better car, but we had money only for guns. Soon, some day, I thought. I started across the road, through the oval of light. I could hear the others behind me. I turned my head over my shoulder, and there was Chotta Badriya, stuffing a handkerchief in his pocket, and close behind him the others. They moved, walking, and their shoulders shifted as they walked, and through a chance gap in the figures I saw Mohan Surve under the neon sign, still near the door, his back against the wall and not moving. It was too far to see his eyes, but he was not walking, not moving. And then, in that instant, I hurled myself to the side, clawing towards the dark, lunging out of the light, and I felt a blow on my shoulder that took me along with it, nearly to the ground, but I found my feet and was running along the side of the building, and I knew I had been hit but I never heard the gunshots. At the corner I stopped myself with a hand on the wall, turned and saw movement in the passage, and twisted around the corner and ran again, and I had my pistol out. Now I heard the shots. I risked a look back, and it was Chotta Badriya, at the corner and firing at something on the other side of the corner.

'Badriya,' I called. 'Come.'

We went over a wall, through a building compound and out of its gate, and down a road. Two more turns and I had to stop. I leaned against a truck, and then bent over and spurted vomit on to the road. My left arm was shuddering, squeezing in regular spasms of pain. 'Are you hit?' I said to Chotta Badriya.

'Not one touch,' he said. 'Not one. I'm fine.' He laughed, a thin crackling sound.

'Good,' I said, turning my head to look at him. 'I know it's not you.'

'What's not me?'

'The one who sold us to them. Because if you were, you wouldn't be here now. And if you were, you could kill me now.' The barrel of his pistol was six inches from my head, one quick movement from my death.

'Bhai,' he said. 'Really, bhai.' He was shocked. I loved him in that moment, loved him like a brother.

'Wipe your face,' I said. 'You still have mango lassi on it. And get me to a doctor.'

* * *

I made phone calls from the doctor's table, as he stitched and worried at my shoulder. I called Paritosh Shah and Kanta Bai and some others of my boys and told them to be ready. Paritosh Shah said that the police were already on the scene at the bar, and that three of my boys were dead. Pradeep Pednekar, Krishna Gaikwad and Qariz Shaikh had died. Pradeep Pednekar had been shot once through the hips, and then again at close range in the head. There was no news of Mohan Surve. And I had survived.

Being shot is a peculiar experience, quite unlike any other. When it first happened I didn't really recognize it, I was so eager to get away that it didn't occur to me that the thing I felt in my skin and muscle was a bullet ploughing in. I didn't feel the pain until later, until I had the possibility of life in my mouth, as succulent as a mango. Now my shoulder and chest were cold, like somebody had frozen my bones from the inside out and was stabbing me with a sliver of ice. I said to Chotta Badriya, 'Get me to Gopalmath.'

Three of our boys had brought a car to the doctors. They and Chotta Badriya took me to the car, surrounding me and shielding me with their own bodies. They followed me. We had once been strangers, but now we were bound together. We had been attacked, we had survived, so now they loved me a little. They asked me, Are you all right, bhai? Are you comfortable? We sped down the empty night road towards Gopalmath. I had made this velocity, and in its wake they came behind me. I was one lone man who had almost died that night, and they clung to me.

'What do we do now?' Chotta Badriya said.

'Find me Mohan Surve,' I said.

In Gopalmath my house had already been cleared, checked twice by my boys. I got in safely, and was back in my own room, sitting on the gadda. I put boys on the peripheries of Gopalmath, to watch for an attack, but I knew I was safe, at least for now. The crowded lanes were my guard, these children who wandered in the streets, the women who sat in the doorways. They all knew each other, up and down the alleys. There was no getting past them for the enemy, not without loss.

'You should sleep,' Chotta Badriya said. It was already morning.

'Yes,' I said. I knew I needed to rest, there was no use in exhausting myself. 'You also. But see to it that there is no gap in the guard.'

I lay in my bed, shaking under my sheet. Vibrations, little tremblings started in my stomach and spread into my chest and then my throat. The left side of my body was aching steadily. But it wasn't the pain that kept me awake. It was rage at myself, at my stupidity. Now, in looking back, it was obvious: you cannot watch someone without changing the world they live in, and if they are alert they will feel these shifts, sense the faint echo of your questions as they roll along the ground, and they will watch you in return. They had watched, and reached the same conclusions as I had, they had read me, they had predicted me and then they took my gaand. They had picked the place, and the time, and the method, and declared war. If not for a chance glance, a trick of time and my body, a bullet finding its way through space along one angle and not another, if not, if not, if not, I would have been dead on the road in front of Mahal, reduced to nothing again, a small man become smaller. The war would have started and been instantly over. This was what I couldn't bear, my foolishness, my blindness.

Finally, I laid aside the past, which cannot be changed but only left. I cut it from me as if with a scalpel. The future is what exists for you, I said. You are a man of the future. I planned. And I slept.

The next day I carried the war to them. They knew we had been watching, but they couldn't hide everything from us. We knew at least something, what business they did, where they went. On that next day we killed five of them. There were two separate attacks, and I led one of them. It was difficult for me to move, I couldn't raise my arm without a struggle, but the boys were watching me, and this was a crucial time. So I sat in the front seat of the car, next to Chotta Badriya, who was driving. There were three other boys in the back seat. We waited for the enemy outside Kamath's Hotel, where we knew they were meeting a builder for cash collection. It was six o'clock, and the road was full of workers coming home, trailing long evening shadows. When I closed my eyes I could still see the burning of the sun, it blazed inside my head.