Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Took too long,' he said. 'You're late.'

'It was the lawyers and everything,' Chotta Badriya said.

Samant tugged on the door, which opened with a long metallic squeak. Just inside, there was a man face-down on the floor. A blue shirt and black pants, and his hips cocked up and stiff.

'Vilas Ranade,' Samant said, with a little motion of his hand, palm up as if he was making introductions.

'You did it alone?' I said.

'He was a brown-sugar sniffer,' Samant said. 'The stupid bhenchod. He thought nobody knew. Used to go by himself to get it. I know the dealer who sold to him.'

'The dealer told you when Vilas Ranade would come to buy?'

'He had to, if he wanted to keep dealing.'

'You're sure this is Vilas Ranade?'

'I've seen him twice at the Mulund station when I was posted there. He had friends there.'

'I want to see his face.'

Chotta Badriya stepped over the body, tugged at the shoulder. Vilas Ranade's shirt was black at the front, soggy. Chotta Badriya got behind him, and then Vilas Ranade sat up into the light. He looked sleepy, eyelids half down. I know him, I thought. He looked just like me. I squatted in front of him, leaned closer. Yes, he was my duplicate. I waited for one of the others to remark on it, but nobody spoke.

'What's the matter, bhai?' Chotta Badriya said finally. 'Don't like his face?'

'No, I think the bastard's got an ugly face.' I tapped Vilas Ranade on the cheek lightly, and I stood up. 'What a game you played, Samant Saab,' I said. I took Samant by the hand and shook it violently. I thumped him on the shoulder, and I laughed, and all of them, every one of them, laughed with me. But in me it was all acting. I was making big motions and roaring and celebrating, but inside, inside I was bewildered: what did it mean that Vilas Ranade and I looked alike, and why did none of the others see it? What did it mean that he and I had hunted each other, like ghosts seen in mirrors, and then killed? Where did this coincidence point me, where was it taking me?

I was still dazzled when we got into the cars. Again we drifted through the long, unlit night, and by the time we were near the highway I had solved the conundrum. I had decided it had been a trick of the light. If he had looked so like me, Chotta Badriya would have seen it. Samant would have said something. I was tired from the days in the lock-up. I needed sleep, rest, good food. There was nothing to worry about.

* * *

Shooter Vilas Ranade Killed in Encounter, some of the afternoon papers reported the next day. Parab Gang Warlord Dies in Encounter. And then we destroyed the Cobra Gang. We ambushed their boys, we took their money, we intimidated their businessmen, we strolled down their streets. We lost four more of our boys, and one of them was my Sunny, who by now was so fervent in his worship of pistols that he carried two of them. A bullet fired from behind broke something in his back and left him pissing out his life into the road. But we shattered the Cobra Gang, and took their territories. We were still smaller, but now that seemed an advantage. We hit and ran, and then circled back and hit again. They were confused and old, like their Rajesh Parab, who at the last tried to seek help from the bigger companies, he went here and there, to Dubai even, and everyone gave him assurances, and promises, and nothing else. We were the winning team, and we had a bright, burnished shine about us, and those watching the battle saw this, and placed their bets. They knew the practical lesson, had learnt it already: a small band of fighters, knit by hardship into brotherly love, will easily beat a large, unwieldy organization with its courage failing and its belief vanished.

Rajesh Parab died of a heart attack six weeks later, in his bed, in his sleep at night. Paritosh Shah said, 'He must have dreamed you coming through his door.' But I was glad I didn't have to kill him. I would have felt like a dog-catcher putting down a tired, yelping cur, and there was no pleasure even in the thought of it.

* * *

I caught a fever that winter. A dry, jittery whistling in my head and a jerky restlessness tossed me about my sweaty bed. Movies did not calm me, nor music, nor the girl Chotta Badriya brought in. I spat and spat, trying to rid myself of a rush of bitter saliva. I swallowed the pills, drank the salty water, ate the plain white rice. The fever stayed with me.

So I was wide awake at two in the morning when Chotta Badriya tapped at my door. 'We found Mohan Surve,' he said.

'You have him here?'

'Outside in the car.'

'Get him in.'

I got up and dressed. Since he had betrayed us, Mohan Surve had vanished from Bombay. After that night when I had seen his face outside the Mahal Bar, lit red by the neon, he had just gone, phut, away. Once the bullets had started flying, nobody had seen him, ever, not in Bombay and not in Wadgaon, where his sister stayed with her husband and children.

Chotta Badriya came in and helped me with my shoes. 'We watched the sister,' he said. 'The postman was showing us her letters.'

'Good. And then?'

'And then nothing much. Surve thought he was being very smart. Money orders every month from a Manmohan Pansare in Pune. Finding out which post office the money orders came from was simple enough. Then we just watched the post office. He had grown a beard.'

The beard was soft and very thin on Mohan Surve's face and didn't much disguise him. He still had fat cheeks, beady squirrel eyes. I would've known him from fifty feet. He began babbling as soon as he saw me.

'Bhai, I just got scared because of the shots and ran and hid,' he said. 'I didn't want to be part of all this any more, I can't take it, I'm a coward, forgive me, bhai, but that's how I am, forgive me. Sorry, bhai, sorry.'

He kept using that English word 'sorry', and that irritated me, angered me even more sharply than what he had already done.

'How much were his money orders?' I asked Chotta Badriya.

'Five thousand, six thousand, like that. The first one was ten thousand.'

And I looked at Mohan Surve. 'Don't try it, Mohan. Just don't try it.' My voice was a calm whisper, a surprise even to myself.

Then he broke, and threw himself on the ground, and clutched at my ankles, and fell loose. I smelt the piss spilling from him. Chotta Badriya had tied his wrists together with green electrical wire, and now as he twisted and turned, his skin chafed and blood seeped over the wire. On and on Mohan Surve went: the Cobra Gang had come to him first, he had said no to them, but they had threatened to kill his sister and her husband and the children, Vilas Ranade had threatened him personally with a sword. So he had told them I would be at Mahal that night, and they had prepared their ambush.

I had Chotta Badriya peel him away from my legs, and then I went back into my room. I sat on my bed. I thought of my boys who had died first, Krishna Gaikwad, Pradeep Pednekar and Qariz Shaikh with his stories, and I remembered how it felt to run down the side of the building, run from death with the shadows flailing towards me, and the pump of blood down my chest. Mohan Surve was making a wail in the next room now, it had all the force of a scream but not the loudness, and yet it penetrated the wall, this querulous long moan. I called Chotta Badriya in. 'Shut him up,' I said. 'I don't want him making noises. Make him calm. Give him something, whisky, something. And get the boys together. Anyone who is around or is available, tell them to be here in half an hour.'

So Chotta Badriya untied Mohan Surve's hands, gave him nimbu pani with three Calmpose crushed in. By the time the boys were together, Mohan Surve was lying curled on the ground, one arm over his head. The boys picked him up, hauled him up at the wrists and ankles and his head fell back and his eyes rolled, all glassy, dark and moving. I walked out of the house, and they followed. They carried Mohan Surve at four points, four of them, and brought him behind me. He was quiet now. We took him through the empty lanes and left the houses behind, and went up the hill above Gopalmath. I had a large Eveready torch, and I lit the way. I turned around only when we were at the top, at the small upturned bowl. While they all came up, the trailing line of my company, I was looking out at the haze of lights. My fever softened the diamond points into circling halos, and the horizon swam under this swarming, gleamy flux, the breathing of this undulating city.