Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Sisters,' Katekar said.

'Right,' Sartaj said. 'But who is taking all the pictures?' He flipped on through the pages of happiness and love. Then there was a blank page, all white. But there had once been a photograph there, he could still see the impression it had made under the sheer plastic. The next page again had the two sisters, this time in the Hanging Gardens. But there had been a photograph removed every two pages or so, and about half-way through the album, the sisters were having a birthday. It wasn't a party really, just them, gifts on the dining table and a pink cake with lots of white icing.

'Seventeenth,' Katekar said. He had, with his quick head for numbers, assessed the bright candle flames.

Sartaj turned the page, and there was a blank, this time with no impression left by an image. The rest of the album was empty. The photography had stopped abruptly. Sartaj put the album aside, and turned to the next one. This one went backwards into childhood. The sisters were in white school shirts and dark skirts. And then they stood barefoot, their identical pigtails sticking straight out like wings, happy in front of a house with a heavy stone lintel and thick wooden doors and a sunlit courtyard inside. 'Village,' said Sartaj. 'But where?'

'South,' Katekar said. 'Somewhere south. Konkan.'

Now they were in a studio, the sisters, in identical blue frocks with puffy sleeves and enormous bursts of lace at the throat, and their mother was with them. She wore sober black, a dress with sleeves down to the wrists, and her head shone with streams of grey, and the lights picked out the crucifix she wore at her neck and made it blaze. She was smiling, but carefully. 'No father,' Sartaj said.

'No father at all,' Katekar said. 'What is it, a farm?'

The sisters played under trees, in groves brimming over with green light, they ran between long rows of plants with broad leaves curling at the edges. 'I don't know,' Sartaj said. He knew nothing about trees, or plants, or farms. This was another world.

The last album was of the old-fashioned type which nobody made any more, with thick black pages, and the first photograph was held on to the page by small black corners, elegant little tabs, Sartaj couldn't remember what they were called. But both he and Katekar said together, 'Father.' The father sat with that particular stiffness which men and women from a long-ago generation assumed in front of cameras, it was the formality owed to a rare event, and he wore a white uniform. His shoulders were thrown back, and his right hand was curled in a fist against his hip.

'Navy,' Katekar said.

'Merchant Navy.'

The father had his daughters' eyes, large and direct. Actually, for the next couple of pages he had only one daughter, who stood between him and his wife, holding both their hands. And then suddenly, on a fresh page, here was the new arrival. She reached out with both her hands and her feet towards the camera, grinning toothlessly, fine-haired and round-faced. She reached towards the name above the photo, the name hand-inked on to the black page in white writing edged with flourishes and decorative marks: Juliet.

'Ju-li-et?' Katekar said.

'Yes,' Sartaj said. 'Like with Romeo.'

Katekar's laugh was long and full. 'So Juliet became Jojo? And Gaitonde was her Romeo?' He pronounced it 'Rom-yo', and Sartaj found his pleasure unfair and ugly, and his guffaws scraped across the base of Sartaj's skull. He thought Katekar very coarse and ganwar and low-class in that moment, and didn't care to correct him. Sartaj was feeling protective of the Juliet-that-was, before Jojo ever existed. She grew up in the pages that followed, under the care of her sister and mother. Soon after Juliet began walking, the mother began to dress the two sisters alike, in identical frocks and the same hair and the same hair-band. This first photograph with the two of them in matching outfits was a studio portrait, in front of a backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. They stood holding hands under the graceful arc towards a red sky, and now there were two names in white ink under the picture: 'Mary' and 'Juliet' separated by a fancy curlicue.

'Mary Mascarenas,' Sartaj said. That was the sister.

This paired dressing ended when Juliet was ten, or maybe eleven, in the last pictures in the album. In that birthday photograph, she had her hair cut short in a smart little bob, much shorter than Mary's, and she had a necklace, bright, light-coloured beads. The frock was the same as her sister's, but it was somehow different. She carried it better. Juliet had started to assert herself, she knew who she was and she was resisting her mother. Sartaj liked the tip-toed exuberance of her stance, her impudence. And then there was the serious Mary.

In Jojo's fat address book, under 'M', Sartaj found 'Mary' and work and home phone numbers, and an address in Colaba. But the number was old, outdated, Sartaj knew that the Colaba exchange had been converted to digital at least seven, eight years ago. Had Jojo not talked to Mary for eight years? Sartaj pondered, and they put the apartment in order, things back to their original positions, everything but the bedroom cupboard. Then Sartaj made the call to the Delhi-walli.

They sat in Jojo's office and waited. Sartaj swivelled slowly on Jojo's office chair and thought about sisters and their quarrels. Ma spoke often about her own older sister, Mani-mausi, and of her stubbornness, her silly communistic refusal to get live-in help despite long illness and weakness, what if she has one of those fainting spells and falls down the stairs or something, how many times I've told her to come here and stay with me, but she's so stubborn. Sartaj could never bring himself to point out that she, Ma, the younger sister, was no less self-willed, no less protective of her own prickly independence, no less devoted to the house she had built, to its high walls, its lambent floors and familiar lights, its corridors of quiet.

Jojo had built herself a home also, and it had been hard-won. Next to the kitchen sink, in a small floor-level cupboard, they had found a box of tools, and two rows of cans of paint in various colours. She had painted the rooms herself. Inside the fridge, there were plastic containers full of left-over food. Jojo threw nothing away. Despite the extravagance of her shoes, she was frugal. She was energetic too, Sartaj thought. You could see that in the photos. She must have been good at what she did.

* * *

The Delhi-walli came quickly. She was there in twenty minutes, maybe even less, in a black Ambassador. From Jojo's drawing-room window, Sartaj and Katekar watched the car pull into the building's compound, fast. There was a fast rat-tat-tat of car doors slamming shut, and barely two minutes later there was a knock on the door.

Anjali Mathur led her people in, breathing hard. Today her salwar-kameez was dark brown. The man immediately behind her was Makand, who had thrown Sartaj out of Gaitonde's bunker. 'Bedroom?' Anjali Mathur said.

Sartaj pointed. On the phone, he had already told her Jojo's name, her profession, her professions, and about the secret niche in the cupboard, about the sister named Mary. The number he had called was a land line, but the call must have been forwarded to the mobile phone she carried in her left hand.

'Could you wait outside?' she threw over her shoulder as she marched across the room. One of her short-haired flunkies was already holding the door-knob, and Katekar was barely through the door when it shut firmly. He and Sartaj stood in the corridor, too baffled to be angry.

There was nothing to do but wait, and so they did. 'Those chutiyas with her were the same ones,' Katekar said, 'from that day with Gaitonde.'

Sartaj nodded. The three men with Anjali Mathur had been at Gaitonde's bunker, and they all had the same haircut and the same shoes. What shoes did she have on, with her brown salwaar-kameez? He hadn't noticed, it had all been too quick. Something eminently sensible, he was sure, flat-heeled and sturdy. She was that sort, with her hair tied tightly back and her dupatta efficiently slung and the square brown leather bag with the strong straps, big enough to hold whatever an international agent carried on her missions. The air in front of the lift was stale and very hot, and Sartaj felt the sweat gather on his forearms. He began to breathe deeply, in a rhythm he had developed in a thousand stake-outs. If he could get it just right, heat and sweat would recede, and time would turn inward on itself until it whirlpooled into stillness, and he was relieved of the world while he was still in it. But he had to get it just right. He breathed, and he could hear Katekar on the other side of the door, trying also to find a repose in the pressing stillness. They perspired together, and after a while they were breathing together. Sartaj was floating, veering up and vanishing into rooms of his childhood where with anxious concentration he whitened his keds for PT in the morning, and showed them to Papa-ji, who was a stickler for perfect white, much more than any monitor at school, and who had impressed upon his son the urgent lesson that the best outfit could be ruined in its effect by a sloppy pair of shoes, and an ordinary one made glorious by soft, mirror-shined, deep brown tasselled loafers. What had Ma done with Papa-ji's shoes, those orderly columns of black and brown in the special narrow cupboard which always stood to the left of the clothes cupboard? And what had become of his suits, of that mothball-tinged wool smell of rain-laden mountainsides? Given away, packed away. Lost now, even a white Filipino shirt that a friend had brought back from Manila, that had set off Papa-ji's white upturned moustaches and the forward sweep of his beard, that he had worn with an entrancing flamboyance on his sixty-seventh birthday with grey twill trousers and a jet-black turban. Sartaj had burst out laughing in admiration when he had first seen him walking down the gravel path at the front of the house. But later that evening, on the way back from the restaurant, they had climbed up three flights of stairs in a new shopping mall, and Papa-ji had had to stop on the second landing to catch his breath, and Sartaj had faced away, looking steadfastly out of a window at neon signs and had listened to the small alternating, fluttering sound, life still finding itself, working on, and he had been afraid.