Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'That's why you will outsmart them, sir.'

'Don't be so sure, Sartaj,' Parulkar said, jabbing a hand towards the rising arc of buildings, 'nowadays, stupidity is what wins here.' Behind him, the sea lay flat and quiet. His driver and bodyguards were standing close by, shading their eyes from the glare. 'The times have changed.'

There was no arguing with this simple truth, the times had indeed changed. 'If there's anything I can do, sir,' Sartaj said, 'please tell me.'

That was all the comfort Sartaj could offer to the old man. Sartaj watched Parulkar's three-car convoy edge away from the promenade, and thought that this was the first time he had ever thought of Parulkar as old. He had always seemed ageless because of his appetite for the job, his unflagging cheer and amusement at the absurdities of the policeman's life, his energy, and his steady and amazing progress. Maybe he had risen too far, maybe it was inevitable that at these high professional altitudes his sharp ambition would betray him, yes, it had twisted and cut him and emptied out his confidence and his joy. Perhaps it was better to stay at a respectable middling level, like Papa-ji had, to do one's job well and go home and sleep soundly.

But no, it was impossible to believe such a thing in these changed times, when a lack of passionate careerism was considered a fatal character flaw. Sartaj slung a leg over the motorcycle and kicked it into grinding life. He turned back along the causeway, coasted along and went past the entrance to Shiv Sagar Estates, where Harshad Mehta had once owned seven – or was it eight? – apartments. Sartaj had come there long ago, to support a huge CBI team which had searched Mehta's apartments for evidence of his multi-crore perfidy. Sartaj's contribution to the stockbroker's arrest had been crowd control, he had held back the rapidly growing crowd of onlookers and Mehta-supporters, and kept the building gate clear. That night and the next day, everyone he had met – policemen, friends, Megha – had asked eagerly, 'Did you see Harshad Mehta's house from inside? What was it like? It must have been great, no?' Sartaj didn't mind, at first, telling them that he hadn't seen anything except the outside of the building, but each enquirer had been so disappointed that finally Sartaj had felt obliged to make up a story about Harshad Mehta's extravagant living. There were indeed some fragments of fact in the mosaic he had built, little shiny nuggets harvested from constables who had been inside the building, but mostly Sartaj had thrown together pictures taken from television and films, he had talked about duplex drawing rooms with staircases that went coasting up to family quarters, doors that slid into walls, bedrooms as big as entire ordinary apartments, all floored with exquisite Italian marbles, and with an intercom tying it all together. 'Thirty thousand feet,' Sartaj had said. 'Can you imagine, he lives in thirty thousand feet?' And all those who could barely afford five hundred feet, or a thousand, had become a little wet-eyed and dreamed of a perfect life. Sartaj knew the admiration they were feeling, because he had felt it himself: Harshad Mehta was a thief, but he had dreamt big and lived large. He had been arrested, and then arrested again, and he had died of a heart attack, but in his own time, he had been a hero.

Sartaj gunned the engine, and liked the howl it made. Ambition had spread like an inescapable virus in those Harshad Mehta days, and there had been stock-market crashes and burst bubbles since, but the contagion had taken firm hold. Now these outsize aspirations were something like a universal condition. Maybe it was a form of health – after all, it gave you vim, zip, velocity. He had read an editorial in the papers not long ago, which had noted gratefully that the Indian cricket team had finally acquired some killer instinct. Yes, they had acquired cash and killer instinct. Very correct. Sartaj speeded up. It was time to go and hunt eve-teasers.

* * *

Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad, of the lengthy name and the long political aspirations, had given Sartaj the names and address of the tapori brothers he wanted disciplined, and so Sartaj and Katekar went visiting. They had no hope of finding the two at home, but their intention was to cause terror and discomfort to the family, and thereby impel the brothers to give themselves up. So they went into the kholi with extravagant amounts of shoving and shouting. Sartaj kicked open the door and roared, 'Where are those two gaandus? Where are they?'

Katekar gathered up the family from the three cramped rooms. There was a tottering old man, a woman and a girl of eleven or twelve. The girl began to curse Sartaj in a steady monotone, and the woman clapped a hand over her mouth.

'What have they done?' said the trembling grandfather. 'What?'

Sartaj spoke to the woman. 'Are you the mother of Kushal and Sanjeev?'

'Yes.'

'Where are they?'

'I don't know.'

'You're their mother but you don't know where they are?'

'No, I don't know.'

She was a sturdy woman, short but big in the shoulders and bigger in the hips. She was wearing a bright red sari, the pallu of which she now wrapped tightly around her shoulders with one hand as she held her daughter with the other.

'What's your name?' Sartaj said.

'Kaushalya.'

'This is your father?'

'No, his.' Meaning her husband's.

'And where is he?'

'At his factory.'

'What factory?'

'They make mithai.'

'Is it near by?'

She jerked her chin towards her left shoulder. 'Next to the bus depot.'

Sartaj pointed at the girl, who had stopped muttering under her mother's hand. She was looking at him with an unblinking concentration. 'What's her name?' he said.

'Sushma.'

'Sushma, go and get your father.' Kaushalya removed her hand, but her daughter didn't move. Sartaj was used to being disliked by the public, but the little girl's hatred stung him. 'Go,' he growled.

'Listen to Saab,' Kaushalya said, and the girl ran out of the door.

Sartaj settled himself on the chair next to the door. He spread his knees wide and planted his feet firmly. Katekar turned to the small kitchen area on the left, and began to search, rattling pots and plates. He picked up a bottle from a shelf and sniffed at it loudly. Kaushalya and her father-in-law retreated to the other room. Sartaj could hear their urgent whispering.

Hunting apradhis should've meant car chases, sprints through crowded streets, motion and movement and pounding background music. That's what Sartaj wanted, but what hunting actually meant was intimidating a woman and an old man in their own home. This was a tried and tested policing technique, to disrupt family life and business until the informant sang, the criminal caved, the innocent confessed. Katekar spread himself over a couch covered with a bright blue sheet, and Sartaj called to Kaushalya and asked for chai and biscuits. She twittered angrily behind the wall, but went outside and asked a neighbour to walk down to the dhaba at the corner. She came back in, her head ducked down low, her jaw working, and stalked past them to her back-room refuge.

The walls were bare white, but on a single shelf there was a row of photographs, the record of Kaushalya's marriage and three children. Sushma laughed happily from a pink heart-shaped frame. Sartaj leaned his head on the wall and shut his eyes. But he was restless, too tense for a doze. He sat up, and Katekar was studying, intently, an old copy of Filmi Kaliyan . On the left corner of the cover, Bipasha Basu had her arms folded under the rolling expanses of her chest. Sartaj instantly resented her for the keen cut of desire that came up from his groin. He straightened up, rearranged discreetly and then had to lean forward to hide himself. The hell with you, Bipasha. The last time he had had sex was eight months ago, with a stringer for one of the Marathi afternoon papers. She had first come to him with tough questions about dance bars and bar girls, for a big lead story, and he had been impressed by her big shoulders, her loose green jeans, her cynicism and her rangy competence. They'd met three times, in three different restaurants, and she had each time carefully mentioned her husband, who was also a journalist, for another Marathi daily. But by the third afternoon, by the third cup of tea, she had run out of questions about bar-balas, and it was obvious that something else had to happen. They'd said goodbye awkwardly, and this time she'd not offered her hand for a hearty from-the-shoulder handshake. She called ten days later, and this time they'd walked on Chowpatty beach, brushing knuckles. He didn't think she was pretty, exactly, but he couldn't pause himself, cease short the impulse to rest his hand on the small of her back, under her loose, full-sleeved white shirt. They'd had weekly sex for four months, always in PSI Kamble's room in Andheri East, in the afternoons. Ghochi karo, boss, Kamble used to say. Had sex, made love, ghochi, whatever it was, it made Sartaj precariously alone, put an insoluble knot in his throat. To feel her skin against his was good, her crises tripped easily through her long body, and she was comfortably undemanding, relaxed and relaxing in her distrust of drama. And yet Sartaj felt no yearning for her, suffered none of the agonized need he had once endured for Megha, and this absence made unbearable those moments when he lay panting on Kamble's flowered sheets. He felt small and lost inside his own body, submerged far under the skin and drowning. Finally he had to stop, had to end it. Now she was hurt, but she hid it under a journalist's shrug: marad sala aisaich hota hai .