Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'The father? Saab, really, he's not such a problem. But he spoils his sons, and starts puffing up if anyone says anything to them. They are the ones who instigate him. He is a simple man, a dehati really, they are the haramzadas who think they are too smart. Once the boys are squeezed a little and become quiet, he will also sit down.'

'You have everything calculated out, don't you?'

'Saab, I was not trying to hide anything.'

'But you didn't give us all the information.'

'My mistake, saab. Saab, where are you?'

'In your raj.'

'Saab, where in Navnagar? I'll be there in five minutes.'

'Make it ten minutes. I'll see you in Bengali Bura, at Shamsul Shah's house.'

'Yes, saab. At their new kholi?'

'Yes, at the new kholi.'

'Okay, saab. I'm putting down, saab.'

Katekar was eating a biscuit. 'He's running to meet us?'

'Yes. He's very dedicated to justice.'

Katekar snorted. Sartaj took a biscuit, and they walked through the basti, towards Bengali Bura. Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad was eager to be seen with the police. It would give him a chance to demonstrate his affinity with power, his ability to get things done. He would probably let it be known that he had summoned them himself, asked them not to forget the investigation into the murder of Shamsul Shah, urged them to keep working hard. In his telling, he would be the concerned community leader who was getting action from the police. Sartaj didn't begrudge him his spin. The man was revealing himself to be an adept politician, in spite of his error in not telling all about Birendra Prasad, the inconvenient father.

Sartaj paused at an intersection. The narrow lane directly ahead led to Bengali Bura, and the wider one to the right towards the main road. He brushed the crumbs from his fingertips, and said to Katekar, 'Let's go and see Deva first.'

Sartaj had an old contact in Navnagar, a Tamil named Deva. Sartaj had met him nine years ago, when he had arrested a gang of four tyre-thieves in Antop Hill. Deva had lived with the thieves, in the little closed porch at the entrance to their kholi. He had protested his innocence, said that he was just a tenant, he had nothing to do with the burglaries, he was just in from his village and new to the city, he had thought that having tyres stacked in the house was normal urban practice. Sartaj had liked Deva's cheerfulness, his humming of weird-sounding Tamil songs, his resolute nineteen-year-old attempt to muster up courage, despite the twitching in his skinny, pole-like legs. So Sartaj had decided to believe him, and looked after him, he had not put his name in the FIR and had spoken to a couple of people about a job for him, and now Deva was very respectable, settled, married, he had a son and another one on the way, and he had grown a small moustache and a paunch. He ran an ironworks in Navnagar, where a sweaty cadre of Tamils made enormous iron wheels for use in hand-loom mills, and fences and fittings, and all kinds of special-order items.

So Sartaj took the right-hand turn, and called Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad as they walked, to tell him they would be delayed. The road had been recently tarred and maintained, and there was a constant traffic of cycles and scooters. The houses in this part of Navnagar were old and well-established, all of them had good water connections and electricity. Many of them were two and three stories tall, with shops and workshops on the ground floor fronting the street. A face floated above the staggered roofs, huge, luminous brown eyes that went and came from behind the parapets, larger than any of the windows, and there was a gleaming brow touched by blue light, half-open lips and swirling hair, all of it somehow completely weightless and paradisiacal. Sartaj knew that she was only a cunningly lit model on a vast billboard across the main road, but it was distracting to be watched so intently by her. He turned his eyes down and went on.

Deva called for refreshments as soon as he saw them, and wouldn't accept a refusal. A boy came around the corner with two Limcas, which Sartaj and Katekar drank standing near the door of the workshop, just outside it. There were no lights inside the workshop, just two livid streams of sunlight pouring through the roof, heating the glow of the molten iron as it slushed into the moulds and the faces of the nearly naked men who worked the bellows with their feet, stepping up high and then down in a slow and endless climb.

'Haven't remembered me for a long time, saab,' said Deva.

'The Tamils have been behaving themselves, Deva.'

Deva roared. He leaned in through the doorway and shouted a translation to his workers. There was a quick winking of gleaming smiles among the sparks. It was possible to live in Navnagar and never speak anything but Tamil. A shouted answer came back over the blaring rush and banging of work. 'He says,' Deva said, 'that we're so well-behaved now that even the Rakshaks love us.'

There had been a time when the Rakshaks had demonstrated son-of-the-soil Mumbai patriotism by hounding Tamil immigrants. Sartaj put his empty Limca bottle down, next to the door. 'Sure. They're chasing other people now.' Muscular chauvinism still won votes, but you had to be canny in your selection of enemies. So now the Rakshaks protested about the Bangladeshi menace, and told 'unpatriotic' Indian Muslims to leave the country. Same game, different targets. Sartaj motioned Deva away from the door and its exhalations of heat, and they walked down the lane a little, stepping over a gutter. Katekar followed close behind.

'You're investigating that murder,' Deva said. 'The boy who was killed by his friends.'

'Yes. Know anything about it?'

'No. I didn't know any of them.'

'Ever heard of a social worker named Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad?'

'Yes, yes. That bastard. He's a sharp one.'

'How sharp? What are his dhandas?'

'His father is a local butcher. The son does mostly social work, I think. But he has a lot of cousins, these cousins have garages. Two around here, one somewhere in Bhandup. They are a well-settled family.'

'And these garages, are they crooked or straight?'

'Medium, saab. I hear they do business in second-hand parts.' Deva had an extraordinary smile, he thrust his jaw forward and his eyes narrowed and a bank of sparkling teeth split his face in half. Second-hand parts could come from anywhere, from legitimate sources or some poor fool's car. 'One or two of these cousins have been in trouble. Never arrested, saab, but little things here and there.'

'You know the names of these cousins?'

'No. But let's see.' Deva led Sartaj and Katekar around the corner, to a bakery, a large tin-roofed hall with towering ovens at one end and ranks of men kneading dough. At the very far end, there was a small cubicle, almost filled by a portly owner. He gathered up his lungi and his bulging stomach and walked amongst his workers while Deva used his phone. Sartaj listened to the nasal southern rhythms, which reminded him as always of Mehmood and childhood laughter, and tried not to breathe too deeply. The smell of the fresh loaves of bread was good but overpowering, too rich, too dense in the stifling heat. Deva made two phone calls, and Sartaj knew he was tugging at his Tamil connections across Navnagar, strumming them and listening to what came back. The Tamils had once been the feared newcomers into the city, the ones denounced and hated by the Rakshaks as the threatening outsiders who supposedly stole jobs and land. Now they were old Mumbaikars.

Deva sat back and settled into his chair. He held up his fingers in a little cone, and said, 'Ready, saab? Write down.'

He gave Sartaj five names, and their exact genealogies, how they were related to Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad, and estimations of his involvement in their work, both legitimate and otherwise. It was solid intelligence.