Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

I walked around the corner of the desk, and sat on the couch close to him. I put my hand on his knee, patted clumsily. He flinched away from my touch. 'Who will marry my children?' he sobbed through his fingers.

I had no answer. I had promised Dipika happiness, but what about Paritosh Shah's two other daughters and two sons, what were they to do? I could win elections, I could move men up the steep ladders of success and kill them in the next moment, I could burn down houses, seize land, bring half the city to a standstill with an arbitrary proclamation of a bandh, if that was my pleasure. But who would fight the rows of meek matrons who had sat primly, heads covered, at the wedding of Paritosh Shah's daughter? Who would push their portly husbands into enlightenment? Paritosh Shah's natevaik would declare themselves busy in response to his invitations, they would forget to ask him to their functions, and their sons and daughters would be engaged and married elsewhere, no matter how much money he had or how close he was to me. And he would feel shame every time he saw some acquaintance, each time he walked in the street. Sitting next to Paritosh Shah, abased by his tears and unable to look at him, I knew how helpless I was. I would have beaten all his relatives, thrashed each of them with my shoes, broken all their smug, snug heads open to the modern air, if only that would have made any difference. But custom floats between men and women, it hides in the stomachs of children and escapes and expands and vanishes in every breath, you cannot kill it, you cannot hold it, you can only suffer it.

'Have you met that bastard maderchod?' Paritosh Shah asked. He was angry now.

'No, I haven't. Listen, I didn't come to you for him. He matters less than an ant to me. But Dipika asked me.'

'Kill him,' he said. 'Just kill him.'

'Easily done,' I said. 'I'll give the order now. In an hour he'll be gone, no part of his body will ever be found, not one fingernail. But then what? He'll be gone and so she will be able to love him the rest of her life. And also hate you for the rest of her life.'

'She is young. This is foolishness. She will cry for a week and then she will forget him.'

'Is that how much you know your daughter?' His cheeks were burnished wet, and his jaw clenched and opened and shut, sending little rushes of torment up into his eyes and forehead. 'She told me she would kill herself, and I believed her. Do you understand? I believed her. You'll find her dead.'

'Then what?'

He was walking in small circles now. 'Let her marry him,' I said. 'Marry them quietly and send them away. Settle them in Madras, in Calcutta. Amsterdam, if you want.'

'That won't change anything,' he said. 'Everybody will still know. If she suddenly goes, disappears, they'll ask questions, they'll make up stories. Everybody always knows. You can't keep something like that a secret for ever. I am a well-known man.' That he was. 'Bhai,' he said, 'what do we do, bhai?'

'You won't marry her to this fellow?'

'No. I can't. You know that.'

So here we were. He was trapped, and I could do nothing. 'Marry her today to someone else,' I said. 'Marry her this hour. Find a boy and get a pandit and marry her off now. Then send them away. Somewhere. Maybe she won't kill herself. Maybe she will, but maybe she won't.'

He was panting. 'Yes,' he said, and picked up the phone.

I left by the back door to the house. I had betrayed Dipika, and I could not face her. They married her that afternoon, to a boy who was flown down from Ahmedabad. Dipika and her husband went by the next morning's flight back to Ahmedabad. The in-laws told Paritosh Shah that after a few days of gloom, she seemed to have adjusted, she began to smile and laugh. Paritosh Shah was satisfied that the reality of the marriage had already erased the silly illusion of romance. The boy's parents told him, over the phone, that Dipika was talking a lot to the younger girls in the family, and had been to the cinema twice with her husband and her devars and their wives. So, two months later, Dipika and her husband were sent on their honeymoon to Switzerland. On the fifth night of the honeymoon, in Bern, she left the hotel suite while the husband was sleeping. She walked out of the lobby, and out of the gates and on to the road beyond. She was hit by a car that came fast around a curve. The driver said later that she was walking in the exact middle of the road, on the painted dividing lines, and he never had a chance to swerve, he didn't even know what he had hit until he came to a halt and reversed. Dipika was killed instantly. The husband said she had seemed happy, that their relations were joyous, as between any new husband and wife. In the Swiss records they put it down as an accident.

* * *

Three months after Dipika's death, I was watching one of Bipin Bhonsle's American movies when Paritosh Shah came to me. I had been awake all night, so excruciatingly awake that I could hear the creaking of the settling joists, the click of a passing dog's toes on the concrete outside. I watched the red second-hand of my bedside clock scything smoothly around its eternal circle, and I felt it tearing at something inside my head. So I popped in one of Bipin Bhonsle's tapes, switched on the television and pressed buttons on the control, and where there had been black fuzz a lion appeared, stretching its mouth in a yellow-toothed yawn. I watched, and the first time I understood very little. But I used the rewind button, and by morning I understood the story, who wanted what, what was standing in the way, and who must be killed. It was a good story, but it was the words that were the pleasure for me. I ran one scene back and forth, and the hero raced backwards under fine white lines, jerky and clown-quick, and his mouth twisted, and sounds came out glistening with his anger, and I ran it back, and forward, and back, and the syllables fell on my ears like pattering drops, and suddenly they fell together and the sense came to me, he was asking, 'Where did he go?' He had his pistol ready and was asking, 'Where did he go?' And in that moment there was a humming joy in every part of me. 'There,' I shouted in English at the hero. 'He went there.'

When that film was over, I put in another one, and learned. Paritosh Shah came at nine o'clock, and sat on the bed and watched with me, watched another hero and his men move down a jungle river with water to their chests, their faces blackened. 'These are commandos,' I said. 'Their country's secret missile has been stolen by one bastard. So they are going to get it back from his jungle den.'

Paritosh Shah smiled. 'A jungle den? It would be expensive to supply and maintain. That's what I always wonder about. How do they get the oil and atta and onions to it, for so many henchmen?'

I switched off the tape. 'You're just too much of a bania,' I said, 'to appreciate a good story.'

'I just don't understand these foreign films.'

'I can see that. Everything all right at home?'

After Dipika's death, his wife had taken to bed with palpitations of the heart. She was still weak, and given to fits of crying. 'We are going along,' he said. 'And you? Did you sleep?'

He knew that I lay awake at night, that I watched television in the grey hours of the morning, that I fell fitfully asleep in the car on journeys. I shook my head. 'I'll take a pill tonight.'

He made a sweeping motion in the air between us, like a man wiping a window clean. 'That's what I wanted to talk to you about.'

'About sleeping pills? Your ved-maharaj has some new recipes?' I had tried his Dhanwantri's pills, had got indigestion and gas and no sleep, and had gone back to the allopathic doctor for his strongest medicines.

'No. Not that,' he said, very serious. 'Listen, bhai, I think you should get married.'

'Me?'