Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Look at you. You're not happy. You can't sleep. You're distracted, you do this and that, nothing works. You're restless. A man needs to settle down. You have everything now, you need to become a grahastha, start a family, everything has a place and time.'

'Marriage doesn't bring happiness to all of us.'

'You mean Dipika. Bhai, she was my daughter. It wasn't the marriage that was wrong, it was the other thing. Once she had gone past all boundaries, where was the chance for happiness? But you need to get married. All the scriptures say a life has its stages. First you are a student, then you are a householder. But you, you live like you've given up the world already. Look at this.' He meant the room, the bare walls, the white sheets, the crusted thali from dinner on the floor. 'Chotta Badriya and the boys are all very well, but they can't be your life. You need a woman, she will make a home for you.'

'Who will marry me, Paritosh Bhai? Which respectable girl?'

'You worry too much, bhai,' he said. 'We have money. Everything is possible.'

Everything is possible. Yes, he and I had created possibilities, we had snatched dreams out of the air and snapped them into solidity. Everything was possible. And yet Kanta Bai and Dipika had died. Looking at Paritosh Shah, I was reminded of the smile of the god above his shoulder, the blue conjuror who had regarded me with his sleepy eyes. He had had a family too, many families. Now he was trying to trap me into one. Yes, I now knew that certain things were impossible, even for me, and it was true that money made marriages possible. Most of our boys had chavvis, and some of these chavvis became wives. Sometimes the parents objected, made a fuss about the boy's profession, but always finally agreed. After all, the boy was earning, and earning good money. 'Yes,' I said sourly. 'Money can bring a bride. At least it can do that.'

'Do you have somebody to love-marry?' Paritosh Shah said with the satisfaction of a player moving rapidly towards checkmate.

'No.' I had women aplenty, bar-girls, whores, would-be actresses. Certainly no one to marry.

'Then don't refuse me, bhai,' he said. 'You came to me that day and asked me for something. And I couldn't give you what you wanted. But don't say no to me today. I am asking you for something. Say yes, bhai.'

I knew in that moment that we are trapped for ever in the connections that wrap us from head to foot and bind us to each other, as invisible as gravity but as powerful. From this net there is no escape. I had come to this city alone, to be alone, but my solitude was illusion, a story I had told myself to convince myself of my strength. I had found a family, a family had found me. This Paritosh Shah was my friend, and he was my family. All the rest of them, Chotta Badriya and Kanta Bai and my boys, they were my family. I was a part of this family, and they wanted me married. I couldn't fight them. I was defeated. I nodded. I said, 'All right. I'll do what you want.'

* * *

While we looked for a girl we fell into a war. Paritosh Shah wanted my janampatri, he wanted to know about my parents and my gotra and my village. 'Only by knowing a man's past,' he said, 'can you settle his future.' And I said, 'Forget all that. I have none of that, I have money. Past is passed. Future is future, so make it for me.' I believed then that a man can become anything he wants. I wanted it to be true: no past, any future. But Paritosh Shah, that fat bastard, that slippery Gujarati schemer, that faithful friend of mine, he looked at me as if I was crazy, and then dreamed a past for me. He ordered up a janampatri, a long roll which unfurled across the room, sprinkled with stars and secret hatchings and vermilion Sanskrit and all good things. 'But not too perfect,' he said. 'Otherwise no Papa will believe it.' So, according to Paritosh Shah, there had been bad times in my early youth, poverty and danger and near-death because of a rising Shani, but I had overcome these malign inevitabilities, I had faced down fate itself through the strength of my will and my single-hearted devotion to Krishna-maharaj, I had turned destiny through the energies of my uncountable devotions. This too he invented, all this, my God-fearing daily poojas, my temple-building, my love of Krishna. 'It is good publicity, bhai,' he said. 'So give up your godless ways, nobody likes that stuff. People will think you are a communist, and anyway your children will need a good, God-fearing household.' His special-order janampatri predicted many sons for me, and a daughter or two, and a long life of rising power and stability and eminence. Only one or two periods of illness were foreseen, like beauty-marks on a perfect face, and even these were easily surmounted through wearing of the right stones. Paritosh Shah rolled up the scroll with quick, practised little twirls of forefingers and thumb, his underarms jiggling, and smiled at me. 'You are a very eligible boy. You'll get a queue of candidates, you wait.'

I had my doubts. We might have moved the planets to shine a golden light on my future, but the fact remained that men had died at my hands. The newspapers called me 'Ganglord Gaitonde'. I was hated and feared. I knew this. And yet, the photographs came in. The Papas sent in pictures of their daughters, through intermediaries and marriage-brokers. Paritosh Shah spread a sheaf of them on his golden desk, like a pack of playing cards. 'Choose,' he said.

I picked up the first one. She was sitting in front of a red backdrop, wearing a silky green sari with a gold dupatta, with her sleek hair pulled tightly back from a long forehead. 'This one looks like a schoolteacher,' I said.

'So don't choose that one. Make a shortlist. Then we'll consider family background, education, nature of girl, horoscope, and move on from there.'

'Move on?'

'See the girls, of course.'

'We'll go to her house? And she'll bring in tea while her parents watch?'

'Yes, of course. What else?'

I flicked the picture back on to the table, where it slid smoothly into the rest. 'This is completely mad,' I said.

'What, marriage is mad? Bhai, the world does it. Prime ministers do it. Gods do it. I mean, what else are you going to do with your life? What else is a man born for?'

What is a man born for? I had no answer to this, and so I took the photos back home and laid them out on the floor of my room in rows of ten. They shivered in the draught from the air-conditioner, these faces patted smooth with powder, softly gleaming with hope. It was April, and without the blast of frigid air, even with the fan on 'Full', I sweated into my mattress, left damp stains on chairs. My blood was hot, and needed wintry air, more cold than this city could ever exhale. Outside, under the sun, my trousers stuck to my thighs and drove me into rages of restlessness, my shoes left red rings around my ankles. In these moods I was capable of rash anger and carelessness, so the boys had special power cables laid, and they knocked a new window into my bedroom wall for the machine, and so I was cooled. I was now comfortable and calm, and yet those faces on the floor were all the same to me, each was as good or bad as the next one. They were pretty enough, not phatakdi beautiful –who would want that in a wife? – but pleasant and welcoming and shy. They were sufficiently educated, well-cultured, no doubt each knew cooking and embroidery, they were all qualified, so why pick this one, and not that one? I waited for a sign from one of them, a wink of the eye as they fluttered in the chill blast. And there I was, Ganesh Gaitonde, leader of my own company, master of thousands of lives, death-giver and generous benefactor, completely and wholly unable to make a decision.

'Bhai, there's trouble.' Chotta Badriya was knocking urgently at the door. I called him in and he said it again. 'Very big trouble.'