Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Sartaj nodded. All this was true, and it was a restful pleasure to lie under a thela and complain. They had already complained about the municipality, corporators, transfers of honest civil servants and policemen, expensive mangoes, traffic, too much construction, collapsing buildings, clogged drains, unruly and uncivilized Parliament, extortion by Rakshaks, bad movies, nothing worthwhile to watch on television, American interference in subcontinental affairs, the disappearance of Rimzim from soft-drink stands, inter-state quarrelling over river waters, the lack of good English-language schools for children whose parents didn't have truckloads of money, the depiction of police on the movie screen, long unpaid hours on the job, the job, and the job. When you had complained enough about everything else, there was always the job, with its unspeakable hours, its monotony, its political complications, its thanklessness, its exhaustion.

Sartaj yawned. Near the iron fence, there was a rank of kholis with tin roofs. Some of the kholis were two-storeyed, and had leaning ladders, posts with pegs really, to allow access to the upper levels. There was a sturdy-looking pucca house about two-thirds of the way down the row, new and unfinished. A light burned behind a newspapered window in one of these upper stories, and that room was where the apradhis were expected tonight. Not far from the lighted window, at the far end of the kholis, PSI Kamble and four constables were wrapped in sheets on the pavement, trying to look like tired labourers deep and fast in their sleep. Sartaj was quite sure they were complaining. On that side of the kholis, there was a sloping ridge of rubbish, its top higher than a tall man's head, banked up against a brick wall. Sartaj had passed it many times over the last few years, this noisome mountain, and it had grown and shrunk many times but never disappeared, and now at this far distance, he could see the bright neon blue, green and yellow of plastic bags winking from its archaeological layers. As senior officer on the operation he had the privilege of avoiding the gigantic stink, so Kamble and his fellows lay directly under its influence, and Sartaj knew they were cursing him. The thought of Kamble holding a perfumed handkerchief to his nose gave Sartaj a smile.

Now Katekar stopped in mid-complaint. Two men were coming up the street, leaning against each other's shoulders. 'Drunks,' Katekar said, and he was right. These men were only two, and it was unlikely that the actual apradhis would stagger drunk to a meeting with a receiver to collect money. Still, Sartaj stiffened, watched. The drunks went by, giggling. Down the road and three lanes to the left there was a country bar and a gambling den. Men went from one to the other and then went home. These two were happy, which only meant that they would wake up in the morning to find out what they had lost. Sartaj watched them go, feeling the warm tingle of anticipatory satisfaction moving up his shoulders. He would get the apradhis tonight. He would take the bastards in, and then he would sleep well afterwards. He had done well by Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad, and now it was his turn to gain.

Katekar had, for the moment, run out of things to complain about, so now he was telling a police story. In the old days, he said, during the very early part of his service, he had known a hoary old inspector named Talpade. This Talpade was wizened and gnarled, stained not only by the paan he chewed incessantly, but also by the four corruption cases he had fought off and survived. It was said – and generally believed – that he had killed more than a dozen innocent men during his career, shot them dead during riots and encounters. He had once beaten an apradhi to death in the lock-up, and had been suspended for eleven months before he managed to extricate himself from the blood-spattered mess, mainly by scattering money up and down the chain of command until even his most ardent admirers and enemies marvelled.

Two years before his retirement, Talpade fell in love with a dancer. There was something admirable about a man that age gripped by a great passion. Of course he was ridiculous: he had new clothes tailored, his mehndi hair now was suddenly jet-black, his teeth gleamed an unearthly white. But you had to recognize and respect the completeness of his devotion. He went every night to worship at the altar of his beloved, he brought her home from the bar where she worked, he gave her messages from her lovers. Yes, she had other men, younger ones and more handsome, but Talpade accepted this pain as the price of his proximity to her, and suffered it with humble gratitude. He was transformed. There was something new moving under the age-old creases on his face, under the bitter valleys – you only had to spend a minute with him to know it was joy.

The force laughed at him. It was not his aged-rooster's walk or the new dark glasses he sported. The problem was that he loved Kukoo ('just like that actress from long ago'), and as Talpade told anyone who would stop and listen, Kukoo was as beautiful as a Kashmiri apple, and nobody could deny the fragile and fatal charm of Kukoo's nakhras. But she was a man. She said she was nineteen, but she had danced at various bars for the last five years, so it was more likely that she was twenty-five, at the very least twenty-two or so. She had luxurious straight hair to the small of her back, lightened to a striking almost-golden, a pert bottom of astonishing roundness, and opulent lips that deserved a poem of their very own. But there was never any doubt that Kukoo was a man. She never attempted to hide this. She had a slim, long chest, and her voice was husky. But she still accumulated a following as she moved from bar to bar, increasing her earnings each time.

So why had Talpade become such a majnoo for Kukoo? Was he, after all – despite his long marriage and three children – a gaandu, literally? Most of the men and women in the force believed so. But his friends, and those close to Kukoo, knew that Talpade never touched her. Not that she would have refused, no, Kukoo had a finely developed sense of how far you could tease a man, and above all she was practical. She knew when to be shy and when to be very forward. But Talpade didn't want to catch her and squeeze her and take her, he was content to sit at his regular table, just to the left of the dance floor, and look at her. On the sparkling silver of the dance floor, she was indeed something to look at, floating on the whirling lotus of her ghagra, her waist turning like a slender fall of water. Under those cunning black and red lights she was more beautiful than any other girl in the bar, more graceful than any woman on the street outside. Talpade sat and drank Old Monk and watched Kukoo. He gave her money just before he left, never called her to his table to take the cash like other men, never expected anything but an occasional glance and smile. He was happy to talk to friends who came into the club, he joked with the waiters, his concentration on Kukoo was not one-pointed or obsessive enough to be frightening, but it was obvious that he cared only about her.

His best friend, David, got sloppy drunk one night, grabbed Talpade's hand and said, 'Bastard, come, touch that thing between her legs. Then you'll know what she is.'

Talpade said, 'I know she's not a woman.'

'So then?'

'I like looking at her.'

'Tell me why.'

'It just feels good.'

And that's all he would say. David cursed Talpade for subjecting himself to open ridicule, for spending money and getting nothing, for plain stupidity. Talpade smiled and went back to watching Kukoo.

Two months later, Kukoo called David. She told him that Talpade was now weeping as he watched her. He had been doing this for the last three nights, watching her for hours as usual, and then, very late, crying without a sound or any indication that he was unhappy. 'Now he has finally gone mad,' Kukoo said. She wanted the friend to get Talpade away from her. He was depressing her with his big watery eyes, and offending the other customers, who came to have fun, not to mourn.