Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

The professor waves them back to their chairs. 'Gentlemen,' he says, 'as the PM said, you have been picked because you are the best. Welcome to the organization.' It turns out that the professor is not a professor after all, but an additional commissioner in the Intelligence Bureau, which – he informs them – is the oldest intelligence agency in the world. And they, if they choose to sign their recruitment papers, will be members, workers, soldiers for this venerable organization. They all sign eagerly, they are dazzled by Nehru.

Later that morning five of them celebrate at Yusuf in the Chowk Bazaar, where they have been taken by Jagdeep Mathur, a fellow-recruit who has grown up in Lucknow. They eat what he tells them are the best kakori kababs in Lucknow, and they discuss the magical appearance of Nehru in their midst. Mathur blames Nehru for the recent débâcle in the Himalayas, for all the defeats and all the dead, and K.D. cannot help but agree, but finds himself defending the old man's idealism, his belief in a future of peace and rationality. 'K.D., yaar,' Mathur says, 'you're just like my mother, always going on about how bloody good-looking Pandit-ji is, how he means well, how Gandhi-ji loved him like a bloody son, what a good good man Nehru-ji is. I say a good man shouldn't be our bloody prime minister. Good men are usually fools. Good men get people killed. When we live in a world with the bloody Chinese and the bloody Americans and the bloody Pakistanis we don't need good men, we need men who eat kakori kababs and carry big sticks.' K.D. nods, and says, 'Big lathis, actually.' Mathur laughs, he has a face like a perfect cube, with massive and ridged jaws, but he is quite striking with his fair skin and light-brown eyes. K.D. thinks he looks quite the Lucknow brahmin, and he is aware that Mathur has noted his own surname immediately it was uttered, has perhaps filed him in some slot reserved for Yadavs and other backward castes, as no doubt every other of his new colleagues has already done. K.D. has noticed this, that the organization is old, and like other old organizations it is indisputably Brahmanical, with a light sprinkling of Kayasths and Rajputs. And yet Mathur's grin is unfeigned, and there is not a moment's hesitation as he reaches across the table and thumps K.D.'s shoulder and chortles. 'Bloody big lathis,' he says. 'Exactly right. Bloody big lathis. Are you a lathait, K.D.?' 'I am,' K.D. says. 'I spent many years in shakhas.' It's true, he has spent many evenings in a starkly lit sandpit, whirling the lathi over his shoulders, learning defences and attacks from khaki-wearing instructors. Mathur approves of this, K.D. can see. He has passed some kind of test. Mathur likes him.

And after that kakori morning Mathur is known affectionately by his colleagues as Bloody Mathur, all the way until his disappearance two decades later. He leaves behind, on a road sixty-three miles north of Amritsar, a white Ambassador with two blown tires, one dead driver and one dead bodyguard and one dead informant named Harbhajan Singh, all killed by close-range AK-47 fire from at least three rifles. On that day, that year, K.D. is very far away, on the other side of the churning world, in London. He learns of Mathur's vanishing, is informed of it by the Europe desk in Delhi, puts down the phone and looks out of the window at the evenly ordered rhythm of staircases in an English square, at the white and grey fronts of the houses under a shadowed autumn sky. There is a six-hundred-year-old hospital on one side of the square, and a museum on the other. K.D. has a meeting in fifteen minutes, in a pub three squares down, with a Sikh militant he has been courting for six months. He has to be alert and careful, because he knows that this militant is also being run by a Pakistani officer, an ISI man named Shahid Khan, but all he can do is think of Anjali, little Anjali.

Anjali. Her name is Anjali. She is Bloody Mathur's daughter. She is sitting in front of me, now, in this hospital which is in Sector V of Rohini, in New Delhi. I am not in Lucknow, I am not in London. I am here. Anjali. Hold on to it. Don't mix up times, dates, places. Hold on to the sequence. There was Lucknow, where you met Mathur, and there was his disappearance in Punjab, but there were decades in between. There was NEFA, Naxalbari, Kerala, Bangladesh, London, Delhi, Bombay. Remember the dispositions, the distances, in the connections between the points is a shape. The shape is the meaning. In the shape of my life there must be a meaning. What is the shape? Apply analysis to the events, look for proximity, conjunction, repetition, similarity, find the impetus behind the momentum, the intent on the other side of the action. This is the business of intelligence. K.D. Yadav remembers teaching this, in a room in a house in Safdarjung. With this girl sitting in the first row. Anjali.

'Anjali,' K.D. says. 'Anjali.' His voice comes free of rust with a painful grinding, and he wonders how long it had been since he has spoken. 'Where have you been?' he says.

'Uncle, I need your help with Gaitonde.'

'Gaitonde is dead.' Gaitonde was dead. K.D. knows that, but doesn't know how he knows it. I am not in my right mind, he thinks. His greatest, his most secret and enduring pride has been in his memory, his precise eye for detail, his razor-edged logic, his capacity for analysis, his huge, humming, incandescent mesh of an intellect. In the corridors of the brahmins, in Nehru's royal gardens, he had walked proudly because of this famous mind. But what was my right mind? Was NEFA right, was London? In the ruin of his faculties, in the drifting, smoking aftermath of his collapse, there is a great lurking emptiness. It is an absolute vacuum, an utter absence, and K.D. flinches from it. And yet there it is, this loss, this suspicion that his whole life has amounted to nothing. He says to his little girl, his Anjali, he says, 'The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.'

She frowns. 'What does Sultan Mehmet have to do with Gaitonde?'

He is delighted, he has to laugh. What a mind she has! She has a doctorate in history. She understands his most obscure allusions, she has read the most esoteric and useless of texts, she needs them as much as he does, she is his inheritor, she is his daughter as much as Bloody Mathur's. Only she would have remembered, without a moment's hesitation, that after Sultan Mehmet led his armies over the walls of Byzantium, after he and his men brought to a fiery end an empire which had lasted for 1,123 years and 18 days (Know the details! Remember the specifics!), after a day of killing and capture and rape and plunder, after everything, after Byzantium, the Sultan walked in the Palace of the Emperors, where the Byzantine rulers had endured lives of luxury and intrigue. He had won. And in the moment of his victory – the chroniclers tell us – looking up at the twilight sky, Sultan Mehmet whispered something to himself: 'The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.' But, K.D., control yourself, have discipline. Anjali needs you. What does Gaitonde have to do with Mehmet? What, indeed? 'Sorry,' K.D. says. 'I'm sorry. Gaitonde.'

'Yes,' she says. 'Gaitonde.'

'What was the question?'

'My latest information has Gaitonde, before his death, looking for three sadhus in Bombay. Why? Why sadhus? What's the connection?'

'Gaitonde was learning yoga in jail when I recruited him. The teachers were from some yoga school.'

'Abhidhyana Yoga. They're very old, very established, very respectable. I checked it out. As far as we know, Gaitonde had no contact with them after leaving the jail.'

The yoga teachers dressed in white, they taught yoga in the main courtyard of the jail, with discourses from the Mahabharata and Ramayana . The yoga was supposed to soothe the criminals, to make them better citizens. But K.D. always wondered why they believed this, the teachers. Why wouldn't yoga just produce better criminals, more centred, calmer thugs who were more efficient in their criminality? That master of villains, Duryodhana, was surely a yogi. They all were, those evil warriors. Gaitonde had looked quite calm, sunlit in his prison whites, in the superintendent's room. He was a bad man. Was Duryodhana a bad man? He had been killed through trickery and had risen to a warrior's heaven. Is there a soldier's paradise waiting for K.D. Yadav? I did my best, Nehru-ji, Pandit-ji, sir. No, no, think, think. Gaitonde. Why was he chasing sadhus? Help Anjali, help her. 'Gaitonde was religious,' K.D. said. 'He was always doing pujas, donating money for temples. He gave money to all the muths, we have pictures of him with the holy representatives. He knew some sadhus, surely, plenty of them. What's special about these three?'