Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'We don't know. All we know is three sadhus. They were important enough for him to break cover and come back to India. He knew we were displeased with him, he must have been afraid that we would sanction him. He must have been afraid of being killed. Still, he came back. Why? Do you know anything? Can you remember anything, Uncle?'

Yes, he can remember. She is looking for detail, for texture, for one or two particulars that will come together to unlock her conundrum, make sense of Gaitonde and his life and his death. That is what K.D. Yadav taught her. K.D. Yadav now has memory, but not sequence. He has elements, but not the distance between them. To him the past is no longer separated from the present by a distinct and comfortable boundary, everything is equally present, all things are connected and are here. Why? What's happened to me? K.D. can't remember. But he can remember. He is in a chopper flying up a valley. K.D. is laughing, grinning, because he can't help it, he hasn't ever been off the ground before, and now they are following the long mercury sliver of a river, they are curving and buffeting above the thick green, the shadows fall a deep black at the bottom of the ridges. There is a brilliant light, an early-morning gold that fills the rattling plexiglass, and the sky beyond is a colour that K.D. has never seen, a vivid, saturated hue that moves across his face, he can feel this blue in his skin. He's smiling, and one of the pilots turns and laughs at him. These are army flyboys, out of the base at Pasighat. The pilot is pointing down, at a patch of brown near the edge of the water, near the sprays K.D. can now see pummelling past the rocks. Then the river is spiralling up, and they are on the ground. The chopper takes off as soon as K.D. is out, and it is gone in a moment, invisible, drawing its thunder with it. Now there is another sound that K.D. can hear, a small but resonant chirping. It's not a bird he has ever heard, he's sure of that. Now there's another one, which sounds like a tin can full of stones being rattled. And one more, but K.D. isn't sure this last one is a bird, it's a whooping call with a click at the end, a snap. The tree-trunks at the other side of the clearing hold between them a blue-green light that is infinitely deep, a whole hazy world that K.D. knows absolutely nothing about: NEFA. He is alone in the North Eastern Frontier Agency, with a green army bag by his side, wearing a yellow bush-shirt and cheap Bata leather street shoes. He is suddenly afraid, completely afraid. Two bloody months of training, he thinks, only two months, and they did not train me for this, not for this jungle and for this unknown sky above.

A platoon of Assam Rifle boys arrive two hours later and explain they were delayed by a landslip three kilometres down the road, they had to detour. K.D. listens intently to the subedar's strange Hindi, and asks, how far are we going? The subedar grins, and says nothing. He has a pair of boots for K.D. The boots are too big, but that's better than too small. K.D. puts on three pairs of socks and walks. He walks for twenty-one days. On the third morning his legs are so tightly cramped that he can't squat to ease himself, and he leans against a tree and weeps. It's an oak tree, he knows this, and in that recognition he feels better. When he found out he was coming to these mountains, he bought a book about the flora and fauna, and studied it in spare moments. So he knows these are magnolias, and scattered poplars, and a chestnut. They have been following the line of the river, walking steadily upwards along a path that twists and backbends through the forest but always moves higher. In those early days of the walk, in that first week, they pass pairs and groups of stilted houses surrounded by patches of cultivation, rice and millet still surrounded by the charred ashes of burnt forest. Women sit in front of these houses, weaving, and the soldier-boys make sneering remarks about the nose-plugs they wear. The local men all wear straight blades at their waists, and the subedar tells him that they used these daos to take heads until not many years ago. These men look athletic enough to swing the daos and lop off limbs, but it's not them he's scared of, not their alien, slanting eyes under conical bamboo helmets. No. It's the breath of the forest that terrifies him, that creaking sigh of the bamboo that threads under the junipers. There is a belling and a booming that stretches through the long blue light under the canopy. The jungle speaks to itself, long calls and answers that surprise K.D., make him jerky, nervy. The soldiers laugh at him when a shrieking directly overhead makes him start, despite himself. 'It's only a monkey,' says the youngest one of them all, hitching his rifle to shoulder. His contempt is clear, and K.D. feels the justice of it. He knows it's only a monkey, and yet each night he huddles inside his blankets, pulling them over his head. He wakes up each morning more exhausted than the day before. In the mornings, the mountains hulk far above, black and engulfed by the thick cover, shoulder upon shoulder into the pinking sky.

They cross a ridge and descend, go down towards another threadlike river that fattens itself into a thrashing torrent. They wade across it, straining, and eat lunch on the far bank, the flank of a deer the subedar had shot two days ago. The mountains on both sides are precipitous, like walls, and the sky is a distant reflection of the river, a narrow twisting ribbon far above. Then they begin to walk again. They climb, and K.D. knows they are going much higher now. They hump through a forest of blue pines, their heads lowered against the weight of their packs, and K.D. is too tired to be amazed by the unearthly orchids that gleam up white and white from the grass, there is sweat in his eyes. In a long, sighing field of green bamboo the birds flutter above his head. Then they are edging through a last stand of poplars, and a meadow swoops out in a narrow crescent above them. Across it they walk, higher and higher, and looking behind him, to the south, K.D. can see the ridge they have crossed already, and ranged behind it, dozens of others, under the huge red sky. They camp that night in the meadow, and K.D. sleeps at an incline, asleep as soon as he pulls the blanket over his head. The next morning they eat a cold breakfast and walk on, and reach a saddle notched like a big V into the ridge. It has taken them two days, the trek up just this last immense slope. They come through the defile single-file, with K.D. exactly in the middle. He steps around a massive fortress of a boulder, watching his ankles against the cracks that run through the rock, and then he looks up and gasps. There are more meadows across the valley, but above those slopes, beyond them, the jagged white runs to the heavens, canopied by white clouds. The great silver peaks are very far away, and yet K.D. can feel their immense inhumanity, their indifference. He tries to steady his breath, and feels the frigid exhalations of the white crests like a claw in his throat. The next man in line nudges him, none too gently. 'What are you looking at, Raja Saab? That's Tibet over there.'

'China,' the subedar calls from below, without turning around. 'China.' The subedar is thirty-nine years old, the veteran of recent battles with the Chinese not far from here. He has skin the colour and toughness of old oil-paper. His name is Lalbiaka Marak, which is a name that K.D. has never known before. Among the jawans, there is a Das and a Gauri Bahadur Rai, but the rest of them have names like Vaiphei, Ao, Lushai and the exotically foreign Thangrikhuma. K.D. has no doubt that they find him oddly alien. They have taken to calling him Raja Saab, he doesn't quite know why. He doesn't feel very royal, with his stubble, his cracking lips, his blistered and oozing feet. Standing at the threshold of this great, deathly landscape, facing it with these men who are supposed to be his compatriots, K.D. Yadav feels completely alone. Ginzanang Dowara is standing very close behind him, and K.D. can smell the milky sweat on him. K. D. shrugs his pack higher, lowers his head and walks on. And after twenty-one days of walking, they reach their base.