Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

A hundred and sixty men live in this little settlement of rough wooden cabins and tents, all of them from the Assam Rifles. There are two lieutenants and a captain on deputation from the army. 'We are a bit under-officered,' the captain tells K.D. 'But these are hard times.' The captain's name is Khandari, and he has grown up amongst other mountains, in Garwahl, but he hates these hills. 'In Garwahl the mountains have a soul,' he says. 'Here even the mountains are junglees.' K.D. laughs at him, points out that these are the same mountains, part of the same rippling chain that writhes over the subcontinent from east to west. But although he doesn't admit it, K.D. knows exactly what the captain means: these valleys which fall away from their feet are foreign in some profound way, they are very far away from anything he knows. Captain Khandari has seen combat in the recent war, in the far northern reaches of Ladakh, and he hates Nehru virulently, for all the men he says died fighting without ammunition, without support, without hope. Captain Khandari drinks mightily every evening, vast quantities of army-issue rum, and every evening he and the two lieutenants – Rastogi and DaCunha – play flush in the captain's hut. K.D. joins them, declines to join them in their wagering, in their violent throwing down of the cards, but he does share in their tippling. The rum takes away the awful feeling of isolation, that desolation of being cut off by mountains and impenetrable darkness. It feels cosy to be inside the firelit cabin, warm and woozy, telling stories. In four nights K.D. knows his new friends, his cronies, he knows of DaCunha's hopeless love for Sadhana, for her magnificent Technicolor behind, he knows Rastogi's love of obscure mathematical facts and riddles and tricks, and he has listened – very late at night – to Khandari's slurring and barely comprehensible accounts of terror-filled retreats across barren high plateaus. When K.D. leaves to pick and stumble his way back to his own cupboard-like hut, he can see the dying embers of campfires across the parade ground, the shadowy shapes of tents in orderly rows. And beyond them, the absolute black of immense rock walls under a cool, star-pierced sky.

On the fifth afternoon, K.D. feels recovered enough from the exhaustion of the long trek to make his way to the command tent, to face the impossibility of his job. He has been tasked primarily to investigate the Chinese presence in the area, to establish a network of informants and a fund of information, to make sure that the Chinese have in fact withdrawn and are engaging in no further incursions, to determine future Chinese intentions and the intentions of all and sundry in this sensitive border area. K.D. has no knowledge of the Chinese, or their language or history or politics, he has no experience or knowledge of this area or its peoples or geography. He is quite bewildered, but he makes his way to Captain Khandari. The captain, he is sure, will know where he should start. But the captain is very hung-over and surly, and finally K.D. is able to work out that only one patrol is sent out every week, they go four kilometres along the same route to the north-east, to an unoccupied bunker on a knoll. This constitutes the full effort of this unit to establish a presence in this area and collect intelligence. The shock is plain enough on K.D.'s face, but Captain Khandari shrugs and says, 'There's nobody out there, you know. Nobody at all. The Chinese are gone. It's all bhenchod empty.' K.D. is silent. He is trying to work up his courage to say something. Finally Khandari cocks his head and breaks the silence. 'Well,' he says. 'What do you want to do?'

Three days later two patrols leave the base, with routes that K.D. has picked out on one-inch maps. Now K.D. feels the hostility of men who have had their comfort disrupted, and he lives in silence. Even Marak – his friend the subedar – will not speak to him except in grunted monosyllables. K.D. finds a dead rat under his bed. Rastogi and DaCunha bring the patrols back earlier than expected, Rastogi by three full days out of the planned seven. Of course they report seeing nothing, absolutely nothing, and K.D. is sure they have gone around the next ridge and camped for a few days of rest and relaxation. The week after, he puts together another patrol for DaCunha and Marak and a platoon, and walks along himself. His feet twinge for the first mile, but he has a good pair of boots now, and after his muscles ease up, he enjoys the effort. He has lost weight, and he feels strong. There is pleasure in employing his new map-reading skills, and he examines the distant ridges through his binoculars at every halt. The men watch his binocularing with amusement, and DaCunha is barely civil. K.D. bears it quietly, he is doing his job, and he intends to do his job well. On their fourth day out they make camp in the lee of a rock wall that glitters in streaks of metallic silver, and K.D. opens his backpack and pulls out a book, hurrying because these are the last few moments of sunlight. He has been thirsting for books, for anything to read. He has long ago finished The Riddle of the Sands , which he brought with him into NEFA, and has been reduced to reading the labels on bottles of medicine, the fine print at the bottom of army requisition forms, and as even these have run out he has started to experience a kind of panic, as if he is slowly drowning. Then, just before they leave for patrol, in the corner of the command tent, behind a stack of food and supply files, he finds two books, left behind by some long-gone officer, who is now quite possibly dead. So he is now reading, within sight of Tibet, The Benham Book of Palmistry: A Practical Treatise on the Laws of Scientific Hand Reading . He is reading it very slowly, savouring each sentence, because it must last him. So he is lingering on the absurdities of each page, which find the shape of the future in the lines of the past, which locate meaning in these fleshy hieroglyphics of the palms. It must last, because in his backpack he has the other book, Palmistry: The Language of the Hand by Cheiro, and it is less than an inch thick, and to face these mountains with nothing to read would be unbearable.

Marak leans over him suddenly, cutting off the light. Marak is looking down at the open pages of the book, in which Benham is describing the proportions that obtain between the various mounts and the fingers. Marak is transfixed. He squats, with his arms resting on his knees, and faces K.D. squarely. 'You read the future?'

'Yes,' K.D. says quickly. 'Yes.'

Marak shoves his hand towards K.D.'s face. 'Read,' he says.

K.D. holds Marak's craggy hand in both of his own and tells a tale of the future. It's not so hard really. He uses some of Benham's strange prescripts, but mostly he lets Marak talk about his anxiety about his wife's health, his farmland struggles with his brothers, and from these he extrapolates and guesses. 'Your father was a very hard-working man, until the end of his life he worked every day from morning till night,' K.D. tells Marak, who looks at him with a new awe. Which is entirely misplaced, because there is no Benhamite reading involved in this assertion, just simple deduction from the clues that Marak has scattered about in his very questions, in his eagerness to know the shape of his happiness to come, to have a talisman against the depredations that will come surely, by and by. K.D. leads him along gently, then senses that it will not do to give too much, that you must leave the subject wanting, pleasured and reassured but not satiated. 'Enough for today,' he says authoritatively. 'I am tired.'

'Yes, sir,' Marak says. 'I will bring you some tea.'

And he does. Meanwhile, K.D. has been studying the dramatic fall of light on the mountain that faces them, the deep swathes of red and black. He takes the mug of tea and says, idly, 'We will see Chinese.' He is not quite sure why he says it, except that he has been telling the future, and he is rather hoping they will see Chinese. Not that he is eager for confrontation, or fighting. He is not sure of his physical courage, and knows from his three brief training sessions with pistols that he is a very bad shot. But to see Chinese would make his training meaningful, would give substance to his inductions, make the enemy real. And since he hasn't talked to anyone in days, he lets this slip, 'We will see Chinese.' And they do. The next day, just past three o'clock, Thangrikhuma – who is on point – calls back, 'Dushman.' They edge up to the ridge line and peer across the dry valley at a scattering of grey dots on the grey rock. It is, yes, the enemy. Thangrikhuma has very good eyesight, K.D. can hardly see the dushman, but in his binoculars they become recognizably men, a section's worth of Chinese soldiers moving slowly west. The boys move up with K.D., and they lie close next to each other, watching. DaCunha is rustling a map, and now he declares, 'They're on their side. I think.' Their side is indistinguishable from our side: in this waste, here there are no markers, no fences. But there they are, and here we are.