Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'She won't talk, Uncle.'

The doll is blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, with a puckered strawberry of a smile and a tinny voice. K.D. now realizes that he hasn't heard her saying 'Mama' for a few minutes. He turns the doll over, and under the pink dress, the panel in the small of her back is loose. He fingernails the panel up, and the wires inside are twisted around the battery, a green chip hangs loose. 'What did you do?' he says.

'I wanted to see how she worked,' says Anjali.

K.D. laughs, alight with pleasure and love. The feeling inside him is complete, unrestrained, without any of the holding back that he has felt in every other interaction in his life. She giggles. 'Uncle, I'm too old for dolls anyway,' she says, not unkindly. 'I stopped playing with them long ago. You don't know much about girls. I like reading now. You should bring me books.' They laugh together, sending each other into pealing outbreaks that spiral away. Anjali's mother watches, faintly suspicious. At least for that moment, K.D. doesn't care, and he carries Anjali's warmth with him into the next day, into the office where he sits at the Islamic Fundamentalism desk. In this enclosed, windowless cabin he collects reports from all over the world, he collates, connects, sifts, analyses. The beliefs and hatreds of men and women come to him in fragments, and he puts together the pieces. And then he writes his own reports, has them typed on crisp sheets of white rice paper, and through them information rises up, to the Additional Commissioner and then the Commissioner and then perhaps all the way to the prime minister. Information rises, and orders descend. Action is taken, and that produces results and new cascades of information. K.D. feels always that he is sitting at a node in a web, at the intersection of globe-spanning lines of energy that hum and spin and change shape. He can strum a thread here, and ten thousand miles away a man will slump in a doorway. He can write a paragraph, and two weeks later hear it paraphrased in a speech by the home minister. In this dusty room he sets strings of events in motion, he changes the lives of millions of people.

But he cannot find the men who took Bloody Mathur. He has a file, a thick one full of police reports and on-the-spot evaluations by teams of organization investigators, who evaluate the incident and also its investigation by the Punjab authorities. The facts are few and clear: Bloody Mathur had been cultivating a certain Harbhajan Singh, who had two years of college and no job, who was the son of a small farmer, who had been arrested twice for petty theft. This Harbhajan Singh had contacts in a certain militant group called the Punjab Liberation Army, and for months Bloody Mathur had fed money to Harbhajan Singh, who in turn had passed money to a close friend who had gone over to the militants. Good information had come back, verifiable material but none of it very useful. The source within the PLA asked for a face-to-face meeting, said he would bring another disaffected friend. Bloody Mathur had a hunch, he went, and then was gone. Leaving a tilted, shattered Ambassador and three dead men. And there the trail stops, ceases. Bloody Mathur has disappeared, and that is all.

But K.D. won't let that be all, he refuses to allow matters to rest. He follows Harbhajan Singh's family, he follows his friends, he makes deals. Bloody Mathur used to say, 'If it's not money, it's lust. If it's not that, it's safety, his fear for his family. Any and every man can be bought. You just have to find out what the price is.' So Bloody Mathur ate tandoori chicken in roadside dhabhas with Harbhajan Singh, because the dushman had widespread operations in Punjab, it was their staging area, their haven, their easy entry into India. And so he vanished. Now K.D. pushes his field officers, he has Harbhajan Singh's brother followed and watched, he asks for backgrounders on known associates, listings of bank accounts. He manoeuvres men and resources and money, because they are in a battle, a war. K.D. fights back. He will not forget. So the great game is played in the streets and farmlands of Punjab.

The game lasts, the game is eternal, the game cannot be stopped, the game gives birth to itself. K.D. plays it, and plays it well. He has a vast memory, and a sensual feel for details: a pair of dark-lensed reading glasses glimpsed in a blurry photograph of preachers in Frankfurt stay with him for six years, so that he is able to spot the same man in another photograph taken on the other side of the world, in Peshawar, when Taliban commanders emerge from a meeting with an ISI major. These prodigious feats of connection and naming, this creation of meaning, give K.D. his reputation, his fame, his place in the organization. He advances. He is now an Assistant Commissioner, a junior one but a man with a future nevertheless. He is moving. Four years, and he moves on, this time to Berlin. In this divided city, he gives study visas to Iranian students, arranges scholarships for them, he gives sympathetic hugs to Afghan doctors and invites them to dinner. He sends parcels to Anjali, who is speeding through school, leapfrogging whole ranks of students with double promotions and impossibly high marks in final examinations. She reads up on Berlin, and asks for biographies of Hitler which she cannot find in Delhi, and books about generals with names as round and full as pink breakfast sausages.

'There are space-occupying lesions in the patient's frontal lobe.' Dr Kharas stands over K.D., surrounded by an attentive rank of interns. 'The effects of the glioma are interesting. The patient presents with reduplicative amnesia, during which he is quite literally somewhere else. Usually patients with this kind of amnesia imagine themselves to be at home, or in some place they like. This patient seems to range in his imagination to places where he has been in his life, all kinds of places all over the world.'

That's because I never had a home, fair Doctor Anaita. My home was a place in my imagination, a beautiful, prosperous land that doesn't exist yet. In all my journeys, that is where I was going, to this peaceful country of the future.

'Patients with this kind of impaired memory also usually present with confabulation. That is, they give incorrect answers in response to questions about remembered experience. Even questions about trivial matters, like details of past employment, dates, locations, elicit answers that seem coherent but are fantastic. The patients describe impossible, adventurous and gruesome experiences. Mr Yadav? Mr Yadav?'

Dr Anaita wants to demonstrate symptoms to her students. K.D. nods. He will give her that, he will give her whatever she wants. He owes her, he owes her because of her ardent curiosity, her skill, her passion for her job, he owes her because she gives him hope. Not hope for his own survival, but hope that he has lived a good life, that all the ugly things he has done might finally amount to something good. She is his hope.

'Mr Yadav, can you tell me your date of birth?'

He cannot remember. No matter, he mustn't disappoint her. He picks a number out of the air. '9 July 1968,' he says. There is a quick fizz of excitement among the interns, a tingle in their eyes. They like symptoms, symptoms demonstrate the inner workings of the defective machine. An abnormality in the organism, by inverse but impeccable logic, demonstrates some truth about its normal functioning. K.D. realizes that his 1968 date is many years too late, he is much older than that. But what happened on 9 July? The date is rough, it sticks and scrapes across his mind like a burr. Then he remembers. He sees it. In the lower half of his world, in the new half-darkness of his vision, K.D. sees a burning village. It is not fuzzy and indistinct like a remembered village, it is not a hallucination. It is a real village, and he can see it. He can see the flames moving under the wooden floors of the huts, a red-eyed sow grunting in panic through the orderly green rows of a turnip garden, he can hear the sharp pop of exploding bamboo. The colours are deep, incandescent, just like reality but more so, he can see the sparkle of saliva on the teeth of a black dog shot through the head, the hair on its splayed rear legs. It is more real than real, this dying village. He has never been to this village, but knows exactly what it is. This is the village of Chezumi Song, in Mon district of Nagaland, which on 9 July 1968 was visited by a unit of the Assam Rifles under the command of a Captain Rastogi, a Dakshesh Rastogi who was the very same mathematically-inclined friend of K.D.'s first field posting. Rastogi has grown, from lieutenant to captain, and he has grown thicker, he has grown into a fine man. He doesn't know it, but he is acting on intelligence that K.D. has collected and collated and passed down the chain of command, and he is after two Naga insurgent leaders, L.K. Luithui and M. Essau. They are known to be in the area, and they have relatives in this village. Rastogi's unit has lost six men to sniping and mines in the last month, and these two Nagas are the tacticians behind the attacks. The village is subjected to a search, and the villagers are interrogated. Captain Rastogi applies pressure. The village chief is beaten with rifle butts, along with the village notables. They all say they know nothing of the two insurgents. More pressure is applied. The chief's daughters, three of them, are dragged out of the square by the hair. Their names are Rose, Grace and Lily. They are raped. Twenty-two women are raped, and the village is burnt. Three of the village men are shot, and Captain Rastogi's report states that these three terrorists were cornered and killed in a running gunfight that resulted in the destruction of the village of Chezumi Song. L.K. Luithui and M. Essau, the two insurgents, are cornered three days later in a forest hideout eight miles to the north, and are killed. Captain Rastogi receives a commendation, and is thereafter a man on the rise. K.D. knows what was in the official reports, and he knows what really happened. He is, after all, an intelligence man. He knows that the tip-off about the hideout was given by a girl named Luingamla, who stuttered out the location because Captain Rastogi had a pistol pointed at her father's head. K.D. knows this. It is his business to know. He wasn't there, but he knows. He can see the village of Chezumi Song now, quite clearly. He can see it blazing. But where are the people? He can see none of the Nagas, and none of the soldiers. He hears screams. The birds are shrilling through his head. Now, a gunshot, and he knows it is a Webley-Scott.38, that is what Captain Rastogi carried that day. But there are no people in this real village.