Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'No,' he says. 'Nothing. Nothing at all.'

She nods. Behind her there is a young man, a sharp young fellow with a foxy face, a clipped moustache. 'This is Amit Sarkar,' she says. 'He has just joined the organization, he is my trainee. He will stay with you today.'

'Good morning, sir,' Amit Sarkar says, vibrating with the proper enthusiasm of a recent inductee in the presence of a legend.

Anjali is keeping up the surveillance, going with her intuition on this long shot. K.D. doesn't mind. He is finished with it all. 'Right,' he says, settles back into his pillow. He wants to be easy, to float away, but something is working at him. Gaitonde's money. There is something about Gaitonde's money that is nettling, the image of it sticks and scrapes through his head, one crore and twenty lakhs of Central Bank stacks. K.D. shoves the memory of the money away, he wants none of it. He fixes on the wall, on the slight vibration of light across it from the fan overhead. He passes into a comfortable drowsiness, a light-feeling awareness that skips across memory and image and thought without attachment. His mind feels weightless, freed of gravity. The lower half of K.D.'s vision is still visited by ghosts from the past, soldiers long dead, informants, agents, victims. He watches it all with a sublime detachment. And in the upper half, visitors come and go, old colleagues with their grandchildren. Dr Kharas and her interns. Nurses and attendants. Finally, in the evening, Anjali comes back to relieve Sarkar. They whisper to each other, and then she comes to sit with K.D. in the dusk. K.D. eats because she insists and he wants no fuss. Or he would turn away from the food, also with no fuss. It's all the same to him now. A night passes, and then a day. He watches it all, life and the life inside his eyes, and they are all equally insubstantial, all phantoms, Dr Kharas and her pricking needles and diagnoses, Anjali, the MIGs yawing and screaming down towards a Pakistani airfield, two men walking through fields of rice. They are all illusions, these unreal men and unreal women, and they live by illusions and suffer for them and die because of them. Let it all end tomorrow, this meaningless cavalcade of ghosts, in an inescapable white flash of light. Tomorrow it is over. K.D. is content with this thought, and he is comfortable.

He dreams. He knows he is sleeping, and he knows he is dreaming. He is aware of himself as the sleeping watcher, and yet he feels the thumping impact of his feet through the thick bottoms of his keds as he runs. They are playing football on the high plateau they have levelled into the side of the mountain. Everyone is there: Khandari in his green Garhwali sweater with its sprays of rough wool, Rastogi on the far left, DaCunha with his incessant calls of 'Put-tru, put-tru, man!', and Ginzanang Dowara, who keeps trying to put through but always loses the ball. It is Sunday, and they have divided all the off-duty men into two teams, forty men to a side, and they play a hectic, savage football on what they think is the highest football ground on earth. They have hacked it out of the mountain in two months of high-altitude labour, widened a natural, almost level slope. This ball has come up all the way from Calcutta, through a chain of personal requests and favours called in. So now they play. Thangrikhuma has the ball, he is small and compact and very quick, he slips through a chain of half a dozen defenders with a leaning and a side-step that is so fast that it looks like some sort of cinematic flicker. K.D. gives a great shout of admiration and chases him. Thangrikhuma is fast, so fast. He knows K.D. is coming and doesn't care, he is grinning. K.D. runs hard. The valley beyond is green and grey, and the white clouds are puffy overhead. Thangrikhuma is running. Then Marak the subedar is in place, near the goalkeeper and the two rough stakes of wood which are the goal. Marak is old and slow, and he hangs back near the goal always, and then manifests himself at crucial junctures. He is experienced. He waits, he waits. Thangrikhuma is jinking and jiving, tempting him. Marak attacks now, he slides, our wily Marak. He misses Thangrikhuma but reaches back with an unerring hand as he falls and hooks a handful of jersey, and down goes Thangrikhuma. Foul, foul, but this is a man's game, and it's too late to cry foul, K.D. has the ball and is speeding it back into enemy territory. His boys are with him, shouldering aside the defenders, and K.D. has speed, such speed, he grins at the lovely jounce of the ball and it sits perfectly on his instep and comes back to him, he has perfect control of it, he takes it past Rastogi easily, past the gasp of breath and the spray of sweat, and he is running free now, down the field, and he can hear DaCunha on his left, and Ginzanang Dowara is keeping up nicely on the right, and the ball glitters black and white in its bounce, K.D.'s chest pains him and he is happy and the air is cold in his throat, and the goal is ahead.

K.D. wakes, and he is weeping. There is a burning in his heel. Long ago, as he sat on the unfinished mud floor of a hut with Chunder Ghosh, sat cross-legged with his shoes off, he was bitten on the left heel by an insect. He remembers now, remembers how he rubbed the angry red stain with his thumb, and how Chunder Ghosh had for a moment stopped his questions and peered at the bite curiously. K.D. remembers and feels a sob come racking out of him. Anjali stirs, in her bed, and K.D. tries to hold down his convulsions, to make them stop. The men and women he is weeping for are mostly dead now, but he is crying for their lives, for the brevity of their struggles, for their brief agonies and joys. He is sobbing for the burning in their stings, for the momentary flaming of their desires.

'Uncle, what's wrong? Shall I call a nurse? Are you in pain?'

In the flaring of an electric bulb, Anjali is leaning over him. He shakes his head, and reaches for her hand. He is unable to speak, but he tries to smile at her, all the while shaking his head. She holds him. She sits on the bed and holds him in her lap.

'What is it?' she says. 'Don't be afraid,' she says.

K.D. is not afraid. He feels no fear at all, at least not for himself. But he can find no words for the great compassion that heats his body, this illusory carcass of damaged flesh. In his collapsing mind there is a fear for Anjali, for the life that surges through this strong young woman who holds him. She values her life, clings to it, as do her colleagues, her friends, her family. I must help her, K.D. thinks. I must. He casts back through his life, and through all that he knows and remembers, and now that he is thinking and has a purpose, his trembling stops. He lies still in Anjali's arms and thinks. Now there is that old joy of cogitation, and the information flows in an intertwining of streams, bright with colour and image and smell. It moves and he swims in it and changes angle and nudges it together in many and various arrangements: it feels like he is ambling through a kaleidoscope. There is that old pleasure. When the sky begins to grey outside, he stirs. 'The money in Gaitonde's bunker,' he says.

Anjali is leaning back against the headboard, and she comes out of her slumber. 'What?' she says.

'There was money in Gaitonde's bunker. You said something about wrapping.'

'The bundles were wrapped in clear, thin plastic. Like the kind that toys are wrapped in sometimes. Or chocolate.'

'Five bundles together? A stack like this?'

She looks at the shape he is making with his hands, the emptiness he holds in the air. Her eyes are sequined with pinpoints of early morning light. 'Yes,' she says.

'I want to see the money,' he says.

She runs across the room to her mobile phone, and he sits up to the fast blip of her dialling. She rattles out orders, and comes back to him. 'It's on the way,' she says.