Sacred Games (108 page)

I waited for him patiently, after the sermon was over. He had the usual line of devotees waiting to talk to him. I sat on a chair in the emptying hall, as the sadhus let the Germans one by one into a private room to the side. I wasn't worried that they would halt the audiences before they reached me, this time Guru-ji knew I was coming. So I was content to sit and watch the firangis emerge from their personal darshans, smiling, transformed.

‘You are Indian?'

It was one of the Germans. She was wearing a deep red sari and had her blonde hair caught up in a jooda on the back of her head. There was a mangalsutra on her neck, and sindoor in her hair. She was young, maybe in her mid-twenties, but she looked like a traditional Indian mother from thirty years ago, from a small town at that. ‘Yes,' I said.

‘From where?' she said. Her English was clear and clangy. I had heard this accent on the beaches of Phuket.

‘From, from Nashik,' I said.

‘I have not gone,' she said. ‘But Nagpur, you know Nagpur?'

I nodded.

‘Guru-ji married me there, and gave me a new name.'

‘Guru-ji married? You?'

‘No, no, married me to my husband. To Sukumar.'

‘Sukumar, he is Indian?'

‘No, also German. After I met him I became Guru-ji's disciple. Then Guru-ji married us.'

‘And gave you a new name.'

‘I am Sita.'

‘A very good name.'

‘Guru-ji says it is a high ideal.'

‘What?'

She gestured up, up towards the heavens. ‘Sita is a good woman.'

This Sita had bright blue eyes, and a happy, beaming countenance. I smiled back at her. ‘Sita was the best woman.' One of the sadhus waved at me then. It was my turn. ‘Bye,' I said to Sita.

‘Namaste,' she said, with an elegant folding of the hands and a deep bow. ‘It is always nice to meet someone from home.'

I stood up, and fought off a sudden dizziness. I was tired, yes, too much travel in a short time. I stood by the green door to the private room,
flanked by two sadhus, both firangis with bushy brown beards. They were both completely calm, quite silent. Then the door opened, and I was in.

Guru-ji was seated on a gadda near the fireplace, and his hair was a silver halo. The chairs and couches – it must have been a meeting room – had been moved to the sides, leaving the open space that he liked. He watched me come to him. I knelt in front of him, and touched my forehead to the ground, clutched at his feet. He put his right hand on my head, and said, ‘Jite raho, beta.' He took me by the shoulders and raised me up.

I kept quiet. I should have said something, in gratitude for his blessing, but I held myself back.

‘What is your name, beta?'

I hadn't planned this silence on my part, I had no intention of testing Guru-ji. But suddenly, I wanted him to know me. Not one other man or woman had seen through the disguise of my new face. But Guru-ji knew my soul, he knew even the small, hard, cinder-like fragment at the centre, which I had never shown to anyone. He knew the softness and yearning which lay under that black surface. He was waiting now, expectant.

‘Are you dumb?' he said. ‘Can you not speak?'

A smile came slipping across my face. I was being very silly, but the fact that he thought me mute amused me greatly. I knelt there, smiling.

‘Ganesh?' he said.

I was amazed. I had wanted him to recognize me, but I hadn't expected him to. It was merely a wish, from the deepest core of who I was. There are many longings that float close to the surface of our skin, and I had achieved many of these: power, money, women. But there are needs so deep that they are not named, not even to oneself. They operate like subterranean flows of molten liquid, on which the continents move. They burst up sometimes with the fury of volcanoes, and then vanish, gone to the underground again. This is the true underworld, where desire boils eternally. I had wanted, like a child, to be named and known. And Guru-ji had done it.

‘How?' I said. ‘How did you know?'

‘Do you really think you can hide from me?' He patted my cheek, then hugged me close.

‘Guru-ji.' I was laughing. In one touch, I was rescued from my exhaustion, my anger, my fear. This is why I came to him, across the world and alone. I held his hands. ‘Guru-ji, I know seeing me is…'

He shook his head. ‘Not here.'

So he called up one of his sadhus, told him that I was a bhakt named Arjun Kerkar, that I had a very personal problem that would require a long consultation. His staff seemed used to this. Guru-ji climbed into his wheelchair in one powerful movement, and I followed him down into the garage. There was a flight of seven stairs down from the elevator lobby to the floor of the garage, and he took it easily in his wheelchair. The fat black wheels made little whirring and clicking noises, and the wheelchair danced down the stairs, perfectly balanced.

‘Excellent, Guru-ji,' I said.

‘Latest model, Arjun,' he said to me, with a flash of teeth over his shoulder. ‘Everything is computerized. I can balance on two wheels. Look.'

And he did, whirling slowly on his two wheels. I clapped. There was a special van waiting in the garage, with a ramp to let the wheelchair in, and we skimmed off to the house where Guru-ji was staying, a devotee's mansion just outside the city. Everything was efficiently organized, and the sadhus spoke to each other on little walkie-talkies, and there were no delays or wasted motion. In fifteen minutes we were in Guru-ji's suite, which had been set up exactly the way he liked it, with fresh flowers in every room, and fruits on the table, and his CDs of sitar music and devotional chants by the bed. I took my shoes off, and found a comfortable chair in a little anteroom. I waited. Guru-ji took a bath, dictated some essential letters to his aides and then dismissed them. He called me in, and I found him seated on his bed in the centre of the room, wearing a white silk kurta and a dhoti.

‘Come,' he said, pointing to a chair by the bed. ‘Sit. Tell me, when did you do this to your face? Why?'

So I told him. Of course he agreed with the security concerns I had, but he also said that I had felt the urge to renew myself because of the coming change. ‘A new world needs a new man. And you have renewed yourself. You felt the need to do so, you listened to the calling of the times, Arjun. I think that is the correct new name for the new you. I shall call you “Arjun” from now. You shall be Arjun who fooled me.'

‘Only for ten seconds, Guru-ji. You are the only one who recognized me.'

‘It's a good face, Arjun. Nobody will know it. Now tell me why you wanted to meet.'

He followed me closely, as I told him about the recent disaster. I told
him that of course no operation is ever completely foolproof, that I had insulated myself from the arms smuggling with several levels of delegation through the company, and used semi-independent groups. And we had fed the UP police some arrests, low-level men that we thought would satisfy them, cool them down. But they had more information than we thought they did, and they had pursued further investigations, and I had been finally implicated. My thought was that some of this relentless zeal was being funded and informed from Dubai and Karachi, by Suleiman Isa and his fellows. They were using their people in the police to prosecute a new campaign in their war against us. And so the police – both UP and Maharashtra – were pushing us hard.

‘Yes,' said Guru-ji. ‘Yes, Arjun.' In the face of all these calamities, he was still as a statue in a temple. ‘Do they know about me?'

‘You – no, no, Guru-ji. Never. You have been kept completely out of the operation, your name has never ever been mentioned. Nobody in my company knows about you, even. I have maintained full security. I have come only by myself on this trip, no boys, no cover. There is no threat to you from my side, I have made sure of that. But I think we must pull back on the arms movements. It is too hot right now.'

‘Yes, Arjun. In general, I agree. But let me meditate on that.' He reached out, put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You look tired. Sleep now. We will talk in the morning. There is a bed for you in the small room.'

He was right. It had been a journey across the world, and many days of conflict and bad news before that. I felt drawn out, thinned out, as if I was barely hanging on to wakefulness. He cupped my head with his hand, in blessing, and I felt as if I was sliding safely into sleep. His eyes were dark, opaque, huge. He raised me up, and embraced me. ‘Go to sleep. I will think about it. In the morning we will decide how we will act.'

I staggered into the room to the side of the suite, collapsed into the bed. I barely had the strength to turn on to my side, and then I was asleep.

I woke up to the sound of mantras. I sat up, and was instantly awake. As I padded through the suite, I was suddenly aware of how hungry I was, how alive. My shoulders were strong and relaxed, I felt the blood moving in my chest, there was sandalwood in my throat. I laughed. I felt like I had been reborn. One night of sleeping close to Guru-ji and I was young again.

The big windows on the eastern side of the suite opened up on to a garden, and I could see Guru-ji and the sadhus performing a puja. They were
seated in a hollow square, with Guru-ji at the centre facing a small fire. I sat cross-legged near the window, far from them, and watched. It was very early, and under the deep grey of this foreign sky a small glow lit up their faces. I didn't know the mantras. It must be some ceremony for sadhus only, I thought, and I was content to sit and listen.

But, afterwards, Guru-ji explained the ritual to me. At the moment of dawn, he said, they meditated on change. Through this small yagna, he said, they were working to bring about a change in the world. The universe was consciousness itself, in interaction with matter, which itself was just energy. The combined consciousness of the monks and Guru-ji's own tremendous spiritual power were moving the universal consciousness towards transformation. ‘History has a shape, Arjun,' he said. ‘The universe is a miracle of design. We have talked about this before. Look at this garden. For every insect, there is a predator. For every flower, there is a function. Some scientists still look at all this beauty, but insist that it is the result of mere random selection, of chance and nothing else. They are blind. They are afraid. Pull back from chance, look at it with the right vision, and chaos reveals patterns. The question is, are you able to read its signs, understand its language? The question is, can you look through the surfaces? You and I are sitting here, Arjun, talking to each other in a garden. The sun is coming up. Is all this just random, without meaning? Is there no
direction
to everything?' With a wide motion of his arm he took in the earth, us and the sky. ‘Look into yourself, Arjun. Feel the truth inside you. And tell me, who is the creator of this direction?'

I knew the answer to this. ‘Consciousness.'

‘Undoubtedly. And do you know where this consciousness is? Where it lives?'

‘Everywhere?'

‘Yes. And in us. You are He, Arjun. Your consciousness
is
the universal consciousness. There is no difference. If you can know that, really know that, then there is nothing you cannot do. You can shape history itself. Leaving the mind behind, the vira can direct events. He can move time towards transformation.'

I nodded. ‘I understand, Guru-ji. What do you want me to do?'

‘We have to do one more run, Arjun, one last one.'

He wanted to do one trip, one consignment. The cargo wasn't very bulky, or heavy. There was some cash – rupees mostly, but also some dollars – which had been collected abroad and now needed to be transported into the country. There was some laboratory equipment, which Guru-ji's
people needed to run some agricultural experiments in Punjab. These they could have brought in through normal channels, but customs clearance would take weeks, maybe months, and important work would be held up. And finally there was some computer equipment, which again was urgently needed. No arms, no ammunition. Very simple, and even clear of the specific activities that Kulkarni was raging about. ‘I wouldn't ask this of you, Arjun,' Guru-ji said, ‘if it was not vital. Without this cargo, our work of several years remains undone, incomplete. Of course I could easily move it through other channels. But you and I, we have a history. We have trust. I trust only you to do this for me. And in this shipment, there must be no mistakes. Arjun, I know there is great danger for you. So I will not tell you that you must do this for me. But I ask it of you, and leave the decision to you.'

Of course I agreed. I was bound to, as his disciple. And I owed him much, he had saved me time and again, in many ways. I told him I would do it, that I would begin to plan it as soon as I got back to Thai waters. Then I asked to spend another day with him. It was a risk for both of us, but I was compelled to beg this of him. I had a foreboding, a dense certainty that I would not see him again. I told him this, and he calmly agreed. ‘Yes, that is true,' he said. ‘I know it too.'

‘You can see this?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why? What happens?'

‘I don't know. I can't see that, but I do see this. That this is our last meeting.'

‘How can we both know this? Has it already happened, whatever is going to happen? But how can that be?'

‘Our small minds think that time is like a single railway track, Arjun, going forward always into the future. But time is much more subtle than that.'

‘Are we already parted, in the future?'

Guru-ji shook his head. ‘Every moment contains a number of probabilities. There are choices we can make at every minute. We are not machines moving along a track, no. But there is no such thing as full freedom. We are bound by our pasts, by the consequences of our actions. We can lean towards this choice or that, at the criss-cross of events. And sometimes the probabilities converge at a node, into something approaching a certainty. And then, if you are capable of listening, of seeing, you know.'