Sacred Games (39 page)

I picked up the first one. She was sitting in front of a red backdrop, wearing a silky green sari with a gold dupatta, with her sleek hair pulled tightly back from a long forehead. ‘This one looks like a schoolteacher,' I said.

‘So don't choose that one. Make a shortlist. Then we'll consider family background, education, nature of girl, horoscope, and move on from there.'

‘Move on?'

‘See the girls, of course.'

‘We'll go to her house? And she'll bring in tea while her parents watch?'

‘Yes, of course. What else?'

I flicked the picture back on to the table, where it slid smoothly into the rest. ‘This is completely mad,' I said.

‘What, marriage is mad? Bhai, the world does it. Prime ministers do it. Gods do it. I mean, what else are you going to do with your life? What else is a man born for?'

What is a man born for? I had no answer to this, and so I took the photos back home and laid them out on the floor of my room in rows of ten. They shivered in the draught from the air-conditioner, these faces patted smooth with powder, softly gleaming with hope. It was April, and without the blast of frigid air, even with the fan on ‘Full', I sweated into my mattress, left damp stains on chairs. My blood was hot, and needed wintry air, more cold than this city could ever exhale. Outside, under the sun, my trousers stuck to my thighs and drove me into rages of restlessness, my shoes left red rings around my ankles. In these moods I was capable
of rash anger and carelessness, so the boys had special power cables laid, and they knocked a new window into my bedroom wall for the machine, and so I was cooled. I was now comfortable and calm, and yet those faces on the floor were all the same to me, each was as good or bad as the next one. They were pretty enough, not phatakdi beautiful –who would want that in a wife? – but pleasant and welcoming and shy. They were sufficiently educated, well-cultured, no doubt each knew cooking and embroidery, they were all qualified, so why pick this one, and not that one? I waited for a sign from one of them, a wink of the eye as they fluttered in the chill blast. And there I was, Ganesh Gaitonde, leader of my own company, master of thousands of lives, death-giver and generous benefactor, completely and wholly unable to make a decision.

‘Bhai, there's trouble.' Chotta Badriya was knocking urgently at the door. I called him in and he said it again. ‘Very big trouble.'

‘What?'

‘Tonight's shipment, bhai. The police have it. They were waiting at Golghat. They were above the beach, behind that line of trees. They waited until all the maal was loaded into the trucks, then they came out and arrested everyone and took it all.'

All of it was forty lakhs worth of computer chips, vitamin B-complex tablets and video cameras. The maal was brought to the coast off the fishing village of Golghat on a hundred-foot dhow, then put on neat little fishing boats for the trip to the beach, where three trucks were waiting with plastic sheets on the flatbed, all ready for my precious cargo. But now the police had it.

‘They knew,' I said. ‘They had information.'

‘Yes,' said Chotta Badriya.

‘It was only police? No customs?'

‘Yes, only police.'

‘Who was it?'

‘Zone 13 officers. Kamath, Bhatia, Majid Khan, those fellows. Parulkar's boys.'

We both knew what that might mean. It was possible that the police had their own sources who had tipped them off, or it could be that one of our rivals had given them my maal. At the time, there were four other big companies in Bombay, the Pathan company down in Grant Road, the Suleiman Isa outfit in Dongri and Jogeshwari and Dubai, the Prakash brothers and their company in the north-eastern suburbs and the Ahir company in Byculla. Any of those four – no, five, if you counted the
Rakshaks – could have thought us tiny fish, easy to feast on. It wouldn't be the Pathans, they were weak from their long war with Suleiman Isa, which they had barely survived. Any of the other companies could have thought of us as a tasty passing snack, we were by far the youngest, the most inexperienced, least connected, with the smallest money and weapons. Which was it?

Parulkar had just come in as Assistant Commissioner in Zone 13, and he was said to be close to Suleiman Isa. And Suleiman Isa and his brothers headed the most politically connected, best-armed, largest gang that Bombay had ever seen. Maybe they saw us as a growing threat, and maybe they were trying to eat us.

‘Is that all we know?' I said.

‘That's all, bhai.'

I was so angry that I felt it as a pain in my joints, a shifting throb in my stomach. I wanted to kill someone. But slowly, slowly. Suleiman Isa was big. I had to know for sure. ‘Call Samant. Find him wherever he is. I need to speak to him.'

 

Who was hunting us? Samant investigated, inside the department, fielding rumours, giving out a little cash here, a bottle of Black Label there. He had friends everywhere, constables and clerks and peons, and through these hands the secret would finally slip. But it was taking too long. There was a spy in my company, somewhere close to me, some chutiya who had sold the secret of my shipment, and with every passing minute the danger to me loomed and grew, like a leaning hill. I had to pick up the mountain, or it would topple and crush me. I could lift this weight, I knew it. But first I had to find the snake in my house, I had to crush his head. Where was he hiding? How to get him out in the open? In my air-conditioned room I slid the heads of the girls into patterns, formations, and thought. On the last day of May, I went to Paritosh Bhai. ‘I want to
do
something,' I shouted at him. ‘I'm sitting here like a chutiya while a bunch of bhenchods laugh at me. My own boys are laughing at me.'

‘Nobody's laughing at you,' he said. ‘Be patient. It's a big matter, and nothing big gets done in a day.'

I was about to let loose at him again, but there was a knock at the door. Bada Badriya peered around the door, then let a timid little tailor into the room. Paritosh Bhai was getting fitted for new safari suits. The tailor stretched his tapes around him as Paritosh Shah kept up a rapid series of calls on his cordless phone. I sat and watched. He had been very busy
recently, launching his airline. My fat man wanted to fly. He had dozens of businesses, he gloried in his construction companies, his restaurants, his rental properties, his plastics factories, his garments factory near Ahmedabad, but he dreamt of soaring high above the earth, and so he had been appearing recently in all the newspapers, beauteous and polished from his gleamy hair to his gold chain with Krishna locket and the gold Rolex which set off all the birth stones on his fingers. There was some comfort for me in the thought of him flying high above the stepped cliffs of Bombay's buildings, above the brown lowlands of its bastis, of him hovering like a smooth and rotund balloon over it all, shading the city's long-toothed silhouette in the benevolent umbra of his blue safari suit, more delightfully blue than the sun-bleached sky. Maybe one day his shadow would fall west and north, all the way to Delhi, and beyond. He had the intelligence, the ambition, and a clear cold eye. But for now the airline would extend its service from Bombay to Ahmedabad and Baroda. He was arranging the celebrations and formalities surrounding the maiden flight.

‘Listen,' he was saying. ‘Just listen. I knew that randi when she would suck a lauda for a whole night for five thousand rupees. Now she's become such a big star that she wants three lakhs to sit on a plane for an hour? To cut one ribbon? Be serious.' He was talking to Sonam Bhandari's secretary, negotiating a personal appearance. He listened, then settled into his no-nonsense negotiating voice. ‘I can give one lakh. I'm starting an airline, not a fund for starlets who are already finished. One lakh.' The tailor was measuring from waist to floor now. ‘How much? Okay. One-fifty. Done. I'll send over fifty thousand today. Okay.' He put the phone down. ‘Done,' he said to me. ‘A film star will come for the flight. We shall be on TV.'

‘You be on TV,' I said. ‘I'm not coming anywhere near your flight.'

‘Not even with Sonam Bhandari on it?' he said. ‘If you see her jiggle those coconuts, you'll forget all about your shipment.'

‘No woman has coconuts good enough to make me forget that.'

He was quiet until the tailor gathered up his scribblings and samples and left. ‘You've done everything that can be done,' he said. ‘Now we just have to wait.'

And wait and wait and wait. Waiting was grindingly hard for me. ‘Listen,' I said. ‘I don't want to wait. We have to do something.'

‘At times like these, we need help,' he said, looking crafty. ‘Let's do a puja.'

‘Fine.'

‘What, really? You mean that?' That he was amazed was only natural: in all our years I had never said a prayer, never begged for divine favours, had eaten prasad only as a quick snack. But now he wasn't interested in my reasons, just in moving fast through this unexpected opening. He was picking up one of his phones already. ‘We'll do a Satyanarayan Katha. I know just the pandit. You'll see, all his kathas bear fruit without fail. Not to worry. Before you blink we'll be on top of the situation.' He was smiling at me most benevolently. I could see the story he had in his head, hear the katha he was going to tell as resoundingly as if he was loud-speakering it into my ear: Bhai has come home, he was going to tell the boys, he has come home to the Lord, by the grace of God he has been woken up, in his heart devotion has come alive like a flame. The truth was that I didn't feel very lit-up, just inert. I had the sensation of drowning slowly, and as the water eased over my cheeks I had flung up a hand and clutched at whatever was floating by. This puja was a twig, and I grasped it.

 

I could see the heavy boat motionless on the shifting silver surfaces of the enormous waters. Paritosh Shah had picked a bhaiyya pandit for his puja, so I could understand the katha in Hindi without effort. This pandit was a very dramatic story-teller, and he was doing the Satyanarayan Katha with vivid expression, with different voices for the characters and full Dilip Kumar expressions, and now we were at the part where the trader and his son-in-law were on their way home with a boat laden with gold and pearls and perfumes and ivory, all the weighty profits of a long, windy voyage away from home. Then a dandi-swami appeared on the bank, crafty old Satyanarayan himself in disguise, to ask the simple question, ‘Bachcha, what's in the boat?' And the businessman, afraid of having to give alms, greedy short-sighted bastard, said, ‘Oh, nothing, Swami-ji, just some lata-pata,' and the dandi-swami nodded and said ‘Tathastu' and the boat was indeed suddenly bobbing up like a cork, filled now only with fluffy grass and dry hay. The dandi-swami now went into a deep meditative trance, and exactly at that moment, before we could get to the businessman's final comeuppance and regret, Chotta Badriya tapped me on the shoulder, and whispered, ‘Come, bhai.'

Outside the room, he gave me a phone. I took the call with Paritosh Shah and Chotta Badriya and his brother Bada Badriya watching. It was our breakthrough. The night before, one of our landing agents from Golghat had spent the night with a girl named Simky in Colaba. This
landing agent, one Konkani named Ashok Khot, had been on our payroll for four years. Last evening, he had come to Bombay to put his wife on a train to Delhi, where she was going for her brother's daughter's wedding. She had gone off on the Rajdhani, well-settled with her two sons in the chair car, and then Khot had decided to partake of the delights of the city. He had called this Simky from the station itself, then picked her up an hour later in front of the Lido Bar, near Regal. Khot was flush with money. He had arranged for a private air-conditioned taxi with darkened windows, and he took her for dinner to Khyber, and then for a drive down Marine Drive. All during dinner he drank Johnny Walker Black and told her stories about men he had fooled and money he had made and high officers he had ruined, and in the car, between massaging her mausambis and laughing at jokes he never finished, he took sips from a silver glass attached to a flask by a silver chain. She lay back in the seat and listened, humming along with the songs on the cassette player. They ate kulfi at Chowpatty, and he staggered to the water and tried to sing a song, and then threw up into the sea, and then drank another peg just to show how much of a man he was. On the way back, he had the driver turn up
Makhmali andhera
and opened fully Simky's choli and was nuzzling into her with small slobbering sounds and babbling softly, and under the music she heard it, ‘Saali, you better be good to me, do you know who I am? Nobody can look cross-eyed at me in this city. Masood Meetha himself comes to my house.' In the hotel room in Colaba, Khot looked dully at her while he pawed at her skirt, and then he slid slowly to the side and fell fast asleep. Simky took his shoes off, and his socks, then tugged off his pants and Jockey underwear. She found twenty-four thousand rupees in five-hundred-rupee notes in his various pockets, of which she counted off five thousand, which she hid deep in her red purse. From this purse she carefully extracted a small paper pudi, and from it pinched a judicious nip of brown sugar and breathed it up her nostrils, sending a voluptuous shudder through her breasts. Then she lay back and slept. In the morning, Khot turned over and stretched, and she kept herself still despite the gutter-reek of his breath. When he tried to climb on to her, she turned her head and winced and in a little-Simky voice said, ‘Raja, you made me so sore last night, I can't take any more, really I can't.' He laughed proudly, and magnanimously let her off. The next day she had lunch with one of our boys, Bunty Arora, from GTB Nagar. When Simky had first come from Chandigarh, Bunty had taken care of her, she had been his chavvi. Now he wouldn't touch her, she had a nasty brown-sugar
habit, but still there was the feeling for an old mashooq, and occasionally when he was on that side of town, he looked her up. She told him about her night with Khot. Now, our Bunty had been the one who had introduced Khot to Simky. So he said, ‘That bevda bastard, he's unbearable when he starts drinking.' And she said, ‘Yes, he talks and talks, he won't stop! I'm this, I'm that, nobody had better look at me, Masood Meetha comes to my house. I wanted to hit him on the head with a cricket bat.' She tossed her hair, and for a moment she had that old Simky fire. Then she went back to her golden falooda and foggy humming. Our Bunty, he kept his face calm, and moved the conversation on, talked about films and stars and this and that, and when they had finished lunch, he saw her off and then walked to the nearest shop and made a phone call. Just as the dandi-swami was saying, ‘Tathastu.'