Sacred Games (40 page)

So there it was. Masood Meetha was Suleiman Isa's number one man in the city, had been ever since Suleiman himself had taken off for Dubai. The enemy who had stolen our goods was Suleiman Isa, he and his bastard brothers. I put the phone down and said this to Paritosh Shah and Bada Badriya and Chotta Badriya. ‘It's Suleiman,' I said.

‘Are you sure?' Chotta Badriya said.

‘Of course I'm sure. I was sure of it before, now we have proof. That bhenchod Parulkar and Suleiman have been close for years and years.' This was common knowledge, and Chotta Badriya's face showed it, he looked down and was quiet. Parulkar and Suleiman had risen together, or at least in parallel. Many of Parulkar's most famous arrests and encounters had been based on intelligence passed to him by Suleiman, and those who had gone to prison or bled out their lives in some lane had been the enemies of Suleiman, his rivals, or just those who had grown big enough to be seen by him as competitors. He and his clan had eaten up many in this city, they had grown fat on this daily diet, and they swaggered through the streets. Suleiman Isa and his many brothers, the Nawabs of Bombay. ‘I am going to kill them all,' I said.

The fan was skipping above us, aslant in its fast circle and letting out a periodic creak. This was the only sound. This was very serious. The Pathans had fought a war against Suleiman, had killed one of his brothers and many of his boys, but he had struck back and bled them weak. Finally a truce had been called, and the firing had halted, no more pistols snapping away in restaurants and AK-47s at petrol pumps, but the Pathans were left crippled. It was madness to doubt Suleiman's will, or his brain, or his wealth, or his contacts in the police and in the ministries. So
my friends were quiet. Finally Paritosh Shah said, ‘There's no other choice.'

War comes upon us. We are led in leaning curves towards the battlefield. You may try to avoid it, but find that last flower-lined turn you chose was really an entrance into a blood-soaked arena. So we were here. ‘Good,' I said. ‘Let's start.'

 

We were victorious at first. We had the advantage of surprise. On that very first day, I had Khot picked up. His wife was still in Delhi, so some of the boys just went over to his house that night and picked him up from his bed, lifted him and brought him to me. I didn't want him in my home, so we dealt with him outside, behind the house. At first he tried to tell me that he didn't know anything about any Suleiman Isa, why would I think that he would even try anything as low and crazy as that, everyone knew he had been faithful to Ganesh Bhai for years and years, he swore on the heads of his children. Finally, the shameless bhenchod, he tried a religion angle. ‘Why would I go with that kattu bastard?' he said. ‘Ganesh Bhai, think about it. Like you I'm a God-fearing man. Every week I give to the temple. This is only some Muslim plot to break our friendship.'

I hit him so hard I skinned a knuckle. ‘Listen, you bastard,' I said, and then was too angry, I felt my blood swell up behind my eyes. ‘Beat him' was all I could say. ‘Beat him,' I said, and walked away.

He made coughing, gasping noises, and called on his father. ‘Papa, Papa,' he wept. That was interesting. Pain makes babies of most men, and their mothers are usually who they cry out for. Maybe Khot didn't have a mother. I went back and watched, rubbing my hand. When I pressed at the second knuckle on my right hand a hot fan of pain bloomed into my hand. I pressed harder. Now it was a cold movement, quick and edged and stabbing into my wrist. It was a slippery tooth just under the skin, biting. Under the quick rain of kicks, Khot was convulsing on the ground. I pressed harder. He broke first.

He told us everything. There wasn't that much to tell. He and Masood Meetha had known each other since they were young men. The families were from adjoining villages originally, somewhere near the coast. Masood had approached him a year and a half earlier, in Bombay, had called and invited him for tea and biscuits in his Dongri office. Khot had refused to meet in Dongri, so they had chai at a cheap restaurant in Ghatkopar. All they had done that first time was talk about Konkani villages and the food and whatever happened to old so-and-so whose father
was a postman. Then, a month later, late at night, Masood had casually stopped by Khot's house near Golghat, on the spur of the moment, he just happened to be near by, and he had asked for dinner, for all the traditional Konkani dishes that Khot's wife could make, and so then he had Bhabhi's cooking which was just like his mother's. After this dinner, there had been phone calls and gifts of watches and bottles of whisky, but never any face-to-face contact. Khot was no innocent, he knew from the very first sip of Meetha's tea during that first meeting what this whole game was about, why after all these years Masood Meetha had remembered him. And when it came time to make arrangements for my shipment, my forty-lakh shipment, it was Khot who picked up the phone and called Masood, ‘Bhai, shall we have dinner?' He cried and told us all of this.

‘Kill him,' I said. I turned and walked away, and before I was at the steps leading to the back door, it was done. Two flat thumps and Khot was done. Chotta Badriya followed me inside, and I heard the snick of the safety before he put his Glock back under his shirt. ‘Don't dispose of the body yet,' I said. ‘We'll send it back to Suleiman tomorrow. Afterwards.'

‘Afterwards,' he said, and grinned. So we set to work. We had been preparing. We had our lists, our hand-drawn maps, our information. So we set up our fielding. The next day, between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon, we killed Vinay Shukla, Salim Sheikh, Syed Munir, Munna, Zahed Mechanic and Praful Bidaye. That same night Samant encountered Azam Lamboo and Pankaj Kamath, for which action he got big stories in the papers, ‘Encounter King Guns Down Top Suleiman Shooters', and three lakhs from me. And that same night, actually at four-thirty in the morning, a car pulled up to the corner near the Imperial Hotel in Dongri and Khot slid out on to the pavement, his head wrapped in a crusted towel. So, we told them who we were. We wrote our answers in blood.

What I wanted was Suleiman's head, to kick around like a football. But he was safe in Dubai, where he had gone after the Pathans had killed his brother, after he had killed many of them. Bombay had become too dangerous for him, and so he had fled, the bhadwa, but still he ran his operations in the city, through Masood Meetha and others. We were braced for their assault, and for a day we waited, and then sure enough it came. They ambushed three of our boys as they left a relative's house in Malad. All three of ours died, all three before they could draw their pistols. Ajay Kumble, Noble Lobo, Amir Kenkda. The next day Parulkar's inspectors were waiting in ambush for our weekly collection run to Darya
Mahal Bazaar, where the shopkeepers had their contributions ready. The police party, led by Majid Khan the muchchad, were dressed as labourers. They gave no warning, and fired thirty-four bullets. Vinay Karmarkar, Shailendra Pawar, Ziauddin Qazalbash.

So we fought Suleiman Isa through the summer, and into the monsoon floods. When we collected our bodies from the morgue, carried them through the white waterfalls of water, it seemed as if we had been fighting them for ever, that the war had always existed. They hurt us, but they couldn't kill us. And we ate away at them, we bled them a little every day. Meanwhile Paritosh Shah's Rajhans Airline flew, and he got hair implants because he decided he looked too old on television, and he gave me lectures every day on the power of his dandi-swami. ‘You saw how he answered your need. You asked and he gave. Now how can you not believe?' I was tempted to believe. But early in my life, I had seen how belief was an inner rot that hollowed out a man and made him a eunuch. I knew faith was a convenient crutch for cowards and weaklings. No, I wanted no such disease inside me.

So I resisted, I argued coincidence to myself, that the fact that our information had come to us during the puja was clearly a trick of unconnected movements shifting past each other in a way that made sense only to me, random particles bumping themselves into an illusion that seemed like a shape. And what about the thousands of moments in every minute where there were no connections, no sparkling threads of meaning from one event to the next? Paritosh Shah saw Dandi-swami behind the flashing face of every second, he entreated him with gifts and bhajans, and pressured him with stones and charms and secret mantras, and quarrelled with him on occasion. And always he then apologized to Dandi-swami and flew on the wings of his blessings. He was convinced that if only I would let go of my resistance and fall into marriage, I would automatically slide into belief. ‘Once you are well-settled,' he said, ‘all this nonsense will settle itself also. One-two, like that it'll happen.' And he snapped his fingers, one-two. Every day he asked me for my shortlist of girls.

So the year wore on. September, October. In early November Samant called. We had been doing business all during this struggle and had profited mutually, him in cash, me in dead bodies. But it had become harder for us to meet face to face since we had both been written about in the newspapers. We were trapped by fame. Only Bombay-fame so far, not all-India, but it was enough to make us very careful. So we spoke on the phone, on numbers we changed every week.

What Samant had to say was simple enough. A month after the seizure of my shipment, the government had distributed monies worth almost a fourth of its value to various officers and a certain anonymous informant. We knew that this unnamed bastard was not Khot or his survivors – we had kept a careful watch on them. So who was it, this gaandu who had taken what was mine? Now Samant had a name: ‘Kishorilal Ganpat'. I knew the name. All of Bombay did. He was a builder, for ten years now he had spread his constructions across the east of the city. From the highway you could see his buildings rearing their heads out of the green fields, above the villages and the old colonies. He was big. There had been talk of his dealings with Suleiman, but their interaction had been just ordinary, of the necessary sort, what any builder would have with Suleiman Isa in the normal course of events. Nothing close, nothing special. We ourselves had talked to Kishorilal Ganpat when he needed some help with clearing slums from four residential plots in Andheri. But if he had taken my money, if he had stolen from me, he was closer to Suleiman than anyone had known. This meant he was a banker for Suleiman, that he ate from the same plate as that maderchod.

I thanked Samant, and hung up. His reward would follow later, and we had nothing else to talk about. I had the option to swallow this news quietly, to forget that I had heard it, and I also had the option to act. I kept the information to myself, locked it away in my stomach. I wanted to think it over carefully.

Just before dawn the phone rang again. Another one of ours was dead. This was a boy from Gopalmath itself, a boy I had seen growing up in the lanes I had built. His name was Ravi Rathore, and he had come back on the bus from Aurangabad, where he had relatives. Suleiman Isa's dogs had picked him up in Dadar at the bus station. An ice-cream-wallah had noticed some pushing and shoving. There had been a black van parked near by. At one in the morning someone had noticed a body in a reeking pile of garbage near the highway in Goregaon East and had made an anonymous call to the police. There was a bullet hole in each of Ravi Rathore's thighs, and one in his forehead. We brought back the body, to his kholi, in the late afternoon. He had no relatives in Bombay, so I gave the fire to his pyre. The body in its white shroud was tiny under the wood, under the spray of flame. He had been very skinny, Ravi Rathore, with a chest bent inwards, and his favourite belt with heavy silver buckles used to wrap nearly twice around him. When the boys played cricket on Sundays on the sloping pitch close to the hill, running between the wick
ets made Ravi Rathore heave and pant. Now he was dead. We burnt him and came home. I sat on my chair, on the terrace, and watched the night come again. This valley we live and die in is a valley of light and shade. We flicker in and out of it. How easily Ravi Rathore gave up his small space in it. I turned away tea, and dinner, and remembered a monsoon long ago, and Ravi Rathore's skinny legs in shorts, paddling in a flooded corner between two twisting lanes. That was what I knew of him, that and his belt and his wheezing enthusiasm for cricket.

‘What are you thinking of, bhai?' said Chotta Badriya. He was sitting on the floor, at the end of the terrace.

‘Bachcha, what's in the boat?'

‘What?'

‘I'm thinking of Dandi-swami.'

Chotta Badriya ducked his head down low, rubbed at his ankles. He was trying to decide where my temper was, if he could risk another question. He picked at the roof, took up a flake with his fingernail.

‘Leave my house alone,' I said. ‘Here's what we're going to do. We're going to sink a boat.'

 

Kishorilal Ganpat was a great Shiva-bhakta. He thanked Bholenath every morning for all the crores he had swindled, for the bribes he had given, for sand-mixed cement, for shoddy wiring that spilt out of rough-finished walls, for illegal and unlicensed buildings, for encroachments, for extra floors towering far beyond FSI limits, for middle-class money desperate for homes, for starving labour, for slums, for tough, sword-swinging boys, for Suleiman Isa. Kishorilal Ganpat was properly careful in these bad times, so he had two sinewy bodyguards who were so tight-muscled that they walked wide-legged, like somebody had tweaked a rubber band around each of their golis. Kishorilal Ganpat also liked appearances to be just so, so he dressed the driver of his Mercedes in a white suit and a cap, and the two bodyguards in grey safari suits. Kishorilal Ganpat was also a hoarder of time. He collected short-cuts that saved two minutes or three in this jangling maderchod jam of a city, he gave speeches to his employees about Japanese punctuality, he came to the Shiva temple on Satyagrahi Jamunanath Lane every Tuesday morning at eight-thirty precisely, on the ‘dot of the dot of eight-thirty', as he liked to point out to anyone listening. All of which made the game childishly easy for us. We set up our fielding. Six boys, six Star pistols. We knew where Shiva sat, on his pedestal, we knew the steps that led down to the lane lined with
houses and hawkers, we knew where the Mercedes would wait for its master, we knew where the bodyguards would be. It went smooth, like an oiled lauda into a wet chut. Kishorilal Ganpat came down the steps, holding his prasad aloft on a special silver thali. He had positioned his shoes pointing outwards at the bottom of the steps, and he stepped into them efficiently, saving a good three seconds. The bodyguards were bent over still, their backs to their boss as they pulled on their sandals, and Kishorilal Ganpat was stepping high, skipping over a puddle of water, when my boy Bunty moved sideways and into his path, and Kishorilal Ganpat turned his head to look, and Bunty raised his right arm and blew out Kishorilal Ganpat's left eye. One of the bodyguards reached under his shirt and was cut down. The other sat down on the temple steps and never raised his hands from the stone, which he grasped with whitened fingernails. Meanwhile Kishorilal Ganpat staggered and stumbled at the corners of the lane, from door to door, looking for a way out, any way out. Bunty walked after him, squeezing rounds tenderly into his back and buttocks. Finally Kishorilal Ganpat knelt in front of a vermilion door, under an elegantly painted Om in white, his head down and gaand high in the air, his clothes soaked through with blood, quite dead.