Sacred Games (72 page)

I had trouble conjuring up her face, remembering what she looked like. But of course I didn't say this to Jojo. ‘She used to bring me milk at night,' I said, but I knew Jojo had caught the hesitation. She kept quiet, though, and didn't read me one of her lectures about men and women.

‘Gaitonde. You never talk about your father and mother.'

‘I don't.'

‘Your mother, who was she?'

‘A woman, what else?'

‘What else? What was she like?'

‘She was my mother. Forget it. All this maderchod talk.'

Of course she caught the growl in my voice, and was quiet. I hadn't
meant to cut her off, and I didn't want silence, couldn't stand it. ‘Tell me about your mother and father,' I said. I could hear her breathing. ‘Jojo?'

‘I am trying not to curse you. Because you already have a lot of tension.'

‘If I didn't have tension, you would give me gaalis?'

‘Anybody who speaks to me like that gets gaalis.'

I was lying on the floor, in a corner of the barrack. I liked the cold concrete on the back of my neck. Through a window I could see the black rise of a wall, the sparkling shards of glass on its rim, keen in the moonlight. I had to smile a little. Somehow Jojo's recklessness, her anger, it made me smile. In life I would have hated her, I think. But on the phone, me here, she there, she had me smiling. ‘Listen, madam,' I said. ‘Tension I do have. So forgive me. Tell me about your mother.'

Jojo told me about her father, who was a sea captain. He drove small boats for a big company, and was away for months at a time. When he came home he wanted the house to be quiet. The parrots in the orchards behind the house drove him into a trembling rage, he threw firecrackers into the tops of trees and finally bought a shotgun. All his murdering of koels and swallows wouldn't banish the birds, and they sat on the heads of his scarecrows, and nested in their bellies. Finally he retreated to the armchair in his bedroom, put red earplugs in his ears and a black scarf over his eyes. His daughters tiptoed around him, and tried to stay awake late to listen for scraps of conversation between him and their mother. They never heard anything that would make sense of him, not even at meals, when all he said was that there was too much salt in the fish curry and that there was no money for Easter dresses. And so it went until he left, again for a few months. When Jojo was eleven, this big-beard father died of a heart attack on the bridge of his latest ship, on a rainy day in the Arabian Gulf. He died sitting in his captain's chair, with his black scarf over his eyes, so that his men thought he was sleeping. Finally he had quiet, Jojo thought. But there was no quiet for them, because when it came to the matter of his pension it turned out to be not so much. They were poor. But Jojo's mother refused to be downcast, or frightened. I have my land, she said, I refuse to live meekly and full of tears because my husband was taken by God. God is merciful and he will look after us. And so she brought them up, with hard work and hardships and hard discipline. You have to buy your own food in this world, she said, remember that.

‘I asked her once about them, she the wife and he the husband, the two of them together,' Jojo said. ‘About how she could stand to be with him all those years, through all that silence. Why.'

‘And she said?'

‘She said nothing. She used to do this thing with her mouth, make it all small like she was irritated, and wave her hand at you. Like you were a fool for asking. Then she would go on with her work. She was always working.'

‘When did she die?'

‘After I had my trouble with my sister. I didn't find out until a year after it had happened.'

The trouble had really been with the sister's husband, but I let that pass. When women talked about their troubles, it was best to let some things go by. This much I had learnt from my long talks with Jojo, the champion of women. If you argued, you got screaming argument, and then silence. And I wanted Jojo to talk, I needed her to go on talking. Late at night, she saved me with her talking.

In the mornings I read the newspapers. I started with the Marathi papers, then read the Hindi, and finally the English. My English reading was still very slow and halting, and often I had to stop and ask the boys about meanings and constructions. I had my English-Marathi dictionary, but still it was a dragging business, and I always grew annoyed by the end of it. ‘Gaitonde Outfit Struggles to Recover from Losses,' the
Times of India
said, and by the end of the article I wanted to kill the anonymous ‘special correspondent'. It wasn't just the errors in every other sentence, the carelessness of the reporting, but the tone, that slightly sneering implication that the writer knew everything, even what went on in the head of Gaitonde: ‘As Gaitonde mourns his wife and licks his wounds in his cell, Suleiman Isa consolidates his power.' These English-wallahs were always superior, as if the world they lived in was some other one, far from my barrack, my streets, my home. When I grew angry, the boys grinned and said, if it aggravates you, bhai, why read this nonsense?

I didn't tell them, but I read the nonsense because it made me feel alive. In this pictured Gaitonde, caught between columns of newsprint, there was a vitality I didn't feel in my belly. He was hard-faced, confident, injured but ruthless, and plotting a comeback. Looking at him, I myself felt proud of him. Here was a man. So I didn't kill any reporters, but instead gave interviews. I sent bottles of Scotch to them, and flattered them with confidences. All of them wanted to know the story of my life, so I told them stories. They printed all of it. Our revenues grew, and more boys than ever wanted to join us.

It was in these days of my rising all-India fame that one of the warders came to me. ‘Bhai,' he said, ‘there's this mad chutiya in Barrack Five who keeps saying he knew you before you were Ganesh Gaitonde.'

‘When I had another name? I never had another name. I have always been Ganesh Gaitonde.'

‘I don't know what he means, bhai. He's crazy. But he keeps saying it.'

‘Forget it, then. Why are you bothering me with it?'

‘Sorry, bhai.' He turned away, ducking his head, and giggled. ‘Sorry. He's a real vediya, he thinks he's Dev Anand himself. But he's always got his finger in his nose like this, crazy bastard.'

‘Wait,' I said. ‘Wait. This fellow. He's with the budhaus? He's old himself?'

‘Yes, bhai. He's not so old, but he's got all white hair. He puffs it up, like Dev Anand.'

I opened my mouth, then shut it. I said quietly, ‘Bring him to me.'

‘I'll tell him you want to give him paper, bhai. He'll come running.'

‘Paper?'

‘He draws, bhai.'

‘Draws? Never mind, just go and get him. Go, go. Now.'

There were some ten minutes of delay, as various guards were told what to do. But then there he was. I recognized him as soon as he came in through the door at the far end of the barrack, through all the hundreds of men. He was hunched over, and even thinner than before, but there he was, Mathu. Yes, the same Mathu who had been my fellow-shooter on that trawler long ago, who had travelled with me across the seas to bring back gold, who had been an equal partner in the destruction of Salim Kaka. He came up to me slowly, flanked by two of my boys, peering at me from under scraggy eyebrows. He had a stubble, and his careful grooming was all gone. Now he wore no talcum powder on that rodent nose, but he had his Dev Anand hair still, swept up into a suave curl. The hair was all white, complete white. There were crusts of dirt on his bare knees and ankles, and when he was up close I had to steel myself against his stink of old age and sweat and sadness.

‘Mathu,' I said, waving the boys away.

He crushed a wad of paper between his hands, nodded his head from side to side and said, ‘Yes, it is Ganesh.' Then he was quiet, and very still. He was still looking at me, like he was trying to measure me. He was not hostile, or afraid, he was just appraising. Then he seemed to be satisfied, and he lost interest in me, and worried his nose. He flicked away a fleck
of green, and then he looked about the barrack, and then began to shuffle through the stack of paper he carried.

‘Mathu, you bastard,' I said. ‘Where have you been? What happened to you?' I had been annoyed by him then, long ago, but now I was stirred by affection and surprise and concern, I got up and thumped him on the back, and stopped because his shoulder blades cut into my hands. He was starved and he was trembling. ‘Mathu, you want to eat something?'

That got his attention. ‘Yes, Ganesh.'

So we got him some food. He hunched over his bhakri and garlic chutney and ate. His papers were carefully tucked under his right thigh. I called in the warder and questioned him about Mathu. ‘He's been in here as long as I've been here, bhai,' the warder said. ‘Which is almost five years. And I know he was here for a while before that, and he was shifted from Arthur Road, where he had been for at least a year.'

‘Why?'

‘As far as I know, bhai, the charges are that he killed his brother.'

‘Then why has he not been tried?'

‘His family is saying he is mentally unfit to stand trial, bhai. They've got some tame doctor to write that. So they keep having him moved from jail to jail.'

They would keep on avoiding a trial, and keep Mathu in jail for longer than his possible sentence if he were convicted of murder. Bastards. ‘Who are these people who put him in here?'

‘He has another brother, and one sister. It is all about property.'

It turned out that Mathu had taken his gold and gone home, to Vasai. He told his sister and brothers that he had been in Dubai, that he had had a windfall, and now he was back to take care of everyone. So of course they made him the big man of the house, even though he was the youngest. The gaandu spent his money on them: he bought them all houses, all within the same compound, and they started a business together. They got him married. Then of course the brothers and the sister and the sisters-in-law and the brother-in-law started fighting. They fought over land, and cash, and who was going to get how much profit from the business, and who was responsible for the losses. So finally the decision was made to split up the business, and split up the property. Mathu didn't want to, he saw all his gold flying away, but he had made the deeds out in the names of the siblings, and the business had many partners. The others made alliances and conspired against each other, and Mathu went from one side to the other asking them to be good to each
other, and let go of their anger, and remember their father and mother. But the fighting got worse, and finally the eldest brother was murdered. He was found in his office one morning with a lamp wire wound around his neck, pulled tight till it cut the flesh, and he had thirty-two stab wounds. Nothing had been stolen, nothing had been disturbed. The only door into the room was locked. The investigating policemen decided that the killer must be someone known to the victim. A bloody knife was found behind Mathu's house. He had no witnesses who could place him anywhere the night before. His wife was visiting her parents. All his relatives said that he had been acting crazy recently, and that he had cursed and ranted against the dead brother, and threatened to kill him. So Mathu went away to remand, and then to jail to await trial, and he was still waiting. He had no money left, and anyway he couldn't have hired a lawyer. He was crazy.

‘What is that on the paper, Mathu?' I said.

He cringed, and doubled over, and began to make a low whine.

‘He is afraid you'll take it from him. In the general barracks, the prisoners used to make fun of him, and steal his paper and pencils and pens. That's why we put him in with the old men. He sits and draws all day long.'

‘What, Mathu, what do you draw?' I rubbed his shoulder. ‘Come on. You remember me. We went out on the boat together. See, you said you knew me. You know me. I am Ganesh Gaitonde.'

He turned to me then, and let me straighten him up and take the papers from under his leg. They were scraps of paper, old newspapers, envelopes flattened out and made wide, bits of receipts and jail documents. Every clear space on these scraps had been filled with tiny drawings of men and women and buildings and animals. He was a good artist, our Mathu. You could tell what a man was feeling, or if an animal was afraid. The trees bent to the force of a great wind, and there were streetlights on a dark lane. The people spoke to each other in little balloons, but the drawings were so crammed in and so tiny that you could hardly make out what they were saying, even when you had your eye an inch away from the paper. It was like some sort of gaandu crazy comic, it made you dizzy just to look at it, all those figures moving up and down the paper and spreading from one sheet to the next, every inch filled with some discussion or quarrel or love, but still you could tell that it was all connected, that it made some sense somehow.

‘This is very good, Mathu. What is this you have been drawing?'

He was ecstatic that I had asked. For a minute I saw the Mathu I had known once, the Mathu who was faithful to his Dev Anand even in the days of Amitabh Bachchan, who liked to fly kites from morning till night all the way until Sakranti, who liked to wear navy blue because a friend of his sister's had once told him he looked handsome in it. He smiled wide, showing gaps in his yellowed teeth, and said, ‘My life, Ganesh.'

I took that in. Now that he had said it, you could see that there was a little boy, about five or so, in shorts and chappals, who walked along the torn edge of an envelope, carrying a school-bag. ‘This is you?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you're going to draw your whole life?'

‘Yes, yes.'

‘Why?'

That closed him up. He didn't have an answer to that. He hung his head down and after a while he began to cry. I hugged him and put him close to me, and got one of the boys to bring me a pad we had been using. ‘Here, Mathu. Here's lots of paper. You want more paper?'