Sacred Games Read online

  Sacred Games

  VIKRAM CHANDRA

  For

  Anuradha Tandon

  and

  S. Hussain Zaidi

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Dramatis Personae

  Policeman’s Day

  Siege in Kailashpada

  Ganesh Gaitonde Sells His Gold

  Going Towards Home

  Ganesh Gaitonde Acquires Land

  Investigating Women

  INSET: A House in a Distant City

  Burying the Dead

  Ganesh Gaitonde Wins an Election

  Old Pain

  INSET: The Great Game

  Money

  Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited

  A Woman in Distress

  Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited Again

  Meeting Beauty

  Ganesh Gaitonde Explores the Self

  Investigating Love

  Ganesh Gaitonde Makes a Film

  INSET: Five Fragments, Scattered in Time

  Ganesh Gaitonde Remakes Himself

  The End of the World

  Ganesh Gaitonde Goes Home

  Safety

  INSET: Two Deaths, in Cities Far From Home

  Mere Sahiba

  Selective Glossary

  About the Author

  Other Books by Vikram Chandra

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgements

  Some of the travel for this book was funded by a University Facilitating Fund grant from George Washington University.

  I’m grateful to my erstwhile colleagues at George Washington University for their support and forbearance, especially my friends in the Creative Writing Program: Faye Moskowitz; David McAleavey; Jody Bolz; Jane Shore; Maxine Claire.

  S. Hussain Zaidi has been extraordinarily generous with his vast knowledge, warm friendship and unstinting support. I am indebted to him.

  Many others offered me aid, information and hospitality during the writing of this book:

  Anuradha Tandon; Arup Patnaik, DIG, CBI; API Rajan Gule, CID; Fazal Irani; Akbar Irani; API Sanjay Rangnekar; Violet Monis; Iqbal Khan; Imtiaz Khan; Nisha Jamwal; Rajeev Samant; Rakesh Maria, DIG; Viral Mazumdar; Bandana Tewari; Shernaz Dinshaw; Nonita Kalra; A.D. Singh; Sabina Singh; Rajiv Somani; Aftab Khan; Rasna Behl; Ashutosh Sohni; Shruti Pandit; Kalpana Mhatre; Deepak Jog, DCP; Srila Chatterjee; Sherry Zutshi; Namita Waikar; Shashi Tharoor; Julia Eckert; Jaideep and Seema Mehrotra; Dr Ashok Gupta; Namrata Sharma Zakaria; Dr Amiq Gazdhar; Farzand Ahmed; Menaka Rao; Gyan Prakash.

  In Delhi, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir: Harinder Baweja; A.K. Sehgal; Amit Sehgal; Manohar Singh; Agha Shahid Ali; Shafi; Sumit (Surd) Nurpuri; Praveen Swami.

  In Bihar: Sanjay Jha; Vinod Mishra; Ravinder Jadav; Ashok Kumar Singh, SP, Gaya; N.C. Dhoundial, DIG, Gaya; R.K. Prasad, Dy SP, Gaya; Sunit Kumar, IGP, Patna; Subnath Jha; Bibhuti Nath Jha ‘Mastan’; Gopal Dubey; Surendra Trivedi; Sh. Shaiwal.

  There are others I cannot name. They know who they are.

  As always, I’m grateful to my parents, Navin and Kamna, and my sisters, Tanuja and Anupama; my friend and support, Margo True; Eric Simonoff; Julian Loose; David Davidar; Terry Karten; and Vidhu Vinod Chopra.

  And to Melanie, who changed everything.

  The hymns in the chapter ‘Ganesh Gaitonde Explores the Self’ are from the Rig Vega. I adapted Raimundo Pannikar’s translations (The Vedic Experience, Motilal Banarsidass, 2001).

  Dramatis Personae

  Sartaj Singh: a Sikh police inspector in Mumbai

  Katekar: a police constable who works with Sartaj Singh Shalini, Katekar’s wife

  Mohit and Rohit, their sons

  Mrs Kamala Pandey: a married woman and airline hostess with a lover, an airline pilot named Umesh

  Kamble: an ambitious police sub-inspector who works with Sartaj Singh

  Parulkar: a deputy commissioner of police in Mumbai

  Ganesh Gaitonde: a notorious Hindu gangster and don, leader of the G-Company in Mumbai

  Suleiman Isa: a much-feared Muslim gangster and don, leader of a rival gang in Mumbai

  Paritosh Shah: a supremely gifted money handler for gangsters, including Ganesh Gaitonde

  Kanta Bai: a businesswoman who deals with Paritosh Shah and Ganesh Gaitonde

  Badriya: Paritosh Shah’s bodyguard

  Anjali Mathur: a government intelligence agent investigating Ganesh Gaitonde’s death

  Chotta Badriya: Ganesh Gaitonde’s bodyguard, and the younger brother of Badriya

  Juliet (Jojo) Mascarenas: a television producer/agent for aspiring actors and models…and a high class Madam

  Mary Mascarenas: Jojo’s sister who works as a hairdresser

  Wasim Zafar Ali Ahmad: a social worker in a poor neighborhood in Mumbai who has political aspirations

  Prabhjot Kaur, ‘Nikki’: Sartaj Singh’s mother, originally from the Punjab Navneet, her beloved oldest sister

  Ram Pari: the maidservant of Nikki’s mother in the Punjab

  Bunty: Ganesh Gaitonde’s right hand man and organizer

  Bipin Bhonsle: a Hindu fundamentalist politician whom Ganesh Gaitonde helps get elected to public office

  Sharma (aka Trivedi): Bipin Bhonsle’s ally who also works, through intermediaries, for Swami Shridhar Shukla

  Swami Shridhar Shukla, ‘Guru-ji’: a Hindu guru and nationalist, a spiritual adviser of international renown, who becomes Ganesh Gaitonde’s spiritual mentor

  Subhadra Devalekar: Ganesh Gaitonde’s wife and mother of his young son

  K. D. Yadav (aka Mr Kumar): a pioneering Indian intelligence officer who ‘ran’ Ganesh Gaitonde and became a mentor to Anjali Mathur

  Mr Kulkarni: the intelligence agent who runs Ganesh Gaitonde after K. D. Yadav

  Major Shahid Khan: a Pakistani intelligence agent who masterminds a counterfeit money operation against India

  Shambhu Shetty: proprietor of the Delite Dance Bar

  Iffat-bibi: Suleiman Isa’s maternal aunt who is one of his main controllers in Mumbai

  Majid Khan: a police inspector in Mumbai, a colleague of Sartaj Singh

  Zoya Mirza: an actress and a rising star in the Indian film industry

  Aadil Ansari: an educated but poor man from a small rural town who flees to Mumbai to escape the violent conflicts of his native Bihar

  Sharmeen Khan: the high-school-age daughter of Major Shahid Khan, who moves to the USA to work in Washington, DC, and brings his family – wife, daughter, and mother – with him

  Daddi: Shahid Khan’s mother, originally from the Punjab; to her family, she is a Muslim, but she hides a secret

  Policeman’s Day

  A white Pomeranian named Fluffy flew out of a fifth-floor window in Panna, which was a brand-new building with the painter’s scaffolding still around it. Fluffy screamed in her little lap-dog voice all the way down, like a little white kettle losing steam, bounced off the bonnet of a Cielo, and skidded to a halt near the rank of schoolgirls waiting for the St Mary’s Convent bus. There was remarkably little blood, but the sight of Fluffy’s brains did send the conventeers into hysterics, and meanwhile, above, the man who had swung Fluffy around his head by one leg, who had slung Fluffy into the void, one Mr Mahesh Pandey of Mirage Textiles, that man was leaning on his windowsill and laughing. Mrs Kamala Pandey, who in talking to Fluffy always spoke of herself as ‘Mummy’, now staggered and ran to her kitchen and plucked from the magnetic holder a knife nine inches long and two wide. When Sartaj and Katekar broke open the door to apartment 502, Mrs Pandey was standing in front of the bedroom door, looking intensely at a dense circle of two-inch-long wounds in the wood, about chest-high. As Sartaj watched, she sighed, raised her hand and stabbed the door again. She h
ad to struggle with both hands on the handle to get the knife out.

  ‘Mrs Pandey,’ Sartaj said.

  She turned to them, the knife still in a double-handed grip, held high. She had a pale, tear-stained face and tiny bare feet under her white nightie.

  ‘Mrs Pandey, I am Inspector Sartaj Singh,’ Sartaj said. ‘I’d like you to put down that knife, please.’ He took a step, hands held up and palms forward. ‘Please,’ he said. But Mrs Pandey’s eyes were wide and blank, and except for the quivering of her forearms she was quite still. The hallway they were in was narrow, and Sartaj could feel Katekar behind him, wanting to pass. Sartaj stopped moving. Another step and he would be comfortably within a swing of the knife.

  ‘Police?’ a voice said from behind the bedroom door. ‘Police?’

  Mrs Pandey started, as if remembering something, and then she said, ‘Bastard, bastard,’ and slashed at the door again. She was tired now, and the point bounced off the wood and raked across it, and Sartaj bent her wrist back and took the knife quite easily from her. But she smashed at the door with her hands, breaking her bangles, and her last wiry burst of anger was hard to hold and contain. Finally they sat her down on the green sofa in the drawing room.

  ‘Shoot him,’ she said. ‘Shoot him.’ Then she put her head in her hands. There were green and blue bruises on her shoulder. Katekar was back at the bedroom door, murmuring.

  ‘What did you fight about?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘He wants me not to fly any more.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m an air-hostess. He thinks…’

  ‘Yes?’

  She had startling light-brown eyes, and she was angry at Sartaj for asking. ‘He thinks since I’m an air hostess, I keep hostessing the pilots on stopovers,’ she said, and turned her face to the window.

  Katekar was walking the husband over now, with a hand on his neck. Mr Pandey hitched up his silky red-and-black striped pyjamas, and smiled confidentially at Sartaj. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘So you like to hit your wife, Mr Pandey?’ Sartaj barked, leaning forward. Katekar sat the man down, hard, while he still had his mouth open. It was nicely done. Katekar was a senior constable, an old subordinate, a colleague really – they had worked together for almost seven years now, off and on. ‘You like to hit her, and then you throw a poor puppy out of a window? And then you call us to save you?’

  ‘She said I hit her?’

  ‘I have eyes. I can see.’

  ‘Then look at this,’ Mr Pandey said, his jaw twisting. ‘Look, look, look at this.’ And he pulled up his left pyjama jacket sleeve, revealing a shiny silver watch and four evenly spaced scratches, livid and deep, running from the inside of the wrist around to the elbow. ‘More, I’ve got more,’ Mr Pandey said, and bowed low at the waist and lowered his head and twisted to raise his collar away from the skin. Sartaj got up and walked around the coffee table. There was a corrugated red welt on Mr Pandey’s shoulder blade, and Sartaj couldn’t see how far down it went.

  ‘What’s that from?’ Sartaj said.

  ‘She broke a Kashmiri walking stick on my back. This thick, it was,’ Mr Pandey said, holding up his thumb and forefinger circled.

  Sartaj walked to the window. There was a group of uniformed boys clustering around the small white body below, pushing each other closer to it. The St Mary’s girls were squealing, holding their hands to their mouths, and begging the boys to stop. In the drawing room, Mrs Pandey was gazing brightly at her husband, her chin tucked into her chest. ‘Love,’ Sartaj said softly. ‘Love is a murdering gaandu. Poor Fluffy.’

  ‘Namaskar, Sartaj Saab,’ PSI Kamble called across the station house. ‘Parulkar Saab was asking after you.’ The room was some twenty-five feet across, with four desks lined up across the breadth of it. There was a six-foot poster of Sai Baba on the wall, and a Ganesha under the glass on Kamble’s desk, and Sartaj had felt impelled to add a picture of Guru Gobind Singh on the other wall, in a somewhat twisted assertion of secularism. Five constables came jerkily to attention, and then subsided into their usual sprawl on white plastic chairs.

  ‘Where is Parulkar Saab?’

  ‘With a pack of reporters. He’s giving them tea and telling them about our new initiative against crime.’

  Parulkar was the deputy commissioner for Zone 13, and his office was next door, in a separate building that was the zonal headquarters. He loved reporters, and had a genius for being jovial with them, and a recent knack for declaiming couplets during interviews. Sartaj wondered sometimes if he sat up late with books of poetry, practising in front of a mirror. ‘Good,’ Sartaj said. ‘Somebody has to tell them about all our hard work.’

  Kamble let out a snort of laughter.

  Sartaj sat at the desk next to Kamble and flipped open a copy of the Indian Express. Two members of the Gaitonde gang had been shot to death in an encounter with the Flying Squad in Bhayander. The police had acted on received intelligence and intercepted the two as they proceeded to a factory office in that locality; the two extortionists had been hailed and told to surrender, but they had instantly fired at the squad, who then retaliated, et cetera, et cetera. There was a colour photograph of plain-clothes men bending over two oblong red stains on the ground. In other news, there had been two break-ins in Andheri East, one in Worli, and this last one had ended in the fatal stabbing of a young couple. As Sartaj read, he could hear the elderly man sitting across from Kamble talking about slow death. His eighty-year-old mausi had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her hip. They had checked her into the Shivsagar Polyclinic, where she had borne with her usual stoicism the unrelenting pain in her old bones. After all, she had marched with Gandhi-ji in forty-two and had suffered her first fracture then – of the collarbone from a mounted policeman’s lathi – and also the bare floors of jail cells afterwards. She had an old-fashioned strength, which saw sacrifice of the self as one’s duty in the world. But when the pressure ulcers flowered their deep red wounds on her arms and shoulders and back, even she had said, perhaps it is time for me to die. The elderly man had never heard her say anything of the like, but now she groaned, I want to die. And it took her twenty-two days to find relief, twenty-two days before blessed darkness. If you had seen her, the elderly man said, you too would have cried.

  Kamble was flipping pages in a register. Sartaj completely believed the elderly man’s story, and understood his problem: the Shivsagar Polyclinic wouldn’t let him take the body without a No Objection Certificate endorsed by the police. The handwritten note on Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation stationery would say that the police were satisfied that the death in question was natural, that there was no foul play involved, that the body could be released to relatives for disposal. This was supposed to prevent murders – dowry killings and suchlike – from being passed off as accidents, and Police Sub Inspector Kamble was supposed to sign it on behalf of the ever watchful, khaki-clad guardians of Mumbai, but he had it sitting next to his elbow and he was studiously scribbling in his register. The elderly man had his hands folded together, and his white hair fell over his forehead, and he was looking at the indifferent Kamble with moist eyes. ‘Please, sir,’ he said.

  Sartaj thought it was on the whole a finely considered performance, and that the grief was genuine, but the bit about Gandhi-ji and broken collarbones quite excessively and melodramatically reproving. Both the elderly man and Kamble knew well that a payment would have to be made before the certificate was signed. Kamble would probably hold out for eight hundred rupees; the old man wanted to give only five hundred or so, but the sacrifices of the elders had been done to death in the movies, and Kamble was quite indifferent to the degeneration-of-India gambit. He now closed his red register and reached for a green one. He studied it closely. The old man began the whole story again, from the fall down the stairs. Sartaj got up, stretched, and walked out into the courtyard of the station. In the shade of the gallery that ran along the front of the building, and under the tin por
tico, there was the usual crowd of touts, hangers-on, relatives of those chained in the detection room inside, messengers and representatives from local businessmen, favour-seekers, and, here and there, those marked by misfortune and sudden misery, now looking up at him in mingled hope and bitterness.

  Sartaj walked past them all. There was an eight-foot wall around the whole complex, of the same reddish-brown brick as the station house and the zonal headquarters. Both buildings were two storeys high, with identical red-tiled roofs and oval-topped windows. There was a promise in the grim arches, in the thickness of the walls and the uncompromising weight of the façades, there was the reassurance of bulky power, and so law and order. A sentry snapped to attention as Sartaj went up the stairs. Sartaj heard the laughter from Parulkar’s cabin well before he could see it, while he was still twisting through the warren of cubicles piled high with paper. Sartaj knocked sharply on the lustrous wood of Parulkar’s door, then pushed it open. There was a quick upturning of laughing faces, and Sartaj saw that even the national newspapers had come out for the story of Parulkar’s initiative, or at least for his poetry. He was good copy.

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Parulkar said, raising one proud, pointing hand. ‘My most daring officer, Sartaj Singh.’ The correspondents lowered their teacups with a long clatter and looked at Sartaj sceptically. Parulkar walked around the desk, tugging at his belt. ‘One minute, please. I’ll talk to him outside for a moment, then he will tell you about our initiative.’