Sacred Games (18 page)

‘Chalo,' I said.

‘Already, bhai?' Mohan Surve said. ‘It's only eleven.'

Chotta Badriya upended his lassi glass and drank steadily and his throat bobbed up and down.

‘I'm sick of this place,' I said. ‘Let's go.'

I walked fast towards the door. Outside, the road sloped down to the darting lights of the highway. On the left, three rickshaws stood in a row. We were parked to the right, on the other side of the lamppost. It was a decrepit, ancient Ambassador taxi that Qariz Shaikh's father drove during the days. I wanted a better car, but we had money only for guns. Soon, some day, I thought. I started across the road, through the oval of light. I could hear the others behind me. I turned my head over my shoulder, and there was Chotta Badriya, stuffing a handkerchief in his pocket, and close behind him the others. They moved, walking, and their shoulders shifted as they walked, and through a chance gap in the figures I saw Mohan Surve under the neon sign, still near the door, his back against the wall and not moving. It was too far to see his eyes, but he was not walking, not moving. And then, in that instant, I hurled myself to the side, clawing
towards the dark, lunging out of the light, and I felt a blow on my shoulder that took me along with it, nearly to the ground, but I found my feet and was running along the side of the building, and I knew I had been hit but I never heard the gunshots. At the corner I stopped myself with a hand on the wall, turned and saw movement in the passage, and twisted around the corner and ran again, and I had my pistol out. Now I heard the shots. I risked a look back, and it was Chotta Badriya, at the corner and firing at something on the other side of the corner.

‘Badriya,' I called. ‘Come.'

We went over a wall, through a building compound and out of its gate, and down a road. Two more turns and I had to stop. I leaned against a truck, and then bent over and spurted vomit on to the road. My left arm was shuddering, squeezing in regular spasms of pain. ‘Are you hit?' I said to Chotta Badriya.

‘Not one touch,' he said. ‘Not one. I'm fine.' He laughed, a thin crackling sound.

‘Good,' I said, turning my head to look at him. ‘I know it's not you.'

‘What's not me?'

‘The one who sold us to them. Because if you were, you wouldn't be here now. And if you were, you could kill me now.' The barrel of his pistol was six inches from my head, one quick movement from my death.

‘Bhai,' he said. ‘Really, bhai.' He was shocked. I loved him in that moment, loved him like a brother.

‘Wipe your face,' I said. ‘You still have mango lassi on it. And get me to a doctor.'

 

I made phone calls from the doctor's table, as he stitched and worried at my shoulder. I called Paritosh Shah and Kanta Bai and some others of my boys and told them to be ready. Paritosh Shah said that the police were already on the scene at the bar, and that three of my boys were dead. Pradeep Pednekar, Krishna Gaikwad and Qariz Shaikh had died. Pradeep Pednekar had been shot once through the hips, and then again at close range in the head. There was no news of Mohan Surve. And I had survived.

Being shot is a peculiar experience, quite unlike any other. When it first happened I didn't really recognize it, I was so eager to get away that it didn't occur to me that the thing I felt in my skin and muscle was a bullet ploughing in. I didn't feel the pain until later, until I had the possibility of life in my mouth, as succulent as a mango. Now my shoulder and chest
were cold, like somebody had frozen my bones from the inside out and was stabbing me with a sliver of ice. I said to Chotta Badriya, ‘Get me to Gopalmath.'

Three of our boys had brought a car to the doctors. They and Chotta Badriya took me to the car, surrounding me and shielding me with their own bodies. They followed me. We had once been strangers, but now we were bound together. We had been attacked, we had survived, so now they loved me a little. They asked me, Are you all right, bhai? Are you comfortable? We sped down the empty night road towards Gopalmath. I had made this velocity, and in its wake they came behind me. I was one lone man who had almost died that night, and they clung to me.

‘What do we do now?' Chotta Badriya said.

‘Find me Mohan Surve,' I said.

In Gopalmath my house had already been cleared, checked twice by my boys. I got in safely, and was back in my own room, sitting on the gadda. I put boys on the peripheries of Gopalmath, to watch for an attack, but I knew I was safe, at least for now. The crowded lanes were my guard, these children who wandered in the streets, the women who sat in the doorways. They all knew each other, up and down the alleys. There was no getting past them for the enemy, not without loss.

‘You should sleep,' Chotta Badriya said. It was already morning.

‘Yes,' I said. I knew I needed to rest, there was no use in exhausting myself. ‘You also. But see to it that there is no gap in the guard.'

I lay in my bed, shaking under my sheet. Vibrations, little tremblings started in my stomach and spread into my chest and then my throat. The left side of my body was aching steadily. But it wasn't the pain that kept me awake. It was rage at myself, at my stupidity. Now, in looking back, it was obvious: you cannot watch someone without changing the world they live in, and if they are alert they will feel these shifts, sense the faint echo of your questions as they roll along the ground, and they will watch you in return. They had watched, and reached the same conclusions as I had, they had read me, they had predicted me and then they took my gaand. They had picked the place, and the time, and the method, and declared war. If not for a chance glance, a trick of time and my body, a bullet finding its way through space along one angle and not another, if not, if not, if not, I would have been dead on the road in front of Mahal, reduced to nothing again, a small man become smaller. The war would have started and been instantly over. This was what I couldn't bear, my foolishness, my blindness.

Finally, I laid aside the past, which cannot be changed but only left. I cut it from me as if with a scalpel. The future is what exists for you, I said. You are a man of the future. I planned. And I slept.

The next day I carried the war to them. They knew we had been watching, but they couldn't hide everything from us. We knew at least something, what business they did, where they went. On that next day we killed five of them. There were two separate attacks, and I led one of them. It was difficult for me to move, I couldn't raise my arm without a struggle, but the boys were watching me, and this was a crucial time. So I sat in the front seat of the car, next to Chotta Badriya, who was driving. There were three other boys in the back seat. We waited for the enemy outside Kamath's Hotel, where we knew they were meeting a builder for cash collection. It was six o'clock, and the road was full of workers coming home, trailing long evening shadows. When I closed my eyes I could still see the burning of the sun, it blazed inside my head.

‘That's them,' Chotta Badriya said.

There were three, all young, wearing white shirts and good pressed trousers, like good businessmen making a living in the world. The middle one was carrying a plastic shopping bag in his left hand.

‘Pass behind them,' I said.

We came up through the car park, turned right as they reached the bottom of the stairs in front of the hotel, and hummed slowly along, letting them pass directly in front of us. I let them take two more steps, then opened my door with my left hand, pushed it wide, took the pistol from my lap. We all came out at once. Chotta Badriya fired the first shot, and then it was one continual roar. They never even turned around. My hand was unsteady, and I don't think any of my shots hit. But I remember a gout of blood exploding like a momentary flower on the other side of a man's head, he must have seen it hanging in front of his eyes before he dropped down dead. It was all quick and easy. Chotta Badriya got back into the car.

‘Get the money,' I said.

Two minutes later we were safely on S.V. Road. Inside the shopping bag there were three lakhs, and a new bottle of Halo anti-dandruff shampoo.

‘Bhai, that's for me,' Chotta Badriya said. He was full of glee.

‘Here,' I said, and tossed the bottle into his lap. ‘You have dandruff?'

‘No,' he said. ‘And now I won't. I'll prevent it. You see?'

I had to laugh at that. ‘You're one mad chutiya,' I said.

‘I think I should grow my hair,' he said. ‘I think long hair will look good on me.'

‘Yes, yes, you'll look like bhenchod Tarzan himself,' I said. I managed a nap on the way back to Gopalmath, and when we got home I was given the news that the other mission – to ambush some of their boys who frequented a carrom club near Andheri station – had netted us two more wickets. So we were ahead of them for now, but the match wasn't over, it had barely begun yet. In the series that followed, we stayed ahead of them, but only just. By the end of the month, they had lost twelve players, and we eleven. Twelve to them was minor losses, they had many many more batsmen waiting to substitute, but we were almost half gone, vanished from Gopalmath. Samant the inspector laughed at me on the phone more than once. ‘Gaitonde,' he said, ‘they are bajaoing your baja, you better run away and hide, you'll get finished.'

After our thirteenth death, three of my boys just didn't appear for morning attendance the next day. I knew they hadn't been killed, but that they had just walked away from a losing game. I saw the logic of it. We were indeed brothers, and the battles we had suffered together had made us more so, but when defeat is certain, when you are hiding, exhausted and stripped of hope, and the strong enemy is coming to break your thighs, some men will just quit you. This was just another defeat among defeats, and I swallowed it, and looked to those who were still with me. We went on, kept our businesses going, the daily round of living, all the time moving in twos and threes, comforted by the hard metal we carried under our shirts, our weapons that we obsessively cleaned and oiled and caressed. I saw Sunny, one of my boys, raise his pistol to his head, touch it to his forehead in whispered prayer before he went out of the door, and I laughed and asked him if he lit diyas and did puja in front of it every morning, and he ducked his head and smiled, abashed. But we were desperately in need of blessings, and if I thought it would have helped, I would have prostrated myself in front of my garlanded Tokarev without a second's hesitation.

It was a woman who finally showed me the way. I went with Kanta Bai and the boys to Siddhi Vinayak, and we stood in the long queue that wound up the temple steps. It was all nonsense to me, all this praying and whining, but the boys believed and wanted to go, and it was good for morale, so I went along. Despite all her monstrous vulgarity and cynicism, Kanta Bai was a great devotee also. She held a thali in her hands, and had her pallu draped very respectably over her head. Ahead of us and
behind us, in line, were my boys, shoulder to shoulder. There was that full, sweet temple smell of rose-water and agarbatties in my head, and I felt safe. Kanta Bai said, ‘I know what you are going to ask for.'

‘It's obvious,' I said. ‘Even
he
already knows, if he exists and knows anything,' I said, with a jerk of my head up the stairs, where Ganesha sat, supposedly knowing everything.

She shook her head. ‘He can't give you what you won't take with your own hands.'

‘What do you mean?'

She had her head down to the thali, very low, as she neatened up the little piles of rice and sindoor and flower petals. Her neck was puffed up in round folds of flesh. ‘They're going to kill you,' she said. ‘You're going to die.'

We moved ahead three jerky steps now, up the stairs. On the other side of the passageway came a steady stream of worshippers, hurrying down the stairs, full of hope now, renewed now that they had confronted the god, seen him and shown themselves, shamelessly exposed their need and their pain. ‘Why?' I said.

‘Because you fight like a fool. All this hero-giri, shooting here and shooting there, you can't win like that. They will win. They've already won. You think war is about showing them you have a big lauda.'

My pistol was in my waistband, heavy against my belly, and as I looked at her, saying this and not even looking at me, I wanted to pull it out and shoot her. I could have done it easily, I saw it clearly, myself doing it, and the anger came up my throat into my head, like a hoarse humming, until it shadowed my eyes. I wiped at my tears with the back of my hand, and said, ‘How then?'

‘Fight the war to win it. It doesn't matter who kills more men. It doesn't matter if all of Mumbai thinks you are losing. The only thing that matters is victory.'

‘But how to win?'

‘Cut off their head.'

‘Kill Rajesh Parab?'

‘Yes. But really he's an old fool. He's the boss, but he's set in his ways.'

‘It's Vilas Ranade then. He's the one.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘If you get Vilas Ranade, you will leave them deaf and blind.'

Vilas Ranade was the one. He was Rajesh Parab's general, he had decimated us, tricked us, gone in front of us when we had expected him
behind, and he had killed us. I knew now that he led them in war. But I still knew nothing about him, whether he had a wife, sons, what he looked like, where he went. He had no pattern, no habitation, no desires that I could see. I didn't know how to track a man who lived only for war. ‘I don't even have a photo of him,' I said.

‘They keep him out of town,' she said. ‘Pune, Nashik, somewhere there. They bring him in only when there is trouble.'

‘He sleeps until it's time to wake him up?'

‘You don't waste a good shooter on trips to the municipality office. It's too risky. And he's the best of shooters. He's been around for a long time, ten, twelve years.'