Sacred Games (34 page)

‘That Bipin Bhonsle is such a haraamkhor,' she said. ‘Before elections he told us that he would get a new extra water pipe to the colony. Now there is no new water pipe, but even the old one gets leaks every second week. Three children and no water, it is impossible.'

‘Vote him out in the next election,' Katekar said.

‘That is impossible, Dada,' Vishnu said. ‘He has too many resources, too many connections. And the other parties have all gadhav candidates in that constituency. None of them can win. Putting a vote in for someone else is a waste of a vote.'

‘Then find a good candidate.'

‘Arre, Dada, who will stand against that Bhonsle? And where does one find good candidates nowadays? You need someone who is tough, who can give a jhakaas speech, who is attractive to the people. That type doesn't exist any more. You need one giant, all you get nowadays are crowds of small men.'

Shalini leaned to the side and brushed her hands off, then neatened her sari over her knees. ‘You're looking everywhere but the right place,' she
said.

Vishnu was very surprised. ‘You know someone?'

Shalini pointed with both hands at Bharti. ‘Here, here.'

‘What?' Vishnu said.

Katekar pitched forward and back, shaken by laughter. It came more from the dismay on Vishnu's face, from his abject horror at his wife somehow becoming a giantess, than from Shalini's joke, but the children took it up and instantly they were all guffawing.

‘See,' Shalini said, ‘my sister Bharti is brave, she can impress anyone with her style, and nobody gives a speech like her. You should make her a mantri.'

Vishnu had understood by now that this was all humour, and he was grinning tightly, stretching his lip over his lower teeth. ‘Yes, yes, Taai, she would make a good chief minister actually. She will keep everyone in control.'

Bharti had both hands in front of her mouth. ‘Arre, devaa, I don't want any such thing. Taai, what are you saying? I have my hands full with these children, I don't want to sit on top of fifty thousand people.'

Katekar wanted to say something about her weight crushing fifty thousand, but then thought better of it and contented himself with a snort at the image of Vishnu's face compressed by her ample haunches. Vishnu looked uncertain, and then laughed along with him.

After Katekar finished eating, he and Vishnu walked along the water. Katekar had his pants rolled up, and he had left his shoes behind with Shalini. He liked to walk on the wet sand where it had been smoothed by the sea, feel it under his soles. Vishnu was walking a good five feet away, protecting his sandals. He hopped away now to save himself from an oncoming surge. ‘Dada,' he said, ‘one of these times you must let me pay. Otherwise we will feel embarrassed to come again.'

‘Vishnu, don't start that whole argument again. I am elder, so I pay.' A bitter wash of irritation gushed up from Katekar's stomach. It was stupid, this pride of his that refused to eat meals paid for by Vishnu, but he could not stomach Vishnu's smugness, his satisfaction at his own success.

‘Yes, yes, Dada,' Vishnu said, raising both hands. ‘Sorry. You are doing well nowadays?'

‘I am getting along,' Katekar said. Vishnu had of course noticed the thousand-rupee note that Katekar had used to pay the waiter. He never missed anything, the watchful Vishnu.

Vishnu stepped thoughtfully over a ragged branch from a palm tree.
‘Dada, at this age, you should be doing much better.'

‘At what age?'

‘Your sons are growing up. They will need education, good clothes, everything.'

‘And you think I can't give them all that?'

‘Dada, you are getting angry again. I will stop talking.'

‘No, say what you mean.'

‘I'm saying only a little thing, Dada – this chutiya sardar inspector of yours will never make a decent income.'

‘I have what I need, Vishnu.'

Vishnu lowered his head and became very meek. ‘All right, Dada. But I don't understand why you stay with him. There are other postings you could have very easily.'

Katekar didn't answer. He turned and went back to the families. But later that night, lying in bed with Shalini next to him, he thought about Sartaj Singh. They had worked together for many long years. They were not friends exactly, they did not visit each other or go on vacations together. But they knew each other's families and they knew each other. Katekar could tell what Sartaj Singh was feeling from moment to moment, he could read his melancholy and his delight. He trusted the sardar's instincts. They had done some good detection, and when they had failed, Katekar always had the knowledge that they had tried hard. Yes, there wasn't as much money as could be made elsewhere, but there was job satisfaction. That was something that Vishnu would never understand. People like him wouldn't believe that a man could want to be a policeman for reasons other than money. The money was welcome, of course, but there was also the desire to serve the public. Yes, really,
Sadrakshanaaya Khalanighranaaya
. Katekar knew he could never confess this urge to anyone, much less Vishnu, because fancy talk of protecting the good and destroying evil and seva and service would elicit only laughter. Even among colleagues, this was never to be spoken about. But it was there, however buried it may be under grimy layers of cynicism. Katekar had seen it occasionally in Sartaj Singh, this senseless, embarrassing idealism. Of course neither of them would ever so much as hint at the other's romanticism, but perhaps this was why their partnership was so enduring. Only once, when they had rescued a trembling ten-year old girl from a shed in Vikhroli, from her kidnappers, Sartaj Singh had scratched at his beard and muttered, ‘Today we did good work.' That had been enough.

It was still enough. Katekar sighed, turned his head and stretched his
neck, and went to sleep.

 

Sartaj saw the crowd first, a thick clutch of people pressed up to the front of a double-height glass window. The building was a new commercial complex, very beautiful with its expanses of grey stone and accents of polished steel. Sartaj had gone to the new office of his bank, to deposit some dividend cheques into his mother's account, and had come out dazzled by the sweep of the counters and the unprecedented cheer of the bank clerks. Now he peered over the collection of dark heads and saw a flash of deep red.

‘Saab, come inside and see.' A blue-suited security guard was beckoning to Sartaj from the left.

‘Ganga,' Sartaj said, and went through the door Ganga was guarding. Sartaj knew Ganga from the old bank building, where he had kept watch over a jewellery store with a long-barrelled shotgun and a baleful stare. ‘Did your seth move here as well?'

‘No, saab, I am working for a new company now,' Ganga said, pointing to his braided shoulder, where a blue-and-white patch announced his new allegiance: Eagle Security Systems.

‘Better company?'

‘Better pay, saab.' There were a lot of new security companies, and demand for ex-servicemen like Ganga was high. He shut the door behind Sartaj, and turned towards the window. ‘Tibetan sadhus, saab,' he said, with proprietary pride.

There were five of them, five self-contained, serene men with very short haircuts and flowing scarlet robes. They were working around a large wooden platform, on which there was the colourful outline of a circle within a square within a circle.

‘What are they doing?'

‘They are making a mandala, saab. There were reports about it on yesterday's TV, you didn't see?'

Sartaj hadn't seen, but now he could see the apertures let into each side of the square, and the deep green that one of the sadhus was using to fill in the area just inside the innermost circle. Another sadhu was filling in the small figure of what looked like a goddess against the green background. ‘What are they using, powder?'

‘No, saab, sand, coloured sand.'

It was restful to watch the fall of the sand from the sadhus' hands, their sure and graceful movements. After a while, the general structure of the
mandala emerged for Sartaj in dim white outline. Inside the final circle there were going to be several independent regions, ovals, each with its own scene of figures, human and animal and godly. Between these ovals, at the very centre of the entire wheel, there was a shape, Sartaj couldn't make out what it was. Outside these ovals there was the inner wall of the square, and outside the square there was another wheel, and more figures, and then a rim with its own patterns, all of it hypnotically complex and somehow pleasing. Sartaj was content to be lost in it.

‘When they are finished, saab, they wipe it all up.'

‘After all this work?' Sartaj said. ‘Why?'

Ganga shrugged. ‘I suppose it's like our women's rangoli. If it's made of sand, it won't last long anyway.'

Still, Sartaj thought, it was cruel to create this entire whirling world, and then destroy it abruptly. But the sadhus looked quite happy. One of them, an older man with greying hair, caught Sartaj's eye and smiled. Sartaj didn't quite know what to do, so he bowed his head, touched his hand to his chest and smiled back. He watched them work for a few more minutes, and then walked away.

‘Come back tomorrow evening,' Ganga called. ‘The mandala will be finished by then.'

 

Sartaj spent the day in the courts, waiting to give evidence in an old murder case. He had missed the last two dates, and the defence counsel had made a mighty noise, but today the judge himself was late, so the various parties to the case waited quietly. Sartaj read about the Tibetans in
Afternoon
, which described them as ‘monks' and said they were making their mandala for the peace of the world. The judge finally arrived after lunch, and Sartaj gave evidence, and went back to the station. Birendra Prasad and his two sons were waiting under the portico.

‘You wait here,' Sartaj said to Birendra Prasad. ‘You two come with me.'

‘Saab?' Birendra Prasad said.

‘Quiet. Come on.'

The boys followed him inside. Sartaj took them through the front rooms, to his desk. He was tired, and he wanted a cup of chai very badly, but here were these two bastards. They were good-looking, strapping young men, both in bright T-shirts. ‘Who is Kushal, who is Sanjeev?'

Kushal was the older one. He was chewing on his lip. He was only
tense, though, not scared. He still had some confidence in his father and in himself.

‘So you have eaten a lot of mithai in this life, Kushal?'

‘No, saab.'

‘That's why you have become such a hero with big muscles?'

‘Saab…'

Sartaj slapped him across the face. ‘Bastard, shut up and listen to me.' Kushal's eyes were wide. ‘I know you have been bothering the girls in your area. I know you stand around the gallis and think you are the rajas of everything you see. But you aren't bhais, you aren't even taporis, you are little insects. What are you looking at, bhenchod? Come here.' Sanjeev cringed, and shuffled forward. Sartaj fisted him in the belly, not too hard, but Sanjeev doubled over and turned away. Sartaj thumped him on the back.

It was an old routine of violence and intimidation, and Sartaj performed it automatically. If Katekar had been there, they would have enacted the ritual with a practised co-ordination that approached a kind of beauty. But Sartaj was hot, and tired, and so he hurried up the sequence. He wanted to get it over with. The boys were amateurs, and required no great subtlety or skill. In ten minutes they were panting and stammering and terrified. Sanjeev had a stain down the front of his pants.

‘If I hear about any trouble from you two again, I'll come and get you and give you some real dum. You understand? Maybe I'll bring in your father also. Maybe I'll string him up too.'

Kushal and Sanjeev shuddered, and had nothing to say.

‘Get out of here,' Sartaj shouted. ‘Go!'

They went, and Sartaj sat and leaned back and took out his handkerchief and found it already damp. It was disgusting, but he wiped his neck and shut his eyes.

His mobile phone rang.

‘Sartaj Saab?'

‘Who is this?' Sartaj said, although he knew the rough rumble of the voice. It was Parulkar Saab's old woman, the high-up contact in the S-Company he had spoken to a few days ago.

‘It is your well-wisher, Iffat-bibi. Salaam.'

‘Salaam, Bibi. Tell me.'

‘I heard you are interested in a chutiya named Bunty?'

‘I may be.'

‘If you haven't decided yet, beta, it's too late. Bunty is dead, lurkaoed,
finished.'

‘Did your people arrange it?'

‘My people had nothing to do with it.' She sounded completely convincing. ‘The man was useless anyway,
sala langda-lulla
.'

‘Where?'

‘It will be on your police wireless in a few minutes. Goregaon. There is a building complex called Evergreen Valley, in the compound of that.'

‘I know the place. All right, Iffat-bibi, I'm going.'

‘Yes. And see, next time you want something, somebody, anybody, talk to me first.'

‘Yes, yes, I'll come running to you.'

She guffawed at his sarcasm, said, ‘I'm putting down now,' and hung up. Sartaj drove fast, accelerating through intersections and weaving across the lanes of traffic. There was already a police van in front of Evergreen Valley, and a crowd of plain-clothes officers in the car park to the rear. Sartaj saw several men he knew to be in the Flying Squad. As he walked up to the body, he saw their boss, Senior Inspector Samant, and then he was sure Bunty had been hit.

‘Arre, Sartaj,' Samant said, ‘what news?'

‘Bas, sir, just work.' Sartaj pointed at the corpse, which lay face-down and twisted to the left. The wheelchair was on its side, three feet away.

‘You know this maderchod?' Samant said, arching an eyebrow. ‘What, Parulkar Saab has an interest in him?'