Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

unfamiliar lanes. The buildings came closer to each other now, jammed together wall against wall, and the streets were close with people who stepped aside for the auto to pass. I peered out on the left, and then through the oval window in the canvas at the rear.
    â€˜Calm down,’ the woman said. ‘You’re safe. If I wanted to harm you, that big ghoda in your pants wouldn’t save you.’
    I looked down. I had been holding the revolver through stained blue cloth. I let go of it and massaged my right hand with the other. ‘I’ve never been here before,’ I said.
    â€˜I know,’ she said. She leaned over to me. ‘What’s your name?’
    â€˜My name is Ganesh. And yours?’
    â€˜I am Kanta Bai. What do you have for Paritosh Shah?’
    I said, close to her ear, ‘I have gold.’ I came closer. ‘Biscuits.’
    â€˜Be quiet, Ganesh, until we get out of the auto.’
    The auto stopped on a busy bazaar square full of wholesale clothing shops, and she led me through rapid turns in narrowing lanes. She was known well here, and people passing greeted her by name, but she hurried by without a pause. At the end of a lane there was a wall with a break in it, a jagged hole lined with shattered bricks, and on the other side there was a basti. I watched my feet and followed her rapid walk. The shacks were closer now, and in some places the pucca buildings were so close to each other across the lane that it was like walking through a tunnel. Men and women and children stood aside to let Kanta Bai pass. There were boys, young men, sitting on ledges and in doorways and I felt their eyes on my neck, and I kept my back straight and kept close to Kanta Bai.
    I smelt the overpowering round richness of gur first, and then the vomit. We turned right and passed by a low doorway, and I saw metal tables, and men sitting around them drinking. A boy put a plate with two boiled eggs down on the table nearest the entrance, and his customer shook out the last milky drops from a glass into his mouth. Kanta Bai angled around the side of the building, and the whine of an electric turbine deepened its pitch. She left me in a dark room filled to the ceiling with sacks of gur. ‘Wait here,’ she said, and so I waited. The warm smell settled on my shoulders, brown as river-bottom earth. Through the unceasing grind of the motor I could hear the highest notes from a radio in the front room, the bar, just the tinny tops of the song, coming to me like froth, and I wondered about the quality of Kanta Bai’s product. There had been customers enough, maybe twenty on a work-day afternoon, sipping steadily at the eight and ten-rupee glasses of saadi and satrangi they distilled in the back. It was a good business, raw materials cheap and legally available, overheads low. And the demand for good desi liquor was steady and constant, as continuous and vast as the tramp of feet in the lanes outside. I leaned forward and through the curtained doorway I could see just the bare feet of Kanta Bai’s workers and the dragging bottoms of sacks, and occasionally the round gleam of bottles. I recognized her sari, and so was able to turn away and be standing at the furthest end of the room when she turned aside the curtain. When I saw her eyes, burning white despite the sloughy darkness of the gur sacks, I was afraid.
    â€˜I spoke to Paritosh Shah on the phone,’ she said.
    I was unable to speak, buried by the abrupt terror of being alone, inexperienced, alone with gold. I nodded, and in the same motion leaned my shoulder against the doorway, very casual. I put a hand on my hip and nodded again.
    Kanta Bai was faintly amused. A very small ripple of pleasure passed through her jaw, and she said, ‘Let’s see your gold.’
    I nodded. I was still very unsafe, queasy inside, but this was necessary. I groped in my right pocket, moved the bars to my left hand, and held them out, two of them