Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra Page A

weighty in my palm.
    Kanta Bai took the bars, tested their heft and weight, and gave them back to me. Her eyes were steady on my face. ‘He’ll see you now. I’ll have one of my boys take you.’
    â€˜Good,’ I said, now able to find my voice and confidence. The biscuits went back to my pocket, and I fumbled out a thin roll of notes, and fanned them out.
    â€˜You can’t pay me.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜How much do you have?’
    I turned my hand to the side, to the light. ‘Thirty-nine rupees.’
    At this she gurgled out a laugh, and her cheeks bunched and her eyes squeezed almost shut. ‘Bachcha, go and meet Paritosh Shah. He’ll owe me a favour if things go well. Thirty-nine rupees doesn’t make you Raja Bhoj of Bumbai.’
    â€˜I’ll owe a favour, too,’ I said. ‘If things go well.’
    â€˜Very smart,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’re a good boy after all.’
    Â 
    Paritosh Shah was a family man. I waited for him on a second-floor hallway, near a staircase that exhaled occasional blasts of sharp urine-stink. The building was six storeys tall and ancient, with a bamboo framework roped and nailed to its tottering façade, and worrisome gaps in the ornate scrollwork on the balconies. The second floor was full of male Shahs, who passed by where Kanta Bai’s boy had left me on the landing, and they called each other Chachu and Mamu and Bhai, and ignored me entirely. They walked by my dirty shirt and ragged trousers with the barest of glances. They were a flashy, gold-ringed lot who wore mostly white safari suits. I could see their white shoes and white chappals lined up in untidy rows near the uniformed guard at the door. Somewhere inside was the sanctum of Paritosh Shah, guarded by a hoary oldmuchchad perched on a stool with an absurdly long-barrelled shotgun. He wore a blue uniform with yellow braid, and his moustache was enormous and curved at the ends. After twenty minutes of passing Shahs and piss-stench, I was starting to feel quite insulted, and somehow my resentment focused itself on the ammunition belt the old man wore around his chest, on its cracked leather and three cylindrical red cartridges. I imagined pulling my revolver and putting a hole in the centre of the ammunition belt, just above the saggy stomach. It was an absurd thought, but there was satisfaction in it.
    Ten minutes more went by, and that was enough. It was either now or the bullet to his chest. I had a pulsing headache. ‘Listen, mamu,’ I said to the guard, who was now investigating his left ear with a pencil stub. ‘Tell Paritosh Shah I came to do business, not to stand out here and smell his latrine.’
    â€˜What?’ The pencil came out. ‘What?’
    â€˜Tell Paritosh Shah I’m gone. Gone elsewhere. His loss.’
    â€˜Wait, wait.’ The old man leaned back and pointed his moustachios through the doorway. ‘Badriya, come and see what this fellow is saying.’
    Badriya came, and he was younger by much, and very tall, a quiet-moving muscle-builder, with a deliberate padding way about him in his bare feet. He stood in the doorway with his arms hanging away from his chest, and I was sure he had a weapon tucked away in the small of his back, under the black bush-shirt. ‘Is there a problem?’
    It was a challenge, no question about it, and the man was blank-faced and hard, but I was riding now on the thin-drawn craziness of the moment, on the exhaustion from the long day and the bracing leap of anger. ‘Yes, problem,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of waiting for your maderchod Paritosh Shah.’
    The old man bristled and started to climb down from his stool, but Badriya spoke quietly. ‘He’s a busy man.’
    â€˜So am I.’
    â€˜Are you?’
    â€˜I am.’
    And that was all it took. The guard had panic in his shoulders. His grip on the shotgun was clumsy, far up the stock, and