Chapter One
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 had 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.’
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Sacred Games
by Vikram Chandra
Copyright © 2007 by Vikram Chandra.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperCollins
Copyright © 2007
Vikram Chandra
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-113035-9
