Recap / Sacred Games Episode 1 Ashwathama

Do you believe in God? God doesn't give a fuck.

A dog falls from the top of a building, scaring a group of schoolgirls. The scene then shifts to a woman, crawling and shot in the stomach, trying to drag herself away from a man walking up to her with a pistol in hand. Realising her fate, she turns and mocks him:

Yes, I also knew how they fucked you over for twenty years.

She laughs, stopped only by a bullet to the head. As the man walks back to his computer and sets up an anonymous call, he starts to narrate his story.

Sometimes I feel like I am God. It is my story, everyone else is playing their part in it. It is my job to connect all of them together.

The call is made to a phone in a room where, another man, Uzis akimbo, is shooting his way through a room, with only one man able to hide. The shooter finds a survivor asking him about a 'consignment', to which he receives a name - Bunty - but nothing else. Not receiving a reply to the call, the caller makes another call, this time to Bunty, and says that he wants to contact Sartaj right now. As we go into the intro, the narrator says:

I don't know how this world began, but I do know how it will end.

'Sartaj' is Constable Sartaj Singh, a policeman in Mumbai, currently staring at a corpse of a man while his partner, Katekar, holds back the crowd. As they drive away with the body, Katekar reminds Sartaj of the hearing he has to attend in order to not incur the wrath of Parulkar, the District Commissioner of Police, and suggests that he simply say what Parulkar wants him to say.

The hearing is an enquiry into the death of Junaid, a young man who was shot by Parulkar. The story as told by Parulkar's toady Majid to the hearing board, that Junaid shot at a policeman and point his gun towards Parulkar before being shot, disgusts Sartaj enough that he storms out of the room. This sign of rebellion earns him a beating up by Majid and a taunt from Parulkar about Sartaj's ex-wife Megha, who left him and is now engaged to another man, before he is ordered to go home.

As Sartaj and Katekar hang out at the local bar, girls dancing around them, Sartaj tells the story of how his father, Dilbagh Singh, was a man so dutiful he cancelled a family trip to the Golden Temple so that he could take a beggar child who had been run over by a car to the hospital, and also the real story of Junaid's killing - that Parulkar shot an unarmed, surrendering Junaid as Sartaj watched (Katekar retorts that the enquiry commission is in Parulkar's pocket, and that it wouldn't matter what Sartaj would say).

Finally Sartaj goes home, once the loving home of a married couple, now the lone abode which doesn't even seem to have running water.