“What?”
“I’m only joking,” she said. And they held hands and she said nothing and this had been a kind of promise.
________
Months passed. The possibility of returning grew bleaker and bleaker. He saw that his life was over, his happiest moments were behind him, and that he had lived those moments unthinkingly, so consumed and fired by thoughts of the future he hadn’t even been aware of how happy he was.
Then one day he heard from Mansoor that Tara had left for the U.S.
That day he went to meet Zunaid.
________
Zunaid was a local fixer and thug, known to have ties with gangs, and Ayub came up to him in an alley late at night. In the distance, a Maruti van lay twisted in an open sewer trying to rev itself out. Two men helped push the awkward cockroach of a vehicle.
“Ustad, how many years it’s been!” Zunaid said. “Tell me, how can I help you?” He was a big man in an impeccable kurta.
“I want to buy a gun,” Ayub told Zunaid after some preliminaries. “We have a big monkey problem in the field. They come and tear our plants every afternoon. We’ve tried to use a spade and a scarecrow, but nothing works. I thought using a pistol might help.”
“A pistol, is it?” Zunaid gauged Ayub’s face. Ayub had been one of the golden boys of the town, with a legendary academic record, and Zunaid was curious about this shift. “You sure you don’t want me to do it for you?”
“Monkeys multiply very fast.”
“I see.” Zunaid paused. “Eight hundred rupees.”
“Five hundred.”
“Very good, boss.”
________
A few days later, when Zunaid brought Ayub the pistol, Ayub said, “What is this nonsense? Are you sure this won’t explode in my face? This is the sort of gun the student union leaders carry in Shibli. One lost his hand shooting this kind of gun.” It looked like a tin imitation of a pistol, the metal corrupted by holes. It had a handle ripped from a cooking knife and a barrel fashioned from the steering shaft of a rickshaw. The nails on its sides were poking out.
Zunaid explained patiently, pedantically, why it worked well regardless.
“Come, let’s go try it,” Ayub said.
In a field, Ayub took a long lead bullet from Zunaid, slid it into a hole at the back of the pistol, rocked back on his heels, and took aim at an old family-planning advertisement up along the road that ran into the town. “Shit!” he shouted, dropping the overheated weapon.
Zunaid looked at Ayub and marveled at how gaunt he seemed, how ringed his eyes were. Then he sighed, took the gun back from Ayub, and, while explaining its qualities, shot within the inverted red triangle of the family-planning sign. “You just have to practice,” he said. “Can you tell me what you need it for? If you’re trying to kill someone it’s better if you hire one of our sharpshooters. Doing it yourself will only lead to trouble.” As he spoke he was proud that he might be spotted with Ayub, and he went on. “For you, bhai, because I respect and admire you, I’d even give you a special rate.” When Ayub said nothing, strange tears came to Zunaid’s eyes and he said, “We’d even do it for free.”
Ayub—standing in the field, with this man, days from Delhi, the country vast and unbending around him, the bullet in the gun small, the heart of the man he wished to kill even smaller—was overcome with despair. It was the kind of despair he felt often in Azamgarh when he walked through the alleys at night or watched the burqa-clad women cower in their homes or when he fell out of step with the pleasant mood of manual labor.
He told the pesky gang member he didn’t need his help, paid him five hundred rupees, and left with the pistol tucked rakishly into his trousers.
Ayub now began practicing—first with bottles and then with pieces of wood, dead plants, mongooses, stray dogs. His aim got better; he grasped the wayward path of the shotgun bullet. He often chewed tobacco when he shot the pistol and sometimes swallowed an entire wad in excitement, experiencing a deep, watery high, the bullet magically standing still in its cape of smoke and the bottle exploding into shards moments later. There was no shortage of things to shoot in Azamgarh. It was a town made of trash.
As his aim got better, he laughed his high-pitched laugh. His parents, who were going blind from diabetes, groped around in the single room of the hut, worrying, not saying anything.
But at night, when he lay on his bed with the pistol under his charpai, praying that no one would break into the house and force him to use it, he was fearful of what was in store for him if he actually went ahead with his plan, of the torture he’d be subjected to, the years in prison, the electrocutions and head dunkings—also, the almost certain failure. But there would be one difference. Whereas other people who had tried to assassinate political figures or planted bombs escaped after the deed was done, leaving innocent Muslims to bear the brunt of the police’s fury and oppression, he would turn himself in. This was the biggest incentive for taking matters into his own hands. No matter what, then, prison lay in store for him. (He could also kill himself after committing the crime, but this would lead to the same outcome as escaping; no one trusts a suicide note by a nobody.)
Funny, to be confronted with prison after years of working with inmates, of learning the full horrors of the system—but wasn’t this always the case with things you got to know too well, even if you feared them? He knew the power of visualization. Most people never go to prison because they never think of it. Whereas he had thought so much about prison, about the state of inmates, that his ending up there had a whiff of inevitability. Would Tara come to visit him if he were behind bars? Would that reignite her interest in him? Romances conducted from jail were common, and Tara had always romanticized inmates, people cast down into complete helplessness, people so disenfranchised that they had a certain dignity and directness.
In his sleep, he imagined a long trial following his arrest, Tara getting him out of jail; he imagined being vindicated for killing Modi when the man was officially recognized as a war criminal by the International Court at The Hague; he imagined books being written about his heroism, his humble background, his idealism, the world he carried within him, the dozen rooms he’d occupied in different parts of India, his photogenic handsomeness, the dignity with which he endured the indignities of jail.
The distance between these dreams and his ambitions was revealed to him when he shot his shoddy little gun and wiped it with a towel in the evenings. To kill Modi, it was necessary to aim from within a crowd, with people around you, and then through the phalanx of bodyguards that spread on either side of him like the multiveined hood of a snake—he had seen Modi’s setup during his Gaurav Yatra rally in Delhi.
How could he—a small person, in a ruined place, with a gun fashioned from throwaway parts, the rusted infrastructure of the town—succeed?
In May, he took a train to Delhi on the pretext of finding a job. In the cramped compartment, as he bent his neck to read a copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, a commotion started up. An old man with powerful jaws was demanding a magazine from a bearded student. When the student said, “Let me finish,” the old man started swearing. “You pigs! Fucking Muslims!” The student finally gave up and handed the magazine to the old geezer. But when the old man flipped through it, he snapped again, “This is in English!” and threw it down. Ayub did not intervene. He was light-headed and tired and hungry, the pistol pressed against his hip like a piece of bone, and when he hopped off at Old Delhi Railway Station, he took a rickshaw and then a bus to a vast field full of people. Modi’s rally. Holding his breath, swaggering, he swam through the dam-burst of people: office men, peasants, women covering their eyes with free posters handed out at the entrance. Modi twinkled in the distance behind a stage. You could barely hear him. Nevertheless, Ayub lifted his head and stared at him, and imagined Modi staring back, and he felt something pass between them. He put his small, neat hands i
n his pockets. He couldn’t do it.
He had planned to meet Mansoor and his Peace For All friends if this mission failed, but he took the train back the next day in despair.
When he got to Azamgarh, he was trembling and twitching from his inaction, a wedge-shaped headache squeezing the top right corner of his skull. He wasn’t sure he could control his face—felt it might split away from him in a series of twitches. Perhaps, he thought, he had brought himself to the point of such stress that he would suffer another physical collapse, implode, experience something much worse than back pain—an aneurysm, maybe, a blood clot, one of those deadly killers that gathered evidence from the rest of your stressed body before detonating the whole sorry scaffolding.
When he ate a meal with his mother and father, he told himself he was seeing them for the last time. He clutched the pistol in his pocket; his eyes felt weak.
This sort of thinking continued for a few days, till he realized he was as incapable of killing himself as he was of killing Modi. Besides, he still loved Tara. He wrote her another letter and posted it to a friend in Benares, who, in turn, typed it and e-mailed it to her (Azamgarh still didn’t have an Internet cafe). Afterwards, he felt happy. Having Tara even once, for a short period, had been a great thing. He visited a prostitute, mastering his disgust by imagining he was making love to Tara, her sweet face turned up, the braid beside her like a watchful dangerous snake that he took in his mouth.
It was in this unstable, ecstatic, endorphin-soaked mood that he went to visit Zunaid.
________
Zunaid was playing cards in his house with friends when Ayub entered; he immediately put the cards down in embarrassment, treating Ayub with honor and respect. “Tell me, Ayub bhai, what brings you here?” Zunaid said, clearing space for him on the charpai, his lips wet with spittle, as usual.
“I wanted to talk to you alone,” Ayub said. “But there’s no rush; play your cards.”
“We can go back and talk.”
“I’d prefer if you all played,” Ayub said. “I’ve brought a paper. I’ll sit and read.”
“No, no, that’s too awkward, you just watching us,” Zunaid protested.
“Abe, play,” one of the men on the charpai said.
So they played and were soon lost in their cards. Whipping the newspaper to crispness (like women whipping clothes to open them out before hanging them on a clothesline), Ayub watched the faces and personalities of the four men in the room and admired their concentration, their ability to find peace, even happiness, in this tragic hellhole of a town. My mistake was to leave in the first place, he thought.
Later, Zunaid and he stood side by side taking a leisurely piss over the garbage dump behind the house. Ayub examined the brands of the wrappers in the garbage, their good fonts, the fine print—he thought of the craftsmanship that had gone into these wrappers and had a strong feeling that, despite all its problems, the country was progressing. The fact that Azamgarh received all the trash of the country was proof that it would someday receive other things as well, that it was not cut off. Someday the trash itself would be of such high value, so beautifully made, that this awful place wouldn’t need an economy at all.
“Are you good at keeping secrets, Zunaid bhai?” Ayub asked, tucking his dick back into his pants.
Zunaid said yes, he could keep secrets.
“You asked me why I wanted the gun,” Ayub said as they walked back. “It was a test. To see if you were trustworthy.”
Zunaid smiled, clearly pleased.
“And you were,” Ayub said. “I’m going to let you in on a secret.” He told him that he had been sent by a political party to recruit people to kill Modi and that he was looking for a team to carry it out. The payment would come from a rich man in Bhopal.
Ayub was dismayed to discover that Zunaid had no idea who Modi was. “Arre, yaar, not the tire company,” he said. “He killed thousands of Muslims in Gujarat.” He proceeded to describe Modi’s atrocities.
“We must take revenge on such a person,” Zunaid said, tears in his eyes. “For our own self-respect.”
“The problem is that he’s well guarded,” said Ayub.
“Don’t worry,” Zunaid said. “We have means.”
The two men talked for a while and then Ayub went home. He was light-headed from excitement, the heat, the wood fires at dusk, the mosquitoes, the angle at which the sunlight pushed dust motes into his room through a small window, making him think again of jail. Maybe the thing to do is to run away from Azamgarh right now, he thought. Before Zunaid tells the police. But the same strangling pleasant inertia, which had been his constant companion these past few months, took hold of him and the next day he returned to work at the farm. He was reminded, watching the farmers in the field, of the opening of his favorite novel, Raag Darbari, the first novel he’d read about his type of town, in which a man dressed in khadi hitches a ride on a truck on the way back to town and is mistaken for a CBI agent. Ayub felt that he too, with these conversations, had turned himself into an agent—an agent for an imaginary organization, yes, but one that, on the edge of this field, verging on madness, he could summon into existence just by thinking about it. And who was to say such an organization didn’t exist? There were thousands of groups trying to kill Modi—yes, one reason he had acted so quickly was because he was afraid of being beaten to it. Yet the presence of these groups gave him the confidence that this work would be completed—if not by him, then by someone else. There would be justice eventually. He didn’t feel alone. The field grew smaller. The branches of the trees seemed to reach out, brown and hard, carved with footholds. There are times in the day when every plant seems to breathe openly.
He had never hated anyone with the passion that he brought to his hatred of Modi. He’d often wondered why, tried to examine how this bearded fellow had infiltrated his imagination, and could only chalk it up to one thing: Modi’s arrogance. There had been so many killers in Indian history but none as unrepentant or shameless as this capitalist politician pig. None had operated in public view. And none seemed so above the law, so beloved by Hindus of all kinds—yes, he hated the Chief Minister because he represented the worst in Hindus, a belief in their own invincibility that always sprang up when they were doing well, making money hand over first, a belief that you could get away with anything if only you had money. Forget Modi: he hated money too, money of all kinds, stripes, and currencies. He hated what the country had become, a capitalist stooge of America. In his mind he carried an image of India’s pure precapitalist past: a water pump by a paddy field unreeling a stream of electrified water. Where this image had come from he didn’t know—he’d never actually seen it; all he’d seen was the trash of Azamgarh and the crush of Delhi, where all the garbage was generated. Still, the image was powerful, and Tara and he had discussed ways in which it could be achieved, how India could shake off the shackles of Western capitalism. But the economy was a large, inexorable machine. There seemed to be no way to turn it back. “Not till lots of people are miserable and poor,” she’d said.
“But the rich will never be miserable,” he’d said. “And they rule the country.”
Zunaid came and told Ayub that he had someone he wanted him to meet. It was Shockie.
CHAPTER 26
Shockie had been reluctant to meet Ayub; he had learned, from years of experience, that no one could be trusted when it came to the work of revolution.
So, when he met Ayub near Zunaid’s house, he asked Ayub basic questions about himself: his age, his birth place, his work background.
When he heard that Ayub had worked with inmates, people wrongly jailed for terrorist attacks, including the blast in 1996, he fell silent. “And you were doing this for free? Who was paying you?” Did Ayub know his friend Malik?
Ayub, meanwhile, was confused by Shockie. He must have been in his mid- or late thirties, but looked older: there were prominent worry l
ines on his forehead and something permanent-seeming about his small, black, tough mustache, as if it had been there from the beginning of time to assert his avuncular place in the world. His questions too, these worried, careful questions about money, were the questions of an uncle. Still, Ayub, who was used to being interviewed, said, “Sir, I worked for an NGO—they paid me. The condition in the jails is very bad, as you can imagine. There are no human rights.”
Shockie’s resolve, in the warm evening air, diminished. He’d waited so many years for news of Malik, for access to him—had even considered disguising himself and visiting him in jail—and now here was someone who had not only met Malik but also worked with him.
How would this fellow feel if he knew I was behind the blast? How would he respond? But this was the terrible thing about the profession—you could take credit for nothing. When blasts were mentioned, Shockie tried to clear his mind completely and respond with the mild shock of a civilian. He saw that he was on dangerous turf. “You will have to leave your family,” he said suddenly.
“Yes, sir.”
“No contact with your mother or father.” (He himself had never followed this rule, but that had been a different, less brutal time. The internationalization of terror, the increased scrutiny in the press, had changed everything.) “You can’t even know if they die. For you, they are dead from this moment.”
“Yes, sir,” Ayub said, surprised at how quickly the man’s tone had shifted, how he had gone from a harmless middle-aged uncle to a priest, delivering well-worn mantras and cleaning his nose occasionally by squeezing his nostrils with his fingers. He might have been stating the prayers for a marriage. There was something practical, nasal, and strict about it.
“You give up money, drinks, happiness. You give up everything. You’re ready for that?”
“Yes,” Ayub said.
Shockie paused, still testing him out. What was that expression on his face—that ready, watchful, but resigned expression?
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