One shadow was forever talking about a former minister for communications who lavished his staff with foreign whiskies and non-vegetarian banquets. Sitting slumped in the backseat while I drove, hands on his belly, he would say, ‘Never have I seen such plump chickens, never—god knows where he got them from! We were not guarding him, we were attending an unending wedding feast! Never have I swallowed so many digestive pills! What a good man he was!’
Wristwatches, wall clocks, clothes, mobile phones, boxes of mithai and dry fruit, pens, kitchenware, crockery, cutlery, calendars, music cassettes, movie tickets, cricket bats, framed photographs, even fresh vegetables and sacks of grain—these offerings, it seems, would continually fill the front room of his Lutyens’ bungalow, and from there flow to the staff. The shadow may not have been exaggerating. The minister, charming and eloquent—a modern, techno-savvy man, three mobiles in hand, data crunchers working computers in his backroom around the clock—had a reputation for making his millions but also for his generosity.
The minister had built a makeshift air-conditioned gym on the grounds of his sprawling government house, and was sometimes seen on TV giving panting sound bytes from an angled treadmill. Generously, the staff too was allowed to embrace the Nautilus, and when the minister went to five-star hotels and did his business—of money and pleasure—his entourage ate at glittering coffee shops where the opulence of the marble humbled the mind, the names of the dishes twisted the tongue, and the desserts were works of art to be admired. In contrast, there was the tiny overhang of the porch at my house, a splintering cane chair, a folding bed propped against the wall, and tea and glucose biscuits three times a day.
Unlike Vijyant, belly and phlegm felt no awe for moral lustre. Like Hathi Ram they had been cops long enough to acquire the skills of a bahurupiya, to wear the face the man in front demanded. With me they were simply Billi Rams, cool cats, neither aggressive nor deferential, just aloof and uninterested. Any curiosity they may have had about me, from following the news, was quickly exhausted seeing my small house, battered car, mean life, and desultory office.
Basically, they were fools. Complete idiots. Of the strain that had made us vassals for hundreds of years—vassals of dumb royals and ruthless white men. More than fifty years of freedom and democracy had changed nothing. Anyone with a loud voice and sharp clothes could have these mahaphuddus on their knees—the vassal gene was instantly triggered by the vaguest hint of power or money. Those were the two great attributes that awed them. And to a lesser, and lessening, extent, language—if you had some English you could potentially wreak terror.
In school in the early seventies I had seen my football coach, Rashidmian, give the perfect demonstration of this on a train to Gorakhpur. When the ticket checker, a bird-like man in a frayed black coat, came by to check the tickets of which we were three short, Rashidmian, tall, fair, with faded brown hair, launched into the English alphabet at such rattling speed that the clacking of the passenger train was drowned out. Abcdefghijklmno … he went without breaking for breath, and then repeated it swiftly three times in different rhythms and intonations, singsong, staccato, guttural. The iron wheels clacked, the train shook, the boys gawped, and the dazzled checker left without tallying the count.
Mahaphuddus, that’s what we were.
So I treated them as such. Giving them no explanations of my life or plans, not letting them know how long I would be in any place, when I would be leaving, when coming back. At any time of day or night I would walk out and they had to be there ready and waiting to move. When they asked me for permission to go off to eat, I just nodded, and let them interpret it any way they wished. A couple of times I emerged from a meeting to find my shadow missing—and just left. Later, belly and phlegm fretted about how foolish it was to have left alone, unprotected, and how I was putting their jobs on the line. I gave them my face of steel. It was their job to watch out for me, not mine for them. They could try to hold in their piss and hunger for eight hours.
Several people told me to be careful: that the shadows had actually been planted not for my protection but to spy on me. Information of my life and movements was being funnelled straight back to the Intelligence Bureau, and from there to the highest echelons of government. In thick-walled rooms, under pools of yellow lamplight, grim men in grey suits were decoding the significance of my eating a burger all alone at McDonald’s.
At the office, Jai, my partner, a bearded bleeding heart—who saw a conspiracy in every step of the state, and spent his evenings in some expensive living-room slitting his wrists over some banal people’s issue—my partner Jai said, ‘They are just preparing a big dossier on you before they plant something on you to fix you.’
I said, ‘What?’ The American McBurger.
He plucked at his thick black beard and said, ‘Let’s not be naïve. These guys are capable of anything—could be heroin, cocaine, fuck knows what. You visit a place three times—one, two, three; the fourth time you come out and under your car seat, a pouch of white powder. They stop you at a naka, put their hands under three seats, one, two, three, and then under the fourth, and there it is! Ponds talcum powder! Straight up your nose!’
He was enjoying himself.
He said, ‘And now, from being mister investigative you are mister drug dealer—or at best, mister drug user. On every channel, in every newspaper, in every office. Now go hoarse trying to say you know nothing! Try brushing off every fleck of the talcum! Of course you will, eventually, but by then ten years of your life would be over, and the whole circus would have moved on a long time back, with no interest whatsoever in your innocence! They kill by the sword anyone who dares live by the sword!’
We were sitting in his room, right next to mine. The gold on the laburnum was now totally gone, the trees branches scraggly, with no hint at all of their dazzling potential. The sky was low and painted in heavy colours of grey and was leaking rain in stop-and-start dribbles. It was a peculiar monsoon, refusing to open up, hovering overhead, teasing with thin fleeting showers, sudden charcoal darkenings and occasional overtures of light thunder. Looking up, Sippy would say, ‘His balls have swollen up—He can’t piss properly and He’s complaining.’
From inside the room, through the clear glass window, after the hammering white heat of so many weeks, the day seemed cool and dark, full of poetic allure. But outside, without the air-conditioning, it was muggy and clammy, a wretched waiting.
Jai was now intense and angry—a convincing performance, it had served us well in many a sticky situation. He said, ‘Okay, tell me, do you know why they are guarding you? Who is it who wanted to kill you? Why does anyone want to kill you? You only know what they are telling you. Why have you suddenly become so believing of them? So far all we’ve done is to trade charges and accusations with them! Accused them of lies, perjury, unconstitutional conduct, vendetta. And they’ve repaid the compliment. How come they are suddenly so concerned with your well-being?’
I said, ‘The talcum powder.’
He said, ‘Fuck off, maaderchod!’
I put my arm around him and gave him a full smile and a half-hug.
It’s true that the shadows had a thick fold-over log book, a sort of police diary with a maroon cloth cover and stitched sheets. And it’s true I had often caught them, at all hours of the day, making painstaking entries in it. And it’s also true that they hurriedly shut it and jumped up each time I appeared. But unless they were really working their imagination, there was nothing to write.
Office, home, sports club, lawyers, restaurants, movie hall, Sara. That was the universe. Nothing to report back on; not the best of places to credibly sprinkle the talcum. The only spot in the universe that had bothered me initially was Sara’s flat. I tried to give them the dodge the first few times I went to her place but that got them quite agitated, and I didn’t want them alerting the police control room to track me down, sirens singing, to the boxy colourless building where I lay naked and fevered, in a paroxysm of Hindi abuse,
in front of the humming Napoleon.
So I would take them along and let them rot under the sucked brown trees, imagining whatever they could. Sara stood on her toes to peep at them from the tiny window high in her bathroom, and said, ‘They don’t look as if they can protect you against anything. That one looks like the fat lala of my old college canteen!’
I looked at her unequal body, the promise of her fullness, and said, ‘The Indian police wages war by deception. This man is nothing short of a real cool killer.’
I stood behind her, her fullness soft against my thighs, her frizzy hair smelling of some fruity shampoo under my chin, her photo shoulders in my hands, and followed her gaze. The real cool killer sat at the edge of the parking lot under a dusty papri tree in leather chappals, his bush shirt buttons open till the waist, fanning himself with a magazine in his right hand, the forefinger of his left stuck deep in his ear.
She said, moving her fullness against my thighs, ‘Meditating?’
I said, ‘The methods of the Indian police are deadly and inscrutable.’
Well, the inscrutable part was true. Weeks went by and no one came to tell me what was really happening, what it was all about. The shadows claimed to know nothing, and even if they did, it was unlikely to be anything beyond their basic duties. SI Hathi Ram had not shown up again after the first two visits. I refrained from calling him, though he had left his mobile number with me, or from making any other inquiries. I felt, instinctively, that this was some kind of game. To show the anxiety of Jai and the others would be to concede it. We were still in the preliminaries, the warm-up stage, limbering up, circling each other, watching the moves, trying to read apprehension and uncertainty in the other. The intensity of the real bout would depend on how well we sized up each other’s attitudes and ability.
In my life I had learnt a few things about power. I knew, for one, that it fed off fear. Grand power is about control; but petty power is only about fear. At the village I had always seen my uncles thrash underlings, and the one with the most cringe got it extra. There was one, Ghoda, a low-caste, a big enough fellow who would start shrinking into a small fist the moment one of my uncles began to move in on him, and well before the first blow landed he’d let out a piercing whine. ‘Hai they’ve killed my mother! Hai they’re going to murder me today! Hai somebody save a poor man! Hai cruel lord why was I ever born!’
So loud, so piercing, were his wails that everyone working the spreading fields would know the show was about to begin. Ghoda screamed hysterically through his beatings, begging for mercy, begging forgiveness, summoning mother, god, justice, fate. No pain could have created such lament: it sprang from abject fear. And everyone enjoyed thrashing him, even my fifteen-year-old uncle, and most times the bashing only stopped when their arms were spent.
It was not unusual for them, sitting around on their charpoys under the shisham tree in the front yard, getting bored, to suddenly say, to entertain themselves, or a visitor, ‘Want to see the circus? Ghode da gana? The horse who sings!’ The low-caste would start to shriek from the moment he was summoned. The terror in his eyes would excite everyone. One of my uncles would look at the visitor—at us—and say, ‘Ever heard such wonderful singing in the city? On your Bush radio? Now listen to the fantastic tunes our local Radio Ghoda produces!’ And with fist and foot, stick and stump, they would fall upon him.
The cops, I knew from my years at work, were pretty much the same, all purveyors of petty power. They needed their daily diet of fear. They woke every morning deflated dolls, and as the day wore on, filled themselves to fullness and more by drinking in dread. There was no cop I had known who felt more complete than in the presence of the helpless. At such a moment, most of them became whole and complete to the point of being cinematic, speaking with a sense of drama, intuitively aware that an unequal relationship creates a stage that demands theatre.
I knew if anyone—from the lowly shadows to the dizzy heights of the great state—if anyone detected fear in my eyes they would become ravenous. For, through the centuries, we had not only been mahaphuddus when vassals, but also had a track record for being barbaric mahaphuddus when in control.
So I asked nothing and was told nothing, and the weeks rolled by, and the shadows came and went, with an occasional face changing and transiting through my life namelessly.
I was hard at work performing my fortnightly duty when Felicia knocked on the door. The room was dark, the lights off, the thick curtains drawn. I preferred it that way, it made it less difficult for me. But before I could move, Dolly—that’s what her family called her though on our wedding card she was Sangeeta—Dolly held my shoulders, and stopped me from getting up.
It was Saturday morning and Dolly’s school was closed and she had reached for me as I slept, unknotting my pajama, cuddling up against me. Now her long blue nightie, with tiny flying golden cherubs, was pulled up around her breasts and my pajama was around my knees and I was labouring. She had her slim athletic legs wrapped tight around my middle, keeping me in place as I floundered in her swamp of wanting, struggling to be man enough to stay there. My face was buried in her neck, under her short straight hair where it was bristly as a boy’s, and turned away as far from her mouth as possible. She was panting and moaning, occasionally calling my name. I had my eyes shut tight—and Sara on her knees—as I tried hard to not die in the swamp before Dolly was delivered. I was already losing the battle, wilting, despite Sara’s pungent ripeness, when Felicia knocked. I reached for the opportunity, but Dolly held me back in desperation, flexing her wrapped limbs frantically. Her seeking need made it worse. I tried to imagine the hard wet grasp of Sara’s reluctance, her maddening mix of hauteur and desire. And then Felicia knocked again, and that was it. I stopped trying and Dolly too went still.
We were both coated in sweat.
Without rolling off her, I shouted, ‘Yes?’
In her diffident tribal accent Felicia said, ‘One Huthyam has come to see you.’
I patted Dolly’s damp forehead and got up, knotting my fallen pajama. When I switched on the bedside lamp she turned over on her side, her cherub nightie still around her dipping waist, her fair slim legs curled up, the dark line of her ass sharp and straight, the yellow light catching the wet shine on it. I threw the sheet over her, straightened my kurta, patted my hair in place, and opened the door.
Coal-dark Felicia, rancid with the sweat pouring out of her body, was waiting right outside. She scuttled away, trailing a broom in her hand. She was terrified of me. We had never exchanged a full sentence.
Huthyam was sitting in the study, in his pointed black shoes and loose bush shirt, caressing The Naked Lunch. He had been to the barber recently, for the grey hair was spiky like a mowed lawn and the bushy moustache gleaming black with dye. The pudgy avuncular face was smiling; the eyes hard and still.
He gave me a limp hand and said, in his low voice, ‘Saturday is for the wife and the family and I am sorry to bother you, but you know for the police there is no Saturday or Sunday, no holi or diwali, no winter or summer, no day or night, no wrong or right, no mother or father, no wife or girlfriend.’
I said, ‘Hathi Ramji, you all do great service to the nation.’
He said, ‘Please sir, please don’t mock us! We all know how much water there is in this milk. In fact, the whole world knows. No one trusts the police, no one likes the police. And it is true, were we not such eunuchs the very look of this country would change. But we have to just do what we are told to do. We are meant to serve the people, but those above us decide how we have to serve them. Sometimes when we are working over a misguided boy in the thana and he is screaming too much, we tell him, “Maaderchod, keep quiet, just remember we are serving you, be grateful.” We do what we are told. We cannot ask why. If we start asking why, there will be a mountain of whys and no police. And that would be worse. Some milk in the water is better than none. At least there is the illusion of it. In our poor houses they put two spoons of milk in a glass of water a
nd the child drinks it as milk and is happy. We are a poor country, and we have to feed ourselves illusions when there is no milk. Don’t be harsh on us. We are only one of our great country’s many illusions. Arre sir, if you look around you’ll see that all of us are basically just merchants of fantasies. Khyali pulao, sut-sut ke khao.’
He said all this without a single inflection, in his low even voice, slapping the two halves of the orange-cream biscuit together like a pair of cymbals, providing accompaniment. Such equanimity could come only from a long and intimate association with violence and injustice. I had seen it only in veteran cops, perhaps doctors and dictators have it too. A meditative calm about the nature of the world, far removed from the exhorting moralities of textbooks and art and media and religion. A zone of functionality not inclined to agitate over the death of the body, not inclined to exalt the body’s sacredness. Men died, evil was done, wrong was often—fairly or unfairly—right, and there was nothing to breast-beat about. You could spend your life thinking about it, or deal with it. In fact, even as one spoke, there was more death and chaos storming in through the door. Flood, earthquake, rape, murder, arson, bomb blasts, calamity, germ, terror. So you set aside the ululations, and simply did your job and went home, and sometimes if you had to work on Saturday, you just got out and did it, banging biscuit halves like cymbals and caressing The Naked Lunch.
Huthyam said, ‘You are very safe.’
I nodded.
He said, ‘People like you are very important for the country. It is our job to make sure not a hair on your body is harmed. You are very safe.’
I nodded and waited.
He said, ‘We are going to make you even safer.’
I said, ‘What’s happened?’
He said, ‘All is well, no problems. But we are just increasing your security to the next level.’
The Story of My Assassins Page 4
