The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

Her nipples were stiff against the white slip.

  I caught her finger and squeezed it till it hurt and she grimaced. Looking her in the eye, I said, ‘Bitch!’

  She said, ‘I should stop seeing you. In fact, would you please leave this very moment?’

  I said, ‘You whore! You have someone else coming in to make you happy?’

  She said, her pupils dilating, ‘Yes, but why should it concern you, you limp bastard!’

  I took her finger that I had caught in my hand and slowly pushed it between her thighs, parting the fat fish on her turquoise wrap. She resisted, hissing, ‘Stop it! Stop it, you bastard!’ Her finger was unbending in my hand and I guided it into her lushness, striking water on the surface and digging deeper. Her eyes were half-closed now. ‘Stop it, you dog,’ she hissed, more softly now. I said, ‘Saali randi! Always so open!’ She gave a loud moan and virtually squatted on my hand. I immediately unleashed a stream of Hindi invective. She spat back more. I picked her up and nailed her to the wall, and kept her there till her foul mouth had turned beautifully fruity, and she was whispering sweet love to me and beseeching me to stay buried in her for life, and beyond.

  She was free to save all my killers, present and future, if that’s what kept her thus.

  Guruji, truly, was not the master for nothing.

  6

  CHAAKU

  i

  The Son of Dakota

  In the first few years of his life, Chaaku saw so little of his father that he assumed he was his uncle. The man who was his uncle, his father’s younger brother, he took to be his father. It was done in the unconsidered way that children do these things. It’s not as if Chaaku began to call his uncle Pitaji; he continued to call him Chacha, and his own father—when he saw him—Pitaji, but he just assumed that Chacha meant father. In the first ten years of his life, he did not see his father for a total of more than three; Chacha was there almost every single day.

  Their village in Haryana lay several kilometres off the Grand Trunk Road and was named Keekarpur after the grove of thorny keekars on the sandy mound behind the hamlet. But they didn’t live in its untidy cluster of naked brick and mud houses. To reach their eight-acre plot you had to walk a full fifteen minutes through the fields and then ford an ankle-deep stream by balancing on a fallen tree trunk. When they had visitors from the town, the directions given were: Ask anyone in the village for Fauladi Fauji’s homestead, and after you’ve walked in the given direction for ten minutes and see only spiky fields of wheat and bajra all around you, you’ll spot two tall date palms crossed at the neck, as if hugging each other. That’s where the stream and the fallen tree across it lie. Step across it, and you’re home. The dogs bark angrily, but don’t bite.

  Chacha, like the date palms, was into perennial hugging. He greeted everyone with great slapping embraces, and always there was occasion to do so. Every week someone dropped in from near or far. The ones from close by, from Karnal and Kurukshetra and Pipli, stayed for a night or two; the ones from far off, from Amritsar and Gurdaspur, and occasionally from Delhi and Meerut, stayed on for weeks. Chaaku’s grandmother didn’t mind, nor did his uncle. He hugged everyone and cracked jokes with them; she cooked for them uncomplainingly, the chulha being set to fire from crack of dawn to late into the night.

  The moment guests showed up, extra charpoys were put out under the neem tree and glasses of tea started to circulate as family stories were told and retold, news exchanged and dissected. At some point an old pack of cards, held together with a red rubberband, was brought out and rounds of Sweep commenced. Four players, many divided supporters and much banter and abuse. Chaaku always hung close to his Chacha—reading the cards from over his shoulder—and learnt to play expertly by the time he was seven.

  At the time nobody called him Chaaku. His name was Tope Singh—a tribute to his father who was in the armoured corps of the Indian army. Each time the boy did something smart, especially helped win a trick at Sweep, his Chacha would say, ‘He is not just a tope, he is India’s hope!’ And someone else would say, ‘You have to admit, the tope may be small, but the bomb it fires is big!’ His prowess at Sweep gave him a place among the adults, and a grand idea of himself. He learnt early that all it took to impress big people was some quick sleight-of-hand, some dazzling moves, a disarming smile.

  While his Chacha presided over the Sweep tournaments—on days watching desperately for someone to ford the stream so that a game could begin—and his grandmother kept the food fires burning, his grandfather Fauladi Fauji sat by the fodder chopper outside the hay room, bubbling his hookah. Once in a while he cast a sidelong glance at the quiet frenzy under the neem tree, but almost never sent a word in its direction. On first arriving, when visitors dove for his feet, he simply grunted, ‘Is everything okay?’ or, ‘May you live long.’ After that, he exhibited no desire to speak to them, save sometimes after dinner, when he returned from a slow walk through the fields and drinking his nightly glass of boiling milk, called out sharply to one of the visiting males, ‘Come here, Sukha, and tell me how you’ve been wasting your life.’ And Sukha, jumping to it, would say, ‘Oh Fauladi Taiya, it’s the only degree I’ve managed to get in my life! Everything else has been a zero.’

  By then Sukha, forty years old, would have tried his earning hand at more than a dozen things. As a serial entrepreneur he’d have launched and closed shops selling electrical goods, household provisions, bicycle spare parts, textiles, sweetmeats, hardware, fruits and vegetables. He’d have taken a shot at dairy farming, rising before dawn to squat on his haunches and supervise the milking of his buffaloes. His foray into poultry farming would have ended in a spectacular failure that saw him and his friends eating up every single bird. There would be no bank in all of Ambala that had not extended him a loan; no self-employment scheme of the government of which he would not have availed. He would also have been a registered agent of the life insurance corporation; a link in many multilayered marketing chains, selling everything from home appliances to bits of gold. He would have played his part in many wild moneymaking schemes—lotteries, committees, jackpots—all of which would have ended in chaos and disgrace. In between, in periods of fallowness, he would have held jobs too—doing accounts at the local sugar mill, teaching in a school, supervising the truck movements for a local trader.

  But a job was always the last resort. Essentially, he’d have hated working for someone, earning a salary, steering by office hours. In spirit, he was an entrepreneur, a risk taker, the dreamer of fabulous dreams. ‘One doesn’t have to just eat! Even Bija does that!’ he would say, referring to the low-caste who worked on the farm, and now grinned, squatting near the charpoys, watching the game of Sweep. When urged to a job, he would say, ‘Nah bhai, I don’t want to spend my life listening to some lala’s recriminations. Did you put one spoon of sugar in your tea or two? Did the foreman wash his hands twice? Does he think the soap comes for free? Sack that Sharma, he took three days of leave last week. But, lalaji, his mother is old and dying—he had to take her to the hospital. So what? Do you think ours are young and flying! And is he a doctor that he needed to stay on there?’

  But Sukha, what about a government job, someone would urge. And Sukha would get up and stick out his buttocks and do a duck waddle around the charpoy. ‘Have you ever seen a government officer who doesn’t look like he’s walking around with a thick finger up his ass? The smart ones have their own finger up their hole, the fools have someone else’s. Well, I don’t want to put my finger up anyone’s ass, and I don’t want anyone’s up mine!’

  Sukha’s life, at forty, would be rich with experience and failure. Many of the young men who came to the farm across the stream were like him, freewheeling failed men, trying to chase and ride every new scheme and dream that caught the air. In their own way, creative men, playing the long shot, trying desperately to overturn the odds with one magical move. The thing Tope discovered about them was that they were not only the most interesting men, with the greatest fund of
stories and anecdotes, but that they were also the most happy.

  The ones who were dour and complaining were those who held steady jobs, drew secure salaries, and went to work on time and returned home by six every day. Their stories were always about some stupid family problems, some child’s illness, some scooter or house loan to be repaid, the travails of a hatchet-tongued wife, or a boss who didn’t let them off on time, some damn increment that was denied, but mostly about the impossibility of balancing the domestic monthly budget. These men either mourned ceaselessly or were sullen and bitter.

  In contrast the freewheelers like Sukha always came with a hilarious tale of a recently collapsed venture and the excitement of a freshly brewing one. They were always canvassing the others present into investing in their mad plans, and though they were always broke—sometimes dangerously in hock—they seemed to be having a good time.

  Once, for two weeks, Sukha came and hid out at the farm because there were creditors in Panipat looking out for him. He had taken twenty thousand rupees from two traders as an advance to secure them a gas agency. His commission of five thousand he had burnt on his friends and revelry, and passed on the remaining fifteen to the government middleman in the petroleum ministry in Delhi, who had promised to do the job. Well, the agency had gone to someone else; the middleman refused to see him any more; and the traders had sent their goons to collect. Hiding at the farm, Sukha had been a riot.

  He’d told little Tope, ‘Your father is a lance-naik, but I am appointing you a naik. Above him. Two stripes instead of his one. And his Vijayanta tank is nothing compared to the Neema tank I am giving you.’ And he lofted Tope into the crotch of the tree, and curling the thumb and forefinger of both his hands into tiny circles he put them against his eyes, and said, ‘Here, I’ve also given you the best binoculars in the world. Now keep an eye on the borders of our country, and if you see the enemy moving in our direction, fire a loud fart! It should strike terror into the enemy’s heart, and give us enough time to bring up reinforcements!’

  Then Chacha and Sukha would sit below, cross-legged on the charpoy, and play cards and swig the pale santri. Every now and then he would look up and holler, ‘I hope you haven’t gone to sleep in your tank? I haven’t heard a fart in a long time!’ Immediately Tope would mimic one by blowing hard into the back of his hand.

  Sukha was slim as a bamboo. His thick hair fell to his ears and his face always sported a light stubble. He wore pointed Patiala juttis on his feet and smart bush shirts with small stiff collars. He had friends in the university campus in Chandigarh and he told many stories about their lifestyle. While Tope manoeuvred the Neema tank and scanned the borders with his binoculars, Sukha, on the charpoy below, gave graphic accounts of the boozing, the parties, the motorcycles, and the amazing girls. He described how stunningly beautiful the girls were and how brazen the clothes they wore—the tight trousers, the red lipstick, the open collar shirts—as Chacha made sounds of disbelief. Tope’s hands grew clammy on the steering of the Neema as he heard how the girls visited the rooms of the boys and willingly did things that could barely be imagined to be true. Chacha clearly too was sceptical. Like a police detective, he asked intricate questions, details of physical features, postures, what was said, done. Like the finest of investigators, he asked for everything to be described to him again and again. Sukha spared no detail. Tope went faint and feverish by turn, even taking his hands off the tank to clutch himself. Often he felt he would simply explode, taking the magnificent Neema with him. Each time Sukha finished an account, Chacha waved his thin arms and shouted, ‘Behanchod, fuck off from here! You are going to make me go mad!’ And Sukha, scraping his stubble with his fingers would say, ‘Wait till I tell you what we did with Ruby of the big-big booby!’

  Occasionally someone not immediately recognizable was spotted crossing the stream. Sukha then rushed into the small mud room at the back where the grain was stored. The room had no windows but some light seeped in from under the eaves and from the chinks in the thatch. Tope brought in a hurricane lamp and Sukha and he sat on the cool golden heap of winnowed wheat—digging out comfortable seats for themselves—and played Sweep. It was here that Sukha first showed him his flick-knife. He said it was a Rampuria. It had a handle of wood with three visible screws and a four-inch blade, bevelled in two surfaces and curved to a hard sharp point. The catch was in brass, easily worked with the tip of the thumb. Tope was allowed to hold it, open it, close it, run his fingertips along its gleaming steel. He even tested it against his skin, without breaking it. Sukha said the four-inch was better than the six-inch—that is, if you were looking for efficiency not exhibition. The short blade, with an equally matched handle, gave better leverage when you cut hard or dug.

  Tope asked him if he had ever knifed anyone. Sukha smiled and said, ‘What do you think?’ Tope asked, how many. Sukha opened both his hands, closed them, and then opened four fingers of the right. It was late afternoon, and the light in the small mud room was a peculiar mix of a weak sun leaking in from here and there and the small pool of yellow light created by the lamp. The room was set too far back in the house for the voices of the visitor and Chacha to reach them, but there was the continual scurrying of animal feet in the thatch above. Tope looked at Sukha’s face in the mixed light, and it was not smiling. He said, ‘Fourteen?’

  Sukha nodded.

  He said, ‘Killed?’

  Sukha lifted the forefinger of his right hand.

  Tope said, ‘The rest got away?’

  Sukha said, ‘Oyee Tantia Tope, I am not a killer! That one was also a mistake. It was in the beginning, when I didn’t know how to handle this. A knife is a beautiful thing. It is not meant to kill—for that you have the pistol. A knife is meant to strike terror, to sow the memory of fear in your victim. A knife is a goldsmith’s instrument; a pistol is an ironmonger’s. A bullet can never give you the finesse, the precision of a blade. With a knife you can decide the exact punishment you want to mete out—cut a five-inch-long line, dig a two-inch-deep hole, chop one half of a finger, blunt the nose at the tip, dice the tongue in half, slice out one testicle, expand the size of an asshole, chop the ears into new shapes, draw a flower on the chest, a star on the cheek. You can do all these lovely things; and if the occasion really demands it, you can excavate the entrails, carve out the heart, plant a flag in the brain. With a pistol you can only do one thing: blow a hole in flesh. Pistols are used by butchers; artists use knives.’

  Little Tope was agog. He stared at Sukha’s handsome face in the shifting light as he delicately ran the open blade across his stubble. How strong and calm he was.

  Sukha said, ‘You want to see what good artists can do?’

  Tope nodded, lost for words.

  Sukha picked up the hurricane lamp with his left hand and bringing it close to himself pulled his shirt up to his chin. His face vanished into the dark, and in the pool of yellow light a flower of knotted flesh appeared on Sukha’s chest. The artist had drawn the flower like a child. Six petals around the heart of the flower which was Sukha’s left nipple. Sukha said, ‘Four of them held me down, while he drew. I screamed enough to have burst the lord’s eardrums, but the artist’s hand did not shake for an instant. See how beautifully he’s made it. Can you ever do that with a pistol? Each time I take off my clothes, each time I have a bath, each time I run my hands over my body, I remember that artist, I remember his helpers, I remember the mad pain that made me want to die. That is the power of the artist—he is always remembered. No butcher ever is.’

  Then Sukha showed Tope his other exhibits of flesh art. A thick rope climbing from the inside of his right thigh to his groin; a little pink-red motte on his left shoulder; and then, turning around, a supremely surreal second spinal cord next to his first.

  Tope said, ‘Did it pain a lot?’

  Sukha said, ‘You must never think of the pain. If you think of the pain you got, then you can never give it. If you fear getting pain, you will fear giving it. What do our
elders always tell us—don’t think, just do. If you think too much then you lose the ability to do. But our elders are wrong when they say, always act with a cool mind. Different situations demand different responses. Sometimes you have to carve beauty, and sometimes you have to repel ugliness. Sometimes the odds are stacked against you, and what you need in the fight is not coolness but madness. You must pump the rage up from the bottom of your stomach, it must scream through you, it must take you beyond all considerations of pain. The knife must become an extension of your arm; it must cut, slice, dig with a fury born in hell. You must become a dervish. At such a time there should be nothing calm in your head or body. I have seen a five-foot mosquito set four big men to fleeing because his fury was bigger than all of them. When you work with a knife you need both skill and courage. No weak man can put a knife into human flesh. I tell you, there are men who cannot even stick it into a live chicken! When you work with a knife you have to be both—artist and madman. And you know, actually, they are the same thing.’

  Tope blanched. He knew how he himself recoiled each time his Chacha trapped a chicken between his feet and decapitated it; how he averted his eyes when the blood spurted and the chicken flopped about looking for its missing head. Even the defeathering and skinning repelled him. Only when it was washed and clean, the pink flesh succulent and soulless, would he begin to feel good about it.

  By now they had sunk deep into the mound of golden grain, and Sukha was scooping the cool wheat and running it through his fingers, and pouring it over his forearms and legs, his lungi pulled up to his thighs. Tope was playing with the Rampuria, testing its spring, feeling its blade, trying to grip it in different ways, for an underhand drive, for an overhead stab, for a roundhouse slash.

  Sukha said, ‘Well done! You are learning.’

  Tope said, ‘I want to learn,’ shredding the air ruthlessly.