The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  In no time at all, Chaaku became a part of his uncle’s trucking business. With every month his hours at St Green Meadows dwindled, and by the time March came around and he wrote his class ten exams he was primed for failure. Since fleeing the village he had learnt a million things; not one of them in the classroom. The maths paper was a disaster, the English worse.

  When the results were declared, his uncle asked, ‘You want to try again?’

  Chaaku said, ‘No.’

  At the yard he did not slide into the kind of work Chacha was doing, keeping logs and accounts. His Rampuria marked him out as different. To begin with he was put to travelling with the trucks, sitting high up in the cabin in front, understanding the rhythms of drivers and helpers, the metabolism of loadings, unloadings, tea breaks, diesel stops, sleep hours, and most importantly, dung heaps and collections. Shauki Mama instructed the boy to be both friendly and distant: his task was to learn all about the truckers who worked for them and ensure that every trucker feared him. To nudge matters along, the businessman referred to his nephew only as Chaaku in public. The nephew was also obliquely encouraged to cut open some skin at the earliest so that the legend was suitably amplified. This Chaaku soon did, and more. In time he became Shauki Mama’s sword arm, the man sent to make the petty collections that were falling into dispute. The bulge of the flick-knife was always visible in his trousers, and it was mostly enough to do the trick. Sometimes it had to be unveiled in its naked glory; and rarely, very rarely, was he required to play a small game of noughts and crosses on someone’s arm.

  By now the first lessons of Sukha and Bhupi had matured into a full education. Chaaku learned that almost all of the world lived in colossal and constant fear. Afraid of everything—the police, officials and courts, the thugs, criminals and mafia; afraid of the establishment and the anti-establishment; afraid of failure and of criticism, of being humiliated and of being mocked, of being ugly and of being bald; afraid of cockroaches and of cats, of the seas and the skies, of lightning and of electricity; afraid of priests and physicians; afraid of dying and of living. More than hope, people’s lives seemed to be defined by fear. Most hope, it seemed, was only about somehow being able to negotiate fears successfully. A tiny minority managed to cross the line of fear—of the police and courts and failure and censure and priests and cockroaches—and this tiny minority then became the shapers of the world in which the rest lived.

  This fearful world, Chaaku realized, was easily terrified by the mere shadow of a knife.

  Chaaku also now understood something even more important: that fear was not a line on the ground, it was only a line in the head. Inside everyone’s head. And if people were pushed too far they could sometimes walk over that line in the head and become formidable themselves. The idiot Bhupi, by shoving him one time too many, had sent him—Tope—over that line and paid a big price for it.

  It was then that Chaaku understood the lessons of the Gita he’d always heard bandied about: of fearlessness and action and the legitimacy of violence.

  In later life, Chaaku looked back at these years as his halcyon period. He owned a Yezdi motorcycle, whose emblem he had turned upside down to read ipzeh. It was full of adornments: extra horns, rear blinkers, leather satchel, faux fur seats, red wheel hubs, and above the headlight a small many-coloured plastic fan that whirred madly and kaleidoscopically when he drove. On lean days his friends and he rode up to Shimla, roaring around the mountain curves without helmets, denim jackets flapping open, guzzling up the cool air. They drank beer from the bottle and tossed the bottles down the ravines. They raced other bikes and cars, and waved at them in triumph. Occasionally they sang Hindi film songs at the top of their voices—songs about friendship and love and the melancholy mysteries of life. In Shimla they walked up and down the old colonial mall road, admiring the pretty women, joking about the honeymooning couples, licking ice creams, eating chicken curry with hot naan and raw onions.

  Shauki Mama encouraged these excursions. The last thing he wanted was a fearless knife-wielding nephew getting obsessed with his business. Shauki was not looking for an heir, just a competent bogey man. He need not have worried. Chaaku’s world view was not very different from that of his father or grandfather. Simple soldiers, splendid in the narrow frame—of obeying orders, exhibiting loyalty, displaying courage.

  Like a good army man, Chaaku would have soldiered on endlessly—making the dung heaps, riding the trucks, occasionally flicking the knife for collections—had the village not arrived at his doorstep one afternoon.

  It was winter and he was dozing on a charpoy at the back of the yard, in the sweet spot where the sun cut past the tamarind tree and the corrugated tin awning of the shed to create an oval pool of hot light. His lunch of tandoori parathas and lassi was heavy inside him, and he had pulled a coarse brown shawl over himself for additional snugness and to keep away the flies. The stop-and-start buzzing of the mechanical lathe as Bauna—the dwarf mechanic—retooled truck parts was a reassuring background sound. A crow had been cawing on the tree since morning. A few flung stones had seen him take off and circle right back. Bauna, his short muscular arms shining with oil and grease, his child’s pants a nondescript black-brown and tattered in a dozen places, had pronounced, ‘We are definitely getting visitors today.’ Driver Jassi, his long hair open after a bath under the handpump, had said, chewing lazily on a sugarcane stick, ‘Yes, of course, your future in-laws, to size you up. I am so happy you’ve come dressed for the occasion!’

  Chaaku was wading through a familiar dream. He was hiding in the burning fields on the farm by the embracing palms. The wheat field he was crouching in had not yet caught fire, but he could feel the growing heat as the orange line licked itself steadily towards him. The glow from the fields spread to the dark homestead where he could see armed figures moving about. He could hear his mother’s screams detonating from inside the house, and see his father and grandfather lashed to the neem tree, which had once been his tank. While Dakota Ram was raging, screaming and straining at the ropes, Fauladi Fauji was as ever unperturbed, calmly bubbling the hookah whose pipe had been left in his mouth. Men were staggering out from the house and washing their fat cocks in the rich gush of the handpump. Working the handle steadily, with a high-pitched mechanical creak, was Pappu. He had no fingers, and was pumping up and down with his palms. In the foreground, double-barrel in hand, strode Sardar Balbir Singh. His eyes were dark with fury, and he seemed bigger than ever before. In fact he appeared to be growing by the minute. Suddenly two men came up—tucking in their cocks—and began to urgently whisper to him. Chaaku wished his mother would stop screaming so he could hear what they were saying. Then one of them pointed to the field in which Chaaku was hiding. The sardar, now looming big as the neem tree, levelled the gun in his direction and bellowed, ‘Tope Singh!’

  For some reason, Chaaku did not jump off the charpoy and respond when he heard his name being called. The sun was scalding hot above him now and the rough shawl felt uncomfortable. The voices were coming from the front of the yard, just inside the main iron gate, near the makeshift room of naked brick in which the log of truck movements was entered.

  The voices were not familiar but something in their tone spelled a warning. Lifting his shawl a little, Chaaku squinted through the intervening clutter of trucks and makeshift rooms, the sun and the shadows. At this angle all he could discern were several legs and torsos, and the curve of swords in scabbards held in hands, two bamboo staves and the black steel of a double-barrel gun, pointing downwards.

  It was his name that saved him. Neither Jassi nor Bauna had heard of any Tope Singh. Nor of a village called Keekarpur, nor of Dakota Ram, nor of Fauladi Fauji. A voice, clearly of the man who had directed them to the yard, said, ‘They are lying. Of course the boy works here. I have seen him going in and out. He’s thin and short and has a fancy Yezdi motorcycle, with a whirling fan over its headlight.’ Bauna said, in his thin voice, ‘But that’s Chaaku!’ A commanding voice said
, ‘Chaaku! Maiovah Chaaku! That’s him! Phuddihondya Chaaku! Where’s he?’

  In five bounds, Chaaku had thrown off the blanket, put a foot on the water drum, and leapt on to the tin roof of the lean- to against the back wall that served as the yard toilet. Through the blood pounding in his ears, through the loud clang of the corrugated sheet, he heard voices shout, ‘There’s the fucking runt! Catch the bloody dog! Shoot the maaderchod!’ He vaulted over the wall of the yard and landed in a tumble on the hard earth, just missing the bushes but not the offal the men threw over the walls—used tea leaves, banana and orange peels, rancid food, empty packets and containers, oil-stained rags. The fall soiled his clothes and knocked the wind out of him, but he was up and running without a pause. Instinctively, as he rolled and stood up and ran, he felt for the Rampuria in his pocket and was reassured by its hard length.

  This was a suburb just being born, and most of the lots were still empty. Fertile fields—furrowed, fecund, fed by water channels—rolled away on one side, a stark reminder of modern India’s urban amoeba slowly sweeping over older vocations and older ways. Farmers suddenly with thick wads in their pockets but no soil under their feet forced to confront new realities, a life less dignified. In less than a generation an ancient way of existence would be gone, the rhythm of seasons dead, the logic of sky and water and the exploding seed lost, and they would all be petty pawns working the implacable engines of cities, feeding the fantasies of men who had somehow annexed the world by crunching numbers, not growing things or shaping lands or expounding ideas.

  Chaaku was pounding through the cabbage lines—like florid buttons on a sere shirt—heading for the square of sugarcane close by, which the truckers often raided. As the sparrows and mynahs scattered in front of him, he heard the sharp report of a rifle and voices shouting. Looking back without breaking his sprint, he saw several faces above the wall, standing on the tin roof of the lean-to. The barrel of a rifle was tracking him. He crouched low, breaking into a panicky zigzag. There was a second sharp report, then a loud expletive, ‘Maiovah, are you trying to kill the ground or the man!’ Flurries of birds had taken wing and were wheeling around.

  Just as Chaaku gained the sugarcane fields, he heard a soft thud and another expletive: ‘O behndiphudimari!’ One of the men had jumped and landed badly, and was struggling to his feet. The sardar with the gun was waving him on angrily from the wall and screaming. As he looked back a second man took the leap.

  Chaaku ran through the thicket of sugarcane as if it didn’t exist, the razor leaves opening up his skin everywhere. There was a small nullah on the other side, sluggish with unclean water, and then the road. He tried to leap over the nullah, fell short, into the dirty water, and came to his knees. In a flash he was out, and in the middle of the road, scaring down a young boy on an old Bajaj scooter. By the time the pursuers emerged from the sugarcane patch, the puttering scooter had gained a few hundred metres.

  This time the price was paid by his Chacha, Tattu, the mild, meek uncle who had been his protector, guardian, friend and tutor. Sardar Balbir Singh and his henchmen broke one radius, one ulna, two metatarsals, two metacarpals, one rib and one femur; they pulled out some hair from his chest and his pubes; they tested the elasticity of his sphincter with the tip of their bamboo lathis; and they squeezed his testicles by turns till his screams for mercy became high notes of pure gibberish. For his interventions, Bauna had two of his buck teeth pulled out with his own pliers. The sardar said, ‘How nice he looks now! Do you think we should also lengthen his legs?’ The skinny bhaiya from Bihar, Ram Bharose—who manned the gate, opening and shutting it, and cleaned the yard—was asked if he wanted some dental treatment too. When he gibbered, the sardar delivered a swinging kick between his buttocks that sent him sprawling to the floor where he lay whimpering and unmoving. Even as Chacha continued his testicular wail.

  Driver Jassi played it safe, cowering silently on his haunches by the tailgate of his truck—ok tata bye bye—keeping his eyes averted from all that was going on. When he was asked if he too would care to taste some village hospitality, he wordlessly clasped his hands and looked down at the ground. Later he would say, ‘Can there be bravery in committing suicide! Even Guru Gobind Singh had to take flight from Aurangzeb’s much bigger army, and then recoup! Would you like to live with your testicles in your pants or in a jar?’

  Shauki raged with a rare fury. But he did not go to the police. These were clan transactions, and uniforms and penal codes had no role to play in them. Something had once been done: retribution was inevitable. Chacha was sent to hospital and put in various plasters. But at least there was a definite upside for him. His account stood squared. Now he could go back to his village and the farm by the embracing palms.

  But Chaaku was still in the crosshair. The yard was no longer safe for the boy, nor was the Chandigarh suburb. And the pervasive militancy in the whole area meant that the sardar could always get someone else to do the job, maybe even the cops. The state was awash with vigilantes, terrorists, criminals, compromised policemen, spooks from various central agencies. Shauki’s trucks were commandeered by all sides all the time, and he had to skate the ice with great skill and trepidation to keep it from cracking. There was more illicit money and weaponry floating around in the Punjab than since the Anglo–Afghan and Anglo–Sikh wars. Anyone would break both his legs for a thousand rupees and put a bullet, or many, in him for less than ten thousand. But the boy was his nephew and the boy still had his uses.

  In less than a week of the attack in the yard, Shauki had loaded Chaaku, his gaudy motorcycle and his suitcase of belongings on to one of his trucks heading for Delhi.

  Five years of relentless terrorism—assassinations, bus massacres, Hindu killings, bomb explosions, cyclical extortions—had made the Punjab a fragile place to do business. Shauki had begun to hedge his bets, to transfer some resources to Delhi to try and set up a hub there. His son had been travelling by the Haryana Roadways buses, carrying cheap plastic bags in which bundles of soiled cash were buried amid clothes. This money was being funnelled into small properties: a two-bedroom second-floor flat in Punjabi Bagh and a shop in an upcoming market complex in Rohini, another wasteland suburb beginning to protrude out of Delhi.

  Built on a two-hundred-square-yard plot, the flat was dark and derelict, all sun and light cut off by the houses crowding it in. It had one bathing bathroom with a leaking brass tap, and one Indian-style crap cubicle with an old-style iron cistern strapped high on the wall with a dangling chain that activated with a heart-stopping clang. Each floor, counter and finish in the house was grey mosaic. Even with all the lights on it felt like a dungeon. All the window sills and grilles were daubed with bird droppings—mostly pigeon—and the bathroom slats had nesting sprouting from them like tufts of hair from an old man’s ears.

  Inside, the furnishings were cut-rate and rudimentary. Clunky wooden chairs, a couple of tables, and box double-beds in the rooms, capable of having their bellies prised open and locked after they had been stuffed with crumpled currency. There were only two adornments on the walls: a poster, slightly swollen with moisture, from an Indian girlie magazine, pasted above the mosaic line in the bathing toilet; and in the drawing-room a framed poster of a famous film actress playing the role of the goddess Santoshi Mata, with a garland of marigolds that had died weeks ago, the yellow petals dried to a dark crisp, strung around it.

  The larger bedroom was mostly kept locked and was exclusive to Shauki and his son. Chaaku was told to set up residence in the other. The room already had an inmate. He was called Mr Healthy, and he had been shipped out from Amritsar.

  Mr Healthy’s arms and legs were so thin they could be encircled with a thumb and index finger. His face was gaunt and his nose disproportionately long. His chest was less than the span of one hand. All of it was compensated for by the size of his dick. Even flaccid it hung to mid-thigh, thick as a wrist, and when erect it made his body seem like the appendage rather than the other way around. He wo
uld sit on his side of the bed, propped against the wall, painfully thin, naked but for his loose cloth underwear, reading the daily papers, his formidable cucumber peeping out. It was hard on the nerves.

  But it was not the size of his organ that brought Chaaku under his thrall. It was his razor-sharp mind. He could crunch numbers, he understood money, he understood politics, he could make all the connections, and he knew wonderful words with which he could express complex ideas. Mr Healthy talked about the murky roots of terrorism in Punjab, the impending doom of the Congress party, the Cold War convulsions between America and the Russians, the way the black money economy worked, how mosquitoes were getting the better of quinine. He knew the names of ministers, the different companies industrialists owned, how much cricketers were paid, and which film star was sleeping with whom. Chaaku was flabbergasted. This nondescript man, living like him in this crummy flat, sleeping in the bed next to him, working, like himself, for his Shauki Mama, how could he possibly know so much?

  What made Mr Healthy even more daunting was that he never joked or smiled. There was no easy backslapping, no trivial loose talk that was permitted with him. When they sat in a restaurant or dhaba and there was easy banter all around, he stared at the others with steely eyes. When they emerged from a movie, while everyone around smiled and chatted or cribbed and argued, Mr Healthy set about dissecting it with quiet seriousness. Frivolous interactions were the only kind Chaaku had ever known, and he suddenly felt the sheer smallness of his life so far. All he could do was ride a motorcycle and slash with his Rampuria, and in a small gesture of genuflection he gladly put both these feeble talents at Mr Healthy’s feet.