The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  Chaaku was in awe. He was ready to be Mr Healthy’s slave—to cook for him, clean for him, fetch for him, do as he ordered—even minister to his monstrosity.

  In turn the savant gave him an umbrella of confidence and reassurance he had never had. He introduced him to reading the morning newspaper, taught him to think about his life, its purpose, why he was doing what he was. He directed him to posh commercial areas like Connaught Place and Khan Market and South Extension where he pointed out opulent stores and brilliantly turned out men and women alighting from cars and jauntily making packets of purchases. He made him drive them through Lutyens’ Delhi pointing out lane upon lane of sprawling Raj bungalows with famous name-plates and grand old trees and guards with guns and white official Ambassador cars sweeping in and out.

  Money and power, he told him. Only two things drove the world. And neither of them had any. But he would change all that. Chaaku must not worry. He must merely have a sense of destiny and a sense of himself. All this after all was only created by men. Not unlike them; not better than them.

  He explained all these things by quoting from the Bhagavad Gita. It was the one book, he said, that had all the answers demanded by life. He said it was his father, a schoolteacher in the village, who had first taught him the great wisdoms of the song divine. That always men must act: they must both live their karma and make their karma—and all of it must be done without regard for reward or punishment. Lord Krishna said to the unequalled Agjuna, ‘O Partha! In the three worlds, I have no duties. There is nothing I haven’t attained, there is nothing yet to be attained, yet I am engaged in action. O Partha! If I ever relax and stop performing action, then men will follow my path in every way. If I don’t perform action, then all these worlds will be destroyed. I will be the lord of hybrids and responsible for the destruction of these beings.’

  Mr Healthy—he had been so named by a cruel English teacher when he was eleven: his real name was Sukesh Kumar—Mr Healthy did not believe in idols, temples, or rituals. All religion, except for the Gita, was skewered by him in his cool hard voice. He told Chaaku that all of modern Hinduism was a wasteland, full of hokum rites, festivals and places of worship, overrun by ignorant, corrupt priests. In contrast, in this mess, lay the heart of all profound truth, the Gita. And of all the great lessons of the Gita what was the greatest? The idea of detached action.

  ‘Look at me. Look at me, my boy. Do you ever see me agitated, angry, emotional? When you slash skin with that knife, do it as if you are drawing birds in the air. When you gouge out someone’s entrails do it as if you are digging soil in a flower-bed. And when someone puts a hard blade into you see it as a shower of sudden cold rain that you can do nothing about. When you feel pleasure see it as a passing breeze. When you feel pain see it as a passing breeze. Life itself is only a passing breeze. Detached action.’

  The thin man from Amritsar with a cucumber for a cock had been sent to Delhi by Shauki seth to manage the soiled bundles, to buy the properties. This involved parsing the market, hard negotiations, doing numbers, checking papers, handling illicit cash, getting clearances, taking possession. The boy with the knife was there to protect him, and also to be a check on him. Shauki Mama had assumed his nephew’s loyalty, the family bond. He had failed to see the boy was putty waiting to be moulded; he was not a finished product, just a tragic upshot of his circumstances. Anyone could seize control of him and bend him to his will. Shauki seth was also soon to learn the truth in the saw: never trust a thin man who thinks too much.

  In less than four years, without cracking a smile, without Shauki seth’s college-going son—in the next bedroom—having a clue, while getting his big cucumber regularly peeled and polished by Chaaku, the thin man with the ideal of detached action had siphoned enough soiled notes to set up on his own. With even greater cunning he had purloined several of the key papers of the properties he had acquired for his master. This meant that Shauki seth, instead of mounting a revengeful assault on him, had to come begging for truce and friendship. Without the missing documents his properties were valueless; in fact, he was vulnerable. A man as cunning as Mr Healthy could set the officials on him; and there was no way he could sell any of his properties without all the papers.

  When his uncle came to meet his mentor, Chaaku sat in the inside room with the door ajar, playing nervously with his knife, opening and closing the blade. The renegade duo now lived in a tiny two-bedroom flat in Saket, a South Delhi colony. The thin man said this was where Delhi would boom in the future. Already this house was better furnished than the one they had first lived in. There was a proper red Rexine sofa suite in the drawing-room with a maroon durrie on the floor, a small dining-table with four chairs next to it, a two-burner gas stove in the kitchen, a white ceramic cistern in the toilet, which sat behind one’s back and worked with a refined whoosh, box-beds with coir mattresses in the bedrooms, plastic shades over all the bulbs, and semi-transparent muslin curtains on the windows and doors.

  From where he sat, with the lights off, Chaaku could see clearly into the well-lit drawing room. The thin man was sitting on the single seat, his pencil-thin arms spread out, his collarbones jutting out like wings, the big apple in his throat unmoving. Shauki Mama was on the triple-seater sofa, sitting on the edge. He was in a brown safari suit, wet patches of sweat under and around the armpits.

  In the next one hour, the boy saw the thin man deconstruct the transporter. Everything his uncle threw at him—camaraderie, threat, blandishment; police, mafia, partnership—everything was dismissed with a cool demeanour and minimal words. Each time the thin man spoke it was as if he was cracking ice with a chisel.

  The seth was free to do what he chose.

  There was no reason to get all hot under the collar. Like the seth, they were only acting in self-interest.

  The seth must watch his tone. Unlike them, he had a lot to lose.

  They could all be winners. The world was a large place, with enough for everyone.

  Would the seth like to go to jail? He could provide ten different tickets that could head him that way.

  There was a civilized way of doing everything. He would hold the seth’s papers in trust and pass them on periodically, as long as the seth kept his end of the bargain.

  And Chaaku? Well, Chaaku was fine. Just fine. There should be a law against exploiting young nephews. Was he sent to him to be educated and prepared for life, or to be made into a small-time slasher? Why didn’t he give his own son a knife and ask him to stick it into passers-by?

  No, he could not see him. No, because he was not at home. And had he been, he may still not have wanted to.

  By the time the thin man ushered Shauki Mama out and latched the door, Chaaku was giddy with adulation and pride. When he turned around, sombre and unsmiling, the boy fell to his knees and clasped his stick legs. Not one expression crossed the thin man’s face as his cucumber was delicately peeled and consumed.

  Later, he said, gravely, ‘Every seth needs to have the key to his safe stolen once in his lifetime. Makes them into better men.’

  Chaaku never left the thin man—and never fell out of love with him—till many years later, when he was dragged into jail for having conspired to murder a man.

  7

  THE EMPERORS OF AIR

  By now the sparrow had become a full fluttering presence in Sara’s life. His involvement with her had become a daily thing. If she was not seeing him, she was on the phone to him; else she was poring over his brown, string-strangled files, or she was talking to me about what they had lately discovered. Puny Bhandariji of the pencil moustache and stylized delivery, was, of course, fully infatuated by now, reeling under the Sara effect. As was her wont, she had made her own concerns the most important in his life, and it was obvious the one time I visited him in his house in Kalkaji that he was beginning to neglect his other cases.

  In the one hour that Sara and I spent in the cramped room—a converted garage, partitioned with bad plywood into three tiny cubicles, a
nd crammed with hardbound volumes of the Law Reporter and tottering heaps of mouldering files—in that one hour of repeated glasses of tepid tea and glucose biscuits, of dust particles hanging in the air, of a weird mishmash of white and yellow lights, Bhandariji’s juniors came in several times, demanding with an exasperated tinge in their voices, his attention for other cases. They all looked at Sara as the bitch that had broken up the family.

  I knew Sara was being derelict with her own organization too. Often she’d take a call from her rabid bunch at the women’s advocacy group and start making excuses for not being able to travel out of the city—to Rajasthan, Himachal, Kumaon—for any length of time. Sara was a good liar. White lies, sure, but effortlessly essayed, without a crease of doubt in her tone. She was unwell; she had a key report to send off to Washington; her family was in town; a new funding contact had to be met; and, yes, there was a legal case she’d got stuck into. A couple of times she couldn’t wiggle out of it, but I knew even when she was in the boondocks of Jaisalmer, she was burning the line to her sparrow.

  The sparrow had, on her unstoppable urging, been taking her to the jail to meet the killers. It was how she was slowly piecing their stories together. I thought she had completely lost it. But I didn’t care. Every visit to the jail was followed by a detailed, highly emotional narration, progressing to a colourful festival of abuse, culminating in a happy hanging on the wall. She was welcome to interview all the thirteen thousand prisoners in the jail—twice over if she chose—as long as she came back each time to be joyously crucified.

  To be honest, as the weeks rolled into months I was surprised that the sparrow’s affair with Sara had not petered out. I had imagined that the inevitable inertia of a court case in India would slowly sap the enthusiasm of both the do-gooders. Injustice, real and imagined, can be fought with red-hot passion for a day, a week, a month; you can picket, barricade, shout, scream, take on the tear-gas and the lathi; but if it becomes a somnolent waiting for a court date three months later, and a postponement and fresh date another two months later, and an adjournment and another date four months later, then passion can quickly dissipate.

  There is very little that is stirring about collecting fresh dates from yoronour’s clerk.

  After the first two hearings the case had gone into characteristic limbo. In any case I had been informed that my role was consummately over. If I knew nothing about the alleged assassins, or about the conspiracy to kill me, then I was of no consequence to the proceedings. Sethiji—the king penguin—had said to me, beaming hugely, ‘Go home and sleep peacefully. You are like the dead body in a mystery movie. The movie revolves around you, but you have only a guest appearance and it is now over. Your killers have now become the sons-in-law of the state, and will be fully taken care of.’ We were sitting in his choked cubicle in the courts, around a small wooden table, sipping piping hot tea, with his junior penguins jamming the door. ‘Look at them,’ Sethiji said, taking a noisy slurp of his tea, ‘do they look like lawyers? They look like extras in a film whom the hero will soon beat up!’ All three grinned and flexed their arms and shoulders, their hair glistening with gel. ‘See,’ said Sethiji, ‘they are the kind of extras who will keep smiling as they are beaten up!’

  The oldest one among them—with trendy sideburns—said, ‘Have you told Bhaiya what we heard last week?’

  ‘And why don’t you do it yourself, mister side-hero? Is my voice sweeter than yours? Is it my job to both argue in court and to amuse you with gossip?’

  The convoluted story the boy told had to do with a huge sum of money that a business house had supposedly paid Jai to do a hit job in the magazine against certain bureaucrats and some businessmen. When I told him that it was not Jai who owned the magazine but a clutch of investors, the boy said he might have heard it wrong, the money then must have been paid to them. When I said they were already absurdly rich—with naked mermaids spouting water from their mouths—the boy said there was no such thing as having too much money. When I said that the investors did not even know about the story and only saw it when it was printed, the boy said, then it must be Jai who was being referred to. When I said the story was my idea and Jai had no role to play in it, the boy stroked his flaring sideburns and looked helplessly at his fat patriarch.

  The king penguin snarled, ‘Go on, James Bond, now tell him that it means that he only must have taken the money! All that day-night gym-shym muscle-phuscle has filled your brains with fat! If Mahatma Gandhi himself appeared in front of you, you’d kick him like a beggar! Now get out all of you before your foolishness makes me want to cry! And send us some tea and samosas!’

  Grinning, the boys filed out, banging shut the steel door. Even after they left, the tiny cubicle felt cramped. It was barely enough for the fat lawyer. Stretching himself—no mean sight—and testing his suspenders with his thumbs, he now said, ‘My father used to always say: “Son, don’t do any bad but also don’t do any good. In fact, if you do bad the people will fear you and respect you. If you do good they will be suspicious of you and attack you. Because in the depth of their own heart coils the serpent of deceit! Tell me, who killed Gandhiji? Was it the white man? This is not a country of men, my son, but of phuddus! Phuddus only understand the stick and the shoe.” Sirji, my father was completely right. If I had my way I would impose military rule in this country and shove a stick and a shoe up each man’s asshole, and I guarantee you each one would love it and bloom with good feeling and affection for everyone else!’

  This was not the first time such bazaar gossip had washed up at our doors. Both Jai and I had been hearing wild theses from all kinds of sources for the last few months. Most of the stories had a predictable spin involving dubious motives and fat pay-offs, but some were truly outlandish, alluding to a cast of characters and conspiracies that staggered the imagination. These were a fevered mix of political skulduggery, the underworld, and big business—storylines generated from the deranged hyper idiom of Hindi cinema. To even conceive of them in jest required absurd credulity.

  In the beginning they generated great amusement amongst us. Jai and I would strut around the room and loudly orate the grand attributions made to us. Jai would say, ‘Maaderchod, I have a hundred million in Swiss banks—I am going to buy myself a yacht, and I am going to employ Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey as my butlers!’

  I would say, ‘That bugger, the transport minister, he’s finished! Yesterday my car hit three potholes! I am changing him! D’Mello, it’s over for you!’

  And Jai would say, ‘That paper guy, Arora, who cheated us and tried to threaten us—I’ve made a call to bhai in Dubai. By tomorrow evening he’ll be in the crematorium.’

  We would look at each other gravely and say, ‘Shall we crash the stock market today, or start a border skirmish with Pakistan?’

  This crap went on all day. There was little else to do. We’d drink endless glasses of tea and talk up our myth. The room was always echoing with hysterical laughter. But if any other staffer—less than a score remained—dropped by, Jai would shed all frivolity and become Mr Lincoln and deliver his state-of-the-nation address. No matter how many times I heard it, I was seduced by it. The fact is if there were still twenty-odd employees hanging around, it had to do with little other than Mr Lincoln’s stirring orations. For all other purposes the place was dead.

  In the crematorium, to use Jai’s phrase.

  Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey continued to stonewall us.

  Jai had finally managed one meeting with them, in which they had categorically told him that they were way out of their depth, this was not the kind of thing they could afford to be associated with: it had the potential to damage everything else they owned.

  When Mr Lincoln had made an attempt to talk about democracy, liberty and freedom, Kuchha Singh, raising his arm, had said, ‘Everyone knows by now that we are chutiyas! But you really think we are the managing directors of the World Chutiya Federation!’

  Jai was told we should expect no more help from them.
As a gesture of goodwill they gave us one last cheque of five lakh rupees—to be used to buy time to find a new set of investors. They were willing to part with their own stake for a mere fifth of what they had so far invested.

  Calvin Klein was going to have to sell a lot of extra underwear to white men to make up for the cost of democracy in India.

  Asking someone to invest in us was, of course, like asking developers to put up a building on quicksand. Forget procuring a commitment, even getting someone to visit the site was nearly impossible. Jai had been steadily slipping down the scale of possibilities. He had long ago exited the category of what he called PLUs—people like us, the blue chip, public school, English-speaking scions, born rich and getting richer.

  This category was now treating him like he’d caught some African disease. A couple of times I had walked in on him pleading abjectly on the phone with some friend to not be so fearful, to understand that the air was full of falsehoods and propaganda, and the truth really was that we were still a good investment. When he put the phone down he would revert to his usual bravura. There was no question that he was a chutiya too, but there was something charming about his cussed delusion. Now he was trawling territories that were totally alien to him—to both of us, actually. Shopkeepers from the old city; exporters of rice and iron ore; brokers from the stock exchanges of Delhi and Bombay; currency traders; mine owners and scrap merchants; government contractors and suppliers; small-town businessmen from Ludhiana and Indore looking for a positioning in the big city; and middlemen and deal-makers who closed the circuit between entrepreneurial desire and government largesse. Most of them he met at locations of their choosing. Hotel lobbies, coffee shops, their offices; occasionally even their crammed homes, with the bustle of children and servants. A rare few showed up at the office, wandered with suspicious eyes through our echoing rooms, and then settled down with Jai to monosyllabic inquiries.