The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  When I told Guruji, he said, through his happy laugh, ‘You don’t become a mahatma because you wear a loincloth. Else, every man in his bathroom would be one.’

  And yet, despite Guruji’s cheerful cynicism, something happened while Jai was still visiting god’s showrooms—something totally removed from us—that altered our derailed fortunes. A few days after Jai began his quest, a couple of days after Holi, the hard colours still lingering on skins everywhere, irritating me because I hated that adolescent bullshit, on a lazy afternoon as I was slumped in my chair watching India struggling under the heel of the Australian cricket machine in Eden Gardens, Calcutta, my mobile buzzed frantically. I didn’t recognize the number and I didn’t recall the last time someone unknown had called me. It was several months since the hoopla of our exposé and the murder attempt had died down.

  The voice belonged to a breathless television reporter. He wanted my reactions to a story. When I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, he said, well, I ought to hotfoot it to my television set: if what we had done was the mother of all stories, this one was the motherfucking great-grandmom of them all. All hell was breaking loose; the government was about to fall; the skies were about to open; the Himalayas were about to crumble; the country was about to change. I clicked away from the Indian batsmen—abjectly on a follow-on, chasing a mountainous score—and found an exploding nuclear bomb of a story on the news channels.

  A bunch of guys running a website had cracked wide open the rules of the journalistic game. Using spy cameras, they had hauled in footage of the rich, the powerful, and the animals who work the in-between, grabbing crisp rupee notes from reporters posing as arms dealers. The journos had sold the corrupt jokers a turkey as big as an elephant and, blinded by an endless influx of easy money, the jokers hadn’t seen it. Now here they were—politicians, generals, businessmen, government officers, presidents of major political parties—all in Technicolor, emblazoned across tens of millions of television sets across the country with their pants down and scabs showing.

  No one the fuck knew what to do. There were swarms of newsmen buzzing around like hornets, hitting on whoever they could find. There were politicians running around like headless chickens, raving and ranting every which way. Parliament had been stalled by screeching members filling the well and bouncing up and down as if they had roaches in their undies. Everyone was looking for a television screen. Everyone was looking for an explanation. Who was behind it? What was the motive? Was the government going to resign? Nothing like this had been seen before.

  Jai barged into my room, his neck a swathe of Holi purple, his forehead freshly slashed with vermilion. Throwing himself on the single sofa in front of the television, he flung his legs over its arms, and said, ‘They are fucked.’ We both looked at each other, and knew what he meant. We’d been fucked for something that in comparison was the pop of a balloon.

  At the moment they were on television, and they were talking big. Facing down phalanxes of cameras and thronging reporters, and talking real big. One of them in particular was grand—grand in the manner of Mr Lincoln. In fact, he was surreally reminiscent of Jai. He had a beard with a little more salt in it than Jai’s, and the lofty cadences of Mr Lincoln. He was giving state-of-the-nation orations on corruption, morality, politics and the Idea of India. He was talking about illicit electoral funding and national security and the subversion of a democratic dream.

  I looked at Jai, and asked, ‘Separated at birth?’

  Jai said, ‘Boss, I am not in this guy’s league.’

  The bugger was dripping virtue like Christ on the crucifix. And he was smart enough to be loftily humble. No personal preening, no naming names. Just principles and values and morals and a whole lot of fucking hot air! Stuff that fills up balloons the size of buildings, but if you want to hold it in your hands you get nothing but your own damn palms rubbing against each other. Of course they would fuck him eventually, but it seemed it would take some doing.

  The other guy with him appeared more all there, more my kind. Sort of a big, thickset, straight-seeming fellow with nothing overtly creepy about him. No grand design, no save-the-nation crap. There was shit out there in the world and he had gone and hit it with a solid club, a big bertha. And if it was now flying around splattering everyone, it was not his fault. It was not his shit. He was just the clubman.

  Apart from hotair and clubman, there was a third specimen lurking in the corner. This one was like the bumbling hitman of a noir film, or the comic moment in a Hindi movie. He didn’t seem like any investigative reporter one could have imagined. In comparison, Woodward and Bernstein were Citibank managers. This guy was rotund, clad in a loose bush shirt, with a shambling manner, and nothing he said made any sense. It was easy to see how devastatingly deceptive he could be. Men would think nothing of handing him their cheque books, and wives, for safekeeping.

  I guessed he was the pitchman who’d sold the sod politicians the turkey bigger than an elephant. So all-pervasive was the hoopla around these guys that I, like many others, did not realize till a whole day later that India had turned around the Test match against Australia and were on the verge of their greatest-ever victory.

  Though, like us, it teetered on the precipice for the next ten days, the government did not fall. The shit continued to fly—there were resignations, sackings, suspensions, inquiry committees. The cacophony grew by the moment but the citadel held. Within forty-eight hours the counter-attack began, and a hundred versions of everything rent the air. Soon no one knew the truth of anything. We had an eerie sense of déjà vu as wild theories of the underworld, business rivalries, stock market manipulations, Pakistani subversion, political skulduggery and Swiss bank pay-offs began to scorch the social waves. The only real difference was scale. If we had been mucking around in a puddle, these crazies had gone and fucked up the whole ocean.

  For us the chaos created a sweet moment of reprieve. If it was owed to Jai’s rush of eclectic religiosity, I was happy to credit him. And if it was the inadvertent doing of hotair, clubman and hitman, then they had my gratitude.

  A few days later we were sitting in Jai’s room watching the shit fly on television when his phone rang. I paid no attention, but when he got off the line he said, ‘Do you remember that Kapoor?’

  I did.

  He had visited our office in a red Pajero, bathed in cologne, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Delhi was full of weirdos struggling to manage their machismo. Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey had once talked about a friend who kept a ghariyal—illegally, of course—on his farmhouse, and often during parties, muzzled the antediluvian beast and lowered him into the pool as guests screeched in frightdelight. Kapoor had talked of holidaying in the south of France: ‘Lousy beaches, skinny women, lovely blue waters; take your own women, ignore the beaches, sail the waters. Food and wine, just fine.’

  Jai said, ‘He wants to come and see us. Wants to carry on the investment discussion.’

  We looked at each other, serious and expressionless.

  I said, ‘But do we want to?’

  He said, ‘No. Absolutely not. Not our type.’

  By now both of us were standing, beginning to pace.

  I said, ‘Tell him we’ll consider it only if he changes the colour of his Pajero and stops wearing that hat.’

  Raising his right arm and his eyebrows, Jai said, ‘Dhan dhana dhan dhan …’

  Raising my right arm, I said, ‘Mahmud di maa di lund!’

  And then breaking into a slow dance—one arm raised—both of us said in unison, loud and ringing, ‘Dhan dhana dhan dhan, Mahmud di maa di lund! Dhan dhana dhan dhan, Mahmud di maa di lund! Dhan dhana dhan dhan, Mahmud di maa di lund!’

  We were still chanting and dancing, criss-crossing each other in front of the hyperventilating TV, when Sippy walked in, tea on tray, eyeballs swimming, and said softly, ‘Sirji, you are right, Mahmud di maa di lund.’

  When I called up Sara to inform her of the new glimmer of hope—there was no one else
to tell: father, mother, Dolly/folly were imbeciles; Guruji I could dial only after eight in the evening—when I called Sara up, she was in the waiting room of Tihar jail. Before I could say anything, she said, ‘You have no idea of the stories of these guys. Just no damn bloody idea. The bastards who run this fucking country owe an explanation to at least 800 million fucking people! A personal explanation and a personal apology to each one of the 800 million!’

  I said, softly and slowly, ‘Dhan dhana dhan dhan, Mahmud di maa di lund.’

  8

  KABIR M

  i

  The Science of Anonymity

  His father named him Kabir to confuse all killers, amputators and arsonists of the ominous future. There was another perilous giveaway Ghulam Masood needed to account for, and for that he procured a medical certificate when his son was twelve years old. The certifying piece of paper was a letterhead that declared in bold black print: Dr Babban Khan, MBBS, Specialist in Diarrhoea, Fever, Boils and Ladies Problems. It stated in a typewriter’s clear script, not a medic’s illegible scrawl, that acute phimosis had necessitated the surgical removal of young Kabir’s little skin of pleasure and pain. In effect, he was circumcised for medical reasons, not …

  Carefully folding over the thick paper and encasing it in a robust green plastic pouch—fashioned from a smart shopping bag from the local saree emporium by firmly firing its new seams together—his father protected the document so that even the most torrential downpour could not breach its skin. Before he was thirteen, Kabir knew that he had to carry the pouch on his person whenever he left the house, and if the occasion ever arose, swiftly present it as his credentials.

  Ghulam Masood did not stop at this alone. A hard-thinking, far-sighted man, quite unlike those of his tribe, he studied the past and cast the future and built in further safeguards for his boy in this forever unstable world.

  When the padre at the local missionary school insisted he give his son’s surname, Ghulam said, with his palms joined and his head bowed, that his son would carry his blood and his spirit but not his name. He had called his son Kabir to put him beyond the lines of community and religious lacerations that shredded the land. It had been the most thought-out act of his life.

  Though this was most unusual, Fr Conrad was not thrown by it. The big burly priest from Kerala, dark as bitter chocolate and bald as an egg, had trained all his life for misery and the deformities it creates. The first case he had handled in his diocese as a young friar was of a middle-aged transport department clerk who got drunk and thrashed his parents every weekend while being a model son, caring and solicitous, all week. The old parents loved him and feared him; he adored them and hated them. He beat them with a seasoned bamboo cane either on Saturday night or on Sunday, sometimes on both days. Then on Monday morning he took them to the mission dispensary or to the government clinic and applied the poultices and mercurochrome on their wounds himself. Through the week, several times a day, he prayed at the altar of the crucified one, begging forgiveness for the beast that raged within him. And each night he heated a brick, wrapped it in an old towel, and pressed it for hours to his parents’ aching bones. Then Saturday arrived, and the bottle was unscrewed. The brick was put away deep under the bed, and the cane was pulled out.

  The young Conrad, attempting gravitas with a goatie—later he would sport a full flowing beard—had tried to talk to the entire family, in turn. The clerk’s wife Maria had said, ‘Better them than me! All men are animals, there’s nothing to be done.’ The old parents had said, ‘He is a very good son. We forgive him his trespasses. The devil has ways of waylaying men that we can never know.’ The clerk had said, ‘I am a sinner. I deserve no mercy. There is no hope for me. Curse me, Father, curse me!’

  The young friar had spent hours, week after week, talking to them all, fondly and threateningly, invoking man’s law and god’s law, till he finally understood the great truth of his calling. His task was not to talk but to listen. His job was to offer men the solace of god’s ear. Men were what they were; very little could alter the darkness within them. Each man walked his darkness on his own, in his own way, feeling his way through. No lofty sermons, no stinging admonitions, no preceptor or padre, no policeman or pandit could help light the way. All that each stumbling soul wished to know was that there was someone out there who would hear him, hear the story of his darkness, and punish or absolve him.

  So he began to listen, not preach. He became the representative not of a hectoring god but an empathetic one. It made him increasingly popular. The friar became a single gigantic ear—as in the gramophone boxes of another era, only this one sucking in sound, not issuing it. A single gigantic ear, into which could be poured all the misery of the world. His gift was quickly spotted by the grey hairs of the cloak and he was picked to work in the fine schools that the Cappuchian order ran across the spread of the country.

  He proved a good teacher and a sound administrator, and as he moved from school to school, he left hundreds of malleable boys with lifelong memories of grace and godliness. Sometimes other things too. In time the friar had discovered the darkness within himself as well. Amid the press of boys, fresh-faced and supple-skinned, he had found torments that ravaged his senses. The lord above knew he fought it every moment, and each time he succumbed he fell in desperate penitence at the altar. He had come to learn that everyone failed the test of their own darkness. It was the lord’s way of keeping men humble.

  So Ghulam Masood was fortunate, in this critical moment of his son’s life, to find Fr Conrad sitting across from him. The friar—now grown into a handsome beard of salt and pepper—understood this frail, tremulous clerk’s area of darkness. Not only did he give the man’s son admission to the school, but in a rare exception, he registered him as only Kabir M. In a crisis Ghulam knew the M could be Mishra, Mehra, Malhotra, Mallick, Mehta, Mahapatra, Modi, Mitra. Fr Conrad, who was a reader of modern literature, told his fellow brothers that it was a stylistic flourish sanctified by Franz Kafka himself, for hadn’t he named his hero Joseph K. Ghulam told his kinsmen that he had shortened the Masood to the letter M so it could merge seamlessly with Mohammed, the one and only.

  For the boy himself, in the universe of boys, there were no such easy explanations. Very early he was strung by the rope of the solitary letter. By the time he was in class four he had been firmly christened ‘Muthal’—in recognition of the inherent delights of the stroking fist that his classmates were just beginning to discover. The name was to stay with him through his school years and beyond, to the point that many of his schoolmates never knew his real name. It also gave his wan, gaunt frame a different resonance: the provenance of the initial M was soon lost, and it came to be widely believed the boy’s body was not delicate but wasted, thanks to an excess of self-abuse.

  It’s possible Ghulam did not know of the loss of his son’s carefully chosen name, but if he did he could have derived relief from the fact that Muthal was no less secular a name than that of the wise unlettered saint he had chosen.

  In any case, for Ghulam Masood, having his son named a masturbator was infinitely more welcome than one day having his organ sliced and his intestines gutted in a fleeting riot. Curiously, Ghulam was so incredibly timorous not because he had been savaged in some religious clash, but precisely because he had never been. It was the fear of it, the apprehension set deep in his bones, that had corroded him since he was a small boy.

  Ghulam was not even a teenager when the rumours had begun to burn through their bastis like a forest fire in May: the new country Gandhi was about to found was to be only for Hindus. They were to have another land, their own. The white man was definitely going, but he was going to leave two countries behind. In Ghulam’s father’s basti the dread word was that this land where they sat, where they lived, where they worked, where they prayed, where they fornicated, where they died, where they were buried—where they had done all this for time beyond recall—was not going to be theirs. Even to those used to being dealt ran
dom cards by the universe, this was an inconceivable thought. It sucked the sleep and peace out of every single person in the cluster of hutments.

  Every single night of that scorching summer of 1947, as Ghulam and his friends played cops and robbers late into the night, their fathers sat in disarray under the tamarind tree, their vests patched with pockets of sweat, fanning themselves with flats of wood, smoking chillums and beedis and muttering to each other, as weak hurricane-lamps cast pools of shadows.

  Inside the hutments, clustered together on their haunches like conferring vultures, sat their mothers holding their heads. Occasionally an old aunt let loose a hair-raising lament, cursing every man whose hand had ever steered the giant ship of India. This invariably provoked a chorus of curses—the arsenal of the ordinary. Till someone at the tamarind took his mouth off the chillum and told the whole bleating lot to shut the fuck up. Young Ghulam loved this moment of womanly excess and manly chastisement.

  The basti had one battered battery-operated radio-set, which belonged to Hasanmian. From croaking once every evening under the tree for whoever cared to hear it, it had become a ceaseless mutterer. The men came by turns and put their ear to it, and if someone caught something that was vaguely intelligible, he set off a loud relay that had everyone in a fever of interpretation.

  In that basti of artisans and craftsmen and cobblers and tailors, there was only one man who remained resolute about his position. He had neither much education nor the knowledge of the Book, but he knew his mind. The children called him Ali Baba, though his name was Ali Hussain, because of his long white beard and the wonderful stories he could tell. The tales he told were not originals nor gleaned from old texts. His material came from his workplace. Dramatic tales of emotion and intrigue and fantasy and history—with names like Toofan Mail, Sikandar, Kismet, Hunterwali. Stories that were absorbed by Ali Baba over days and unfurled to his young audience over weeks.