The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  When Parvez asked the fat man running the eatery what was happening all around, he replied acidly, ‘Do I look like Laad Mountbatten to you? And right now probably even he doesn’t know what’s happening.’

  The burly man holding the crying boy said, ‘Mountbatten ki maa ka bhosda! The white Englishman can make donkeys look like horses, shit smell like roses, and brothers behave like enemies. Let me tell you there is going to be no freedom, no independence. This is just one more game to make chutiyas out of us. India and Pakistan! They will wait for us to kill enough of each other, then they will step back in and continue to rule us as they have for hundreds of years. My grandfather used to say, if you are caught between a white man and a snake, run towards the snake. There is at least a chance you can kill the snake and survive its poison—with the white man there is no chance of either.’

  The fat eatery man said, ‘Inquilab zindabad! Haath mein loda, gaand mein paad!’

  On the train, Imroze fell asleep on the rattling floor, curled against Wasim’s soft buttocks, his head resting in the crook of his right arm. This was not how the four friends had imagined they would journey to the promised land, but given the run on space when the train had pulled in, this was not bad at all. As he slept he slid under the berth, along with their luggage. He had his arm around Wasim, and ahead of Wasim lay Parvez and Faisal, similarly tucked into each other. Imroze twisted the Idrisi pir baba’s protective locket on his upper arm so that the metal wouldn’t bite into his cheek. His mother had got it for him when he was eleven to ward off the fevers to which he was prone. It had worked to perfection and Imroze had not been ill since.

  There were men, women, children, sleeping everywhere. Four to a berth, in the aisles, inside the toilets; sitting, standing, leaning—exhaustion and sleep melting and flowing into each other’s pliant bodies. The train odour of sweat, dust, coal smoke, pickles, parathas, subzi, alcohol, fear, piss and vomit was everywhere. Jammed in that mess—in their own annexed space—the friends, before nodding off, had made playful jibes, accusing each other of harbouring dubious intentions. Some amount of jestful pushing and pulling had also ensued, with maybe a trace of seriousness. As they fell asleep the consensus had been that Imroze had the premier position, spooned into Wasim’s feminine ass. Wasim’s warning was, ‘Saaley Imroze, make sure nothing escapes from your pajama! You know what they say in the basti, if you see a snake cut off its head!’ Parvez said, from between Wasim and Faisal, ‘That’s the good thing about being a Musalman, the head is already cut off. Imroze, feel no fear! Let your headless snake go wherever it wishes!’

  Imroze woke from a dream in which he was embroidering the sparkling zari with such frenzy that he had leapt past the holding frame of the adda and plunged into the spongy skins of the other craftsmen sitting around. Fountains of blood spurted as his needle thrust in and out of the screaming men and they began to thrash about desperately. Then one of the men pulled out a long curved dagger and plunged it into his speeding arm and he yelled out in pain, and when his eyes opened he knew he had tumbled into hell.

  There was very little light, a great chaos of movement, and a medley of indescribable noises all around. Beside him, Wasim was reduced to a heap grunting softly like the pigs they used to stone as children, while someone drove the point of a spear steadily in and out of him. Over the sounds of grunts and moans and screams and pleading and keening was the clear barbaric sound of Hindi and Punjabi abuse. Maiovah, bahenovah, saale kanjar, phuddihondya, saale suar, kameene kutte, gaandu gaddaar, kutte katuay, kutte musultay, vaddho salya nu, vaddho, vaddho, vaddho. Hack them, hack them, hack them.

  Curiously it was not the wild screams that were the dominant sound but the loud sighs. This was how—it seemed—people succumbed in sleep and half-sleep; with surprised, startled, grateful sighs. Deliverance following quickly on assault: the first sudden opening of raw pain; the second and third and fourth of relief—final, enduring relief—from it. The travellers to the promised land had been set upon like the herds of cattle of his childhood. In the moving light of lanterns he could see the herders had come in scores and were carrying swords, spears, axes and sickles. Actually—as with cattle—the herders were making more noise than the belaboured animals. The cattle just took in the blows with deep sighs.

  Abuse, thud, scream, sigh. Abuse, thud, scream, sigh. Wasim next to him had ceased to moan. But Parvez was still sighing sweetly, softer by the moment, as the long-handled spear drove in and out of him. His hands were holding the bamboo shaft—and if you didn’t follow the shaft to the man in the darkness who held it, it appeared as if Parvez in a frenzy of hara-kiri was steadily disembowelling himself. Faisal, true to type, was dying in an undignified way. All his youth he had been the crudest of them all—digging his nose, abusing, farting, masturbating in front of everyone. Now he was moaning and protesting and trying to get up, despite the steel buried in his stomach. When he had pulled himself halfway up there was the angry grunt of a herder, a slicing arc in the dark, a soft thud, and the gurgle of an opening tap. The herder pulled out his axe from Faisal’s neck by planting his foot on the boy’s chest to yank it out. Parvez and his blood became one.

  Soon the sound of satisfied sighs and occasional groans had begun to reduce. From the berth above, lines of blood had begun to drip steadily onto him, wetting him warmly. The herders were now moving around looking to locate any animals that still needed to be taken care of. They spoke in the abbreviated grunts of herders, pointing out moving limbs to each other, encouraging the swift blow. Imroze had shrunk into himself, halfway under the seat, and stopped breathing a long time ago. Through his shut lashes he could see only the swinging lanterns and the anointed weapons.

  Imroze thought of his marble collection. One more handful of milky whites and the jar would be full. A warm thick line began to drip down on the corner of his mouth. He pursed his lips tight.

  Suddenly, he became aware that the train had not been moving all this while. Some faraway cries from outside the coach wafted through the window, riding on the gentle moonlight. There were sounds of many feet running along by the tracks, mixed with muffled verbal exchanges. He thought he heard the snorting of horses and the jangle of reins and stirrups. Now a rough voice called loudly, ‘Are you done?’ From behind a swaying lantern inside the coach a voice said, ‘I think so.’ Another voice said, ‘Take a last look, laudu! These insects don’t die so easily!’

  Through the curtain of his eyelashes, in the moving light, Imroze saw the faceless herder pick his long steel-tipped bamboo, and like a river navigator, start prodding and probing the mounds of flesh lying splayed all about. Beside him there was another voice doing the same, with the edge of a warm-blooded sword. The axe-man had presumably moved on to further decapitations. Once he heard a low moan at the end of the spear, and it was swiftly cut off by a singing blade. The first voice said, ‘Bloody insects! Don’t die even when you’ve killed them!’ The second voice said, ‘Come on, this bunch were fucking calves! Not even one tried to fight back!’

  Imroze’s bowels had loosed completely now, and he lay on his side, trying to somehow bury himself under Wasim without making any movement. The angry-nosed spear was going thak, thak, thak—right through the spongy bodies—as the herders checked the carcasses. More voices called from outside the carriage, asking those inside to get a move on. There was no doubt that Allah the merciful would come between the steel of the infidel and the life of his faithful. Imroze squeezed shut his eyes to dwell on the glory of the almighty, the all-seeing, the all-protecting. And at that precise moment a fire raged through his belly as the spear slipped in the gap between Wasim and him, searing his flesh. The boy from the Rohilla basti screamed aloud, his torso jacking up in pain, his left arm shooting up to stall the assailant, and in the flash of that moment—in perfect time with the guttural abuse of the herders—the singing blade smoothly cut the air and the arm that came in its way. When the second swipe came it caught the wailing-collapsing boy across his face, opening his s
kin like a juicy tangerine, and the third and the fourth and the fifth scraped his ribs like a rake does the ground. When the herder’s checking prod came soon after, the boy was too perforated and too far gone to twitch.

  For the rest of his life Imroze lived within the tight confines of the basti, always within sight of his family—sitting against the mud wall while his father and brothers worked at the adda, or sitting on the dung-smoothed threshold of their hutments while his mother bustled around, her heart forever heavy. Always he carried with him his jar of milkywhites, scooping them out in the palm of his right hand, rolling them onto the ground, and striking at them endlessly, as he hissed, ‘Vaddho! Vaddho! Vaddho!’ Hack them, hack them, hack them.

  Shaking his head sadly, Ali Baba said, ‘Allah in his wisdom has put him on a train that will never reach its destination.’

  For years after his country’s independence, Ghulam slept next to his mother and never found the courage to go close to Imroze and try to speak to him. The news floating in from the Punjab only intensified the terror. Such rapine and savagery was afoot as no man could describe nor any god decree. The landscapes of Ghulam’s nights were now full of swinging lanterns and jabbing spears and flashing blades and heavy-headed axes. Almost every night he came to with a start just as the steel was about to enter his flesh.

  By never encountering the monster he grew more and more terrified of it. With every passing year it became more menacing, and Ghulam more fearful. When he walked the bazaar in town it was always with one eye over his shoulder. He avoided crowded buses, never boarded a train, and during festive occasions and marriage processions seized a position removed from the crush.

  He refused to enter the choking galis of Kutubkhana or the Meena Bazaar where his friends spent their days buying and selling trinkets, artefacts, silver ornaments, black surma, diaphanous chunnis, shining zari-zardozi, sparkling glass bangles, cosmic bindis, particoloured kurtas, using it all to flirt with the girls who came to buy their wares, to hold a slim hand for a heart-stopping moment or caress an inch of fair skin. Ghulam knew that in the noisy intimacy of those alleys a single sweep of a singing sword could kill six people.

  As he grew older he even began to fear living amid his brethren. Fretting about it at all hours, he realized that the basti itself was the biggest invitation to the monster. When its appetite was stirred, when its drool began to drip, when it wanted the blood of its choosing, where else would the monster head but for the basti? How obvious for the tiger to take the tethered goat.

  Unlike the rest of his community he found no security in sticking together, in numbers. He wanted to shed his identity, to become anonymous. He had no quarrel with anyone in the world and did not want to lose an arm—or much more—for the absurd reason of his religion. It terrified him that none of the others in the basti seemed to think like him. They were continually full of religious assertions and the will of Allah. Every night by the tamarind tree there was someone high on ganja who mounted the horse of militancy and drummed up a mood of wild bravura. Every night they slaughtered trainfuls of infidels, chopping limbs like carrots, slicing heads like tomatoes.

  Every night Ghulam raged to his mother, ‘We will all soon become one-armed! That’s when these people will be happy!’

  His mother, old before her time, a bad hip giving a slow waddle to her walk, said, ‘Men! Pay no attention to them. When they talk of killing elephants, they mean mice. Do you think the men who killed Faisal, Wasim and Parvez were killing elephants? They were killing trapped mice! Your father, those men under the tree, do you think they can kill anything but trapped mice? Just remember, my son, men are either brave and foolish, or foolish and brave. I have never yet seen a man who is brave and wise, or wise and brave. Never forget that we are small people and it is best for us to lie low—beneath the sweep of every marauding wind and murderous sword. We are not Hindu or Muslim, men or women—we are just small people who can only stay safe by making ourselves invisible.’

  Shy Ghulam, timorous Ghulam—with a sliver of icy fear jamming his heart—resonated to his mother’s words. The pursuit of his life became anonymity and evanescence, and later, for his son, the flattening out of all identity.

  ii

  An Alien Tongue

  Before he turned twenty, Ghulam convinced Ali Baba to take him on as his understudy. Ali Baba had seen too many Hindi films to have a fanatic bone left in his body and he instinctively liked this timid boy’s need to break away from the basti’s narrow confines. Firdaus, the owner, didn’t mind an extra hand—traffic at the Talkies was multiplying by the day as Bombay began to churn out more and more films, bigger, brighter, more irresistible. Ghulam was told to start working, and promised that one day some kind of a salary would come.

  Ghulam’s father flew into an abusive rage, screaming at the boy for abandoning the family craft for a menial job. For days, at every meal, he flung the food and utensils around. Mastering the lesson of lying low, Ghulam did not counter him with a single word and soon the fulminations settled into sullenness and the food was eaten and not thrown about.

  Ghulam’s working day began at seven in the morning with cleaning the stalls of the night show’s offal—paper packets, beedi-cigarette stubs, the mud from a thousand feet, hair from the scratching of scalp and pubes—and proceeded to playing usher for the morning, noon and matinee shows. It was also his task to carry up glasses of tea twice during every screening for Govind in the projection room, and when the rolls of a new film arrived on Thursday it was he who helped cart them up. By six-thirty, once the matinee was over and he’d cleaned up, he was free to leave. It was Ali Baba’s job to see the last two shows through, for now he only came in at noon.

  However, when his day’s work was done, Ghulam never wanted to go back to the basti, to the bragsters under the tamarind tree, to the hush of their hutment. Every night he stayed back at the Talkies till the last straggler had drifted out, the projection room had been locked, the footlights in the hall and the wall bulbs in the foyer had been turned off. Then, turning the big padlock on the front door and handing the key to the chowkidar, he would pull out Ali Baba’s old cycle and slowly ride them home. All the way to the basti, forty minutes away, the old man on the back carrier and the thin young man straining at the loose pedals would discuss and debate every film that transited through Minerva Talkies. There would be the old man’s slow, wise voice, often carried away by the wind and necessitating repetition, the rhythmic squeak of the cycle, and in between, the pant and push of Ghulam’s thin-voiced assertions.

  For a long time the caustic disagreement between the two men was over Madhubala and Nargis, and by extension, over Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor. Each gesture of those beautiful divas, each profile, the play of their eyes, the shape of their lips, the gaps in their teeth, the lilt in their voices, their nakhras and adas, the way they held their heads, the way they looked over their shoulders, the stretch of fabric across their fullness, everything was argued and contested. Ghulam’s last word was if he had an option he would marry Nargis and take Madhubala as his mistress; the old man said he would do exactly the reverse.

  One time, as they cycled home after the first-day screening of Shree 420, Ali Baba punctured Ghulam’s heady elation—he was singing ‘Pyaar hua ikraar hua’ in loud, panting bursts into the velvet night—by calling Nargis horsey. His exact words, from behind the young man’s singing-straining back, were, ‘Oh stop singing this nonsense. In that sequence they looked like a clown and a horse standing under an umbrella. More circus than love.’

  This upset Ghulam so viscerally that he threw his right leg over the front bar and jumped off the cycle. Ali Baba, riding behind on the carrier, had to scramble off to keep from falling. Dropping the cycle down on the road—its broken pedal pointing at the sky—Ghulam strode off in a huff. The old man stuck his foot into the still rotating wheel, picked up the fallen cycle and followed. The two men walked home on opposite sides of the road that night, in the dark blue night, a half-moon lig
hting the houses and fields in a dreamy glow.

  Ali Baba said, ‘Arre, stop behaving like she’s your wife. Tomorrow your wife could look like a horse, what will you do then? Look at the women of the basti. They all look like strange animals. Amina is a pig, Shahnaz is a camel, Munni is an owl, and your aunt Shaukat is a splendid hippopotamus—the only one in all of Hindustan!’ When the boy refused to relent, the old man said, ‘This is why I don’t like the young to go to the Talkies. They can never distinguish between real life and films. Now you think Nargis is your wife and you have to defend her even if it means walking home at one o’clock at night!’

  There was some truth in what the old man was saying. Ghulam took the films more seriously than anything else in his life. He sat through two or three screenings of the same film every day, and with something like Shree 420—or any other film that starred Nargis—he saw every single show, sometimes for weeks on end. It was only in the inky dark, with the beam of divine light flowing above his head, that he felt safe and complete. Unlike Ali Baba he did not squat in the middle of the central aisle. He scouted for an empty chair anywhere in the hall, and actually revelled in the fact that he saw the same film from so many different angles. Sometimes he was in the first row up front, sometimes at the very back, sometimes he had a side seat and sometimes he managed dead centre. To see Nargis from so many perspectives was to fall more and more in love with her. The laughing eyes, the promise of her lips, the strong straight limbs—often he chose to sit in the front row just to be overwhelmed by her beautiful immensity.

  Minerva Talkies, the dark hall, the twilight zone between harsh reality and sublime desire, became his entire life. Four months into his job, when Firdaus gave him his first salary of five rupees, it was an unexpected bonus. This sense of money as an extra reward did not change in the forty years that he worked there—an endless access to the moving pictures always remained his main recompense. Only in the warmth of the hall did he feel a security that had been sucked out of his life in that autumn of 1947 by the departure of the four boys and the mangled return of Imroze.