The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  The arithmetic and algebra he could manage, and Hindi he was good at. But English, and every other subject—all of them taught in English—fried his brains. He was not alone in this. The entire school was full of boys whose brains were being detonated by Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth and Tennyson and memoriam and daffodils and tiger tiger burning bright and solitary reapers and artful dodgers and thous and forsooths and the rhymes of ancient mariners.

  The first counter-attack Kabir M made on English was in class four when he learnt like the rest of his reeling mates to say, ‘Howdudo? Howdudo?’ The answer being: ‘Juslikeaduddoo! Juslikeaduddoo!’ It set the pattern for life for most of them. English was to be ambushed ruthlessly when and where the opportunity arose. Its soldiers were to be mangled, shot, amputated wherever they were spotted. Its emissaries to be captured and tortured. The enemy of English came at them from every direction: in the guise of forms to be filled, exams to be taken, interviews to be given, marriage proposals to be evaluated. The enemy English had a dwarfing weapon: it made instant lilliputs of them. Whenever it appeared on the horizon they seemed to suddenly shrink in size. Their weapon of Hindi was a mere slingshot compared to the enemy’s cannon. Some of them understood that if they could somehow keep themselves from shrinking they would be able to take the enemy English on, beat it back, perhaps even show it its true place. But in practice it never worked: the English weapon was much too powerful and all their bravura and resolve dissolved in a moment, leaving them puny dwarfs. All they could attempt then were ambushes. And here too, many of them, in the course of their lives, would come to feel that the more enemy soldiers they killed the more they seemed to multiply. Some of them were so completely ruined by English, so shrunk by its brutal onslaught, that they never managed to regain their true size, not even when the enemy was not around, not even when they were in their own place with their own people. Many of them tried to broker a truce with it, but there can never be peace between unequals. Their attempts to cohabit with it—master such smatterings of it as they could—only left them open to further ridicule.

  Of course there were some boys—especially from the army cantonment—who spoke English as if they were pissing in the bushes behind the school wall. A flowing, gushing, casual stream, laughingly delivered. In the classroom these boys chirped like budgerigars and answered questions with fluent orations that left Kabir and his mates scratching their heads. Turwant, the son of the motor-parts dealer, called them the ‘chutterputter chutiyas’.

  The chutterputter chutiyas monopolized the school dramatics society and the speakers’ and quizzers’ clubs; they were nominated class and school leaders and were gawped at by the girls. The chutterputter chutiyas seemed to have big engines of confidence humming in their bellies: they were always laughing and smiling and seemed to have private jokes about everyone else. Even when a teacher lost it with them, they retained a smiling, unfazed air. At least one teacher—the Hindi one, a Mr Pandey—hated them and was terrified of them. They would humiliate him by talking to him in English and making him struggle to understand them. When he would attack their betrayal to the foreign language of conquerors they would make him abject by questioning his betrayals of wearing English trousers, teaching in an English-medium school, using a toothbrush, and reporting to English-speaking Catholic priests.

  In the presence of the chutterputter chutiyas, Kabir became a stunted dwarf scurrying for cover. Like Mr Pandey, he hated them and was terrified of them.

  While Kabir, like most of his friends, rode to school on his father’s old creaking Atlas cycle, the chutterputter chutiyas came in a green, shining, libidinous army truck. Many of them wore big black army boots, and all of them walked with a strut. Not only did they cut everyone to ribbons in the classroom with the merciless sword of English, they were also juggernauts on the sports field. And sitting in the last rows they talked of sports Kabir had never known or seen—squash, billiards, water polo, and something called dressage.

  The bastards even masturbated in English. Crumpled copies by Anonymous were always being swapped between them and sometimes one of them brought a magazine with colour pictures of such provocation that even a fleeting glimpse of them sent you rushing to the toilet. The Mastram Mastanas—yellowed and hand-stapled and fraying—that Kabir and Co lived off were like the fare of beggars. They were read aloud by the chutterputter chutiyas and laughed at. It took the steam off Mastram’s pages for a few hours.

  Most days Kabir hated going to school, and hated his father for having admitted him there. Between his father’s fearful cautions and the humiliations of the school, the boy found solace and wholeness in only one place, the same place that had worked for Ghulam: the warm womb of Minerva Talkies, with the reassuring solidity of its neat stories, its triumphs of Hindi dialogue, Hindi songs and the superstars revelling in Hindi exuberance.

  Of course, in the perverse way in which parents will often deny their children precisely that which created and saved them, Ghulam forbade his son more than a film a month. Naturally then, the first deceit the son learnt was evading his father and conspiring with the Talkies staff to see every film that was released. Ghulam’s colleagues never understood why he denied his son what he himself obsessed over. Ghulam said in defence, ‘Does he have to also be a chutiya just because we are chutiyas? What have we learnt by watching films all day? To dance like Shammi Kapoor?’

  The father wanted his son to be a child of the new India. Modern, rational, tutored in secular ways, a wearer of pants, a speaker of English, removed from the rumble and rabble of Bombay cinema and Bareilly’s serpentine bazaars. He himself had moved very far away from the ties of the basti. He wanted his son to move even farther away, so far away that no shadow of its religion, rites, crafts, inheritances or dogmatic smallnesses could ever fall across his life. His son belonged to the city, to a life of hygiene and elegance and polished speech and educated work.

  With a miraculous display of restraint and a generous use of free Nirodhs—the state-supplied condoms, thick enough to stop a snake—the timid Ghulam had ensured that he would not have another child. He needed all his resources to make a modern success of the one. To his wailing wife Fatima, who wanted to fill her yawning womb with the screaming train of life as her mother before her had, he said, in consolation, ‘Bitches produce yelping litters. The tigress never gives birth to more than one or two.’

  But no child is molten wax to be poured into a mould. Each is twisted inalienably inside its own genes. The truth was his son was concussed by the absurd alienness of English and quickly lost all talent for any textbook learning. By the time Kabir came to class five, Ghulam was on his knees in the padre’s sombre office at the end of every academic year—the terracotta Christ on the cross looking down at him sadly—spelling out the litany of poverty and hardship against which his son’s academic failure needed to be weighed. Schooled in compassion, the Cappuchian fathers pushed the boy along, giving him the grace marks the meek deserve. Till the rabbit-eared boy with limbs of stick reached class eight and made the first real friend of his life.

  This boy came to school in the libidinous army truck and his name was Charlie. In the attendance register he was listed as Barun Chakravarty, and though he could rattle off English like the chutterputter chutiyas, he was not one of them. He didn’t hang out with them, he didn’t play sports, and he refused to take part in the character-building regimen of dramatics and elocution. Nor did he wear the big army boots or walk the strut. Yet he exuded a cockiness that was more potent than anyone else’s. It stemmed from his mocking smile and his bludgeoning tongue. It did not cut and nick and slowly bleed its victims; it smashed their faces in. He called his fellow army boys Angrezi Laudus, English pricks. ‘Unzip their pants and check them out,’ he would say aloud, ‘I can bet you they’ve painted them pink and white.’

  Kabir never figured out why Charlie chose him as his friend other than the fact that he too was short and thin and had rabbit ears. The first time they connect
ed was in the school auditorium where one of the army boys was elocuting Alfred Noyes’s The Highwayman for an inter-class competition.

  The hall had a stage but no chairs yet and the boys were crammed in disorderly fashion at the back while the girls stood in neat lines up front. Suddenly, beneath the dramatic monotones from the public address system, a mock thin voice was heard chanting:

  Bal Krishan Bhatt,

  dekho pad gaya putt;

  boley lauda tana jhat,

  boley bhonsdi ke hutt;

  tera lauda hai ya lutth!

  A titter snaked through the crowd and heads began to turn to locate the source of the doggerel. Next to Kabir a gnomish Bengali boy looked straight ahead. As Kabir stared at him, he slowly turned and gave him a smile. Meanwhile, the highwayman was continuing to ride up to the old inn door. To counter him, the same voice, now in a grave tone, slower and deeper, repeated the doggerel about Bal Krishan Bhatt’s giant phallus:

  Bal Krishan Bhatt,

  dekho pad gaya putt;

  boley lauda tana jhat,

  boley bhonsdi ke hutt;

  tera lauda hai ya lutth!

  Almost immediately a hundred adolescent throats thundered with laughter. The highwayman halted uncertainly. The padre who taught English, Father Michael, leapt up and roared like a provoked lion, frantically twirling the thick cord around his waist, which he used for whipping the boys. In the dead silence that followed, everyone sought the source from the corner of their eyes. The whirlpool of eyes slowly began to find its centre, and in the swirling heart of it stood Kabir. The padre caught him like a rabbit by the scruff of his neck and pushed him so that he went flying through the boys to lie sprawled on the floor.

  Over the years Kabir had often witnessed this dance of penitence, but it was the first time he had a starring role in it. In a voice he had never heard before he shouted, ‘No Father!’ From the floor view he could see the padre’s turned-up black trousers peeping from beneath his flowing white habit. His calloused feet were strapped in brown leather sandals. The padre said, ‘Goonda boy! Rascal!’ and sliced the cord across Kabir’s back and buttocks. Kabir shouted, ‘No Father!’ and leapt up to run, but with one swift lunge the padre had his frail left wrist in his hand. Then the two dancers began to twirl in endless circles: the padre’s left hand holding Kabir’s left wrist, the boy running with jumps and skips, while Father rotated on his heels whipping the boy with the rope in his right hand.

  No Father!

  Goonda boy!

  No Father!

  Goonda boy!

  No Father!

  Goonda boy!

  Round and round they spun with increasing speed—the knotted rope singing as it struck—while the assembly tittered.

  Suddenly the yelping boy’s thin wrist slipped out of the assailant’s hand and the boy went crashing to the floor. Father Michael, giddy with the relentless circling, lurched towards him, and the reeling boy, frantic with fear, in a desperate attempt at escape, crawled between the padre’s legs and disappeared under his flowing habit. Inside that dark secure place, the boy clung to a stout leg and refused to let go.

  The father shouted, ‘Rascal boy, where are you?’

  A muffled voice screamed, ‘No Father!’

  Where are you? No Father! Where are you? No Father!

  The maddened priest leapt and kicked and shook and twirled, trying to dislodge the infuriating boy clamped to his thigh. In a burst of fresh rage, the padre began to shout and wildly whip the habit between his legs with his rope.

  ‘Goonda boy! Rascal boy! Where are you? Where are you? Come out! Come out!’

  From the unseen place between his legs came the scream, ‘No Father! No Father!’

  Out I say! No Father! Out I say! No Father!

  The assembly roared its approval.

  Father Michael now began to stomp up and down in a manic fury. Hanging on in terror, getting banged against his knees and thighs, Kabir thought his life was about to end. Suddenly the father used the heel of his left foot to deliver a sharp reverse kick between the boy’s bony buttocks. With a screech of pain the boy straightened up, hammering his head against the padre’s swinging balls with the speed of a runaway train. The padre let out a long high-pitched scream—‘Ooomiilorrrddjeessus!’—and clutching the hard head mashed against his balls keeled over like a sawn tree, taking the boy with him.

  When Kabir emerged, scrabbling, from under the folds of the Friar’s habit, like a cockroach from under a pile of bread slices, the assembly cheered and hooted and whistled. Even as he ran from there faster than any cockroach ever—without once looking back at the felled priest—and raced to the cycle-stand to jump on to his old Atlas, he remembered the laughing, approving faces of the packed assembly all around him.

  For the very first time in his life he felt worthy.

  The feeling—strange, novel, wonderful—did not desert him over the next week of pathetic grovelling in the principal’s office. Ghulam weathered the storm of apologies, threats, and other abjections, while the boy insisted on his innocence. At home the fearful Ghulam implored his son to take the blame and end the stand-off. Revelling in this newly discovered sense of himself—a surging sense of potency that brought steel to his gnomish face, hardened his jaws and stilled his eyes—revelling in himself for the first time in his life, Kabir declined.

  The bewildered father, imagining the worst—expulsion, police case, persecution—went and fell first at the feet of the crucified Christ and then at the principal’s. ‘Father, cane me instead! If the boy is bad, it is my fault. I gave birth to him. Cane me! Cane me!’ And he grabbed the priest’s slim cane and began to roll around the room flagellating himself wildly as he had seen his kinsmen do during the penitent rites of Muharram. The alarmed father had to grab him by his hair to bring him under control. Then Ghulam began to weep like a baby, squatting on the ground. ‘None of this would have happened had I gone to Pakistan! No one would have thrown my son out of school had I gone to Pakistan!’

  The principal thought the entire family was deranged. Father Michael was lucky the boy had not bitten his testicles off.

  Looking on, Kabir thought his father was beyond idiotic. Profoundly disgusted, he did not speak to his father for many long years.

  When he returned to his class a week later, he was no longer just roll number seven, the dumb and unknown Muthal—masturbator. He was the hero who had stopped the Highwayman and felled a full Father. Even the boys of class twelve now gave him a nod of recognition.

  Charlie, of course, met him with a happy smile and a song—Bal Krishan Bhatt dekho pad gaya putt—and gave him a hug. That day Kabir changed his seat to the last row where Charlie sat. The irreverent Bengali boy cut open Kabir’s head like a can of juice and began to stir it. Kabir had never seriously questioned anything in his life. Now everything was brought into question.

  Why was he studying in this weird missionary school where English would humiliate him every day? Where he would always be a failure? Why did he know nothing about his community or religion? Did he want to be a floating fool, a deracinated chutterputter chutiya? What was wrong with his father? Why was he such a coward about everything? Why did he treat Kabir like a three-year-old girl? And, by the way, why could Kabir not see as many films as he liked? Especially when his father could not stop seeing them? And what was this nonsense about getting home before dark every evening?

  Charlie the anarchic Bengali told him all about the life of the cantonment. The gymkhana clubs, the officers’ mess, the starch, the ceremony, the uniforms, the endless saluting, the spit and polish, the whisky and soda, the epaulettes and lanyards, the English films—Mary Poppins, Gunfight at the OK Corral—and the amateurish plays—gaudy bedroom capers with haw haw accents. He told him about hot fat aunties with moist cleavages and May Queen balls with Anglo-Indian bands crooning Cliff Richards and Neil Diamond. He told him about lean lieutenants hunting for any orifice and precious picnics during which soldiers used dynamite sticks t
o blast fish out of water. And he said he hated it all—the swagger, the affectation, the lack of intelligence. He said when he saw his father, a brilliant doctor, saluting and sirring morons whose only skill was parading up and down and firing rifles into the air, it drove him mad. He said he had once in anger in the middle of a dinner at the brigade commander’s house pissed in his prize rose bed. He said it was the most satisfying piss of his life.

  He said every time his father saluted some dumb senior in his presence, Charlie would loudly drawl, ‘Bokachodaaa Battalion … forward march!’ and stride off swinging his arms in a military clip. He said, actually his father was as idiotic as Kabir’s father for suffering such shit.

  Kabir was spellbound by Charlie. He could not imagine such an absence of fear, such chutzpah in the face of teachers, parents, the chutterputter chutiyas. In the Bengali boy’s presence he found himself filling up with a crazy confidence too. To earn his approval, Kabir began to develop a manner he could once have barely imagined. He could still not talk smart—he was not clever enough to do that—but he could rustle up the outrageous act. As he had inside the habit of the fallen padre.

  Once during an inter-house cricket final, Kabir commandeered an ass carrying sacks of sand from a line of animal transport trudging by the school, and rode it onto the middle of the field, pricking the beast’s flanks with a pin. The crazed animal chased down Tora Tora Vohra, the tearaway fast bowler from the cantonment, one of the chutterputter chutiyas. Tora Tora Vohra was running in to bowl, his windmill arms turning, when the maddened animal suddenly appeared behind him. With a scream of terror, Tora Tora Vohra kept running, ball-in-hand, down the pitch. The batsman facing him—called Mungfali, peanut, because of the size of his equipment: the boys insisted he didn’t need ball guards since there was nothing to protect—Mungfali turned and ran, bat in hand, leg pads flapping. In front of him, running pell-mell already was Sukha the wicketkeeper—a sardar from Kichcha with no glove skills but a body of steel that he recklessly put behind the ball. With the presence of mind of a man of the world, Tora Tora Vohra slammed off the bails as he ran past the wickets, and shouted the question, Howzzat? Peter Massey, the history teacher—an Anglo-Indian so wedded to the perfections of the past, to Bradman and Ponsford, to rules and discipline, Peter Massey, whose trousers were so starched they did not break form even when he walked—Peter Massey, standing as umpire in a floppy white cap, raised his right forefinger. The benches of Green House exploded in screaming protest and began to infiltrate the boundary. Manjit Singh, captain of Green House and king jock of the school, six feet of moving muscle, famed for his brutal temper, ran on to the field and put his big fist into Mungfali’s running face. ‘Maaderchod, are you playing cricket or kho-kho!’ Mungfali hit the ground flat on his back and stared up at the lovely blue sky with kites skating on it. Just then Sukha came running, big wicketkeeper pads and gloves aflap, and mighty Manjit swung his right leg and put his hard-nosed cricket shoes directly into his bum. Sukha actually sailed through the air for a few feet to the high-pitched whine of Maaaaaadiiiiiphuddeeeeee, before landing gracefully on his face. Frantic with fear, Tora Tora Vohra tried to change course but by now the furious Manjit had grabbed his bowling arm and was swinging him around like he did the discus at the nets, with Tora screeching, Obehhaanchooddddhhh! At that moment the jogging ass appeared with Kabir Muthal astride, and rounding on them Manjit kicked the beast hard in its belly, sending it hawing wildly, and careening off towards the teams now invading the field. A free-for-all erupted, and Manjit kicked everybody present at least once, and the runaway ass several times. At some point Peter Massey took off his floppy hat and declared the match abandoned.