The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  And that is how Kapoorsahib dangled us. He did not close the deal with Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey, baiting them continually with the absurdity of the offer, making them grovel to give away what they had started out wanting to sell. At the same time he extended us the thinnest lifeline, loaning us twenty-five lakhs, over forty-five days in five instalments, so we could hobble on for some time more. ‘I know I am burning good money—but I owe too many favours to Bhargavaji!’

  From that first meeting when he came to visit us in our office in his red Pajero and wide-brimmed hat, and we spoke to him as cool equals—the man of means meets the men of words—we had, in a few short weeks, reached the stage of sitting outside his offices, sometimes for hours, in search of a brief appointment.

  The desperation was more Jai’s than mine. I think he had delivered too many over-the-top orations to quietly fade away now. Somewhere along the way he had come to believe some of his own helium-pumped words and felt that we just had to survive, that all kinds of bullshit about democracy and freedom was tied to our sorry story.

  Sometimes I watched him standing against the window with a set jaw and steely eyes and I thought, the fucker thinks he is in a film and everything will end happily before the curtain comes down. And then I watched him in Kapoorsahib’s big office with its polished mahogany tables and plush leather sofas and golfing doodads everywhere, smiling ingratiatingly, making light wheedling talk, trying to discuss different kinds of golf clubs and courses, and I knew he knew that he was only a serf and would have to behave like one if he was to keep this gig alive.

  I mostly kept quiet and, to tell the truth, I no longer cared a fuck who took over the magazine, whether it lived or died. It was clear by now that it was never going to make us rich, and the fame it had brought to us had been mostly dubious, fleeting, and inexplicably accompanied by some weird assassination conspiracy crap. The high of the shadows, the 9mms, the carbines, the walkie-talkies, the screeching escort car, had all thinned over the months. Even Dolly/folly’s mother no longer rushed to the window when we went visiting, and the neighbours did not come knocking to discuss national affairs. All my relatives had crawled back into the holes they had leapt out of, and the media calls for random quotes and responses had fully died. The glory of the globe currently belonged to the three crazies who had stuck a javelin up the defence ministry’s tight ass. All the shadows, all the security hardware, all the Z+ security and so on, were crawling over them, the media trailing them like a cloud of whining mosquitoes. Presumably their relatives were wriggling out of their holes and their mothers-in-law leaping in through the windows.

  I had no time for Jai’s save-the-democracy crap. I had done the story because it had fallen into my lap and because I loved the sweet rush of digging out some exciting dirt and plastering it all over the walls. What a reek is produced when the hidden dirt of pompous men is aired! It makes ordinary men’s garbage seem so sweet smelling.

  It happened like this. My cousin from the agriculture ministry had passed on some information, then many papers, and then some more. He was a disgruntled bastard, a cantankerous whiner whose career was unsurprisingly in abeyance. He was the perfect station for collecting dirt. The story was about a huge swindle—in subsidies, in grains. Fictitious invoices, fictitious transportation, fictitious handouts to millions of fictitious poor. Rivers of grain had flowed on paper, without a fistful exchanging hands. Ministers and bureaucrats had been colluding with fatcat traders to cream the exchequer of hundreds of crores.

  We knew it was not unusual. It was how every government and department accounted for the poor. The pond was full of crocodiles, but we were only concerned with the one we had by the tail, and we were going to drag it out and string it up. We were stupid enough to not know that we had latched on to the biggest and meanest motherfucking mugger of all—the minister for agriculture—and he would take the government down with him if it came down to the line.

  When we’d broken the story, making the charges, we were drowned in denials and threats of lawsuits. That was in week one. In what we thought was a smart move we had divided the story into two editions. The hard evidence, blowing holes in the denials, came in week two, leaving everyone looking really bad, marooned in their dirty underpants. In hindsight the strategy was not very wise. It’s a dumb idea to leave a strong adversary—in this case, adversaries—with no escape route but to blindly hit back. When the crocodile snapped the rope it had nowhere to go but straight at us. With the second issue, the denials immediately turned into rabid countercharges. We were working at the behest of other political parties. We were on the payroll of a dubious business house. We were agents of the enemy, Pakistan. We were trying to destabilize the government, India, the whole fucking universe.

  The media printed and repeated everything. They were like the man with a straight pipe for a stomach. Everything came out the asshole as it went in the mouth—unprocessed, undigested, nothing selected, nothing rejected. If required, you could have put it back into the mouth and pushed it out the asshole once more.

  Unlike the internet lunatics who hung madly on to their quarry—the defence minister—through all the epic thrashings, our mean mugger flicked its tail out of our hands in no time and turned on us, its crocodile maw opening wider and wider. Who were we anyway? No one had heard of our magazine. No one had heard of me. Why had I done such a story? There had to be a sinister motive—it was only a matter of time before it was uncovered. The threats of lawsuits changed to threats to life and limb. Somewhere, hired assassins began to limber up for their next assignment.

  Jai tried to keep us afloat with his orations, but words were not rupees, and here we were now, prostrate before the absurd Mr Kapoor, our magazine a twenty-four-page rag, our staff only eight strong, our trio of investors aching to slit our throats. I didn’t give a twat about democracy and liberty and the glories of the Constitution but I did care about the debts we had run up. Some of Kapoorsahib’s warnings of legal liabilities were true. Jai and I would not only be broke and in hock, but also likely to face criminal charges. Sharing a jail yard with Kuchha King, Kuchha Singh and Frock Raja was no solace—though the thought of seeing them there in their Calvin Klein boxers, under the gushing handpump, was a sweet one. Frock Raja, I am sure, had one with Dalmatian puppies frolicking on them.

  So we went on our knees to Kapoorsahib every other day, and when he deigned to meet us, he lectured us about the journalistic carcass we were continually dragging to his door and Jai whinged about bogeys and doglegs and the hidden opportunities of media, and I sat quietly in the corner and imagined the merchant of arms naked, sneering at the beautiful woman labouring on him, telling her she needed to get herself a new vagina. This one was dead, and no one would take it, even for free. It was a physical, financial and legal liability. He was only sliding in it because of Bhargavaji—he owed him far too many favours.

  It helped make him seem more farcical than sinister, and helped me feel less abject.

  One stormy evening, with the wind ripping branches off neem trees and snapping power lines and the rain coming in waves of hard and harder, the house bell trilled. I was sitting in my cramped study—away from Dolly/folly, who was greedily swallowing some emotional family drama on television—and reading the part in the Mahabharata where Lord Krishna tricks the Kauravas with the illusion of sunset, allowing his favourite, Arjuna, to fulfil his dire vow and slay Jayadratha, when Felicia opened the door, flecks of water glistening on her coal-black face, and said, ‘Huthyam.’

  It had been a while, and it took me some time to realize what she was saying.

  SI Hathi Ram stood outside the front door in a clumsy, standard army-issue rain cape, rivulets of water flowing off it, rubbing his cropped hair dry with the palm of his hand. Behind him, in the mouth of the open gate, was a white-coloured police Gypsy, its parking lights blinking in the soaked dark, with the silhouettes of four men dimly visible inside. My shadows stood at attention beside the SI, their feet hurriedly stuck into unlac
ed shoes. By now they had somehow managed to finish buttoning their clothes and recovering their weapons. A visiting assassin would have to wait for them to get dressed before engaging them.

  With a smiling mouth and unsmiling eyes, Hathi Ram said, ‘In the films, always, the bad man—the policeman—comes to meet the hero on a night like this. The wind is screaming; the rain falling in sheets; the lights have blown; every djinn and spirit has stirred from his hiding place; and then the bell rings. Ting tong. The audience’s heart stops beating. It knows immediately that something dramatic is about to happen. Either the bad man will meet his deserved end, or he will trap the hero in a false case that will destroy his life.’

  Wriggling out of the stiff canvas cape, he hooked it on the edge of the door where it hung stiffly, like a dripping corpse. ‘You don’t need to close the door,’ he said, as I tried to push it shut as much as the cape would allow. ‘We have enough fire-power outside to take on the Bhutanese army.’

  I thought, only if it can get dressed in time.

  His leather shoes squelched, and when I looked at them, he said, ‘Don’t mind?’

  I didn’t and I took him into the study, where he sat down comfortably on the chair opposite my table, and casting around, found and picked up The Naked Lunch. Caressing it tenderly with his fingertips, he gave me his first-ever critical appreciation. ‘Naked lunch—that means nanga khana. Arre bhai, what an idea! Have you read it?’

  I nodded.

  He said, smiling only with his lips, ‘Anything about the police in it?’

  I said, only tangentially.

  He said, ‘You think I can read it?’

  I said anyone could read anything.

  He said, ‘You know, sahib, that’s not true. Most of us are fated to only mindlessly do. Like insects. Just do. We don’t know how to think, we don’t know how to read, we have no understanding of anything. We are just insects. The smallest of insects. Move our limbs, fill our stomachs; move our limbs, fill our stomachs. Day after day. And then one day we are dead. Just like that. Accidentally stepped upon, or flicked aside, or in our stupid greed we fall into a honey jar, or a bigger insect simply swallows us whole. Nobody mourns us, nobody remembers us. Insects like us are dying by the minute.’

  I said, ‘Hathi Ramji, have no illusions, that is true for all of us. We are all unsung birds of passage in this world.’

  He suddenly held up the book and said, ‘No sirji, we are both grown-up men, let us not just try and be nice to each other. The fact is, those who want to kill you are insects and those of us who guard you are insects. But you are not an insect. You are a killer of insects; you are a killer of those who kill insects. You are a man who challenges the world, shapes it, changes things. If you are an insect, you are a very big and important one.’

  I thought of Dolly/folly getting wet watching some daughter-in-law scream at her mother-in-law on television. I thought of the eight people left at the magazine and Sippy swaying through the echoing rooms. I thought of Sara and me lunging and probing as we abused each other in accented Hindi. I thought of Jai and me performing a shashtang namaskar, fully prostrate in front of Kapoorsahib, whose dick pointed at us like the barrel of an AK-47. I thought of the five men, four nondescript, one a maker of brain curries, in a courtroom surrounded by a waddle of flapping penguins.

  I said, ‘So what happens in the film now? Is the hero trapped in a false case that destroys his life?’

  The SI laughed with his mouth and said, ‘Sirji, this is no film. This is real life, and in this both the hero and the policeman are finally destroyed. And that is why I am here today, under the cloak of rain and storm. I am here not as SI Hathi Ram, but as a friend. You know we are pawns. We can only move straight, one step at a time. Someone pushes us and pushes us, till we die. But above us are bishops and knights and horses, and they can move right and left and up and down and back and front and jump over others too. There is no way of knowing what they will do. I have come to tell you that you must not trust anyone. No one. I know you are a powerful man and have friends in powerful places, but take this as the plea of a simple cop. Trust no one; nothing is what it seems.’

  Trust no one? Fuck, I knew no one! The least powerful man I knew was Sippy and the most powerful was Kapoorsahib, with Jai in between. And of course Sara, who was a force of nature, beyond categorization.

  The wind was howling in an almost continuous scream and sluicing through my closed window, making the bamboo chik thrash about. Right outside, in the alcove next to the entrance, sat the shadows, passing on their weapons from shift to shift, unbuttoning and buttoning their clothes, guarding a man against no one knew what.

  I said, ‘What happened to those five men? Did you find out anything about them?’

  Just then the lights blew. In the dark Hathi Ram said, ‘It’s the question that did it.’

  I could not remember being in such complete darkness ever. Always at night there was the seep of some light from the ventilators and windows. Now there was nothing. The storm had obliterated the skies, and the power cut had sucked out the streetlights too. Suddenly there was a rasp and the policeman’s face appeared in the light of a match. In that wan light, with the rest of him missing, it came to me that he was actually an old man. His eyes were lined deep, and his jowls had begun to collect along his jawline. The skin on his neck was loose. More than hard and set, in that yellow light his eyes appeared tired and still.

  I shouted, ‘Felicia!’ and almost instantly the door opened and she came in with a big red candle, thick as a coke bottle, its light glancing off her moist, coal-dark skin. Right behind her loomed ms fair and lovely, Dolly/folly, a vacuous white ghost, cut adrift from the squawking on the television. I refused to make any introductions, and she floated away soundlessly as ghosts do, after a perfunctory namaste. Now she would get on the phone and whisper to her mother for hours. I could never tell about what. Both were dumb and knew nothing.

  The SI said, ‘Very nice.’

  I said, ‘The men? Did you learn something from them?’

  He fished out a pack of cigarettes from his trousers, held it up, and said, ‘Don’t mind?’

  I found him a round green stone ashtray.

  He said, ‘I smoke less than a cigarette a month. Sometimes only one in three months. I bought this pack last year. Look at its state. I only do it when the stress gets too much. This weather—you know, this weather makes me nervous.’

  He pulled on the cigarette with a theatrical flourish and followed it with an exaggerated cough. He didn’t look nervous, just old. How many characters like me he must have negotiated in his long career, I thought. He thinks I am just a pup off the kennels who inadvertently landed the outsized bone.

  He said, ‘I should not be saying this to you, but I felt I had to. This Tuesday when I woke to go to the mandir I had a vision. I saw Hanumanji—he was carrying his mace on his shoulder, and he was so big I did not even come up to his ankles. His muscles were the size of mountains, and his tail was going through the sky. But he was smiling, and his eyes were shining with compassion and love. He said to me—his voice like a million megaphones though he was speaking softly—he said to me, “Hathi Ram, my son, you may be part of a vile and corrupt police force, but this week you will take a vow only to do good and to speak the truth, especially if you encounter anyone who is a devotee of mine.” I clutched his mighty ankles, overcome, and suddenly he became as small as me. And before I knew it he had blessed me with his right hand and vanished. That day I took my wife out and bought her a saree, and I sent my sick mother and my daughter money orders of a thousand rupees each, and I bought boondi prasad for a hundred and one rupees and distributed it to my neighbours, and at the mandir I gave all the cripples a ten-rupee note each. And today, when I was sitting in my office and the orders came about the reassessment of your security, I knew immediately why Hanumanji had come to me. Tell me: is it possible that you are a devotee of Hanumanji?’

  I nodded. There were probably two do
zen entries in that red-cloth fold-over book recording my Tuesday evening excursions.

  His face was in the dark. The candlelight was only a small pool on the table.

  He said, in that flat voice of his, ‘I knew it. There had to be a reason. Nothing in this world happens without a reason. The problem is, most of us never manage to find the reasons, or do so too late.’

  I said, ‘What did Hanumanji tell you to tell me?’

  He said, ‘To trust no one. Nothing is what it seems.’

  I said, ‘What did the men say?’

  He said, ‘I don’t know. No one knows. They say one thing to the police, another thing to the media, and something else in court. None of it may be true.’

  I said, ‘What do the police say?’

  He said, from beyond the pool of trembling light, ‘That’s even more unreliable. The police only say what someone wants them to say. They have nothing ever to say on their own.’

  Just then Felicia materialized, soundlessly, from the dark, giving us both a start. Hathi Ram said, ‘You should get headlights for her.’ She handed out the cups of tea and set a plate of cream biscuits on the table. The policeman put away The Naked Lunch, stubbed out his cigarette, and picking up a biscuit opened its halves.

  I said, ‘But they did want to hit me?’

  He said, smelling the cream, ‘I hope so.’ Then seeing my expression, he added, ‘Sorry, that’s not what I meant. I meant I hope they are not innocent.’

  I said, ‘So whom should I not trust?’

  He said, ‘Trust nobody. Believe nothing that anyone tells you. Don’t go anywhere without your security. Avoid public places. Change the roads you take. Don’t take the same route every day.’

  I thought: Sara. The bastards probably had their eyeballs inside the chinks in her door.

  I said, ‘Is that all you came to tell me, Hathi Ramji?’

  He said, ‘I did what Hanumanji told me to do. But I had to also tell you that your security is being downgraded. They are pulling out the escort car and sentries.’