At the back, away from the tracks, right below where they slept, was a park—well, not quite a park, just an open dusty lot, fringed by anaemic eucalyptus trees and some bushes of yellow oleander. For two months every year, mostly in October-November, depending on what the priests decreed about the alignment of the stars, this lot became a veritable Kublai Khan’s banquet hall. Each day the lot was taken over by a new group, who set up the same-looking red-and-blue striped tents, spread the same red-and-blue frayed durries on the ground, and arranged the same ugly iron and wood tables, covered in starched but stained white sheets. In the near corner, where the tallest eucalyptus grew, sat huge gas stoves and massive steel containers for cooking and serving.
During the day the rats avoided peeping down too often at the savouries that were being stirred. In the night when the lot stood transformed into a thing of light and beauty, and loud music beat up the trees and onto the roof, two of the band scrubbed themselves to shining and climbed into the cleanest clothes they could muster—some fancy export rejects bought for a few rupees from the pavements stalls of Sadar Bazaar. When the groom’s army arrived, band blaring, horse frisking, men jerking, and tore a hole through the welcoming hosts into the heart of the tent, the two boys swept themselves in with the tide. At the tables, they dived into the middle of the biggest swirl of bodies and ate and ate till the food crept up to their nostrils; then they stuffed what they could into their pockets; and sometimes when there was no roofing tent, casually tossed food packets and cold drinks out onto the roof.
This gambit was not for everyone. Kaaliya never made the trip—he had intruder written all over him. Dhaka never went, partly for the same reason, partly because it was beneath him to scrounge. Tarjan was a risk. In a certain kind of wedding party he could merge, but there too his slow wit could wrong-foot him easily. The safest transgressors were Gudiya, who slopped on the stolen make-up, Chhotu, Makhi and Chini who, well served by their fair skins, were slow to arouse suspicion. Of them, Chini had to be the most cautious: though his innocence was completely beguiling, his slit eyes and pug nose were a giveaway.
Sure enough, every now and then they were caught out, and hunted down with a barrage of abuse. But it was not easy to snare a station rat. Working in tandem, they created diversions and chaos, blitzing under tables, over chairs, through gaps in the shamiana. Capturing hands received teeth marks, and the abuse was batted back with equal colour. The rats lived in a land way beyond shame. It was the first injunction of their catechism. In fact, baiting the swaying beaming fools pretending at marriage jollity was fun: sometimes when two of them had eaten well they would provoke a fracas just to generate a situation.
The finest days of their lives were the sweet weekends when a banquet in the lot coincided with a video night. The network would begin to hum by late afternoon, early evening. Yes, he was coming; yes, he had been spotted; yes, he had the latest Bachchan starrer. Everywhere the excitement was palpable. Their stomachs stuffed with matar-paneer and naan, gulab-jamun and rasmalai, Dhaka’s gang would head for the large garbage dump beyond the end of platform one. Every path of the pathless station led there; the mood at the venue was already electric; the buzz of the rats like the hum of a million flies.
A 25-watt yellow bulb, hung on a pulled wire and looped around a nail, marked the entrance to the dump. On the left, against the far white-tiled wall sat a boxy television, hissing softly, emitting blue light. The heaped garbage on the right was cordoned off for the night with a length of discarded shamiana. Under the weak bulb, wearing a dirty white kurta-pajama, sitting cross-legged on a packing crate, pulling on a beedi that cut through the stench, was video uncle. He sported a long beard like Salushan Baba, but was different: fatter, younger, less patient, more authoritarian. Uncle would not start the film till the dump was packed, till every rat from the station’s gutters had bought his five-rupee ticket and settled down. It angered him to rewind and repeat scenes, and he would not do it for anyone but the boys from the peepul tree. As it was, the peepul boys were never late. They loved the films as much as anyone else; in fact, it was they who ensured that video uncle gave them value for money through the night.
When the garbage dump was crammed and the chatter of the boys had startled every night bird out of the area, video uncle would send someone scampering to holler up the peepul tree. This ancient giant, once at the edge of the Raj-era outhouse that lay just beyond the main platform, had over the decades split the old brick wall and become one with the building. To access the roof you had to climb one of the tree’s hundred knotted sinews. Over time, footholds had been scuffed out in the tree’s flesh to make the ascent easier, and a thick iron stake driven into a crack just above head level to give the climbing hand a grip. Of course, you only went up there if you were invited in or dragged up. The rats referred to it as narak, hell. The stories of narak were aptly hair-raising: tales of violence, drugs, alcohol and sex. A casual summons to the peepul tree was enough to loosen the bowels of the most hardened rat.
The balcony—two back seats ripped from an old Ambassador car, the stuffing bursting through the green Rexine—was reserved for the peepul boys. They sprawled there with their strips of foil, cigarettes, peanut packets and beer bottles, commenting gutturally on the scenes, tossing emptied bottles in a high arc over the cloth wall into the refuse. Any rat daring to look back had his ears boxed. When they wanted to take a piss, when they wanted to see a scene again, they called out to uncle, who paused, repeated, re-repeated as ordered. If they disliked a film, they ordered it stopped. Uncle then rummaged in his duffel bag and slid in a fresh cassette.
The peepul boys were tough, shadowy, out-of-bounds; their numbers growing and dwindling, their reputation for violence keeping even the khakis at bay. At the time the group’s leader was a youth called Shakaal—a reference to the shaven-headed villain of a 1980s’ blockbuster. Every Saturday evening, Madhmudwa, the barber with a wall-side shop along the parking lot, climbed the peepul to shave Shakaal’s head. In the night, boys watching him from the corner of their eyes could see the light from the television screen glance off his oiled scalp. In Shakaal’s pocket, it was said, nestled not just a katta made out of a sawn-off pipe, like the others had, but a real revolver.
Like everyone else, Chini fell in love with the movies immediately and the ardour never faded. Sitting on the durrie, arms tight around his folded knees, snug between Kaaliya and Tarjan or one of the other men, he sat riveted as one film after the other lit up the night. By the time the third film played itself out and the dark sky above began diluting into grey, he was among the few rats left wide awake.
When uncle began to roll up his wires and pack away the bricklike cassettes, Chini was always hit by a dreadful melancholy. Scattered hazy images drifted through his sad unslept mind. Of green hills slippery with rain; a bamboo and thatch house with low beds; big birds and small animals moving in and out; the continual swirl of people outside the open door; noises in a language he no longer knew; the arms of a mother with coal-black, defiant eyes; a man who came and went, patting his head, lying on his mother; many men who came and went, patting his head, huddling in whispers. Then the night of infernal noise: shouts in the night, screams in the night, flames in the night, dogs wailing, chicken squawking; someone hammering open the night with sharp cracks in nice rhythmic cycles. Thak. Thak. Thak. Thakathakathakathakathakathaka. A mother’s arm pushing him under the low bed, followed by a thick shawl and full sack. Loud shouts in the room. A mother’s defiant snarl. Thakathakathakathakathakathaka. Someone hammering open a mother in nice rhythmic cycles. Little Lhungdim sleeping. Little Lhungdim waking. Little Lhungdim travelling in an uncle’s arms. Little Lhungdim on a train. Little Lhungdim on a train. Little Lhungdim on a train. Little Lhungdim, little Aladdin. Little Lhungdim, little Chini.
When Chini confided his fractured memories to Kaaliya, the snakeboy assured him he’d had parents just like all the others did. Everyone has to come from somewhere. But it was good that he was r
id of them. Parents were rarely anything but a burden. Kaaliya had had to flee his. And think: without losing them would Chini ever have found Kaaliya? And the band? And the solution? And the movies? Then Kaaliya took him to platform one where the baggage-laden hordes surged through the gates unarraigned by the ticket-checker, and pointed out to him glum child after glum child being dragged along by a snarling adult.
Chini had to agree that being a station rat was the only life worth living, and if the price of it was no parents, then it was not too much to pay.
Even so the shrapnel of memory kept flying in his head, and each time he sucked the rag, he heard the sweet music of rain on a thatch roof amid wet green trees at the end of a world he could never again find.
iii
From Bangkok to Hell
Dhaka was the first one to feel up his penis. It was his inalienable right. After all Chini was his catch, and his ward. By now winter had swept into Delhi, with fog, rising mist, and intermittent winds that spliced open the head and made it throb. Everyone’s nose ran and everyone’s eyes watered. The station, always cursed with fewer hours of sunlight than the rest of the city, now felt the fingers of night begin to clutch at it by four in the afternoon.
The band moved home again—the roofs had become killer glaciers—and was now snugly ensconced in the gutter between platforms four and five. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. The gutter was not more than four feet under the ground and was mostly dry. There was a trickle of sludge in the groove at the centre, but the boys had thrown old railway sleepers across it to bury its slime in deep. The iron cover of the manhole had been stolen and sold long ago, and now the entrance to their home was guarded by a cratewood trapdoor, the dozens of nail-heads in its flesh glinting in the midday sun. Most nights, unless there was unseasonal rain, the trapdoor was left to a side to allow the entry of fresh air and of reassuring station sounds.
It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. The gutter pipe was in a generally good condition and did not run too many leaks even in driving rain. There were two big and many small perforations on the far left, but fortunately that section lay under the big sodium lamp that towered over the tracks—this meant that even on the darkest night a few sharp lines of light flowed into the subterranean den. In December and January and February when a single night without shelter could freeze your blood over and make you a corpse, the gutter was a great refuge, positively warm and comforting with bodies packed against each other, the rags of blankets and quilts wound tight. Sometimes you could even rig a small wood-fire on an iron grille set on four stolen bricks and a handful of sand.
It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. As long as the boys stuck to their covenant of not bringing in and eating food in the gutter, the rodents—some the equal of small cats—stayed away. The occasional one that wandered through was grabbed by Tarjan and tossed like a cricket ball through the open hole. Passers-by were prone to be startled by rats suddenly falling from the sky.
That first winter there were nine of them sleeping in the gutter. They had to pay the round-caps on the beat, rupees fifty every day. Each of them pitched in with five and Dhaka gave ten. Sometimes a new boy could not put up his share and sometimes then the round-caps demanded other things.
It was here towards the end of December that Dhaka, descending into the gutter late at night, pushed Makhi aside and settled down next to Chini. It was the hour of vapours and the entire band had rags stuck under their noses. The rain was thumping the thatch reassuringly when little Lhungdim felt his mother’s hand walk his skin. Soon it was up his shorts, palpitating his groin. This was good, very good, the best the solution had ever made him feel. Then his hand was taken and his fingers wrapped around something wonderfully hot. The baba, it seemed, had given him another kind of solution today.
Lying on the other side of Chini, Kaaliya read the contours of the dark—the pungi singing sweetly in his head—and felt a wrench of possessiveness. But he also knew that the new train that was leaving the station would soon stop at his feet too.
Dhaka did not do anything brutal or hurried. He was a young man who had dined well for years, and now had the approach of an epicure. The boy was still small, and he was a rare delicacy—pleasure lay not in consuming him abruptly, but in planting the seeds of arousal in him and seeing what grew from it. All the band boys, except for Gudiya who was his anointed sister, had had a period of initiation with Dhaka. It had been painless for all, except Makhi, with whose soft, fair skin and sharp features Dhaka had been besotted for a long time. With him too, eventually, the novelty had thinned, and sanity been restored.
Now Dhaka had two girls, one on platform two and another on platform nine. One from Calcutta and the other from Lucknow. He took them to the cushioned berths of parked carriages. Two boys from the band had to go along to keep vigil. Though Dhaka held on to his band and returned to it most nights, over the last year he had been moving away from the ordinary delights of the station to more serious concerns of drugs and crime. Kaaliya, for one, intuited that their chief was no longer cutting pockets; he was slowly getting involved with some big gangs in Sadar and Chandni Chowk.
On some days he had rolls of notes in his pocket, and instead of asking the gang to trot out what they had gathered during the day, he actually handed out crisp fifties to each of them. Two slim chains of shining gold had now appeared among the jostle of necklaces roped around his neck and he had put a hole through his left ear and jammed a gold ring in it. Grinning cheekily, Tarjan said, ‘Dhaka has now become America!’ Nor did the gang boss sniff the solution any more; he only smoked the foil. As they lay in the gutter in the dark, the boys watched him burn the lines at blistering speed and felt his growing sense of tranquillity envelop them all.
Dhaka’s reputation had been built on his ability to strike with a screwdriver. A screwdriver demanded more rage than a knife. With a knife you could slash and scrape, undertake a skirmish and withdraw, engage in a tease and play. Not so with a screwdriver. A screwdriver demanded much greater commitment. There was no scope for whimsical engagement. It was something pure. With a screwdriver you had to dig deep: go all the way, go in with your soul screaming, go in with your whole body following your hand. A screwdriver could not live with doubt. If it did, it could never puncture skin, muscle and bone and reach the logical end of its iron tip. A screwdriver seldom afforded a second chance. It had to do its work in one unstoppable plunge. It was an iron pencil and what it wrote was unerasable. Dhaka said if you plunged it in right, you didn’t even stain your clothes or splatter your boots. All you had to do was give your hands a good wash, and run the iron pencil under a flowing tap.
Dhaka said, ‘Show-offs use a knife—all flick and flash and funtoosh! If you want to impress girls it’s okay, but if you want to kill there’s nothing like a screwdriver!’ Dhaka said the beauty of a screwdriver was that it was aesthetic and it was a time bomb. No flesh flapping open, no entrails falling out, no blood gushing like a broken pipe. You made a small hole in the bastard and you sowed death. Many hours later, when he had gone back to whatever fucking hole he had crawled out from, death exploded inside him, and then everyone ran around looking for the hole it had crept in through. Those who did not die, lived for the rest of their life with a hole inside them full of pus and fear. They existed with the knowledge that deep inside them was a festering hollow that nothing could fill; and they lived in dread of getting another one.
Dhaka’s arsenal of screwdrivers came from the hardware shops in Chawri Bazaar. A few were as long as his forearm; some had iron the length of his hand; and many were short, the rod only four inches, the wood handle rounded and smooth, with deep grooves for traction. These were the ones Dhaka preferred to use, and two of them were always on his body.
Chini liked the feel of the smooth round grip of the short screwdrivers, and when his hand was taken in the night by Dhaka he imagined what he lovingly caressed was the weapon’s wooden handle. In time, over the months and years, he came to caress the handles of everyon
e in the band, especially that of his closest friend, Kaaliya.
From those initial fumblings to Bangkok was an inevitable journey. To reach Bangkok the boys exited from Ajmeri Gate and walked a straight line past old Delhi—through Asaf Ali Road and Daryaganj, to the power house behind Rajghat where Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes still blew in the wind. The first time, they left the station at about eight in the evening and walked for two hours. Chini’s mind was blown away by the sheer number of vehicles, the big buildings and the wide roads. He could not believe all of this—two hours of brisk walking—was the same city. His mates had told him that in Bangkok there lay surprises such as he could never imagine.
The jhuggi-jhopdi colony they entered was overhung by a mad skein of exposed wires and lit by naked bulbs. A line of sludge in a shallow groove ran alongside the tight mud lanes that criss-crossed it. In these lanes stood small pushcarts selling ice cream, chaat, tikki; modified bicycles selling rasgullas, cotton candy, aampapad, kulcha; large vendor carts for vegetables, sherbets, lunch and dinner ensembles; and aluminium carts for drinking water. Mongrels sprawled everywhere, and loud voices rang out from every loose brick and tin room—everyone seemed to be in the middle of an argument. No one looked at them with any curiosity as they threaded the lanes in single file.
The Story of My Assassins Page 33
