The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  The cop said, ‘So what did you do with the hammer?’

  He had buried it behind the house, between rows of cabbage, tamping the mud down on it neatly. Watching him dig it out, his mentor said, ‘The police would have found this in less than two days. Don’t ever make the mistake of underestimating a policeman. Their sources and resources are infinite. When they want to get to the bottom of something they do so easily. And they can get information out of anyone, if they want. Even me.’

  The family watched in admiration and horror as the cop and the boy washed the hammer under the handpump. The father said, ‘You have avenged me, my son. You have given your father back his fallen turban.’ The boy said nothing. He could have popped another three skulls had the occasion demanded. It was a sweet sensation: that moment when the iron exploded through flesh and bone, ending all argument, settling all dispute. How the last one’s words had died on his lips as he went through his left ear. He had always felt people fussed and complained too much. Today he knew it was easy to resolve discord if you had clarity of purpose.

  Once the excitement had abated, Gyanendra asked, ‘Will they find out?’

  The cop said, ‘Without a doubt. He has to leave this place. If they catch him they will hang him three times. After which Joginder will take a hammer and break all his bones. The villagers have just begun to stream in to see the bodies. No one has ever seen anything like it. There are going to be no exonerating circumstances, no sympathy from any quarter.’

  ‘But where? He has a maternal uncle near Varanasi. Shall we send him there?’

  ‘All relations are out. Two wireless messages and he will be picked up. Also, don’t forget Joginder. He will get to know soon, and he will be on the hunt too.’

  Looking at the boy, now leaning against the wall—his frame so powerful—the cop said, ‘You come with me. The hare must cover as much distance as he can before the hounds begin to run.’

  Thanks to a senior officer who had been passionate about hockey and to a Gujjar legislator from the area, Rajbir Gujjar had managed to get a job as a physical training instructor in a government school close to his village when he had been pensioned off from the service. The school, like the police, was in a shambles, the chasm between the idea and the reality vast enough to sink a thousand students. Many of the schoolrooms were occupied by the staff as private residences and the holding of classes was a ramshackle consensus between the students and teachers. Some of the key teachers there actually worked on a proxy. The men appointed by the state lived in Muzaffarnagar while other men nominated by them came and taught in their name: the salary was split between the two. It was a kind of subletting. The government was aware of this, but it had more important things to worry about.

  As far as Rajbir Gujjar was concerned, he had nothing much else to do. He could have, had he wished, brokered a deal with the headmaster and never shown up at all. Teaching was a luxury here; the idea of sport, a joke. Village children in India are not born for the affectations of academic accents and athletics: they go to school to escape oppressive fathers and unrelenting toil. The playing field behind the school building had very quickly become broken ground, used by the villagers to graze their cattle. The iron-pipe goalposts at the two ends looked eerie, like doorways into nothingness. No ball had ever rolled through their mouth. At one point, equipment of all kinds had been bought: hockey-sticks, footballs, javelins, badminton racquets, cricket bats and wickets. Now nothing remained except a fat, heavy iron shotput. It was the only sport left for the schoolboys. Each day boys wagered on their ability to throw the heavy ball. The ground in front of the line, drawn in the front yard of the school, was heavily dented.

  It was in this arena of grunts and soft thuds that Rajbir Gujjar first met the young Vishal Tyagi. Already he could heave the shot farther than his older classmates, and the flex in his big shoulders suggested he could do better still. There was also an intensity about the boy that he found attractive—in his time he had had it too, as did the best players he had played alongside. It was what he had missed the most when he’d finally become a journeyman cop, the hard focus on getting something done. The boy also appeared unusually calm and generous. He did not talk much or backslap, and he was happy to give other, more puny boys a chance at tossing the shot while he waited. Often he also saw him exert his huge strength to back someone who was being mocked or short-changed.

  The former cop, when living in the sports barracks, had seen the athletes work out. He was familiar with the rotating swivel that was used for propelling the shot. The schoolboys just threw it with the shuffling momentum of a few short steps. Vishal was the one to teach it to. In a few weeks the taciturn Tyagi boy was spinning and heaving the iron ball farther than anyone had even seen. Now there was one patch of dented ground at thirty feet, and more than ten feet farther, another patch, wholly attributable to the young Tyagi. Rajbir felt this boy could go all the way to Lucknow to the state championships; in fact, with a bit of training he could make it to the national school games. No one from this entire district had ever gone that far.

  As is often the case with coaches and mentors, his entire life, all his personal ambitions, became focused on the young athlete. He set the regime. Hundred sit-ups and fifty push-ups twice a day; twenty chin-ups on the football goalpost five times a day; a five-kilometre run every morning, the last kilometre with a brick clasped in each hand; and two hundred puts of the shot. Once a week he would take him to his fields, unyoke the oxen, and while he sat in the shade and shouted instructions, watch him work the plough till the water ran off his body in a cascade and he could move no more.

  To supplement his exertions, Rajbir Gujjar argued with the headmaster till a special diet was sanctioned for the promising athlete: two litres of milk, a dozen bananas, and four eggs each day. He also convinced the boy to defy his parents and eat chicken once a week. ‘You are not trying to become a priest! You have to eat flesh if you want strength in your flesh!’ With each week, the boy began to dent the ground farther and farther. When he was at training the boys would come and watch, and marvel at the voluptuous biceps and big shoulders.

  On Saturdays, the mentor would give his protégé’s body a mustard oil rub, and as he massaged him they would talk. Rajbir Gujjar told the boy thrilling stories about his playing days—the breathtaking runs he made to trap and centre the ball; the cliffhangers they won; the newspaper mentions; the trophies; the luminaries they met. The boy talked of the only two he loved: his mother and the buffalo, Shanti. He spoke of his resolve to reach the nationals and win a medal there. In his quiet, halting way he would say, ‘The name of this village will become famous because of me.’

  Later, as he came closer to the master, Vishal talked about the family feud. How his father’s cousin and his sons had seized their lands, how they intimidated them, and how they had broken his father’s kneecap. He felt his father was weak. ‘He should have shot them. He has a gun in his trunk.’ He asked the former cop, ‘If the police does not help you, what should you do?’ Rajbir had to agree there was a case for taking matters into one’s own hands.

  As anticipated by the coach, the boy swept the district and zonal championships, breaking the record at every level, and by the time they reached Lucknow he already had a name. At the stadium, while other boys and girls guzzled soft drinks, ate aloo tikki and lurid ice lollies, flirting with the burning heat of adolescence, Vishal drank his milk, ate his bananas, pumped his muscles, and threw the shot to a record distance. That night Rajbir took him to Hazratganj and fed him a lavish dinner at Gaylord’s. ‘Remember, son, the final seat of all achievement is neither the head nor the heart nor the muscles. It is the ass. Courage and determination lives in the ass! When the odds stack up against men, when the challenges mount, it is the ass that gives way first! All my life I have seen it. The asshole opens up and bleats like a goat. The head and the heart and the muscles see it, and follow suit!’

  In saying this, Rajbir Gujjar was able to bring himself to co
nfess to his protégé that his own life and career had been diminished because he had not enough strength in his ass. ‘I was a good player on the sports field, but when I came to the police station my sphincter could not hold. Every time there was something bold to be done, I had to sit down to save my ass from weeping. There was a man with us, from Bulandshahar—Chuchundur, we used to call him. He was not more than five feet tall and was dark as a crow and scrawny as the neck of a vulture. You would treat him as a sweeper if you saw him on the road. But he had an asshole made of iron. I saw him at work at the station. If you wanted finger-bones crunched, kneecaps broken, ligaments wrenched, testicles twisted like toffee wrappers, you turned to Chuchundur. Big men, huge men, feared him. He could in a flash put a pistol up your mouth and have you suck it like a lollipop and wet your pants at the same time. Later, he rose to become the best cleaner of garbage in the state police. Anyone who didn’t deserve to be sent to the courts was sent on a ride with Chuchundur. Because he was tiny they all tried to run away from him, and had to be shot. At one time he was also called Chuchundur Pacheesi, because his score was twenty-five. Later, he went far beyond it. From a mere constable, the little runt rose to become an inspector faster than anyone else, and summons for him would come from inspector-generals of police and powerful ministers. So remember, my son, you can throw a shot very far with muscles and heart, but to win in life you need an asshole of iron!’

  The boy, working his way through a second plate of chholabhatura said, ‘And where is he now?’

  ‘Dead. Found by the riverbank with his kneecaps splintered, his penis spliced off, and his tongue pulled out. They had to identify him by the rings on his fingers.’

  The boy widened his eyes in silent query.

  The former cop said, ‘It’s much better to have an asshole of iron and lead a splendid if short life than to be like the rest of us, our backsides bleating like goats, fearfully rationing out our small pathetic lives. Life gave Chuchundur nothing—no caste, no money, no education, no height, no muscles, no looks, no connections. Nothing! Nothing, except an asshole of iron! And with that he changed everything.’

  The boy said nothing, but he understood the message. He’d been born with an iron asshole, anyway; now it was only a matter of reinforcing it some.

  Even by the standard of iron assholes, the former cop and present coach was taken aback at the brain-curry spree his protégé had embarked on. Defending his ward’s very occasional excesses from irate school authorities and the headmaster was one thing, but with this carnage Rajbir was totally out of his depth. Three dead men, heads caved in. To protect such a killer you needed to be a very powerful politician or a very rich man. Or you needed to be someone who feared neither.

  There was only one he had ever known.

  For most of his four-year tenure with Bajpaisahib, the personal security officer had been Donullia Gujjar’s man. At the time, the mighty brigand was in the process of starting to legitimize some of his wealth. He had lived beyond the line of the law for long enough to know that the greatest bandits worked inside the line as much as outside it. It was only then that you went from being a mere dacoit to a legend. It was only then that you survived beyond the swift cycle of seven years of glory and death.

  Donullia Gujjar knew that while men like him worked from the outside in, there was another class of men who worked from the inside out. Bajpai was such a man. When men like Donullia and Bajpai fell into a marriage they became the masters of all realms, heaven and earth, city and field, money and power.

  Donullia’s brother, Gwala Gujjar, became a civil-works contractor. He was so good at his work that he began to get a slice of every new and old project in the district. Repairing torn roads, laying new ones, building rural schools and primary health centres, culverts and bridges, bus stops and night shelters, clearing drains and gutters, planting power poles and stringing telephone lines. The shrewdest men in India have always known that money lurks not in the dazzle of the markets but in the dour corridors of government. Laying macadam is paved with greater—and quieter—riches than all the hustle of the high marketplace.

  The benign politician blessed the contracts and Donullia’s severe shadow ensured competitors sewed their lips and stilled their fingers.

  But Donullia and Bajpaisahib’s relationship went deeper than macadam. It was also tied to the high rituals of democracy. The brigand was a persuasive canvasser for the public man, and at every election his word would scorch through the district, urging the peasants to vote wisely and in their best interests. On voting days his men would trawl through the booths—armed and alert—ensuring fair electoral processes were not derailed by money or muscle. Bajpaisahib never lost an election, and Gwala Gujjar’s businesses diversified to include shops, petrol pumps, gas agencies, cinema halls, a small vegetarian hotel, and an English-medium school.

  It was only proper that Gwala Gujjar, who was older than Donullia, was a small, mild man. He beamed the terror of his two shadows, but he spoke softly and without aggression. Too few people understand the potency of the big fist that presents a soft face. Gwala Gujjar then was the man to whom Rajbir reported. Mining the minister’s bungalow continually, he took to him news of Bajpaisahib’s movements, the men he had met, and the way the political winds were blowing. He provided details of the comfort women who brought solace to the public man’s stressed life, and of the traders and businessmen who were opening up new and novel mines of moneymaking.

  The brigand’s brother always met him with humility and grace, bending and smiling. He met him at the door of his house, sat him next to himself in his bed-cum-sitting-room, fed him well with snacks and tea, and walked him out to the gate. Sometimes he gave him an envelope thick with gratitude, and sometimes a warm hug. Often he would say, ‘You are my Gujjar brother. Donullia always says, in the gang there is no caste and never can be, but in life caste is family. He has ordered me never to turn away a Gujjar from my door.’

  There were always supplicants crowding the front of the house, seeking jobs, referrals, financial aid, justice, and sometimes the road to the famous brother. Gwala Gujjar performed every good and generous deed with utter humility in Donullia’s name, and always he told the grateful, ‘Seek blessings for him. He lives in the jungle and sleeps on the hard ground, often eating uncooked food, with the open sky for a roof, and wild animals for company—and he does all this for you, for the cause of justice, for the salvation of the poor. So pray for him every day, and on Tuesdays offer prasad to Hanuman so he may protect him and, by extension, us.’

  In the four years that he lived in Chitrakoot, Rajbir saw Donullia’s empire expand and his wealth multiply. New jeeps and big cars, new properties, a movie hall, and a motorcycle agency. More of his men could be seen overground, transiting through the town, creating a stir. Often there were rumours that the man himself was visiting, but for some reason Rajbir had never met anyone who said he had actually seen him. It was always a second-hand story, and it was always couched in vagueness. Few even knew any more what he looked like. Though he had been a legend for fifteen years, the police did not possess a single image of the man. He had turned an outlaw much before the government had started snaring all criminals in passport-sized photographs, and in all the years since, he had never once been captured. Nor had anyone betrayed him and lived to tell the tale. There were stories of defecting gang members whose body parts—eyes, tongue, ears, heart, testicles—had been systematically removed and set in a line, like a modular toy. Donullia gave his life for his men; the least he expected was some gratitude.

  He was a master of disguise who practised his craft at all times; growing moustaches and beards, changing hairstyles, tying turbans, affecting lisps and limps. The great bahurupiya—man of a thousand faces—had a vast collection of false whiskers, wigs, robes, glasses, caps, and moles. Once, he had terrified and excited his men by appearing in their forest clearing, suddenly in the dead of night, dressed in an electric-blue saree with red lipstick full on his mout
h. Even when he came to meet Bajpaisahib, his political partner, he never came as himself. In the end the world is a shifting place, and political partners can be trusted with cracking deals, not with one’s life.

  The few times Rajbir asked the brother for an audience, Gwala said, ‘Of course, of course. He would love to meet you. He always speaks so affectionately about you.’

  But that was never to be. On a couple of occasions, he reached Gwala’s house only to be told that he had just missed him; he was in the jeep that drove past him as he entered the driveway. When his tenure ended and he was transferred back to Lucknow to work in the records department, Gwala assured him that Donullia was sad to see him go. ‘He told me to tell you that he is there if you ever need him. In the world of the gods he can do nothing for anyone, but in the world of men he will do his best.’

  As it turned out, Vishal Tyagi did not get rid of the long-stemmed hammer. It was still in his bag when they arrived at Gwala Gujjar’s house and the armed men outside insisted on frisking them. Too many years had passed and there was no one on that outer periphery who readily remembered the former policeman. The house was the same, but Rajbir could see it had grown, adding on several floors. The boundary walls were also much higher, with blue-flowered creepers running over them, and there were now shisham trees encasing the walls. Rajbir recalled a much gentler cordon. Now the men were rude and aggressive, flaunting their double-barrel guns and their privilege.

  Inside, however, the man was the same. Gwala Gujjar recognized Rajbir immediately and met him with the same bending humility and grace. But this time they did not go into the inner quarters; they sat in the living-room, which had become a fine place, with upholstered chairs and sofas and shining wood tables with brass and glass artifacts set on them. While Gwala’s hair had turned silver and his face was softer than before, the long red tilak on his forehead was fresh and thick as ever. Rajbir noticed that now there was also a holstered gun under his white kurta, the concealed brown belt running diagonally across his chest. The stakes had obviously risen over time.