The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  Guruji was on his charpoy, his long hair caressing his bony shoulders, his wiry legs tucked under him. All around me on the durrie on the floor sat village men, and a couple of women, cocooned in coarse shawls and blankets, spelling out their sorrows, taking home his benedictions.

  I sat in a corner watching as one by one they edged right under him to whisper their woes. He listened with a cocked head, then spoke his wisdom aloud so everyone could collect it. Once the prescription was announced he put his palm forward to reclaim the coin he had handed out the last time they had visited. This he put in a slim tin cylinder lying by his side, and giving it a sustained shake, so that the rattle floated out across the fields, he opened the lid and pulled out a fresh coin, touched it to his forehead and placed it in the disciple’s hand. Guruji’s telecom service. The tin box was green, a Glenfiddich casing. Over the years all manner of containers had put in an appearance, including Dundee cake boxes. A spiritual master, transforming water to wine and paper to bread.

  By the time the last devotee left, the fields were dark and the conversation of the baying dogs had begun. Behind the charpoy, Bhura knelt on the floor, pressing Guruji’s stringy legs. A big brass tumbler of hot milk had been brought up for Guruji. This would be his dinner. I was handed a smaller one, of scalding steel. It had the heavy smell of a fresh milking.

  Guruji said, taking a sip, ‘You are still unhappy? Why?’

  I said, ‘What is there to be happy about?’

  ‘Look around you. The wheat is ripening, the stars are shining, the cows are giving milk, the breeze is cool. Look at yourself. You are alive, your limbs are moving, your eyes can see, your ears can hear, there is a roof over you, a car under you, a wife in the kitchen, and money in the pocket. Is that not enough?’

  I said, ‘You know, Guruji, men do not live by all this alone. Men need much more.’

  ‘Not need, my son, want. And there is nothing wrong in the fact that men should want. But men must not forget that there is always a price to be paid for want. When you go into a shop and buy three soaps instead of one, you pay for three, don’t you? All the transactions of your life are similar. The more you want, the more you pay. Men go home from the market and complain they paid too much. But what they did in the first place was to want too much. That friend of yours—the one who gives you grief—you want her a great deal, don’t you?’

  I said, ‘I am not really sure any more.’

  Guruji said, ‘Don’t be held back by ghosts. Just as it is okay for men to want, it is okay for men to move on. Like desire, movement too is the essence of the world. Everything must continually be in a state of movement. Sun, moon, stars; air, water, earth; men, animals, germs. Everything must be in flux. And as you pay a price for want, you pay a price for movement too. The all-knowing one is also the shrewdest accountant in the universe—he maintains the perfect balance sheet of all our gains and losses. Nor should you be afraid of losses. At the end—at the very end—it will all be squared up. Till it is not, the journey will go on. Finally everyone will end up in the same place, everyone’s balance sheet perfectly balanced. The only difference will be how each of us got there. We will be distinguished and separated not by the final destination, but the quality of the journey. The choices we made; the paths we took. That is the miracle of free will. That is the miracle of men. The opportunity is not moksha, the opportunity is life. Moksha is the same for everyone and we will all eventually get it. But life is discrete, several and separate; it is our indulgence and our gift. So, my son, do not be afraid to want, and do not be afraid to move on.’

  Yes, I thought, looking around at the moonlight flowing through the wheat fields, this was the reason I kept coming back. A few sweet cosmic pills that made sense of all the crap around. A good glug of Vedanta. If only I could persuade ms terminator to try it once. She might discover there was a reckoning beyond the Constitution of India and the Criminal Procedure Code.

  I said, ‘Guruji, those men who were picked up and jailed—I still don’t know the truth about them. Even now, three years after, the accounts vary wildly.’

  Guruji was lying on his side. Now he sat up, his legs crossed under him, and Bhura began to knead his neck and back. The lines of his ribs looked beautiful, and with his open hair he could have been sitting on top of Mount Kailash. ‘The men worry you only because they worry her, right? You would readily forget them if only she would stop obsessing about them, would you not? But let me tell you, son, she will not stop. That is her karma. Men make the great mistake of thinking that every woman’s karma revolves around her man. The truth is, a woman’s karma is far more varied and complex than a man’s. Children, parents, servants, in-laws, the ceaseless war against the small injustices of the world, of small animals and small people, the quiet breaking down of walls, the quiet location of compassion. Being the sail that catches the wind of good fortune; being the cushion that breaks the fall of hard fate; being the poultice on injury, the pill against disease. In contrast, the karma of men is nothing but the pursuit of money and power, whose accumulations know no limit. It’s the reason most men soon think their lives a failure, while women never cease to strive.’

  I said, yes Guruji, and waited.

  He put his hands on the wooden frame of the charpoy and slowly lifted himself up, sitting exactly as he was, legs still crossed under him. The veins of his stringy arms bulged. He let himself down slowly, and then went up again. Bhura’s hand remained on his back as he performed the exercise half a dozen times. I could see the energy pulsing in him. The peasants and the locals were given wisdom in small quick pills; the full treatment was only for the men from the big city whose resistance to illumination had become dangerously high. He enjoyed us. We were a challenge.

  ‘So understand, son, that she will not stop.’ He was slightly breathless with the yogic demo. ‘You must either travel to the end of the road she seeks, or you must move on. And remember, it is not you that she seeks but her own answers. The guru’s job is to show you the many paths, not to tell you which one to embark on. That the seeker has to do; and to answer for. And one waiting path is: tighten your pajama strings and move on.’

  How felicitously he put it. Zip up and run.

  I said, ‘And if I travel to the end of the road she seeks, what will I find?’

  He said, his eyes closed now, ‘You will find exactly what you did at the beginning of the road. Five men who were paid to kill you. And one woman who wants, for her own reasons, to make them seem what they are not.’

  I said, ‘So there can be no doubt all—they are all killers?’

  Guruji opened his eyes and said, ‘You speak as if the world has never seen killers before. What were the great kings? What are the great leaders of today? Covetous men have killed, as have saints. These men too are killers but they are not to be despised. Their reasons are neither wealth, nor sainthood, nor fame, nor fortune.

  I said, ‘You must then tell me what they are.’

  Guruji smiled. ‘Maybe you should take this journey to its end in order to find out. The goals of men may often be similar but the motives may not. My concern was only your safety. Well, you are safe and you will remain safe. Their moment has slipped them by. Their gunpowder will never be dry again.’

  ‘So my guards? There is no need for them any more?’

  ‘That is for the government to decide, not for a religious man. But yes, if anyone needs to feel fear, it is they, not you. They are only puppets on a string and their puppeteer may be losing interest.’

  I was losing the thread. I tried one last time. ‘But what of her? What should I do?’

  He put his hand on the brick floor of the terrace and in one fluid movement went upside down, his ankles together, his toes pointing straight towards the stars. His hair fell on his splayed fingers and the white dhoti bunched small around his groin. It was a perfect asana, barely a tremble passing through his body. In that position, upside down, his face was nearly flush with mine. If Sara had seen us now she wou
ld have let loose a howl that would have made a hole in the skies. ‘I always tell you, one must endeavour to be the mouth and not the mango. The mango is sweet, but it is the mouth that tastes the pleasure. No matter how perfect the mango, it is up to the mouth to eat it, slow or fast or not at all. I hope, my son, you have not made her the mouth. To me, upside down as I am, it seems a good idea to tighten the pajama strings and move on. Maybe it’s also time for you to stand on your head and see how things look the other way around.’

  Stand on your head.

  And zip up and run.

  At twilight, Kafka’s castle lay inscrutable and brooding, exactly the way it had been on our last visit. The man on the stool by the front entrance was still playing with his mobile phone. Like the last time the lift crash-landed noisily and took off with a heart-stopping judder. Unlike the last time there was no Jai with me, but like the last time, I lost myself in the labyrinth of corridors and plywood doors and partitions, and was forced to phone Dubeyji who had to come looking for me. Like the last time the sub-inspector’s moustache bristled like a squirrel’s tail under his rodent nose and he wore a cream bush shirt, many frayed maulis on his wrist, a tin locket around his neck, and a happy expression. Like the last time we sat in his cupboard-sized office with the narrow window like a gun embrasure—through which one could not commit suicide—and allowed our knees to touch under the table.

  The chargesheet was finally ready and about to be filed, and Dubeyji had said if I wished I could come and read it, and if I didn’t that was perfectly fine too. When I called Hathi Ram to seek his opinion he had said, ‘You must go and you must take it very seriously. Those men are real cops doing real investigations, not hundred-rupee rippers at traffic lights like the rest of us!’ When I told Sara she snorted, ‘Hah! Chargesheet! Should be fun to read the latest fiction from the government’s creative writing workshop!’ Guruji said, standing on his head or feet I could not tell, ‘Of course you must go. Truth takes many forms. You must know the different truths so that you may know the one truth.’

  Dubeyji patted his dented brown Rexine briefcase lying by his chair and said, ‘Would you like to read it or would you like me to tell you what it says?’ His moustache was moving and his eyes shone with information.

  I said, ‘Tell me.’

  He said, ‘It’s true—you did not know anything.’

  I said, ‘I told you so.’

  He bared his rodent teeth in a grin. ‘We are not paid to believe what you tell us. We are paid to find out what is the truth.’

  I smiled like a corpse and said, ‘Always?’

  He said, ‘Always. To find out the truth, always. But not always to tell it. The telling or not telling of it belongs to the men above us. The nation is a vast and complex and glorious enterprise. Any truth that does not fit into it is dangerous and anti-national and has no right to exist.’ He was no longer smiling, and his squirrel’s bush was still.

  I said, ‘What you are going to tell me—is it the truth?’

  He said, ‘I believe it to be.’

  I waited while he took out a brown file from his briefcase and opened it. Inside was a sheaf of papers threaded together. On the tiny ledge of the slit window sat a three-tier steel tiffin-box. Next to it, folded twice over, a printed pink-and-white hand towel. And next to it, in the only bit of space remaining, sat a fat Old Monk rum bottle, with two limp strands of moneyplant growing out of it. In his wallet I could bet there were a photograph of his mother and a picture of Goddess Lakshmi. When he went home to his rank-smelling government-issue concrete matchbox, his wife would rail at him about school fees and the price of vegetables, with no inkling that he helped hold up the nation.

  Taking two loud sniffs of his moustache, looking down at his papers, he said, ‘The mastermind and leader of the operation to kill you was the man they call Hathoda Tyagi. He is a hardened criminal and contract killer, originally from western UP, but mostly operating out of Chitrakoot.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘Many such men live in holy places, believing that a daily dip in Gangamaiyya will keep washing away their sins.’

  I said, ‘But why? Do you know that now?’

  He said, ‘First I am on the how. Later, we will try and understand the why. Shall I continue?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘This man—he is almost like a boy—does not work on his own. He works for powerful mafia leaders across UP and Bihar, and has a big reputation for never failing. Like Kake Da Dhaba, his speciality, it seems, is brain curry. When he first started out he used to make it with a hammer; now he makes it with sophisticated guns. Sometimes identifying the victims takes days and weeks. Our information is that this boy was sent to Nepal, to Kathmandu, to collect the contract by the man he mostly works for—a powerful dacoit leader with political contacts called Donullia Gujjar. On 16 February, four years ago, this boy travelled to Kathmandu by road—in a Maruti 800—and stayed there in the house of a man called Sher Singh Thapa, a local businessman dealing in imported cloth and electronics. A week later, he met two men called Sulaiman and Qayoom Ali, both from Pakistan, both agents of the ISI. For one week they all stayed together in the house. It was in this period that the operation was planned, and we have information that Sulaiman and Qayoom Ali handed over five lakh rupees and a consignment of four AK-47s, four AK-56s, and a dozen pistols to Hathoda Tyagi. Ten grenades were also given, along with two bulletproof jackets. Another seven lakh rupees was promised on completion of the job.’

  A dour balding man appeared at the half-open door and handed over two glasses of tea without stepping in. Dubeyji slurped his down with noisy relish. Then he sniffed his moustache loudly and resumed: ‘After Sulaiman and Qayoom Ali left, this Tyagi boy stayed on for another week. It’s not clear why—but most probably it was to prepare the plan for bringing the weapons across. What we do know is that he did not step out of Sher Singh Thapa’s house during his entire stay in Kathmandu. He did not go out sightseeing, he did not visit any temples, he did not go to any hotel, restaurant, or red-light area. A local man, known to us only as Naik—probably a former army man—did visit him a few times. We suspect he is the one who organized the delivery of arms across the border.’

  He now stood up, placed his left foot on his right knee, clasped his hands above his head, closed his eyes, and stretched. He didn’t look like Shiva. He just looked like a crackpot government officer. When he sat down again he said, ‘If you take bribes at the traffic light all your limbs are exercised. But sitting in this hole you have to teach yourself simple asanas to keep the circulation going.’ He needed to meet Guruji upside down and have his moustache stuffed up his nose.

  ‘Soon after the deal was settled in Kathmandu the other four men were contacted. It’s still not clear who contacted them—they all give typically vague accounts. Someone called Aloo or Gobhi or Supari or Sandesh called them and asked them to report for an assignment. Of course they don’t know the real names of any of the men who called! Does Chini expect anyone to know his real name? He doesn’t know it himself. Interestingly, none of them named Hathoda Tyagi as the person who first contacted them. Each of them said when they found out that they would have to work with him on this job they felt both honoured and terrified.’

  I said, ‘Did they know the job they were being hired for?’

  ‘Well, they all claim they did not know it was a killing. According to them, it was to assist in a jewellery shop heist. They are all lying. The men were picked with care and for specific tasks. Kabir, the Musalman, was to be the driver; he was to lift the vehicle they would use for the hit, and lift another for the escape. Chaaku was the man who knew Delhi and was going to navigate them in and out. And those two druggies, Kaaliya and Chini, were to be the back-up hitmen. Once the hit was made, they were to split up. The Musalman would lift a small Maruti, and Hathoda Tyagi and he would melt into the badlands of Meerut and Muzaffarnagar. The druggies would go to the railway station and catch a train to somewhere far away and stay away for some weeks or months.
For Chaaku there was no real problem—he would smoothly retreat into the armpits of his political patrons. And you would go to the cremation ground and from there straight to Indralok, where apsaras would be waiting to dance the bharatanatyam for you.’

  I looked at him grinning, and I thought maybe his moustache is false and I should pull it off and make him real. I said, ‘What happened then?’

  He said, ‘What always does—man proposes, god disposes. But that comes later. First, we know for sure that in the beginning of April they all met at the outskirts of Gorakhpur in a house owned by a local trader-cum-smuggler-cum-politician called Panditji. The house is surrounded by fields and the rail tracks run through it—and they say many trains slow down in that stretch to allow men and material to be loaded and unloaded. We cannot arrest Panditji because the house is benami and the land is benami. If we start running down that road we won’t be back for ten years, by which time your killers will have grown old and died anyway.’

  I said, ‘This Panditji was part of the plot?’

  He twitched his rodent nose and grinned. ‘No no, in this case we think he was only a hotelier, providing a place for them to have their conference. Like fine businessmen, criminals also need convention centres. Panditji’s is one of the best in eastern UP. Many national and international summits on murder, smuggling and narcotics are held there. Impossible to get a booking unless you know the owner, or know someone who knows the owner. And we can’t arrest him because it is all benami, and if we go down that road we won’t be back for ten years.’

  I said, ‘The government provides you all dialogue writers?’

  He said, ‘Dialogue-writers?’

  I said, ‘Then what happened?’

  He said, ‘Soon after, the Musalman—Kabir—left with the two druggies for Patna and they came back some days later with a stolen Sumo. Over the next week Panditji’s men from the city came and turned the white skin of the Sumo black, changed its numbers, and welded a five-inch deep and four-foot-long steel container under the rear seats. Only one AK-56, two AK-47s and four pistols were tucked in there. The rest of Sulaiman and Qayoom Ali’s cache was left behind with Panditji. Chaaku—the political man—had come there with nice pictures of you—from some newspaper or magazine. He also had a map of your colony, with your house number circled nicely with a green sketch pen. We recovered all these things from them. The plan was first to stop on the outskirts of Delhi, in Ghaziabad, and leave the Sumo there. Then to undertake a survey of your colony. They did so. Only three of them came to your colony, in an auto-rickshaw, and walked past your house and around it. Chaaku, the Musalman and Hathoda Tyagi. Do you have a dog that limps?’