The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  I felt my bowels turn to water and my legs lose all strength. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well, they played with it and fed it biscuits. Two days later, when they came for a second survey, Hathoda Tyagi brought your dog some meat and rotis. Then something, it seems, went wrong for a bit. There was some dispute. The strike was first planned for 6 May, then 9 May, and finally it was set for 14 May. We know this because the secret branch of Delhi Police had a tap on one of their mobile phones, on Chaaku’s. He too, it seems, had three phones—but they had the number he was using for this hit job. By the way, the police was already covering you by then—from 4 May itself. Did you get to know at all?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’

  Without standing up he struck his mudra again, curving his hands above his head and clasping them and stretching his whole body. ‘More than twenty men! More than twenty policemen were working around the clock to save you! Do you think anyone will give them credit? If you had banged into a pig on the Ring Road and hurt yourself and the pig, everyone would have accused the police of not doing its job, of taking bribes, of destroying the country. Tell me, what can the police possibly do if you and a pig collide? But when they risk their lives to save you from five killers, they get not a word of appreciation from anyone.’

  I tried to look solemn. The armpits of his cream shirt had big sweat scallops.

  He put his arms down and rotated his shoulders. ‘On the morning of 14 May, at 7 a.m., a traffic policeman stationed at the traffic lights near Ghazipur stopped a white Sumo entering Delhi, to check the licence papers. He insisted that the Musalman step out and show him the papers. Twenty men, most of them from the secret branch, in five vehicles, were stationed all around. All of them were fully armed and none of them was in uniform. The moment the spotter confirmed it was Hathoda Tyagi and his men, two Gypsys banged themselves in front of and behind the Sumo and the traffic policeman grabbed the Musalman. Everything was over in ten minutes. The two druggies and Chaaku protested their innocence, insisting they had just hitched a ride from Ghaziabad. The other two, the Musalman and the killer, said nothing. And that’s how it has remained. Those two never said a thing ever, and the other three have kept spinning out new accounts every day. In the prison, it seems, they have all gone back to type. The druggies, Chini and Kaaliya, are already a leading part of the prison drug mafia; they appear to be happy; they play carrom and table tennis and hang together all the time. Hathoda Tyagi is a complete loner but is feared by everyone; even the mafia does not provoke him; and it seems he sometimes protects some of the weaker prisoners. Chaaku’s contacts ensure he lives well; money, food, cigarettes, even whisky, are made available to him; the warders treat him with care. The Musalman is the strangest. He knows some English and helps the prisoners in drafting their applications. But mostly he works quietly in the carpentry unit and chisels little wooden choozas all day—there are enough there now to open a full poultry farm.’

  He paused for a moment, then said, ‘But they are all third-rate bastards. Gutter insects.’

  I said, ‘But who wanted me killed? What does your chargesheet say?’

  He said, ‘Pakistan.’

  I said, ‘Pakistan.’

  He said, ‘The ISI. You know, their secret agency. More powerful than their politicians, more powerful than their prime minister, more powerful than their army. It looks after their national interest. It understands what is national interest. Not like us here—chained dogs that any minor government officer can kick! If we had the powers they have, we could clean up this miserable country. Get rid of every traitor, get rid of all the dogs, like the men who took a contract to kill you.’

  And make every window a slim slit impossible to use for suicide, and put up a maze of plywood partitions everywhere so everyone can spend their lives opening and closing doors without arriving anywhere, and give everyone a bushy false moustache to wag at each other.

  I said, ‘But why?’

  He said, ‘To destabilize our government. Our country. Create chaos.’

  I thought of Jai and the geopolitical oration he would have conjured out of this.

  I said, ‘No. Really. Why?’

  He said, all trace of lightness gone from his voice, his moustache still and spiky, ‘The enemy is cunning, motivated, relentless, and ruthless.’ He was speaking mostly in Hindi now—anger had leached all English niceties out of him. ‘He seizes every opportunity to strike. Because he cannot kill us with a single lunge, he wants to bleed us from a thousand wounds. Those other idiots, with their spy cameras, who messed around in the defence ministry, there is a contract out on them too. By whom? Yes, you guessed it right! And why? Yes, you guessed it right again! All of you—the people of my great country—live in a dream of innocence. And all the while, as you foolishly watch cinema and cricket, as you drink and smoke and eat and sleep, the enemy is hard at work, severing our arteries, slicing our muscles, injecting poison into our flesh, planting explosives under our feet, hollowing us for collapse. You all—I don’t mean you specifically, but your breed—fill the newspapers with so much dung that no one can ever see the true picture. Even when a bomb goes off right under our buttocks we think it is the high note of a Hindi film song. I can tell you the enemy is thrilled with us. He can hardly believe how stupid we are. Hindustan, bada mahaan, mooh mein beedi, haath mein paan.’

  Somebody needed to rush him to the nearest multiplex, sit him down in front of a manic multi-starrer and stick his rodent nose into a bucket of popcorn and a Pepsi with ice.

  I said, ‘Can I have a copy of the chargesheet?’

  He closed the file, put his hand on it, and said, ‘Not yet. It is still confidential.’

  Behind the inspector’s head was the lurid green poster on the wall, the handsome man in a peak-cap. Small minds: discuss people. Average minds: discuss events. Big minds: discuss ideas. Great minds: work in silence.

  I said, ‘I would like to know.’

  He said, ‘One day you will. Don’t worry. We are taking care of everything.’

  I said, ‘It’s about my murder.’

  He said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  As I sat in my study I thought, not bad, I’ve done it. Nearly a year had passed since I had seen Sara.

  I had taken Guruji’s upside-down advice: zip up and run. And I had taken the advice of the rodent in the castle, Dubeyji: that doesn’t matter. It had proven easier than I had anticipated. The first few times the impulse to see her seized me, I laced up my keds and went for a run, jogging round and round the colony park like Forrest Gump till the children began to stop and point fingers at me, till all thought was thumped out of my head by my pounding feet, till there was nothing to do but go home and collapse.

  We kept messaging each other but I erased all play from it, sticking to perfunctory information. I think she was for some time—typically—too self-obsessed to notice. Then, when I excused myself one more time from going over, she caught on. I received an envelope from her one day. In it was a foolscap sheet folded over like a card. On the cover were drawn two oval eggs, cracked open and spilling. Under it was written, A Tale of Leaking Testicles. The subtitle was: The Inspiring Story of Five Killers and a Peashooter. On the inside page she had pasted a colour picture of the goddess Kali, all her arms in motion, her eyes blazing, the garland of decapitated heads around her neck resplendent. The sign-off was: Your humble wall-hanging, Sara.

  Kali, Mahakali, Inder ki Beti, Brahma ki Saali, Tera Vaar Na Jaaye Khali.

  I was not sure if it was a provocation—as of old—or a real dismissal. I was tempted to retaliate, to set in motion the spiral that would end in a symphony of abuse against the wall. But I held myself in, and, slowly, her magnetic tug on me waned to the point that days would go by without any thought of her engaging me.

  For a while, there was a writer on the features team of the paper I now worked for, an expatriate born and brought up in Birmingham, back on a roots trip. She was darker than Sara and talked incessant
ly of her pind in the Punjab—the village had emptied out in the fifties as the lower castes took flight to freedom and janitorship in England. We did a couple of lunches, then dinners. She had a nasal voice and a way of clucking that shot my nerves. When we finally got inside her bedroom in Defence Colony, her smell was rank. After that it was a struggle to be rid of her. Thankfully, expectedly, her discovery of India quickly floundered in the face of the heat, the traffic, the testosteronic north Indian male, and the third-rate journalism.

  Someone then gave me the number of a massage parlour in Lajpat Nagar. It was in a building in the market, two floors up, with a shop selling steel utensils and bone-china crockery on the ground floor. The stairwell had posters of gods and goddesses and a bright blue print of Jesus on the cross. One of the six-odd parlour girls was the colour of bitter chocolate. She had hardly any takers. They all sat in a row on the plastic chairs, and the men would walk in and pick the fair ones and take them down the short corridor into the wooden cubicles, while bitter-chocolate worked a needle in a wooden frame, embroidering little birds and trees into existence. I picked only her, never asked her name, never spoke to her. Her hair was kinky, and her skin shiny and tight. And her hands—dipped in oil—were earning her great karma. She was sure to be born a princess in her next life.

  The parlour was a true discovery. Once a week, twice, one could go there and square with the body. I was surprised I had not discovered such a relationship earlier—more honest, less neurotic, than any I had ever had. The body continually forces one to deceit. Here was a way to sidestep it. Along with the manic jogging, it also took care of the moments when Sara would suddenly invade my head.

  I also absorbed the advice of the rodent and stopped thinking of the killers—with Sara’s keening voice out of my ear, it was quite easy. In this time there was a last visit from Hathi Ram. His time in the police was done. He was going back to his village in Haryana, the childhood of koel calls, green fields, woodsmoke, and raindrops detonating the aroma in the soil. Sitting in my small study, he caressed The Naked Lunch, and said, ‘For the rest of my life I am going to keep a fast on every Monday. I have to atone for thirty-two years of sinning as a policeman. Shiva is the easiest god to please, and Shiva knows all that I have done I had to. Shiva knows that the world has to be continually created and destroyed by the practice of right and wrong, and even those of us who do wrong are playing our designated part in the drama of the universe.’

  Near the gate I nodded at the shadow—standing erect in the background—and said, ‘How much longer?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Do I really need him?’ He said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I said, ‘Then why?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Then who will?’ He said, ‘It’s not even worth trying to find out. Do you think we ever know who is really issuing us an order?’ From the gate he turned back and said, ‘Don’t feel guilty about it—just treat it as your rightful share of the great Indian government.’

  Now as I sat in the study—all the lights off, my feet on the table—I felt empty. The din of television relationships floated through the closed door—Dolly/folly was drinking in her prime-time serials, chin in palms. Coal-black Elizabeth—coal-black Felicia had quit six months ago—had already brought me four cups of tea. In the big wide world only two decisions awaited my attention. One, on undertaking the thirty-day Kailash Mansarovar trek to the abode of the gods; two, about taking the television job Jai had put on the table for me. In favour of the trek was getting close to Shiva and fleeing Dolly/folly and the rest. Against it were all the paperwork and medical tests that needed to be done and the misery of being stuck for thirty days on Himalayan trails with shrill, eager, moronic devotees. In favour of the job was the mound of money on offer—clearly television was plugged into a pipeline that print had not yet found. Or it was some equation that said the dumber the medium, the more you were paid to abase yourself on it. That was what was against it, as also the neurosis of how you looked. The stiffness of collar, and the cut of shave. I knew, at the moment, money was winning and god losing. Jai had summed it up: ‘You’ve seen it all by now. Decide. Do you want to be Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey or do you want to be run by Chutiya-Nandan-Pandeys!’

  Suddenly in the dark there was an angry buzz and the glow of the phone opened up the room. I had her down in the directory as Kali. The message was one word: call. I hesitated for a moment, but it had been so long that I had lost my fear. She was business-like; a receptionist passing on information. I needed to see her. She had some important things to tell. When I asked where, she said, ‘In front of the Taj Mahal, by moonlight, mr peashooter, where else!’

  I told coal-black Elizabeth to tell her memsahib I might not be back for dinner, and I took the shadow along, sitting in the rear seat, his iron hard in his crotch. This one had come only six months ago and had no idea where we were going. She opened the door in a black sarong and a striated white vest, loops of coloured bangles on her photo arms. The memory of pleasure powered through me like adrenalin, and I wanted to immediately pick her up and hang her on the wall. But before I could say a word, a woman I had never seen appeared behind her. She was thickset, with short hair and wore a wide blue-and-red tennis band on her wrist. She could probably kill with a karate chop.

  They were drinking rum with water, and they gave me a mug of tea. Big enough to bathe in. I tried to catch her eye, to create a synapse of intimacy—the sight of her had already undone my resolve—but her look gave nothing away. It seemed as if something fundamental had changed in her. Her nervous energy was low, her voice calm. When we were all seated—I on the cane armchair, she on the sofa, feet under her, and the karateka at the dining-table, chair angled towards us—Sara said, ‘Do you want to know the entire story now?’

  I said, ‘Of what?’

  She said, ‘Of the building of the Taj Mahal, what else!’

  I said, ‘Are you saying you’ve been digging out more stuff on those guys?’

  She said, ‘Do you want to know?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  I looked towards the dining-table. The woman was running her forefinger under the wristband and flexing it and looking directly at me. Surely she was accidental to the evening?

  Sara said, her voice preternaturally flat and low, ‘As I always thought, you were incidental to the whole plot. The plan to kill you had nothing to do with killing you.’

  The rodent and she had been conspiring in the castle.

  I said, ‘Yes, I know. Pakistan. The ISI. They wanted to destabilize the Indian government.’

  The geopolitical pawn explains his predicament.

  She said, tonelessly, ‘You hear nothing. You see nothing. You learn nothing. You are changed by nothing. Data, stimulus, experience, everything bounces off you like water off a rock. You obsess about your gods and gurus, you screw anything you can find, and you work only for money. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing ever changes you. Nothing ever affects you.’

  I kept quiet. She was not angry. She was not baiting me.

  ‘Everything those guys have been telling you is false. Often they don’t even know it. Often they even believe it to be true. Most of the cops you talk to are themselves unwitting pawns in bigger games. Now listen carefully. The plan to kill you had nothing to do with your exposé or with the ISI. Yes, the boy Tyagi went to Kathmandu. Yes, he met men there who gave him a contract to kill you. Yes, they provided him a cache of weapons—including AK-47s. Yes, they gave him hard currency as an advance. Yes, the team of five men met in a farm outside Gorakhpur. Yes, they worked out the details of the operation there. But no, the primary purpose of the plan was not to kill you. And no, the men who gave out the contract were not from the ISI.’

  She was speaking in a measured way, and now she took a break to drain her rum. A fly was buzzing in the room. The karateka rose, rolled a magazine, crouched for a moment, and then in a flash splattered it on the wooden table. Guruji would have said all life is potentially a black blotch.

  ‘Th
e real targets of the contract and the plan were the killers themselves. Not all of them. Just two of them. The rest were like you. Incidental fodder. Collateral damage. The two—yes, I am sure you guessed one right—were the Tyagi boy and the man they call Chaaku. Someone wanted to get rid of both of them. The real plan was to have them shot just as they were shooting you. You were all supposed to die in a dramatic shoot-out. The men who had sent the killers had also leaked the information of the hit to the police. The first two times they came to recce your house, they were being trailed by an army of plainclothesmen from the special cell. The orders were to shoot to kill. It was a sweet construct. The ISI would take the rap for your murder, and the police the credit for killing your killers. But something went wrong.’

  She stopped and waved her empty glass like a flag. The karateka came over with two bottles and smoothly sloshed them into a perfect drink.

  ‘It’s still not quite clear what went wrong. But the agreed upon date for the hit came and went. Then, it seems, a new one was set. That too came and went. It’s possible that there was some dispute between the killers and their patrons. Finally—and this even peashooters can confirm by just asking a few questions—the men were not picked up as claimed at the Delhi border on their way to the hit, nor were they picked up on the morning the news was broken to the media. They were picked up a whole day earlier, in the middle of the night, from the small hotel they were staying in, in Shahdara. There was no scuffle, no shoot-out. None of the men retaliated, or made a run for it. Not even the so-called beast, Hathoda Tyagi. For a day they were with the secret branch and did not exist in any paperwork of arrest. Then they were produced before the media and in court.’