The Assassins

by Jeremy Trafford

  They drove alongside a railway line. Tammy and Clare sat in the back, with Max and Subramaniam in the front. A train was hissing slowly past, hooting shrilly and shooting out blasts of steam. The carriages overflowed with passengers, and several small boys could be seen crouching on the roof, the braver ones among them recklessly scampering from carriage to carriage, defying a fat policemen with a whistle that he furiously blew to no great effect.

  ‘We rid ourselves of British rule through ahimsa,’ Subramaniam continued. ‘That is, non-violent resistance. It is what Gandhi taught us. Although it worked against the British, it wouldn’t have succeeded against Hitler. But would it have worked in South Africa and Ireland? Resistance was sometimes very violent there and this provoked even more oppression.’

  ‘Do you think non-violence would’ve brought freedom to the people in those countries any earlier?’ Max asked.

  ‘Well, we Indians won our freedom through ahimsa, although the British were quite oppressive. My uncle was shot in the Amritsar massacre, just after World War One. Four hundred men and women were killed. My father survived, but some years later he was arrested for being on Gandhi’s salt march. That was in 1930, when I was thirteen. The salt tax was a symbol of our oppression. Two hundred miles we walked to collect salt from the sea. I remember the long and dusty road, with villagers standing by the roadside, gently cheering. And then the sea at last! Such a sense of liberation! But sixty thousand people were imprisoned as a consequence. My father was locked for six months in a single cell.’

  ‘Were you imprisoned too?’

  ‘No, I was too young.’ Subramaniam waved his fingers once again. ‘All long past now, but we must not forget. Forgive, but do not forget. We must learn our lessons from it. There must be the right to protest, just as long as it’s non-violent. There’s been such violence since, though. Yes, indeed. And now poor Venkataraman, knifed to death by a mere boy.’ His voice rose. ‘How could he have done it? Giving Venkataraman a flower, pretending to be devoted. Oh, so very false and terrible.’

  Subramaniam stopped talking and gazed pensively up at the sky, as if he sought consolation in the windblown clouds. He began to chant softly to himself, his fingers ascending from his lap to tremble in the air at the more sonorous moments; they hovered and made tiny dips before alighting on his knees again.

  The car slowed down because of a large and unwieldy procession. They passed a couple of vehicles carrying enormous cardboard statues of Ganesh, with dangling trunks and slowly flapping, elephantine ears. A line of sadhus, wearing holy threads around their torsos, held their hands together. They were quietly intoning, picking their delicate way forwards. Some boys dodged nimbly between the onlookers, selling glasses of syrupy-looking tea, thick with milk and sugar. One of them wobbled along on an antiquated bicycle, chirruping his bell and balancing trays of oozing sweetmeats precariously on one hand.

  The taxi had to slow down more to avoid hitting an overloaded cart that was being pulled by two half-naked, sweating men. A garlanded cow, with silver-tipped horns, chewed its cud musingly and meandered across the road with all the stately freedom the reverence of India allowed it. As it passed a vegetable stall, it seized some cabbage leaves in its frothy mouth with a lordly tossing of its head, to the startled dismay of the stallholder.

  The taxi moved slowly forward again and then stopped at some traffic lights. A large, throbbing motorbike pulled up alongside. Clare noticed the rider was looking over at Tammy, whose face was turned outwards, his arm on the ridge of the open window.

  Suddenly she thought she recognised, behind the Perspex of the crash helmet, the troubled eyes of the boy assassin!

  She saw the knife in the rider’s hand and shouted out. Tammy reacted fast. He pulled his arm in from the window and wound it up at once. The knife struck the glass and rebounded. The driver pulled up on the clutch and the car lurched forward, through the red lights. A car was crossing the junction, and the driver had to swerve to avoid a collision. There was a scream and a shudder of wheels, followed by rasping shouts of protest and horns blaring out in anger and confusion. The car skidded towards a bullock cart; the animal jerked up its head, the whites of its eyes bulging. It emitted a terrified high bellow. The motorbike hurtled away with a reverberating thrum, leaving a trail of bluish fumes in its wake. The rider crouched forward, his body looking so thin and fragile on that vast machine, with its blazing headlamp.

  The car had hit the bullock cart. It was only a glancing blow but the animal had been knocked down. It lay on the tarmac, bleating. The cow Clare seen earlier ambled grandly by, waving its great head as if in solemn deliberation and loftily preparing to overlook the incident. A policeman soon appeared, but no real damage had been done to the bullock or the cart.

  Tammy was typically cool, surprising Clare with the assumption that the young man had merely been trying to cut the watch from his wrist.

  ‘This happened to me once,’ he said. ‘The strap was sliced off with impudent expertise. The young thief dashed off with a cheeky grin, which made the theft even more infuriating.’

  While Max took photos, Clare led Tammy aside and spoke to him.

  ‘That might’ve been the assassin making an attempt upon your life.’

  Tammy smiled incredulously.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he answered.

  ‘The knife was far too large for what you suggest. And did you see the naivety of those eyes? Or the delicate, thin body? He was just like the assassin!’

  ‘That’s a very mild coincidence. Thinness isn’t exactly uncommon in India. Nor is criminality among the young. It’s a symptom of growing urban unemployment, desperation, lawlessness and social breakdown.’

  Subramaniam was showing some solicitude for Tammy, although rather more, Clare thought, for the poor buffalo, whose owner Tammy now stepped forward to console with some much-appreciated banknotes.

  As they got back into the car, Max looked inquiringly at Clare, curious about the closeness of her talk with Tammy. But she didn’t wish to share her fears with Max. He would be over-anxious on her account, as he always was, and she felt too hurt and angry with him over Narayan to want his concern now. However, as they drove on, she thought again about the crippled beggar and the motorcyclist, and about their being hit men determined to murder Tammy in his turn. But how morbid was her fear for him! And how melodramatic! Perhaps she was falling in love with him, she pondered with vague irony, and her anguish only measured how far she’d fallen. That was absurd, though. She merely found his attention reassuring; she liked his strange courage and his nonchalant, dry wit.

  She gazed at the car window, at the scratch on the glass where the knife had struck. She imagined the blow again, and the motorbike leaping forward with its raging engine. Then she thought about the cow with its flower-strung head, as if it travelled to some grave and peaceful ceremony, well away from all the noise and speed and violence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Max hadn’t seen Narayan since he got back from Madurai, and he’d missed him at the dancing. He was thinking back to the vicissitudes of their relationship when on his home ground in Los Angeles. Narayan had once left Los Angeles to visit some married friends of his in Mexico. Max had then thrown himself into his studies, trying to ease the dismay Narayan’s absence caused him. He sent him texts but got back nothing in reply. When Narayan returned, Max did at last manage to reach him by phone. ‘I’m driving over to see you,’ Max said.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea right now,’ Narayan replied, sounding guarded and reluctant.

  ‘I really need to see you,’ Max said, hearing frustration in his voice, and worrying about how he was coming across.

  ‘If you’re sure,’ Narayan replied.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Max drove too fast to the university campus. He loathed his feelings of uncertainty over Narayan, even more than he hated his guilt about Clare. He convinced himself that Narayan felt bad and wanted to put an end to things between them.
To a certain extent, Max welcomed the idea. He hated being so much in someone else’s power. He longed to be free of what he thought in his worst moments was a demeaning obsession that threatened his marriage.

  Narayan was apologetic, though, when Max arrived.

  ‘You took me by surprise on the phone,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I sounded a bit dim. I’m also sorry I didn’t answer your messages when I was down in Mexico. I left my wretched mobile phone behind. I’ve only just read them. Sometimes I’m ridiculously scatty.’

  ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ Max said. ‘You sounded as if you didn’t want me to come today, though. I thought I was maybe pushing you too much.’

  ‘You certainly do push, but that impresses me. You’re always reaching out at life, bursting with American achievement complex. If you’re not rushing about controlling things, you don’t feel quite alive, I imagine.’

  ‘Oh,’ breathed Max, with a smile. ‘So I’m full of aggressive, misdirected energy? Like our president?’

  ‘I’m just joshing,’ said Narayan. ‘No, not at all like your president. You love being on the move and self-improving, though, while I lazily stagnate. I was pretty active down in Mexico, mind. I climbed Popocatepetl, as I told you on my postcards.’

  ‘Postcards?’ said Max. ‘I never got any postcards. You climbed Popocatepetl? Wow!’

  ‘I sent two postcards,’ said Narayan. ‘It seems you and I are doomed to a state of non-communication! Oh well, maybe they’ll turn up eventually. Anyhow, while I was there I got you this.’

  And then he produced the gift. It appeared to be an ancient Mayan head figurine but Max at once knew it was a fake, a well-made fake but definitely a fake. It would have cost a fortune if it had been genuine, but Max decided not to reveal it wasn’t. He smiled warmly as he took it. He was touched by Narayan’s generosity, ashamed of his unspoken grievance and impressed by his climbing skills (having no head for heights himself, he’d always been impressed by mountaineering exploits).

  ‘The antique shop said it was pre-Columbian,’ Narayan added.

  ‘Really?’ Max feigned being impressed. ‘It’s incredible, thank you. I love it.’

  ‘I wanted to check it out at the Getty museum first, so I could learn more about it. That’s why I didn’t want you to come today. But as you’re here, I might as well give it to you now.’

  It mattered nothing to Max that the head should be a fake. It was the giving that meant so much. Impulsively, he took Narayan’s hand, surprising him. They just stood there in silence for some seconds. Max eventually found his voice. He seemed to drag it husky and disused from somewhere deep inside.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking of you,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.

  ‘I think of you, too.’

  ‘Do you? Do you really?’

  ‘Yes, Max. I really do.’

  ‘I think of you in my arms,’ Max blurted out. ‘I want to make love to you. I suppose you’d hate it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Narayan answered candidly, not at all offended, or so it seemed, by Max being so direct. ‘The truth is, I’ve never made love before. Not to anyone. I’ve done a bit of frustrated snogging but that’s all.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Our women are so dauntingly virginal.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it time you started?’ asked Max, smiling and recovering his confidence. ‘At twenty-six, you’re getting on a bit.’

  ‘I know,’ Narayan laughed.

  They were still holding hands.

  ‘It’s such a waste,’ Narayan went on. ‘I’m quite disgracefully immaculate.’

  Both men laughed then, and Max released Narayan’s hand.

  ‘So you can’t stop thinking of me. How boring for you,’ Narayan teased. ‘What on earth can you possibly see in me?’

  ‘God knows!’ Max replied with a grin. ‘You’re as ugly as a…’ – he fumbled for the joke – ‘… as a toad and just as charmless. So anyway, tell me… do you like me back at all?’

  Narayan raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Or have I become a horrible embarrassment?’ Max continued. ‘Have you become all American and cool? Am I being schmaltzy?’

  ‘Oh yes, definitely schmaltzy… disgustingly schmaltzy. I’m far too cool and cynical to have human feelings of any sort. I’ve become just like those silent majority American males you’re always criticising: tough-minded and impenetrable, terrified of being thought sensitive and soulful. You’ve no idea how hard and mean I am. Beneath my toad-like surface, that’s to say.’

  Despite his joking, Narayan seemed embarrassed now. He appeared to lose his humour suddenly and to become vulnerable without it.

  ‘I like your wanting me, Max,’ he said. ‘But I feel very bad about Clare. If it weren’t for her…’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Yes,’ said Max dolefully. ‘I know.’

  ‘These feelings between men… I know they’re not wrong. But back home they’re thought of as unnatural. It’s such a relentlessly heterosexual culture, fixated on marriage and having children to support one in tottering old age. So it’s not just to do with us being two men.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘It’s mainly Clare who worries me. If you want me, then you can’t want her. Or can you? You’d be cheating on her. But I’d feel I was cheating on her too… and being a fraud.’

  ‘Look, I still love Clare deeply. I always will. This’ll make no difference to her and me. Anyhow, it’s all your fault.’

  ‘What? How so?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have given me this fantastic present. How did you expect me to react?’

  ‘In that case, I’d better take it back,’ Narayan answered, his smile returning. ‘You know, it’s not just that I feel bad. I also feel a fool. I’ve no idea what we actually do in bed… what two men do, I mean. You’re dealing with a virgin, as I’ve told you. Unmentionable in your society, I’m sure, where sex is apparently so obligatory, although everyone starts out as a virgin. Even you!’

  ‘Do you think I did?’

  ‘But you’re so attractive, in your highly suspect way. I daresay it wasn’t for very long.’

  Max had longed for encouragement but hadn’t expected anything this explicit. He moved closer and put his lips to Narayan’s mouth. Narayan didn’t react at first but then very gradually began to return the kiss, which slowly deepened. They put their arms around each other. Max took off his shirt; Narayan, taking the cue from Max, did the same, stripping it from his back with an oddly touching awkwardness, grinning shyly. They undressed and lay on the floor together. The lovemaking that Max initiated, although constrained and lacking confidence, was to some extent reciprocated.

  As they held each other afterwards, Narayan turned to look at Max.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Max asked him.

  ‘It’s instinct, I suppose,’ Narayan said. ‘Or maybe I’ve made love in a past life, though God knows what the body was I did it in. It might’ve been that of some hairy gorilla whom you wouldn’t have fancied much.’

  He laughed at his own joke, which Max found curiously appealing. His laughing and talking about their sex delighted him. In the weeks that followed, Max went to see him several times in his hostel room on campus. The physical side of their lovemaking improved, Max feeling more actively desired. His own confidence grew. Eventually he told Narayan he loved him, which seemed to add to Narayan’s ardour. His breath came tremblingly. His legs moved as if not under his volition. His eyes glazed over. Max felt the thudding of Narayan’s heart as if it almost came from his own body. Narayan’s spine arched backwards. His legs stiffened. His breathing was a series of rough gasps. With a shuddering of his entire body, Narayan came at last, crying out as from some convulsive pain.

  As their mutual passion grew, so did the humour they brought to it. It seemed this was some necessary element to make the passion more acceptable. It made the guilt they both felt about Clare somehow easier to deal with. Narayan joked about his possible previous incarnation
s, which had set him down this terrible path of sensual desire.

  ‘Maybe I was a deviant figure from the Kama Sutra, someone whose activities were expurgated even from that masterpiece of erotica. What will happen to my soul in my next reincarnation, I wonder? By the law of karma, I’ll be reduced next time round to something unimaginably frustrating.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A lustful spider, perhaps. A spider who’s eaten her husband and suffers badly from second thoughts.’

  ‘Are you having second thoughts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Kama Sutra,’ Max said, shifting his body slightly. ‘I’ve heard so much about it but I haven’t read it yet.’

  ‘Oh really? I might’ve assumed you had.’

  Max smiled at the implication.

  ‘It says no guilt is attached to sex as such,’ Narayan told him. ‘Women are men’s sexual equals. It’s a paradox that Indian women have become so prudish on the whole since then – some of the middle class ones, at least. They can be so stodgy and respectable, like my harpy aunts.’

  ‘Village women worship a phallic emblem in the temple sanctum, I’ve observed,’ said Max. ‘And yet kissing in public is frowned on. Another paradox.’

  ‘Yes, it’s strange that our culture venerates the sexual instinct, and yet there’s this belief in the sanctity of chastity. As with Gandhi in his later years, his aim being moksha and not kama.’

  ‘Moksha means spiritual enlightenment, right?’

  ‘You’ve been doing your research,’ said Narayan, pleased. ‘Yes, and kama means the delights of love and sex. Dharma means virtue. All of these are part of being a good Hindu, such as I’m trying to be – but without spectacular success, I must admit.’

  Their humorous fantasies grew as their intimacy grew. They spent time together in Narayan’s room, in Max’s car or on the wide windy beaches where they surfed – and the sense of privacy added to the charm Max found in them. Max wanted to keep their whole affair separate, inviolate, outside the equally charmed circle of his life and his love for Clare. Consequently, when circumstances came to threaten it eventually, he had notion how to react.