I said, ‘Hathi Ramji, don’t treat me like a chutiya. I too am a man of the world. Tell me what’s happening.’
He said, in the same flat tone, ‘There is nothing, sir, that I am hiding from you. All is well. Just that we’ve received orders to up your cover.’
I said, ‘But I thought the boys had been caught.’
He said, ‘Yes, they are with us. We are taking care of them, giving them a good time.’
I said, ‘So who are they? You still haven’t told me anything.’
He said, ‘We are talking to them. Gently, patiently. You know how reluctant guests behave? Always slow to open up, taking their time to feel at home, to start speaking freely and happily? We are giving them a good time, settling them in. Soon they will want to share their whole lives with us.’
I said, ‘So there is nothing at all that you can tell me?’
He said, ‘Nothing. Nothing that I know. Except that you are safe. My job is to keep you safe. The investigation is someone else’s work. They will not tell me anything either. I am a very small nut-bolt in a very big machine. The big machine tells me what to do, I cannot ask it why. For if every nut-bolt like me begins to ask why, there will be a big mountain of whys and no machine.’
I just looked at him—so quiet, so unamused, so apparently sincere—as he delicately stuck the two halves of the biscuit together and placed it deep inside his mouth.
Before the weekend was out I had begun to feel like a drug lord, or more aptly like a political villain in a Hindi film. The category to which I had been upped sounded ominously important. Z. The one man thrilled by it was Vijyant. He said to me, ‘Who knows, they might soon make it Z+!’ For him the pomp of my new situation was unbearably giddy.
Well, from having one plainclothes cop with a 9mm pistol as a shadow I had now acquired a virtual platoon:
Three uniformed bodyguards, cradling mean, perforated carbines.
One middle-aged leader of the pack, black 9mm stuffed into crotch.
One white Ambassador car with a civilian driver.
A small heap of sandbags outside my house.
Another small heap of sandbags outside the office.
Two stationary policemen in uniform behind each, with heavy self-loading rifles.
A spotlight that shone bright on the house gate all night, while leaving the sandbagged policemen in the dark.
A large khaki-olive tent—its mouth always half-open as if in dismay—at the end of the back lane, to which the platoon retired by turns.
Next to it—a sackcloth shower cubicle, that began at a height of one foot and ended at four, held up by four bamboo staves, with a floor of flat, loose bricks, supplied water by a rubber pipe pulled from our backyard and slung around the neem tree.
A big police truck that appeared every few hours and with a great clanging of its tailgate dispensed tea and food to the garrison.
And a few sets of walkie-talkies that crackled gibberish at all hours.
The pack leader and two of the carbine boys travelled in the white Ambassador, tailing me ferociously, as if tied to my fender. The third carbine boy travelled with me in my car, sitting next to me as I drove, the black carbine cradled across his chest, its short barrel, riddled with little holes, pointing out the windscreen.
At the back, mulling his place in the new scheme of things, sat one of the original shadows. If it was Vijyant, it was with a puffed chest and a new sense of importance; if it was belly or phlegm, with a mousy air and a sense of great diminishment.
Jai said, stroking his beard, ‘They are setting you up! Setting you up! Much too clever. The maaderchods are much too clever! They still haven’t told you a thing about who, what, why—in the meantime they are doing all the right things. Making all the appropriate moves. So when the crap hits the ceiling, they’ll shrug their shoulders and say, Look we did everything to take care of him, to protect him, but if he wants the powder up his nose what can we possibly do!’
My in-laws behaved like Vijyant, luxuriating more in my suddenly acquired stature than worrying about an assassin’s bullet. Sangeeta/Dolly/folly, in her fair-foolish way had no opinion on any of it (except to keep repeating in that horribly solemn tone—Please be careful), but her ugly mother would monitor the platoon as if she were a recruiting agent. Where are they? Are they outside? Have they had tea? Biscuits? Shall we send them something to eat? One of them seems to have changed? What happened to that tall Jat? You have a Bengali among them now! That fellow, that Musalman, he doesn’t look trustworthy—ask for him to be replaced. In the DDA block in which she lived she would inform her neighbours when I was visiting and encourage them to peer out their windows to gawk at the army. A buzz would go around the moment our cars stopped and the shadows jumped out, flashing their hardware. Sometimes she would have some fool from next door in for tea, some middling government officer or company executive who would try and give me his stupid thesis on the state of India and ask me searching questions about things—politics, religion, stock markets, bureaucracy—which made my acid rise. As the man in the iron mask, I’d give differing nods and they would, anxiously and gratefully, supply the answers themselves.
My mother, of course, only wailed. She would look at me, trailed by guns and uniforms, and start loudly lamenting her fate, my fate, the fate of her forefathers; start begging forgiveness for her misdeeds, my misdeeds, her forefathers’ misdeeds; pledge atonement in this life, the next, and the next. ‘My lord let no harm come to my son—take my life instead.’ If I was not looking she would fall upon the platoon: ‘Even if you have to give up your lives, nothing must happen to him. Promise me! All of you promise me! Promise me now!’ She was insufferable.
My father watched it all, her and me and the ululations, in near silence and with averted eyes. Scared to speak to me; scared to speak to her. He stuck quietly to his dietary regime—no oils, no sugar—and to his morning-evening walks and focused simply on the central concern of his life, his unending struggle with paper. The reading of newspapers and the filing of bank statements and tax returns and insurance papers and postal deposits and telephone bills and water bills and cable TV bills and property papers and loan repayments and recurring deposits and share certificates. A full life of hiding behind papers thrown at him; shuffling them all day like a cardsharp waiting for the tables to fill and the big game to begin. Watching him sitting there, in his beige golf cap, which he’d bought in Nainital from a roadside vendor, reading every line of his two newspapers, he filled me with pity and contempt: the cardsharp whose tables would never fill, whose game would never begin. Once, the shuffled papers had been examination-sheets, job applications, account opening forms, passport applications, bank loan applications, housing applications, leave applications, medical applications, departmental memorandums, governmental communiqués, officers’ instructions, transfer requests, promotion requests, school reports. A life devoted to the management of paper. Like my father-in-law, a clerk for all occasions. The reality of the shadows—the carbines, the walkie-talkies, the pistols—was not something he could easily comprehend. Had the security detail come as a three-page memo, with a formal number to it, some gibberish code of alphabets and numerals, he would have instantly absorbed it and asked me a few questions.
My relatives, of course, thought I’d become the prime minister. They crawled out of every sad hole to phone us, visit us, invite us—people I had not heard from in years, some whose names barely rang a bell, cousins from my father’s side, mother’s side, uncles, aunts, old friends of the family, from parts of Delhi I had never visited, some from places which I had never even heard of. Typically the phone would ring when I was in the middle of a meeting and an energetic unknown voice would exclaim, ‘Oye, we saw you on TV last night! You were looking django! What fun it was! We told everyone! So tell us when are you coming over for dinner? And where’s masiji?’ Worse still were the older lot, who launched into a litany of concern and blessings: ‘You must take care. Don’t go out in the night. Don
’t trust anyone. You can’t trust anyone these days. These are very dangerous people. They can do anything. But remember god is with you. Guru Nanak said those the lord picks to protect, nothing in the world can kill. I am going to go to our Santji and get a protective ring for you. Once you start wearing it you won’t need any guard-shards. And when did you grow a moustache?’
When did I grow a moustache? In the thirty years you haven’t seen me.
Soon enough, I had to corner each of the three women individually—mother, mother-in-law and Dolly/folly—and terrorize them into not accepting any invites or inviting anyone home. I did not want to see anyone, or talk to anyone, even on the phone. They were free to go and meet whom they pleased. Dolly/folly looked chastened and compliant, the mother-in-law sullen and swollen, and Mother let loose a blood-curdling wail. I wanted to bang her head against the wall.
All her life Mother had chanted the Bhagavad Gita every morning, loud and long, not understanding a word of it. Sitting in her gaudy puja corner, surrounded by gods in brass and silver and cheap framed prints in lurid colours, she’d let rip early every morning, after a bath, before a single defiling sip of water had travelled down her gullet. Sitting cross-legged on her prayer mat, her head covered with a dupatta, she’d rock back and forth chanting raucously, the Gita Press hardbound edition from Gorakhpur lying open on a walnut-wood stand in front of her, the cotton wick dipped in thick mustard oil burning strong, and vapours of sharply sweet incense curling about, completing the hokum aspect. When she was done—hitting a crescendo of shouted-out exclamations to the gods—she’d mark her page with an old peacock feather and devoutly wrap the book in a red satin cloth. Eighteen days into the cycle, when she got to chapter 18, the end—Om Tat Sat!—she’d start over. Again and again. Month on month. Year on year. And never understanding a word of it: ‘To protect the righteous and to destroy the sinners and to establish dharma, I manifest myself from yuga to yuga. O Arjuna! He who thus knows the nature of my divine birth and action, he is not born again when he dies, but attains me. Many, purified through the meditation of knowledge, have immersed themselves in me and sought refuge in me, discarding attachment, fear and anger.’
In all her decades of chanting, Mother had managed to discard nothing but her sanity. And all that she had acquired was the wail, which she deployed recklessly. I often wondered how my father had been surviving her. If he had ever come out of his paper tomb he would have surely strangled her, if only to cut out the noise.
Sara reacted like Jai, with the informed world view of the urban sophisticate. Looking immediately for the story behind the story. Unlike him, she didn’t look for white powder conspiracies. Typically, she peered through the opposite end of the telescope. She was not interested in how power wanted to fix me—through lead or talcum—but how power manipulated the disempowered to do its bidding. From the moment the first shadows had shown up, she had slit her wrists, fretting more about their situation than mine.
Each time I’d walk through her door she’d start the inquiries: ‘Who’s there? Belly? Phlegm? Vijyant?’ Then she’d stand on her toes, peer through the high bathroom window while I held her unequal body from behind, and harangue me about my indifference. ‘I hope, when the moment comes, they show as little concern for you as you’ve shown for them!’ From there she’d rapidly spiral into a rage, ‘Why should they be risking their lives for you? What’s so valuable about you, mr peashooter? I can bet you their lives are more worthy, more deserving of protection! Each of them probably takes care of a desperately struggling family—toiling wife, ailing parents, children in unaffordable schools! While you, mr peaman and your lovely ms white lead the good fraudulent life, hating each other and your idiotic parentage, and pretending to save the nation.’
After she’d gone on for a bit, walking up and down the room, photo arms waving, I’d say, ‘Bloody whore!’ through clenched teeth, and her breath would catch. Her babble of baiting would grow louder, more disjointed. ‘The state uses these poor buggers for their own damn end! They are cops. They should be protecting the ordinary folk who need protection and have none, who are harassed by anyone with a bit of money and muscle! They should be in the bloody villages and the slums, working for the wretched, not spending their days escorting an elitist bastard, while he wanders about looking for his weekly screw!’ I’d watch her impassively and when the moment was right, spit, ‘Saali randi!’ From there to backing her against the wall was mere minutes of trading abuse—in English and Hindi, juvenile, repetitive, mostly the absurd naming of genitalia. Just as I’d nail her to the wall, her ideological tirade would turn into a taunting sexual challenge, now purely in Hindi. ‘Arre take your little luli away somewhere else! I’ve seen scores like you! Longer than you, thicker than you! Take your little matchstick away and light a fire in dollyfolly! What’s needed here is a flaming torch!’
She was made to be taken standing, and when I was in her, her photo shoulders braced against the wall, her toes stretched, her body curved like a bow, when I was deep in her, holding up her fullness with my hands, her tone would begin to change. As I kissed her cigarette-mouth, it would became increasingly tender, soft, full of endearments, gratitude; all Hindi would now vanish, only sweet English phrases would bloom. Yes please, my god you are lovely, how good you feel, love how you move, I miss you so much, don’t stop, why can’t you see me every day, god you are amazing, love what you are doing, love what you are doing, love what you are doing.
Later, naked in front of Bonaparte, flat on her back, she would begin to slit her wrists again. Now in a gentler way, teasing out speculation about the cops and the killers.
Slowly, over the weeks, she had become convinced that the whole thing was a frame-up. But, after the peculiar way her mind worked, it wasn’t me she was worried about. She thought I was more than capable of taking care of myself. ‘Fully bloody enlisted member of India’s most elite caste, the only true brahmins of modern India—the upper middle-class Anglo! Right school, right language, right friends! Patronized by the system, understands the system, can work the system inside out, and outside in! In fact, pretty much invented the system! The one fucking caste that the Brits created, to ruthlessly dominate old Dr Manu’s four!’
I made a note to gift her a copy of the Manusmriti. But I knew what she was tilting at. She was basically concerned about the poor sods the system was using in the frame-up. Those who were supposed to guard me; and those who were supposed to have shot me. In her words, India’s true low-castes, with neither money nor influence—ruthlessly deployed against each other to fulfil the agenda of the master class. Whose fully bloody paid-up member I was.
In the beginning it was just about her wanting information from me, about both shadows and shooters, and I failing to provide any, which led to her rants. ‘How can you not want to know? How can you be so indifferent?’ And so on, till the nailing on the wall. Then it became a growing suspicion of a sinister plot. In this story I was just a decoy, my fate unimportant; and the cops were minor victims, collaterally damaged for having to fuss over me. The actual victims were the assassins. These were innocent men the system wanted to fix—for reasons of business, politics, religion or terror, this we did not know yet.
Yes, Jai’s talcum had been sprinkled.
I was the talcum.
The killers—the killers were the real victims.
3
MR LINCOLN MEETS FROCK RAJA
That year the rains meandered on right into September in a kind of epileptic way, with sudden fits of rain, a sharp cascade of large luscious drops that would stream suddenly, bringing back memories of childhood monsoons when a daily soaking was inevitable. And even as the fit uncurled its full force, before the first hour was out, the drains overflowed, the roads flooded, and the traffic snarled at every intersection, every underpass, the mouth of every colony. Sara’s master class would suffer stalled cars; her low-castes would slip down uncovered manholes. At such a time it was difficult to believe this was a modern ci
ty—seemingly so organized, so ornamental under clear skies and bright sun, its roads wide, its trees lush, its flyovers leaping up to the heavens.
The canker seemed to be concrete.
In an excess of sprucing up, the city had been choked. Delhiites, seeking ever new ways of displaying their affluence, had bought up every kind of new tile and stone hitting the market and laid it out where they could. Marble—green, pink, Bhutanese, Nepalese. Stone—Jaisalmer gold, Kota grey, Agra red, Jaipur pink. Granite—black, brown, speckled. Tiles—Italian, Moroccan, Spanish. Sidewalks, backyards, gardens, driveways, open areas, walkways—everything was being paved and cemented. Every pore blocked, every breath stemmed: the earth was given a hard, impregnable gloss. The fat drops simply bounced off it.
And then, as if in reparation, days would go by without a falling drop, and the power supply would fluctuate and the feeble invertors die and the thrum of generators and the stench of diesel fumes would stain the air, and the swelter would get under skins and fray the nerves, and the city would curse and scan the festering skies. And Sippy, in his odd moment of lucidity would say, ‘Sirji, it is a curse of the times—just as there is very little milk left in milk, there is very little rain left in the rain.’
There was time for idle bullshit like the weather because we had nothing else to do. Jai’s friends had by now completely lost their stomach for the enterprise. They had been slowly turning off the taps for months; the magazine had steadily dwindled from a hundred and twelve pages to ninety-six to seventy-two to forty-eight. At each stage Jai had addressed the staff as if he were Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, assuring them that immortality and the turnaround would both be theirs, in fact were just days away. All each of us had to do was to resolutely stand by our posts and keep firing. At what, he didn’t say. The fucker was so eloquent, with his burning eyes and waving arms, that even I fell for his talk. Each time, when the trance broke, I thought: through millennia men like him have led thousands to their untimely graves.
The Story of My Assassins Page 5