The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  I knew I had tipped her onto a track that did not lead to a nailing on the wall. This one led to badly bruising places, to prolonged trench warfare that I had no inclination for. In the past my instinct had been to exit such a situation quickly and completely. The last one—the Malayali girl who gave me tree names and wet palms—had ended on sulk number three, in week number nine.

  The truth is I had no time to argue with others; I had too many arguments going on with myself. I was happier recalling her lustrous dark skin, the watermelon red slash at its lovely core, than entering a spiral of you didn’t call, why didn’t you call, where are you, with who are you, do you feel, what do you feel, you don’t care, why can’t you come, why can’t we go, why can’t you say something, what are you saying, you only want that, you don’t want anything, where is this going, this is going nowhere, I thought you were strong, I know you are strong, you are making me weak, I am not weak, you don’t want to change, you’ve changed, you make me sick, you are sick, you don’t really love me, I really love you, how can anyone love you, actually you hate me, actually you hate yourself, actually I hate you.

  I had discovered, over time, that the workable cycle was about sixteen weeks. Two weeks of wooing; four weeks of passion; and ten slow and painful weeks of disengagement. By the time it ended there was poison everywhere, with every fine feeling in tatters. When the last lingering tendon was finally snipped, with one of us saying something barbaric that could have easily gone unsaid, there was a euphoria not dissimilar to that of the weeks of passion.

  Sometimes the process was less corrosive, when she too understood, like cops and doctors do, that the world is what it is, ephemeral, uneven, to be squarely dealt with, and not to be conjured out of weak romantic novels. But few seemed to possess the gift of leaving the room while the laughter was still in the air and the spirits high. For the most, everyone seemed to be committed to creating a heap of debris before walking away from it.

  With Sara it had turned out different. She had surprised me, derailed me. The sixteen weeks had turned to sixty, and I was still wandering around inside the room, refusing even to look at the exit door. At times it angered me. I had even attempted a few times to disconnect completely, wash her out of my system as I had so many others in the past; then, within days, irresistibly drawn by her maddening mix of rebellion and surrender, by the beauty and lust of her unmatched halves, I had rushed back to the boxy building and thrown myself in front of Napoleon Bonaparte to be showered with her abuse and love.

  Not since I was ten and beginning to flee the domination of my mother had I felt so helpless in a relationship. What made it worse was Sara seemed to not know the hold she exercised on me. That, at least, would have involved a game—tactics, strategy, wit, play—something I could train myself to excel at. But she was not a player. She was an original, a force of nature, declaring herself in any way that seized her, and it was up to you to tackle it as best as you could. She was like Jai in her rage and articulation but without the calculation. She spoke such nonsense sometimes that I wanted to tear the Gita page on page and stuff it down her throat. But, even less than with Jai, there was no point going down that road with her. Looking back, my only victories, in more than a year, seemed to be the fleeting ones against the wall.

  Now, in the grand squalor of Patiala House she was declaring war again, opening a new front. I was trying to give her my inscrutable, half-smiling expression—reserved for my clueless moments—when Sethiji’s junior penguins saved the moment by rushing out and demanding our presence in the courtroom.

  Sethiji, the public prosecutor, and the lawyers for the five men, were all in a convivial huddle at the foot of yoronour’s desk. There was much flesh pressing going on between them after each whispered exchange as they all smiled happily at each other. It must have been a terrifying sight for the accused. Was their freedom being negotiated, or their lives being thrown away? Was this flock of waddling penguins just going through the motions with little concern for the outcome on their lives?

  The public prosecutor—a balding clerkish-looking man like my father, but with the alert eyes of a shopkeeper—said to me, ‘Do you know these men?’

  I looked at them. Four of them lowered their eyes. The brain-curry man looked at me as if I was the accused. ‘No, I don’t.’

  The swirl in the courtroom seemed to have stilled a bit.

  ‘Do you know that there has been an attempt to kill you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Do you live under twenty-four-hour police protection?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Do you know who would want to have you killed?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘But do you agree you may have enemies, people you have offended or harmed by your work, who may want to get rid of you?’

  ‘Yes, sure, it’s possible.’

  ‘You have no reason to believe that these men may not be the contracted killers?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Yoronour gave me a grave, pasty look as if I had said something of profound importance. Someone really should have stuck a beard on his chin.

  The lawyer for the defence, more a little sparrow than a penguin, in an oversized shabby black coat and an old-fashioned pencil moustache, said, waving his arm in a cultivated flourish, ‘Look at them very carefully. Do you know any of them?’

  ‘No sir, I don’t.’

  ‘I repeat—look at them again. Very carefully. Have you ever seen these men?’

  I actually did what he asked, scanning their faces slowly. The policeman holding the wrist of the one on the extreme left yanked his face up—prominent cheekbones, a big nose, black stubble—and the other three put up theirs in instant reflex. They looked like each other. Everymen. The roads, bazaars, offices of India were full of men like them. Nameless men who did faceless jobs and perished unmarked in train accidents, fires, floods, epidemics, terrorist blasts, riots. At best, statistical fodder. But I also knew this was how criminals really looked, not like the stylized stars that the movies everywhere in the world loved to essay. More criminals fashioned themselves on film stereotypes than the other way around. Of the five, only brain-curry man was a serious student of cinema.

  I said, ‘No sir, I haven’t.’

  Actually I could have seen them all my life and not remembered.

  The tiny lawyer said in a forcefully mannered voice, ‘Tell me, were you at all aware that someone wanted you killed?’

  Clearly this little semicolon of a man had also fashioned himself from cinema. Everybody in this damn country was an imitation of a Hindi film character. He stroked the lapels of his oversized coat, and worked his mouth fully, the pencil moustache mesmeric. I could see him—a wimp in school, a wimp as a son, a wimp as a husband, a wimp as a father, but in the courtroom the master of the moment.

  ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  ‘Was there any indication of a threat at all? A phone call, a letter, some rumour, a friendly remark—from a colleague, a source?’

  ‘No sir, not really.’

  ‘But you were under police protection?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘The last few months.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I was not told anything.’

  ‘You were not told anything. Of course you were not told anything. Who put you under police protection?’

  ‘The government, the police department … the intelligence bureau … the sub-inspector arrived with his men the day the news broke, and I was just told that I needed to be under protection.’

  ‘You were told, you were told, in the way the police tells us all kinds of things. You were told. And you didn’t bother to ask why, to question what you were told? You just believed what you were told. By the same police that you keep exposing for its lies, its human rights violations, its abuses and its excesses! Such a fine journalist, yoronour! We all respect his work. Fighting against corruption, fighting the
government’s wrongdoing, the police’s wrongdoing, standing up for society. But this time you believed the police. You believed it was telling the truth—which I am sure it was, I am sure it was. Even the police tell the truth sometimes. So you believed everything the police told you?’

  Sethiji’s smile was getting a little rigid. Yoronour seemed to have started some other consultations on the side with his clerk and another penguin. Sara was looking as ferocious as the brain-curry man. Together they could have dismembered me in minutes, he making a hole in my skull and she uprooting my tool.

  ‘No. I didn’t believe or disbelieve. I just let them go ahead and do their job.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. The police must be always left alone to do their job. Even by investigative journalists. So can we say you trust the police?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that.’

  ‘So mostly you wouldn’t trust them, but in this particular case you did?’

  ‘Well, yes. As I said, I just left them alone to do their job.’

  ‘Let us be hypothetical. Do you like hypothesis? I am told all journalists like hypothesis. Do you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Let us hypothetically say the police wanted to fix some innocent fellows. For whatever reasons, personal, political, pecuniary, whatever. This police that you mostly don’t trust. So this police charged them with trying to kill you, gave you police protection and locked them up. Of course the police would never do something like this. We are only trying to form a hypothesis.’

  Fuck, was Sara part of his defence team?

  The public prosecutor with the alert shopkeeper eyes, who had been smiling and chatting with Sethiji all this time suddenly said, ‘Objection yoronour, what are all these misleading questions? The honourable counsel cannot make up any hypothesis and ask the witness to comment on them. This is a courtroom, not Sheikh Chilli’s adda!’

  Sethiji said, ‘Yes, my lord, honourable counsel must stick to the case!’

  Pastyface said, ‘Don’t waste the court’s time, Bhandariji. There will be enough time to go into all this.’

  The sparrow’s feathers were unruffled. He stroked the lapels of his frayed coat with deliberate slowness and said, ‘Milord, we are talking about the lives of five innocent men. Sometimes there is only a hypothesis between the rope and the neck.’

  ‘Hurry up, Bhandariji.’ The magistrate had again turned away from us and was talking to the clerk in whispers. Two penguins were leaning over to be part of the confabulations. The general swirl in the room was unabated. Even where I stood answering the questions, I was being continually pushed and jostled.

  Turning to me the tiny lawyer said, ‘So shall we say that you mostly don’t trust the police?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Shall we say that you have never before in your life seen any of these men?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Shall we say that at no time did you have any apprehensions that your life was in danger? No sign at all?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Shall we say that you have no reason to assume that these men wish you any harm at all?’

  I looked at Hathoda Tyagi. He seemed like he wished to harm all of mankind. Make universal brain curry.

  I said, ‘Sure.’

  ‘Shall we say my little hypothesis could be true? Just as a little hypothesis, nothing more?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Before Sethiji hustled me out of the room, I took a last look at the men. Four of them were shuffling their feet, looking at us, and around us, in a glaze of unknowing. The brain-curry man was motionless, head high, his eyes, unmoving, on me.

  When I reached the door I realized Sara had lingered behind. I turned to look for her and she was talking to the little sparrow, her right hand on her chin, her elbow cupped in her left palm. Her unequal body, in a long peasant skirt with a tribal motif and a slim-fit sleeveless shirt, clearly seemed to be emanating some aura, for the swirl was steering clear of her, leaving her and the defence lawyer in a clear island. How tough men fear tough women! She was listening; the sparrow was chirping, no bigger than her, his entire frame delicate as her photo torso.

  I sent one of Sethiji’s gelled-gymed junior penguins to nudge her along. The look she turned on the hapless boy was of Kali in the moment before commencing carnage. He hotfooted his way back, ashen faced. One more provocation and she’d have decapitated us and strung our heads in a garland around her neck. Yours truly between Sethiji’s wide smile and gymed boy’s gelled hair, with shopkeeper-eyes right across, just below pasty-faced yoronour.

  Our complement—shadows, Sethiji, junior penguins—waited outside in the madness of the corridor, one of many small armies doing opaque battle in the once royal corridors of Patiala House. When she finally emerged she strode right past us, straight into the crush, and we had to scuttle to follow. Sethiji said, nodding his wondrous smiling face, ‘Bhabhiji is not an ordinary woman. No phuddugiri with her. You have to follow her. Not like our sad wives. You cannot just beat her and love her.’

  5

  THE ART OF BALANCE

  The next time I nailed her to the wall I realized she wasn’t quite there with me. I reached deep into my school memories to excavate every obscenity I had traded with my classmates, every vulgarity I had read in the hand-stapled, one-rupee novellas of Mastram Mastana that regularly ignited onanistic mayhem in the back benches. Every boy in the Hindi belt had dirtied his hands on Mastram. His across-the-line carnivals, grubby, taboo-trashing and incestuous—joint families, master–servants, teacher–students, buses, trains, bathrooms, dead-of-night surreptitious encounters—were so direct in the language that often boys succumbed in a weak heap before the first page was done.

  But even Mastram unplugged couldn’t cut through to her. The ringing expletives, the hammering, nothing led her eyes to dilate, nothing altered the tone of her voice, nothing instigated abandon in her body. What made it worse was that I could see it was not deliberate. She was not trying to shut me out. She went through the paces—the challenge, the baiting, the abuse, the surrender—but in the desultory way schoolchildren go through their morning prayers at assembly. When I finished and took her off the wall, she was limp not with satiety but with disconnect.

  There had been similar retreats in the past, mostly when we hit a vista that we read differently. Thanks to her years in American universities and a ceaseless itinerary of seminars, summits and other modern talkathons, she had acquired occidental eyes. A continual hysteria of rights and wrongs, a continual need to name and frame and explain and blame, a continual urge to display virtue, a continual desire to fix the world as if it were a dollhouse waiting passively.

  There was an explanation for the universe, the good, the bad, the rich, the poor, the less, the more, the pain, the pleasure, the eternal, the ephemeral—but it was not be found in the manicured beauty of purdue–brown–harvard–berkeley–yale, in gleaming classrooms and shining skins, in categorizing Olympiads, in bookshops bigger than factories. It lay in the inheritance of her blood; in the millennia-old meditations of naked men with matted hair under hairy ficus trees; in the unsigned, uncopyrighted wisdoms handed down endlessly from master to pupil, from flowing mouth to soaking ear; in the eternal riddles of karma and dharma that were their own answers.

  She’d bought this whole occidental bullshit about fixing the world, about the grand march of logic and reason, all the way presumably—with delicate sips of Starbucks—to Auschwitz and Birkenau. The watchtower of rationality over the gateway of progress through which ran the lines of cold iron, the straight railroad to hell. Alight from the cattle cars and breathe the sweet forgetfulness of xylon. Embrace the modern moksha of death by science.

  If she’d listened to the inheritance of her blood she would have known the world does not need to be fixed, it only needs to be balanced.

  And the art of balance demands you tread lightly, not leap about in a continual frenzy. The art of balance demands you know your designated
role in the game of life, not start muscling in on everyone else’s. The art of balance demands an absence of panic, a rippleless internal calm. The art of balance demands knowledge of timelessness, of birth and death and rebirth. The art of balance demands that you know the world cannot be fixed, it must be endured; it must, simply, be kept forever in splendid play.

  Sara wanted to fix the world.

  She wanted action, answers, victories. Liberty, equality, fraternity. She wanted final solutions. She wanted my killers to be declared innocent, and freed. Nothing anyone said or did was going to deter her from her course. And I was not, I soon realized, to be involved in this campaign. I was a compromised party. I was on the other side. I had set myself up to be killed.

  It took a little while before I realized she was in touch with the tiny lawyer in the oversized coat; that she was lending her formidable energy to help plan the defence of my assassins.

  One day, as I lay spent yet frustrated in front of Napoleon, calming my heartbeat after one more insipid nailing, I saw the file on the unused side of her bed where her books and papers always lay in an untidy heap. A dirty brown file, tied with a red string, dirty white papers peeping out of its edges. She was in the bathroom washing me off her, and I pushed aside the newspapers that lay over the file, to discover there was not one dirty brown file but several—five, six—in a thin pile. The neat ink mark of a rubber stamp at the top declared: Advocate M.S. Bhandari, Llb, Llm.

  When she came out, in a blue wraparound knotted in a big bow on the right and a thin white slip, her photo nipples provocative against it, she smiled and said, ‘Checking on your killer boys, mr peashooter? Go ahead. We must all know what kills us. And what doesn’t.’

  I shut the file that I had just nudged open, flung the newspapers back onto it, and swung myself out of the bed. ‘You’ve lost it,’ I said, pulling on my jeans.