Sukha laughed and said, ‘You want to be a chaakumaar? Your father blasts bombs from a tank, and you want to be a chaakumaar! Okay, I’ll teach you, but only if you run out now and get me a hot glass of tea.’
It was true. His father’s wielding of the mighty Vijayanta tank, or his grandfather’s exploits in the army, did nothing for him. He had heard their stories all his life. How his father won a mention-in-dispatches in the 1971 war against Pakistan for assisting in the destruction of a Patton tank; how his grandfather was recommended for the Military Cross when he helped his platoon hold off a Japanese charge in Burma towards the end of the Second World War; how his father had been the regimental middle-weight boxing champion for eight continuous years; how his grandfather could bend an iron rod on his thigh or his shoulders—hence the moniker Fauladi Fauji; how Burgess sahib told his grandfather that he was the pride of the British army; and how Major Khan told his father that he was as strong as the tank he manoeuvred. He had seen the old uniforms and ammunition boots packed in the dented black army trunk; he had seen the dull medals and the ceremonial lanyards, and the cummerbunds and the faded ribbons, and the frayed woollen socks and the moth-eaten olive cardigans, and the stiff rain cape with two gaping holes for the arms; and the assortment of jungle hats and berets and balaclavas. There were also the yellowing pictures, stuck on yellowing cardboard, with rows of crew-cut men—in stiff uniforms and floppy sports shorts and battle fatigues—all looking the same, till the old man jabbed his finger and pointed himself out as a young man. The reverence with which they handled this junk bored him; their continual talk of discipline, exercise, obedience, rules, regulations, timings, glory, honour was a pain.
Even at the age of ten he could see they were flakes, cut off from reality, living in some place and time that was mostly make-believe. His grandfather managed to stay in this unreal place by loftily removing himself from everyone else around. He almost never spoke to any of the workers on the farm, had dismissive exchanges with the villagers who chanced by, and was brutally laconic with relatives and visitors. For nearly thirty years, from the time he was pensioned from the army, he had done nothing but bubble his hookah and stare out at the fields. Twice a day, morning and evening, he took a long walk past the outer fields, carrying his military stick—of knotted bamboo—in one hand and an empty brown beer bottle in the other. Chacha said, ‘You have to hand it to him. He makes even a crap look like a regimental inspection.’
Often, when the labour was working the wheel of the fodder chopper, he would, sitting close by on his charpoy, stare at the slicing leaves of grass exploding with rich green aromas, as if locating some deep meaning in it. By speaking minimally, doing nothing, and possessing a legendary past, he had come to be seen as a repository of wisdom and strength. Everyone tiptoed around him; no one crossed him; and when he gifted someone a monosyllabic moment, gratitude and awe flowed back.
The grandchild was no exception to this minimalist treatment. He too was spoken to gruffly, and expected to live in awe. In the beginning, when he had dared ask the grand man some questions, he was always dismissed; children must not be so curious. Later, after Tope had stopped trying to talk to him, the old man would often track him with hard critical eyes, as if walking through the fields without chanting left-right-left-right was a crime. His strategy was good: he conveyed disapproval but never expressed it. That left everyone on the back foot, struggling with it, trying to gauge its extent, and yet never having the opportunity to challenge or rebut it. Tope often found himself hoping his grandfather would just say something nasty to him so he could hit back. But that was not to be. You had to contend with the lofty disapproval that arose from nothing and was directed at everything, without ever being articulated.
Tope’s father, Dakota Ram—Fauladi’s unit had just been offloaded from such a plane when he received the news of his son’s birth—Dakota Ram was doubly marred. For years he suffered his father’s inarticulate pretensions, and then the army slopped on a fair share of its own. The result was a tragically two-dimensional man: one part receiving orders, instructions, rules, regulations; the other, implementing and executing them to the letter. It was quite likely that a careless impulse had never coursed through his body; an original thought never sparked in his head. He had always done what he was told—by his father, by the army—and every situation he ever faced had set responses that he knew. When he didn’t know he simply asked someone who did. There was nothing about life or the world that had to be examined, analysed, questioned or understood. There were just processes and rules, just the brass and polish, just the doing.
When Dakota Ram came home on his annual two-month leave, he continued to wake before dawn, cut a close shave, exercise twice a day, eat his meals as in the battalion, at six, twelve and seven, and not indulge in small talk with his family. Like his father, he retained the army starch at all times, a clear distance from ordinary frivolities. He was a man who rode in a thousand-ton tank, who could blast holes in the horizon big as houses, who had lived the din of battle, death and destruction, whose officers spoke clippetyclop English and ate with shining cutlery and had fair-skinned wives with buns on their heads big as melons. Whose regiment had a hundred-and-twenty-year-old tradition of bravery and honour, whose grim job it was to defend the country. Sweep, idle village banter, indulgences of petty affection and love, were not for him. He was happy to give a sombre hearing to issues of village development and serious problems, but no backslapping gossip was allowed. He met everyone, including his small son, with a formal handshake. Every evening before dinner, he knocked back two large tots of dark Hercules rum with four fingers of water but he did it alone, with a sense of ceremony and ritual. In his first year in the regiment Lt Oomen had told him, ‘Dakota, whatever you do, do it with the style of the white man! They shoot you as if they are giving you a medal; they shit as if they are having a conversation in the drawing-room; and they drink as if taking part in a religious ceremony. And look at us! Always down on the ground, shitting, swilling, getting shot!’
Sometimes Chacha was invited to join in, but never to have more than the prescribed two, with Dakota measuring the drinks, holding both glass and bottle up to eye-level as he poured. Chacha would then wander off and quaff his santri, and tell his mother, ‘It’s like giving a berry to a lion! Sher nu ber! Doesn’t even wet my tongue!’ To his father, Dakota gave one large and one small tot. But they sat fifteen feet apart—Fauladi near the chopper; the tank man near the neem tree—and drank in silence, while the tube wells began to rumble water and the fields cleared of the last workers and a final rash of redness bathed the skies and the birds winging home filled the air with the day’s chatter. Behind them, the woodsmoke from the open chulha rose in slow waves and mixing with the aroma of bubbling dal spread through the darkening evening and the chewing of the buffaloes at the feeding trough grew steadily louder, joined by the oxen just in from their labours. The barking of dogs began to mark the scattered homesteads as night fell and a zillion stars burst through the roof of the world. Through the magical transition—which the city can never know—the two army men, father and son, gulped their rum, locked in their individual armour, incapable of giving and incapable of receiving.
The boy stayed close to his Chacha and far away from the stiff stranger under the neem tree. Fleetingly home, the tank man had nothing to say to his son, nothing to offer him. The regiment taught you nothing about this kind of fatherhood. In the regimental kind, the commanding officer was the father, and he gave you not emotion and affection but orders and a protective umbrella. His was the voice of god. Never to be questioned, in life or death. The other fathering that Dakota Ram had known, of Fauladi’s, had been no different. Regular thrashings, unswerving obedience, and no display of feelings. Recruitment, training, boot camp, while a nightmare for most of his mates, had been a romp for him. With a deep sense of piety, Dakota actually approved of his father’s ruthless rules of upbringing. He felt they had served him well. Made a real m
an out of him, indifferent to pain and privation, dauntless in the face of death. He too made it a point to thrash his son once every week while he was home on leave. That was a minimum of eight thrashings during his annual leave and two during his casual. Sometimes it troubled him to do so, but he knew any weakness on his part would ruin the boy’s character.
Sometimes it was difficult to locate a reason to beat Tope. The boy tended to steer clear of his path and to keep his voice down. Then Dakota would summon him and berate him for his indifferent performance in school, and follow it up with some really tough time-and-work sums. Tope Singh would struggle with the maths, his limbs and mind already going numb at the thought of the thrashing to come. For variety’s sake, Dakota Ram sometimes used his cane, sometimes his canvas belt, sometimes his army boots, and sometimes just his big hands. He never hit the boy with all his strength—that would have killed him—but with just enough to hurt him. In fact, the rage only rose in Dakota after he had begun to whack him—it was the boy’s squealing that got his juices going. The first blow was always desultory, cold; the last always hard, heated.
His own father, Fauladi, watched it all impassively from his post on the charpoy by the chopper, gurgling on his hookah. And Dakota, occasionally, to earn his father’s unstated approval, gave his son an extra brutal blow or two. Tope Singh’s mother, Dakota’s wife, was in no position to help matters. The philosophy of regular chastisement that applied to the son applied to her too. Her quota was one thrashing a week, but for the sake of decorum it was carried out indoors. Of course her screams could be heard everywhere. This was also a family tradition Dakota Ram had imbibed from his father: even now the old man gave his old lady an occasional passing blow. The women took it well—fate could have been more cruel: left them unmarried, son-less, widows—and the pain seldom persisted beyond a day unless the buckle or stick caught a bone.
After the beating Tope’s grandmother would heat a stone and wrap it in a chunni and give it to Chacha, who would gently apply it to him while telling him stories from the Mahabharata. In time Tope’s favourite character in the epic became Bhima. The other Pandava brothers—Yudhishthira, Arjuna, Nakul and Sahadeva—were too rule-bound and quiescent. Bhima alone raged at the injustices heaped on them, and threatened vengeance on all who gave them grief. Bhima of the boundless strength, Bhima who would in the great battle seek out and slay each of the hundred Kaurava brothers for the ignominy they had heaped on his wife Draupadi, Bhima who understood that beyond a point moral niceties were a weakness and a sin. Often, when the blows were raining on him or his mother’s screams tearing at his ears, Tope would imagine himself as Bhima, the mace of havoc on his shoulder, wreaking retribution on his father and grandfather as they begged for mercy. When he walked through the fields alone he swung his arms like a warrior, smashing the stalks of wheat, shouting, Bhimsen, Bhimsen, Bhimsen!
As it turned out Tope’s body lived up to neither his own name nor that of his god. He went from twelve to thirteen to fourteen to fifteen with the speed of time, but his frame remained slight, the limbs thin, the shoulders narrow, the chest small. Nor did he gain the expected height, ending up much shorter and much thinner than his father and grandfather, more and more like his Chacha, so far the runt of the family. As if, by osmosis, the uncle’s love had made the boy’s physicality akin to his own.
The old man’s eyes became even more dismissive. He told Dakota, ‘Tope Singh! Look at him! You should have named him Pistol Singh! Doesn’t even look like you!’ The metronomic chop-chop of the fodder being sliced filled the air. The smell of bleeding green was everywhere. The old man pulled hard on his hookah, coughed, and continued, ‘And which army are you going to send him to—the dwarf and midget brigade?’
The tank man said nothing, just kept gulping from his tumbler of dark rum. After some time he rose, went in, and wordlessly thrashed his wife and son.
At fifteen, the humiliation hurt more than the blows. Tope held his tiny sobbing mother close and said to her, ‘I want to kill him.’ His mother, married as a small girl at thirteen, already an old woman at thirty-two, who in her life had known only two modest homesteads and many beatings, whose only warm memory was the love and care of her own mother, Tope’s sobbing mother said, ‘Don’t say such things! But I know what you mean.’
The boy first tasted blood at sixteen.
It was so much easier than he had imagined. For nearly seven years he had played with the fantasy, sitting alone in the gloom of the grain room, and against the naked brick wall of the tube well, and in the heart of the sword-leafed sugarcane fields, and by the sluggish stream that only surged in the monsoon, and under the hugging date palms, and in the lonely walks to the village school, and under his thick quilt on chill winter nights.
As sound is created by simply turning the knob of a radio, the fantasy began with the flicking open of his knife. His thumb pressed the smooth lever and the blade sprang out, gleaming. Suddenly there was menace in his eyes, in the angle of his arm, in the sneer on his lips. He didn’t feel small any more. He felt dangerous, lethal, capable of unleashing mayhem. All around him men and women—mostly faceless, but also his father and grandfather—cowered in respect and fear, averting their eyes, treading soundlessly. As he walked through the bazaar, a hushed whisper of awe filled the air. As sound is killed by turning off the radio knob, the fantasy vanished the moment the knife blade was clicked close. Only runty little Tope Singh remained.
For seven years, the boy had treasured the Rampuria like a priceless jewel. He had managed to keep it hidden from all the prying eyes at home and in the fields. The only one who knew about it was Chacha, and he was sworn to secrecy. In turn the uncle had sought a vow that Tope would not ever carry the knife outside the homestead, certainly not till he was twenty-one. In other words, never use it on man or beast.
On the other hand, Sukha, glorious Sukha, freewheeling Sukha, laughing Sukha, the gifter of the blade, the philosopher of the knife, had merely said, ‘Treat it well, handle it with care. Don’t use it to cut vegetables and don’t use it to sharpen pencils. Don’t use it to trim your nails and don’t use it shave your beard. Don’t use it to dig holes and don’t use it to kill chickens. Remember, a Rampuria has only one purpose. It is like a sword or a dagger or a gun. It is a weapon. It’s made to strike fear in the human heart. It’s made to slice open human flesh. Remember, it may be only four inches, but it’ll add many feet to your stature. A Rampuria makes you a man, it makes you a warrior. In a world where respect is hard to come by, it brings you respect. Both money and power—who care neither for character nor kindness—find in themselves respect for a man who sheathes a Rampuria.’ Sukha had then clicked the blade shut, massaged the sleeping knife in his palm for many long moments, and handed it over to the young boy.
Instantly Tope had recognized the truth of everything Sukha said. When he turned fifteen he went to Rafat, the village tailor—an old squint-eyed Musalman, who had no gift for running a stitch-line straight—and asked him to craft him a tight inner pocket for his trousers.
Rafat’s mud and brick shop was in the outermost circle of the village and a shallow open drain of slow-moving sludge ran past his door. The shop was bare but for a clattering Singer foot-pedal machine, a worn brown and yellow durrie on the uneven mud floor, and the chair on which Rafat sat. A neat stack of tailored clothes stood in one corner and an untidy heap of semi-tailored ones, arms and legs flapping about, were tossed in the other. Rafat wore a faded green measuring tape around his shoulders and a shrapnel of blue chalk in his ear, but seldom took any measurements because he already knew most of his clients’ sizes. The main thrust of his work was not fresh tailoring but the refitting of hand-me-downs doing the endless carousel between fathers, sons, siblings, cousins. There were pieces that he had refitted five, six, seven times, an adult trouser finishing off as a boy’s ‘half-pant’, a man’s kurta ending as a baby’s slip. For years the tailor had altered Dakota Ram’s old olive trousers and shirts for both Chacha
and Tope, leaving in the blank epaulettes, the flap pockets, the belt loops, the pleats. When done, they looked as they were—ragged, giveaway army clothes, without the starch, the shine, the finery. Because Rafat was such a poor craftsman, the adapted clothes were always crooked and ill-fitting. When someone made the mistake of complaining, the tailor looked scathingly at him over his glasses. ‘And look at you! Off to dinner with the deputy commissioner!’ Astutely, however, he made up for the bad aesthetics with excessive robustness. He ran and re-ran many wavering lines over every seam so his clothes never came apart, no matter the strain. The only way the clothes died was by being worn threadbare. It gave him a great reputation.
So Rafat gave him a slim pouch, from the inner waistband, along the line of the fly, in his father’s old olive army trousers. He made the pouch from tough khaki canvas, so that an accidental triggering would not flick open the blade and slice the boy. The knife dug into his flesh, and sometimes when Tope was out for too long it made his skin sore. It was a negligible price to pay. Apart from what it was, where it nestled gave him a heightened sense of potency. Often, when he stood around or walked, he felt for it with his fingers, thick and unyielding along his inner thigh.
He practised drawing it rapidly for a fight, like a revolver from a holster. Often, at midday, he went down to the soft soil by the stream, behind the high sharp rushes, and standing with his feet apart, in one move, shot his hand into the waistband, pulled the knife out of the pouch and flicked it open, shouting ‘Hahh!’ Then he stabbed the swaying rushes, or slashed them shallowly as Sukha had once instructed him, just opening up the skin with the steel tip, causing great pain but not deep injury.
For some time in the beginning he tried to become a knife thrower, practising his skill against the scaly trunks of the embracing date palms across the stream. Standing about ten feet away he chucked the knife at the trunks again and again, but it virtually never stuck. It was not that his aim was bad. He invariably hit the trees but never with the leading tip so that it wedged in. Tope tried tossing it from the shaft, from the blade, underhand, with the wrist turned in, but the knife didn’t seem weighted for attack by throwing. It turned poorly in the air, and never managed a clean trajectory.
The Story of My Assassins Page 12