The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  After each training session, like a good warrior, he would tend to his weapon, pulling out the smooth five-kilo stone he kept in the rushes by the stream. The stone was shaped like an embryo, smoothed to satin by millennia of running water. Tope would put the embryo on its back and in the curve of its torso begin to strop his blade. He would do this sometimes for nearly an hour, squatting on his haunches, pouring palmfuls of water over the burning steel. Once in a while he brought some mustard oil in a tiny medicine vial and gave the blade a viscous coat. Then it was all rubbed down with soft soil and an old rag.

  When Tope first put his knife into Bhupinder’s flesh and in one swift stroke drew an artful cummerbund across his belly, a profound sense of power and ecstasy filled his being. Big Bhupi, bullying Bhupi, with his tight blue turban, his already thick beard, his loud hectoring voice, big Bhupi who had just pushed him in the chest for the second time, took a moment to react. Then blood spurted in a line like juice from a sliced mango and Bhupi screamed, ‘Hai I am dead! Hai the maiovah has killed me!’

  Before the sardar found the nerve to reach for the short kirpan in its brass scabbard that hung by his left side, Tope put a neat cross on his left shoulder. Like Eklavya who mastered archery by practising in front of the statue of Drona, Tope had learnt the lessons of Sukha through unflagging repetition. The cuts were shallow, sucking out the blood without severing anything critical; he himself was balanced nicely between rage and calm; and how sweet, how supremely sweet, the unleashed knife felt in his hand. He so hoped that one of the two other boys with Bhupi would make a move, allowing him to extend his sublime dance, to decorate more flesh.

  But the boys were in a paralysis of terror, all the laughing bravura of a minute ago silenced by the flick-knife. Bhupi who had picked on him for months, calling him a runt, making him the butt of his schoolyard humour, Bhupi who had hustled him into the guava orchard and asked him to open his pants and show him and his gang the smallness of his penis, Bhupi now held his spurting stomach with his left forearm and the cross on his left shoulder with his right hand. There was blood everywhere, on his shirt, pants, and dripping on to the ground, into the mulch of fallen leaves. The sardar had begun to sob, big tears bubbling out of his frightened eyes: ‘Hai I’ve been killed! Hai the maiovah has killed me! Hai someone call my father! Hai my mother I am dead!’

  Tope noticed the guavas on the trees were still deep green and rock hard, thousands of them glistening in the dappled light of mid-afternoon. Another week and they could start plucking them. There was one strain in this orchard that had pink hearts—he loved eating those, though they never tasted as good as they looked.

  Almost playfully, he took a step forward, the knife hard in his extended hand. The three boys immediately recoiled, stumbling back over the mulch. This was the dominant group of the village school, skippered by Bhupi, the biggest landlord’s son. Boys like Tope had been kicked around by them all their lives. His pants had first been yanked off by them when he was eleven, and then whenever they chose. Passively, he had felt the pain and pleasure of their hands and bodies. There was nothing they had not done to him, and he had learnt early that brutality always accompanied the joys of the flesh. He could feel it now, in the way his steel tip opened up Bhupi’s skin, just as the sardar’s had his, so many years ago. Now all he could see in their eyes was fear. It was beautiful. The juices were surging in him. In a delirium of artistry he could have decorated all of them. Festooned them with red ribbons of flesh.

  They must have seen it in his eyes. The fervour beginning to swirl the dervish. Bhupi wailed, crumpling to his knees, clutching at his leaking skin, ‘Maiovah, the fauji’s runt has gone bloody mad! He wants to kill all of us! Wait till my father plucks his cock out and feeds it to the mongrels!’

  Moving to his own music, Tope cut a divine arc through the air and spliced the forearm of the boy nearest him as he raised it in protection. Like juice from a mango sprang the line incarnadine. Jeeta, of the elephant ears, his family tenant-tillers of Bhupi’s family acres, screeched, ‘Oh fuck my mother’s cunt he’s ripped me too!’ He turned on Tope ready to storm him in anger, but then saw the abandon in his eyes, the slow rotation of the Rampuria in his right hand. Tope followed him a step and slashed the air open with a lazy swing of his arm. Backing in panic, elephant-ears Jeeta stumbled upon Bhupi and fell in a heap. The sardar was now dribbling from his nose too, and the two fallen boys were cowering behind their arms.

  The third boy, Bhupi’s fourteen-year-old cousin Lucky, who had been trying to support the crumpled sardar, now tried to make a run for it. With a graceful lunge, Tope sank the tip of his Rampuria into the fleeing boy’s soft left buttock. The boy fell with a thud and a screech that startled the parakeets from the guava trees. ‘Hai my mother I’ve been killed! Hai I am dead!’ Bhupi moaned. ‘My father will peel the skin off your body. He will break your arse. You will regret that you were ever born.’

  Tope turned slowly and with a finely calibrated jab hit the writhing heap of Bhupi right between his arse cheeks. His scream almost scared the feathers off the birds. ‘Oh my mother! My mother! My mother! Fuck my mother!’ Jeeta was trying to bury into the mulch, his head down, eyes averted. Lucky was lying as if dead, on his stomach, both his hands on his arse, one running red. Bhupi was heaving with sobs, but struggling to keep the noise down. The mulch was sticking to the mucus flowing from his eyes and nose.

  What an embarrassment of opportunity! Which to decorate next? The sun pouring through the gnarled guava branches fell as filigree on the ground. The three boys lay in heaps, in shade and light, in a gentle choreography of moan and twitch, arms and legs contorted in an attempt to stem the new openings in their bodies.

  Tope said, to no one in particular, ‘Show!’

  He tried to use the same tone that had been used on him five years ago, and then again and again. Just the word. ‘Show.’

  No one moved. The bodies just curled in on themselves even tighter.

  ‘Show!’

  When no one responded, Tope gently put the tip of the Rampuria between Bhupi’s arse cheeks. With an ear-splitting wail, the sardar turned over, crumpled leaves and twigs sticking all over his face, glued in place by the mucus and the beard. His entire shirt was a sticky mud-brown.

  ‘Show!’

  The sardar’s hands were so slippery and shaky that he had trouble pushing clear the fat button of his trousers, which too were soaked with the thick seeping of his red cummerbund. ‘Show!’ said Tope, bending low and bringing the Rampuria closer. The sardar immediately went into a panic of babbling and tugging. When Rafat’s reinforced last button was yanked free, the last string pulled loose, there lay revealed nothing but purposeless hair and loose flesh.

  The true measure of things. The tyrant after the court has vanished; the policeman shorn of his uniform; the man who is no longer a minister; the schoolmaster in the bazaar. The tormentor bereft of his trappings. The molester leached of his tumescence. Nothing to make the juice rise, nothing to inflate the mind and the flesh with power and passion. Just a small mess of loose flesh drowning in purposeless hair.

  Tope put his right foot on the shrunken tormentor and pressed down gently. The sardar wailed like a baby through his mucus and clutched at his ankle. It was not as bad as it looked. Tope’s keds were the flat rubber-soled mud-brown hand-me-down standard issues used by army men. Light, smooth, not a single groove remaining on their thin underside. The other two boys, faces averted, were looking at him from the corner of their eyes. The filigree of sunlight could not camouflage their terror. That young boy Lucky, they had been breaking him in, tutoring him to extract pleasure from terror. He had been put to practice on the migrant labourers working their fields. Behind hay ricks, inside tube wells, amid the cane, by the rushes. Now he lay there, a second small hole in his bum, burrowing into the mulch.

  All it took was a knife! A Rampuria. Not size, not wealth, not numbers. Not caste, not creed, not class. Just a knife.

  For the first
time in years Tope felt beautiful. Strong and beautiful. Like he used to when Sukha put him on his Neema tank and entrusted him with guarding the borders with an arsenal of farts.

  Suddenly Bhupi squirmed, attempting to push his foot away. In cold anger, Tope pushed his foot down hard and gave it two slow twists. The sardar’s scream must have reached the village, and loosened the bowels of the other two boys.

  Then, as he’d seen in one of the nine films he’d been taken to in town, Tope bent down and wiped the Rampuria on the writhing-screaming sardar’s shirt—at the shoulder, where it was still unbloodied—and flicked the knife shut.

  ii

  The Prince of Bundpangas

  There was hell to pay. For a very long time. But Tope did not pick up any of the cheques.

  By the time he meandered back to the embracing palms, walking on air, the news had already reached. Chacha grabbed his arm as he hopped off the tree trunk across the stream and literally dragged him to the far south of the fields where the eucalyptus grove rose like a garrison of pale ghosts waving at the skies. In no time they were deep among the spectres, the only sounds their panting breaths and the scrunch of the crisp leaves underfoot. Chacha was not letting them walk. They moved at a steady speed. Neither boy nor man exchanged a single word. The hallmark of a robust relationship is knowing how to act in a crisis without anything being said. There would be time to talk. Now there was not enough time to run.

  They emerged on the other side of the waving ghosts and stayed with the fields, running on the narrow mud bunds, both in flat brown keds, Dakota’s army seconds. When the dividing mud line was too narrow they ran straddling it, in an ungainly waddle, swaying from side to side. Fortunately the fields were close to harvest and there was no water or slush to impede their movement. The late afternoon sun was heavy on their backs. They crouched as they ran, as if dodging bullets. The fact was, away from the grove, the land stretched clear for acres and acres on all sides. The ripened wheat was not too high. If your eye was good you could spot a paddy bird taking flight hundreds of metres away. Chacha took a line distant from the homesteads and tried to steer clear of the steadily balding squares where wiry migrant labour, men and women and children from eastern UP and Bihar, were on their haunches slicing the golden stalks and tying them into bundles. A few times, unavoidably, Chacha and Tope stumbled onto a patch being freshly tonsured, but the small burnt figures—heads padded with cloth, curving sickles in their hands, wearing muddy sarees and dhotis—did not question them. They merely turned their heads to look at the panting duo without expression, their eyes containing neither curiosity nor alarm.

  These were people who had left their dark huts and minuscule holdings, tied their pots, pans and clothes in bundles, taken every able family member, and every child below one and above eight, and travelled hundreds of kilometres on foot, bus, truck, train in search of the feeding wage. It was a cyclical pilgrimage to where the crops grew and the rupees were paid. To reap the wheat, to plant the paddy, to cut the cane. They lived as all men had once, by the seasons. In the nights they sang haunting folk songs by their cooking fires, and at the end of season they returned to their waiting homes with money and food and clothes. And the wild hope that some miracle would make the next journey unnecessary.

  You saw them everywhere with their stick limbs and burnt skins and blank eyes. Inside themselves they carried a deep well of loss and lack and sadness and exploitation and struggle and uncertainty, a well so deep that they could hardly see anything around them, anything outside of them. Death, disease, destitution, trauma could not distress them, for they were all of it. A boy and a man running through the fields—with nothing obvious chasing them—was just another passing oddity in a very odd world.

  What really worried Chacha were the homesteads. Any farmer seeing them was bound to hail them; any farmer seeing them run was bound to wonder. And when Bhupi’s family and retainers came asking, the flight path would lie wide open. They went through fields and farms they knew—Bant, Doabi, Lal Singh, Pramukh, Pali, Tau—steering away from the tube wells and houses, and, miraculously, did not run into anyone. Every now and then they scattered flocks of babblers and partridges out at picnic, and the occasional blinding-white egret, which insouciantly took two flaps of flight before landing and carrying on with its strut.

  At every unmarked boundary line, a posse of lean dogs picked up on them, and set pace by their heels, barking and running them out of their domains. Like the birds, the dogs did not worry them. As farmers they knew the only dog to really fear was the odd one that turned rabid. These dogs were all racket and no bite, fit only to terrify the townsfolk who came visiting. They were alarm bells, not defenders. If you walked into them they would keep backing off, all the way into their own doorsteps.

  From the embracing palms by the stream, the highway, the Grand Trunk Road, was over ten kilometres as the crow flies. Chacha had crossed many farms and half that distance before he allowed Tope or himself to slow down to a walk. There were a few other villages that lay between Keekarpur and the main road, but they had managed to sidestep them all. The mango trees under which they now sat were old and barren, and under the canopy of their dirty green leaves it was cool and dark. They sat on their haunches, opposite each other, backs against the rough trunks, panting like hunted animals. Outside the arc of the grove’s darkness the world was shining bright, the sun glancing off the golden wheat.

  When his breath had calmed, Chacha finally asked, ‘How bad was it? Will they live?’

  Tope said—suddenly a man, suddenly in the course of a morning, suddenly in six slashes of a knife, his Chacha’s equal—Tope said, ‘Not bad at all. Nothing is going to happen to them. I just nicked them here and there. But if you heard them screaming you’d think I had pulled their intestines out.’

  Chacha looked at the boy. In the gloomy dark he could not read his expression, but his tone had changed. It was no longer the voice of his runty nephew who spoke little and spent his days trying to stay out of everyone’s way.

  Chacha said, ‘Did you not know what would happen?’

  Tope, the man, said, ‘I did not care.’

  Chacha said, ‘You know what Bhupi’s father can do.’

  Tope said, ‘But Bhupi’s like a fucking eunuch. In fact, I nearly made him one.’

  Chacha suddenly saw the cussed gene that was the boy’s inheritance. No different from his father; no different from his grandfather. Those two had aligned it behind the Indian army and the barrels of their guns. The boy it seemed was going to do so behind the curve of his Rampuria.

  Chacha said, ‘Where is the knife?’

  Tope stretched out his right leg, sucked in his stomach, and drew out the folded knife. He pressed the brass lever and it flicked open. When he pressed the blade between his forefinger and thumb, the steel was sticky. Slowly he palpitated its cold length, feeling his skin peel and stick. He needed to wash the blade and work it on a whetstone.

  Chacha said, ‘Give it to me.’

  Tope did not move. ‘Why?’

  ‘We need to hide it. We should bury it here. We don’t want to be found with it.’

  Tope said, ‘No.’

  The voice of Dakota Ram. The voice of Fauladi Fauji. There was no arguing with it. All these years Chacha had thought his nephew was like him—a slice of his mother’s side. Not like his father, not like his grandfather. That, like him, he was made of gentler stuff, weak in body and in temper. Chacha, who was ten years younger than his big brother Dakota and had always been treated like a boy; Chacha, who failed the army recruitment tests because he was so puny, his legs bent, his chest small, his bones weak; Chacha, whose opinion the big men never sought; Chacha, who milked the buffaloes and helped the women shop in the town; Chacha, who had failed to produce children in eight years of marriage; Chacha, who sang the lullabies that put Tope to sleep, who helped work through Tope’s exercise books, who heard out the traumas of his schooldays. Chacha who had always thought Tope was his spiritual son
.

  In that dark cove of mango trees, as he watched his nephew feel the knife, he knew clearly whose son the boy was.

  The two of them sat in silence as the glare of the sun was sucked out of the day, leaving behind a marmalade glow.

  Then as night fell, bringing on a thick moon and high stars, the fields turned grey-blue. You could still see a man at fifty metres, and a man with a lantern at a hundred and more. But now the landscape was spectral: full of moving shadows; behind every waving stalk and bush, a hiding man. The true guide to the world now was the ear not the eye. Sound was the demon of the night, empowered, enhanced, travelling with a speed and strength it could never possess in daylight hours. No one could sneak up on them unless they moved on the padded feet of animals.

  Inside the mango grove it had become pitch dark and the undergrowth had begun to talk up a fury. Chacha pulled steadily on his Lal Batti beedis, the burning tip the only visible sign of the two fugitives. His bundle of twenty was almost over and the grove was acrid with their stench. Tope had nodded off, the fatigue following the rush of adrenalin.

  Chacha, having acted with alacrity and courage for the first time in his life, was now slowly beginning to wonder what the future held. Its contours were so terrifying, he felt the panic surge in him. Just then he heard a volley of distant noises, of dogs and of men, and when he ran to the edge of the circle of mangoes, he saw far away a swarm of lanterns bobbing through the grey-blue night like dancing fireflies.

  His body turned cold with fear. On quavering legs he hobbled to the boy, pushed him awake, and they began to run. They stumbled out the other side and sprinted blindly, not caring where their feet fell. Through the standing wheat, through the cut and tied bundles, through narrow water channels, through freshly ploughed squares, through muddy feeding troughs, through knife-edged rushes, through slivers of swamp, through stands of eucalyptus, past baying dogs, past throbbing tube wells, past hailing voices. This time the boy had the lead and Chacha struggled on his infirm legs to keep pace. Each time the terrain changed, each time there was a stumble, Tope looked back to ensure his uncle was not in distress.