The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  Ali Baba was the cleaner, usher, guard at Minerva, the only talkies in the nearby town. He unloaded and loaded the big steel cans of magic tapes when they arrived from Bombay and was always the first to taste their flavour. When Govind the projectionist rolled the spool for a check-out run and the fantasy beam cut through the dark, Ali would always be there, right under it, squatting on his haunches in the middle of the central aisle—never on the tin chairs, or the wooden benches, even though all of them were empty.

  Ali Baba had seen enough cinema to know that life posed challenges, but in the end right always won over wrong, the good over bad, the fair over unfair. He had to only look at himself to know that this was beyond dispute: a man of such little worth—no learning, no culture, no artistry, no lineage—had been given a life of contentment, food, a roof, friendly neighbours, and a job that was not a job, but a rare gift, an endless feast of new and newer delights. Each time he squatted in that warm womb of stories he marvelled at the order in the universe, and he was deeply grateful that his simplicity and decency had brought him such rewards.

  So Ali Baba refused to succumb to alarm or cynicism. Under the tamarind tree his position remained resolute. He was not going anywhere, and he saw no reason for anyone to go anywhere. This was where he had been born, and this is where he would die: his tenancy of his piece of earth was beyond dispute. The leaders of the Muslim League and the Congress and Lord and Lady Mountbatten and whoever else could divvy up whatever they wished among themselves—it had no bearing on the simple rights of Ali Hussain. If his patch was named Pakistan that was fine; if they called it India it would do too, thank you. He said, ‘If someone passes an order, give us your wives, will you do it? And will anyone in his right mind expect you to do it? These are political games big men play, they have nothing to do with us in this Rohilla basti!’

  Some of the men nodded in agreement and others scoffed: Ali Baba had seen too many films and lost all sense of reality. Also, unlettered as they all were, they could not really understand such things. Hashimmian had just been to Lucknow for his cousin’s wedding and in that family of rich erudite lawyers he had heard long discussions on the new country that was being created for Muslims, where there would no Hindu domination, where Muslims would call the shots, where they would be safe, where they would live by their own religious laws, where they would prosper as they had never before.

  Under the tamarind tree, the smoking men asked Hashimmian, ‘Tell us, will Lucknow be in Pakistan? And Rampur? And Badayun? And Shahjahanpur? And Delhi? And Hyderabad? And Moradabad? And Lahore?’

  Hashimmian sneered, ‘And what will India be left with? Kabootarwali galli and Chachaji ka gol gumbaz?’

  The fact was, Hashimmian reported, no one even in the big city seemed to know anything. Personally, he thought the whole debate was just the fanciful conjecture of the rich and educated. If every Muslim was going to be called Pakistan and every Hindu called India, then so be it. Changing names changed nothing. If Hashimmian was called Ali Baba he still remained Hashimmian. And physically, on the ground, how much could even rich and powerful men really change? Khichdi, he said, was made by mixing dal and rice, but once it was mixed could anyone separate them again? ‘Can any of us, even with our needles, pick them apart? And if we do, what are we left with? Not rice, not dal, not khichdi. Just a chutiya mess not even a dog will put his mouth to!’

  Ten-year-old Ghulam heard the squawking radio-set, heard the arguing men, heard the wailing women, and did not know what to make of it. All he knew was that the times were tense and this had some benefits: it allowed him to cut all his classes—school, the scriptures, and his hours at learning his father’s trade of zari-zardozi. It was the last he hated the most. He attributed his father’s cheerless disposition, his curved back, his scrunched eyes, to the endless, painstaking embroidery in gold-silver thread, on yet another tinselly ghaghra, put together for one more rich woman’s wedding.

  All the men in his family were embroidering drones—on his mother’s side, his father’s side, all the men married into the family, all the men earmarked for marrying into the family. And they all sat, hunched hopelessly, slit-eyed, ceaselessly snapping their wrists, fashioning tinsel. The only part of the process he found interesting was the old artist Abbajaan’s drawing of the beautiful flowers, with curved leaves and winding stalks, on to the sheets of tracing paper. The old man drew up to ten different floral universes every day. Then the drones set to work.

  The design was perforated, a dye of robin blue and kerosene run through it onto the fabric, and the satin cloth stretched taut on the wooden frame, the adda. His father and his fellow embroiderers, as many as five sometimes, all of them thick in the eyes with spectacles, sat down around it, as if settling in for a long meal on a low table. But this was not about moving jaws and easy talk. This was about the lightning dexterity of fingers as each of them picked their flower and leaf and began with blinding monotony to weave it with flashing needles and snipping scissors and shining baubles, into gold. They went on thus, hour after hour, tied down to the small low frame like tethered dogs.

  Occasionally, some of the younger boys, working on adjoining addas, tried to crack jokes and make light conversation, but they were censoriously frowned upon by the older artists and craftsmen including his father.

  Little Ghulam tried timorously to tell his abba that he did not want to be this kind of tethered animal. That the glittering garments weighing kilos and kilos, the shining threads, the sequins and cowries, the beads and shiny stones, the salma and sitara—none of them held any fascination for him. The thought of hunching over that low wooden frame for the rest of his life struck terror in his small heart. But so timorous was Ghulam’s protest that his father—the artist without imagination—did not even register it.

  Instead, the father only kept reiterating the inevitability of Ghulam’s life. That he was fortunate to have been born into a family of craftsmen, to have his calling—and a dignified one at that—safely accounted for. He would never have to work crudely, in the scullery or the street. Never be a cleaner or a labourer, a guard or a barber, a cook or a gardener, a butcher or a cobbler. Nor would he have to labour at the crude crafts, as did many of his brethren in Moradabad and Rampur, hammering together iron tools or banging out brass vessels or weaving bamboo mats.

  He was an artist, from an illustrious lineage of artists who had embroidered the rich raiments of landlord and warlord, nobles and kings, all the way back to the grand Mughals. Garments heavier than men, garments more expensive than houses. Such as the glorious robe of golden creepers that Akbar wore as he moved atop his gigantic elephant in the stirring royal procession of thousands of frolicking musicians and hundreds of cheetahs on leashes. Such as the sur coat of dark velvet with dancing flowers that Shah Jahan wore as he anticipated with growing arousal the arrival of his favourite wife, the soon to be memorialized Mumtaz Mahal.

  The boy Ghulam could see none of this. All he could see was a tethered dog. So he was glad that the growing furore over the two countries and anxiety about which one they should pick had taken his father’s eye off his son’s zari-zardozi apprenticeship. And he was glad his instinct about the man from the Talkies, the teller of the moving stories, was being proven right.

  Slowly, most of the men of the basti had begun to concur with Ali Baba’s resolute position. This was their land, their air, their country. They knew no other. Nor wished to. Nehru and Jinnah could chop and slice the country as they pleased. They would stay exactly where they were, and go wherever the land under their feet went. If it was named Pakistan it was still their basti; if the name was India, it altered nothing, not even the latch on the front door.

  Inevitably, the opposition to this philosophy of stasis came from the young. Those whose hair was thick and rich with oil and sharp in the parting; those whose flesh rippled with restless muscles; those whose hearts pumped hot blood; those whose lives lay in wait, ripe with hope—these young men, their eyes set on distant Xanadus
, muttered at the inertia of their elders.

  Among these boys in their late teens and early twenties, the excitement and hunger grew by the day. They paid no heed to the news of massacres and murders, of the dance of death, the gory tandav that had broken out between the Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs across the country, especially in the Punjab. They talked instead of their dreams—the promised land, brimful of new possibilities, where they would not have to hunch over the adda all day, where they would be able to do new things in new ways; start their own businesses, open their own shops, effortlessly acquire large lands and sprawling houses. A country was being born, it was waiting to be colonized by them. No more this choking basti on the outskirts of town; no more the interminable grind of the shining thread and traced flora.

  Soon loud battles began to erupt within the basti as fathers and sons locked horns over the issue and mothers wailed the roofs off. The news from the big world—coming in ceaseless waves from the crackling radio-set, the half-anna Urdu papers, and heated word-of-mouth—did not help matters. All was not well. Wilful men had sliced the earth with no regard to the arteries of love, family, community, history, animals, trees that they were cutting. The news was that the blood from the severed arteries was beginning to flow everywhere.

  Then news came that they were now free. That there were two new countries and two new flags flying across Hindustan. In the basti it felt no different. They felt no more free than before. Only Ali Baba, who spent every day in town, listening in to the educated and the knowing, said yes, there was something deep and abiding that had changed, but he too spoke without elation because the blood spilling from the arteries was colouring everything. Many of the stories were so gory as to defy belief. Of the wholesale massacre of dozens, scores, hundreds of people—on trains, buses, the streets and roads, fields and towns. The police was doing nothing, Nehru was doing nothing, Jinnah was doing nothing, the white man was doing nothing. Every evening, for hours under the tamarind tree, the men teased their anxieties, then dismissed them as improbable, hyperbolic.

  A hush had fallen on the frolic of the children too. Inside little Ghulam the whispered stories were fast congealing into a hard splinter of icy fear that would not thaw for the rest of his life.

  One dramatic muggy morning in the second week of September 1947 the basti woke to the knowledge that four of their young had packed their bundles and departed for Pakistan in the dead of night. Faisal, Wasim, Parvez, Imroze. Names Ghulam would not forget till his last day.

  The one letter left behind by Parvez was passed from hand to hand, detonating ear-splitting grief. Only when the hysteria had eased did inquiries reveal that the great escape had been canvassed, discussed, rejected, accepted over many many days. Seven boys were to make the run, but finally in that fully dead hour between midnight and dawn, as the shadows began to slip away in the dark, three of them had lost their nerve. The three—Safdar, Rahim and Salman—were now being cosseted and assaulted in turn. Parents never can locate the shimmering line between love and domination.

  All the children were interrogated, including Ghulam. They admitted that they’d heard of the plans, and when they began to be thrashed, they pleaded that they hadn’t been sure. The elders of the basti went to the kotwali to register a complaint. The policeman in charge was sympathetic but professed helplessness. He said, twirling his big moustache, ‘Mian, they are grown-up boys, they’ll be okay. You know there are millions of people walking this way and that across the Punjab. If the laatsahib Mountbatten himself wanted to find his mother out there he wouldn’t be able to! Do the only thing men can do at such an hour, pray to Allah and all will be well. You know what Sant Kabir has said, Jaako raakhe saiyan, maar sake na koye!’

  None can bring distress to he whom the lord protects.

  Towards the end of October, when the breeze under the tamarind tree had begun to nip the skin, early one evening, Imroze returned. The news electrified the basti; within minutes everyone had come tumbling out to meet the prodigal boy. Ghulam pushed through the legs of the adults to get a glimpse of the short, fair teenager. As a child Imroze had won jars and jars of shiny marbles, from which he gave freely—ten at a time—to all the young children. It was he who had taught Ghulam the correct way to strike marbles—left eye closed, knees bent, torso rigid, wrist tight, a soft kiss for luck and then a short sharp jab with the forearm to knock the striker in the right with the balancer in the left.

  Because everyone was shoving and pushing and the hurricane-lamp was being moved about, it took Ghulam some time to sight his mentor. What he saw twisted the hard splinter of ice in his heart so brutally that his legs almost gave way. Lovely Imroze, beautiful Imroze, now had a thick scar running from the top of his forehead down his eye, across his right cheek, like an uneven bund dividing two fields. It had closed the right eye as it cleaved through it and near the jawline disappeared into a fuzz of brown-black beard that was freshly grown. The other eye, the left one, the one that was open, the one that worked, was also no longer Imroze’s. It seemed like one of his cherished marbles: vacant, unseeing, without a flicker of recognition.

  There was a policeman with him, in uniform, a hand on Imroze’s shoulder. He was clearly waiting for the crush to abate. Surreally, all sound appeared to have been sucked out of the scene. Under the tamarind tree in the basti, at this hour, no one had ever known such profound noiselessness.

  Ghulam watched the policeman carefully roll back the sleeve of Imroze’s kameez, and a soundless scream rip through everyone. Imroze’s left arm now ended at his elbow, where it was bandaged in rags. The master striker would never crash a marble from eight feet again. The cop moved it like the signal arm of a railway line, up, down, up, down. Then, like a forensic expert exhibiting a corpse to a batch of interns, the policeman lifted Imroze’s shirt from the front to show a thick cable lashing his stomach. The knife’s elliptical journey had been halted by the ribs.

  In the shaking light of the lantern, the policeman then pushed the loose shirt up further to reveal Exhibit 2. A small hairless chest with a few vivid coils of rope. The policeman twirled his moustache and turning Imroze around, lifted his kameez from the back. Exhibit 3. The fair back of the boy was an emboss of dancing rope.

  By the time the policeman had moved to Exhibit 4 and 5 on the soft buttocks and boyish legs, Imroze’s parents arrived on the scene—straight from the whitewashed grave of the Abbasi pir where they had gone to seek the safekeeping of their absconding son—and the scream that his mother unleashed curdled the blood of every gawking child and unlocked every adult throat. A tidal wave of questions rose and crashed against the policeman and his mauled exhibit.

  What had happened?

  Where had they gone?

  Who’d done this?

  Where was Faisal? And Wasim? And Parvez?

  Why wasn’t he saying something?

  Allahthemerciful, the arm! The arm! The arm!

  The basti never fully recovered from Imroze’s return. His story became engraved in every heart and mind, and in some, like Ghulam, it became a splinter of icy fear that would never melt.

  Until Delhi the journey of the four friends had been full of banter and anticipation. Parvez, the writer of the letter, the instigator of the escape, had mimicked the reaction of each of their mothers on discovering their sons were gone. Even the other passengers had broken into smiles when they saw Wasim’s mother beating her breasts with her fists. The four had sworn many vows of togetherness—nothing would come between them, not work, not wealth, and certainly never women. They had promised each other they would only return when they were followed by a train of gifts for each and every man, woman and child of the basti. They had amused themselves with what they would buy for whom, and how each of those wretched souls would react. The extent of their generosity made them giddy with pride and pleasure. Parvez had to remind them, ‘Saale chutiye, if we eat one more meal without cooking it we’ll die of starvation!’

  The first foreboding surfaced at the N
ew Delhi railway station. The station was suffocating with people but had the mood of a graveyard. Every face was drawn and watchful. It was easy to make out the large families cleaving together, often three, four generations clustered around their bags and bundles and trunks and hold-alls; endless tight circles, all looking inward, turning their backs to the backs of other circles that jammed the platform. A great stench of excrement filled the air. Scores of men, children and women—with their faces covered—squatted edgily in the dark low ravine beneath the platform, amid the sharp stones and steel tracks, continually startled by large rats.

  Parvez’s attempts at speaking to some of the men fetched blank stares and laconic responses. The few who were talking among themselves did so in funereal whispers. It seemed there had been trouble in the old city; every doorway was wet with blood. When the boys crossed the filthy tracks to the main building—holding their breath, dodging the bobbing bottoms—and stepped out of the grand facade to find some dinner, they got the first clear sense of the maelstrom they had landed in. There were uniforms everywhere: policemen and army men, khakis and olives, lathis and rifles. Instinctively, each one of them scrunched up within himself, smile fading, legs contracting to a mincing gait, stomach loosening.

  They walked together in a tight knot, averting their eyes from the patrolling uniforms. By the gate they turned right and picked the first lean- to eatery, gravitating to a wooden bench away from the road. They shared the bench with a dozen others, all eating in concentrated silence. Most of them were Muslims, chewing with low heads and pushed out elbows. At the next table a young handsome boy, no older than them, with lush facial hair and red fiery eyes was snivelling loudly, his nostrils working angrily, like bellows. Every now and then he would begin to shake uncontrollably and start to rise and the two men flanking him would restrain him and murmur soothing words. At one point he let out a piercing wail, ‘Ammmii!’ and slumped into his curry-stained hands. The man next to him—wearing a Gandhi topi, not a skullcap—gathered him in his arms and held him close.