The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  Kabir’s fame spread, and Charlie bathed him with attention and affection. For the first time since he had joined the school, the dwarfing effect of English was kept at bay.

  This fame had a dangerous downside. He was now on the radar of the padres, and soon enough was singled out for Christian correction. The first time he was suspended from school for three days—for floating a gas balloon during a parent-teacher meeting with a carrot hung from it like a dangling dick—he panicked. But Charlie, in a display of true friendship, calmed him by bunking school to keep him company.

  That day they rode his cycle out into the middle of the teeming market, consumed hot samosas and iced Fanta at Aggarwal’s sweet shop, and then went off to see a film at Paras. When Helen began her cabaret number in her shimmering slit gown, Charlie pushed his hand up the leg of his school shorts, and began to rub. Helen and Charlie finished at the same time.

  Kabir discovered another threshold of the acceptable.

  Barring Minerva Talkies, the two boys now invaded every other movie hall in the city. On days when the prospect of entering the missionary school was too depressing, they turned back from the school gates, freewheeled their way to Aggarwal Sweets, drank endless cups of tea, ate samosas, and headed for the morning show. This was solace cinema, for the lowliest of the low, made by the lowliest of the low. The scattered heads slumped low in the seats, trembling with a transitory connection, were all busy pushing the threshold of the acceptable. Everyone entered the hall after the lights had been dimmed, and everyone exited the hall without looking at another.

  There was always a second film, the gourmet morsel after the junk food. This was mainline stuff with marquee stars, thrilling music, and heroines so beautiful that they burned the imagination. Sometimes Kabir and Charlie stayed on in the same hall, and sometimes tore across town to another, desperate not to miss the opening credits. The atmosphere of the second show was very different. Happy chatter in the foyer, marble-sodas and samosas being consumed, women of all ages, eyes shining, restless with excitement. Standing at the edge of the snacks counter, sharp-eyed Charlie would study the women like a fine detective and elaborate on each one’s possibilities. That one with the big red necklace? She’d only simper—you’d have to pinch her to make her move. The sharp-nosed one with a pierced right nostril and a tight mouth was a certain screamer—take her deep into a forest or put a pillow over her face. Purple saree, with those gold jhumkas—oh, don’t look at her fat—would say no, mean yes, say no, mean yes. And that one in the green salwar-kameez—observe her high-heeled sandals—was to be mounted like a horse, and she’d neigh like one.

  The gnomish Bengali boy was unstoppable—sociologist, psychologist, sexologist, all rolled into one, a committed researcher, gathering data. Soon, pursuing his research, he had his protégé testing new frontiers in the crush of the cinema halls. In the foyer, Charlie would identify the woman who badly wanted them, and then as the doors opened, Kabir would be right beside her and behind her, his loosely hanging arm and wide open palm—tactile vernier calipers—measuring flesh, calibrating response, verifying his master’s theses.

  Sometimes the crush was excessive, the subjects many, and the boy had to work overtime, using both hands as vernier calipers, measuring in every direction, working a variety of materials and apparel. The most cooperative were chiffon sarees, the least burqas, and the gathered folds of Punjabi salwars fell somewhere in between. The occasional trousers were a treat, but not if made of denim. As with all scientific endeavour, sometimes the boy brought back very precise findings and sometimes the results were fuzzy. Charlie, with the imperious distance of the academic, never ever participated in the data collection, but worked hard to juice every detail out of his field researcher.

  It became the pattern of their friendship: Kabir acting to earn the approbation of his hammer-tongued friend; Charlie living vicariously all that he dared not do.

  And Kabir, without registering it, crossed another threshold of the acceptable.

  It was curious. For his father the movies had been about love and lyricism. For Kabir Muthal they were about lust and longing. For his father films had represented the quest for a more humane and refined world, removed from the poisons that made train signals out of men’s limbs. For the boy it was an escape from the moral strictures of his father and the padres into a vigorous, vulgar world without any obvious boundaries.

  By the time he came to take his class nine examinations he had begun to steal money from home. There was no other way to fund the films, the samosas, the colas, the extensive research. His father kept the folded five- and ten-rupee notes between stills of old black and white films—Raj Kapoor and Nargis and Dilip Kumar and Madhubala and Dev Anand and Guru Dutt—that he had collected from the Talkies over the decades. For some time Ghulam noticed nothing. He was more likely to miss a filched scene from Anari than some purloined rupees. But then Kabir became greedy and Ghulam’s domestic budget began to spring sudden unknown holes.

  The father was just beginning to round on his son when a new academic year dawned and it was time to go and genuflect in the Father’s office. Kabir M had failed every subject except Hindi and maths. Thanks to the run of the ass through the inter-house finals, even the physical education teacher had given him a red entry. When Ghulam began his whine at the lofty Father’s feet, the bearded padre picked up the report book and flung it at Kabir, standing in the corner. ‘Forget the marks, Mr Masood! Your son is a goonda! He is a bad influence on all the boys! He will end up in jail one day!’ Then, in a paroxysm of rage the padre threw his cane, the duster, two pens, a coaster, and the Oxford English Dictionary at the ducking boy.

  Kabir had to repeat class nine, and Ghulam had to start keeping his money in the bank or in his pockets. When it began to vanish from his trousers hanging on the hook in his room—in the dead hours between sleeping and waking—he began to put it under his pillow. His son knew little English or history or geography or physics but he had the tread of an animal and fingers that were water, and Ghulam would lose a folded note or two from under his sleeping head every few days.

  Though they were a class apart now, Charlie and Kabir remained buddies, doing the same things, bunking school, watching films, scouring the bazaar, tormenting other students and teachers with their pranks. Then Kabir was detained for a second time in class nine—the fucking impossibility of English, of Julius Caesar!—and something hardened in him irrevocably. The first threat of a moustache had appeared, and juniors who had once looked at him in awe now sat at his side.

  Meanwhile, Charlie’s father had been transferred to Kashmir, and with his board results out—he had done brilliantly—Charlie had moved to Modern School in Delhi for the last two years of his school life. With the ironic Bengali boy gone, Kabir—sitting in the last row of the classroom, the moustache deepening by the day—slowly lost his winning air of derring-do and outrage. He became a sullen brooding presence, refusing to talk to his new classmates, still trying to hang out with his friends who had moved on, increasingly maddened by Cassius and Brutus and Antony and the utter nonsense they spoke. Each time Father Michael strode into class and began to declaim, Kabir’s head bloomed with murderous thoughts.

  Soon the boy developed a tic that was not to leave him for the rest of his life. He began to mutter to himself, and every now and then—in the classroom, on the sports field, at home—he would break into a thunderous oration of gibberish. ‘Haauu haaa, thouu thaa … lusheus dusheus chuseus … forsooth a geyser, in the gaand of Caesar … haauu haaa, thouu thaa … friends, romans, countrymen, meri murgi tumhari hen … ohhh brutus ki chootus mein balkishan ka jootus … haauu haaa, thouu thaa!’ His father and mother looked at him in admiration, while his young mates brought up the chorus, ‘friends, romans, countrymen, meri murgi tumhari hen … haauu haaa, thouu thaa.’

  When the school decided to hold him back in the same class for the third year running, it was the principal who folded his hands in front of Ghulam and begged him
to take his son to another school, a Hindi-medium one, perhaps the Islamia Inter College.

  iii

  The Peace of High Walls

  In many ways, Kabir lived up to the promise of his sainted secular name. Over the years he travelled through scarred landscapes of religious bigotry and caste animus but remained untouched by them. Though the son could never see it, his father had—out of fear of the train signal arm—gifted him an unprejudiced mind. But he had also diminished him with the demon of fear and the poltergeist of English. Between the freedom and the crippling, the boy soon found his vocation in chaarsobeesi, the sleight-of-hand of minor thievery and deception.

  Turning his back on the grand noises of the padres, turning his back on the whining aspirations of his father, Kabir joined the Islamia Inter College in class ten, and almost instantly felt the relief of an animal returned to its forest. Everyone spoke Hindi here and everyone called everyone else a chutiya.

  The teachers chewed paan all the time, spitting red strings out of the windows and sometimes into the corners of the poorly whitewashed rooms. Most of them wore sandals and frayed shirts. The school cricket kit had only two leg guards, and during matches the batsmen wore one each on their left leg. The football field and cricket ground overlapped, and on many afternoons parallel games resulted in pitched battles with clothes being torn and skulls cracked open. Lacking the armour of a padre’s habit, the teachers looked the other way. Interventions in the past had invited fisticuffs, kicks and ambush as they pedalled home. In fact the student skirmishes were welcome—broken bones and stabbings thinned the ranks of the toughies.

  Kabir embraced the crudity but steered clear of the violence. Unexpectedly, pleasantly, his elite background—amid the padres and the chutterputter chutiyas—opened up a niche of privilege for him. He brought with him stories of that other world, and his inadequate English was quite masterly for the rudimentary course requirements of the state board. Intrinsically he was still not terribly smart, but his time with Charlie had taught him the art of posturing, of seeming more than one was. Soon he had the patronage of young men who carried tamanchas—country-made pistols, welded from sawn-off pipes, capable of just one round, as likely to take off one’s own hand as blow a hole in the enemy. These boys, laconic and angry young men with brooding eyes and a fine gift for abuse, moved in tight bands. They tied hankies around their wrists, and those who didn’t have to conceal a tamancha tucked down their trousers, knotted their shirt fronts. Kabir felt these were real people, real men. Not cardboard cut-outs like his father, the padres, or the chutterputter chutiyas. In their presence he felt more potent than he had felt even with Charlie.

  The leader of the main gang was a cocky youth called Babloo. It was rumoured he had access to the Lucknow don Sulaiman, who himself was rumoured to be a satrap of the great Mastaan of Bombay. Every once in a while there would be a phone call for him at Tewariji’s cloth shop and a boy would come running with the message: Sulaimanbhai, Sulaimanbhai. Instantly, Babloo’s expression would become urgent, and he would leap up and leave at a trot, Azam and Batti at his heels. Azam, an orphan, had a permanently skewed walk because he’d carried a tamancha in his groin since he was thirteen. And Batti’s moniker referred to his particular specialization: shoving things up rival rectums. Pencils, pens, coins, fingers, marbles, sugarcane sticks, Fanta bottles, the hilt of his knife, the barrel of a tamancha. His stated ambition was to, one day, push a small frog up a victim. ‘Nothing vile and poisonous like a snake or a beetle,’ he would say. ‘Just a little frog. To see if a man with a frog inside him will jump like one.’

  Babloo himself had cultivated the look of a 1930s revolutionary. He had a rapier moustache that he oiled and twirled upwards, a maroon paratrooper’s beret and an olive-green army shirt with epaulettes and flap pockets, bought from the service store in the cantonment. Below the waist, though, he was a 1960s revolutionary, a hell’s angel: blue, locally tailored jeans and brown leather boots that zipped up his calves. The boots had iron studs in their soles so they clacked down every corridor of the inter college. The belt was a cycle chain with a canvas grip, which he sometimes trailed on the floor as he walked. His black Yezdi motorcycle had a high handle grafted on to it, and a special number plate: UP 0007. In a tin plate below it was stencilled, Live and Let Die. The silencer of the bike had been unscrewed and the gang leader’s entrances and exits were salient affairs.

  Babloo quickly warmed to Kabir. He liked the fact that despite Kabir’s curiously elite educational background he was so willing to pay obeisance to him. It brought a kind of shine to the gang to have this boy from the missionary school in its fold. One of the first tasks allotted to him was to teach the gang some good English abuses. Very quickly, after fuck, cock, bastard and homo, Kabir realized there was no creativity in English expletives. In Hindi, by comparison—he learnt from the gang—you could string together virtual sonnets of singing abuse, like: Gaand mein gurda hai nahin, lauda karey salaam (crippled by fear yet flashing a hard-on).

  Apart from his English, he earned respect for his knowledge of Hindi films. He could extensively cross-reference every film and hero for the gang leader, and Babloo, with a cinematic idea of his own life, was enthralled.

  Soon Kabir and he developed a game.

  Every morning when they met Babloo would ask, ‘Jai or Veeru?’

  Then they would toss a coin. If Kabir won, Babloo would be Veeru for the day—blathering away, playing the comic. If Babloo won then the gang leader would be Jai all day—sardonic, brooding, speaking in terse monosyllables.

  Though he was a khalifa of the inter college, Babloo had put in enough repeat years to have acquired a reputation that had spread to the university grounds. During the annual student body elections his services were requisitioned by one party or the other—for mobilization, canvassing, managing the booths, and maintaining the balance of terror. It was mostly strong-arm stuff, but with his penchant for the outrageous act, with his need to please his mentor, Kabir quickly brought an element of artistry, of roguery, to the gang.

  Shoplifting—which he had done occasionally in the past—now became a daily chore. He would sail through a few shops every day and bring his offerings to Babloo’s court. The range was wide. Stationary, socks, hankies, jam tins, sauce bottles, booze, cigarettes, almonds, cashew nuts, spoons, forks, knives, crockery. Once he brought in a Racold mixer-grinder which the gang plugged into the classroom to stir up glasses of banana-shake. Another time he came in pushing an entire cart of ice-golas—having sent the vendor off to the police chowki on a fake summons—and proceeded to shave the ice and serve up endless combos from the coloured syrup bottles till every boy in the gang was speechless with a frozen tongue.

  Babloo loved the audacity and the surprise. And the goodies were more than welcome. His gang had twelve people, and he took their welfare seriously. Now it seemed as if Kabir had put in a daily bonus plan for them all. Every freebie consumed multiplied the debt that the gang leader could call in. In pursuit of applause, Kabir soon progressed to hijacking scooters and motorcycles. Every day he would arrive astride a new one, and the gang would leap on it and ride it till its petrol tank ran dry. Sometimes he’d lift two or three in a day, working the growing bunch of master keys in his pocket. There were no police repercussions because the owners were relieved just to recover their vehicles.

  In time he became such an adept he could swipe a scooter while its owner stepped into a shop, or once, even as the man slid down the road shoulder to take a piss. These capers were moments of wild amusement for the gang boys, and they often drove these scooters three astride, at screeching speed through the bazaars, whooping and slapping passing bottoms. Once they rode an antediluvian blue Lambretta straight into the Emergency room of the government hospital and handed it over to the duty doctor to save its blackened lungs that were collapsing from cancer. On the way out, they took the doctor’s swish green Chetak scooter.