Life, liberty and lund.
In any event, all resistance had been drained out of us after witnessing the decimation of the garment trio. For all their wealth and business savvy, their equestrian dining-rooms and naked mermaids, they had appeared callow recruits getting their inaugural sizing-down from the boot-camp sergeant-major.
A Full Metal Jacket diminishment.
To begin with, Kapoor brutally spelt out to them the utter worthlessness of the publication they owned. This was done with hard numbers—accounting for the past, present and future. Jai and I in this time shrank into our chairs and vanished. Then he told them it was actually worse. The three of them had incurred financial and legal liabilities that would dog them for years, and some of these were actually criminal. Pay them for their stake? They would be lucky if someone even agreed to take it off them for free. And, to be sure, that someone was certainly not him! He said he had no idea things were so bad when he’d decided to examine the investment. And the only reason he hadn’t fled yet was because Jai’s uncle—Bhargavaji, a senior bureaucrat in the commerce ministry—was an old friend. But friendship had its limits. It did not include suicide. Jai’s uncle would understand. He was a reasonable man.
The cool, classy negotiating-table toughness with which Kuchha King, Kuchha Singh and Frock Raja had tried to begin the dialogue collapsed quickly, like pudding. The attempt to stun the prospector with a display of opulence and style had ended badly. Walking through Frock Raja’s excesses to his frock-shaped pool, Kapoorsahib had knocked the construction materials he’d used, the architect he’d used, the designer he’d used, and had pointed out all the zoning and building laws he had broken. ‘Next time you build a house come and see me, I’ll get you the right people,’ he said. ‘In fact, come and see mine and you’ll know what’s wrong with yours.’
The man was a master of bastardy. After the first few sentences of their sales pitch, Kapoor had closed his eyes. Irritated, the trio had stopped, but he’d continued to sleep. When one of them stood up in exasperation, he opened his eyes and said, ‘Why did you stop? I was listening to everything—there was just nothing for me to react to.’ When the trio began pitching again, he continued to remain expressionless. Immediately they switched to making whining noises: surely there was some value here; something had been created; something existed; it wasn’t all so bad.
No, said Kapoor, it was worse, worse, worse. The worst. He felt for them, and he wished them well, but as far as he could see, the magazine was dead. They should just shut it down. Ah, but of course that wouldn’t end it. There was still the legal shit. A lot of it criminal, trickily criminal. Some of it leading straight to jail.
When he got up to go, the threesome literally hustled him back into the chair. All three wheedled in tandem. Kapoorsahib must try and understand, they were garment exporters and had no means of figuring out or running this media business. It was a good business, a great business—so much influence and glamour and power—but they had neither the acumen nor the stomach for it. They were innocents in the big bad world of deals and dealmakers. Mere sellers of undies and frocks, lambs any wolf could casually slaughter. Kapoorsahib on the other hand was a man of the world. A man who worked Delhi’s power levers; who understood politics and policy; he understood mega games and dined with mega players; he could take an ugly jab and deliver an uglier one. He could outwolf the wolves; he could outlamb the lambs; he could take the magazine to giddy heights; he could one day out-time Time and out-newsweek Newsweek.
Kapoorsahib drank in the supplications with sceptical eyes.
Jai was now the smallest I had ever seen him: the moralizing schoolteacher standing in front of the owner’s boardroom, incapable of bridging the vast chasm between those who talk about the world and those who shape it.
His stirring words were harmless paper darts. I hoovered in the cashew nuts. My stomach had begun to move.
Kapoorsahib said, ‘My answer is still no, and so it would be of any sane man. But I owe Bhargavaji many favours and so I promise to try and think about it.’
The trio walked him across the faux-stone driveway where the naked mermaid still spewed water and shook his hand with both theirs, bending low in entreaty. Then they came back to the poolside and alternately minced and pumped little Jai. He was a dog and had misled them and destroyed them. But, listen, he must convince his uncle to lean on this guy; it was clear he would do the deal with one nudge from him. Jai swelled and deflated at such speed that I thought he would have a schizophrenic spasm.
As I narrated this tale of immoralities to Sara, her rage and excitement had mounted. Sitting in the middle of the bed, facing me as I leaned against the headrest, her sarong had fallen open, beaming her readiness. The colour was already high in her cheeks, she was biting her lip. The abuses of money and power were shovelfuls of coal stoking her engines. Guruji could have been India’s leading sex counsellor.
I had then ratcheted up the heat some more. I’d told her about all that we’d managed to unearth on Kapoorsahib. To every appearance he was in the furniture and carpet business. He had emporia in Delhi and Bombay, and he also exported to several countries in eastern Europe. These outlets were gleaming affairs—glass-fronted, wood-panelled, air-conditioned, worked by elegant women in silk sarees. Not Indian shops but international showrooms, with big glossy books on art and culture, piped Indian classical music and herbal tea.
A sneak visit to the one in South Delhi had left Jai and me breathless. It was so classy a place that no sales pitch was made in it at all. As we looked around at the carpets, the ornate, richly polished furniture with inlays of stone, a boy in grey livery, bending low, offered us several options of beverage and returned with flavoured hot water of a pale hue in handle-less ceramic cups. Perfect for gargling. The beautiful woman in a silk saree with black hair that fell below her waist and a black bindi shaped like a coiled snake asked us if she could do anything for us. I shook my head with a hard look in my eye, and when she had moved away Jai said, ‘Yes, please. Take off all your clothes.’
Later, Jai made casual inquiries, pointing to dull carpets, nodding knowingly. Some of them cost more than a flat in Vasant Kunj. In the half hour we were there not one other client cracked open the imposing door and not for a moment did the beautiful woman stop smiling. Yes, please. Take off all your clothes.
It had taken us two days to figure out Kapoorsahib’s real sources of income. The carpets, furniture, showrooms were all smokescreens. If they never made a rupee—and quite likely they did not, given the expensive overheads—he would not turn a hair. Kapoorsahib’s real business was arms dealing. He was an agent representing several European companies and, it seemed, each time he closed a deal his bank accounts in Switzerland swelled by tens of millions of dollars.
From bullets to howitzers to submarines and flak jackets, Kapoorsahib sold everything an army could possibly need. Nothing terribly wrong there. Someone has to do the dirty stuff. Some kill and die; others provide the means for doing so. The problem was it was illegal. In a moment of mad political convulsion in the 1980s the government had, grandly, outlawed middlemen in arms deals. In other words, no commissions were to be paid or received, no deal was to have a facilitator. But as Indians know, nothing in the world happens without the greasing role of middlemen. Not jobs, not marriages, not access to god. If the law was to be strictly followed the Indian army would soon be throwing stones in battle.
The law was one thing. Reality was another.
So Kapoorsahib performed the invaluable and fraught task of keeping the Indian army well equipped. It was a spectral calling—for all purposes he and his work did not exist. Delhi was full of such people, who worked that surreal space between day and night, legal and illegal, government and private, national and international. For his labours, European companies dropped tens of millions of dollars into Kapoorsahib’s many-numbered Swiss accounts, and he in turn generously dropped tidy sums into the many-numbered Swiss accounts of different politician
s and bureaucrats. There were some who said there was more Indian money in Swiss banks than in the Indian treasury.
Father’s friend, Bahugunaji, carper and crank, who had been a head clerk in the commerce ministry, used to say, ‘Everybody has an account there! Everybody, prime ministers down, for decades and decades! If you string them all together, it’ll make a poem longer than the Mahabharata!’
Aptly, Kapoorsahib’s offices were staffed with armies of chartered accountants—moneyworms—who, all day, decoded regulations and constructed delicate webs that would make some of his riches available to him in India. We were told hawala transactions abounded, and unseen mounds of dollars travelled borders to become mountains of rupees. These bankers wore churidars and chappals, and ran a system even more foolproof than that of the suits of Switzerland. Most of these mountains of rupees when they suddenly surfaced in India went into property purchases. The very ground we stood on could well belong to Kapoorsahib or some merchant of arms like him.
Besides the moneyworms bent over desks, there were the liaison officers ranging the landscape. These were men of water, flowing smoothly everywhere, capable of taking care of any demand a man upholding the majesty of the state could possibly dream up—from Black Label whisky for a party to the canvas of a favourite painter to tickets for a holiday in Greece to admissions for a child in a posh American university. Since the state did not look after its people, somebody had to.
This we were told was the sum of Kapoorsahib’s professional staff: moneyworms and menofwater. All of them spectral creatures, working an unacknowledged business that produced very real military hardware and very big mountains of cash. Through the open sarong Sara’s thick hair had shone in anger and anticipation. Now and then an inner thigh muscle flexed involuntarily, spurring me to a more eloquent account. The sheer potency of power and pelf! Easy to see why the great stories of the world are always about evil. Guruji was truly Masters & Johnson.
Then Sara asked the question that had been set up. ‘So why you?’
This was complicated. We didn’t know the answer either. I said it was possible Jai’s uncle—given that he may have facilitated some of the spectral activities—had some leverage with Kapoor, but it was doubtful he would have used it to save a dead rag. Jai’s Lincolnite speeches were not likely to have cut any ice with Bhargavaji, government servant extraordinaire, who lived deep in the belly of the beast and had no illusions about its nature.
‘Then?’ said Sara, the soft muscle twitching, the pupils beginning to dilate.
It was difficult to stay with the story. I was looking at the wall, next to the door, where she had to be crucified. So excruciating it was, the way she fought back, with just her hips, killing herself and me with deep stabs. Sometimes—her teeth clenched—she gyrated slowly, and reduced me to a babbling animal.
I said I felt that we were like the swank showrooms—Jai and I and the magazine. Like the silk carpets and the teak furniture and the beautiful woman with a snake for a bindi. Just another kind of smokescreen. And the reason we were needed could have something to do with the utter mayhem unleashed by the three crazies—hotair, clubman, and hitman—some weeks ago.
It was true the government had not fallen, but the chaos had intensified by the day: Parliament was still comatose; conspiracy theories, each worthy of a book, were bouncing off the walls; and everyone was shouting so much on television that every time you switched it on there were open maws staring you in the face.
Hotair—Jai’s doppelganger—was in the thick of it all, delivering state-of-the-nation sermons that made Jai look like a classroom debater. In an eerie replay, the three of them had—like me, only multiplied manifold—come under the protection of the shadows. You couldn’t miss the uniforms, the carbines, the men in bush shirts with hard iron tucked into their groins on television. Their protective cover, somehow, seemed more legitimate. If someone was out to get me, then these guys were up for being shot, hanged, poisoned and quartered all at once.
I felt—and Jai felt—that Kapoorsahib had come to us thanks largely to these three lunatics. These fuckers had shoved a large stick into the hornet’s nest of arms purchases and stirred it like a glass of lassi. Of course everybody was going to get stung but none feared it more than the spectres, the moneyworms and the menofwater. Kapoor and the other ghosts stood to lose mountains of cash, the very ground everyone stood upon. They needed to set up more and more smokescreens so that the labyrinth of Indian legal and investigative processes took an eternity and more to arrive at their doorstep.
Jai, with his wily brahminical mind, said, ‘You know when they come for him, when they try and nail him, what he’s going to say? He’s going to scream from the rooftops that he’s being targeted because he happens to have an investment in this magazine. This magazine which in the past has annoyed powerful politicians and bureaucrats, this magazine which has taken on vested interests. And your sad fate, the fact of your killers, will be held up as an example. Kapoorsahib is going to be the victim, the man who was persecuted because he was doing the right thing, the honourable thing. The man who was upholding public interest. We will live yet, my friend, thanks to the wisdom of the crooked!’
Sara’s breath was rasping in her chest and her eyes were completely dilated. I could almost smell her arousal. She hissed, ‘What a dog! And you two too, what fucking dogs!’ I almost sighed with relief: Ah, here comes the sun. I said, ‘Madam, there is a real world out there, and most of us have to negotiate this real world. And unfortunately, the real world is run by men who have money and power.’
She said, face twisted with rage, ‘You are just a dog! You would sell yourself to anyone! And that fucking friend of yours, the bearded one, he would find a rationale for it! And you would just echo it! Bloody maaderchods!’
I lunged for her, grabbed her slim wrists and plunged my face into her open sarong.
‘That’s right!’ she screeched, struggling to free her hands. ‘A fucking dog in every way! Saala kutta!’ I shook my head like a dog inside her hot darkness, and she screamed and began to abuse me in English, porn film stuff. I shook it some more, my face slipping easily, and her invective turned to guttural Hindi, street-level stuff. When she began to repeat herself, I pulled my head out and unleashed a stream of such vulgarity that, in a public place it would have led to instant arrest. It made her face twist and her breath choke. She was trashing my prick in anglicized Hindi when I picked her up—so wonderfully light, so narrow in the torso, so full in the hips—and nailed her to the wall. At the precise spot I had been eyeing for the past hour.
When every syllable of abuse had become an endearment and we had reached the place where all arguments end and we were no longer on the wall but on the bed and I had no more legs left and hardly any arms and I was floating in that happy place that can only fleetingly be any man’s, Sara said, ‘You know their lives are actually worthier than yours.’
And their tools much longer than mine.
Contrary to our calculations, despite the abject surrender of Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey, despite our desperate genuflections, Kapoorsahib did not close the deal with any finality. In the world he came from—where spectres built hard-iron weapons and heaped mountains of cash—in that world men understood the true nature of power. They knew it didn’t stem from the gracious handing out of assurances but from the breeding of uncertainty. The idea was to never let anyone, not even one’s allies, not even the moneyworms and the menofwater, feel secure; the idea was to always keep a hand on the handle that flung open the trapdoor.
These men of the world understood that moral niceties, the rituals of honourable conduct, were for the feeble of heart. The men who were nice were the men who were afraid: afraid of being snubbed, afraid of not being liked, afraid of the law, afraid of others’ disapproval, afraid of being alone, afraid of their reflection in the mirror. They were nice because they were afraid to be un-nice; they were nice in the desperate hope that other men would also be nice to them. But Kapoorsahib
was not such a man. He was a man who was not afraid to be un-nice. He understood that the central principle of everything was neither decency nor ethics nor money nor love nor religion. It was power—and its acquiring and wielding. He understood that it was good to keep the men around you in continual fear: it made them into nice men. Afraid men. The path to power was smoothest when it ran through a forest of frightened men.
Men like Kapoor worked at growing sprawling forests of frightened men. In other countries, in Africa and Asia and South America, men were kept afraid through assault to limb and life. But this was a disappointingly free country, full of pretty ideas and retrograde policies that did not allow men to honestly sell a few weapons. Hard unsentimental guns that would guard the nation. In such a country you made men afraid by assaulting their minds, doing damage to the spongy lobes between their ears, left and right, back and front. You made them believe they did not live in a free country, you surrounded them with stories of assault. So that when they were alone, in the silver dark, they felt they were in Africa or South America, and there were shadows moving outside their walls, testing the windows, trying the doors.
As a master shadow yourself, you made them afraid of every shadow. You never took the police to them but you kept their eye on the door through which the police would soon come. You never took them to the courts but you made them aware of the spreading tentacles of the law everywhere. You never showed them the goon with his gun but you made them see the telltale bulge in every unshaven man’s pants. You maimed the mind. You shrank the heart. You provided no certainty: of freedom, or of serfdom. Of death, or of life. You never said you would invest; and you never said you would not.
The Story of My Assassins Page 27