Full of wrath, the guru said, ‘I should have died and this king of snakes lived. These people deserved his terror.’ Kaaliya’s father said that true to his word the guru, though he lived fifteen years more, never snared another snake. But he talked often of the black king. He would say, ‘In those burning eyes I saw everything—power and poison, divinity and death, magic and menace. We made a grave blunder. That was the greatest serpent in the world, and we captured and killed it. Ten cunning men against one magnificent serpent. Having seen it, we should have turned around and left—left the king alone to rule its forest world.’
There were other stories Kaaliya remembered, older, ancient, secondhand. A hundred and twenty years ago, near Agra, there was a charmer, Siva Jogi, whose knowledge of the anti-venom herbs was so complete that he could actually bring back to life the poisoned dead. The only condition was that the victim be brought to him within twenty-four hours of being bitten to death. He had a way of applying his mouth to the wound and sucking out all the venom from the blood in one long, uninterrupted breath. No disciple could master both—the knowledge of the herbs and the technique of siphoning out the settled poison without killing oneself. The art of reviving the poisoned dead was lost after Siva Jogi. Under the moonless sky, light with ganja and alcohol, the charmers also waxed on about the great patrons of yore—benign zamindars and bejewelled kings—who had given them and their serpents adequate land and produce, and the dignity befitting an artist. A time when the charmers lived in plenty and were hailed wherever they appeared.
In a soft, deeply tired voice, Kaaliya’s mother told her six children, of whom he was the youngest, that all this talk was balderdash. There were no benign zamindars, and there was no halcyon past. The king cobra was a fantasy, and Siva Jogi a myth. Their lives had always been rough, driven as they were from place to place, never more than a week’s supply of grain in their sacks. And so it had been for her parents, and their parents. But she admitted it had never been so brutally tough. She said men had now gone to the moon, and these days there was a cinema set in every house. The fanged one no longer aroused awe or curiosity. The few rupees, the few fists of flour that still came their way bore the stamp of casual pity.
She knew that sometimes her man and his cousins had to sing the pungi for more than fifteen minutes before anyone above the age of eight would break step and care to linger. She knew that her man and his mates, several times a day, retreated under a tree to fill their heads with ganja so they could deal with the humiliation of being artists who had no takers. And that was not all. Not only were they artists facing rejection but they were also criminals now. Their work was outlawed, and it was not just the policemen they had to worry about. The real scourge was a new breed of fannekhans who came from the big cities of Delhi and Bombay and claimed to know what was best for their serpents and demanded that the local khakis enforce the law: take away their coiled beauties and threaten them with arrest. Some of these fannekhans—often young men and women, talking a broken Hindi—were also solicitous, promising that they had come to usher the charmers into a new way of life, that there would soon be other jobs waiting for them. Kaaliya’s mother hissed like her snakes, ‘Jobs! Yes, of course, my illiterate lord is now going to be put into a pant and a suit, and will sit in an office and sign papers!’
There was some money to be made as medicine men. Some of them—the few sharp talkers—were dishing out herbs and potions in the small towns, mostly for aches and pains and boils and ulcers and impotence and virility and barrenness. The trick had a six-to-eight-week play. Three to four weeks in one spot to establish an air of permanence and reliability. Ideally under an old tree, at the crossroads of inner lanes, clad in full saffron and turban, an array of dusty jars spread on a piece of matting, a small iron pestle for customizing the treatment, and a few pictures of different gods to reassure every kind of follower. Some of the more desperate ones even displayed a monitor lizard pickled in oil. Sold in little bottles or tiny plastic vials, the yellowy lubricant when applied to the rubber of penis produced the iron of phallus. Like all cures it took time, like all cures it was mostly in the head. The medicine men did not stay around long enough to verify the results. The world was full of grief and there were other sufferers waiting. Three to four weeks to create familiarity; three to four weeks to milk the miserable; and then they were gone.
Every now and then there was some money to be made from panicked residents who had been visited by a harmless snake. Like the medicine men, they had to then embark on a charade, to multiply the fear, awe, relief. Kaaliya’s father and his uncles had the acting abilities of a tree. They could blow the pungi to an aching sweetness; they could make the dark lord rise from the basket and sway to their rhythm; they could trap any snake from any hole in the forest with patience and quicksilver hands; they could snip fangs of poison and suture the venom sacs; and they could walk and walk and walk to the edge of the earth and beyond. But they lacked the talent to become conmen. They made a hash of pretending a rat snake was a lethal viper or a sand boa a python in the making.
There was one other way to earn a living, but it was absurdly sporadic. The rustic gujjars loved the haunting sound of the pungi, and invited the snakemen to play it at their weddings and festivities. It meant squatting in full regalia for hours and hours and blowing and blowing till their lungs were empty and their aching cheeks the size of apples. But later there was always good food to eat and enough alcohol available to stun yourself. Some of the gujjars did not mind the snakemen bringing their waifs along, though others could be insulting.
Kaaliya had done the rounds before he was six and suffered many wounds and diminishments. He had walked the inner lanes of dusty little towns whose names he was too young to know and seen his father and uncles toil and grovel—blowing, beseeching, squatting on the roadside like beggars—to collect a few coins and wrinkled rupee-notes. Their only succour seemed to be hashish; their only vent thrashing Kaaliya and the other small boys.
Kaaliya always saw his father either abject or angry. There was never enough to eat, and when any of his children fell ill, the father just looked the other way, doing nothing, waiting for them to heal or die. By the time Kaaliya was six he had lost a brother and a sister, one younger, the other older, to fevers that none of the herbs and potions could break. He had watched his father expressionlessly flow his dead siblings down the river, and then come home and embark on an orgy of intoxication.
His mother was no solace. She was exhausted beyond emotion. Apart from everything to do with the tortoise-shell homes, she went out for hours every day into alien fields to harness grass for their mule and cow—the two could not be let out to find their own food because they were their only valuable possessions. Sometimes she also managed to steal a few carrots or turnips or potatoes or gourds from the nearby field. And sometimes the odd fruit—a few green guavas or mangoes from a fruiting orchard. His father always abused and slapped his mother for her thieving, and then promptly proceeded to eat what she had stolen. Later, the mother beat Kaaliya and his elder sister—the others were much too old—before she dropped asleep exhausted on the floor between the hissing wicker baskets and her snivelling children.
When they moved, which was every few weeks, it fell to her, with some help from her small sons, to dismantle the house—the bamboo sticks, the shreds of tarp and plastic, the cooking stones, the rush mats and patchwork quilts, the many baskets filled with the coiled ones—and then some days later, outside a new town, in the vicinity of a defining tree and an enabling pond or tube well, set it up again. The father sat with the other men, looking from the corner of his eye, pulling on his chillum, the artist of the serpents who could not be expected to stoop to such mundanity.
Little Kaaliya hated his life, hated the endless trudging, hated being a beggar in every town and lane he ever visited. He felt they were the only houseless people in the world. Everywhere else he saw solidity, people living in firm, immovable homes. With each day Kaaliya grew in
to a very angry child, unafraid to shout, scream and protest. His exasperated father would say, ‘This bastard’s skin will peel off like a snake’s with thrashings, but he’ll continue to bark like a mad dog!’ Every now and then the boy would arraign his mother, demanding to know when they would stop walking, when would they live in an immovable house, when would they begin to give alms rather than seek them, and when would his father stop behaving like a beast. The weary woman said all of it would happen when the sun swallowed the moon permanently and the rivers ran with milk and flowers bloomed all over the desert and men began to fly like birds and snakes began to talk like men and the gods began to look at everyone with an equal eye.
But Kaaliya knew there was another way. When he was eight, and they were camped outside a big town full of famous buildings and minarets, one evening there had been a sudden visitor who had created commotion in the group. He was dark like one of them but so beautifully turned out as to almost seem fair. The red shirt, the grey trousers, the shining black shoes, the oiled hair combed across the forehead, the gleaming gold-coloured watch on the wrist, and most dazzling of all, the ringing laughter and the smiling, confident manner.
Kaaliya and the other children had watched mesmerized from their tents as the young man sat amid the elders, regaling them with stories and talking to them as more than an equal. He was Shambhu Nath’s second son who had fled the fold as a twelve-year-old and gone to the great metropolis of Delhi to find his fortune. Now he worked in an office that printed a famous paper, and his job was to rush around the city on a motor scooter, carrying important messages. He said he was called a Rider, and the outcome of many key events depended on his speed and reliability. Now he narrated ribald stories of the kind of cars the sahibs in his office had, and the things they did in them. The awed and amused charmers said, ‘Arre saale Rider, at least we keep our snakes in baskets, these sahibs of yours carry them around inside their pants!’ Rider, pulling on a cigarette, laughed, ‘Theirs are not like ours, tau. Theirs are small—like a jalebia!’
Kaaliya dreamt of becoming the Rider, tearing around on motor scooters, wearing pants and red shirts, delivering crucial messages, and watching the sahibs in big cars taking out their small jalebias to give to the fair memsahibs. Rider said in Delhi there were joys and pleasures they could not imagine. Sweet-smelling restaurants and cool cinema halls and big shops with glittering wares and beautiful women clogging the streets and parks like paintings and buildings of glass and the amazing Qutub Minar, without a doubt the biggest jalebia in the world. For the rest of his life Kaaliya thought of the great minaret as a giant saw-scaled viper, head pointing into the sky.
That summer day in a small town in Rajasthan, in the searing heat of afternoon, when his thwarted father—with not ten rupees to show for hours of blowing and scraping—began to mercilessly thrash him, Kaaliya was filled with a black rage that knew no limits. All morning at the top of his small voice he had canvassed the snakes, all morning he had held out his small hands seeking a hard coin, all morning he had felt thirst and hunger claw his insides, all morning he had seen men and women go about their lives asking for nothing, and with every passing moment he had known that his father’s life could not be his. And when his father began to beat him, even banging the voluptuous pungi on his back, he knew he was running away from there. He was going to Delhi; he was going to be the Rider.
Spitting on his father, he tore away from his grip, and as the miserable charmer fell into the sleep of hashish, the little boy ran and ran, the blood pounding in his head. At the station a train was waiting for him and it left the moment he was on board. It took him three days, many queries, and three different trains to reach Delhi, where Dhaka was waiting for him—the black face in the compartment—as Kaaliya wept with fear like Chini would many years later, struck with terror at seeing so many people, so much bustle, so much noise, so many trains.
The charmer’s angry little son never became a Rider, nor did he see rich sahibs in fancy cars showing their little jalebias to fair memsahibs, nor did he for many many years visit a fancy eatery or go to see the biggest jalebia in the world, the Qutub Minar, but he did take to the freedom of the platforms and tracks with a wild exuberance. He turned out an alley cat, snarling, spitting, scratching, biting, forcing respect out of others. He never begged for anything. He always demanded, stole, negotiated, cheated. If he ever came up against a tougher adversary, he located a harmless snake from the Paharganj alleys, and swiftly restored the balance of terror. He never thought of his family and the misery of those nomadic days, but every night when he soaked his rag in Shiva’s prasad and stuck it under his nose he only heard one sound—the haunting, beckoning whine of the pungi—and saw just the one image, the flaring head of the black king as it rose above the rainforests of Assam, filling the sky and striking awe into the world.
When Dhaka’s mentor Bham Bihari died some years later—many bottles of solution delivering him to eternally juicy green paddy fields—Dhaka became the keeper of his iron trident, the undisputed leader of the gang, and Kaaliya became his chosen henchman. Between Dhaka’s violence and Kaaliya’s cunning their gang never lacked for food or the solution. Only once did the snakeboy feel a pang when he saw a group of weather-beaten charmers alight from a train, their turbans soiled, their clothes frayed, their earrings dulled, their juttis torn, their eyes vacant, carrying little children, baskets of coiled serpents, bulging pungis, bundles of pots and pans, and remaining rags. And yet his instinct was to hide: among them could be someone who once knew him. But the group was sightless with misery, moving inside its own cocoon of aches.
Kaaliya liked Chini from the moment he saw him. He was so different from the rest of them with his smooth fair skin, his small long-lashed eyes, his lovely straight hair. A great maternal urge rose in him. This flower was not to be sullied by all the gutter rats around; this one was to be cherished and nurtured.
With Dhaka feeling the same way, Kaaliya took the little boy into his embrace, gently initiating him into their subterranean way of life, tutoring him in the deep joys of the solution, and earning his loyalty and love by telling him fascinating stories of the coiled ones—the spitters and the strikers, the two-faced and the hooded, the poisonous and the pliant.
The one story little Chini demanded to hear again and again was the tale from his part of the universe—of the great black king. Each time the peerless beast rose to its full striking height in the clearing of the rainforest and locked eyes with the greatest snake-catcher of his time, the excitement in the boy became so great that he had to clutch his penis to stop himself from peeing.
ii
Freedom at Midnight
Since the rains had not yet let up, Chini’s first abode was above platform three, beneath the overbridge, wedged snugly between Kaaliya and Makhi Khan. At this point the corrugated iron roof sloped in gently from opposite directions, creating a lovely alcove that was secure and dry except during the worst storms. The breeze wafted in from both ends, day and night, and it was wonderful to lie there and watch the never-ceasing drama of travellers on the platform. It took him a few days to get used to fitting his body into the corrugations and to sleeping at an incline, but once he did, the comfort was complete. It also helped that the roof of their bedroom was only a few feet above their heads and resounded with the reassuring thump of human feet every minute of the waking-sleeping day.
This allowed them to play one of their favourite gambles: Madhuri. Mostly it fell to Gudiya to stand on the high point just outside the opening, peer onto the overbridge, and yell out the results. The wager was to intuit when Madhuri Dixit—Bombay cinema’s reigning queen and everyone’s fantasy—was right on top of them. Periodically a boy would shout Madhuri! and if Gudiya confirmed that at that very moment a beautiful woman had indeed walked over them, the others had to fork out a rupee each. There was an unspoken consensus on who qualified as Madhuri: any woman in jeans or trousers; fair women in churidar-kameez who had some make-up on, especiall
y bright lipstick; newly married ones, in sarees with their glittering earrings and bangles and their freshly fucked aura. Dark skin was an instant disqualification. On days when something important was brewing at the station—a ceremonial function, a movement of VIPs—and the round-caps and khakis were out in a brutal mood, the boys would lie out of sight under the overbridge, playing Madhuri for hours. Ten per cent of the winnings went to Gudiya, and when Dhaka returned to his fold at night he would ask, ‘Who did Madhuri how many times today?’
A week after his arrival there was a raging monsoon storm. Rain lashed their quarters mercilessly and lightning ripped open the skies. Chini went down with the rest of the gang to sleep above the juicewala’s kiosk on the platform. Away from the screaming elements it was a cosy and secure perch, but Chini hated being there. A scooped-out space with tiny parapets, the juicewala’s roof was dirty and musty, and the old newspapers they laid out under themselves crumpled and tore as they tossed and turned. Worse still was the flatness of the roof: without an incline, without corrugations, it was difficult to fit one’s body into a comfortable position. And then there was that degraded feeling of being part of the platform, in the middle of the foolish swirl of passengers and vendors, their arguments and complaints, their hustling and screams. All through the night, right under them, they could hear people fighting over the price of bananas and oranges, juices and shakes. One unrelenting fair-price seeker was scared witless by an exasperated Dhaka who leaned his face out of the dark roof, and barked, ‘Come up here, fucker! I’ll give you a big banana for free!’
The Story of My Assassins Page 31