They were deep in the bowels of the slum, and Chini was sure he could never find his way back, when the line stopped. Chini saw three small signboards on three one-room shacks, all in a row. Tempo Video House. Manpasand Video House. Sweet Dreams Cinema Parlour.
For the next four hours, for five rupees, inside Sweet Dreams Cinema Parlour, packed in with twenty other boys, Chini saw films that blew his brain into kaleidoscopic fragments. Here were gora women prettier than Hindi film heroines, doing dirty things that could not be imagined. The genitalia of these golden-haired, red-mouthed white women was beyond fantasy. Breasts like balloons, thighs like pillars, vulvas like peaches. Kaaliya said, peering between their open thighs, they were like the muscular maw of a python, capable of swallowing any and everything.
In the translucent glow of moaning white women, Chini saw boys streaming in until, by midnight, the rough blue jute durrie, stained with a million happinesses, on which they sat, was completely packed. The bigger boys bagged the last row at the back, against the wall, and it was lit with glowing tips as silver lines were shared and burnt. It was the only row allowed to talk aloud; comments on the size, shape and colour of genitalia flowed steadily.
Chini had no time for such frivolity. He was not blinking, and his fingers were fluttering like a master weaver’s. By now the sexual stench in the room was overpowering, blanking out the smell of sweat and dirt and cigarettes. Every boy was working his handle; some that of others. A few had fallen asleep, exhausted and sated. At some point they would wake and start working the handle again.
Malaria, the emaciated young owner of Sweet Dreams parlour, sat outside, intensely burning silver lines. When, with a loud click, the tape ran out and the boys erupted in a roar, he made a quick sortie to slip in a new cassette. Chini thought of video uncle and he thought of Malaria, and he marvelled at the endless wonders of cinema. At around three o’clock, Malaria staggered in sleepily to change yet one more cassette—the sex stench was thick as cheese now—and said, ‘Fucking vagabonds, stop pulling at it as if there’s a sack of gold coins at its root! Haven’t you had enough for one night!’ The boys erupted, ‘Fuck your mother, Malaria! May she get filaria!’ He grinned and retreated.
Neither Chini nor Kaaliya slept a wink that night, and by the time the owner came in to finally turn off the player—warm as toast now—every body part of the boys, from eyes to limbs to hands to handle, was sore.
Outside, a red-grey dawn was opening the day. The lanes of Bangkok were full of bustle. Burnt-skin men in vests prepared their carts and cycles, rich food smells vying with the fumes from the sewage. A few privileged children in ragged uniforms trudged cheerlessly to school, weighed under their cloth satchels. In less than an hour the slum would be vacated of all activity. Every single denizen above the age of nine would leave to forage the city for every rupee they could find, while the night toilers, like Malaria and the sex and security platoon, would turn in to sleep off the daylight hours.
The slum worked hard every moment to discover new ways to make a living; new ways of any kind at all. Pornography was no less respectable than selling contaminated drinking water or looking after some rich man’s dogs or soliciting funds for a fake orphanage. In fact, for years afterwards, Chini and Kaaliya argued that it was a positively wholesome pastime, compared to some of the other things their mates were doing. By the time they wound their weary way back to the tracks, the sun was beginning to singe the city, and the two friends had found in themselves a tacit commitment to the consumption of pornography that was to seal their friendship forever.
While Bangkok became a regular destination for the two boys, neither of them tasted any other part of the sprawling city for many years, except of course Sadar Bazaar, where they went once in two months to pick up a set of fifteen-rupee shirt and trouser ensembles, wearing them without break till every thread ran thin, returning in the winter for cardigans and coats for twenty-five rupees. Some of these clothes bore labels that would have dazzled the swank sets of Park Avenue and Mayfair; the gap between the white rich and the gutter boys was only a stitch insufficiently strong or a collar out of true.
While visiting Sadar was easy—you just walked the rails till you got there—the rest of the city remained alien. Different dangers lurked here: of policemen, government officials, the begging mafia, the eunuch tribes. Boys had been lost, with the accompanying mutilation of limbs and penises, to all of them. Then there were the spies of social agencies whose weapons were soft words and rosy dreams, who talked with sincere eyes about goodness and education, who wanted to pull the boys into their hospices and domesticate them into cooks and guards and gardeners. The few who managed to slave through school would end up as clerks and accountants.
Dhaka called them the ‘fucking pimps of goodness’. ‘I tell them to sit on my dick! They hate our freedom and happiness! They hate it that we don’t live by their rules! They want to scrub our skins, teach us to write and read a few words, and then send us off to be slaves in some rich man’s house or office! Clean some memsahib’s shoes and wipe her children’s ass! What happened to Ismail, to Kamal, to Doctor, to Pani? All serving tea and wiping tables and washing dishes! Has any one of us ever had to do that? I would rather die under a train than go with those pimps! Sit on my dick, I tell them!’ To Chini he would say: ‘You they won’t even teach a few words! They’ll straightaway give you a topi and a lathi and make you a chowkidar! You can spend the rest of your life awake every night walking around banging your lathi on the road!’
Chini, however, was in training to be not a guard but a crook. Dhaka had inducted him into the shaving blade. He’d said, ‘Saaley Aladdin, you are too pretty to have the stomach for a screwdriver. You need something gentle, something dainty.’ Given the innocence shining out of him, he was made for contact crime, charm crime—simple swindles, the theft of bags, the slitting of pockets. The stainless steel Topaz blade was snapped in two; it easily vanished between Chini’s index and middle finger, the cutting edge flush with the palm. In the moment that Kaaliya banged up against the man, Chini’s sweeping palm brushed past his pocket, opening it like a mongrel’s mouth. If the man caught on, Kaaliya swarmed all over him, swaying and striking like the coiled black one whose blood-line was inextricably entwined with his, while Chini made a run for it.
There were times when they were caught and brutally thrashed. By groups of passengers, by the khakis, by the railway round-caps, by other bigger, meaner rats. There was nothing to do then but to lie on the roof or in the gutter and inhale the rag day on day till all pain had eased and every welt had healed. Sometimes one of the band would bring in a dark bottle of iodex, but it was more gratifying to eat it layered thickly on bread than to apply it to one’s aching skin.
And so more than ten years passed.
Ten years in which everything, and nothing much, changed. In this time Dhaka was killed, chopped into pieces with a butcher’s knife. When the news reached the station and the boys went rushing to the open lot behind Red Fort, they found parts of him strewn beside a small lantana bush near a sewer. Like a plastic doll whose arms and legs had been yanked out. His head, cut close to the torso, had rolled three feet away. The dismembered parts had bloated and discoloured to blue-green rust. There was no way anyone could have recognized him but for the trademark tennis wristbands. The short screwdriver he used to carry in his boot was hammered into his navel, the smooth wooden handle sticking out like a gravestone. When they had identified him, the policeman said, ‘Motherfucking wastrels, this is how you’ll all die! I hope someone will come to identify you!’
Dhaka’s parts were bundled tightly in a sheet and burnt by the old cremation ghat by the Yamuna. Nobody from his sixteen years at the station came to watch him burn, except for three boys. Kaaliya, Chini and Tarjan gave seventy rupees to a cut-rate priest, who asked for a cigarette before performing some perfunctory rites. He mumbled incantations at a speed that did not yield a single word, and waving a clump of green grass and a brass lota
, he threw some water randomly around the pyre. They paid another eighty rupees for three armfuls of wood. The priest said it was lucky the man had come chopped in small bits, else it would have never done the job.
The next day they went back and scooped the ashes and bits of charred bone into a small pot and caught a bus to Haridwar. Before they reached the ghat, Kaaliya had banged into two groups of well-heeled mourners, and Chini’s blade fingers had opened up two crisp white kurtas. Now they had enough money to afford a young panda—a big steel watch on his wrist—to mouth some more facilitating incantations at a mumble and a speed that did not yield a single word. Bits of Dhaka were then floated down the great Ganga—to flow all the way back from where, those many years ago, he’d once come.
The three of them stayed on in the holy city for a few weeks, slitting flapping kurtas, observing the pilgrims and mourners, watching the evening aartis with the deafening chanting and the delightful floating of the glittering diyas, eating endless rounds of puri-aloo and halwa, studying the hustle and swindle of god’s middlemen. They slept in the many buzzing ashrams, on the banks of the groaning river, and on days when the slit kurtas were fat with offerings, in one of the many cramped hotels dotting the town. They watched the muttering women dip themselves in the mother of all rivers—the blessing of Shiva, the cleanser of all sins—their sarees clinging to their rolling flesh, their white brassieres etched pointy against their white blouses, their nipples round and dark and liquid.
So more than ten years passed.
In this time, Gudiya was molested, abducted and raped. The boys from the other peepul tree, the one beyond the last platform, beside the tea-stall, near Ajmeri Gate, picked her up one evening as she trawled empty carriages for some left-behinds, and dragged her to the cave. The area was earmarked for crime—the last fingers of the big sodium lights stopped many feet away, and the khakis never ventured there. Inside the gaping hole, shaped like a cowl, under the grassy motte beyond the shunting tracks, the three of them fucked her by turns.
They were brutal and quick, spitting into their palms. None of them fucked silently. ‘Enjoying it, bloody randi?’
‘Now you’ll want it all the time, won’t you?’ Almost as if they were lovers, seeking her approval.
Gudiya did not fight it after the first few minutes. It was late evening; she was high on the solution; and she had lived on the platform long enough to know this assault was overdue. When the fucking was over, they squatted in a semicircle, breathing heavily, dusting their forearms and trousers, and smoking plain cigarettes. On her haunches, Gudiya pushed her fingers deep into herself and scooped out all she could.
She was still wiping her fingers on her kameez, when Shankar, the biggest of the three, and the boss of platforms seven and eight, pushed her down again. He spat on his palm out of habit, though it was not needed. This time he was gentler and slower, and he did not shoot her with questions. Gudiya adjusted her head in the loose soil on the ground, and held her legs wide apart. She could hear the Jammu-Tawi Mail leaving with a piercing whistle. Afterwards he sent the other two off, and told her he’d been eyeing her for months, that he always thought she was Dhaka’s and then he’d learnt the truth. Now she was his. He loved everything about her. He loved her name. He loved her beauty. He loved her. He shared a cigarette with her and gave her fifty rupees.
The next day he took her to Chandni Chowk and bought her a shimmering pink suit, tinsel jewellery, a pair of silver sandals, and a tiny bottle of ittar whose sweet smell filled the air like billowing smoke. They ate mutton korma at Karim’s and he looked into her black eyes.
The next week he took her to his best friend, Abbas, behind Asaf Ali Road, and in his second-floor living-room, amid a clutter of stuffed and padded furniture, shared her love on the green Rexine sofa with him. Abbas was fat but kind, and called her the new queen—nai begum—as he wheezed away on her. Later, Abbas gave her chaat to eat and told her how much Shankar loved her. Shankar looked into her black eyes and she warmed to the deep love in them.
The next month he got on to the Rajdhani with her and took her to Bombay. He came back ten days later without her, and when Kaaliya and Chini and Tarjan went to platform seven to find out where she was, he said, ‘What do I look like to you, you fuckers? The head of the missing persons’ bureau? Can any of you even find your own missing mothers that you want me to find some missing bitch? You come here again and I’ll slice your balls off! Maybe you’ll feel like her then!’
The next night when Dhaka came to the gutter, they told him. Dhaka, burning lines of silver at blistering speed, said, ‘Must be the best whore in Kamathipura by now. You hang around with Shankar, you deserve it. Anyway, where do you think we are all going to end up—the Rashtrapati Bhavan? Better a whore with cock between her legs than dead on some iron track!’ Then he turned over and went to sleep and never mentioned her name again.
So more than ten years passed.
In this time Makhi Khan—once the love of Dhaka, the pretty boy from Malliana who had seen his family consumed by fire and sword, by slogans and screams—was cut into three by the thundering hooves of the Amritsar Shatabdi. By then the delicate boy had travelled way beyond the sniffing of the rag. He was now sucking the wet cloth like an ice lolly, and on days even tilting the little bottles like Coca-Cola directly into his throat. The mullah’s reassuring voice summoning the faithful to prayer played in his head all the time, and just when the shrieking men, bandannas tied around their heads, steel slicing the air in front of them, were about to break through the door and grab his father and brothers, his sisters and mother, he quickly gave the bunched cloth in his palm a deep suck, and the mullah’s soothing voice came sweetly rolling back.
Makhi had long ceased to beg or steal. He had given in to his inherent gift. It was difficult to look at him and not be snared by the soft flare of his hips, the full red mouth, the big brown eyes with long curving lashes. Unhappy men—young and old, married and single, sad and angry—poured through the station night and day, and it was gifted unto him to give them a fleeting moment of joy. Some hurt him and some did not pay him anything, but many were grateful and kind. Some came back, but if they did so too often then he learnt to avoid them. The khakis and the round-caps took him when they wanted. But that was okay. The station, after all, belonged to them.
Makhi used to say that because his mother begged so hysterically for her children, they killed her last, though they did not stop raping her. Her pleading excited them, made them laugh, fuelled their tumescence. He used that learning sometimes—in an empty carriage, bent over a lower berth, when the man was kind and had a fat pocket.
It always worked. The call to mercy provoked harder erections and greater arousal. Men, and power.
He had been wandering back from Sheilapul, pouring the solution into his throat. That day it had been two sadhus from the temple, high on charas, their long matted hair falling over his back as they grunted. They had paid him nothing, just fifteen rupees, saying he was fortunate to be doing god’s work. And so he was, for he could hear the muezzin’s sweet cry, loud and clear, filling the skies. When he fell on the stones, his legs over the smooth rails, and the Shatabdi thundered in, all flashing lights and faces, the muezzin’s cry grew louder and sweeter bringing on more and more peace.
He was still smiling when the boys reached him. The khakis had put his legs in his gunny sack and were discussing what to do next. Kaaliya tried to bend down and cradle his beautiful head but a khaki uncoiled a kick to his side. ‘Stupid fucking punks! Can’t live cleanly, can’t die cleanly!’ he snarled. ‘Get themselves chopped like vegetables, as if their mothers are waiting to cook them!’
They kept arguing among themselves till he was dead. Two rail karamcharis helped stuff him into a sack. He was left next to a refuse pile at the end of the Paharganj lane that fronted the station. Now he was the municipality’s responsibility. They were good at disposing of assorted limbs and carcasses.
The next to go was Chhotu,
chaser of kites, peeper into toilets, befriender of every rat on every platform, the laughing player of pranks, the boy who could not be caught. Chhotu’s feet were running water. Dodging, feinting, taunting, he could elude three chasing men around a narrow platform for as long it took to exhaust them. Nothing slowed him down: not the beatitudes of the solution, not injury, not fever.
Some days, to amuse themselves, the rats would spot a smug group on the platform and say, ‘Go screw them!’ The creativity lay in the provocation: pissing at their feet, smearing snot on their baggage, dropping a kulhad of tea over their clothes, flashing their women. Then came the exchange of abuse, followed by the chase. Threading fatigued passengers, around kiosks and carts, up the stairs, leaping the banisters, over luggage—all the time the laughing abuse, and above on the roof the roaring audience. In every case the pursuers were doubled up on the floor grasping for breath in less than ten minutes.
But when the rag’s magic vapours filled his being, Chhotu saw none of this. All he heard was his mother’s sweet lullaby and all he saw were the flying kites. Soaring souls, in a hundred colours, in a hundred sizes, in their thousands, filling the blue sky, outfluttering every bird, skating the thermals, skipping and swerving, dipping and dancing, connected by the thin body of their threads to a thousand jerking fingers on a hundred shimmering rooftops.
Chhotu lived to fly the kite, to feel the life of the paper-bird flow through his grimy hands. In those years at the station anyone who saw a pair of bare feet silvering across the corrugated roofs, face tilted upwards, knew instantly who it was. On a windless day when paper was like stone, this runaway son of a constable could lift the bird with his wrists alone; and if the breeze blew he could sail the bird so deep into the heavens that it could no more be seen by the keenest eye. If the skies were crowded he could wield his flying bird like a warrior’s scimitar to clear himself a wide space. His string was the edge of a blade, coated with crushed mirrors in the starch of rice; his palms roughly cross-hatched with lines beyond all ordainings of destiny.
The Story of My Assassins Page 34