The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  Chhotu’s champagne months were August and September. As the rains passed, leaving behind cool breezes; as Independence Day approached with the pale rituals of freedom speeches; as the bird-men emerged onto the roofs and streets of old Delhi holding their big kites like delicate porcelain, Chhotu became almost completely airborne. There were several other rats too—between the tracks, in the shunting yards, on the roofs—who put up their birds. But they were peasants amid a gladiator, and Chhotu never crossed his singing line with them. Striding the roofs of the station, he hunted the high-fliers, warriors like himself who could swerve and slash at several hundred feet, with power and precision, whose kites when decapitated were pursued by the peasants who ran and leapt pell-mell over everything to capture the trophy.

  Kaaliya said it was apt that Chhotu died doing the two things that defined him—running and flying a kite. Aptly too, he died off the roof of platform four and in the middle of Independence Day celebrations when his father would have been on duty somewhere, guarding some leader or road against the vandalism of the spirit of freedom. On a midday when the air was buzzing with kites like flies on a heap of refuse, and Chhotu was slicing them down like blades of grass, his flying foot rolled on a dented can of Coke someone had flung on to the roof. The rats who saw him plunge said he bounced on the wires like a rubber ball while the wires sang and spat. The spectacle was so riveting that no one quite remembered if he screamed or said anything. But they all recalled that he held on tight to his big wooden spool of string. When he finally fell to the ground, nicely charred, and the khakis arrived to cart him away, he was still holding on to it.

  That night Kaaliya said, lying on the roof, ‘Chini, you are next! Take it from me. You look too sweet and innocent. Someone will do away with you just because of that!’ Of course, by then, Chini was neither. He alone among the band had made the journey to the top of the peepul tree at the end of platform one. It was on a summons delivered one night at the garbage hall movie. The other band rats had stood at a distance while he climbed the knotted sinews of the ancient tree that had torn apart the building, grabbed the iron stake and swung himself into the dark leafy space above. Narak, hell, where you only went if you were invited or dragged.

  Bizarrely—Chini said later—as he climbed up he was assailed by an acrid smell that he couldn’t recognize, and when he emerged into the dark cave made by the peepul’s lush canopy he was startled to see a large image of him staring back. He almost tripped back in fear and fell down the hole he had just crawled up. Then he realized it was a big stand-alone mirror in a tiltable wooden frame, of the kind found in old colonial bungalows. A voice cackled from the dark and said mockingly, ‘See! We have a duplicate of everything!’

  By now Chini’s stomach was water, and as his eyes adjusted he saw a charpoy with a mattress and bed sheet and pillows and a bald young man lying on it with his arms folded under his head. He was wearing nothing but a black pair of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls shorts, the number 23 luminous in red, its crotch shaped like an igloo. But Shakaal was not the one who had spoken. There were also two wooden chairs and a small table, with young men sitting on all of them. One of them had a thick stubble and a wild grin. The boys called him Kumla Jogi—Mad Joginder—and he tended to blather and was prone to random acts of violence. He had a thick cigar stuck in his mouth and was grinning through it. ‘You are a Chini?’ he said. ‘Do you like eating noodles?’ Chini’s voice had long ago drowned deep in the waters of his belly. When the boy didn’t answer, Kumla Jogi cackled madly, then stopped dead and said, ‘Anyway, take off all your pathetic clothes. We’ve heard Chinis have two cocks—one for pissing and one for fucking. And they can do both at the same time—that’s why they have even more people than us!’ He cackled madly again. ‘Let’s see if it’s true.’

  Nothing surprised the boy because he was an aficionado of Bangkok’s cinema. But it certainly hurt. Shakaal was the first in, without taking off his Michael Jordan shorts; then Kumla Jogi, cackling and talking all the while; and finally the third man, who first brutally used his mouth. Later, he kneeled the boy on the edge of the table and simply would not stop. Chini could look through the beautiful peepul leaves and see the lights coming on in the outer reaches of the station, some white, other yellow. He wished he had the rag—it would have soaked up the pain.

  The other two were talking among themselves, discussing some new film. The table was screeching rhythmically on the brick floor. Dhaka had told him to stick close to the path of no resistance. Boys had gone up that tree, and come down as cripples. Sometimes even as corpses. There were no reparations possible. Hell and the khakis were one team. Now there was no pain; just the banging. He held on hard to the edges of the table. Finally Shakaal said in his filmy baritone, ‘Stop it now, chutiya, unless you are trying to make India and China into one country!’

  Afterwards, Kumla Jogi put the barrel of a big black pistol in his mouth and slowly moved it in and out. ‘My little Bruce Lee that one gives a hot fuck, this one gives a cold fuck! That one shoots life into you, this one shoots death!’ And he cackled madly. ‘So be a good obedient boy always so that you always get life!’ When the boy stumbled down the tree he saw his shadow move in the big mirror.

  For five days Lhungdim lay in the gutter, face stuffed into a dripping rag, hearing the sweet sound of rain falling on a thatch roof amid wet green trees at the end of a world he could never again find. From then on, in the garbage hall during the weekend shows, he hid himself, covering his head with a cap, lying low between the rats in a dark corner. But hell knows how to find those it chooses.

  Lhungdim. Aladdin. Chini. Catamite. The summons came periodically, and in time he mastered every sinew of the tree, scaling it in a jiffy even in the dead of night. He learnt to relax the tight muscles, and he remembered to take his rag along. The canopy regularly unveiled new bodies, and occasionally he felt he was part of some transaction. Sometimes when he was being banged he’d hear a voice ask, ‘Does he know any Hindi? I have to say Chini ass is better than Indian ass!’ Occasionally he was surprised when someone would pull on a cap before starting on him: of course he realized it was to protect themselves, not him. Its abrasions tore at him for days.

  Kaaliya always waited in the platform below, often falling asleep on the undulating concrete bench. He had grown into a wiry young man full of the sullenness of the unfairly relegated. On the platform, colour of skin was fate. The night-dark son of snakemen loved his friend, and was his guardian and keeper, but he was also forced to stand in the wings and to share him with the masters of the world. In the beginning he would rage, threatening to unleash cobras up the tree. But as Chini’s own anxieties tempered and the hell boys began to hand him hundred-rupee notes, Kaaliya began to see it all as one more line of work. You could collect waste, you could steal, you could sell drugs, you could get fucked, or you could, as most of them did, do a bit of everything. It insulated you against the vagaries of the marketplace.

  So more than ten years passed.

  In that time they discovered there was a city beyond the station. It was full of a real opulence and a real beauty. For too long they’d imagined these were only attributes of the films they saw in their garbage hall. In Connaught Circus—a mere slingshot away from the gutter they’d always lived in—were dazzling glass-fronted shops and big glowing signs. There were cinema halls with screens the size of a thousand televisions, and on the road big cars that shone like diamonds. In the colonnaded corridors walked women—and men—so beautiful, so sweet smelling, that one felt faint in their very presence. And that was not all. The city, in a similar way, stretched on and on for miles and miles, to an end none of them had ever seen.

  In that time they discovered the big world was not for them. They had no tools to take it on—no language, no knowledge, no contacts, no money. On the other hand the station was no longer big enough. New young boys were filling the holes and roofs. They were insolent, energetic, scrappy. To contest them for space and spoils was
a diminishment—for Kaaliya and Chini lacked the authority or the wit or the violence to generate awe. And the hell boys of the peepul tree had no interest in the turf battles of the platforms—they were players in the big stakes of the larger world.

  So when they were summoned up the peepul tree one evening, and Shakaal did not unbutton his Jordan shorts and no one took off their pants, and they were offered a new line of work, they were fully ready. Kumla Jogi cackled madly and said, ‘What a pair! Black and white! Night and day! God and demon! It’s perfect!’

  They were not put on the drug route, or the arms line, or the fake currency racket. A new con was being tested, and the maibaaps of the hell boys had demanded a few novices, with no police record, and innocence in their eyes. A new revenue stream in white-collar swindling was being opened—no knives, no guns, no blood, no gore, just go to the bank and collect some money.

  The maibaap, the government, in its infinite mercy had started a loan scheme for the illiterate handicapped. Kaaliya and Chini were handed medical certificates, sheathed in laminate, declaring them deaf-and-dumb. They were then taken to a small branch of a nationalized bank in Gurgaon. Benighted Mr Lhungdim and Mr Nath applied for a state loan to set up a scooter repairs shop. Billa, the broker, held their thumbs and stuck them into various documents; then he heartily backslapped the thin manager, Mr Pareenja, making the claustrophobic plywood cabin shake. Two weeks later, they collected and cashed a cheque of two hundred thousand rupees. Shakaal gave them four thousand each out of it, and stroking his oiled scalp said, ‘Lucky dogs! Didn’t have to spill a drop of blood for it! Like working in a motherfucking office!’

  The next one was a cooperative bank in Najafgarh. The broker Sehwag, fat and unshaven, wore a soiled white kurta-pajama and drove a red battered Maruti. The manager was a young man with a fine moustache that curled upwards, and he gave the two deaf-and-dumb illiterates one hundred fifty thousand rupees to buy buffaloes and set up a dairy milk project. Handing out four thousand each to the serial entrepreneurs, Kumla Jogi cackled madly and said, ‘We’ve always cursed the motherfucking government for not doing anything for poor people. The fact is you have to just learn to ask nicely!’

  Eight months later, Chini and Kaaliya had moved out to a room in Rajinder Nagar. It was above the second floor of a tiny house and you had to climb endless narrow steps to get to it. The toilet and bathroom were out on the small terrace, and each was the size of a large cupboard. They both slept on the single bed and lay low in the neighbourhood, not talking to anyone. The only time they went back to the station was when they had to report to the hell boys. Or on the odd night when sleep would just not come unless they heard the rumble of the trains.

  But going there now was an unhappy experience. Most of the rats of their time were dead or gone; even the khakis were unfamiliar. Shoki too had died some years ago, and soon after, they had closed their bank accounts at the fruit mart. The rail lines still lived by the rag, but Salushan Baba’s place had been taken by a younger man—sharply dressed, not wise, not a fakir, just a salesman. Worst of all the movie hall had been cleared out: the garbage dump was now only a garbage dump—stuffed to overflowing—and no video uncle appeared there every weekend with magic in his duffel bags. As terrible was the onslaught of Dhaka’s dreaded ‘pimps of goodness’. Men and women with saintly smiles were crawling all over the station trying to snare the rats into morbid hospices and spiritless schools.

  The new life was welcome. Every few months the handicapped duo were shepherded to a new bank to mop up a loan. Kumla Jogi cackled and said, ‘We should buy them suits and ties! Look at them—Mr and Mrs 55! Fultu sahibs, going to banks! Their parents would be proud of them!’

  In the long spare hours they sniffed the rag and burnt the silver lines. Sometimes, for days, they were too much at peace to even walk down the stairs. When they could they went to Bangkok, spending entire nights there, inhaling the musk of male desire, finding the perfect peace of oblivion. Even when they got their own Akai TV and Panasonic video player, they did not cease to seek out the collective frisson of Bangkok.

  In October 1996 they were arrested in Ghaziabad while trying to collect a five-lakh loan from the State Bank for a machine-tooling unit. After seven heists the word was out on them. The cops beat them systematically, hurting every bone in their body without breaking it, and pulping every muscle without tearing it. For weeks they were crumpled heaps. No one in more than ten years at the station had hurt them so badly. The cops were in a fury: for one, the two of them had no money to fork out; and then clearly they were street labour, totally dispensable, and their maibaaps, whoever they were, would have no interest in salvaging them. Kumla Jogi bailed them out four months later, and took them back up the peepul tree. Chini’s left cheek had a scar now, from a fight in Dasna jail. The horny Jat who had given him the scar had had a chunk bitten off his chest by Kaaliya. Shakaal rubbed his Michael Jordan crotch and said, ‘Good! Now you’ve finally graduated! Now you are ready for the next level. Tell me, what comes after sahib?’ Kumla Jogi cackled and said, ‘Shaitan!’ Shakaal cracked a smile and said, ‘And after shaitan?’ Kumla Jogi cackled, ‘Sant!’

  Sahib. Satan. Saint.

  Conformity. Rebellion. Enlightenment.

  Shakaal said, his voice sombre, ‘Do you know what Bhagwan Krishna told Arjuna when he was standing around like you looking stupid, in front of a million armed warriors? The great lord said, “Even a wise person acts according to his own nature. Nature drives all beings. Why should you use restraint? Attachment and aversion are certain. But don’t be overcome by those. They are obstacles. Your own dharma, even if followed imperfectly, is superior to someone else’s dharma, even if followed perfectly. It is better to be slain while following your own dharma. Someone else’s dharma is tinged with fear.” ’ At this Kumla Jogi cackled, ‘And what is your dharma, boys?’

  To carry and to fetch.

  So the order of evolution was laid out for the two former rats, and they were inducted into the life of carriers and couriers: delivering packages, collecting packages, asking no questions, seeking no answers. Knowing no one beyond the hell boys; knowing nothing beyond the next address. In this way in the next few years they travelled all over the country, from Kashmir to Bombay to Guwahati to Calcutta to coastal Gujarat and coastal Tamil Nadu and the frontiers of Pakistan and Nepal and Bangladesh and Burma. Sometimes the cargo was a mere envelope slipped in between their vest and skin; sometimes a smooth cylinder nestled in Chini’s supple ass; sometimes a truck laden with sacks and crates, lashed down tightly, and the two of them in the co-driver’s cabin, sharing a rag, burning a silver line. Only once did Shakaal offer them a pistol—beneath the green canopy of peepul leaves, before sending them on a collection to Ganganagar in Rajasthan—but when they hesitated, afraid, Kumla Jogi took it away and cackled, ‘Oh don’t! Not to Mr and Mrs 55! Look at them! If your hands shake like that you should masturbate, not hold guns!’

  They stayed with Dhaka’s legacy of screwdrivers, blades, scalpels, almost never needing to use them, till one day Shakaal summoned them up the tree and twirling a brand-new silver-coloured mobile phone in his hand, said, ‘This whole country is changing, everyone is full of new excitements, don’t you want to do something more with yourselves? Or are you happy being postmen all your life?’

  The two of them kept quiet, knowing well that the decision had already been taken for them. Kumla Jogi, who was wearing a green balaclava over his face, its edges sticking out like bunny rabbit ears, cackled and said, ‘Chutiyas, he’s going to make you James Bond! Zero zero seven! Cars, guns, and a licence to kill!’

  Chini, lost son of a distant land where the slopes were green and the rain always fell, and Kaaliya, coal-dark offspring of a blood-line that never stopped walking and was forever entwined with the scaled one, were given a piece of paper with an address where they were to meet a man more fearsome than Dhaka, more fearsome than the hell boys, more fearsome than any they had known, whose chosen weapon
of mayhem was an iron hammer, who was dreaded by men whose illicit empires ran across states, who made holes in heads that no surgeon could ever hope to suture.

  11

  THE RODENT IN THE CASTLE

  For some reason Jai decided to accompany me. He didn’t need to. The summons was for me. But it was the kind of showy gesture he occasionally indulged in, to show he really cared. I don’t think he did, for anyone, but it flowed with his self-image. Also, I knew he had been dining out on these grimy state-versus-citizen stories—they held a macabre fascination for the kind of well-heeled precious fucks he socialized with; men and women who would pull up their pant legs and stop breathing if you dropped them on a village road. He embroidered into drawing-room theatre everything that I told him: the sinister shadows, the Kafka courtroom, the slippery Sethiji, the menacing Hathi Ram, the clinical assassins led by the brain-curry man, the lethal Kapoorsahib, Bhalla’s line girls. The fools he regaled never realized that, actually, they were part of the same chorus line—the state-and-the-system that had a finger up everyone’s ass. The moment we entered the building, I knew Jai was soon going to command a new silence in the margarita rooms.

  It was a concrete block off Chanakyapuri and it rose nine storeys high, featureless and opaque as a cardboard box. A guard in khaki sat near the main entrance on a wooden stall, carefully punching a blue mobile phone, and he didn’t look up as we went in. The foyer was tight and dimly lit, the terrazzo floor and cement walls thick with grime. There were two lifts, next to each other, with steel doors. When you punched the buttons you heard, somewhere in the distance, a deep groaning and cranking followed by a thick whine. The narrow glass consoles over the doors were playful, displaying some floors and ignoring others. When the lift hit the ground there was a big bang and shudder. But the men in it walked out alive, all nondescript, all in bush shirts and trousers.