It was six in the evening. Only the two of us were going up. When the doors had juddered shut and we were enclosed in the semi-dark, Jai said nervously, ‘You think we should take the stairs?’ Before I could say yes, someone up there pressed a button and with a deep groan and jerk we were on the move.
We emerged on floor eight into a cramped corridor littered with government-issue furniture—iron-frame tables with shiny wooden boards screwed on, chairs with the plastic mesh torn in several places, dented steel almirahs, broken wooden cupboards, even some aluminium trunks with thick locks. The area was badly lit with a few lopsided tubelights coated with streaks of thickly settled dust. The lift went no further, but we had to go to the ninth floor. A pot-bellied man emerged from a door, jostling his crotch. He stopped and looked at us. We asked. He pointed with his free hand to a stairwell behind us.
The winding staircase was reasonably broad but giving way at the edges and without air or illumination. It had banks of windows with latches that ought to have allowed them to open six inches but they were all jammed shut and the panes were so caked with dirt and pigeon shit that not a shard of light could penetrate. A cement banister wound alongside but there was no way we could bring ourselves to put a hand on it. We walked in tandem, me ahead, feeling every step, Jai behind, mumbling abuse at the state of the state.
The ninth floor landing was much like the eighth with the same clutter of third-rate furniture and the same crooked flickering tubelights, except that at both ends of the corridor there were unmarked wood-board walls with doors cut into them.
A faux confidence suddenly seized Jai. He took the lead, wrenching open the door to our right and marching in. A stout man with a big moustache and a bush shirt open to the fourth button sat behind a small shiny table—wood-board pasted with sunmica—writing in a fat cloth register. He looked up at us without expression, jiggled the back of his pen in his right ear, and went back to writing. Jai asked for the man we had come to meet. He pointed over his shoulder without lifting his head. We went through another wood-board door, flimsy, unpolished, unsteady on its hinges, with a shiny chrome handle stuck into it, and immediately waded into what seemed like a small work hall, with tables and chairs at all angles. Every one of them empty save one at the far end. Two men sat there, facing each other, comparing the text of two documents. One read out a sentence softly and the other read it softly back. Then the first one said, ‘Check!’ loudly. Both officials were clean-shaven, in cream bush shirts, identical in their nondescriptness. If they went back to each other’s homes their wives would not notice.
We went and stood by them, but they did not look at us till they had done about fifteen checks and come to the end of the typewritten page. They had the same incurious look the man outside had worn; weirdos probably pranced through these rooms by the hour. Jai asked, and they wordlessly thumbed us on to another door behind them, immediately returning to their task.
Inside this door we found ourselves in a dark vestibule, hemmed in on all sides by plywood walls. The edges of the strips of ply, painted a dull cream-yellow, were peeling off, like skin from nails. There were three doors in front of us: one on the left with a silver lock fat as a pomfret stuck in its latch; one right in front with a big brown signboard with ‘No Entry Without Permission’ stencilled in white; and one on the right, out of true with its frame, saying nothing.
Inside, a man leaned back in his chair, the fingers of his right hand splayed over his forehead, listening to a small radio softly singing Mukesh’s maudlin ‘Jeena yahaan marna yahaan.…’ He looked at us through the slats of his fingers, then closed his eyes. He was in a moment of sadness; his head moving slowly, one with the song. Jai closed his eyes and began to hum the song too. This fucking country was awash with sentimental fools. One turn of a radio knob could conjure up weeping hordes.
The song finished. The man rubbed his eyes and sat up. He had a too-perfect mop of brown-black hair, with a parting clean and sharp as a knife. Probably a cheap toupee. Jai said, ‘There’s no one like Mukesh.’ The man agreed, eyes shining, holding his left hand like a small mirror before his face. ‘Before god! First Mukesh, then god! When I hear Mukesh I stop doing everything. I don’t care whose work it is—my wife’s, my children’s, or my boss’s! After all, if you are kneeling in the temple in front of god’s image, do you jump up because a senior officer walks in?’ Jai said, ‘Your god is truly great, and you are a true disciple!’
The man patted his toupee sombrely—his hair was definitely nylon—and looked at me. I told him my name. The light went out of his eyes. He nodded impassively, and opening a register, turned it around and pushed it at me. The entire double-page spread was a scrawl of different hands, most of them illegible. I filled in our names, the name of the person we’d come to meet, the purpose of our meeting, our address, the time of arrival, and signed. He peered at it without turning it around, then putting a steel foot-rule on a white sheet of foolscap, neatly tore out a small square of paper and wrote my name on it with a ballpoint pen tethered to the desk with a string. Then he shut the register, got up, buttoned the waistband of his trousers with an audible suck, opened the door, and left.
Jai said, ‘The song lover meets the commissar in a moment of melancholic intelligence sharing.’
The song lover returned, loosed his trouser button with a sigh, and sat down, expressionless. Then he turned up the small radio again. Mohammad Rafi’s voice floated out. ‘Yoon toh hamne lakh haseen dekhe hain, tumsa nahin dekha.…’ Immediately he grew agitated. ‘Junk! Junk! Junk! Is this a song! A hundred thousand lovers! Shammi Kapoor jumping up and down!’ Jai said, ‘Will it take time, boss?’ The man just held up a hand, his face full of distaste. We waited, talking to each other in whispers. He diddled the radio knobs, unleashing static, hunting for Mukesh. A boy came in carrying tea in small glasses in a wire holder. The song lover raised his eyebrows at us. We raised ours back. He raised them at the tea boy. The tea boy gave us a glass each and left.
A low buzzer rang somewhere in the room. The song lover got up, buttoned his trousers, and said, ‘Come.’ Gingerly, he cracked open the door with the signboard, and ushered us in.
The room was big, with enough space for a sofa suite with a coffee-table, and a big work desk with four chairs in front of it. Behind the desk was a high-backed chair, with an unsmiling man with a thin moustache sitting on it. The collar of his white shirt was pushed open to accommodate a small towel wrapped around his neck. He acknowledged us with a curt nod, making no effort at getting up. His spectacles were black and thick, and he bent down to his papers again, as we took a chair each.
On the wall behind the officer were four framed pictures. Gandhi, Nehru, and the incumbent president and prime minister. The only place those four would ever be found together was on a government wall. Gandhi was grinning toothily at the man below, while Nehru had a faraway tryst-with-destiny look. I turned slowly in my chair and scanned the room. Thick green curtains on the windows, two slim black briefcases on the floor with gold-coloured number locks, a heap of dirty-brown files tied with cord on the table next to the single sofa, some photographs on the wall of the man puffed out in police uniform, some thick books on a shelf, prominent among them the Indian Penal Code and Gray’s Anatomy.
And then my eyes fell on Jai, and I was terrified. He was going into full Lincoln mode—the self-righteous clasp of the lips, the moral tightening of the eyes, the squaring of the ethical shoulders. He was poised for an oration. Fuck, the bugger was mad! These guys ate Lincolns for breakfast. If the real Abe showed up, they’d make him fill forms and wait in a corner till his beard touched the floor. Only the Sethijis of the world were a match for them. I put a hand on his knee. He turned and looked at me as if I was standing between him and the eradication of poverty. I pinched his flesh hard till the pain took the nobility out of his eyes. ‘Say nothing!’ I hissed.
The man looked up from his papers, the glasses low on his nose. I said, ‘His name is Jai. He’s the editor
.’ Not a muscle flickered on the man’s face. He looked down again and continued to read with the tip of his pencil.
They were all Huthyams, inscrutable bastards, whether they prattled like schoolgirls or stayed silent like monks.
After a long time he threw the pencil down on the table, making it bounce, shut the file, and took off his glasses. Then he chucked the file on top of several others lying on the floor. On cue the song lover appeared, stooping at the waist, in response, no doubt, to the press of an invisible buzzer, and falling to his knees, picked up the files and vanished. The man lifted one end of the towel around his neck and without removing it dabbed his forehead and chin, his eyes shut. Then he opened his eyes and turned off the table lamp, pushed back his chair and scissored his hands on his belly. ‘So why did they want to kill you?’
I said, my hand tight on Jai’s knee, ‘I have no idea. I have been hoping some of your men would let me know.’ He said, ‘You know the killers?’
‘No.’
‘You have met them?’
‘Saw them in the courtroom once.’
‘Did you think they were killers?’
‘I have no idea at all.’
He dabbed his upper lip with the end of the towel. It was like a small python coiled around his neck. Then he looked at Jai.
Jai leapt on to his horse and said, ‘I think it’s a complete set-up.’
No hand on the knee was going to restrain the march of the human spirit.
The man said, steepling the fingers on his belly, ‘Interesting. You mean like a frame-up?’
Jai said, ‘Yes. The truth is definitely something else. It’s quite possible the arrested men are not the killers at all.’
I loved this. So wonderfully easy to declare other men’s killers innocent! Sara and he were probably sharing morning walks at the Lodhi Gardens!
I said, ‘Why don’t you tell us what you know? We are just conjecturing.’
The man ignored me, and said to Jai, ‘So what do you think could be the reason for this set-up?’
What was the fucking academy of dark sciences that all these cops went to! They were meant to be brutal breakers of bones. But they all behaved like master psychoanalysts. From lowly Hathi Ram to this portly DIG. No pounding; just slow dicing.
Jai said, at full gallop now, ‘To protect the minister, to protect the government, to protect all the contractors who may be involved.’
I wanted to move my hands up from his knees to his testicles and squeeze them till they became one. It was really time to shut down missionary schools and elite education in India; they bred fucking aliens who knew nothing of Indian reality.
The man with a towel for a neck said, ‘But they are the obvious suspects. This would directly indict them.’
Jai said, ‘Ah, but that’s it, precisely. It’s so obvious that it cannot possibly be taken for the truth. The basic law of false obviousness. So everyone will say—they couldn’t be that stupid. So everyone argues the innocence of the killers, they go to jail, get bail after four years, are acquitted after twelve—and forgotten by now are the contractors and the politicians and the siphoning of hundreds of millions!’
He was just making it up as he went along. The basic law of false obviousness! He was a star. I should have plunged to touch his feet.
The man slowly rubbed his chin against his towel neck and said, ‘Interesting. So the crooks get some petty killers to launch an operation to shoot you, but to not actually shoot you?’
Jai said, waving his arms now, his voice thick with wisdom, ‘Absolutely! But it doesn’t actually matter whether they really shoot him or not. If they do, end of story; if they don’t, still end of their part of the story. In any case, no one can ever trace the killers back to these guys. The shooters, you can be sure, are just cheap labour, picked from the villages, given ten thousand rupees and a country-made iron each. More disposable than plastic bags.’
Looking at me, towel-neck said, ‘Would you agree with him?’
I said, ‘I know nothing.’
Jai said, ‘Nor do I. I am just making plausible conjecture.’
Do men with big words do big things, or do they just dig bigger holes in their path of life?
I said, ‘But the security sub-inspector seemed to suggest that you all knew the true story.’
The man said, with no movement or change in expression, ‘The contract to kill you was taken out by the ISI.’
I said, ‘Of Pakistan?’
He nodded.
Jai said, ‘You are not serious? This sounds like bad Indian propaganda. Blame everything on Pakistan. Why would they care about him?’
So now I was a geopolitical pawn. Fuck, what would Guruji make of all this? Would he convert it into a mango parable or a sea parable?
The man said, ‘They calculated that killing him would indict all the political men he exposed. It would cause a public outcry. The government could even be destabilized.’
Public outcry! Every bugger in this mad country was a fantasist. At best, three women would have cried. My mother in a continuum of wailing that had been going on forever; Dolly/folly with a mix of self-pity and coy winsomeness at the cremation; and Sara for the poor killers who would now be arraigned.
Jai said, ‘So the government is protecting him to protect itself?’
I said, ‘The arrested men have confessed to this? This ISI thing?’
The man was now holding the towel at both ends and slowly working it back and forth. The way my grandmother in the village used to churn butter. Maybe it was a way of getting his cerebellum to rise to the surface.
He said, ‘It’s only a matter of time. They will.’
Mahatma Gandhi grinned down at him. Nehru looked nobly into the distance.
I said, ‘You know it from other sources?’
He said, ‘The government of India is a big organization. It works all the time.’
The fire had gone of out Jai’s eyes. He was a mortal once again. He said, ‘So you are still not sure?’
The man ignored him now. He said, looking between the two of us at the exit door, ‘So you know nothing at all?’
We looked at each other. How Jai would spin this story in margarita living-rooms lit by perfumed candles!
The man stood up—he was short, his waist barely reaching the edge of the table—and extended a short arm with a small soft hand. Despite the neck towel the hand was clammy. The door behind us opened and the song lover appeared. The man said, ‘Take them to Dubeyji. Then he sat down, put his glasses back on, and began to read from where he had left off with the tip of his red-and-black striped pencil. When Jai said, goodbye sir, the man without looking up waved his pencil in erudite dismissal.
Outside the door Jai said, ‘The government of India is a very big organization with very small men! He probably sees Pakistani plots in the colour of his piss!’
Turning to him, the song lover said, ‘Which is your favourite Mukesh song?’
Dubeyji was a mouse. Actually, he was more like a squirrel. He was tiny, with a rodent’s nose and darting eyes, but his air was playful, not furtive. Under the rodent’s nose was a bristly moustache, quivering, full of friendly cheer, like a squirrel’s tail.
The road to him had led through another maze of cardboard walls and doors—no windows—and empty rooms with unoccupied chairs and desks. Everywhere the furniture was in disarray, as if the occupants had rushed out at short notice. Either the intelligence armies of the state were scouring the landscape for priceless information, or they had concluded it was a hopeless pursuit in this mad sprawling nation and simply abandoned their stations.
Dubeyji shook our hands heartily, and said to me, ‘Good job, sir.’
Like everyone else in the building he wore a creamy-white bush shirt and dark trousers. On his thin left wrist was an enormous steel-link watch, and on his right many strands of frayed pink-red mauli. Around his neck a tight black cord with a tin locket. Inside it, I was sure, nestled a picture of a holy man or two
.
Dubeyji was the officer on the case, with the rank, perhaps, of sub-inspector or inspector. In this department of spooks there was no place for uniforms. This was not policing through authority; this was policing through stealth. Dubeyji was obviously a field man, the swordarm of this central citadel of investigations and intelligence. On his humble gleanings would grand cases live and die, grand governments plot and move. In this job, his size and his rodent’s nose were definite assets.
The room given to the swordarm was so tiny that I had to half pull one chair out to let Jai through before dragging it back in. It was intimate, like being together on a bed: the small steel table, the three iron-pipe chairs tight around it, our bodies tending to touch at the feet and the knees. Nailed to the corner of the wall was a small fan, whirling noisily, moving its neck with arthritic clicks. Jai looked at it malevolently, and Dubeyji got up with some difficulty and poked it dead. This closet room, unexpectedly, also had a window. But in keeping with the mood of the place it was a thin slit, a gun embrasure in a castle wall. When he saw us looking at it, the swordarm said, ‘In the beginning, once, someone jumped out during questioning and killed himself. Now no air, no light, but also no suicide!’ He had his own briefcase too—shiny Rexine, dark brown, a bit dented, standing next to his chair. It too had a numbered lock. Presumably 007: licence to inspire suicide.
Smiling happily under his bushy moustache, Dubeyji said, ‘So tell me, sir, what all do you know about your murder.’
I said, ‘I only know what the police has told me.’
The Story of My Assassins Page 36