The school was certainly extravagant. Sixteen concrete rooms, in an L-shaped block, ten and six, all the rooms twelve by twelve feet, with two windows and two doors each. Twelve years ago a local village man had become the MLA of the area and had then become a minister in the state government. The school was his gift to his kinsmen, though the village was too small to fulfil the criterion for a high school. Once the minister lost power, the school grew derelict. Maintenance funds were scarce and most villagers didn’t have the patience to walk their children down the long tortuous education road that would most likely end in a blind alley. Now the bricks of the boundary wall were being continually purloined, several rooms had become living quarters for the teachers, and the playing field behind the building was grazing ground for cattle.
The headmaster, who ran a small cement sale agency alongside, actually didn’t give a damn about the school. His only concern was avoiding a scandal. He didn’t want a death on his hands. Times had changed. There were small and big newspapers everywhere, some like Sanjhi Khabar, Twilight News, no more than four smudged sheets, always on the lookout for a juicy story that they could drum up and parley into a deal. This was a comfortable posting. His village was just fifteen kilometres away, and the cement agency was doing brisk business. Any controversy, and he could well be on his way to eastern UP, or worse still, to some godforsaken hamlet at 8000 feet in the Kumaon—an hour’s walk from the road and so cold in December that it froze your piss.
This boy bothered him. Either he was going to be dead before he was eighteen, or he was going to be a legend. The headmaster had spent a lifetime thrashing bullies and brats, and he had learnt to identify their varying thresholds. The most common ones gave you lip and played to the gallery: they could be easily silenced with some precise insults about their caste, or their physical features, or the sheer meanness of their family conditions. There were others, more thick-skinned, inured to insult, who needed to be caned to within an inch of their lives before they understood the obedience–unishment equation. There were still others, physically strong, more resistant to authority, carrying the threat of counter-violence in their bodies. For these you called in their fathers: between master and patriarch they could be taught the meaning of piety.
This boy was different. He didn’t give lip, and he didn’t play to any gallery. Most times, he just exploded disproportionately to someone’s provocation. Then there was no restraining him till his fury was spent. And physically he was an ox. On a few occasions he had mercilessly beaten up as many as six-seven boys, while scaring off another half a dozen from interfering. Since class seven, the headmaster had not risked assaulting him. Matters were compounded by not knowing what would trigger his violence. His Hindi teacher, a thoughtful man who chewed on his sacred thread, always said, ‘Inside his head is a jwalamukhi. A simmering volcano. Does anyone ever know why and when a volcano will erupt? Even a geologist? Even the volcano itself? It’s the same with him.’ And when he was asked what should be done, the teacher would say, thread between his teeth, ‘What do men do with a live volcano? Keep a watchful eye on it, and maintain a safe distance.’
Everyone took that advice as an injunction—at home, in the school, in the village. Except one man—the one man who was to shape and define his life.
Rajbir Gujjar had done twenty-four years in the state constabulary and was now employed in the school as sports-master. In his youth he had been a sprinter, but not good enough to go under eleven seconds, and then in police camp he had graduated to becoming a lightning-quick right-out in hockey. He had made it to the state police team and had played the national police games and endless other regional tournaments for five years. Rajbir’s role on the field was simple: run down the long pass on the right flank, trap the ball, and centre it swiftly for the forwards. He had to do this endlessly: explode from the half line, heart and muscles pumping, stick in his right hand, and somehow intercept the speeding ball and swat it to the top of the D. His mates called him Bhagbir Gujjar. For doing this well, he had been excused from all policing duties for seven years. He lived in a separate, special barracks with the team, close to the playing field. They had to be on the ground before the grey of morning broke; during the day they rested and oiled their bodies; and at four in the afternoon—rain, sun, or storm—they had to be back on the field till night fell and they were guessing at the ball by its running sound. Their extra diet included a litre of milk, three eggs, and a dozen bananas each day, and chicken three times a week.
These long years of no policing and pampered, sportsmanlike conduct ensured he was a bit of a deviant by the time he was trucked into the job. In no time his colleagues discovered he was a liability. On the beat he was sincere, full of the self-importance of his uniform, and inside the station he was fastidious, with an eye for rules and procedures. But leaving him alone was dangerous. It took months to just get him to understand that you did not file a First Information Report each time someone walked in with a complaint. The FIR, the case diary, all these were lethal legal documents, and it was critical to manage them right. The repercussions of one unmeditated entry could play out over years and ruin entire lives and careers. There was also the business of balancing the statistics. Rape, theft, murder, riot: there was a historical legacy to them all, and you worked to keep the numbers along the running line—not too over, not too under, nothing that could attract praise or damnation, nothing that got you on the radar.
In his first year in Allahabad, three police stations parcelled him on. As a former star player he had access to senior police officers. He sought and obtained a transfer to Lucknow, imagining in the state capital it would be easier to work as the rules stated. It is the universal affliction of all athletes: struggling to level with the infinitely more complex rules of life outside the playing arena. Of course Lucknow was worse, a rabidly political city, with no scope for errors. In less than a year, the speedy right-out was in Meerut, then Gorakhpur, then Shahjahanpur, then Faizabad. Everywhere he discovered he was sprinting one way with the rules, while all the other players ran the other way. The rules, he realized, were not what were written in the book, but what everyone had agreed to follow.
It was not about wanting to be just, or honest, or different. It was just that he had poor instinct. Within the esoteric circle of khaki, he never seemed to know what the required word or action on any given occasion was.
By the time he reached Gorakhpur he had decided to leave his wife and daughters permanently in Ghamond, his village near Muzaffarnagar, with his parents. It was a village of Tyagis, but his forefathers had lived there for generations without too much trouble. There were enough stories of the Gujjar peasants being oppressed by Tyagi landlords, but that sort of thing could happen anywhere on the Gangetic plain. Anyway, now new awakenings were afoot and new political alliances were being forged—the Gujjars were becoming big landlords themselves and a strong vote block. To begin with, whether all this would improve or worsen matters remained to be seen.
Eventually, Rajbir Gujjar—lightning-quick right-out but third-rate cop—was transferred to the security detail in the state capital. This was a battalion that provided armed personnel to luminaries perceived by the state intelligence cell to be under serious physical threat. The men in this battalion were of two kinds: tyros, straight out of police academy, full of bristle and ignorance; and the older flotsam of the force, dysfunctional men who lacked the savvy and pliability to be smooth and valuable cogs in the great police machine. The men they were tasked to guard were mostly politicians, and sometimes businessmen who were friends of politicians. It was a dumb, mechanical job. For eight hours every day the Personal Security Officer hung around with the Protected Person with his pistol stuffed into his crotch, and then he went off to sleep and watch television. If he was part of a larger contingent of guards, it was even easier. Everyone worked their timings around to suit themselves: sometimes one could work two days without a break, then take four days off and go home to the family.
The man Rajbir was to protect for many years was a legislator from Chitrakoot. Bajpaisahib was a high-caste, a brahmin who had correctly intuited the forces of modernity and politics and aligned himself with the lower castes. His father would have taken ritual dips in the Mandakini if an untouchable’s shadow touched his body, but Bajpaisahib sat with them, ate with them, embraced them, and even deferred to their supreme leader—never contradicting her in public, never speaking out unless she invited him to. Behind closed doors it was a different story: he was more than an equal, disagreeing with her, upbraiding her, using the legendary brahminical wiles honed over millennia of manipulating kings, warriors and laity, to help her chalk her next move.
Power is a greater principle than family, friendship, race, colour, religion. But caste is skin, caste is indelible. And so Rajbir knew, like everyone else who was part of Bajpaisahib’s entourage, that every night, without exception, when all the business of the world was done, when he was finished with the pollutions of the material life, of power and commerce, of blood and flesh, he withdrew to the fastness of purity that had been occupied by his forefathers for hundreds of generations, cleansing himself with mugs of Ganga water. The holy water travelled with him wherever he went, in an army jerry can that was latched tight and strapped to an iron frame welded into the back of his Willys jeep. Each month the sacred water arrived on a Matador van, in four drums from the ghats, under close supervision, and was stored in the garage.
The supreme leader was not unaware of this, and she understood. In public, caste was a badge, but in private caste was skin. Once you were naked, you were who you were born. In birth, marriage and death the greater truths prevailed. Not money, not politics.
On the other hand, in his swift transit through numberless police stations Rajbir had learnt that policing was not about good and bad, law and order, rules and regulations: it was only about politics and money.
Now, in the entourage of Bajpaisahib, detailed by the state to guard the brahmin leader, his 9mm iron tucked into his crotch, the former athlete learnt that there was very little difference between those who broke the law and those who upheld it. It was like a hockey match in which both the teams were on the same side, but were putting up a show to please the spectators. As long as the audience was fooled the match was a success. Occasionally the spectators caught on, and then an elaborate charade had to be undertaken, of blame and inquiry, arrest and bail, crime and punishment.
In his years with Bajpaisahib, Rajbir saw every crime lord, drug don, property king, gunrunner, bootlegger, currency smuggler show up at the suave politician’s door—often bringing in satchels of currency or taking them away. Many of these were famed men of the region, feared and revered. All of them had scores of cases registered against them; some of them had even done fleeting time in jail. They were only moved against when they fell adrift of the party in power.
Rajbir watched them arrive, mostly after dark, in thick entourages, gun barrels sticking out of the jeeps like party flags. Everyone salaamed them, even the policemen. In bad times, they were a better bet than anyone else. They could give you money for a daughter’s wedding, or a father’s operation. They could get you a transfer to a safer post, or a more lucrative one. They could tell an enemy to lay off, or a friend to be more friendly. They could arrange a lawyer and bail. They could organize flight and a refuge.
All you had to do was to remember the favour. To never lose your sense of gratitude. It was not like in the films where, eventually, the day would come for the laconic godfather to call in his dues. Most of the time, no favours were ever called in. There was little that the majority of the beneficiaries could possibly give in return. In truth these dons were like powerful men everywhere. They wanted not just money and influence, but also the affection and admiration of people. Like the best kings and chieftains they wanted to be known as magnificent patrons, as givers and grantors—more considerate than the police, more humane and generous than the state. They wanted the streets and gallis of the villages and towns to buzz with stories of their terror and their munificence. Not different from the gods. Feared and adored. Clasped to the heart and placed on a pedestal.
It was here, in the outer cordon of Bajpaisahib’s circle of security, that Rajbir Gujjar first met Donullia Gujjar. Along with a score of other servants, supplicants, and guards the former athlete was sitting on the ridge-like roots of the ancient banyan tree near the bungalow’s front gate, sipping tea from a glass, listening wide-eyed to the story of the acquisition of a new foreign car worth forty lakh rupees by the supreme leader, when a Trekker and a Willys jeep screeched in through the open gate, burning grass and gravel. The Trekker had an iron roof but no doors while the jeep had a canvas top with its back flap rolled up. It was the hour of last light and the sound of nesting crows and screeching parakeets filled the air.
Nearly a dozen men spilled out of the vehicles, shawls and blankets slung over their shoulders. Half of them were armed with rifles, and at least two of them wore brown buttoned-down pistol holsters across their chests. They were in the rough pants of police khaki or in army olives. Their boots were either thick leather clompers or green canvas jungle shoes, made for thorn and scrub.
They stood around in a loose cluster, with forbidding self-assurance. Then one of the men, in a white turban, with a broad swarthy face and no visible arsenal, grunted an order. Two of the men peeled away and went and planted themselves by the gate. None of the others made any attempt to move towards the bungalow. Under the banyan tree the murmurs began to rage, and Rajbir stood up, adjusting the pistol lodged inside his crotch. He was after all the police guard on duty.
Finally the mesh door on the side of the bungalow, away from the main entrance, under the porch, opened and Pandeyji came out, wearing his fur-lined astrakhan and rimless glasses. The man in the turban spoke to him. Pandeyji nodded and went back inside. Rajbir sidled closer to the group, angling for an opening, but the men ignored him. Soon glasses of tea appeared for them from the kitchen.
Rajbir retraced his way to the ridge-roots under the banyan, and the word echoing there was, Donullia! Donullia was here! This was Donullia’s band! Everyone was craning to figure out which one he was, which one. It was difficult to tell. Night had fallen, and all the men had their faces masked by shawls and blankets. Also, none deferred to another. In any case there were scarcely any people in the world who even knew what the man looked like. There was no photograph of him in police records, and the only time he had been captured was twelve years ago; he had escaped while being transferred from the police station to the court. Of all the dreaded names of the region, his was the most charismatic.
Donullia had become a brigand at the age of sixteen, shooting dead his thakur landlord and his ruthless son. The story went that the peasant boy, enraged by the regular rape of his sisters by the masters, had run them down in the yard of their own house, and his last words to them were: ‘Motherfuckers, you have never treated anyone as equal, but I am treating you both equally—one barrel and one bullet for each!’
The donulli—double-barrel—gun was the thakur’s own, and the Gujjar teenager had blown one nulli each through both their hearts. Two days later, the thakur’s brothers had picked up the boy’s sisters and raped them repeatedly before decapitating them and hanging their heads on the palash t
ree. Only great terror can restore order. A week later, one brother had a hole blasted through his spine as he squatted by the long rushes next to the Gupt nullah early in the morning. The note found stuffed into his nostril warned that any further act of retaliation against the Gujjars and every member of the thakur’s family would be hunted down.
The thakurs exploded with fury and the repercussions were felt all the way in Lucknow. In those days the thakurs were still a political force. Soon after, a special police party comprising two dozen men led by an officer of the rank of assistant superintendent was dispatched to bring the young brigand to book. A picture of the police party armed with SLRs and carbines was published in the local papers, accompanied by a short write-up in which the officer leading the group said they would bring the killer back in a week, on a leash, like a house dog.
But the boy had vanished—into the forests and ravines of Chitrakoot and from there perhaps into the adjoining badlands of the Chambal in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Nine months later, the special party called off the search and went back to the capital.
The word spread that Donullia could slip through men like a shadow.
Eight months later, the boy ransacked a marriage party of another thakur family of village Habusa, killing the groom and his father and decamping with cash, jewellery, and arms. The note lodged in the dead groom’s nostril warned that any thakur family marrying without paying him his cess faced similar consequences.
The state assembly in Lucknow was convulsed with anger as legislators thumped desks and uprooted microphones. A second police party was assembled under an established sharpshooter of the state police. For more than a year the entire district was combed, the boy’s house kept under watch, informers paid and put on the road, every criminal of the area questioned and aligned, other Gujjar families threatened and tortured, but there was no sign of the young bandit.
The Story of My Assassins Page 39