The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  He needed nothing else.

  Then one day Gwalabhai drove up in a cloud of dust in a new blue Gypsy and told him about a man who was working for forces inimical to the nation. For the enemy. Pakistan. This man posed as a journalist and was cunning as a fox. He lived in the country’s capital, Delhi, and was guarded by the police. A team would have to be assembled. Gwalabhai would help do that.

  Guruji sent his blessings. And from the ravines, the others—Kana Commando, Hulla Mallah, Katua Kasai—their admiration and love.

  This one was for the country. This one was for all Indians. They knew he would not fail.

  Hathoda Tyagi—from the sugarcane fields of western UP, brain-curry man and ascetic disciple of Hanuman and Donullia—was overcome with gratitude and a sense of purpose.

  13

  THE SCALES OF ETERNITY

  ‘Kafka!’ Jai said, slurping a mouthful of tea. ‘Read Kafka, read Miller, read all the business newspapers. That’s it! And pay no attention to god, and pay no attention to love! Power is the engine of the world, and sex and money its oil and lubricants. God is at best the invocation before you start the engine—meaningless if you have no engine to start! God is a goli, a multi-flavoured pill, invented by those who have power, money and sex, to give to those who have none! Love is another great goli. Some days we too swallow these golis. They feel good, like a joint, a temporary high! But they are not the reality. The reality is power, money, sex! And yes, there’s another goli—morality!’

  And, I thought, the revolution. Sara, Kafka, Miller and Che Guevara. Power, sex, and the revolution! All in one unequal body, nailed singing to the wall.

  We were sitting in his swank new office. Glass walls shaded with wooden venetian blinds; recessed white lights in the ceiling; a big desk heavy with stationery and books and magazines and papers and a gargantuan tea mug and a computer; a black-and-white picture of his wife behind him, her eyes and mouth in happy laughter; and a round table with four chairs tucked into it where important decisions about shaping the world could be taken with speed and intimacy.

  Nearly three years had passed since we finally shed ourselves of the magazine. His beard was greyer, his hair thinner. Little else had changed. He was still at the pulpit, his passion and eloquence undimmed. But the discourse was no longer state-of-the-nation, no more about democracy, liberty, equality, public interest, Gandhi, Nehru, and the idea of India. Now was the time of the philosopher of realism. In a flawed world, flawed humans pursued flawed dreams—the real triumph lay in being a master negotiator of this journey, whose engine and lubricants were power, money and sex.

  ‘Kapoorsahib! Remember him? We used to knock him, but he knew how to read the world! Kapoorsahib ran the world, Kapoorsahib is the world! You must understand, Kafka is not power, Kafka only understood power! Power is the Castle! Kapoorsahib is the Castle! You and I can only write about the phallus, but Kapoorsahib is the phallus!’

  With a typical sleight-of-words Jai had made a virtuous thesis of his humiliation, our humiliation. In reality, Kapoorsahib had stripped and buggered all of us, Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey included, for many months before sending us on our way.

  Kapoorsahib had taken on the financial cross of the company but had made each of us sign hillocks of documents higher than our knees, ensuring we initialled each page (we had to take breaks to rest our wrists). These documents made it clear that every legal liability for anything the magazine had ever done was ours. The three original investors had their high-powered lawyers read their agreements and argue about them, unsuccessfully, but Jai and I just signed wherever we were told. There were no lawyers we could possibly hire, and to attempt to read those documents was to enter a labyrinth of language and possibility that could fry your brains.

  There was no point in contesting anything, either. If we had once signed away our life, liberty and lund to Kuchha King, Kuchha Singh and Frock Raja, then we were doing it a hundredfold now. Kapoorsahib’s lawyers had pioneered endless unintelligible ways of laying claim to them.

  At the final signing at the lawyers’ offices in Connaught Place, in a sombre meeting room with video-conferencing screens and dark teakwood furniture, the three original investors had not even cast a look in our direction. We had sat at the opposite end of a table huge enough to negotiate the buying of America, and signed our respective hillocks, one junior attorney by each one’s side to ensure we didn’t skip a single page. Just before the ceremonial disembowelment, Jai had attempted one last stand at Kapoorsahib’s feet. Should the two of us not be given some kind of severance fee, given all we had done to create the magazine? ‘You should be caned! For creating this fucking shambles. Across your dirty buttocks!’ Kapoorsahib used the Hindi word—chootad. ‘For taking on this garbage I should get the two of you for free! Put a leash on you and tie you to my door!’

  Within the month, Jai had lined up a job for himself as a consultant with a television news production company. The money was real, and way more than anything our wretched enterprise had ever produced. It was also the key that once again unshackled his eloquence. Since then, in the last two years, he had floated on his soaring rhetoric to two job changes—the cabins getting swisher, the cheques heavier, the philosophy of realism more robust. Now he was astride a zebra, a round-the-clock news channel. Depending on the call of the hour it could be posited as a black animal temporarily painted white, or as a white animal temporarily painted black. Realism never dressed better, and Jai was the master of such dressage.

  India had more such zebras now than in five millennia. And more masters of such dressage than ever before.

  Of these, Kapoorsahib was an exemplar. Kapoorsahib was the phallus.

  Once we were out the door, he’d brought in an old washed-up beast from the watering hole of the India International Centre. The city was awash with such animals: vaguely familiar names whose eminence was a mystery. Men who had once thundered morals on the editorial pages of the dailies, and now dissected Delhi over whisky and soda in subsidized bars. They were all also zebra riders, and could be used by anyone wanting to dress up realism better. So the magazine had chugged on, now full of political and strategic bombast, and hardly any reportage. Jai said, ‘You can see what it is? It’s an iron poker kept in the fire. When it’s needed—if it’s needed—it will be taken out for a quick jab! It’s another Afghan carpet venture complete with the herbal tea and the lovely woman!’

  After signing off my hillock of papers I had tried to quit the business. An old-time book publisher from Daryaganj, full of the excitement of new glossy jackets and perfect spines—foreign imprints and dollar signs—had offered me a two-book deal. One on the story of our food scam sting operation; the other on the politics of modern India. The advance was enough to sustain me if I ate grass from Lodhi Gardens and drank water from the Yamuna. But I gave it a shot. I threw Dolly/folly out for a month, banishing her to her mother’s, and locked myself into my tiny study and hammered the keyboard till it developed a list and I had to put a chewing-gum plug under its left leg.

  In six weeks I had sixty thousand words hammered out, a title in place, and a dedication in mind. I stuck to the details of the scam and left out our own sorry story of the aftermath. Jai thought it was a stupid decision. ‘Human drama! That’s what people want! The scam is finally a bore! What’s interesting is what happens to the people because of it!’ The publisher, a thin, refined man, with a pencil moustache from forty years ago, was delighted by my efficiency. He shook my hand hard and long.

  I called him a week later. He was terse. He needed some more time to finish reading it. I gave it ten days and called again. He said books were not newspapers, and publishers had hundreds of books to deal with. He would call. Another ten days went by. In that time I played around with the text some more, chopping and adding. Fair, tall Dolly/folly looked at me in soft-eyed adoration, as if I’d just written the Mahabharata. And she hummed songs of courage and determination. Felicia passed through the day like a dark ghost, bearing tea
and toast.

  This time he didn’t take my call. His phone kept playing the Gayatri Mantra till I began to believe I had given my book to a temple priest not a publisher. I called one of the editors he had introduced me to. A middle-aged Bengali whose virtue seemed to be sensibility, not language. He wore thick glasses and had a twitch in his right eye. Laughing nervously he said, ‘The lawyers have raised some issue. But I cannot tell—only boss will know for sure.’ I drove into the hellish lanes of Daryaganj and had three angry arguments before I could find parking space.

  Mr Sahgal showed no sign of panic when I stormed into his room, brushing aside his assistant—a traumatized aunty in a blue saree who kept bleating, please sir, please sir. He was wearing a sharp black suit and his sharp black moustache, and he calmly hung me out to dry with a shower of legal objections raised by the attorneys. The manuscript lying in front of him had so many yellow and pink Post-its sticking out if it, I knew I would have to rewrite every page. My only counter-argument was that lawyers are alarmists. He said, so refined, ‘Lawyers send people to jail, and keep people out of jail.’

  And make sure no one ever does anything worthwhile.

  I tried to be like Jai, talking the grand stuff: public good, clean governance, et al.

  He only said, smooth and plain as vanilla ice cream, ‘I am just a publisher sir, not Mother Teresa.’

  He gave me the manuscript with its pink and yellow ears as a take-home gift. On my way out I stood on the back fender of his old white Mercedes till it crashed to the ground. Then I used a sharp stone to run a loving line through its steel flesh and draw an uncircumcised cock at its end. As my assassin Kabir would have said, ‘Bhosdi ke hatt, tera lauda hai ya lutth!’ When I returned home I put the festooned manuscript on the shelf in the study beneath The Naked Lunch, and addressing the ceiling fan, announced my retirement as a writer.

  The very next day I drove off to see Guruji.

  He calmed my nerves and told me what to do. On my way back I began to call old acquaintances for a job. I didn’t call Jai. I needed work and money, not one more oration on the big picture.

  Truth is, there was no big picture. There was just Kapoorsahib and his labyrinth and Bhalla and his line girls and Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey and their flowing mermaids and Huthyam and his shadows and the assassins and Sara’s stories and Kafka’s castle and Dubeyji and ms fair and folly and Felicia, and lurking in every corner with arsenals of paper lawyers and lawyers and lawyers. There was no big picture. If there was one, it had died fifty years ago, or five hundred years ago, or five thousand years ago. Maybe Gandhi was the last man to have it; or maybe it was the guy who rattled off the Gita, sitting under a ficus, a deerskin draped over his loins.

  There was no big picture. There were no grand connections. There were only endless small pieces, and all you could do was to somehow manage your own. And everyone was struggling to do just that, uncaring of the other. And all of it—the careening, colliding small pieces—were plummeting the world down the chute. My pieces too were in a fine shambles: wife, Sara, shadows, killers. Only Guruji was fine. But he was not a piece. He was Guruji, the answer to all this crap.

  The one piece I knew I could put right was job and money. In two weeks I had it. An investigative reporter’s job in a daily that was modernizing with such speed and determination that its graphics and font sizes were growing by the day and white bimbettes from Los Angeles famed for having their private sex videos leaked were jumping on to its front pages, screaming their skins. I asked the man heading the bureau—fat and affable, hands in his pockets tossing his testicles like salad—to let me know the red lines. He smiled expansively and said there were none; then proceeded to reel off so many names that I lost track. Among them were the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, several political dynasties, and enough business houses to host a grand summit. ‘You can go ahead and hammer everyone else,’ he said, with a smile.

  Yes, slaughter the rabbits. They were way too many, born to be butchered.

  There was no big picture.

  But the salary was good. And Sara was still doing it for me. And two of the three libel cases slammed against us had already fallen by the wayside. Both politicians. It was a waste of time all around. Just one bureaucrat persisted. For the moment.

  In contrast, the three idiots who had jiggled the asshole of the defence ministry with their fake cameras were still being put through the juicer. They popped up in the papers and on television screens now and then, raging, ranting, protesting their innocence. One of them—Jai’s doppelganger—was a particularly bad case. The big picture type. He was most visible, most vocal.

  Some fucks never learn.

  Sub-inspector Hathi Ram felt the same.

  ‘Once a scoundrel, always a scoundrel,’ he’d said, banging the sides of a cream biscuit together and looking at me with steady expressionless eyes. It was January and the small study seemed tighter than ever with both of us swathed in extra layers. The policeman wore a cheap tweed coat and a brown muffler around his neck. His face looked leathery in the lamplight with the grey stubble pushing through. As always I would have to be patient to divine the true purpose of his visit. No Indian could ever talk straight or deal straight; presumably, it would bring disgrace to our complex heritage. ‘There are exceptions,’ he continued. ‘Valmiki changed from brigand to poet and saint. But it’s just as well that such things happen rarely. I am not sure we want too many saints. In this country, I often feel, better to have more scoundrels than saints.’

  I was sitting with my feet tucked under me on the chair, a green monkey-cap on my head. Guruji always said the skull must be kept warm and the aura of brainwaves preserved close around the head. That’s why the great rishis wore long hair, and eminent men tied turbans. I said, ‘So what have my lot turned out to be—scoundrels or saints?’

  Huthyam said, ‘You know, I don’t know anything about these things. This is the work of other, more important men. My duty is only to protect you. But I have heard things, not good things. I would have to be a saint to say that these men are not scoundrels. And you know policemen can never be saints. Scoundrels can be saints, crooks can be saints, murderers can be saints, but policemen can never be anything but policemen.’

  I waited. He too was a master of his game. Like Kapoorsahib, like Guruji, like Sara, like Jai. In some ways he was more honourable. He had worked the gutter, not created it. He banged the cymbals one more time and then in slow sequence planted them deep in his mouth. All three buttons of his cheap tweed coat were stretched. He had put on weight in the three years I had known him.

  ‘I am sure I am wrong, but my information is that it didn’t matter at all whether they killed you or not. They were sent to get themselves caught, or shot. Of course they didn’t know it. They thought they were on a mission.’

  Fuck. Everyone spoke through frosted glass.

  I said, ‘But who sent them?’

  He opened up a biscuit carefully and ran it lightly under his nose. ‘I don’t know. Someone powerful wanted to get rid of them or at least get rid of some of them. The contract on you was just an excuse.’

  ‘So they were set up. They were trapped. They are, also, in a sense, victims.’ Sara would have pinned a medal to my chest.

  He banged the biscuit halves together and his face hardened. ‘They are all scoundrels,’ he hissed. ‘Make no mistake about it. They are thieves, crooks, murderers. They are no more victims than any of us—trapped in the lives we’ve been given. One of them cuts men with a knife like ripe guavas. Two of them are dangerous drug dealers—one a Chinese—who have been killing since they were ten years old. From Kabul to Calcutta they control the narcotics route. The fourth one is a mastermind—a quiet Musalman from Bareilly who raped the daughter of the police chief and has a direct hotline to the Bombay underworld. He moves in and out of Uttar Pradesh’s jails like a friendly pigeon and in every jail he is treated with fear and respect. And the last one, the last one is an asura. I would run awa
y from the street on which his shadow fell. He is so strong he can turn an Ambassador car on its head. And they say, where other people have a heart, he has stone. Nothing can move him. And he wants nothing—not money, not women, not accolades. He just likes to kill. He smashes your head in so that even your mother doesn’t recognize you. And he never fails. Once he takes a contract on you, you may as well just kill yourself. It’s why everyone is whispering that this story does not add up.’ He paused, sitting up stiffly in the chair, and looked directly at me, his mouth smiling, his eyes still. ‘You are alive because you were not really meant to be killed.’

  Through the closed door, melodramatic television sounds seeped in.

  I said, ‘But then, why were they sent?’

  He said, ‘That is the big question! Why were they sent, if not to kill you? I think they were sent to get caught. I think someone very powerful wanted to get rid of them. Maybe all of them; maybe some of them; maybe one of them. It’s like a suspense thriller. All very complex. Till the last scene we won’t know who the real killer is. It could even be the policeman. The very man who is giving you the information.’ And he raised his eyebrows and held the pose.

  I said, ‘Do they always work together? Are they one gang?’

  He let go of the pose and snorted. ‘That only happens in the movies, my friend! Where gang members sing songs together, and buy sarees for each other’s wives! These people know less about each other than I know, say, about your black rose.’ He gestured with his chin towards the closed door. He meant Felicia. Her skin fascinated him. ‘What is not clear is whether they were meant to get caught after killing you, or before. Whether someone wanted to just have them punished for a bit, or put away for good.’

  Sara, the seer of our times.

  I said, ‘But why do it in this elaborate way, through a plot to kill me?’

  The policeman had put the biscuit back together and was rotating it in his fingers like a coin. ‘This is India, my friend. Why do anything simply if you can do it in a complicated way? Have you ever been to get a driving licence or a ration card? Have you ever filed a complaint at a police station? Have you ever got a child admitted to school? It’s the brahminical brain, so wily, so twisted, it draws a straight line by making circles.’