The Story of My Assassins

by Tarun J. Tejpal

  I looked at her, the light glancing off her photo shoulders and sharp collarbones. She still needed an urgent inoculation of Vedanta, but she was mad enough to intuit the truths of this mad country. How could I have let her go? Had Guruji met her, he may never have advised me to zip up and run. For a moment I almost felt in love with her. Were it not for the karateka something pulpy might have slipped my mouth.

  I said, ‘But if the idea was to kill them, why didn’t the police do it?’

  She said, ‘I don’t think the police knew they had to kill them. Whoever was tipping them off on the hit was hoping they would kill them in the heat of the encounter. In the hotel in cold blood would have been impossible—too many cops involved, too many witnesses. Can be done in Bihar; tough in Delhi. Many wouldn’t believe it, but we do have some kind of a free press and an independent judiciary.’

  She said it flatly. Something had certainly settled inside her.

  I said, ‘So the main target of—whoever—was the Tyagi boy?’

  She said, ‘Yes. It clearly seems so. And to some extent, Chaaku. The other three were just journeymen, filling the numbers on an assignment. Those two platform boys, Kaaliya and Chini, are just happy-go-lucky fellows, content to make do with some money, some drugs, and some sex. Probably more decent than anyone you know. And Kabir—gentle Kabir!—he is a wronged angel. He should be wrapped up in someone’s arms and protected. Even in prison he floats in an aura of peace, chiselling his choozas and giving them to everyone. Demands nothing, says little. Has no lawyer, doesn’t want to file even a bail application. No one bothers him—not the inmates, not the warders. And slowly he is beginning to be called Baba. The Tyagi boy and Chaaku stay away from these three and have nothing to do with them. They stay away from each other too.’

  I said, ‘Will they get bail?’

  She said, ‘Yes, soon. But by then they will already have served most of their sentence. So it goes in this godforsaken country.’

  I said, ‘Where did you find out all this?’

  She said, ‘Mr peashooter, if you look you find.’

  For the next fifteen minutes I tried hard to plug into the old socket that had electrified us, made our bodies sing and singe around each other. The delicate shoulders, the full black sarong, the caramel skin was filling me with an unexpected ache. I was hoping if I made the connection she would somehow get rid of the tank in the room. But she had thrown a switch and removed herself from my field. It could have been pretence, but she was not even looking at me any more, choosing to talk to the dining-table about some new law regulating inmates in the prisons of Haryana. She was like a bureaucrat who had finished with a petitioner and was, with polite exasperation, waiting for him to leave. For a moment I thought it was the old kind of provocation. But then I saw her eyes and there was nothing for me there. Besides, I knew if I essayed any move the karateka would pick the chair and break it over my head.

  On a weird impulse—triggered by the meeting with Sara—a few days later, on a Sunday morning, I got into my car with my shadow and drove off to Muzaffarnagar. We left Delhi early because we were heading for serious badlands. My shadow—from the equally notorious area of Bulandshahar—said, ‘We must leave that place well before the sun begins to go down. After dark, even armed policemen dare not venture there.’

  Even early on a late winter morning—with the mist still hovering over the ditches—the roads were choked, and it seemed as if one would never exit Delhi’s endless sprawl. Concrete finger on concrete finger, the ancient city seemed to extend itself relentlessly to swallow the countryside around. Where once seed of grain sprouted, now septic tanks bloomed. Out of every slain tree had grown a lamp post, and every dead nilgai had been replaced by two cars. The highway was full of sugarcane—on bullock-carts, tractor-trolleys, small trucks—on its way to the factories, and I drove with the windows up to avoid being speared by a swinging stalk.

  The moment we were out of the hell of Muzaffarnagar we had to turn right off the highway, and then stop every ten minutes for directions. Gnarled trees with dust-coated leaves were all around and neat blocks of sugarcane ran to the horizon. I had taken the address from the files of the fat penguin, Sethiji. At some point the interior road we were chasing ran out of tar and we were rolling along on dust. A pool of stagnant black marked the entry into the village. The houses in it were a mix of mud and cut-rate brick. Television antennae sprouted like hair. As I drove around the outskirts asking for directions, I saw at least two small Maruti cars, the sun blinding on their skins.

  Eventually we had to park by a field and walk a winding path through juicy green wheat fields and tall sugarcane. On the way was a grove of ageing mango trees, the leaves dull, the barks deathly. From that point the dogs picked us up and howled us all the way to the house.

  The main section of the house was in plastered brick, while the rooms on the side were naked brick attachments with thatched roofs. In the front yard, by a long mud trough, five tethered buffaloes and two oxen masticated in tandem. I could see pipes and wires—running water and electricity.

  Gyanendra Tyagi was leaning back on a charpoy, two grimy hard pillows under his elbow and an empty Bournvita tin by his side. He looked old. His eyes were rheumy. The white hair on his head, without its turban, showed sparse. His bad leg, clear of his pulled-up dhoti, was thin as a matchstick. Every few minutes he hawked and spat into the empty tin. Like every other Indian he was probably dying of tuberculosis.

  When I told him I was a journalist, he spat a thick gob into the tin, and without preamble, mumbled that he knew nothing about his son, that he had not seen him in a few years. My shadow picked up a mooda lying close by, took it to the corner of the yard, and sat down, looking at me in contempt. It was his luck to be detailed to guard a low-life like me.

  When I persisted, the old man said his son had been seduced by bad company and forced into the wrong life. There was a lower-caste man, a Gujjar, a sports master in his school, who had taken control of his son, debased him. Tyagis, such as he, kept no truck with that criminal caste—not of friendship, not of marriage. Did he know that before a Gujjar father married off his daughter, he checked whether his son-in-law could scale a tall wall quickly and as swiftly crack open a closed window? A man of such a wayward caste had snatched his boy away.

  But the boy was his boy, still a good son. He had, over the years, taken care of their land disputes in the village, and regularly sent them money. When his sister was being tormented by her husband he had had the man’s legs broken; then sent him money for the repair.

  Just then a thin old woman came out of the black hole in the brick wall, her salwar-kameez frayed and colourless. The dogs rushed to her, circled her, tails wagging, and then settled back under the charpoy. She peered at me through her thin-rimmed glasses and asked, ‘Guddu has sent you?’ I told her who I was, and she said, ‘Have you met him recently?’ I said no, and she said, ‘Well, when you meet him tell him that Lalli’s husband has begun to thrash her again, and the doctor says his father needs to have his knees operated, and the buffalo we had bought from Ghomuru has died, and his mother moves closer to the cremation ground every day, and if he would just come by and show her his face once, she would feel bathed in the peace of eternity, and there is just no money at home.’ She moved towards the cattle trough, and then turned back and added, ‘And tell him I am still waiting to get him married so that Gyanendra Tyagi’s blood-line does not die out!’

  I was still framing a reply in my mind when the old man suddenly put down his Bournvita tin with a clatter and said in alarm, ‘Is he okay? Have you come with bad news?’

  The old woman said from the trough, ‘The shastriji had said at his birth that no one can hurt him. His stars are like Hrinyakashyap’s. He can only be harmed in a place that has both sunlight and shade; he can only be harmed when he is moving and not still; he can only be harmed when his belly is full; he can only be harmed when he is hidden from view; he can only be harmed by a slain enemy; and he
can only be harmed when he is trapped between friends. For all these things to come together is a near impossibility. To kill the evil Hrinyakashyap, Lord Vishnu had to appear himself and bend the elements. And we know the gods don’t descend into this country any more.’

  I said he was fine. There was no bad news at all. As far as I knew he was in good health and high spirits. And Lord Vishnu had not yet descended.

  Just then the shadow leaned back in his flatwood chair and took out the iron from his crotch and began to caress it. The old man instantly let out a bloodcurdling shout and began to wildly spew abuse, calling us sons of catamites, whores, eunuchs and sweepers. The woman turned around from the trough and charged on hobbling legs, screaming similarly. The dogs exploded like gunfire from under the charpoy, yapping and baying, and darting at our ankles. I tried to tell the old couple that he was a policeman, my guard, but they were beside themselves with drooling rage. The old man even managed to pick up and fling the Bournvita tin at me, and the crazy old crone charged as if she were an armoured carrier out to flatten us.

  We beat a retreat with the dogs yowling us all the way to the car.

  Inside the air-conditioned car, the shadow said, ‘Arre sahib, why do you get familiar with such low-borns? One should always keep them at an arm’s distance.’

  That one foray cured me of all curiosity. I dropped my half-baked plans of visiting Bareilly, Chitrakoot and Keekarpur off the Grand Trunk Road and, in fact, failed to make it even to the nevernever-land platforms of the New Delhi railway station. Sergeant Sara and her bleeding hearts band could carry on with their show, egged on by cheering groupies. I had a life to live.

  Guruji and Hathi Ram and Dubeyji were right—this country was crazy and out of control, and these men were killers and criminals and waywards, and had to square their sordid accounts. I was through with orphans, charmers, chisellers, knifemeisters, hammermen, penguins in courts and rodents in castles, and the labyrinth of all their travails. I did not make the world and I was not responsible for it. Bhallaji and Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey and silhouettes in castles were free to run it; and Jai and his media choir, to sing of it.

  Vedanta had, millennia ago, declared it all an illusion. Maya. All of it. The suffering of the waif and the pomp of the emperor. To fret was naïve. In the scale of eternity we would all be perfectly balanced out. I forgot about my assassins, and after a few attempts at reconnecting—that were rudely snubbed—I forgot about Sara too.

  I did not take the mound of money offered by Jai to squawk on TV, and I did not make the thirty-day pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar. The very thought of chanting alongside mindless traders trekking up to the icy abode of Shiva to ask for some more money exhausted me. Instead, I decided to learn Sanskrit.

  It would have been as easy to learn American football. As I looked for a place to start, a bewildering array of schools and approaches hit me. I didn’t want to sit in an open-university classroom, nor under a tree with my head tonsured. An old Tamilian at the newspaper’s copy desk found me someone who would come home. This Dr Sarma was older than my father, wore a dhoti and sandals, and in his first few tutorials I struggled to understand a single word. It was not just his Telugu accent, it was also the numbing abstractions—of religion, language, and culture—that he piled up without drawing a breath. I understood why for centuries the language had been learnt by rote—there was no other way to hold on to anything. He sipped coal-black Elizabeth’s tea and swayed to and fro, and intoned in a singsong drone, and I was mesmerized.

  Some weeks later, I cornered my colleague and asked him for someone younger. The new man who came was from Kerala, wore jeans and white bush shirts, and cracked jokes in English. He was also a fan of Hindi films. Slowly I settled down to learn the mother of all languages, to acquire the words in which the cosmos was first explained, before colonial buccaneering vanquished it all, word and meaning.

  At the newspaper I realized how far in the world a minor reputation could carry you. On the basis of that one exposé which had brought on nothing but ruination and killers and shadows, I was treated as a savant. My specialization was presumed to be state policy and strategic affairs. For days I could coast around doing little, and then to register my presence, hammer out a few banalities about some national issue on one of the opinion pages. Sometimes, even simpler, there was an interview, a pointless ping-pong with some minor minister that could be conducted and banged out all in the space of an hour. Few things are less taxing than modern journalism.

  For pleasure and peace there was the parlour on the second floor, above the crockery and the utensils, with Jesus Christ on the way up. The bitter-chocolate skin, the kinky hair, the hands dipped in oil, the fingers supple from needlework.

  And I jogged every day at the Saket sports club, where the women got trendier and the men prettier. I would pound the bitumen track till I had sweat out all foolishness and sentimentality, and all illusion was dead and my mind was clear and still as a sheet of glass. It was meditation on pumping legs.

  The shadows were still there, and I only noticed them if they were missing.

  And then I had the encounter.

  It was the month of March, and I was on my way to Abu Dhabi for a two-day conference on managing tensions in South Asia. At Muscat I had to change a flight and for the four-hour layover I had been seated in the first-class waiting lounge. It was cavernous and plush, and in bad taste. In India it could have housed twenty families. Apart from me, that vast space of sofas and settees and chairs and tables contained only two other women huddled in a far corner. They were draped in such comprehensive hijab that only their fingers were visible. After a few visits to the food counters and the toilets I slumped into a maroon satin sofa and fell asleep.

  When I woke suddenly, chilled by the soundless air-conditioning, I found a man seated across from me, looking intently at my face. He had a neatly trimmed beard around a strong nose, and was clad in a cream-coloured salwar-kameez. His glasses were strung on a chain of black beads around his neck and there were traces of henna in his thick wavy hair. I gave him a tight smile, and he said, ‘I know who you are and what you did.’

  I said, ‘What do you know?’

  He said, ‘I know you exposed corruption in the agriculture ministry, and I know there was an attempt to kill you. Do you still live under police protection?’

  I said I did.

  He said, ‘But I hope you know that actually it was nothing to do with you. The plan to kill you was really aimed at getting rid of some others. It’s true you could have been killed—but that wasn’t really the purpose of the plan.’

  I said, ‘What was the purpose of the plan? To get rid of whom?’

  He said, ‘Did you ever meet your killers?’

  I said, ‘Yes. Once. In the courtroom.’

  He said, ‘Do you remember a young, very strong-looking boy?’

  I said, ‘Hathoda Tyagi.’

  He laughed aloud and slapped his hands together. ‘Hathoda Tyagi! Yes, Hathoda Tyagi! You know that name too! Do you know who he worked for?’

  He was speaking in a flowing mix of Hindi and English, and now I noticed he had gold rings on most of his fingers, with different coloured stones in them.

  I said, ‘Some criminal don. In Chitrakoot?’

  He said, ‘Not just some criminal don, but Donullia Gujjar, one of the most dangerous and powerful dacoits ever seen in that part of the world. Do you know anything about him?’

  I said, ‘No.’

  The air-conditioning had got to me and my bladder was bursting, but I didn’t think this was the moment for me to break the conversation.

  He said, ‘The problem is, Donullia did not live his life in English. That is why you don’t know about him. If he had been shooting beans instead of bullets, and cutting carrots instead of arteries, and speaking chutterputter English, everyone would have heard of him, from Delhi and Bombay to Madras and Muscat. And if he was a woman, like Phoolan Devi, you all would have made books and films on him a
nd elected him to Parliament. But let me tell you, he is a far greater dacoit—far purer. He’s always lived like one—on his feet, in the jungles and ravines. Do you drink Coca-Cola?’

  For a moment I thought it was a trick question. Then I said, ‘Yes.’

  He got up and walked away to the end of the cavernous room and turned into the service area. The big face was not misleading. He was a large man, probably over six feet. Beneath his cream salwar-kameez he wore well-buffed leather sandals. I scampered to the toilets at the other end, and had to close my eyes to concentrate before my piss found its flow. The soap smelled like strawberry dessert, and I splashed palmfuls of water on my face.

  When I returned, he said, ‘I thought you had jumped on to the first plane and fled.’ The two women in hijab in the corner were playing a hand-slapping game on the table, and tittering. It was impossible to tell how old they were, but from their frames they did not seem like girls. The man said, following my eyes, ‘Beneath our skins we are all the same. All seeking a moment of joy.’

  I said, ‘And what’s your name?’

  He said, with a patronizing smile, ‘Rashid Iqbal. They call me Iqbalmian. But how does my name matter? It could be Jalal-ud-din Akbar. What I know is what matters. What I have to tell you is what matters.’ He took a sip of his glass and said, ‘Coca-Cola from the tap is never as good as it is from the can.’

  I said, ‘What do you do, Iqbalsahib?’