The Story of My Assassins (29 page)

The girl chosen for him was from Moradabad, from a family of brass craftsmen. Fatima had frizzy hair and was as scrawny like him, all bones and edges: not at all like the fleshy Kamla or the juicy Parvati. Yet the first time he sank into her he fell deep in love. The poetry of the Talkies had so primed him to the idea of romance that if he had found a statue in his room he would have discovered an intense passion for it. Fatima had never been inside a school, and knew nothing except cooking and cleaning and sewing and darning. She would have had trouble naming the century she lived in, or the prime minister of the country.

For a time Fatima lived with her mother-in-law in the basti, and Ghulam visited her every weekend for some frantic fumbling. Whenever he could, he also took her to the Talkies where they became all hands and moans. But soon he began to crave the comfort and security of her bony body on a daily basis. One day he persuaded Ali Baba to speak to his landlord. He stood outside the
living-room while Baba went in. Strangely, Bhatiaji did not jump on to his horse and unsheathe his rusty sword. Indifferently, vaguely, he said, ‘Yes, sure, let him. If he won’t get his own wife whose will he get—the neighbour’s?’ Then when Baba had reached the door, he called out, ‘But if he makes one more Musalman on my roof I’ll chop his cock off.’

The boy, Kabir, inevitably then, was born to fear. To timidity, to trepidation, to caution. The first words he heard his father say to him were, ‘Be careful.’ And all the years he lived at home this warning was sounded out to him many times a day. Each time he used the stove to make a cup of tea, each time he moved a piece of furniture, each time he shaved his face (‘I hope it’s not too sharp!’ ‘No, father, it’s blunt as my buttocks!’), each time he mounted his bicycle, each time he ate fish, and sometimes in winter even when he went to have a bath with hot water. ‘Test it, first test it with your fingertips,’ his father would shout from outside, and then wait by the door till his son made a splashing noise and declared it safe.

When he stepped out the threshold of the house, the cautions became even more feverish. Ride carefully. Don’t talk to strangers. Steer clear of arguments. Never tell anyone where you live. You have no religion. You have no caste. You have no politics. You are just an Indian. Don’t mingle with the poor. Don’t mingle with the rich. Don’t mingle with older boys. Don’t mingle with younger boys. Never get into any tangles with girls. Actually, never talk to any girls. Be careful with the sardars, be careful with the vendors, be careful with the policemen, be careful with the padres. Don’t scowl at anyone. Don’t smile at anyone. Don’t anything with anyone.

Till Kabir reached class eight, all this made him a rabbit. A very timid and lonely rabbit. He even had the large ears and big scared eyes of one. But his body was like that of a cricket’s, thin and knobby,
his legs and arms like burnt sticks—the legacy of his mother. He slid in and out of the missionary school quietly and sat in the front row of his class, eyes bulging, mostly in desperate incomprehension, his father’s anxieties madly multiplied by the pressures of school.

The arithmetic and algebra he could manage, and Hindi he was good at. But English, and every other subject—all of them taught in English—fried his brains. He was not alone in this. The entire school was full of boys whose brains were being detonated by Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth and Tennyson and memoriam and daffodils and tiger tiger burning bright and solitary reapers and artful dodgers and thous and forsooths and the rhymes of ancient mariners.

The first counter-attack Kabir M made on English was in class four when he learnt like the rest of his reeling mates to say, ‘Howdudo? Howdudo?’ The answer being: ‘Juslikeaduddoo! Juslikeaduddoo!’ It set the pattern for life for most of them. English was to be ambushed ruthlessly when and where the opportunity arose. Its soldiers were to be mangled, shot, amputated wherever they were spotted. Its emissaries to be captured and tortured. The enemy of English came at them from every direction: in the guise of forms to be filled, exams to be taken, interviews to be given, marriage proposals to be evaluated. The enemy English had a dwarfing weapon: it made instant lilliputs of them. Whenever it appeared on the horizon they seemed to suddenly shrink in size. Their weapon of Hindi was a mere slingshot compared to the enemy’s cannon. Some of them understood that if they could somehow keep themselves from shrinking they would be able to take the enemy English on, beat it back, perhaps even show it its true place. But in practice it never worked: the English weapon was much too powerful and all their bravura and resolve dissolved in a moment, leaving them puny dwarfs. All they could attempt then were ambushes. And here too, many of them, in the course of their lives, would come to feel that the more enemy soldiers they killed the more they seemed to multiply. Some of them were so completely ruined by English, so shrunk by its
brutal onslaught, that they never managed to regain their true size, not even when the enemy was not around, not even when they were in their own place with their own people. Many of them tried to broker a truce with it, but there can never be peace between unequals. Their attempts to cohabit with it—master such smatterings of it as they could—only left them open to further ridicule.

Of course there were some boys—especially from the army cantonment—who spoke English as if they were pissing in the bushes behind the school wall. A flowing, gushing, casual stream, laughingly delivered. In the classroom these boys chirped like budgerigars and answered questions with fluent orations that left Kabir and his mates scratching their heads. Turwant, the son of the motor-parts dealer, called them the ‘chutterputter chutiyas’.

The chutterputter chutiyas monopolized the school dramatics society and the speakers’ and quizzers’ clubs; they were nominated class and school leaders and were gawped at by the girls. The chutterputter chutiyas seemed to have big engines of confidence humming in their bellies: they were always laughing and smiling and seemed to have private jokes about everyone else. Even when a teacher lost it with them, they retained a smiling, unfazed air. At least one teacher—the Hindi one, a Mr Pandey—hated them and was terrified of them. They would humiliate him by talking to him in English and making him struggle to understand them. When he would attack their betrayal to the foreign language of conquerors they would make him abject by questioning his betrayals of wearing English trousers, teaching in an English-medium school, using a toothbrush, and reporting to English-speaking Catholic priests.

In the presence of the chutterputter chutiyas, Kabir became a stunted dwarf scurrying for cover. Like Mr Pandey, he hated them and was terrified of them.

While Kabir, like most of his friends, rode to school on his father’s old creaking Atlas cycle, the chutterputter chutiyas came in a green, shining, libidinous army truck. Many of them wore big black army boots, and all of them walked with a strut. Not only did they cut everyone to ribbons in the classroom with the merciless sword of English, they were also juggernauts on the sports field. And sitting in the last rows they talked of sports Kabir had never known or seen—squash, billiards, water polo, and something called dressage.

The bastards even masturbated in English. Crumpled copies by Anonymous were always being swapped between them and sometimes one of them brought a magazine with colour pictures of such provocation that even a fleeting glimpse of them sent you rushing to the toilet. The Mastram Mastanas—yellowed and hand-stapled and fraying—that Kabir and Co lived off were like the fare of beggars. They were read aloud by the chutterputter chutiyas and laughed at. It took the steam off Mastram’s pages for a few hours.

Most days Kabir hated going to school, and hated his father for having admitted him there. Between his father’s fearful cautions and the humiliations of the school, the boy found solace and wholeness in only one place, the same place that had worked for Ghulam: the warm womb of Minerva Talkies, with the reassuring solidity of its neat stories, its triumphs of Hindi dialogue, Hindi songs and the superstars revelling in Hindi exuberance.

Of course, in the perverse way in which parents will often deny their children precisely that which created and saved them, Ghulam forbade his son more than a film a month. Naturally then, the first deceit the son learnt was evading his father and conspiring with the Talkies staff to see every film that was released. Ghulam’s colleagues never understood why he denied his son what he himself obsessed
over. Ghulam said in defence, ‘Does he have to also be a chutiya just because we are chutiyas? What have we learnt by watching films all day? To dance like Shammi Kapoor?’

The father wanted his son to be a child of the new India. Modern, rational, tutored in secular ways, a wearer of pants, a speaker of English, removed from the rumble and rabble of Bombay cinema and Bareilly’s serpentine bazaars. He himself had moved very far away from the ties of the basti. He wanted his son to move even farther away, so far away that no shadow of its religion, rites, crafts, inheritances or dogmatic smallnesses could ever fall across his life. His son belonged to the city, to a life of hygiene and elegance and polished speech and educated work.

With a miraculous display of restraint and a generous use of free Nirodhs—the state-supplied condoms, thick enough to stop a snake—the timid Ghulam had ensured that he would not have another child. He needed all his resources to make a modern success of the one. To his wailing wife Fatima, who wanted to fill her yawning womb with the screaming train of life as her mother before her had, he said, in consolation, ‘Bitches produce yelping litters. The tigress never gives birth to more than one or two.’

But no child is molten wax to be poured into a mould. Each is twisted inalienably inside its own genes. The truth was his son was concussed by the absurd alienness of English and quickly lost all talent for any textbook learning. By the time Kabir came to class five, Ghulam was on his knees in the padre’s sombre office at the end of every academic year—the terracotta Christ on the cross looking down at him sadly—spelling out the litany of poverty and hardship against which his son’s academic failure needed to be weighed. Schooled in compassion, the Cappuchian fathers pushed the boy along, giving him the grace marks the meek deserve. Till the rabbit-eared boy with limbs of stick reached class eight and made the first real friend of his life.

This boy came to school in the libidinous army truck and his
name was Charlie. In the attendance register he was listed as Barun Chakravarty, and though he could rattle off English like the chutterputter chutiyas, he was not one of them. He didn’t hang out with them, he didn’t play sports, and he refused to take part in the character-building regimen of dramatics and elocution. Nor did he wear the big army boots or walk the strut. Yet he exuded a cockiness that was more potent than anyone else’s. It stemmed from his mocking smile and his bludgeoning tongue. It did not cut and nick and slowly bleed its victims; it smashed their faces in. He called his fellow army boys Angrezi Laudus, English pricks. ‘Unzip their pants and check them out,’ he would say aloud, ‘I can bet you they’ve painted them pink and white.’

Kabir never figured out why Charlie chose him as his friend other than the fact that he too was short and thin and had rabbit ears. The first time they connected was in the school auditorium where one of the army boys was elocuting Alfred Noyes’s
The Highwayman
for an inter-class competition.

The hall had a stage but no chairs yet and the boys were crammed in disorderly fashion at the back while the girls stood in neat lines up front. Suddenly, beneath the dramatic monotones from the public address system, a mock thin voice was heard chanting:

A titter snaked through the crowd and heads began to turn to locate the source of the doggerel. Next to Kabir a gnomish Bengali boy looked straight ahead. As Kabir stared at him, he slowly turned and gave him a smile. Meanwhile, the highwayman was continuing to ride up to the old inn door. To counter him, the same voice, now
in a grave tone, slower and deeper, repeated the doggerel about Bal Krishan Bhatt’s giant phallus:

Almost immediately a hundred adolescent throats thundered with laughter. The highwayman halted uncertainly. The padre who taught English, Father Michael, leapt up and roared like a provoked lion, frantically twirling the thick cord around his waist, which he used for whipping the boys. In the dead silence that followed, everyone sought the source from the corner of their eyes. The whirlpool of eyes slowly began to find its centre, and in the swirling heart of it stood Kabir. The padre caught him like a rabbit by the scruff of his neck and pushed him so that he went flying through the boys to lie sprawled on the floor.

Over the years Kabir had often witnessed this dance of penitence, but it was the first time he had a starring role in it. In a voice he had never heard before he shouted, ‘No Father!’ From the floor view he could see the padre’s turned-up black trousers peeping from beneath his flowing white habit. His calloused feet were strapped in brown leather sandals. The padre said, ‘Goonda boy! Rascal!’ and sliced the cord across Kabir’s back and buttocks. Kabir shouted, ‘No Father!’ and leapt up to run, but with one swift lunge the padre had his frail left wrist in his hand. Then the two dancers began to twirl in endless circles: the padre’s left hand holding Kabir’s left wrist, the boy running with jumps and skips, while Father rotated on his heels whipping the boy with the rope in his right hand.

Round and round they spun with increasing speed—the knotted rope singing as it struck—while the assembly tittered.