The Story of My Assassins (3 page)

She said, ‘Are you coming home?’

I said, ‘Eventually.’

She said, ‘Where are you going now?’

I said, ‘Why? You want to inform the TV channels?’

I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could read her face. She didn’t move. Sippy was on his knees now, trying to push home the rusty latch at the bottom of the shutter and lock it. I got into my car, slammed the door and pulled out of the parking lot. In my rearview mirror I could see her getting into her car, and Sippy swimming steadily on the veranda floor.

She opened the door at the first chime of her singsong bell, glistening with some lotion she had hurriedly slopped on. I brushed my
cheek against hers in a half-hug and went straight into her bedroom, cool with the rattling air-conditioner, and lay on her bed. The only light in the room came from a weak yellow table lamp. The window was blocked with heavy blue drapes, tucked around to frame the plastic-grille air-conditioner. The brand name stuck on the cream-coloured grille said ‘Napoleon’, which meant it had been knocked together in some backyard shop in the city. Napoleon air-conditioners, high-heeled leather boot key chains—this country was in imaginative heat.

She said, ‘You want some tea?’

I nodded, and began to take off my clothes. The back of the study-table chair had a large flowery towel drying on it. I picked up a corner and sniffed: it was musty. I slid it off, kicked it into a corner, and draped my jeans, shirt and boxers there instead. When she came back with two mugs of tea I was sitting propped up on her side of the double-bed—crumpled and warm from the night—one leg pulled back to conceal what was happening to me. I had pushed her reading pile of papers—NGO reports, magazines, books on development economics, and an anthology of Hunter Thompson’s I had given her that she was making heavy weather of—I had pushed the whole heap to the far corner of the unused bed and thrown a pillow over it to still the fluttering. She gave me my mug and sat down on the edge of the bed, not touching me. In the lamplight I could see the fine down on her upper lip. The sun had roasted her slim arms a darker shade of chocolate. When she lifted her mug to take a sip, the cross-hatch in her armpit was dense.

She said, ‘How come you’ve been let out on a Sunday morning?’

I said nothing, looking her in the eye, demanding to change the register of the moment.

She said, ‘What? The same old same old? Well, sorry, it’s Sunday, this crèche is closed.’

I put my hand deep into her thighs and she held it tight, her flesh full and smooth. I waited, feeling the heat radiate. Then I saw
the moment catch in her eye and come over her. Her muscles relaxed a fraction, letting me in. She was ready. I danced my fingertips slowly, setting up an overture. She gave a start, then grew still, not a muscle moving, holding on to her tea mug, challenging me with her eyes. Time to play. I responded with the length of a finger. She pulled in a short breath and her eyes dilated, but she didn’t move. I pulled my hand out and touched her upper lip with the tips of my shining fingers. She looked back at me, unmoving, in full activist mode. Desire rocketed in me. I straightened my leg and, putting my hand on the side of her head, pushed her down. She fought, stiffening her neck. I pushed harder.

I said, ‘Look what you’ve done to me.’

She said, ‘Anyone can do that to you.’

Her head was halfway down now, but she was still holding on to her tea. I put my left hand on the side of her head, and reached out with my right. I said, ‘Give it to me, you whore!’

She looked at me, challenging, demanding.

I said, ‘Saali randi!’

She took a long draught of the tea and released her grip on the mug. By the time I set the mug down on the bedside table, I was swimming in a tea-warm mouth. I slumped back, my hand moving slowly in her frizzy hair. Then I began to abuse her, relentlessly, in Hindi, in English, recalling words and phrases I had learnt in school, street words, cheap porno phrases, stringing them out absurdly like overheated boys do. And with each crude volley—especially the Hindi—she became beautifully uncontrollable, giving and taking, giving and taking, in the simplest and most complicated transaction of all.

Later, while Napoleon Bonaparte cooled the sweat off us and we drank some more tea, dipping chalk-dry Marie biscuits in it, I looked dispassionately at her naked body as she lay opposite me at the foot of the bed. She had two beautiful halves that belonged to different bodies. Above the waist, from her fine nose to her frail
shoulders, to her breasts made for pleasure not lactation, she was narrow and fragile. Below she was full, with the hips and thighs of a woman made for bearing children. Not for the photograph, as she was above, but for real-life excitements. Two trademark moles stamped her body as being a single unit: a gaudy beauty on her right collarbone, and its mysterious twin marking the start of the dense hairline at the top of her right thigh. She had found a solution to her two unmatched halves, dressing in long flared peasant skirts and close-fitting sleeveless cotton blouses: concealing the excess, flaunting the fragility.

Now, head propped on her left palm, she was talking. It was what she did best. She was talking politics, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, ecology, all in a magnificent jumble that exhausted and fascinated me. She was dismembering the new liberal economics that was opening up India to the world, cursing the scourge of globalization, abusing patriarchal politics, demanding lower-caste mobilization, declaring the death of the idea of India at the hands of a surging Hindu right. In five years, by 2005, this would be a fascist state. She and I, and those like us, would be in hiding. Everything—every freedom—we took for granted would be gone. It would be worse than the colonial past, because this time we would have done it to ourselves. I think she saw the smile in my eyes for she broke into a rage. She jumped up, rummaged through her bookshelves and brought out an Oxford anthology of English poetry.

‘Listen to this!’ she barked, opening a flagged page:

She read the poem aloud with a hard anger, with the voice and
rhythms of a protestor, not a lover of poetry. She finished and looked at me balefully. ‘You know what Wystan Hugh Auden is saying?’

I shook my head.

She said, ‘Wystan’s telling us that fascism is creeping up all around us, and we don’t even know! He’s telling us that we suffer from the Illusion of Normalcy. He’s telling us that the worst horrors take place around us while we go happily about our everyday lives. Just because the newspapers keep coming, the televisions keep humming, the planes keep taking off, the trains keep running—just because our daily crap goes on doesn’t mean all is well. My dear phallo-foolish friend, Icarus has plunged into the ocean and is drowning while we are chattering away merrily on the sailing ship!’

I watched mesmerized. She was walking up and down the room, her two different bodies moving differently. The pleasure legs in rolling motion; the photo arms waving angrily. In her, sexual satiety brought on not the customary torpor, but a great intellectual and moral anxiety. It was the stuff of research. I thought of the wild Hindi profanities she had been urging me to heap on her just minutes back.

‘You,’ she said, rounding on me. ‘You!’

I said, ‘What have I done now?’

‘Nothing! That’s just it. Nothing. You know who Wystan Hugh was writing for? For people like you—who are worse than people like them! They don’t have a voice so they can’t speak. You have one and you barely whisper. Surely you don’t think your little exposé and stories are all they are cut out to be? You know they are basically ego massages. And that preening, posing partner of yours! Him and you, and your little boys getting their rocks off! Being given a bloody cannon and using it to shoot peas!’

Boy. The postcoital social contract. I was drowsy and no longer interested. The crazy bitch needed a dose of the Vedanta to cleanse her head. Hindi abuse for the body; Hindu philosophy for the soul.
Her problem was too little Hinduism, too much occidental crap. I was thinking about what the television channels were saying. I had been shot. By whom? My phone already showed more than forty missed calls, and the count was going up by the minute. I closed my eyes and her words became a fading noise.

When I came to, minutes later, she was no longer talking, just pacing up and down, her photo arms folded across her breasts, looking at me with contempt. I washed myself at the sink, draping my smelly hanging flesh over the enamel rim, pumping soap from the Dettol dispenser, splashing water from the tap with a cupped palm. In the frameless mirror it looked like a third-rate postmodern painting.

She pushed open the bathroom door and hollered, ‘Stop pissing in my sink you stupid clunk!’

It was all so third-rate.

Back in the parking lot I turned on the engine and the air-conditioner, leaned my seat back as far as it would go and closed my eyes. In the end it was always exhausting. It took no time for every damn relationship to spill out of the functional. Suddenly even the prospect of home seemed like a relief. At least I wouldn’t have to talk, or listen to anything. And if things got insufferable I could shut myself in my tiny study and stew—and bugger you Wystan Hugh—and not see anything either.

The sun had obliterated every nuance from the world by now, and was pouring down white heat. No dazzle was permitted in this enclave of the nondescript, of boxy colourless buildings and endless Maruti cars. The trees in the parking lot looked as if they’d had all the green syringed out of them, leaving them coated with settled dust. Most of them seemed stunted, throttled by a tourniquet of concrete. Every now and then an excitable-irritable family—mother,
father, couple of sated, snotty kids going to fat—tumbled out of dark holes in the boxy buildings flaunting their Sunday best, scrambled into a car, slammed doors, and left.

I had directed all the air vents at myself but was still patchy with sweat. The synthetic grip on the steering wheel was burning, barely touchable. The phone was a trapped insect and had not ceased buzzing for a moment. I began to swiftly parse my missed calls and messages. Everyone I knew had called or messaged. Even as I scrolled the calls the phone kept buzzing and letting new ones in. I was about to pull out of the parking lot when her name began to appear insistently on my phone. When it wouldn’t go away, I said, ‘Yes?’

She said, ‘Moron, why didn’t you tell me?’

She must have turned on the television after I left.

I said, ‘There was nothing to tell.’

I sensed the activity even before I turned the car into our lane. There were several unfamiliar vehicles parked at the corner, and men hanging about under the shade of the massive peepul, at least two of them in uniform. I took the turn slowly. Under the overhang of the tiny porch of my house a small crowd milled. The iron gate was wide open, and a police Gypsy was parked right in front of it. Jeevan was checking out its radials with his good eye, wagging his tail and spurting piss.

I walked into the tumult to a chaos of greetings, questions and blessings. I could see family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, cops, and media men with eyes growing out of their shoulders—a mad democracy’s ever-open third eye, marrying us all in a grand collective of sorrow and celebration, lament and lust, brands and stars. The masterly sleight: conformity through freedom. What Mao and Stalin could not pull off through violence and coercion.

Mother leapt on me like Tom on Jerry and clung to my midriff,
mewling, even as I staggered about shaking hands and making incoherent noises. Everyone held a glass with clinking ice; nimbupani was doing the rounds. Everyone had the same questions. What happened, how did it happen, who were they, what did you do, where have you been, are you okay, can I do anything.

Yes please, turn around and get the fuck out.

My wife was leaning on the door jamb, slim, tall, fair, expressionless—as ever, uncertain of what to do around me, all beauty flattened by joylessness. Her fat mother, eyes red-rimmed with forced tears, was holding her daughter’s right forearm and stroking it. Her balding father sat in the living-room, shrunk into the chair, timidly awaiting his moment. A clerk for all occasions.

A portly, round-faced man in a cream-coloured bush shirt, with close cropped hair and a bushy moustache, whom I had never seen before stood to a side, arms crossed on his chest, benignly witnessing the circus. Beneath his loose trousers he was hoofed in pointed black leather shoes. Beside him stood a tall fair young man, almost a boy, with hairless cheeks and a coiled air about him. The loop of a nylon lanyard was visible just under the right edge of his grey safari suit. I shuffled up to them—Mother still draped around my midriff—and gave the portly man my hand.

He said, with an understanding smile, in a low flat voice, ‘Shall we sit inside?’

When I had ushered him into my chokingly small study, I stood outside the closed door, peeled my mother away from my body and told her to bugger off. My pretty wife and her ugly mother were hanging by too. I told them both to bugger off as well and to encourage every idiot present to do the same. The party was over. My mother opened her mouth to let out a monster wail but I clamped my hand down hard on her mouth and looked at her with such venom that all three of them quietly melted away.

I took the plate of orange-cream biscuits Felicia had brought for us and latching the door behind me sat down on the frayed sofa. He
was sitting on one of the two wooden chairs in the room—the one in front of the small work table I sometimes used. He had taken a book from my shelf and was looking at its cover.
The Naked Lunch
. I set the plate down next to him.

He put the book down on the table, took a biscuit in his left hand and gave me a limp right hand. He said, in his low flat voice, ‘We all admire you—you are doing very good service to the nation.’