The Story of My Assassins (31 page)

The father was just beginning to round on his son when a new academic year dawned and it was time to go and genuflect in the Father’s office. Kabir M had failed every subject except Hindi and
maths. Thanks to the run of the ass through the inter-house finals, even the physical education teacher had given him a red entry. When Ghulam began his whine at the lofty Father’s feet, the bearded padre picked up the report book and flung it at Kabir, standing in the corner. ‘Forget the marks, Mr Masood! Your son is a goonda! He is a bad influence on all the boys! He will end up in jail one day!’ Then, in a paroxysm of rage the padre threw his cane, the duster, two pens, a coaster, and the
Oxford English Dictionary
at the ducking boy.

Kabir had to repeat class nine, and Ghulam had to start keeping his money in the bank or in his pockets. When it began to vanish from his trousers hanging on the hook in his room—in the dead hours between sleeping and waking—he began to put it under his pillow. His son knew little English or history or geography or physics but he had the tread of an animal and fingers that were water, and Ghulam would lose a folded note or two from under his sleeping head every few days.

Though they were a class apart now, Charlie and Kabir remained buddies, doing the same things, bunking school, watching films, scouring the bazaar, tormenting other students and teachers with their pranks. Then Kabir was detained for a second time in class nine—the fucking impossibility of English, of Julius Caesar!—and something hardened in him irrevocably. The first threat of a moustache had appeared, and juniors who had once looked at him in awe now sat at his side.

Meanwhile, Charlie’s father had been transferred to Kashmir, and with his board results out—he had done brilliantly—Charlie had moved to Modern School in Delhi for the last two years of his school life. With the ironic Bengali boy gone, Kabir—sitting in the last row of the classroom, the moustache deepening by the day—slowly lost his winning air of derring-do and outrage. He became a sullen brooding presence, refusing to talk to his new classmates, still trying to hang out with his friends who had moved on, increasingly maddened by Cassius and Brutus and Antony and the utter
nonsense they spoke. Each time Father Michael strode into class and began to declaim, Kabir’s head bloomed with murderous thoughts.

Soon the boy developed a tic that was not to leave him for the rest of his life. He began to mutter to himself, and every now and then—in the classroom, on the sports field, at home—he would break into a thunderous oration of gibberish. ‘Haauu haaa, thouu thaa … lusheus dusheus chuseus … forsooth a geyser, in the gaand of Caesar … haauu haaa, thouu thaa … friends, romans, countrymen, meri murgi tumhari hen … ohhh brutus ki chootus mein balkishan ka jootus … haauu haaa, thouu thaa!’ His father and mother looked at him in admiration, while his young mates brought up the chorus, ‘friends, romans, countrymen, meri murgi tumhari hen … haauu haaa, thouu thaa.’

When the school decided to hold him back in the same class for the third year running, it was the principal who folded his hands in front of Ghulam and begged him to take his son to another school, a Hindi-medium one, perhaps the Islamia Inter College.

I
n many ways, Kabir lived up to the promise of his sainted secular name. Over the years he travelled through scarred landscapes of religious bigotry and caste animus but remained untouched by them. Though the son could never see it, his father had—out of fear of the train signal arm—gifted him an unprejudiced mind. But he had also diminished him with the demon of fear and the poltergeist of English. Between the freedom and the crippling, the boy soon found his vocation in chaarsobeesi, the sleight-of-hand of minor thievery and deception.

Turning his back on the grand noises of the padres, turning his back on the whining aspirations of his father, Kabir joined the Islamia Inter College in class ten, and almost instantly felt the relief of an animal returned to its forest. Everyone spoke Hindi here and everyone called everyone else a chutiya.

The teachers chewed paan all the time, spitting red strings out of the windows and sometimes into the corners of the poorly whitewashed rooms. Most of them wore sandals and frayed shirts. The school cricket kit had only two leg guards, and during matches the batsmen wore one each on their left leg. The football field and cricket ground overlapped, and on many afternoons parallel games resulted in pitched battles with clothes being torn and skulls cracked open. Lacking the armour of a padre’s habit, the teachers looked the other way. Interventions in the past had invited fisticuffs, kicks and
ambush as they pedalled home. In fact the student skirmishes were welcome—broken bones and stabbings thinned the ranks of the toughies.

Kabir embraced the crudity but steered clear of the violence. Unexpectedly, pleasantly, his elite background—amid the padres and the chutterputter chutiyas—opened up a niche of privilege for him. He brought with him stories of that other world, and his inadequate English was quite masterly for the rudimentary course requirements of the state board. Intrinsically he was still not terribly smart, but his time with Charlie had taught him the art of posturing, of seeming more than one was. Soon he had the patronage of young men who carried tamanchas—country-made pistols, welded from sawn-off pipes, capable of just one round, as likely to take off one’s own hand as blow a hole in the enemy. These boys, laconic and angry young men with brooding eyes and a fine gift for abuse, moved in tight bands. They tied hankies around their wrists, and those who didn’t have to conceal a tamancha tucked down their trousers, knotted their shirt fronts. Kabir felt these were real people, real men. Not cardboard cut-outs like his father, the padres, or the chutterputter chutiyas. In their presence he felt more potent than he had felt even with Charlie.

The leader of the main gang was a cocky youth called Babloo. It was rumoured he had access to the Lucknow don Sulaiman, who himself was rumoured to be a satrap of the great Mastaan of Bombay. Every once in a while there would be a phone call for him at Tewariji’s cloth shop and a boy would come running with the message: Sulaimanbhai, Sulaimanbhai. Instantly, Babloo’s expression would become urgent, and he would leap up and leave at a trot, Azam and Batti at his heels. Azam, an orphan, had a permanently skewed walk because he’d carried a tamancha in his groin since he was thirteen. And Batti’s moniker referred to his particular specialization: shoving things up rival rectums. Pencils, pens, coins, fingers, marbles, sugarcane sticks, Fanta bottles, the hilt of his knife, the
barrel of a tamancha. His stated ambition was to, one day, push a small frog up a victim. ‘Nothing vile and poisonous like a snake or a beetle,’ he would say. ‘Just a little frog. To see if a man with a frog inside him will jump like one.’

Babloo himself had cultivated the look of a 1930s revolutionary. He had a rapier moustache that he oiled and twirled upwards, a maroon paratrooper’s beret and an olive-green army shirt with epaulettes and flap pockets, bought from the service store in the cantonment. Below the waist, though, he was a 1960s revolutionary, a hell’s angel: blue, locally tailored jeans and brown leather boots that zipped up his calves. The boots had iron studs in their soles so they clacked down every corridor of the inter college. The belt was a cycle chain with a canvas grip, which he sometimes trailed on the floor as he walked. His black Yezdi motorcycle had a high handle grafted on to it, and a special number plate: UP 0007. In a tin plate below it was stencilled, Live and Let Die. The silencer of the bike had been unscrewed and the gang leader’s entrances and exits were salient affairs.

Babloo quickly warmed to Kabir. He liked the fact that despite Kabir’s curiously elite educational background he was so willing to pay obeisance to him. It brought a kind of shine to the gang to have this boy from the missionary school in its fold. One of the first tasks allotted to him was to teach the gang some good English abuses. Very quickly, after fuck, cock, bastard and homo, Kabir realized there was no creativity in English expletives. In Hindi, by comparison—he learnt from the gang—you could string together virtual sonnets of singing abuse, like: Gaand mein gurda hai nahin, lauda karey salaam (crippled by fear yet flashing a hard-on).

Apart from his English, he earned respect for his knowledge of Hindi films. He could extensively cross-reference every film and hero for the gang leader, and Babloo, with a cinematic idea of his own life, was enthralled.

Soon Kabir and he developed a game.

Every morning when they met Babloo would ask, ‘Jai or Veeru?’

Then they would toss a coin. If Kabir won, Babloo would be Veeru for the day—blathering away, playing the comic. If Babloo won then the gang leader would be Jai all day—sardonic, brooding, speaking in terse monosyllables.

Though he was a khalifa of the inter college, Babloo had put in enough repeat years to have acquired a reputation that had spread to the university grounds. During the annual student body elections his services were requisitioned by one party or the other—for mobilization, canvassing, managing the booths, and maintaining the balance of terror. It was mostly strong-arm stuff, but with his penchant for the outrageous act, with his need to please his mentor, Kabir quickly brought an element of artistry, of roguery, to the gang.

Shoplifting—which he had done occasionally in the past—now became a daily chore. He would sail through a few shops every day and bring his offerings to Babloo’s court. The range was wide. Stationary, socks, hankies, jam tins, sauce bottles, booze, cigarettes, almonds, cashew nuts, spoons, forks, knives, crockery. Once he brought in a Racold mixer-grinder which the gang plugged into the classroom to stir up glasses of banana-shake. Another time he came in pushing an entire cart of ice-golas—having sent the vendor off to the police chowki on a fake summons—and proceeded to shave the ice and serve up endless combos from the coloured syrup bottles till every boy in the gang was speechless with a frozen tongue.

Babloo loved the audacity and the surprise. And the goodies were more than welcome. His gang had twelve people, and he took their welfare seriously. Now it seemed as if Kabir had put in a daily bonus plan for them all. Every freebie consumed multiplied the debt that the gang leader could call in. In pursuit of applause, Kabir soon progressed to hijacking scooters and motorcycles. Every day he would arrive astride a new one, and the gang would leap on it and ride it till its petrol tank ran dry. Sometimes he’d lift two or three in a day, working the growing bunch of master keys in
his pocket. There were no police repercussions because the owners were relieved just to recover their vehicles.

In time he became such an adept he could swipe a scooter while its owner stepped into a shop, or once, even as the man slid down the road shoulder to take a piss. These capers were moments of wild amusement for the gang boys, and they often drove these scooters three astride, at screeching speed through the bazaars, whooping and slapping passing bottoms. Once they rode an antediluvian blue Lambretta straight into the Emergency room of the government hospital and handed it over to the duty doctor to save its blackened lungs that were collapsing from cancer. On the way out, they took the doctor’s swish green Chetak scooter.

That year during the university elections Kabir became quartermaster general and did yeoman service for his gang and the candidature of Raghuraj Singh of the Independent Students Front. Instead of purloining from his own town, Kabir, in a brilliant move, led expeditions to Shahjahanpur, Rampur, Haldwani, Moradabad, bringing back vehicles from each town. Soon he had placed a fleet of eight scooters and three motorcycles, with fresh coats of paint and new number plates, at the disposal of the campaign. Babloo was elated, and in turn was acknowledged by Raghuraj Singh as the new strongman of the ISF.

The ISF swept all four seats that year and Raghuraj’s victory procession snaked through the city on stolen wheels. Raghuraj presented Babloo a beautiful .32 Webley & Scott revolver with twelve bullets. In turn Babloo gifted Kabir his tamancha, with a fistful of rounds. This did not obviously excite Kabir. Ghulam’s son had not yet been fully drained of a childhood soaked in fear.

In the gang he had always steered clear of the terror hardware, confining himself to the chaarsobeesi, the thievery and the duping.
Not even once—until Babloo handed him his own tamancha—had Kabir asked for or handled the guns and daggers the gang tucked away into their clothes. It was quite an interesting little armoury they carried around. Sanju had a Nepali khukri; Raja, a Rampuri flick-knife; Amresh kept a knuckle-duster, three iron spikes studded into a leather strap which he wrapped around his fist; Datun had a steel blade stitched into the toe of his boots, which he could open in a flash—one swinging kick could dig a neat hole in the flesh; Aziz carried a short-handle axe, only eighteen inches, strapped inside a brown leather jacket that he always wore, even in a summer of forty-five degrees; and Santokh, with religious sanction, openly wore a long kirpan, with an engraved handle, on a cross-belt at his waist.

It was Pandit, however, who possessed the most compelling piece, a lovely Luger, with its angled grip and slim sleek barrel. It had a magazine for 9mm bullets, but Pandit owned only two rounds. The weapon was a family heirloom, brought home by his grandfather who fought the Nazis in North Africa in the Second World War. It had last been fired in 1955—three shots in the air—when Pandit’s father got married. Pandit kept the two precious rounds in his pocket in a polythene wrap, and fired the Luger every now and then by making sounds with his mouth—sometimes a single decisive phtak! and sometimes an improbable machine-gunning, diggi-diggi-diggi!

The fact is there were not that many brawls, and the armoury was seldom used. There was a great deal of posturing and brandishing though, and most times it was enough to settle growing arguments. The few times violence had erupted—with manic energy, screaming abuse, and flying fists and blades—Kabir had instantly backed off to the margins, refusing to participate. He had no stomach for physical pain, or even the sight of torn skin, broken bones and gushing blood. Each time a skirmish erupted he could feel his legs give way beneath him. Often it took him hours to regain any poise of speech or conduct. He had no way of understanding Sanju or Aziz or Datun, who
sailed into battle emitting bloodcurdling yells—hammering and getting hammered, slashing and getting slashed—and regarded it all without anxiety or distress. Later, even as their own wounds oozed with pus, they laughed about how so and so had squealed when Datun’s iron toe was wedged inside his testicles.