The Story of My Assassins (33 page)
After the beasts of the kotwali, the warders were saints. Their attitude probably drew from the temperament of the head warder, Tiwarisahib, who was in his mid-fifties, walked with a slow gait and had a drooping grey moustache, and spectacles so thick that his eyes swam behind them. He always wore a white and maroon gamchha around his neck, and used it to wipe his mouth after every sentence. Tiwarisahib liked to say, ‘In the world there are only two kinds of people, the jailor and the doctor, who know the truth—that most men are punished for no fault of theirs.’
When the two boys checked in, he looked at Kabir’s papers and said, ‘What a fancy convent school you went to, my dear boy! Your padres are good men, but now you are entering the greatest college in the world. Pay attention, son, and you will leave with a degree for wisdom which no other institution can ever give you.’
In the barracks, the duo’s smooth induction was aided by the fact that Babloo’s gang—and his mentors in Lucknow and Bombay—had a reputation. Ample space was made for them by the forty-two other occupants of Ward 3, and the king of that domain, Bhediya Boss—he had bitten off a patwari’s jugular in a brawl—sent out the signal by sitting them next to himself at dinner and sharing with them his unfiltered cigarette.
One night, a week later, the Ward received some country liquor—for the scullery work the prisoners had done for the wedding of the superintendent’s daughter. Kabir knocked it back and became a padre. ‘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!’
For years afterwards, in the city jail, prisoners wishing to savour a moment of anglicized grandness were inclined to strut about declaring, ‘Haauu haaa, thou thaa … lusheus dusheus chuseus …’
By the time he got bail Kabir had come to understand the role the initial M and the missing piece of skin had played in his incarceration. Aziz’s hard-on for the ripe Rekha had in the SP’s khaki mind become an act of religious aggression. While Aziz raged about it every day, and swore religious and romantic revenge—also cursing Babloo and his mates for their betrayal—Kabir was sailing through the days peacefully, carving his wood menagerie—and had even begun to teach some of the inmates basic English.
It was strangely satisfying—that moment when someone finally understood a word and began to mouth it slowly: work—kaam; anger—krodh; peace—shanti; knowledge—gyan; balance—santulan; mad—paagal; hope—aasha; law—kanoon; strength—shakti; hard—mushkil; love—pyaar; sad—dukhi; thief—chor; rape—balaatkar;
justice—nyaya; fate—kismat; karma—karma. The students, many of them illiterate, many dropouts from government and village schools—in for crimes ranging from stealing poultry to assault and battery—looked at Kabir with deep admiration. He woke every morning wanting to see that look in someone’s eye.
His lack of frenzy also had something to do with the truncating of desire. Over the months the wounds of the leather rub had slowly healed, but it appeared the nerves had been abraded beyond repair. Kabir knew his desires were now just a piece of dead flesh, his promise of eternity damaged forever. Those who get used to sleeping under the skies soon stop dreaming of roofs. The man who could not now know eternity found solace and then addiction in the sonorous sermons of Baba Mootie. Twice a week the bearded drinker of urine—he used his steel mug—read from the song divine. This he did under the soaring semul, sitting cross-legged on a low wooden slat, prisoner and warder sitting on the ground before him, as last light fell from the skies.
With the greatest armies of the world eyeball to eyeball, with ten thousand bowstrings stretched to twang and a hundred thousand swords unsheathed to sing, with mighty maces refracting the sun and a forest of spears tearing the sky, with a million men and beasts coiled to unleash mayhem, Kabir heard the unarmed blue god tell the peerless Arjuna, whose mighty Gandiva hung limp in his hand: ‘He by whom other people are not disturbed and he who is not disturbed by other people and he who is free from delight, dissatisfaction, fear and concern, is dear to me. Without desire, pure, enterprising, neutral, without pain and one who has renounced all fruit, such a devotee is dear to me. He who is not delighted, nor hates. He who does not sorrow, nor desire. He who has given up good and evil, such a devotee is dear to me. Equal between friend and enemy, and respect and insult, equal between cold and warmth, happiness and unhappiness and without all attachment … Alike between criticism and praise, restrained in speech, satisfied with whatever is obtained,
without habitation and controlled in mind, such a devoted man is dear to me.’
Kabir M looked at himself—within the high walls of the jail, free from delight, dissatisfaction, fear and concern—and he knew he was such a man. In his own mind, he felt he was slowly becoming like Baba Mootie, a realized being.
Soon, in fact, he became uncertain about what he would do in the great outside. Now each time Ghulam came to meet him and assured him the lawyer would have him released any day, Kabir abused him and told him to leave him alone. Each time his father mistook it for pique, and began to cry and mumble, promising to redouble his efforts.
By the time Ghulam paid the five thousand rupees that transformed the tamancha into a water pistol, more than a year had passed. None of the gang was in the crumbling courtroom when the judge signed off his papers finally and Kabir stepped out as a released convict and not a wronged hero.
He did not speak to his mother when he got home, and he did not leave the house for the next two months—lying mostly on his bed in his room looking at the roof. Often he found himself crying, weeping abjectly—as he had never done when he was incarcerated—and as the tears rolled off his face and soaked the pillow he knew he was sorrowing not for himself but for the nameless griefs of the universe.
In despair, timid Ghulam—the creator of the initial M, the seeker of the modern, non-aligned future for his son—went to the padres for help. He sought from them a counselling role, and the addresses of classmates who might be able to lend a hand. But there was no further purchase to be had in those hymn-soaked corridors, where eighteen years ago he had bowed and scraped to change the life of
his only son. The padres were already overburdened with souls to save, and his son’s peers had either moved on to the big cities of Lucknow and Allahabad and Delhi and Pune to pursue college or been syringed into the adult calculus of their family businesses, the factories and shops and hotels and petrol pumps. Of course they remembered Muthal who had disappeared up the padre’s habit. It was tragic he had fallen on bad days. Sure they would try and help. And that was that. Generation after generation learns that the equalities of the schoolroom are a delusion. You pass through the greatest educational mixer-grinder and when you emerge on the other side what remains unshredded and intact are class, caste, religion and wealth.
Kabir, with neither money nor English, not religion nor clan, lay bare-torsoed on his back and looked at the peeling ceiling and the Usha fan twirling with slow creaks. Sometimes with his small knife he whittled a chooza, letting the wood shavings stick to his stomach and fleck his bed. His parents brought him food and tea and took the choozas away, lining them on the dining-room shelf, a chorus line for the kindergarten.
One day his parents packed him a bag and took him to Moradabad, sitting on each side of him in the state roadways bus. His mother’s brothers had over the decades established a robust business in brassware, and as concerned families do, were open to accommodating the errant nephew. Given his background of the missionary school he was given a front-office job, talking up the wholesale clients who came from Delhi, Bombay and occasionally abroad, to place orders for jugs, ashtrays, vases, candelabras, peacocks, elephants, camels, dancing natarajas, long-eared Buddhas, tribal masks, sun faces, and even fat buffaloes in gleaming gold. ‘Noorjehan Brassworks, Best and Brightest, Suppliers to All India and the World.’
Almost immediately the nephew proved a disappointment, struggling to converse in English, poorly informed of his wares, disinterested in closing a deal through the extra hustle. The first time a white man showed up he became clammy with the anxiety that would fill him each time the bell rang for the English class in school.
In a month, Syedmamu moved him to the backroom, to the preparation of the catalogues and sales pitches, and to help with the maintenance of the inventory. Kabir had no talent for either, and given his indifference, he soon earned the contempt of the old employees who had grown this trade through hard labour over the years. ‘He should have been a carpenter or a poulterer,’ the old accountant said, in derision, to Syedmamu, opening his palm to show him a chooza, many of which—open-beaked—filled the table where Kabir sat. Syedmamu said, ‘It’s his father’s fault. He is a lost soul—not knowing god, and betrayed by men. He needs our compassion.’
Very quickly the uncle had noticed that the boy was bereft of all knowledge of the great religion he was born into. He didn’t know where to look nor how to genuflect when the azaan sounded across the rooftops. Nor was he moved to imitate anyone. He would keep sitting on his chair, staring off, while everyone fell to the floor. Astonishingly, he knew not one kalma from the Holy Book, and it seemed he had never abstained a day during the great fasting.
Moved by the mansion of darkness his nephew had been abandoned in, Syedmamu sought the services of the old maulvi who had once tutored his sons. The maulvi’s teeth were black with tobacco and mouth red with paan. He came from the old city, clad in soiled white, pumping his old cycle. His manner was gentle, and sitting in the room given to Kabir—on the roof, with a toilet outside, like his timid father thirty years ago—he spoke in a soft voice, eyes closed, rocking slowly on his haunches. The maulvi—instructed by the master of brass—exhorted the young man to understand divine design and to fulfil his destiny. Dread spiralled in Kabir at the spectre
of fresh expectations … haauu haaa, thouu thaa … lusheus, dusheus, chuseus …
A few weeks later, from outside the brass showroom—so crammed with wares that nothing could be seen—he picked a shining red Maruti car, with a grip of faux fur, and drove it all the way up to Nainital. As he went ribboning up the mountain road, singing old Hindi film songs, he felt, after a very long time, free and elated. Leaving the car by the crowded bus stand, he strolled on the bustling mall and took a boat ride into the lake. All around were the glowing faces and telltale tinsel of honeymooning couples. Thanks to the leather rub, this was as alien a territory for him as English had been in school. Two days later, he slid into a white Ambassador at Mallital and drove it up to Ranikhet. The soaring chir-pines, the forests of oak and deodar, the cool breeze, the tiny red tin-roofed houses and hamlets—it was marvellous. The car however turned out to be the district magistrate’s, and he was picked up in the bazaar while just beginning to eat a chhola-samosa.
A few days later, when the magistrate consigned him to judicial custody, a wave of relief swept over him. He refused to offer the name of anyone who could be contacted for the filing of bail.
He spent the next decade of his life sailing in and out of jails. Soon there was no town in the region that had not felt his thieving fingers, and hardly a jail that had not seen his gentle shadow on its walls. Bareilly, Shahjahanpur, Rampur, Moradabad, Haldwani, Almora, Dehradun, Mussoorie, Agra, Meerut, Pilibhit, Ferozabad, Farrukhabad, Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, Allahabad, Amethi, Ayodhya, Gorakhpur, Barabanki.… There was no design to the wanderings: the desire to see a monument, a town; the urging of an acquaintance in a dhaba; the pursuit of an unseen film; the mere fact of a road, tarred and uncurling, and leading somewhere.
Through it all he stuck to the minor sin of chaarsobeesi—the trivial deceptions of theft and con. India was changing rapidly and every day new fancy cars were scorching the roads. Japanese cars, Korean cars, American cars, European cars. They had power steering, electronic locks, stereo players, push-button windows, parking lights. Their skins glistened, their horns sang, their hearts purred. They started instantly, sped like rabbits, and everyone was busy banging into everyone. In the denting-painting workshops of every town master keys were being manufactured by the day. The pockets of Kabir’s denim jacket were heavy with them.
Only two things propelled his capers: the search for something to do, and the necessity of finding food and a roof. He forged friendships that lasted a few days or a few weeks, at the end of which there was always a waiting car, a winding road, and happy incarceration. Not all jails were as benign as the first, but he discovered that each harboured a heart of deep wisdom; each had a tree that radiated calm; each a quiet corner where you could whittle the perfect chooza; and each a Baba Mootie who was in touch with eternal truths. Jailed men were free of things that free men could never be free of. Suffering men knew things ordinary men could never know.
Among the police force and the warders he developed a reputation for innocuousness. The small scarecrow-thin conman with big ears who never fussed when he was nabbed, and always gifted his captors lovely little wooden choozas for their children. Some of them knew that something had happened in a thana many years ago that had ensured he would never have any of his own ever.
In all those years he went back home only once, and found his father in a derelict state. Modernity had failed to embrace Ghulam with its promised enlightenments (it had in fact eluded his son too); and the religion he had rejected had kept from him its assurances. The magic of the dark theatre that had all his life absorbed his fears and given flesh to his dreams had also precipitously waned. The glory days of Minerva Talkies—of packed openings and new stars—were
long over. Firdaus was dead—had been dead nine years—and his sons had moved on to Bombay and Delhi, mining new veins in advertising and trading. The hall was crumbling—the seats broken, the long-necked fans dysfunctional, the projection cameras dated, the screen in need of replacement, with tears at its edges and dirt all over. There was no air-conditioning and no new film opened there any more: it was now the haven of C-grade quickies and old cut-rates, and rank with the smell of labourers from adjoining constructions sites who squatted on the chairs to avoid the bounding rats. The Talkies was up for sale: a developer from Lucknow wanted to erect a contemporary shopping mall, with uniformed ushers, credit card machines, and walls of glass. Efforts were on to change the land use clauses.
