The Story of My Assassins (34 page)

Ghulam had no idea what he would do once Minerva Talkies was gone. The old basti had ceased to exist: its community had scattered, its rhythms were dead. In its place stood a government housing project with straight roads lined with mast trees. The cemetery in which his parents slept—as did Ali Baba and all the other grey-hairs of his childhood—had for the moment been cordoned off from the complex with a high brick wall. But negotiations were on to disinter and shift the dead to an area of lower realty prices and more breathing room.

The tamarind tree—where they had first felt the ground shift beneath their feet, where Imroze had returned alone, with just the one arm going up and down like a train signal—the tamarind tree was still there: a hoary man, its hair thin, its skin leathery, its scalp scaling with age. Some days, terrified by the echoing loneliness of his life, Ghulam went and sat under it and, closing his eyes, wept for himself.

Now the scarecrow-thin boy with large ears and quicksilver fingers, and the fearful man with hollow eyes and missing teeth, sat silently across the room and could not summon up a single redemptive word. They had both failed each other. Religion and language;
ambition and fear. When it was time for him to leave—the stolen silver Ford waiting outside—Kabir M—modern, muthal, moron, Musalman—told his father a lie. He said he worked in the State Bank of India in the faraway state of Kashmir, where he had the rank of an officer and filled ledgers in cursive English, and he gave him an address at which no letter could ever arrive.

To his wailing mother he made a promise: he would regularly send her and her husband enough money from his grand salary as an officer for them to not worry about the dying Talkies. And this he did each time a new car transited through his life, and in many ways the pledge became a tethering cord in a life of almost no meaning.

‘He who is free from delight, dissatisfaction, fear and concern … without desire, pure, enterprising, neutral, without pain … he who is not delighted, nor hates … he who does not sorrow, nor desire … 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.’

This man then—indifferent to the passage of months and years—one day in the new year of the new century met another man in a jail near Dasna, who understanding his virtues—of heart and mind and hand—offered him a task that would take him on a long drive through beautiful roads. After the drive was over he would be given enough money to fill all his pockets and both his hands.

It was a long drive that would take Kabir M—defrocker of the padre, rider of the ass, hater of English, lover of ahimsa, chiseller of choozas, son of Ghulam, follower of Baba Mootie, dead of penis, quicksilver of hand, native of penitentiaries, prince of the road—on a journey that led to the murder of an innocent. Something his fearful genes had not prepared him for, and something he had never wished to do.

I
had just taken Sara off the wall and was drifting in the happy place that I had never once found with Dolly/folly when she said, ‘You know their lives are actually worthier than yours.’ This is what I hated. I had paid my talking dues in full before I’d picked her up and nailed her. We had talked for nearly two hours, telling and listening with great sincerity, as if we were really interested in what the other had to say—so this, now, as I floated in that place with no equal, was extortionate. Today in fact I had outdone myself, got her juices really raging.

After she had finished a long tearjerker about some weird fucker with a random initial and a smashed dick who thought jail was the Ritz-Carlton, I had filled her in on the cool horrors of Kapoor: his buying out of Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey for next to nothing, the draconian shareholders’ agreement he’d made us sign, pretty much making over everything—life, liberty and lund. Our lawyer had warned us that such an agreement ought not to be signed even with a gun to our heads. But we said we were already dead, no agreement could kill us further. The lawyer said actually it could. We looked at the twenty-four pages the magazine had become, we looked at the eight people who remained, we calculated the debts the two of us had already incurred, we calculated them mounting as we spoke, and we just signed.

Life, liberty and lund.

In any event, all resistance had been drained out of us after witnessing the decimation of the garment trio. For all their wealth and business savvy, their equestrian dining-rooms and naked mermaids,
they had appeared callow recruits getting their inaugural sizing-down from the boot-camp sergeant-major.

A Full Metal Jacket diminishment.

To begin with, Kapoor brutally spelt out to them the utter worthlessness of the publication they owned. This was done with hard numbers—accounting for the past, present and future. Jai and I in this time shrank into our chairs and vanished. Then he told them it was actually worse. The three of them had incurred financial and legal liabilities that would dog them for years, and some of these were actually criminal. Pay them for their stake? They would be lucky if someone even agreed to take it off them for free. And, to be sure, that someone was certainly not him! He said he had no idea things were so bad when he’d decided to examine the investment. And the only reason he hadn’t fled yet was because Jai’s uncle—Bhargavaji, a senior bureaucrat in the commerce ministry—was an old friend. But friendship had its limits. It did not include suicide. Jai’s uncle would understand. He was a reasonable man.

The cool, classy negotiating-table toughness with which Kuchha King, Kuchha Singh and Frock Raja had tried to begin the dialogue collapsed quickly, like pudding. The attempt to stun the prospector with a display of opulence and style had ended badly. Walking through Frock Raja’s excesses to his frock-shaped pool, Kapoorsahib had knocked the construction materials he’d used, the architect he’d used, the designer he’d used, and had pointed out all the zoning and building laws he had broken. ‘Next time you build a house come and see me, I’ll get you the right people,’ he said. ‘In fact, come and see mine and you’ll know what’s wrong with yours.’

The man was a master of bastardy. After the first few sentences of their sales pitch, Kapoor had closed his eyes. Irritated, the trio had stopped, but he’d continued to sleep. When one of them stood
up in exasperation, he opened his eyes and said, ‘Why did you stop? I was listening to everything—there was just nothing for me to react to.’ When the trio began pitching again, he continued to remain expressionless. Immediately they switched to making whining noises: surely there was some value here; something had been created; something existed; it wasn’t all
so
bad.

No, said Kapoor, it was worse, worse, worse. The worst. He felt for them, and he wished them well, but as far as he could see, the magazine was dead. They should just shut it down. Ah, but of course that wouldn’t end it. There was still the legal shit. A lot of it criminal, trickily criminal. Some of it leading straight to jail.

When he got up to go, the threesome literally hustled him back into the chair. All three wheedled in tandem. Kapoorsahib must try and understand, they were garment exporters and had no means of figuring out or running this media business. It was a good business, a great business—so much influence and glamour and power—but they had neither the acumen nor the stomach for it. They were innocents in the big bad world of deals and dealmakers. Mere sellers of undies and frocks, lambs any wolf could casually slaughter. Kapoorsahib on the other hand was a man of the world. A man who worked Delhi’s power levers; who understood politics and policy; he understood mega games and dined with mega players; he could take an ugly jab and deliver an uglier one. He could outwolf the wolves; he could outlamb the lambs; he could take the magazine to giddy heights; he could one day out-time
Time
and out-newsweek
Newsweek
.

Kapoorsahib drank in the supplications with sceptical eyes.

Jai was now the smallest I had ever seen him: the moralizing schoolteacher standing in front of the owner’s boardroom, incapable of bridging the vast chasm between those who talk about the world and those who shape it.

His stirring words were harmless paper darts. I hoovered in the cashew nuts. My stomach had begun to move.

Kapoorsahib said, ‘My answer is still no, and so it would be of any sane man. But I owe Bhargavaji many favours and so I promise to try and think about it.’

The trio walked him across the faux-stone driveway where the naked mermaid still spewed water and shook his hand with both theirs, bending low in entreaty. Then they came back to the poolside and alternately minced and pumped little Jai. He was a dog and had misled them and destroyed them. But, listen, he must convince his uncle to lean on this guy; it was clear he would do the deal with one nudge from him. Jai swelled and deflated at such speed that I thought he would have a schizophrenic spasm.

As I narrated this tale of immoralities to Sara, her rage and excitement had mounted. Sitting in the middle of the bed, facing me as I leaned against the headrest, her sarong had fallen open, beaming her readiness. The colour was already high in her cheeks, she was biting her lip. The abuses of money and power were shovelfuls of coal stoking her engines. Guruji could have been India’s leading sex counsellor.

I had then ratcheted up the heat some more. I’d told her about all that we’d managed to unearth on Kapoorsahib. To every appearance he was in the furniture and carpet business. He had emporia in Delhi and Bombay, and he also exported to several countries in eastern Europe. These outlets were gleaming affairs—glass-fronted, wood-panelled, air-conditioned, worked by elegant women in silk sarees. Not Indian shops but international showrooms, with big glossy books on art and culture, piped Indian classical music and herbal tea.

A sneak visit to the one in South Delhi had left Jai and me breathless. It was so classy a place that no sales pitch was made in it at all. As we looked around at the carpets, the ornate, richly polished
furniture with inlays of stone, a boy in grey livery, bending low, offered us several options of beverage and returned with flavoured hot water of a pale hue in handle-less ceramic cups. Perfect for gargling. The beautiful woman in a silk saree with black hair that fell below her waist and a black bindi shaped like a coiled snake asked us if she could do anything for us. I shook my head with a hard look in my eye, and when she had moved away Jai said, ‘Yes, please. Take off all your clothes.’

Later, Jai made casual inquiries, pointing to dull carpets, nodding knowingly. Some of them cost more than a flat in Vasant Kunj. In the half hour we were there not one other client cracked open the imposing door and not for a moment did the beautiful woman stop smiling. Yes, please. Take off all your clothes.

It had taken us two days to figure out Kapoorsahib’s real sources of income. The carpets, furniture, showrooms were all smokescreens. If they never made a rupee—and quite likely they did not, given the expensive overheads—he would not turn a hair. Kapoorsahib’s real business was arms dealing. He was an agent representing several European companies and, it seemed, each time he closed a deal his bank accounts in Switzerland swelled by tens of millions of dollars.

From bullets to howitzers to submarines and flak jackets, Kapoorsahib sold everything an army could possibly need. Nothing terribly wrong there. Someone has to do the dirty stuff. Some kill and die; others provide the means for doing so. The problem was it was illegal. In a moment of mad political convulsion in the 1980s the government had, grandly, outlawed middlemen in arms deals. In other words, no commissions were to be paid or received, no deal was to have a facilitator. But as Indians know, nothing in the world happens without the greasing role of middlemen. Not jobs, not marriages, not access to god. If the law was to be strictly followed the Indian army would soon be throwing stones in battle.

The law was one thing. Reality was another.

So Kapoorsahib performed the invaluable and fraught task of keeping the Indian army well equipped. It was a spectral calling—for all purposes he and his work did not exist. Delhi was full of such people, who worked that surreal space between day and night, legal and illegal, government and private, national and international. For his labours, European companies dropped tens of millions of dollars into Kapoorsahib’s many-numbered Swiss accounts, and he in turn generously dropped tidy sums into the many-numbered Swiss accounts of different politicians and bureaucrats. There were some who said there was more Indian money in Swiss banks than in the Indian treasury.

Father’s friend, Bahugunaji, carper and crank, who had been a head clerk in the commerce ministry, used to say, ‘Everybody has an account there! Everybody, prime ministers down, for decades and decades! If you string them all together, it’ll make a poem longer than the Mahabharata!’

Aptly, Kapoorsahib’s offices were staffed with armies of chartered accountants—moneyworms—who, all day, decoded regulations and constructed delicate webs that would make some of his riches available to him in India. We were told hawala transactions abounded, and unseen mounds of dollars travelled borders to become mountains of rupees. These bankers wore churidars and chappals, and ran a system even more foolproof than that of the suits of Switzerland. Most of these mountains of rupees when they suddenly surfaced in India went into property purchases. The very ground we stood on could well belong to Kapoorsahib or some merchant of arms like him.

Besides the moneyworms bent over desks, there were the liaison officers ranging the landscape. These were men of water, flowing smoothly everywhere, capable of taking care of any demand a man upholding the majesty of the state could possibly dream up—from Black Label whisky for a party to the canvas of a favourite painter to tickets for a holiday in Greece to admissions for a child in a posh
American university. Since the state did not look after its people, somebody had to.