The Story of My Assassins (52 page)

The former cop said, ‘Joginder’s sons are dead.’

Gyanendra, pulling on his last hookah for the day, said, ‘Why, what have they done now?’

‘They are dead, tau. Dead. All three of them. Too dead to be even taken to a hospital. Somebody pulped their heads, as if they were animals.’

Gyanendra pulled the bubbling pipe out of his mouth, and said, ‘It cannot be. I saw them this morning in the village, their chests puffed out like a cockerel’s. The bastards said to me, “Hope you are well, tau, and your children. We haven’t seen your daughters around for some time now.” ’

The cop said, sipping carefully from the burning steel glass, ‘Tau, no one in these parts has seen a killing like this in years. Even their mother couldn’t recognize one of them.’

In the dark, Vishal Tyagi sat by his buffalo on the ground, slowly stroking her sandpaper flanks. He felt calm. His father now gripped his tutor’s shoulder and said, ‘Have you seen it for yourself? I don’t trust that low-caste and his satanic sons!’

Sipping loudly, the cop put two fingers on his eyes.

‘God be praised! But who?’

‘Nothing is known yet. The police say it looks like the work of a gang, five-six people. But nobody seems to have seen anything. The farmhands went to investigate when the dogs wouldn’t stop barking.’

Gyanendra said, ‘Finally we can be sure there is a god! There is justice!’

But his wife, squatting on the ground near the handpump, shook her head slowly. ‘This is not good. No one deserves such an end. Now there will be a new cycle of bloodshed. Joginder will not keep still.’

The cop had seen the boy’s bulk beside the buffalo, sunk into the shadows. He called out, ‘And what do you plan to do now?’

The boy did not reply. His raped sisters sat in the open doorway of the house, squatting on the threshold. They picked at their hair in silence. The death of the cousins meant nothing to them. They were
inside their own cocoon of taint and unhappiness. All their lives they would have to live in dread of their husbands discovering they were used goods. That’s if their marriages went through at all. The killing of the cousins could start a police investigation that would lead to the disclosure of their torn flesh.

The cop said, ‘So what did you do with the hammer?’

He had buried it behind the house, between rows of cabbage, tamping the mud down on it neatly. Watching him dig it out, his mentor said, ‘The police would have found this in less than two days. Don’t ever make the mistake of underestimating a policeman. Their sources and resources are infinite. When they want to get to the bottom of something they do so easily. And they can get information out of anyone, if they want. Even me.’

The family watched in admiration and horror as the cop and the boy washed the hammer under the handpump. The father said, ‘You have avenged me, my son. You have given your father back his fallen turban.’ The boy said nothing. He could have popped another three skulls had the occasion demanded. It was a sweet sensation: that moment when the iron exploded through flesh and bone, ending all argument, settling all dispute. How the last one’s words had died on his lips as he went through his left ear. He had always felt people fussed and complained too much. Today he knew it was easy to resolve discord if you had clarity of purpose.

Once the excitement had abated, Gyanendra asked, ‘Will they find out?’

The cop said, ‘Without a doubt. He has to leave this place. If they catch him they will hang him three times. After which Joginder will take a hammer and break all his bones. The villagers have just begun to stream in to see the bodies. No one has ever seen anything like it. There are going to be no exonerating circumstances, no sympathy from any quarter.’

‘But where? He has a maternal uncle near Varanasi. Shall we send him there?’

‘All relations are out. Two wireless messages and he will be picked up. Also, don’t forget Joginder. He will get to know soon, and he will be on the hunt too.’

Looking at the boy, now leaning against the wall—his frame so powerful—the cop said, ‘You come with me. The hare must cover as much distance as he can before the hounds begin to run.’

Thanks to a senior officer who had been passionate about hockey and to a Gujjar legislator from the area, Rajbir Gujjar had managed to get a job as a physical training instructor in a government school close to his village when he had been pensioned off from the service. The school, like the police, was in a shambles, the chasm between the idea and the reality vast enough to sink a thousand students. Many of the schoolrooms were occupied by the staff as private residences and the holding of classes was a ramshackle consensus between the students and teachers. Some of the key teachers there actually worked on a proxy. The men appointed by the state lived in Muzaffarnagar while other men nominated by them came and taught in their name: the salary was split between the two. It was a kind of subletting. The government was aware of this, but it had more important things to worry about.

As far as Rajbir Gujjar was concerned, he had nothing much else to do. He could have, had he wished, brokered a deal with the headmaster and never shown up at all. Teaching was a luxury here; the idea of sport, a joke. Village children in India are not born for the affectations of academic accents and athletics: they go to school to escape oppressive fathers and unrelenting toil. The playing field behind the school building had very quickly become broken ground, used by the villagers to graze their cattle. The iron-pipe goalposts at the two ends looked eerie, like doorways into nothingness. No ball had ever rolled through their mouth. At one point, equipment of all
kinds had been bought: hockey-sticks, footballs, javelins, badminton racquets, cricket bats and wickets. Now nothing remained except a fat, heavy iron shotput. It was the only sport left for the schoolboys. Each day boys wagered on their ability to throw the heavy ball. The ground in front of the line, drawn in the front yard of the school, was heavily dented.

It was in this arena of grunts and soft thuds that Rajbir Gujjar first met the young Vishal Tyagi. Already he could heave the shot farther than his older classmates, and the flex in his big shoulders suggested he could do better still. There was also an intensity about the boy that he found attractive—in his time he had had it too, as did the best players he had played alongside. It was what he had missed the most when he’d finally become a journeyman cop, the hard focus on getting something done. The boy also appeared unusually calm and generous. He did not talk much or backslap, and he was happy to give other, more puny boys a chance at tossing the shot while he waited. Often he also saw him exert his huge strength to back someone who was being mocked or short-changed.

The former cop, when living in the sports barracks, had seen the athletes work out. He was familiar with the rotating swivel that was used for propelling the shot. The schoolboys just threw it with the shuffling momentum of a few short steps. Vishal was the one to teach it to. In a few weeks the taciturn Tyagi boy was spinning and heaving the iron ball farther than anyone had even seen. Now there was one patch of dented ground at thirty feet, and more than ten feet farther, another patch, wholly attributable to the young Tyagi. Rajbir felt this boy could go all the way to Lucknow to the state championships; in fact, with a bit of training he could make it to the national school games. No one from this entire district had ever gone that far.

As is often the case with coaches and mentors, his entire life, all his personal ambitions, became focused on the young athlete. He set the regime. Hundred sit-ups and fifty push-ups twice a day; twenty
chin-ups on the football goalpost five times a day; a five-kilometre run every morning, the last kilometre with a brick clasped in each hand; and two hundred puts of the shot. Once a week he would take him to his fields, unyoke the oxen, and while he sat in the shade and shouted instructions, watch him work the plough till the water ran off his body in a cascade and he could move no more.

To supplement his exertions, Rajbir Gujjar argued with the headmaster till a special diet was sanctioned for the promising athlete: two litres of milk, a dozen bananas, and four eggs each day. He also convinced the boy to defy his parents and eat chicken once a week. ‘You are not trying to become a priest! You have to eat flesh if you want strength in your flesh!’ With each week, the boy began to dent the ground farther and farther. When he was at training the boys would come and watch, and marvel at the voluptuous biceps and big shoulders.

On Saturdays, the mentor would give his protégé’s body a mustard oil rub, and as he massaged him they would talk. Rajbir Gujjar told the boy thrilling stories about his playing days—the breathtaking runs he made to trap and centre the ball; the cliffhangers they won; the newspaper mentions; the trophies; the luminaries they met. The boy talked of the only two he loved: his mother and the buffalo, Shanti. He spoke of his resolve to reach the nationals and win a medal there. In his quiet, halting way he would say, ‘The name of this village will become famous because of me.’

Later, as he came closer to the master, Vishal talked about the family feud. How his father’s cousin and his sons had seized their lands, how they intimidated them, and how they had broken his father’s kneecap. He felt his father was weak. ‘He should have shot them. He has a gun in his trunk.’ He asked the former cop, ‘If the police does not help you, what should you do?’ Rajbir had to agree there was a case for taking matters into one’s own hands.

As anticipated by the coach, the boy swept the district and zonal championships, breaking the record at every level, and by the time
they reached Lucknow he already had a name. At the stadium, while other boys and girls guzzled soft drinks, ate aloo tikki and lurid ice lollies, flirting with the burning heat of adolescence, Vishal drank his milk, ate his bananas, pumped his muscles, and threw the shot to a record distance. That night Rajbir took him to Hazratganj and fed him a lavish dinner at Gaylord’s. ‘Remember, son, the final seat of all achievement is neither the head nor the heart nor the muscles. It is the ass. Courage and determination lives in the ass! When the odds stack up against men, when the challenges mount, it is the ass that gives way first! All my life I have seen it. The asshole opens up and bleats like a goat. The head and the heart and the muscles see it, and follow suit!’

In saying this, Rajbir Gujjar was able to bring himself to confess to his protégé that his own life and career had been diminished because he had not enough strength in his ass. ‘I was a good player on the sports field, but when I came to the police station my sphincter could not hold. Every time there was something bold to be done, I had to sit down to save my ass from weeping. There was a man with us, from Bulandshahar—Chuchundur, we used to call him. He was not more than five feet tall and was dark as a crow and scrawny as the neck of a vulture. You would treat him as a sweeper if you saw him on the road. But he had an asshole made of iron. I saw him at work at the station. If you wanted finger-bones crunched, kneecaps broken, ligaments wrenched, testicles twisted like toffee wrappers, you turned to Chuchundur. Big men, huge men, feared him. He could in a flash put a pistol up your mouth and have you suck it like a lollipop and wet your pants at the same time. Later, he rose to become the best cleaner of garbage in the state police. Anyone who didn’t deserve to be sent to the courts was sent on a ride with Chuchundur. Because he was tiny they all tried to run away from him, and had to be shot. At one time he was also called Chuchundur Pacheesi, because his score was twenty-five. Later, he went far beyond it. From a mere constable, the little runt rose to become
an inspector faster than anyone else, and summons for him would come from inspector-generals of police and powerful ministers. So remember, my son, you can throw a shot very far with muscles and heart, but to win in life you need an asshole of iron!’

The boy, working his way through a second plate of chholabhatura said, ‘And where is he now?’

‘Dead. Found by the riverbank with his kneecaps splintered, his penis spliced off, and his tongue pulled out. They had to identify him by the rings on his fingers.’

The boy widened his eyes in silent query.

The former cop said, ‘It’s much better to have an asshole of iron and lead a splendid if short life than to be like the rest of us, our backsides bleating like goats, fearfully rationing out our small pathetic lives. Life gave Chuchundur nothing—no caste, no money, no education, no height, no muscles, no looks, no connections. Nothing! Nothing, except an asshole of iron! And with that he changed everything.’

The boy said nothing, but he understood the message. He’d been born with an iron asshole, anyway; now it was only a matter of reinforcing it some.

Even by the standard of iron assholes, the former cop and present coach was taken aback at the brain-curry spree his protégé had embarked on. Defending his ward’s very occasional excesses from irate school authorities and the headmaster was one thing, but with this carnage Rajbir was totally out of his depth. Three dead men, heads caved in. To protect such a killer you needed to be a very powerful politician or a very rich man. Or you needed to be someone who feared neither.

There was only one he had ever known.

For most of his four-year tenure with Bajpaisahib, the personal
security officer had been Donullia Gujjar’s man. At the time, the mighty brigand was in the process of starting to legitimize some of his wealth. He had lived beyond the line of the law for long enough to know that the greatest bandits worked inside the line as much as outside it. It was only then that you went from being a mere dacoit to a legend. It was only then that you survived beyond the swift cycle of seven years of glory and death.

Donullia Gujjar knew that while men like him worked from the outside in, there was another class of men who worked from the inside out. Bajpai was such a man. When men like Donullia and Bajpai fell into a marriage they became the masters of all realms, heaven and earth, city and field, money and power.