The Story of My Assassins (59 page)

After signing off my hillock of papers I had tried to quit the business. An old-time book publisher from Daryaganj, full of the excitement of new glossy jackets and perfect spines—foreign imprints and dollar signs—had offered me a two-book deal. One on the story of our food scam sting operation; the other on the politics of modern India. The advance was enough to sustain me if I ate grass from Lodhi Gardens and drank water from the Yamuna. But I gave it a shot. I threw Dolly/folly out for a month, banishing her to her mother’s, and locked myself into my tiny study and hammered the keyboard till it developed a list and I had to put a chewing-gum plug under its left leg.

In six weeks I had sixty thousand words hammered out, a title in place, and a dedication in mind. I stuck to the details of the scam and left out our own sorry story of the aftermath. Jai thought it was a stupid decision. ‘Human drama! That’s what people want! The scam is finally a bore! What’s interesting is what happens to the people because of it!’ The publisher, a thin, refined man, with a pencil moustache from forty years ago, was delighted by my efficiency. He shook my hand hard and long.

I called him a week later. He was terse. He needed some more time to finish reading it. I gave it ten days and called again. He said books were not newspapers, and publishers had hundreds of books to deal with. He would call. Another ten days went by. In that time
I played around with the text some more, chopping and adding. Fair, tall Dolly/folly looked at me in soft-eyed adoration, as if I’d just written the Mahabharata. And she hummed songs of courage and determination. Felicia passed through the day like a dark ghost, bearing tea and toast.

This time he didn’t take my call. His phone kept playing the Gayatri Mantra till I began to believe I had given my book to a temple priest not a publisher. I called one of the editors he had introduced me to. A middle-aged Bengali whose virtue seemed to be sensibility, not language. He wore thick glasses and had a twitch in his right eye. Laughing nervously he said, ‘The lawyers have raised some issue. But I cannot tell—only boss will know for sure.’ I drove into the hellish lanes of Daryaganj and had three angry arguments before I could find parking space.

Mr Sahgal showed no sign of panic when I stormed into his room, brushing aside his assistant—a traumatized aunty in a blue saree who kept bleating, please sir, please sir. He was wearing a sharp black suit and his sharp black moustache, and he calmly hung me out to dry with a shower of legal objections raised by the attorneys. The manuscript lying in front of him had so many yellow and pink Post-its sticking out if it, I knew I would have to rewrite every page. My only counter-argument was that lawyers are alarmists. He said, so refined, ‘Lawyers send people to jail, and keep people out of jail.’

And make sure no one ever does anything worthwhile.

I tried to be like Jai, talking the grand stuff: public good, clean governance, et al.

He only said, smooth and plain as vanilla ice cream, ‘I am just a publisher sir, not Mother Teresa.’

He gave me the manuscript with its pink and yellow ears as a take-home gift. On my way out I stood on the back fender of his old white Mercedes till it crashed to the ground. Then I used a sharp stone to run a loving line through its steel flesh and draw an
uncircumcised cock at its end. As my assassin Kabir would have said, ‘Bhosdi ke hatt, tera lauda hai ya lutth!’ When I returned home I put the festooned manuscript on the shelf in the study beneath
The Naked Lunch
, and addressing the ceiling fan, announced my retirement as a writer.

The very next day I drove off to see Guruji.

He calmed my nerves and told me what to do. On my way back I began to call old acquaintances for a job. I didn’t call Jai. I needed work and money, not one more oration on the big picture.

Truth is, there was no big picture. There was just Kapoorsahib and his labyrinth and Bhalla and his line girls and Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey and their flowing mermaids and Huthyam and his shadows and the assassins and Sara’s stories and Kafka’s castle and Dubeyji and ms fair and folly and Felicia, and lurking in every corner with arsenals of paper lawyers and lawyers and lawyers. There was no big picture. If there was one, it had died fifty years ago, or five hundred years ago, or five thousand years ago. Maybe Gandhi was the last man to have it; or maybe it was the guy who rattled off the Gita, sitting under a ficus, a deerskin draped over his loins.

There was no big picture. There were no grand connections. There were only endless small pieces, and all you could do was to somehow manage your own. And everyone was struggling to do just that, uncaring of the other. And all of it—the careening, colliding small pieces—were plummeting the world down the chute. My pieces too were in a fine shambles: wife, Sara, shadows, killers. Only Guruji was fine. But he was not a piece. He was Guruji, the answer to all this crap.

The one piece I knew I could put right was job and money. In two weeks I had it. An investigative reporter’s job in a daily that was modernizing with such speed and determination that its graphics
and font sizes were growing by the day and white bimbettes from Los Angeles famed for having their private sex videos leaked were jumping on to its front pages, screaming their skins. I asked the man heading the bureau—fat and affable, hands in his pockets tossing his testicles like salad—to let me know the red lines. He smiled expansively and said there were none; then proceeded to reel off so many names that I lost track. Among them were the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, several political dynasties, and enough business houses to host a grand summit. ‘You can go ahead and hammer everyone else,’ he said, with a smile.

Yes, slaughter the rabbits. They were way too many, born to be butchered.

There was no big picture.

But the salary was good. And Sara was still doing it for me. And two of the three libel cases slammed against us had already fallen by the wayside. Both politicians. It was a waste of time all around. Just one bureaucrat persisted. For the moment.

In contrast, the three idiots who had jiggled the asshole of the defence ministry with their fake cameras were still being put through the juicer. They popped up in the papers and on television screens now and then, raging, ranting, protesting their innocence. One of them—Jai’s doppelganger—was a particularly bad case. The big picture type. He was most visible, most vocal.

Some fucks never learn.

Sub-inspector Hathi Ram felt the same.

‘Once a scoundrel, always a scoundrel,’ he’d said, banging the sides of a cream biscuit together and looking at me with steady expressionless eyes. It was January and the small study seemed tighter than ever with both of us swathed in extra layers. The policeman wore a cheap tweed coat and a brown muffler around his neck. His
face looked leathery in the lamplight with the grey stubble pushing through. As always I would have to be patient to divine the true purpose of his visit. No Indian could ever talk straight or deal straight; presumably, it would bring disgrace to our complex heritage. ‘There are exceptions,’ he continued. ‘Valmiki changed from brigand to poet and saint. But it’s just as well that such things happen rarely. I am not sure we want too many saints. In this country, I often feel, better to have more scoundrels than saints.’

I was sitting with my feet tucked under me on the chair, a green monkey-cap on my head. Guruji always said the skull must be kept warm and the aura of brainwaves preserved close around the head. That’s why the great rishis wore long hair, and eminent men tied turbans. I said, ‘So what have my lot turned out to be—scoundrels or saints?’

Huthyam said, ‘You know, I don’t know anything about these things. This is the work of other, more important men. My duty is only to protect you. But I have heard things, not good things. I would have to be a saint to say that these men are not scoundrels. And you know policemen can never be saints. Scoundrels can be saints, crooks can be saints, murderers can be saints, but policemen can never be anything but policemen.’

I waited. He too was a master of his game. Like Kapoorsahib, like Guruji, like Sara, like Jai. In some ways he was more honourable. He had worked the gutter, not created it. He banged the cymbals one more time and then in slow sequence planted them deep in his mouth. All three buttons of his cheap tweed coat were stretched. He had put on weight in the three years I had known him.

‘I am sure I am wrong, but my information is that it didn’t matter at all whether they killed you or not. They were sent to get themselves caught, or shot. Of course they didn’t know it. They thought they were on a mission.’

Fuck. Everyone spoke through frosted glass.

I said, ‘But who sent them?’

He opened up a biscuit carefully and ran it lightly under his nose. ‘I don’t know. Someone powerful wanted to get rid of them or at least get rid of some of them. The contract on you was just an excuse.’

‘So they were set up. They were trapped. They are, also, in a sense, victims.’ Sara would have pinned a medal to my chest.

He banged the biscuit halves together and his face hardened. ‘They are all scoundrels,’ he hissed. ‘Make no mistake about it. They are thieves, crooks, murderers. They are no more victims than any of us—trapped in the lives we’ve been given. One of them cuts men with a knife like ripe guavas. Two of them are dangerous drug dealers—one a Chinese—who have been killing since they were ten years old. From Kabul to Calcutta they control the narcotics route. The fourth one is a mastermind—a quiet Musalman from Bareilly who raped the daughter of the police chief and has a direct hotline to the Bombay underworld. He moves in and out of Uttar Pradesh’s jails like a friendly pigeon and in every jail he is treated with fear and respect. And the last one, the last one is an asura. I would run away from the street on which his shadow fell. He is so strong he can turn an Ambassador car on its head. And they say, where other people have a heart, he has stone. Nothing can move him. And he wants nothing—not money, not women, not accolades. He just likes to kill. He smashes your head in so that even your mother doesn’t recognize you. And he never fails. Once he takes a contract on you, you may as well just kill yourself. It’s why everyone is whispering that this story does not add up.’ He paused, sitting up stiffly in the chair, and looked directly at me, his mouth smiling, his eyes still. ‘You are alive because you were not really meant to be killed.’

Through the closed door, melodramatic television sounds seeped in.

I said, ‘But then, why were they sent?’

He said, ‘That is the big question! Why were they sent, if not to kill you? I think they were sent to get caught. I think someone very
powerful wanted to get rid of them. Maybe all of them; maybe some of them; maybe one of them. It’s like a suspense thriller. All very complex. Till the last scene we won’t know who the real killer is. It could even be the policeman. The very man who is giving you the information.’ And he raised his eyebrows and held the pose.

I said, ‘Do they always work together? Are they one gang?’

He let go of the pose and snorted. ‘That only happens in the movies, my friend! Where gang members sing songs together, and buy sarees for each other’s wives! These people know less about each other than I know, say, about your black rose.’ He gestured with his chin towards the closed door. He meant Felicia. Her skin fascinated him. ‘What is not clear is whether they were meant to get caught after killing you, or before. Whether someone wanted to just have them punished for a bit, or put away for good.’

Sara, the seer of our times.

I said, ‘But why do it in this elaborate way, through a plot to kill me?’

The policeman had put the biscuit back together and was rotating it in his fingers like a coin. ‘This is India, my friend. Why do anything simply if you can do it in a complicated way? Have you ever been to get a driving licence or a ration card? Have you ever filed a complaint at a police station? Have you ever got a child admitted to school? It’s the brahminical brain, so wily, so twisted, it draws a straight line by making circles.’

I said, ‘Sure. Then why the security cover? Why for so long? If I never was the target?’

He said, ‘Because I may be wrong. This is only what I think. The men who decide these things, I don’t know what they think. It’s not my job to know what they think. My job is to do. If everyone thinks, there will be a mountain of thinking, and no policing. My job is only to protect you, and that’s what I do. These doubts that I share with you, I share with you not as a policeman but as a friend. After all these years I am a friend, am I not? After some time even jailors
and prisoners become friends—they realize one has no meaning without the other. And you and I are on the same side, are we not?’

He said all this with a soft mouth but hard eyes. I thought, what a peerless cop this man must have been. I knew he was six months away from retiring. He’d told me several times that his nights now were full of dreams of his village and his family farm. The mango trees, the sugarcane stalks, the ripening gold of wheat, the green tufts of cabbage, the odour of cattle dung, the woodsmoke in the dal, the milk warm from the udder, the haunting call of the koel, the rain falling on mud, and the skies full of stars. In typical Huthyam fashion he’d said, ‘I want to decay and disintegrate where I was born and fashioned. I want my soul to wander in the fields of my childhood, not on the streets of Delhi, where it’ll get run over every day by a new Maruti.’

I said, ‘So which one of them do you think was the one that was being fixed?’

He said, ‘Who can tell? They are all bloody maaderchods! They all deserve to be fixed. This country needs to hang a few thousand of them and the rest will fall into place. You know who I think it is—I think it’s that quiet Musalman from Bareilly. They say he’s very calm, never complains, says nothing, asks for nothing, except pieces of wood which he chisels all the time. No one has ever come to seek bail for him or to represent him in court. Such men carry worlds inside them. Such men can go anywhere, do anything. In this age of terrorism and Pakistan and the underworld and sinister politics, a man like him could have crossed many dangerous lines. They say he is resolute that he doesn’t want bail. What kind of man says that? What kind of man fears freedom? Only one who fears the freedom of other men to kill him.’