The Story of My Assassins (7 page)

In all her decades of chanting, Mother had managed to discard nothing but her sanity. And all that she had acquired was the wail, which she deployed recklessly. I often wondered how my father had been surviving her. If he had ever come out of his paper tomb he would have surely strangled her, if only to cut out the noise.

Sara reacted like Jai, with the informed world view of the urban
sophisticate. Looking immediately for the story behind the story. Unlike him, she didn’t look for white powder conspiracies. Typically, she peered through the opposite end of the telescope. She was not interested in how power wanted to fix me—through lead or talcum—but how power manipulated the disempowered to do its bidding. From the moment the first shadows had shown up, she had slit her wrists, fretting more about their situation than mine.

Each time I’d walk through her door she’d start the inquiries: ‘Who’s there? Belly? Phlegm? Vijyant?’ Then she’d stand on her toes, peer through the high bathroom window while I held her unequal body from behind, and harangue me about my indifference. ‘I hope, when the moment comes, they show as little concern for you as you’ve shown for them!’ From there she’d rapidly spiral into a rage, ‘Why should they be risking their lives for you? What’s so valuable about you, mr peashooter? I can bet you their lives are more worthy, more deserving of protection! Each of them probably takes care of a desperately struggling family—toiling wife, ailing parents, children in unaffordable schools! While you, mr peaman and your lovely ms white lead the good fraudulent life, hating each other and your idiotic parentage, and pretending to save the nation.’

After she’d gone on for a bit, walking up and down the room, photo arms waving, I’d say, ‘Bloody whore!’ through clenched teeth, and her breath would catch. Her babble of baiting would grow louder, more disjointed. ‘The state uses these poor buggers for their own damn end! They are cops. They should be protecting the ordinary folk who need protection and have none, who are harassed by anyone with a bit of money and muscle! They should be in the bloody villages and the slums, working for the wretched, not spending their days escorting an elitist bastard, while he wanders about looking for his weekly screw!’ I’d watch her impassively and when the moment was right, spit, ‘Saali randi!’ From there to backing her against the wall was mere minutes of trading abuse—in English and Hindi, juvenile, repetitive, mostly the absurd naming of genitalia. Just
as I’d nail her to the wall, her ideological tirade would turn into a taunting sexual challenge, now purely in Hindi. ‘Arre take your little luli away somewhere else! I’ve seen scores like you! Longer than you, thicker than you! Take your little matchstick away and light a fire in dollyfolly! What’s needed here is a flaming torch!’

She was made to be taken standing, and when I was in her, her photo shoulders braced against the wall, her toes stretched, her body curved like a bow, when I was deep in her, holding up her fullness with my hands, her tone would begin to change. As I kissed her cigarette-mouth, it would became increasingly tender, soft, full of endearments, gratitude; all Hindi would now vanish, only sweet English phrases would bloom. Yes please, my god you are lovely, how good you feel, love how you move, I miss you so much, don’t stop, why can’t you see me every day, god you are amazing, love what you are doing, love what you are doing, love what you are doing.

Later, naked in front of Bonaparte, flat on her back, she would begin to slit her wrists again. Now in a gentler way, teasing out speculation about the cops and the killers.

Slowly, over the weeks, she had become convinced that the whole thing was a frame-up. But, after the peculiar way her mind worked, it wasn’t me she was worried about. She thought I was more than capable of taking care of myself. ‘Fully bloody enlisted member of India’s most elite caste, the only true brahmins of modern India—the upper middle-class Anglo! Right school, right language, right friends! Patronized by the system, understands the system, can work the system inside out, and outside in! In fact, pretty much invented the system! The one fucking caste that the Brits created, to ruthlessly dominate old Dr Manu’s four!’

I made a note to gift her a copy of the
Manusmriti
. But I knew what she was tilting at. She was basically concerned about the poor sods the system was using in the frame-up. Those who were supposed to guard me; and those who were supposed to have shot me. In her words, India’s true low-castes, with neither money nor
influence—ruthlessly deployed against each other to fulfil the agenda of the master class. Whose fully bloody paid-up member I was.

In the beginning it was just about her wanting information from me, about both shadows and shooters, and I failing to provide any, which led to her rants. ‘How can you not want to know? How can you be so indifferent?’ And so on, till the nailing on the wall. Then it became a growing suspicion of a sinister plot. In this story I was just a decoy, my fate unimportant; and the cops were minor victims, collaterally damaged for having to fuss over me. The actual victims were the assassins. These were innocent men the system wanted to fix—for reasons of business, politics, religion or terror, this we did not know yet.

Yes, Jai’s talcum had been sprinkled.

I was the talcum.

The killers—the killers were the real victims.

T
hat year the rains meandered on right into September in a kind of epileptic way, with sudden fits of rain, a sharp cascade of large luscious drops that would stream suddenly, bringing back memories of childhood monsoons when a daily soaking was inevitable. And even as the fit uncurled its full force, before the first hour was out, the drains overflowed, the roads flooded, and the traffic snarled at every intersection, every underpass, the mouth of every colony. Sara’s master class would suffer stalled cars; her low-castes would slip down uncovered manholes. At such a time it was difficult to believe this was a modern city—seemingly so organized, so ornamental under clear skies and bright sun, its roads wide, its trees lush, its flyovers leaping up to the heavens.

The canker seemed to be concrete.

In an excess of sprucing up, the city had been choked. Delhiites, seeking ever new ways of displaying their affluence, had bought up every kind of new tile and stone hitting the market and laid it out where they could. Marble—green, pink, Bhutanese, Nepalese. Stone—Jaisalmer gold, Kota grey, Agra red, Jaipur pink. Granite—black, brown, speckled. Tiles—Italian, Moroccan, Spanish. Sidewalks, backyards, gardens, driveways, open areas, walkways—everything was being paved and cemented. Every pore blocked, every breath stemmed: the earth was given a hard, impregnable gloss. The fat drops simply bounced off it.

And then, as if in reparation, days would go by without a falling drop, and the power supply would fluctuate and the feeble invertors die and the thrum of generators and the stench of diesel fumes would stain the air, and the swelter would get under skins and fray the nerves, and the city would curse and scan the festering skies.
And Sippy, in his odd moment of lucidity would say, ‘Sirji, it is a curse of the times—just as there is very little milk left in milk, there is very little rain left in the rain.’

There was time for idle bullshit like the weather because we had nothing else to do. Jai’s friends had by now completely lost their stomach for the enterprise. They had been slowly turning off the taps for months; the magazine had steadily dwindled from a hundred and twelve pages to ninety-six to seventy-two to forty-eight. At each stage Jai had addressed the staff as if he were Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, assuring them that immortality and the turnaround would both be theirs, in fact were just days away. All each of us had to do was to resolutely stand by our posts and keep firing. At what, he didn’t say. The fucker was so eloquent, with his burning eyes and waving arms, that even I fell for his talk. Each time, when the trance broke, I thought: through millennia men like him have led thousands to their untimely graves.

Now we were down to forty pages—the magazine was as spineless as a pamphlet—and nearly one month’s salaries in arrears. The investors, Jai’s school friends, three of them, christened Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey by us, had stopped taking our calls, and even their executive assistants, though unfailingly polite—‘we’ll certainly pass on the message’—had frost in their voice. Unusually, the accounts man Santoshbhai, an old-timer with a Hitler moustache and six strands of hair glued across his bald pate, was still very warm each time we called him pleading for a transfer of funds. But, of course, he was helpless. ‘Arre bhai, I only count the money, not earn it. If I could give it, you wouldn’t have to ask twice. Just get me one nod from the chhote sahib’ was all he would say. But chhote sahib, Nandan of Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey, was busy imbibing Scotch and slapping flesh and was nowhere to be reached.

In desperation, not knowing what to do but needing to do something, we’d keep calling Santoshbhai in the crazed hope that one day, suddenly, miraculously, he would be reckless enough to send us the money and explain it to chhote sahib later. Like the old good-hearted family retainer in Hindi films who finally earns the ear of the young Turk.

I have to say I was not surprised things had gone badly. I had always been sceptical of the trio, and I don’t think they liked me either. In his blindly enthusiastic way Jai had been profuse in spelling out their virtues when we first set out. ‘Good guys, have made their millions, not really chasing money any more, want to do social stuff, things for the soul, I’ve seen them since they were in their chuddies, always been decent chaps not rich brats, anyway there’ll never be the perfect investor for what we want to do, these guys are about as good as it’ll ever get, at least they talk our language, at least we’ll be able to hear each other, think of the guy we went to in CP, who wanted our asset sheets—we didn’t even know what he was talking about, think of the buggers we’ve worked for, surely nothing can be worse than them!’

Actually these guys were worse. They were complete fools. Not smart enough to just focus on making the money; stupid enough to have bought this magazine thing from Jai in the middle of a wrist-slitting festival one posh evening.

The very first time Jai took me to meet them, at a hotel bar, I concluded they were chutiyas. Chutiya-Nandan-Pandeys. They were dressed sharply in crisp fresh clothes, with manicured hands and hair, and were awash in cologne. Very briefly, in the beginning, they had American accents—two of them had done university abroad. In between struggling to ask serious questions they had cracked dumb jokes and guffawed loudly, randomly slapping each other’s backs,
hands, thighs; they were still in their school dorm getting giggly about the geography teacher’s bra-strap.

They were all garment exporters and had earned countless millions working sweat factories that supplied dirt-cheap apparel for the big stores of the West. Bondhu Ram fashioning Calvin Klein—that sort of thing. Two of them did undergarments and were called Kuchha King and Kuchha Singh (he was a shorn sardar). The third was called Frock Raja, after his special act. Coming from the same posh school as Jai, incapable of much else, they had been set up by their fathers at a time of great export incentives. Before economic playing fields were levelled, they had made enough for five generations. The chasm between Bondhu Ram and Calvin Klein—between Jaunpur and Fifth Ave—was big enough to accommodate vast wealth and all its excesses.

The bar was all burnished wood and glass with windows the size of walls through which I watched a white-skinned mamma working the length of the heaven-blue pool on the other side. She wore a yellow bikini and opened her mouth in a big O each time she broke a stroke. She should have worn an orange burqa and kept her mouth closed. The water in the pool sparkled as if each drop had been diligently polished before being flowed in by the super servile waiters who whispered by our side. Most of India would have gladly drunk it, like sherbet.

Remembering Guruji, I had quickly become the man in the iron mask, dug into the bowl of salted peanuts and settled back to watch the proceedings. Jai had striven to humour his pals with weak smiles and fey ripostes. He had an amazing ability to shrink himself down to the dumbest fuck. Mr Lincoln Goes to the People.

By the time the third round of whiskies had arrived, they were already talking about the first anniversary party—the venue, the music and the starlets they’d like to invite. They had given up trying to involve me and were in the swim of their own happy lake. I had, meantime, fed my entire bowl of peanuts to the iron mask and
was now burrowing deep into Jai’s, setting in motion the engines of great flatulence.

The parting was demonstrative, with effusive hugs and loud wisecracks. Mr Lincoln was flung from embrace to embrace. On the granite-floored lobby of the hotel there was much of this, very similar, noisy happiness reverberating all around. The fastest growing national affliction: opulence euphoria.

I had pumped hands, sick with the peanuts.

When they had been driven off in their Mercedeses and Pajeros, and we were waiting for our small cars in the foyer, Jai said, ‘So what do you think?’ I said, ‘Chutiya-Nandan-Pandeys.’

Jai had laughed and said, ‘Who else would back crazies like us?’

The next time, we were invited to meet them at Frock Raja’s farmhouse. It was five acres of la-la land, just behind the boxy Vasant Kunj flats where Sara lived. There were water-spurting Scandinavian marble mermaids with large Indian breasts, a topiary of dinosaurs, a swimming pool shaped like a flounced skirt—with a submerged bar at the waistband—bulb-lit Halloween masks on pruned branches, undulating manicured lawns with colourful steel birds poised for takeoff, lines of mast trees trimmed to precisely the same height flanking every pathway, piped Clayderman tinkles at every corner of the garden, a Yeats pond with the fifty-nine swans of Coole, a dining-room in a mock stable with two handsome horses tethered in a corner for atmospherics, so you could chew to the music of shuffling flanks and scuffing hooves.