The Story of My Assassins (11 page)

The others were fairly nondescript. Short, thin, almost weedy, unlikely to stand out in any crowd. One of them was dark as burnt coal; and one very fair, with north-eastern, Nepali features—Sippy would have referred to him as a Chingfunglee. They didn’t look like they could kill a gutter rat between the four of them. The fair brigand, on the other hand, looked as if he could kill all four before breakfast and then be ready for a day’s work. Even with the rope stringing them together the four pressed close to each other and
clear of the boy. Their eyes were averted and they were talking to each other in hushed voices. The young brigand paid them no attention, and after showing me his contempt turned away to stare at yoronour conducting his business in conspiratorial whispers. The policeman holding his arm was big built too, by far the biggest in the detachment of six.

I could sense that in that swirling mad room, every eye had slowly come to rest on him. I saw even yoronour in all his pasty majesty sneak a look or two.

Sethiji said, ‘They say he is the future king of western UP. His name is Hathoda Tyagi. Before he was nineteen he’d killed his first five men by caving their skulls in with a hammer. Full brain curry. Now, of course, he shoots people—through their ears, in their mouths, up their assholes. Today he kills you, tomorrow your enemy. Like Sethiji gets up and comes to Patiala House courts every morning, he goes out every day and dispatches a few sorry souls to Yamraj directly. He works only for the big mafia dons now. When they want a big job done, they send for Hathoda Tyagi. You should be proud. Not just Sethiji, even the mafia thinks you are a big man!’

Sara said, ‘They are being framed.’

I looked at her.

She said, ‘Can’t you see they are being framed!’

I said, ‘How can you tell?’

She said, in a hard whisper, ‘Oh don’t give me those lofty peashooter ones! Even a blind man can tell they’ve just been set up! Look at those four poor guys—seems like they’ve been dragged off the road to settle someone else’s agenda. They wouldn’t know how to kill a chicken for dinner!’

And what about him, I said with my eyes. He looks like he, in one joyous spree, could hammer in the brains of the entire courtroom. Mass brain curry. Served steaming fresh, at the altar of truth and justice.

She said, in an even harder whisper, ‘Oh don’t always get taken
in by looks mr peashooter! Just because he has some muscles doesn’t mean he goes around killing people!’

Yoronour caught her hard tones and looked our way, frowning sharply. The clerks and wastrel instantly broke into shushing sounds. Sethiji, his smile still beatific, immediately said, ‘I am sorry milord.’ Then swivelled left and right and loudly admonished everyone, ‘Silence! Please learn to maintain silence in the courtroom.’ For a moment I thought Sara was going to say something, but before that could happen, Sethiji had caught my hand and put it on her photo arm and whispered, ‘Take Bhabhiji out, I’ll call you when our number comes.’

We had barely exited the room—the shadows in hot pursuit—that she turned on me. Wriggling her arm free, she said, ‘You are not going to allow the bastards to use you to frame them! Can’t you see you are being used?’

We were in the middle of the corridor, a river of people flowing around us. Using their elbows and hips, the shadows had fenced off a tiny island for us. I said, ‘I know nothing about this. Nothing! All I know is what that Hathi Ram has told me. And he claims he knows nothing. I’ve told you what they’ve told me or not told me. I know nothing more and am not interested in finding out either!’

Many people had stopped by the cordon and were listening in. One young man with a gaunt face and handsome nostril hair had literally stuck his head into our space and cocked his right ear towards us. I said to him, ‘What are you listening to, tiger sandoz—the sermon of Bhagwan Ram?’ He looked at me foolishly with his mouth half open. One of the shadows caught him by his bird neck, twisted it around, and slowly pulling out the black pistol from his crotch, showed it to him. ‘Shall I put this in your ear, hero? Want to hear it? The bugle of Bhagwan Nine MM.’

Moving like a striking snake, Sara grabbed the shadow’s wrist, and shouted, ‘Stop it! What do you think you are doing?’ The shadow immediately let go of the bird neck, his face filling up with
bewilderment and shame. Bird neck, his mouth still half open and his eyes dazed, quickly backed off and melted into the crowd. All the other onlookers leapt into the surging river and flowed away.

The shadow—a new replacement, middle-aged, balding, but full of energy—stood there struggling with his sudden diminishment, working on a weak smile, his entire vocation called into question.

I looked at Sara, and saw she realized she had gone too far. The shadows were clearly out of bounds. Ignoring them was one thing; active intervention in their work, another. They were on dispatch from the state, doing their duty, and any interference in it was basically unacceptable. Ostensibly the man lived to save your life; you could not piss on his so brazenly.

Then I made the mistake of not letting remorse do its work. I forgot Guruji’s cardinal lesson that you can wound and destroy more effectively with silence than with words. I decided to pluck a quick feather for my cap. I said, coldly, with a sneer, ‘It’s time even you learnt where to draw the line.’ And before I had finished saying it I knew I had thrown away all advantage. Regret vanished from her face like a midsummer mirage. Her eyes hardened with contempt; she folded her photo arms across her chest like armour. ‘And where, mr peashooter, in your opinion should the great line lie? In sticking a gun into a poor bystander’s ear? In helping the state frame innocent men on charges of murder? Or in asking desperate women who call you up to sell some harmless things if they’d care to be raped? And how amusing you find all of it! So tell me, mr peashooter, where do you draw the line? Wherever your day’s selfishness finds it convenient?’

I knew I had tipped her onto a track that did not lead to a nailing on the wall. This one led to badly bruising places, to prolonged trench warfare that I had no inclination for. In the past my instinct had been to exit such a situation quickly and completely. The last one—the Malayali girl who gave me tree names and wet palms—had ended on sulk number three, in week number nine.

The truth is I had no time to argue with others; I had too many arguments going on with myself. I was happier recalling her lustrous dark skin, the watermelon red slash at its lovely core, than entering a spiral of you didn’t call, why didn’t you call, where are you, with who are you, do you feel, what do you feel, you don’t care, why can’t you come, why can’t we go, why can’t you say something, what are you saying, you only want that, you don’t want anything, where is this going, this is going nowhere, I thought you were strong, I know you are strong, you are making me weak, I am not weak, you don’t want to change, you’ve changed, you make me sick, you are sick, you don’t really love me, I really love you, how can anyone love you, actually you hate me, actually you hate yourself, actually I hate you.

I had discovered, over time, that the workable cycle was about sixteen weeks. Two weeks of wooing; four weeks of passion; and ten slow and painful weeks of disengagement. By the time it ended there was poison everywhere, with every fine feeling in tatters. When the last lingering tendon was finally snipped, with one of us saying something barbaric that could have easily gone unsaid, there was a euphoria not dissimilar to that of the weeks of passion.

Sometimes the process was less corrosive, when she too understood, like cops and doctors do, that the world is what it is, ephemeral, uneven, to be squarely dealt with, and not to be conjured out of weak romantic novels. But few seemed to possess the gift of leaving the room while the laughter was still in the air and the spirits high. For the most, everyone seemed to be committed to creating a heap of debris before walking away from it.

With Sara it had turned out different. She had surprised me, derailed me. The sixteen weeks had turned to sixty, and I was still wandering around inside the room, refusing even to look at the exit door. At times it angered me. I had even attempted a few times to disconnect completely, wash her out of my system as I had so many others in the past; then, within days, irresistibly drawn by her maddening mix of rebellion and surrender, by the beauty and lust of
her unmatched halves, I had rushed back to the boxy building and thrown myself in front of Napoleon Bonaparte to be showered with her abuse and love.

Not since I was ten and beginning to flee the domination of my mother had I felt so helpless in a relationship. What made it worse was Sara seemed to not know the hold she exercised on me. That, at least, would have involved a game—tactics, strategy, wit, play—something I could train myself to excel at. But she was not a player. She was an original, a force of nature, declaring herself in any way that seized her, and it was up to you to tackle it as best as you could. She was like Jai in her rage and articulation but without the calculation. She spoke such nonsense sometimes that I wanted to tear the Gita page on page and stuff it down her throat. But, even less than with Jai, there was no point going down that road with her. Looking back, my only victories, in more than a year, seemed to be the fleeting ones against the wall.

Now, in the grand squalor of Patiala House she was declaring war again, opening a new front. I was trying to give her my inscrutable, half-smiling expression—reserved for my clueless moments—when Sethiji’s junior penguins saved the moment by rushing out and demanding our presence in the courtroom.

Sethiji, the public prosecutor, and the lawyers for the five men, were all in a convivial huddle at the foot of yoronour’s desk. There was much flesh pressing going on between them after each whispered exchange as they all smiled happily at each other. It must have been a terrifying sight for the accused. Was their freedom being negotiated, or their lives being thrown away? Was this flock of waddling penguins just going through the motions with little concern for the outcome on their lives?

The public prosecutor—a balding clerkish-looking man like my
father, but with the alert eyes of a shopkeeper—said to me, ‘Do you know these men?’

I looked at them. Four of them lowered their eyes. The brain-curry man looked at me as if I was the accused. ‘No, I don’t.’

The swirl in the courtroom seemed to have stilled a bit.

‘Do you know that there has been an attempt to kill you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Do you live under twenty-four-hour police protection?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Do you know who would want to have you killed?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘But do you agree you may have enemies, people you have offended or harmed by your work, who may want to get rid of you?’

‘Yes, sure, it’s possible.’

‘You have no reason to believe that these men may not be the contracted killers?’

‘No, I don’t.’

Yoronour gave me a grave, pasty look as if I had said something of profound importance. Someone really should have stuck a beard on his chin.

The lawyer for the defence, more a little sparrow than a penguin, in an oversized shabby black coat and an old-fashioned pencil moustache, said, waving his arm in a cultivated flourish, ‘Look at them very carefully. Do you know any of them?’

‘No sir, I don’t.’

‘I repeat—look at them again. Very carefully. Have you ever seen these men?’

I actually did what he asked, scanning their faces slowly. The policeman holding the wrist of the one on the extreme left yanked his face up—prominent cheekbones, a big nose, black stubble—and the other three put up theirs in instant reflex. They looked like each other. Everymen. The roads, bazaars, offices of India were full of men like them. Nameless men who did faceless jobs and perished
unmarked in train accidents, fires, floods, epidemics, terrorist blasts, riots. At best, statistical fodder. But I also knew this was how criminals really looked, not like the stylized stars that the movies everywhere in the world loved to essay. More criminals fashioned themselves on film stereotypes than the other way around. Of the five, only brain-curry man was a serious student of cinema.

I said, ‘No sir, I haven’t.’

Actually I could have seen them all my life and not remembered.

The tiny lawyer said in a forcefully mannered voice, ‘Tell me, were you at all aware that someone wanted you killed?’

Clearly this little semicolon of a man had also fashioned himself from cinema. Everybody in this damn country was an imitation of a Hindi film character. He stroked the lapels of his oversized coat, and worked his mouth fully, the pencil moustache mesmeric. I could see him—a wimp in school, a wimp as a son, a wimp as a husband, a wimp as a father, but in the courtroom the master of the moment.

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Was there any indication of a threat at all? A phone call, a letter, some rumour, a friendly remark—from a colleague, a source?’

‘No sir, not really.’

‘But you were under police protection?’

‘I was.’

‘Since when?’

‘The last few months.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t really know. I was not told anything.’

‘You were not told anything. Of course you were not told anything. Who put you under police protection?’

‘The government, the police department … the intelligence bureau … the sub-inspector arrived with his men the day the news broke, and I was just told that I needed to be under protection.’

‘You were told, you were told, in the way the police tells us all kinds of things. You were told. And you didn’t bother to ask why, to
question what you were told? You just believed what you were told. By the same police that you keep exposing for its lies, its human rights violations, its abuses and its excesses! Such a fine journalist, yoronour! We all respect his work. Fighting against corruption, fighting the government’s wrongdoing, the police’s wrongdoing, standing up for society. But this time you believed the police. You believed it was telling the truth—which I am sure it was, I am sure it was. Even the police tell the truth sometimes. So you believed everything the police told you?’