The Story of My Assassins (17 page)

Tope put his right foot on the shrunken tormentor and pressed down gently. The sardar wailed like a baby through his mucus and clutched at his ankle. It was not as bad as it looked. Tope’s keds were the flat rubber-soled mud-brown hand-me-down standard issues used by army men. Light, smooth, not a single groove remaining on their thin underside. The other two boys, faces averted, were looking at him from the corner of their eyes. The filigree of sunlight could not camouflage their terror. That young boy Lucky, they had been breaking him in, tutoring him to extract pleasure from terror. He had been put to practice on the migrant labourers working their fields. Behind hay ricks, inside tube wells, amid the cane, by the rushes. Now he lay there, a second small hole in his bum, burrowing into the mulch.

All it took was a knife! A Rampuria. Not size, not wealth, not numbers. Not caste, not creed, not class. Just a knife.

For the first time in years Tope felt beautiful. Strong and beautiful. Like he used to when Sukha put him on his Neema tank and entrusted him with guarding the borders with an arsenal of farts.

Suddenly Bhupi squirmed, attempting to push his foot away. In cold anger, Tope pushed his foot down hard and gave it two slow
twists. The sardar’s scream must have reached the village, and loosened the bowels of the other two boys.

Then, as he’d seen in one of the nine films he’d been taken to in town, Tope bent down and wiped the Rampuria on the writhing-screaming sardar’s shirt—at the shoulder, where it was still unbloodied—and flicked the knife shut.

T
here was hell to pay. For a very long time. But Tope did not pick up any of the cheques.

By the time he meandered back to the embracing palms, walking on air, the news had already reached. Chacha grabbed his arm as he hopped off the tree trunk across the stream and literally dragged him to the far south of the fields where the eucalyptus grove rose like a garrison of pale ghosts waving at the skies. In no time they were deep among the spectres, the only sounds their panting breaths and the scrunch of the crisp leaves underfoot. Chacha was not letting them walk. They moved at a steady speed. Neither boy nor man exchanged a single word. The hallmark of a robust relationship is knowing how to act in a crisis without anything being said. There would be time to talk. Now there was not enough time to run.

They emerged on the other side of the waving ghosts and stayed with the fields, running on the narrow mud bunds, both in flat brown keds, Dakota’s army seconds. When the dividing mud line was too narrow they ran straddling it, in an ungainly waddle, swaying from side to side. Fortunately the fields were close to harvest and there was no water or slush to impede their movement. The late afternoon sun was heavy on their backs. They crouched as they ran, as if dodging bullets. The fact was, away from the grove, the land stretched clear for acres and acres on all sides. The ripened wheat was not too high. If your eye was good you could spot a paddy bird
taking flight hundreds of metres away. Chacha took a line distant from the homesteads and tried to steer clear of the steadily balding squares where wiry migrant labour, men and women and children from eastern UP and Bihar, were on their haunches slicing the golden stalks and tying them into bundles. A few times, unavoidably, Chacha and Tope stumbled onto a patch being freshly tonsured, but the small burnt figures—heads padded with cloth, curving sickles in their hands, wearing muddy sarees and dhotis—did not question them. They merely turned their heads to look at the panting duo without expression, their eyes containing neither curiosity nor alarm.

These were people who had left their dark huts and minuscule holdings, tied their pots, pans and clothes in bundles, taken every able family member, and every child below one and above eight, and travelled hundreds of kilometres on foot, bus, truck, train in search of the feeding wage. It was a cyclical pilgrimage to where the crops grew and the rupees were paid. To reap the wheat, to plant the paddy, to cut the cane. They lived as all men had once, by the seasons. In the nights they sang haunting folk songs by their cooking fires, and at the end of season they returned to their waiting homes with money and food and clothes. And the wild hope that some miracle would make the next journey unnecessary.

You saw them everywhere with their stick limbs and burnt skins and blank eyes. Inside themselves they carried a deep well of loss and lack and sadness and exploitation and struggle and uncertainty, a well so deep that they could hardly see anything around them, anything outside of them. Death, disease, destitution, trauma could not distress them, for they were all of it. A boy and a man running through the fields—with nothing obvious chasing them—was just another passing oddity in a very odd world.

What really worried Chacha were the homesteads. Any farmer seeing them was bound to hail them; any farmer seeing them run was bound to wonder. And when Bhupi’s family and retainers came asking, the flight path would lie wide open. They went through
fields and farms they knew—Bant, Doabi, Lal Singh, Pramukh, Pali, Tau—steering away from the tube wells and houses, and, miraculously, did not run into anyone. Every now and then they scattered flocks of babblers and partridges out at picnic, and the occasional blinding-white egret, which insouciantly took two flaps of flight before landing and carrying on with its strut.

At every unmarked boundary line, a posse of lean dogs picked up on them, and set pace by their heels, barking and running them out of their domains. Like the birds, the dogs did not worry them. As farmers they knew the only dog to really fear was the odd one that turned rabid. These dogs were all racket and no bite, fit only to terrify the townsfolk who came visiting. They were alarm bells, not defenders. If you walked into them they would keep backing off, all the way into their own doorsteps.

From the embracing palms by the stream, the highway, the Grand Trunk Road, was over ten kilometres as the crow flies. Chacha had crossed many farms and half that distance before he allowed Tope or himself to slow down to a walk. There were a few other villages that lay between Keekarpur and the main road, but they had managed to sidestep them all. The mango trees under which they now sat were old and barren, and under the canopy of their dirty green leaves it was cool and dark. They sat on their haunches, opposite each other, backs against the rough trunks, panting like hunted animals. Outside the arc of the grove’s darkness the world was shining bright, the sun glancing off the golden wheat.

When his breath had calmed, Chacha finally asked, ‘How bad was it? Will they live?’

Tope said—suddenly a man, suddenly in the course of a morning, suddenly in six slashes of a knife, his Chacha’s equal—Tope said, ‘Not bad at all. Nothing is going to happen to them. I just nicked them here and there. But if you heard them screaming you’d think I had pulled their intestines out.’

Chacha looked at the boy. In the gloomy dark he could not read
his expression, but his tone had changed. It was no longer the voice of his runty nephew who spoke little and spent his days trying to stay out of everyone’s way.

Chacha said, ‘Did you not know what would happen?’

Tope, the man, said, ‘I did not care.’

Chacha said, ‘You know what Bhupi’s father can do.’

Tope said, ‘But Bhupi’s like a fucking eunuch. In fact, I nearly made him one.’

Chacha suddenly saw the cussed gene that was the boy’s inheritance. No different from his father; no different from his grandfather. Those two had aligned it behind the Indian army and the barrels of their guns. The boy it seemed was going to do so behind the curve of his Rampuria.

Chacha said, ‘Where is the knife?’

Tope stretched out his right leg, sucked in his stomach, and drew out the folded knife. He pressed the brass lever and it flicked open. When he pressed the blade between his forefinger and thumb, the steel was sticky. Slowly he palpitated its cold length, feeling his skin peel and stick. He needed to wash the blade and work it on a whetstone.

Chacha said, ‘Give it to me.’

Tope did not move. ‘Why?’

‘We need to hide it. We should bury it here. We don’t want to be found with it.’

Tope said, ‘No.’

The voice of Dakota Ram. The voice of Fauladi Fauji. There was no arguing with it. All these years Chacha had thought his nephew was like him—a slice of his mother’s side. Not like his father, not like his grandfather. That, like him, he was made of gentler stuff, weak in body and in temper. Chacha, who was ten years younger than his big brother Dakota and had always been treated like a boy; Chacha, who failed the army recruitment tests because he was so puny, his legs bent, his chest small, his bones weak; Chacha, whose opinion
the big men never sought; Chacha, who milked the buffaloes and helped the women shop in the town; Chacha, who had failed to produce children in eight years of marriage; Chacha, who sang the lullabies that put Tope to sleep, who helped work through Tope’s exercise books, who heard out the traumas of his schooldays. Chacha who had always thought Tope was his spiritual son.

In that dark cove of mango trees, as he watched his nephew feel the knife, he knew clearly whose son the boy was.

The two of them sat in silence as the glare of the sun was sucked out of the day, leaving behind a marmalade glow.

Then as night fell, bringing on a thick moon and high stars, the fields turned grey-blue. You could still see a man at fifty metres, and a man with a lantern at a hundred and more. But now the landscape was spectral: full of moving shadows; behind every waving stalk and bush, a hiding man. The true guide to the world now was the ear not the eye. Sound was the demon of the night, empowered, enhanced, travelling with a speed and strength it could never possess in daylight hours. No one could sneak up on them unless they moved on the padded feet of animals.

Inside the mango grove it had become pitch dark and the undergrowth had begun to talk up a fury. Chacha pulled steadily on his Lal Batti beedis, the burning tip the only visible sign of the two fugitives. His bundle of twenty was almost over and the grove was acrid with their stench. Tope had nodded off, the fatigue following the rush of adrenalin.

Chacha, having acted with alacrity and courage for the first time in his life, was now slowly beginning to wonder what the future held. Its contours were so terrifying, he felt the panic surge in him. Just then he heard a volley of distant noises, of dogs and of men, and when he ran to the edge of the circle of mangoes, he saw far away a
swarm of lanterns bobbing through the grey-blue night like dancing fireflies.

His body turned cold with fear. On quavering legs he hobbled to the boy, pushed him awake, and they began to run. They stumbled out the other side and sprinted blindly, not caring where their feet fell. Through the standing wheat, through the cut and tied bundles, through narrow water channels, through freshly ploughed squares, through muddy feeding troughs, through knife-edged rushes, through slivers of swamp, through stands of eucalyptus, past baying dogs, past throbbing tube wells, past hailing voices. This time the boy had the lead and Chacha struggled on his infirm legs to keep pace. Each time the terrain changed, each time there was a stumble, Tope looked back to ensure his uncle was not in distress.

In the course of a day, in six slashes of a knife, the equation had changed irrevocably.

By the time they crossed the Gurari nullah, on the east of Shikarpur village and clambered up the muddy incline, they had no more wind left in them. They stretched out flat on the grassy knoll, hearts pounding like wedding drums, their clothes wet and muddied, the sky and stars swimming above them in a haze of exhaustion, ready to die where they lay. Chacha actually held Tope’s forearm as he wheezed in loud cycles. ‘I don’t know about Bhupi,’ he said, ‘but I think you’ve certainly killed us.’

No sooner had he spoken he was struggling to his feet again. When Tope suggested they linger a while longer, Chacha folded his hands and begged him not to argue: ‘O great Chaakumaar, let us just start walking. It’ll keep our legs from cramping, o prince of bundpangas.’

Chaaku liked the sound of that. Asshole-scrapper. Made him feel like Sukha. Footloose and tough and irreverent.

The walking proved tough work. The panic of the mad run had been much easier. The night breeze worked their wet clothes into a chill, and the ache in their limbs oozed to the fore. They walked
stiffly, soaked cloth shoes squelching, slipping as they tried to stay on the mud bunds. The fields lay luminous; the silence of deep night ripped open occasionally by the cry of a nightbird. Through the slip and scuff of their feet, the two men kept their ears trained for danger, but they didn’t hear a single sound in pursuit.

As fear receded, hunger intruded and began to grow a hole in their bellies. But there was nothing to be done. There were no great familiarities this far out, and to risk the boundary of any homestead at this hour would be foolhardy. It was dangerous even to wander into the guava groves. The dogs would be unloosed and noisy and would not be calmed till the watchmen were roused. Without being asked, Chacha said, ‘The great thing about hunger is it kills itself after some time.’

Tope turned around and looked at him with a surge of affection and pity. His Chacha was born to lose. Damned both by genes and environment. What he had done today was against the grain, extraordinary. A show of his love for his nephew. He put out his knife hand and squeezed his uncle’s narrow shoulder. With a smile he said, ‘The great thing about life, Chacha, is that it kills itself after some time.’

Without breaking step, Chacha said, ‘And if you become a bundpanga champion then it does so in no time at all!’

Instinctively, they didn’t take the straight line to the highway. The two bus stops that flanked the point where the dusty village road opened itself out onto the Grand Trunk Road were dangerous places to head for. One fronted a cluster of shops—puncture and motor repair, tea and biscuits, paan and cigarettes. The other was at Gharyali village, opposite the graffiti-painted back wall of the school. These were among the first places the sardar’s men would head for.