The Story of My Assassins (19 page)

While Sardar Balbir Singh admired the lyric loveliness of the Indian countryside, the cool evening breeze, the stars beginning to switch on one by one and then in chandelier-like clusters, the clean lines of a richly milky moon, the soothing music of cicadas and tube wells and sweetly questioning lapwings, while he thought of his childhood and a life spent amid such beauty, while his brother held the shoulder of the old woman, and the old man sat drooling on his sagging charpoy with a hole shot through its heart, his men picked up the other two parts of the three-in-one goddess, and gagging their protesting mouths with their own dupattas, dragged them into the sanctity of the mud rooms.

Now that no one could see him, the sardar allowed his eyes to well with tears. How mercilessly his son had been slashed. What a poor job he had done bringing up his boy, in training him for survival. In comparison, his own father had taught him everything a man needed to know about courage and leadership. Aloofness. Action. Arrogance. The will to violence. The stomach for cruelty. He had taught him that a leader must arouse fear not love, for eventually men also come to love what they fear. But he, the great Sardar Balbir Singh, in turn, had made his son flabby. His sentimentality had destroyed the boy. He wiped his eyes with the sleeves of his kurta.

The men had begun to stagger out one by one from the dark hole of the main doorway, tightening their turbans, settling their
clothes, picking up the naked swords and gandasas that they had leaned against the mud walls. Some were at the handpump, working their body parts through water. The sardar looked from the corner of his eye. The queue at the doorway hole was nearly gone. Thankfully, not everyone was into it. But then there were some who went back in again. The sooner this was over the better. They needed to get a move on, run down that fucking runt and his equally runty uncle. Slice their balls off. How had they dared? Rage spiralled in him.

Turning around, he said, ‘Finish it all off. Make sure they remember god and us in the same breath for the rest of their lives.’

Now the homestead was set systematically on fire. The house with all its belongings, the reaped bundles of grain in the fields, the cattleshed, the tube well hut. No one was killed. The raped women, the amputated boy, the unhinged old couple, were all pulled clear into the front yard and dumped on the charpoys. The three women coagulated into a moaning blob again, and the boy remained a sobbing ball. The cattle were untethered and whacked with the gandasas, forcing them to canter off. As they left, the men kept setting fire to the standing crop, the ripening stalks of golden wheat. Soon the night was full of crackle and smoke and swirling soot, and the odour of kerosene, which had been splashed everywhere.

Sardar Balbir Singh had begun to walk away from it when they started, and was now near the stream where the headless mongrels lay. One by one his posse joined him as the dark lit up warmly orange all around. When the last man had arrived, the sardar moved to cross the stream. With his foot on the log bridge, he paused and asked, ‘What did you do with the finger?’

A voice from the dark said, ‘I left it inside the older one.’

T
ope Singh—alias Chaaku, alias the son of Dakota, alias the new prince of bundpangas—never went back to the farm by the embracing palms. He never again set eyes on his kind grandmother or his mother or his screwball grandfather. Even when they died over the next few years, he held back. Landlords cultivate long memories, and power does not grow out of forgiveness. As it was, Bhupi’s virility and fertility remained a question mark.

Dakota Ram rushed back on casual leave but chose to give the police procedures a go by. He pretended not to know that the women had been raped, and to Pappu he gave the reassurance that he still had nine fingers left. With his old father he remained locked in the silent communion of complete knowledge and ignorance that had marked their lifelong relationship. They met as if nothing could have happened. His frail mother he held in his arms and wept like a boy.

He went to meet the landlord in his olive-green lance corporal’s uniform—one white V on his left upper arm—and sat on the same chair that the policeman from the village chowki had, in the small outer sitting-room kept for village visitors and petty officials. Sardar Balbir Singh and he agreed that for the moment the score was even. In fact, his men had been anything but excessive. Only two mongrels killed! So it must never be forgotten who had provoked the
mess and that the boy was not yet forgiven. The sardar said, ‘I respect your uniform but I tell you the runt will have to pay. My men have taken Bhupi’s slashing badly.’

Clutching his beret tight in his hands, looking down at the red oxide floor, the army man tried to say, ‘But what of my wife and …’

The sardar said in a voice more menacing than their swords, ‘You think a wife is more important than a son? Remember lance-naik, nothing happened. Nothing. Nothing that she can’t forget in a day or two. My men didn’t slash and slice. They didn’t put a knife in her and open her up where she shouldn’t be open. Remember lance-naik, my son is in hospital, his body ripped open. All his life the stitches will show on his skin like on Rafat’s clothes. Don’t ever forget, lance-naik, that I am the only aggrieved party here. Nothing has happened to you. Nothing!’

The policeman came by when night was falling, and Dakota and he sat on the charpoy under the neem tree and drank the dark Old Monk rum. Near the chopper, Fauladi Fauji, more shrivelled than ever, sipped his share. The sun was gone, its last trace a thin red line. The fields in front were burnt black, feathery ash still taking occasional wing. But not all of it was dead: the fire had licked around the farm unevenly, leaving a few squares still with grain. Today Dakota did not drink with military decorum. He drank to kill the fat bottle. The policeman said, ‘You did well to let it go. You are a wise man. The mess of a police case, of courts and lawyers, would have wiped out whatever little is left here.’

The wood fires were burning behind the low charred mud wall—the last meal of the day cooking. Dakota could see his wife and sister-in-law moving about in the shadows, like fugitives, the dupattas curled around their heads and under their chins. They had not spoken about that night. They probably never would. It would only add to their mutual shame. The army man said, ‘I want to kill the motherfucking dogs. Each one of them. Tie them to the barrel of my Vijayanta tank and blow holes through them.’

The policeman said, ‘Motherfuckers. Bloodsuckers. The Lord will make a hard reckoning with them one day!’

The army man said, ‘I don’t want to leave it to Him. Why should He do our work? I am personally going to chop off their balls and feed them to the village mongrels.’

The policeman said, ‘I would love to do it myself. I would do it now were it not for this fucking khaki uniform. Drag them out by their hair, one by one, and slice their pricks off and pickle them like carrots in a big glass jar for my motherfucking officers to eat.’

The army man said, ‘No! I will eat all of them. Every motherfucking one of them.’

The policeman said, ‘Yes, you are right. They belong to you. You should eat them. Each one of them. I will pickle them and you will eat them. The motherfucking dogs!’

The army man said, ‘And then I will do the women. Each one of them. Make them scuttle and squeal like the village pigs!’

The policeman said, ‘Yes. And then I will do the same.’

The army man said, ‘After me.’

The policeman said, ‘Only after you.’

The bottle was almost over. Dakota poured the last bit evenly between his tumbler and his guest’s. From another glass lying nearby he splashed some water into the rum. His father, old Fauladi Fauji, had collapsed on his charpoy and passed out. The tube well was silent, not a throb in its burnt body. The farmhands who had run away that night had not yet returned. It didn’t matter. There was nothing to be urgently salvaged. The cycle of land, plant and season would take its own time.

The army man said, ‘But no killing anyone. We have to make them suffer. Each day when they pull off their underwear to piss they should look down and know that they are no longer men, and then they should remember us. Each time they piss they should remember us with fear.’

The policeman said, now half-slumped on his charpoy, ‘Each
time they remember our names they should piss with fear. And they should have nothing to hold when they piss but the air.’

The army man said, ‘And that Laudu Maharaj, Sardar Balbir Singh, dick of dicks, I am going to shave off his beard and all his hair till his head shines like a panda’s on the ghats of Banaras.’

The policeman said, ‘And I am going to shove that double-barrel up his asshole and rotate it like a top. And then blow his intestines out of his mouth.’

They were barracking loudly now, slumped on their sides, looking up at the bright stars hurtling down. Their voices floated across the scorched fields, filling the earth, challenging the gods. Huddled near the cooking fires, the women watched through their muslin dupattas.

The army man said, ‘But who will pull the trigger?’

The policeman said, ‘I will. I am the policeman. I have to make him pay for all the crimes he has committed on innocent people.’

The army man said, ‘No, o policya, I will. It is my house and women he has raped and burnt.’

The policeman said, ‘Don’t fight, my friend—it’s a double-barrel! You pull one trigger, and I’ll pull the other.’

The army man said, ‘I will pull it first.’

The policeman said, ‘Behanchod fauji, then there’ll be nothing left for me! What do you want me to do, hunt for little shreds of his ass to shoot at?’

The army man said, ‘O phuddu policya, you create too many problems. Nothing satisfies you. Okay, we’ll pull the trigger together. At the same moment. Exactly. One, two, three … fire!’

The policeman said, his head lolling over the edge of the charpoy, ‘Yes, my friend, yes, you are right. At the same moment. One, two, three … phire!’

Shauki Mama was a man who had learnt early to work the world. He had never been one to waste his breath on the business of sermons, ideology, principles. If he wanted to discuss something he talked about things that could be consumed—bought, sold, eaten, felt, seen, worn, penetrated. He was interested in how things could be done, in the calculus of give and take that keeps the universe humming, not in the whys and wherefores.

He’d always thought his elder sister had married into a family of cranks. There was the father-in-law who sat grandly on his charpoy, not condescending to talk to anyone, chugging a hookah as if he were Jalal-ud-din Akbar overseeing the spread of his great empire. And all he had ever been was a dumb sepoy in the army. Worse still was the son, his great brother-in-law, Dakota Ram, who thought he was nothing less than Shah Jahan. If you saw his airs you’d imagine he wasn’t driving a clunky tank but building the Taj Mahal on the border. The truth is with a few instructions Shauki’s truck drivers could have done what Dakota did. He had twelve drivers like Dakota on his rolls, his very own tank squadron. But the army driver gave him attitude as if he were a grand emperor and Shauki a commoner in his court. Bloody phuddu! And he drank that awful horse rum, with tepid water. Shauki Mama only drank IMFL, Indian Made Foreign Liquor, either Aristocrat or Peter Scot. With soda and two cubes of ice, and always with something to munch—sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes with a rain of salt, lemon juice and red chilli, or boiled eggs, or boiled eggs fried in a coating of besan, or richly sweating tandoori chicken succulent between the teeth. Coarse dark rum, pump water, and yards of pretension. It was, he knew, the uniform, the olive-green uniform, and it never ceased to amaze him how something so trivial could create such persistent delusion.

Now the errant pup of those cranks had become his problem. Well, there was nothing to be done. The boy was his sister’s son, and he’d been brought for asylum by the only man he liked in that weird family. Runty Tattu—a warm, real man, willing to cut a hand of
Sweep any hour of the day. The problem was, for the moment, Tattu too was his problem. The uncle and son’s account of their flight made it clear that neither of them could head back to Keekarpur for some time.

So they had to be sheltered and they had to be put to work. The line-up of Shauki Mama’s businesses was fairly simple: trucks ferrying construction material—sand, gravel, bricks, timber, iron girders, cement bags; trucks ferrying cylinders of cooking gas; and trucks ferrying sacks of grain. There was a great deal of private work to be had, but what Shauki Mama angled for were the government contracts. Dealing with individual owners was a nightmare of bargaining and bickering. Rates, quality, quantities, delays; and then chasing payments endlessly. They always settled as if they were doing you a favour, and always after making some random deductions.

The government in contrast was an honourable enterprise. You got what you had agreed upon—sometimes more, if there was cause for you to make some claim. Nor was it so distrustful and petty as to haggle over quality, quantity, or delays. The government behaved as men ought to with each other: with an understanding that there would be failures, shortfalls, mistakes, that both men and their endeavours are fallible. And because it had compassion, because it was so generous of heart, you gave back to it freely. Shared with its staff your every stroke of fortune, let the sweets and the alcohol and the goodies flow. Often, at a moment of rejoicing on receiving a new contract, he had personally delivered gifts of colour televisions and music systems. Sometimes to help these warm wonderful men of the state—with their children’s education, the marriage of their daughters, the treatment of old parents—he had forced upon them small tokens of his friendship in bundles of rupees, sometimes up to ten thousand. It was rare to find such deserving men anywhere.

He put Tattu at the adda, the yard from where the trucks were parked and dispatched. His job was to help maintain the roster of
coming and goings, and the distance travelled on each sortie. These were then squared off against litres of diesel consumed. A ten per cent variance was permitted, in fact it was encouraged. Shauki Mama’s philosophy was: ‘Everyone needs some kind of transgression to feel whole: it’s best to keep them all satisfied with small ones.’ He told Tattu, ‘Better to lose a few bottles of diesel every few trips than have them run off with the truck one day.’