The Story of My Assassins (23 page)

With these men, Jai was never Mr Lincoln. In fact, he was barely even Jai. Even a hard nut like me found it distressing to watch him negotiate them. These men existed outside the grand vocabulary of state and governance and citizenship and the ideas of privilege and responsibility. They were all men of the world, uncontaminated by any sense of larger agency or greater good. They were driven each moment by self-interest, by the primal need to protect and expand their turf and that of their families. It was very basic stuff, with narrow and insular horizons, and yet I could see these were not men to be dismissed: they shaped the world by the simple act of continual endeavour. Ants hoarding the grain, building huge silos, while the cicada pondered the seasons. Not one of them, I thought, would ever hit a state of stasis, or be crippled into inaction by the size and scale and unknowability of the universe.

Jai struggled to find the language that would connect him to them. His usual eloquence vanished and was replaced by a kind of wheedling manner, an attempt at rapping at their level. He spoke to them in a patchy mix of Hindi and English, cracking jokes, making cool comments on politics and business, attempting to exude the aura of a man who knew how to work the world, capable—like them—of sharp moves, of sleights-of-hand, of managing things. He dropped names, often in clusters, of people he may have met or spoken to fleetingly—often only once. Politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats, film stars, even fashion designers and TV minors: celebrities
with whom he enjoyed virtually zero familiarity but whose wattage he imagined would dazzle these men.

He actually slumped low into his chair to make himself as small as he thought they were. I would come upon him giggling at their dumb quips, pressing their flesh, submitting himself to their laconic stories of power and pelf.

It was Bhalla, a smooth Punjabi, who for a time really captured our imagination.

Bhalla was in his forties and wore sharp shirts with monogrammed cufflinks, smoked acrid cigars, and spoke in a loud, filmi, gunslinger’s drawl. He was flamboyantly and brutally dismissive of us, our opinions, our work, our plans. Jai had touched him through the king penguin, fat Sethiji, and over a six-week period Bhalla visited us several times. Each time I came upon him in Jai’s office he was telling him a new story about some Bollywood starlet or the other and what her asking price was. He claimed there was a printed rate-list, and faced with our incredulity, dismissed us: ‘You guys call yourselves journalists? You know nothing about the realities of this country! Nothing! A rate-list like in a restaurant, fully printed with menu and prices! Bread pakora, ten rupees; sandwich, fifteen rupees; chicken tikka, twenty rupees; full buffet, hundred rupees! All cash, no discount!’

He would mention names that sounded unbelievable, marquee names that fevered the fantasies of millions of Indian men. He spoke with a sneer, as if it were everyday material for him. The stuff was compelling, even without the hope of investment thrown in. But with that as a factor Jai and I were like panting dogs. Things went totally out of hand for us when he began to tell us about the ones he had personally ordered off the menu, at what price, and how they had sat on his palate. He referred to them always as ‘line girls’. The
first time that Jai ventured to inquire after the phrase Bhalla ignored the question. After that neither of us had the nerve to ask him lest we receive a merciless put-down. In any case, like good schoolboys, we were more interested in finding out who else was in this notionally available category.

‘Is xyz a line girl?’

‘Is pqr one too?’

‘And rst? She couldn’t possibly be!’

We’d be gawping, in our short pants, and he’d play us. Leaning back, he’d pull slowly on his cigar and say, ‘What do you think?’

Jai and I would break into a babble, saying yes, no, maybe, all at the same time. After a long, amused, pause he would say, ‘Yes.’ The crazy part was it was always yes, and yet both of us needed to go through the process of denial and disbelief before we could savour the impossible lasciviousness of the confirmation.

Soon we knew the rate of every glittering star, and if Bhalla was to be believed all the truth—and lies—of their allure. In those days, inevitably, Jai and I laid bare our own cinematic fantasies as we made breathless inquiries. Nor was it beneath us to enter into heated arguments to protect the virtue or capacities of our favourites.

Cool Bhalla, who thought they were all overrated, that nothing matched the earthy delights of the ordinary EBM (ek bachche ki maa—the mother of one child), would say, through his thick cigar, ‘While you are being chutiyas with each other about who belongs to whom, some slick rich dude is doing them!’

The voyeuristic roller-coaster was not the only reason we tolerated the man’s disdain. He was, unexpectedly, quite a savant in other ways too. When he was not driving us mad with his menu card, he was giving us fluid dissertations on Hindu philosophy. He spoke of dvaita and advaita, mauna and maya, karma and dharma, Vaishnavism and Shaivism, sattva, rajas, and tamas, karma yoga, jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, raja yoga. Mr Lincoln, and even I, were kept reeling. Clearly the man had read—or received—a deep education in the scriptures.
Sometimes he would recite verses from the Gita—in the original Sanskrit, sonorously, and then render them for us in English.

One time, after he had finished inflaming us with stories about a glittering star with a fine pedigree who only offered herself by lying flat on her stomach, he suddenly challenged us to recite the Hanuman Chalisa. Then, as we were mumbling incoherently, he took his cigar out of his mouth and launched into a thunderous rendition of Jai jai jai Hanuman gosain, kripa karahu Gurudev ki nain. He belted out the long invocation to the fearless lord, a fail-safe charm against every kind of marauding djinn and spirit, without breaking for breath. We managed to catch only a few words and phrases, but that day after he left the two of us loped around the room, wielding imaginary maces, criss-crossing each other, loudly chanting ‘Bhoot pisaach nikat nahin aave, Mahabir jab naam sunave’, and ‘Nase rog hare sab peeda’, and again and again, ‘Jai jai jai Hanuman gosain, kripa karahu Gurudev ki nain’.

Sippy, bringing in the tea, said, his eyes swimming, ‘God will definitely help us, sirji.’

Accenting Bhalla’s sway over us was his knowledge of the stock market. In fact, he presented an elaborate plan to us to raise some money for the magazine. Neither of us understood a word of it. Jai at least tried to make some intelligent noises, while I simply dove into the iron mask. In sum, what it seemed to entail was, we were to first hand over to him gratis one-third of the equity of the company, then he would reverse-merge the company into a shell company and take this entity to the stock market and raise fifteen crore rupees by first investing one crore of his own to ramp prices. And then he would give us ten of that for the magazine and keep five for himself, as well as the shares that we had given him.

We could make very little sense of it though he drew it all in elaborate bubbles on the white board, but it sounded great to us. We were sitting on a very big heap of shit. If someone was going to turn it into gold and keep half of it, we would gladly kiss his ass. But
before I could ask, where should we sign, Mr Lincoln said, ‘I hope you are not talking about some kind of insider trading?’

Bhalla stood up and rode into us with an angry sneer: ‘You chutiyas, do you even know what insider trading is? You don’t know the Hanuman Chalisa, you don’t know how to fuck a heroine, you don’t know dvaita and advaita, you don’t know how to smoke a cigar, you don’t know how to make money, and now you pretend to be Jesus Christs about insider trading! Motherfuckers, yes, it is insider trading—even though you don’t know what it means! Motherfuckers, everything in the stock market is insider trading! In fact, everything in this fucking country is insider trading! What do you think politics in this damn city is? What do you think your fucking journalism is? There is no truth in this fucking country except for the poor bastard on the street who has to carry the load of all of it, and of you and me! Have you ever really looked at that poor bastard? Next time you are fucking around on the roads, look at him! He knows everything is insider trading! And he knows he’s outside of it! And you know something—he’s happy for it! He knows all of us great inside traders are doomed! We are busy scribbling out our misery! He’s fucking happy, the universe is on his side. He knows the joke is on us!’

It turned out to be a cruel blow. We didn’t see Bhalla in our office again. Jai made one attempt to thaw him, visiting him in his Hauz Khas house. Jai was thrown by the man he met in his own citadel.

The house was strangely unrefined, opulent in a crass satin-and-sunmica way, full of the claustrophobia of a joint family—the continual movement of crusty-cranky servants, the clamour of children of all ages, the hushed entry and lingering exit by doddering crones, the absence of any real individuality in either the
furnishings or the shelves, the constant buzzing of intercom phones connecting different floors and units, the monosyllabic intra-house conversations.

Bhalla had no cigar stuck in his face and appeared a poor photocopy—faded, unclear—of the man who in the magazine office had for weeks held us in thrall. The handshake was loose, his booming voice low. The hectoring attitude was gone like starch from a washed shirt. Jai and he didn’t sit in the main living-room but in a kind of alcove, just off his dark-doored bedroom on the first floor—approached from inside the house. It was a small cramped place appointed with a futon, two chairs and a small low table. On the table was a brown wood rhinoceros with its horn broken in half. It was only eight in the evening, but Bhalla was wearing a soft pajama and a loose nightshirt.

Bhalla spoke to Jai vaguely and softly, his eyes furtive. There was no talk of the ‘line girls’, no talk of the grand tenets of Hindu philosophy. He rambled noncommittally about politics and the economy, the likelihood of another war with Pakistan, the last film he’d seen. At one point the dark door opened and his wife walked in. Bhalla introduced her in an embarrassed way. She greeted Jai with folded hands and asked him in Hindi if he’d care to eat or drink anything. She was fat, dressed in a shiny salwar-kameez, and her fair skin had the bleached pallor that comes from too little sunlight. The bangles on her right wrist were heavy gold. She turned back at the top of the stairs to ask, in Hindi, what they were planning to do for dinner. He said in a very sweet voice, ‘Whatever you decide.’

Her heavy tread could be heard down the stairs because of her payal.

Soon after, an older thickset man—balding, clean-shaven, chewing paan—came into the alcove. He didn’t sit down, just shuffled around. He gave Jai a limp hand without looking at him and then proceeded to make cryptic inquiries of Bhalla in a gruff voice about stocks and banking details.

When it was done, Bhalla said, ‘Bhaiya, Jai is the one I was talking to you about … the magazine …’

The brother looked at Jai with unsmiling eyes and said, ‘Good to see you are still alive.’

Bhalla said, ‘Bhaiya, remember I talked to you about the reverse merger and the listing …’

The brother said, ‘Give him some tea and some biscuits. And I am sure there are some fresh kachoris at home. And make sure those Corporation Bank papers are with me before ten.’

Jai talked of this meeting for a long time. He said he didn’t feel half as bad for himself as he did for Bhalla. In a moment of largesse he even said Bhalla deserved all the starlets he could possibly procure—including Jai’s very own favourite, the one with an ass like a ripe pear—as reparation for his life in that joint family alcove.

After the debacle of Bhalla, Mr Lincoln began to lose his grand impulses even within the charmed circle of the office. In a desperate way we had begun to believe that the starlet-stocks-philosophy savant would somehow pull us out of our deepening pit. The joint family alcove was a crushing blow. Jai now stopped protesting the resignation letters that floated on to his table every other morning. Even those who had no other real options to this now occasionally paying job and came in expecting to be persuaded against leaving, were shocked to find a subdued Jai and a farewell handshake lying in wait for them.

In ten days we were down to ten people. For the first time I felt a touch of alarm. Without recognizing it, I too had assumed that Jai would somehow find an investor before it all wound down completely. But here we were now, undeniably on the lip of the precipice. The last two issues had been twenty-four pages each, and we had printed only a thousand copies—down from a high of forty-five
thousand. Jai felt, rightly, that we had a chance as long as the magazine kept publishing, no matter how feebly. If we dropped even one issue, we were dead, beyond revival. The lip of the precipice: another seven days and there would be no issue.

I called Guruji. He had given me this privilege—of longdistance spiritual consultancy—to be used only in a crisis.

His laughter sang through the phone: ‘What you make happen, son, will happen. It’s the law of the universe.’

I said there seemed to be nothing left to try. There could be no doubt Jai had worked every opening he could contrive.

Laughing, he said, ‘If you think that’s the case, then it’s over; if you don’t, then it’s not.’

I said, ‘But what do you think, Guruji? That’s what I want to know.’

He said, ‘What I think is of no consequence. But I never think it’s over till it’s over.’

I said, ‘So should we keep trying?’

He said, ‘Is there anything else for you to do?’

I heard him chuckle softly. Then after a pause, he said, ‘Look at the good side. All this is going to get your mate’s head screwed on right. Maybe you should ask him to try some prayer now.’

I thought of Jai at the Hanuman temple, delivering an oration to the ascetic lord on democracy and the social contract.

We were sitting in his room, across the narrow corridor from mine. The scraggly branches of my laburnum wandered onto his balcony too. Through its bony brown fingers the sky was grey. The winter was almost dead and Holi was some days away. Already there were idiots on the road throwing water balloons at cars. Jai had things in his room, personal effects. Photographs on the wall, of his plump two-year-old son, his parents in a studio—father in a three-piece
suit, mother in a saree with a big bun of hair. His wife was on his table, in a diptych, two close-ups, one fair and smiling, the other dark and pensive. ‘So I never get deluded,’ was his quip. There was a moulded metal ashtray of Arion and the dolphin, a sandalwood paper-cutter with animal engravings, a shelf of personal books (no
Naked Lunch
that a police inspector could have caressed), a slim wooden backscratcher in the shape of a naked undulating woman, a clock stuck into the side of a rearing horse, and a stack of CDs of Western classical music. On the table next to his sofa was a crumpled paper lamp. It looked clumsy to me but I knew it had some sort of designer origins. There was also a kind of large litho on the wall, in a heavy wood frame, of what seemed to me to be an Orville and Wilbur Wright airplane. It was the work of some guy called Laloo Shaw. Jai had said to me if all became debris, the litho would feed him and his family for six months.