The Story of My Assassins (26 page)

Soon loud battles began to erupt within the basti as fathers and sons locked horns over the issue and mothers wailed the roofs off. The news from the big world—coming in ceaseless waves from the crackling radio-set, the half-anna Urdu papers, and heated word-of-mouth—did not help matters. All was not well. Wilful men had sliced the earth with no regard to the arteries of love, family, community, history, animals, trees that they were cutting. The news was that the blood from the severed arteries was beginning to flow everywhere.

Then news came that they were now free. That there were two new countries and two new flags flying across Hindustan. In the basti it felt no different. They felt no more free than before. Only Ali Baba, who spent every day in town, listening in to the educated and the knowing, said yes, there was something deep and abiding that had changed, but he too spoke without elation because the blood spilling from the arteries was colouring everything. Many of the stories were so gory as to defy belief. Of the wholesale massacre of dozens, scores, hundreds of people—on trains, buses, the streets and roads, fields and towns. The police was doing nothing, Nehru was doing nothing, Jinnah was doing nothing, the white man was doing nothing. Every evening, for hours under the tamarind tree, the men teased their anxieties, then dismissed them as improbable, hyperbolic.

A hush had fallen on the frolic of the children too. Inside little Ghulam the whispered stories were fast congealing into a hard splinter of icy fear that would not thaw for the rest of his life.

One dramatic muggy morning in the second week of September 1947 the basti woke to the knowledge that four of their young had packed their bundles and departed for Pakistan in the dead of night. Faisal, Wasim, Parvez, Imroze. Names Ghulam would not forget till his last day.

The one letter left behind by Parvez was passed from hand to hand, detonating ear-splitting grief. Only when the hysteria had eased did inquiries reveal that the great escape had been canvassed, discussed, rejected, accepted over many many days. Seven boys were to make the run, but finally in that fully dead hour between midnight and dawn, as the shadows began to slip away in the dark, three of them had lost their nerve. The three—Safdar, Rahim and Salman—were now being cosseted and assaulted in turn. Parents never can locate the shimmering line between love and domination.

All the children were interrogated, including Ghulam. They admitted that they’d heard of the plans, and when they began to be thrashed, they pleaded that they hadn’t been sure. The elders of the basti went to the kotwali to register a complaint. The policeman in charge was sympathetic but professed helplessness. He said, twirling his big moustache, ‘Mian, they are grown-up boys, they’ll be okay. You know there are millions of people walking this way and that across the Punjab. If the laatsahib Mountbatten himself wanted to find his mother out there he wouldn’t be able to! Do the only thing men can do at such an hour, pray to Allah and all will be well. You know what Sant Kabir has said, Jaako raakhe saiyan, maar sake na koye!’

None can bring distress to he whom the lord protects.

Towards the end of October, when the breeze under the tamarind tree had begun to nip the skin, early one evening, Imroze returned. The news electrified the basti; within minutes everyone had come tumbling out to meet the prodigal boy. Ghulam pushed through the legs of the adults to get a glimpse of the short, fair teenager. As a child Imroze had won jars and jars of shiny marbles, from which he gave freely—ten at a time—to all the young children. It was he who had taught Ghulam the correct way to strike marbles—left eye closed, knees bent, torso rigid, wrist tight, a soft kiss for luck and then a short sharp jab with the forearm to knock the striker in the right with the balancer in the left.

Because everyone was shoving and pushing and the hurricane-lamp was being moved about, it took Ghulam some time to sight his mentor. What he saw twisted the hard splinter of ice in his heart so brutally that his legs almost gave way. Lovely Imroze, beautiful Imroze, now had a thick scar running from the top of his forehead down his eye, across his right cheek, like an uneven bund dividing
two fields. It had closed the right eye as it cleaved through it and near the jawline disappeared into a fuzz of brown-black beard that was freshly grown. The other eye, the left one, the one that was open, the one that worked, was also no longer Imroze’s. It seemed like one of his cherished marbles: vacant, unseeing, without a flicker of recognition.

There was a policeman with him, in uniform, a hand on Imroze’s shoulder. He was clearly waiting for the crush to abate. Surreally, all sound appeared to have been sucked out of the scene. Under the tamarind tree in the basti, at this hour, no one had ever known such profound noiselessness.

Ghulam watched the policeman carefully roll back the sleeve of Imroze’s kameez, and a soundless scream rip through everyone. Imroze’s left arm now ended at his elbow, where it was bandaged in rags. The master striker would never crash a marble from eight feet again. The cop moved it like the signal arm of a railway line, up, down, up, down. Then, like a forensic expert exhibiting a corpse to a batch of interns, the policeman lifted Imroze’s shirt from the front to show a thick cable lashing his stomach. The knife’s elliptical journey had been halted by the ribs.

In the shaking light of the lantern, the policeman then pushed the loose shirt up further to reveal Exhibit 2. A small hairless chest with a few vivid coils of rope. The policeman twirled his moustache and turning Imroze around, lifted his kameez from the back. Exhibit 3. The fair back of the boy was an emboss of dancing rope.

By the time the policeman had moved to Exhibit 4 and 5 on the soft buttocks and boyish legs, Imroze’s parents arrived on the scene—straight from the whitewashed grave of the Abbasi pir where they had gone to seek the safekeeping of their absconding son—and the scream that his mother unleashed curdled the blood of every gawking child and unlocked every adult throat. A tidal wave of questions rose and crashed against the policeman and his mauled exhibit.

What had happened?

Where had they gone?

Who’d done this?

Where was Faisal? And Wasim? And Parvez?

Why wasn’t he saying something?

Allahthemerciful, the arm! The arm! The arm!

The basti never fully recovered from Imroze’s return. His story became engraved in every heart and mind, and in some, like Ghulam, it became a splinter of icy fear that would never melt.

Until Delhi the journey of the four friends had been full of banter and anticipation. Parvez, the writer of the letter, the instigator of the escape, had mimicked the reaction of each of their mothers on discovering their sons were gone. Even the other passengers had broken into smiles when they saw Wasim’s mother beating her breasts with her fists. The four had sworn many vows of togetherness—nothing would come between them, not work, not wealth, and certainly never women. They had promised each other they would only return when they were followed by a train of gifts for each and every man, woman and child of the basti. They had amused themselves with what they would buy for whom, and how each of those wretched souls would react. The extent of their generosity made them giddy with pride and pleasure. Parvez had to remind them, ‘Saale chutiye, if we eat one more meal without cooking it we’ll die of starvation!’

The first foreboding surfaced at the New Delhi railway station. The station was suffocating with people but had the mood of a graveyard. Every face was drawn and watchful. It was easy to make out the large families cleaving together, often three, four generations clustered around their bags and bundles and trunks and hold-alls; endless tight circles, all looking inward, turning their backs to the backs of other circles that jammed the platform. A great stench of excrement filled the air. Scores of men, children and women—with their faces covered—squatted edgily in the dark low ravine beneath
the platform, amid the sharp stones and steel tracks, continually startled by large rats.

Parvez’s attempts at speaking to some of the men fetched blank stares and laconic responses. The few who were talking among themselves did so in funereal whispers. It seemed there had been trouble in the old city; every doorway was wet with blood. When the boys crossed the filthy tracks to the main building—holding their breath, dodging the bobbing bottoms—and stepped out of the grand facade to find some dinner, they got the first clear sense of the maelstrom they had landed in. There were uniforms everywhere: policemen and army men, khakis and olives, lathis and rifles. Instinctively, each one of them scrunched up within himself, smile fading, legs contracting to a mincing gait, stomach loosening.

They walked together in a tight knot, averting their eyes from the patrolling uniforms. By the gate they turned right and picked the first lean- to eatery, gravitating to a wooden bench away from the road. They shared the bench with a dozen others, all eating in concentrated silence. Most of them were Muslims, chewing with low heads and pushed out elbows. At the next table a young handsome boy, no older than them, with lush facial hair and red fiery eyes was snivelling loudly, his nostrils working angrily, like bellows. Every now and then he would begin to shake uncontrollably and start to rise and the two men flanking him would restrain him and murmur soothing words. At one point he let out a piercing wail, ‘Ammmii!’ and slumped into his curry-stained hands. The man next to him—wearing a Gandhi topi, not a skullcap—gathered him in his arms and held him close.

When Parvez asked the fat man running the eatery what was happening all around, he replied acidly, ‘Do I look like Laad Mountbatten to you? And right now probably even he doesn’t know what’s happening.’

The burly man holding the crying boy said, ‘Mountbatten ki maa ka bhosda! The white Englishman can make donkeys look like
horses, shit smell like roses, and brothers behave like enemies. Let me tell you there is going to be no freedom, no independence. This is just one more game to make chutiyas out of us. India and Pakistan! They will wait for us to kill enough of each other, then they will step back in and continue to rule us as they have for hundreds of years. My grandfather used to say, if you are caught between a white man and a snake, run towards the snake. There is at least a chance you can kill the snake and survive its poison—with the white man there is no chance of either.’

The fat eatery man said, ‘Inquilab zindabad! Haath mein loda, gaand mein paad!’

On the train, Imroze fell asleep on the rattling floor, curled against Wasim’s soft buttocks, his head resting in the crook of his right arm. This was not how the four friends had imagined they would journey to the promised land, but given the run on space when the train had pulled in, this was not bad at all. As he slept he slid under the berth, along with their luggage. He had his arm around Wasim, and ahead of Wasim lay Parvez and Faisal, similarly tucked into each other. Imroze twisted the Idrisi pir baba’s protective locket on his upper arm so that the metal wouldn’t bite into his cheek. His mother had got it for him when he was eleven to ward off the fevers to which he was prone. It had worked to perfection and Imroze had not been ill since.

There were men, women, children, sleeping everywhere. Four to a berth, in the aisles, inside the toilets; sitting, standing, leaning—exhaustion and sleep melting and flowing into each other’s pliant bodies. The train odour of sweat, dust, coal smoke, pickles, parathas, subzi, alcohol, fear, piss and vomit was everywhere. Jammed in that mess—in their own annexed space—the friends, before nodding off, had made playful jibes, accusing each other of harbouring dubious intentions. Some amount of jestful pushing and pulling had also
ensued, with maybe a trace of seriousness. As they fell asleep the consensus had been that Imroze had the premier position, spooned into Wasim’s feminine ass. Wasim’s warning was, ‘Saaley Imroze, make sure nothing escapes from your pajama! You know what they say in the basti, if you see a snake cut off its head!’ Parvez said, from between Wasim and Faisal, ‘That’s the good thing about being a Musalman, the head is already cut off. Imroze, feel no fear! Let your headless snake go wherever it wishes!’

Imroze woke from a dream in which he was embroidering the sparkling zari with such frenzy that he had leapt past the holding frame of the adda and plunged into the spongy skins of the other craftsmen sitting around. Fountains of blood spurted as his needle thrust in and out of the screaming men and they began to thrash about desperately. Then one of the men pulled out a long curved dagger and plunged it into his speeding arm and he yelled out in pain, and when his eyes opened he knew he had tumbled into hell.

There was very little light, a great chaos of movement, and a medley of indescribable noises all around. Beside him, Wasim was reduced to a heap grunting softly like the pigs they used to stone as children, while someone drove the point of a spear steadily in and out of him. Over the sounds of grunts and moans and screams and pleading and keening was the clear barbaric sound of Hindi and Punjabi abuse. Maiovah, bahenovah, saale kanjar, phuddihondya, saale suar, kameene kutte, gaandu gaddaar, kutte katuay, kutte musultay, vaddho salya nu, vaddho, vaddho, vaddho. Hack them, hack them, hack them.

Curiously it was not the wild screams that were the dominant sound but the loud sighs. This was how—it seemed—people succumbed in sleep and half-sleep; with surprised, startled, grateful sighs. Deliverance following quickly on assault: the first sudden opening of raw pain; the second and third and fourth of relief—final, enduring relief—from it. The travellers to the promised land had been set upon like the herds of cattle of his childhood. In the moving light of
lanterns he could see the herders had come in scores and were carrying swords, spears, axes and sickles. Actually—as with cattle—the herders were making more noise than the belaboured animals. The cattle just took in the blows with deep sighs.

Abuse, thud, scream, sigh. Abuse, thud, scream, sigh. Wasim next to him had ceased to moan. But Parvez was still sighing sweetly, softer by the moment, as the long-handled spear drove in and out of him. His hands were holding the bamboo shaft—and if you didn’t follow the shaft to the man in the darkness who held it, it appeared as if Parvez in a frenzy of hara-kiri was steadily disembowelling himself. Faisal, true to type, was dying in an undignified way. All his youth he had been the crudest of them all—digging his nose, abusing, farting, masturbating in front of everyone. Now he was moaning and protesting and trying to get up, despite the steel buried in his stomach. When he had pulled himself halfway up there was the angry grunt of a herder, a slicing arc in the dark, a soft thud, and the gurgle of an opening tap. The herder pulled out his axe from Faisal’s neck by planting his foot on the boy’s chest to yank it out. Parvez and his blood became one.