The Story of My Assassins (32 page)

The gang was mockingly gentle about his squeamishness. ‘We understand, Padre Kabir,’ they’d say. ‘There’s no way you can punch or stab in English—you can only do that in Hindi. English is for refined things like robbing and cheating.’ Kabir took up the subject of the violence with Babloo a few times, but found himself summarily dismissed. The gang leader said, ‘Padreji, please remember that Gandhiji was shot! With a tamancha like this one! Just like cows eat grass, men assault each other. You can either eat the grass or be eaten as grass! Tell me, what would you prefer?’

So Kabir took the tamancha with butter fingers, and wrapping it in newspaper put it in a tattered cardboard suitcase crammed with old film posters on top of his cupboard. The rounds he poured into a thick khaki pair of old NCC socks and pushed the socks under the pile of musty woollens inside his cupboard. The chances of his parents finding either were remote since he aggressively discouraged their meddling in his space.

Six months later it was the police that dug them out, and as Ghulam and his wife wailed and lamented, put cuffs on their son’s wrists and hauled him off to the police station.

It happened in the way these things do. One wayward thread unravelling the entire tapestry. In the course of courting a Punjabi girl, fair fleshy Rekha, with the haunches of a horse, wordlessly, of course, and from a distance, Aziz broke the jaw of a handsome young boy from first-year BA (English Honours), whom he saw walking by her side three days running. As it was, Aziz used the blunt end of
his short-handle axe. Aziz did not know it, but the boy’s name was Jaiwant and his father was Aakrosh Singh, the new superintendent of police, from the badlands of the Terai.

Aziz was picked up before night fell, taken to the backroom of the kotwali on Civil Lines, thrown face down on the floor, his leather jacket pulled over his head with his arms still in the sleeves and fastidiously beaten from ankles to neck with his own axe. No bones were broken, only ligaments and tendons torn. While doctors wired together Jaiwant’s beautiful face in the government hospital and his mother wailed in the VIP waiting room, Aziz’s sphincter was tested with the handle of his axe, and a pestle was rolled over his broken muscles to register and record the differing levels of pain.

Before Aziz broke his jaw, the young Jaiwant with beautiful long eyelashes had made a cautionary noise: ‘You better watch it, motherfucker, you don’t know who my father is!’ To which Aziz had said, ‘Well motherfucker, my name is Aziz! Aziz Kulhadiwala! And my father’s name is Babloo! Babloo Black Lugerwala! And his cock is bigger than your leg! And all of it will be shoved inside you till your arsehole is so big that men can drive scooters through it with their helmets on! In this town if you fuck with us you fuck with the devil and the devil’s father!’

Now the head constable screwing the handle into Aziz’s anus asked, ‘Is it bigger than this o great Kulhadiwala? Perhaps thicker? Or would you prefer your own father’s, the great Babloo Black Lugerwala?’ Aziz was beyond responding. He needed every bit of energy to cope with the agony. More than four inches of the axe handle was now buried in Aziz’s asshole, like a flag on a mountain, at an angle, the blade catching the yellow light of the naked bulb.

The head constable said, ‘Come here all you fucking laggards and salute the flag of Babloo Black Lugerwala!’ And he gave it a ceremonial twist. Aziz barely changed the register of his low continuous whine.

Not much later Babloo was brought in. The iron flag was still at
full mast. The gang leader, recalcitrant, squirming, giving lip to the cops, saw Aziz sprawled on the floor and went limp. To be locked in battle, however unequal, against another gang, was not a crippling prospect. To face-off against policemen in a police station produced utter hopelessness; there would never be a rescuing knock at the door.

Babloo’s anus was first probed with the short barrel of his Webley & Scott, and later when Pandit had been brought in, with the sleek barrel of the Second World War Luger. By then a thick log had been rolled up and down his back and legs like he was a chapatti. No bone was broken; every muscle was pulped. The policemen took turns pulling the trigger of the Luger. One said, ‘Oh don’t fire any more! The bullets must be getting lost in all his shit! Fucking Babloo don! Black Lugerwala! A heap of dung bigger than my buffalo!’ The other said, ‘Shall we try the 303? Blow his arsehole to Kabul! Then he can become Babloo Kaala Kabuliwallah.’

That night they brought most of the gang in. Aakrosh Singh’s son was still swimming under anaesthesia. Many anuses would have to be probed till he surfaced. Kabir was the last to be marched in, and he began to weep for mercy the moment he saw his friends on the floor, each with a different flag sticking out of his arse cheeks. He had never, he wailed, never lifted a finger on anyone. Never. The fat policeman who had done most of the plumbing early in the evening rolled the tamancha in his hand and said, ‘And what do you use this for? Shooting ants?’

When they took his pants off, he cried like a baby. Then the fat cop lifted his cock up with the tip of the tamancha, and all four cops—their caps off, their belts unbuckled, their shirts unbuttoned, their shoes unlaced—exchanged glances.

One of them said, shaking his head sadly, ‘No helmet … no helmet … very dangerous …’

The fat cop asked softly, ‘What’s your full name, my boy?’

Ghulam’s son blubbered his name.

‘Kabir Musalman,’ said the fat cop softly to the others, in explanation, ‘Kabir Musalman.’

The swarthy assistant sub-inspector, sitting on the lone chair of crude wood—the ASI said sonorously, ‘Kabira baitha paed pe apna lund latkaye, jisko jitna chahiye kaat kaat le jaye …’

The fat cop took off his unlaced leather shoes and wore them on his hands like gloves. The ASI slowly repeated the obscene doggerel about Kabir sitting on a tree dangling his phallus, inviting his followers to chop off and take what they wished. At this, the fat cop caught Kabir’s penis between his leather gloves and began to massage it. To begin with he did it gently, but the grit on the soles of the shoes was immediately lacerating. Kabir was crying like a child, with loud sobs and sniffles and pleas for forgiveness. His mouth and nose were choked with snot and he was finding it difficult to breathe. The ASI, slumped in his chair, had unbuttoned his pants, and had pulled up his khaki shirt to rub his hairy stomach. He said, ‘Now boy repeat after me, Kabira baitha …’

When Kabir couldn’t form the words through the snot and the sobs, the fat cop massaged his leather hands harder. Kabir screamed in agony and began to mutter the doggerel he had known since he was ten years old.

By the time the night ended, he was on the floor, sporting his own small flag, the black tamancha Babloo had gifted him and he had never used. Under him was his tiny piece of mashed flesh—to protect whose telltale baldness his father had once procured a spurious medical certificate. For the rest of his life it would be good only for pissing and little else.

By the end of the next day, Babloo’s mentors managed to crank enough levers in Lucknow to stop the flag-hoisting ceremonies. But there was nothing to be done about the stretched rectums and the
brutalized muscles. The rule of the police game was, you dealt with what happened on the field on the field, as it was played out. You could try and seize the advantage when the next game started; this one was over. To try and reopen the finished game was to ensure that the next time they got you they left you in no condition to protest.

By the time the boys were produced in front of the sessions judge, the facts of the case had metamorphosed. Except for two boys, the rest were arraigned only on charges of hooliganism, given warnings, ordered to pay fines, and let off. The crumbling courtroom with the roots of a huge peepul tree tearing through its walls and the high ventilators crammed with bird nests, was packed with students from the university, including Raghuraj—looking the concerned patriarch. When the weedy judge with a jumping apple in his throat mumbled the exonerations, Raghuraj and his army flexed their fists in triumph. Jumping apple looked at them with pleading eyes.

Only two boys were booked under the Arms Act and committed to judicial remand. The first was Aziz Kulhadiwala, now back inside his leather jacket, his face shining and unblemished, but every muscle in his body torn and his arsehole big as an exhaust pipe. The second was Kabir M—Musalman—whose every fear of pain, his own and his father’s, had been now fully realized. In the screaming-pleading-begging-moaning night he had appealed not only to Allah—his birthright—but also to Jesus Christ—his schoolright—and to Lord Krishna—his nationalright. The secular pantheon was however clearly not interested in boys who didn’t want to declare where their transcendent loyalty lay. This fact—that he was no god’s responsibility—was ratified in the courtroom next day when only two boys were nailed: the one who broke the jaw and the one who wanted to escape his god.

Ghulam—the man who set this tragedy in motion, who imagined god would take the larger view of the equality of supreme gods—Ghulam, timid as ever, cowered behind his wheezing middle-aged lawyer whose slow arguments drizzled flecks of paan. The
Arms Act! Pistols! Bullets! Ghulam could scarcely grasp it. He had brought his son up to be afraid of hot water and fish bones. He had been taught under the majestic padres, with Christ on the Cross, in fine English, with Moral Science classes—fully prepared for the refinements of the modern world. To make it all possible Ghulam had cast his penis in rubber thick as a rain cape and left his wife’s womb barren as the deserts of Rajasthan. Did this judge—who was not even listening to Rizvisahib’s complex arguments, talking instead to some servant who had come in through the back door—did this judge even know all this? Did he know Father Conrad and Father Michael and Father Andrews? Did he know Ghulam had in nearly thirty years never even appropriated a single coin at the Talkies? Even when he knew others were doing so?

While Rizvisahib drizzled on, the judge sent off the two boys to judicial remand. Standing against the far wall, in a row with the six others—all leaning against each other in pain—Kabir did not even look into Ghulam’s eyes. He could see his father still begging for a pretty place in the world, seeking some kind of approval that no one was ever going to give him.

Kabir took to jail like a deer fleeing the anxieties of a forest takes to a sanctuary. After the backroom of the police kotwali, the brisk leather rub and the flag-hoisting ceremonies, this was an oasis of peace and benign conduct. The yard of the prison was big with not a blade of grass on it. Its soul was a huge semul with many arms and many fingers stretching in every direction. Using a carpenter’s plane the inmates had scraped off the semul’s thorny flesh so they could lean against its trunk. At this time it was ablaze with scarlet flowers, and Kabir was surprised he had never noticed such a lovely tree ever before. Next to it, at half its height, a neem tree frothed green leaves.

It was under these two trees that the inmates hung out—squatting,
sleeping, drawing out games in the dust, playing Lakad, in which the den could not snare you if you were touching wood. The best ally in this game was Ektara, the old man who had only a smooth peg below his left knee. It was not unusual, in the heat of the chase, to have a dozen men hanging on to Ektara’s wooden stump.

Near the ten-foot-high wall were the communal baths: three handpumps, standing side by side, like a guard of honour. Everyone brushed, washed, bathed here. It was a selfless place—if you were under the pump, there was always some hand to keep the water gusting over you, and if you found someone under the pump then you immediately bent to the task. Kabir loved the cold water baths in the open, the camaraderie around the trees, the complete absence of expectation.

Contrary to anything he might have imagined, no one appeared particularly frustrated or irate or depressed at being corralled inside the high walls. Most of the inmates, in fact, seemed spiritually evolved, philosophically calm. There were some like Mootie Baba—he drank his own urine—who gave soothing religious discourses interspersed with sonorous chants, that even the jailors and warders came to hear. Aziz and Kabir arrived inside those walls seething, and in no time found their blood slowing down. Everyone lived the wisdom. There was the day, each day, and you simply dwelled in it.

They were roused before first light by the clanging of a metal plate, and ablutions done, were in the yard performing basic physical exercises of the jumping-slapping kind by six o’clock. Breakfast was a big steel mug of scalding tea and thick salted parathas, two apiece; and lunch and dinner, a runny dal with dusty chapattis and the occasional vegetable. There was tea in the evening, and once in a while, a hard mathi or a congealed laddu. In the evenings some fastidious ones hit the handpumps a second time and sang their cleanliness at the top of their voices, in bhajans or film ditties.

In between, during the day, the inmates divided into groups in different sheds at the far west end of the yard to earn their keep. The
options ranged from tailoring, carpet-weaving, metalwork, carpentry, quilting, to bamboo work. There were no ustads, or teachers. There may have been once—but now it was simply the oldest prisoner, gently passing on his skills.

Kabir tried the split-and-weave of bamboo but he couldn’t deal with the constant scything of his skin, the splinters getting under his nails, and he soon switched to carpentry. This involved the making of rudimentary chairs and tables, beds and shelves. To begin with Kabir was happy to just work the plane and see the crisp clean shavings fly, and the unexpectedly young, glowing skin of the wood emerge as he sloughed off the dirty old. But soon he discovered—the blood of his artisan ancestors, the zari-zardozi men, running in him—that he had a gift for chiselling the soft wood of mango into toy animals. It rapidly became an addiction and for the rest of his life he was to carry a hard knife and a slab of soft wood in his pockets, whittling out little figurines which he gave away to whoever would have them. His set piece would become the chooza—the chick of a hen—which he could cut and shape in less than twenty minutes, the easy curve of the belly and head, the gentle beak, and two twists of the tip of his knife for the soft eyes.