The Story of My Assassins (39 page)

But as the nine men who witnessed it that day, in the deep forest slopes of Assam, in the small clearing under a canopy of leaves that barely let in any light, as the men recalled for the rest of their lives, for a long moment they all felt that the great Guru Bijli had finally met his match. In the dying light of evening, with their hurricane lanterns moving the shadows, with every looping creeper around them looking like one more stalking serpent, the black king rose to its striking height, more than six feet off the ground, towering over the magical snakeman. The peerless Guru Bijli was still as a stone, his unblinking eyes watching the great flaring head sway. Never in his long life had he seen a beast so ferocious, so evil—no big cat, no wild boar, no rhino nor wild elephant. He had tutored his squad to
refrain from making a single movement once the stand-off commenced. It was a needless instruction—the life had drained out of each of the nine charmers. Kaaliya’s young father was so without breath or heart that he was happy to die. He had no doubt the black king would dispatch them all after he had finished with the guru.

For a long time everyone remained frozen in that tableau, the only moving thing the swaying hood and darting tongue of the giant serpent. Not a sound of insect or bird broke the spell. And then in a flash—in a sequence so fast that none could fully follow it—the beast struck with its fearsome head, but Guru Bijli was no longer there. He was on the serpent’s back, both his hands locked around the beast’s thrashing neck. The great black one now began to hiss louder than a steam engine and in an instant had dragged the world’s greatest snake-catcher to the ground, and was rolling him around and into his coils. Guru Bijli knew this was perhaps his last fight; he knew if one finger slacked from around the demon’s throat, he was dead. Dead before it withdrew its fangs from his skin. This serpent was a poison factory—beyond the pale of every herb and potion. For the first and last time in his snake-catching life, Guru Bijli screamed for help. ‘Save me, you fucking wastrels! Grab its tail! This is not a snake, you idiots, this is the messenger of the lord of death!’ The panic in his voice—never heard before—galvanized the transfixed charmers. In a trice the nine of them were astride fifteen feet of thrashing, whipping muscle and struggling to stretch it out. With the guru screaming instructions—from a long way off, locked around the head of the heaving beast—two of the charmers shimmied up the closest tree, and slowly, with straining sinews, the rest of them began to feed the beast’s tail to them. Soon four of them were strung out along the high branches, pinning down the lashing body by sitting on it. The black king was now in a place he had never been before, strung upside down, his body trapped at many places. Kaaliya’s young father, who was up in the tree, struggling with strong thighs and hands to quell the thick muscle moving under him, and
looking down at the apocalyptic scene beneath, said he knew even then that if he lived for two hundred years he would never see a spectacle so awesome. In that small clearing, in the flickering light of the lanterns, the great serpent and the little master fought a primal duel, locked head-to-head, fangs bared. Man and beast, skill and fury, death and life, without flintlocks or swords, magic or tricks. The charmers said it was if they were watching the child Lord Krishna battle the hydra-headed sea serpent Kaaliya. Like the villagers on the shore they knew the child-god must prevail but the scale of the tumult filled them with apprehension. Now only the great head of the scourge was near the ground, its black body a thick line going straight up into the trees. With the guru shouting encouragement, one of the trembling charmers knotted a twine around the neck of the serpent, leaving only a finger’s slack. And then using only his two thumbs, millimetre by millimetre, the guru pushed the noose over the beast’s brow and eyes, trapping the hood, clamping the fangs. When the snakeman leapt off its back—more battered than he had been in his entire life—the black king reared up with such menace that the charmers on the tree almost fell off with fright, while those on the ground almost fled into the forest. The guru’s ringing shout restored sanity, and brandishing their forked sticks two of the charmers corralled the thrashing neck of the serpent while three others held wide open the large tarpaulin sack they had borrowed from the army; and with the guru screaming abuse and instruction, the head of the beast was pushed deep into the sack and held there with forked sticks, and in mere minutes, coil on coil, all of the great black king was nestled in its confines.

Kaaliya’s father said no one spoke for the next one hour. They just sat in that forest enclosure, in the dancing shadows created by the lanterns, exhausted in limb, and tormented in the mind. They—ten of them—had subdued one of the great miracles of the world. In their bones they knew this magnificent creature, beloved of Lord Shiva, would not survive the custody of men. The greatest
snake-catcher of the age, lying flat on his back, his eyes closed, said, ‘This is it. There are no more snakes for me to catch in this lifetime.’

The presentiment of the men was well founded. On the fifth day of its capture and display, amid the rejoicing and curiosity of the villagers, in the dead of night, as the charmers slept high on hooch, vengeful men wielding heavy iron daos chopped the black king into a hundred pieces. The great head was put on a bamboo spike planted into the ground, and before the sun was fully up the hundred pieces were snatched away by the villagers as memorabilia.

Full of wrath, the guru said, ‘I should have died and this king of snakes lived. These people deserved his terror.’ Kaaliya’s father said that true to his word the guru, though he lived fifteen years more, never snared another snake. But he talked often of the black king. He would say, ‘In those burning eyes I saw everything—power and poison, divinity and death, magic and menace. We made a grave blunder. That was the greatest serpent in the world, and we captured and killed it. Ten cunning men against one magnificent serpent. Having seen it, we should have turned around and left—left the king alone to rule its forest world.’

There were other stories Kaaliya remembered, older, ancient, secondhand. A hundred and twenty years ago, near Agra, there was a charmer, Siva Jogi, whose knowledge of the anti-venom herbs was so complete that he could actually bring back to life the poisoned dead. The only condition was that the victim be brought to him within twenty-four hours of being bitten to death. He had a way of applying his mouth to the wound and sucking out all the venom from the blood in one long, uninterrupted breath. No disciple could master both—the knowledge of the herbs and the technique of siphoning out the settled poison without killing oneself. The art of reviving the poisoned dead was lost after Siva Jogi. Under the moonless sky, light with ganja and alcohol, the charmers also waxed on about the great patrons of yore—benign zamindars and bejewelled kings—who had given them and their serpents adequate land
and produce, and the dignity befitting an artist. A time when the charmers lived in plenty and were hailed wherever they appeared.

In a soft, deeply tired voice, Kaaliya’s mother told her six children, of whom he was the youngest, that all this talk was balderdash. There were no benign zamindars, and there was no halcyon past. The king cobra was a fantasy, and Siva Jogi a myth. Their lives had always been rough, driven as they were from place to place, never more than a week’s supply of grain in their sacks. And so it had been for her parents, and their parents. But she admitted it had never been so brutally tough. She said men had now gone to the moon, and these days there was a cinema set in every house. The fanged one no longer aroused awe or curiosity. The few rupees, the few fists of flour that still came their way bore the stamp of casual pity.

She knew that sometimes her man and his cousins had to sing the pungi for more than fifteen minutes before anyone above the age of eight would break step and care to linger. She knew that her man and his mates, several times a day, retreated under a tree to fill their heads with ganja so they could deal with the humiliation of being artists who had no takers. And that was not all. Not only were they artists facing rejection but they were also criminals now. Their work was outlawed, and it was not just the policemen they had to worry about. The real scourge was a new breed of fannekhans who came from the big cities of Delhi and Bombay and claimed to know what was best for their serpents and demanded that the local khakis enforce the law: take away their coiled beauties and threaten them with arrest. Some of these fannekhans—often young men and women, talking a broken Hindi—were also solicitous, promising that they had come to usher the charmers into a new way of life, that there would soon be other jobs waiting for them. Kaaliya’s mother hissed like her snakes, ‘Jobs! Yes, of course, my illiterate lord is now going to be put into a pant and a suit, and will sit in an office and sign papers!’

There was some money to be made as medicine men. Some
of them—the few sharp talkers—were dishing out herbs and potions in the small towns, mostly for aches and pains and boils and ulcers and impotence and virility and barrenness. The trick had a six-to-eight-week play. Three to four weeks in one spot to establish an air of permanence and reliability. Ideally under an old tree, at the crossroads of inner lanes, clad in full saffron and turban, an array of dusty jars spread on a piece of matting, a small iron pestle for customizing the treatment, and a few pictures of different gods to reassure every kind of follower. Some of the more desperate ones even displayed a monitor lizard pickled in oil. Sold in little bottles or tiny plastic vials, the yellowy lubricant when applied to the rubber of penis produced the iron of phallus. Like all cures it took time, like all cures it was mostly in the head. The medicine men did not stay around long enough to verify the results. The world was full of grief and there were other sufferers waiting. Three to four weeks to create familiarity; three to four weeks to milk the miserable; and then they were gone.

Every now and then there was some money to be made from panicked residents who had been visited by a harmless snake. Like the medicine men, they had to then embark on a charade, to multiply the fear, awe, relief. Kaaliya’s father and his uncles had the acting abilities of a tree. They could blow the pungi to an aching sweetness; they could make the dark lord rise from the basket and sway to their rhythm; they could trap any snake from any hole in the forest with patience and quicksilver hands; they could snip fangs of poison and suture the venom sacs; and they could walk and walk and walk to the edge of the earth and beyond. But they lacked the talent to become conmen. They made a hash of pretending a rat snake was a lethal viper or a sand boa a python in the making.

There was one other way to earn a living, but it was absurdly sporadic. The rustic gujjars loved the haunting sound of the pungi, and invited the snakemen to play it at their weddings and festivities. It meant squatting in full regalia for hours and hours and blowing
and blowing till their lungs were empty and their aching cheeks the size of apples. But later there was always good food to eat and enough alcohol available to stun yourself. Some of the gujjars did not mind the snakemen bringing their waifs along, though others could be insulting.

Kaaliya had done the rounds before he was six and suffered many wounds and diminishments. He had walked the inner lanes of dusty little towns whose names he was too young to know and seen his father and uncles toil and grovel—blowing, beseeching, squatting on the roadside like beggars—to collect a few coins and wrinkled rupee-notes. Their only succour seemed to be hashish; their only vent thrashing Kaaliya and the other small boys.

Kaaliya always saw his father either abject or angry. There was never enough to eat, and when any of his children fell ill, the father just looked the other way, doing nothing, waiting for them to heal or die. By the time Kaaliya was six he had lost a brother and a sister, one younger, the other older, to fevers that none of the herbs and potions could break. He had watched his father expressionlessly flow his dead siblings down the river, and then come home and embark on an orgy of intoxication.

His mother was no solace. She was exhausted beyond emotion. Apart from everything to do with the tortoise-shell homes, she went out for hours every day into alien fields to harness grass for their mule and cow—the two could not be let out to find their own food because they were their only valuable possessions. Sometimes she also managed to steal a few carrots or turnips or potatoes or gourds from the nearby field. And sometimes the odd fruit—a few green guavas or mangoes from a fruiting orchard. His father always abused and slapped his mother for her thieving, and then promptly proceeded to eat what she had stolen. Later, the mother beat Kaaliya and his elder sister—the others were much too old—before she dropped asleep exhausted on the floor between the hissing wicker baskets and her snivelling children.

When they moved, which was every few weeks, it fell to her, with some help from her small sons, to dismantle the house—the bamboo sticks, the shreds of tarp and plastic, the cooking stones, the rush mats and patchwork quilts, the many baskets filled with the coiled ones—and then some days later, outside a new town, in the vicinity of a defining tree and an enabling pond or tube well, set it up again. The father sat with the other men, looking from the corner of his eye, pulling on his chillum, the artist of the serpents who could not be expected to stoop to such mundanity.

Little Kaaliya hated his life, hated the endless trudging, hated being a beggar in every town and lane he ever visited. He felt they were the only houseless people in the world. Everywhere else he saw solidity, people living in firm, immovable homes. With each day Kaaliya grew into a very angry child, unafraid to shout, scream and protest. His exasperated father would say, ‘This bastard’s skin will peel off like a snake’s with thrashings, but he’ll continue to bark like a mad dog!’ Every now and then the boy would arraign his mother, demanding to know when they would stop walking, when would they live in an immovable house, when would they begin to give alms rather than seek them, and when would his father stop behaving like a beast. The weary woman said all of it would happen when the sun swallowed the moon permanently and the rivers ran with milk and flowers bloomed all over the desert and men began to fly like birds and snakes began to talk like men and the gods began to look at everyone with an equal eye.