The Story of My Assassins (43 page)
Dhaka said, ‘Show-offs use a knife—all flick and flash and funtoosh! If you want to impress girls it’s okay, but if you want to kill there’s nothing like a screwdriver!’ Dhaka said the beauty of a screwdriver was that it was aesthetic and it was a time bomb. No flesh flapping open, no entrails falling out, no blood gushing like a broken pipe. You made a small hole in the bastard and you sowed death. Many hours later, when he had gone back to whatever fucking hole he had crawled out from, death exploded inside him, and then everyone ran around looking for the hole it had crept in through. Those who did not die, lived for the rest of their life with a hole inside them full of pus and fear. They existed with the knowledge that deep inside them was a festering hollow that nothing could fill; and they lived in dread of getting another one.
Dhaka’s arsenal of screwdrivers came from the hardware shops in Chawri Bazaar. A few were as long as his forearm; some had iron the length of his hand; and many were short, the rod only four inches, the wood handle rounded and smooth, with deep grooves for traction. These were the ones Dhaka preferred to use, and two of them were always on his body.
Chini liked the feel of the smooth round grip of the short screwdrivers, and when his hand was taken in the night by Dhaka he imagined what he lovingly caressed was the weapon’s wooden handle. In time, over the months and years, he came to caress the handles of everyone in the band, especially that of his closest friend, Kaaliya.
From those initial fumblings to Bangkok was an inevitable journey. To reach Bangkok the boys exited from Ajmeri Gate and walked a straight line past old Delhi—through Asaf Ali Road and Daryaganj, to the power house behind Rajghat where Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes still blew in the wind. The first time, they left the station at about eight in the evening and walked for two hours. Chini’s mind was blown away by the sheer number of vehicles, the big buildings and the wide roads. He could not believe all of this—two hours of brisk walking—was the same city. His mates had told him that in Bangkok there lay surprises such as he could never imagine.
The jhuggi-jhopdi colony they entered was overhung by a mad skein of exposed wires and lit by naked bulbs. A line of sludge in a shallow groove ran alongside the tight mud lanes that criss-crossed it. In these lanes stood small pushcarts selling ice cream, chaat, tikki; modified bicycles selling rasgullas, cotton candy, aampapad, kulcha; large vendor carts for vegetables, sherbets, lunch and dinner ensembles; and aluminium carts for drinking water. Mongrels sprawled everywhere, and loud voices rang out from every loose brick and tin room—everyone seemed to be in the middle of an argument. No one looked at them with any curiosity as they threaded the lanes in single file.
They were deep in the bowels of the slum, and Chini was sure he could never find his way back, when the line stopped. Chini saw three small signboards on three one-room shacks, all in a row.
Tempo Video House. Manpasand Video House. Sweet Dreams Cinema Parlour.
For the next four hours, for five rupees, inside Sweet Dreams Cinema Parlour, packed in with twenty other boys, Chini saw films that blew his brain into kaleidoscopic fragments. Here were gora women prettier than Hindi film heroines, doing dirty things that could not be imagined. The genitalia of these golden-haired, red-mouthed white women was beyond fantasy. Breasts like balloons, thighs like pillars, vulvas like peaches. Kaaliya said, peering between their open thighs, they were like the muscular maw of a python, capable of swallowing any and everything.
In the translucent glow of moaning white women, Chini saw boys streaming in until, by midnight, the rough blue jute durrie, stained with a million happinesses, on which they sat, was completely packed. The bigger boys bagged the last row at the back, against the wall, and it was lit with glowing tips as silver lines were shared and burnt. It was the only row allowed to talk aloud; comments on the size, shape and colour of genitalia flowed steadily.
Chini had no time for such frivolity. He was not blinking, and his fingers were fluttering like a master weaver’s. By now the sexual stench in the room was overpowering, blanking out the smell of sweat and dirt and cigarettes. Every boy was working his handle; some that of others. A few had fallen asleep, exhausted and sated. At some point they would wake and start working the handle again.
Malaria, the emaciated young owner of Sweet Dreams parlour, sat outside, intensely burning silver lines. When, with a loud click, the tape ran out and the boys erupted in a roar, he made a quick sortie to slip in a new cassette. Chini thought of video uncle and he thought of Malaria, and he marvelled at the endless wonders of cinema. At around three o’clock, Malaria staggered in sleepily to change yet one more cassette—the sex stench was thick as cheese now—and said, ‘Fucking vagabonds, stop pulling at it as if there’s a sack of gold coins at its root! Haven’t you had enough for one night!’
The boys erupted, ‘Fuck your mother, Malaria! May she get filaria!’ He grinned and retreated.
Neither Chini nor Kaaliya slept a wink that night, and by the time the owner came in to finally turn off the player—warm as toast now—every body part of the boys, from eyes to limbs to hands to handle, was sore.
Outside, a red-grey dawn was opening the day. The lanes of Bangkok were full of bustle. Burnt-skin men in vests prepared their carts and cycles, rich food smells vying with the fumes from the sewage. A few privileged children in ragged uniforms trudged cheerlessly to school, weighed under their cloth satchels. In less than an hour the slum would be vacated of all activity. Every single denizen above the age of nine would leave to forage the city for every rupee they could find, while the night toilers, like Malaria and the sex and security platoon, would turn in to sleep off the daylight hours.
The slum worked hard every moment to discover new ways to make a living; new ways of any kind at all. Pornography was no less respectable than selling contaminated drinking water or looking after some rich man’s dogs or soliciting funds for a fake orphanage. In fact, for years afterwards, Chini and Kaaliya argued that it was a positively wholesome pastime, compared to some of the other things their mates were doing. By the time they wound their weary way back to the tracks, the sun was beginning to singe the city, and the two friends had found in themselves a tacit commitment to the consumption of pornography that was to seal their friendship forever.
While Bangkok became a regular destination for the two boys, neither of them tasted any other part of the sprawling city for many years, except of course Sadar Bazaar, where they went once in two months to pick up a set of fifteen-rupee shirt and trouser ensembles, wearing them without break till every thread ran thin, returning in
the winter for cardigans and coats for twenty-five rupees. Some of these clothes bore labels that would have dazzled the swank sets of Park Avenue and Mayfair; the gap between the white rich and the gutter boys was only a stitch insufficiently strong or a collar out of true.
While visiting Sadar was easy—you just walked the rails till you got there—the rest of the city remained alien. Different dangers lurked here: of policemen, government officials, the begging mafia, the eunuch tribes. Boys had been lost, with the accompanying mutilation of limbs and penises, to all of them. Then there were the spies of social agencies whose weapons were soft words and rosy dreams, who talked with sincere eyes about goodness and education, who wanted to pull the boys into their hospices and domesticate them into cooks and guards and gardeners. The few who managed to slave through school would end up as clerks and accountants.
Dhaka called them the ‘fucking pimps of goodness’. ‘I tell them to sit on my dick! They hate our freedom and happiness! They hate it that we don’t live by their rules! They want to scrub our skins, teach us to write and read a few words, and then send us off to be slaves in some rich man’s house or office! Clean some memsahib’s shoes and wipe her children’s ass! What happened to Ismail, to Kamal, to Doctor, to Pani? All serving tea and wiping tables and washing dishes! Has any one of us ever had to do that? I would rather die under a train than go with those pimps! Sit on my dick, I tell them!’ To Chini he would say: ‘You they won’t even teach a few words! They’ll straightaway give you a topi and a lathi and make you a chowkidar! You can spend the rest of your life awake every night walking around banging your lathi on the road!’
Chini, however, was in training to be not a guard but a crook. Dhaka had inducted him into the shaving blade. He’d said, ‘Saaley Aladdin, you are too pretty to have the stomach for a screwdriver. You need something gentle, something dainty.’ Given the innocence shining out of him, he was made for contact crime, charm
crime—simple swindles, the theft of bags, the slitting of pockets. The stainless steel Topaz blade was snapped in two; it easily vanished between Chini’s index and middle finger, the cutting edge flush with the palm. In the moment that Kaaliya banged up against the man, Chini’s sweeping palm brushed past his pocket, opening it like a mongrel’s mouth. If the man caught on, Kaaliya swarmed all over him, swaying and striking like the coiled black one whose blood-line was inextricably entwined with his, while Chini made a run for it.
There were times when they were caught and brutally thrashed. By groups of passengers, by the khakis, by the railway round-caps, by other bigger, meaner rats. There was nothing to do then but to lie on the roof or in the gutter and inhale the rag day on day till all pain had eased and every welt had healed. Sometimes one of the band would bring in a dark bottle of iodex, but it was more gratifying to eat it layered thickly on bread than to apply it to one’s aching skin.
And so more than ten years passed.
Ten years in which everything, and nothing much, changed. In this time Dhaka was killed, chopped into pieces with a butcher’s knife. When the news reached the station and the boys went rushing to the open lot behind Red Fort, they found parts of him strewn beside a small lantana bush near a sewer. Like a plastic doll whose arms and legs had been yanked out. His head, cut close to the torso, had rolled three feet away. The dismembered parts had bloated and discoloured to blue-green rust. There was no way anyone could have recognized him but for the trademark tennis wristbands. The short screwdriver he used to carry in his boot was hammered into his navel, the smooth wooden handle sticking out like a gravestone. When they had identified him, the policeman said, ‘Motherfucking wastrels, this is how you’ll all die! I hope someone will come to identify you!’
Dhaka’s parts were bundled tightly in a sheet and burnt by the
old cremation ghat by the Yamuna. Nobody from his sixteen years at the station came to watch him burn, except for three boys. Kaaliya, Chini and Tarjan gave seventy rupees to a cut-rate priest, who asked for a cigarette before performing some perfunctory rites. He mumbled incantations at a speed that did not yield a single word, and waving a clump of green grass and a brass lota, he threw some water randomly around the pyre. They paid another eighty rupees for three armfuls of wood. The priest said it was lucky the man had come chopped in small bits, else it would have never done the job.
The next day they went back and scooped the ashes and bits of charred bone into a small pot and caught a bus to Haridwar. Before they reached the ghat, Kaaliya had banged into two groups of well-heeled mourners, and Chini’s blade fingers had opened up two crisp white kurtas. Now they had enough money to afford a young panda—a big steel watch on his wrist—to mouth some more facilitating incantations at a mumble and a speed that did not yield a single word. Bits of Dhaka were then floated down the great Ganga—to flow all the way back from where, those many years ago, he’d once come.
The three of them stayed on in the holy city for a few weeks, slitting flapping kurtas, observing the pilgrims and mourners, watching the evening aartis with the deafening chanting and the delightful floating of the glittering diyas, eating endless rounds of puri-aloo and halwa, studying the hustle and swindle of god’s middlemen. They slept in the many buzzing ashrams, on the banks of the groaning river, and on days when the slit kurtas were fat with offerings, in one of the many cramped hotels dotting the town. They watched the muttering women dip themselves in the mother of all rivers—the blessing of Shiva, the cleanser of all sins—their sarees clinging to their rolling flesh, their white brassieres etched pointy against their white blouses, their nipples round and dark and liquid.
So more than ten years passed.
In this time, Gudiya was molested, abducted and raped. The boys from the other peepul tree, the one beyond the last platform, beside the tea-stall, near Ajmeri Gate, picked her up one evening as she trawled empty carriages for some left-behinds, and dragged her to the cave. The area was earmarked for crime—the last fingers of the big sodium lights stopped many feet away, and the khakis never ventured there. Inside the gaping hole, shaped like a cowl, under the grassy motte beyond the shunting tracks, the three of them fucked her by turns.
They were brutal and quick, spitting into their palms. None of them fucked silently. ‘Enjoying it, bloody randi?’
‘Now you’ll want it all the time, won’t you?’ Almost as if they were lovers, seeking her approval.
Gudiya did not fight it after the first few minutes. It was late evening; she was high on the solution; and she had lived on the platform long enough to know this assault was overdue. When the fucking was over, they squatted in a semicircle, breathing heavily, dusting their forearms and trousers, and smoking plain cigarettes. On her haunches, Gudiya pushed her fingers deep into herself and scooped out all she could.
She was still wiping her fingers on her kameez, when Shankar, the biggest of the three, and the boss of platforms seven and eight, pushed her down again. He spat on his palm out of habit, though it was not needed. This time he was gentler and slower, and he did not shoot her with questions. Gudiya adjusted her head in the loose soil on the ground, and held her legs wide apart. She could hear the Jammu-Tawi Mail leaving with a piercing whistle. Afterwards he sent the other two off, and told her he’d been eyeing her for months, that he always thought she was Dhaka’s and then he’d learnt the truth. Now she was his. He loved everything about her. He loved her name. He loved her beauty. He loved her. He shared a cigarette with her and gave her fifty rupees.