The Story of My Assassins (44 page)
The next day he took her to Chandni Chowk and bought her a shimmering pink suit, tinsel jewellery, a pair of silver sandals, and a tiny bottle of ittar whose sweet smell filled the air like billowing smoke. They ate mutton korma at Karim’s and he looked into her black eyes.
The next week he took her to his best friend, Abbas, behind Asaf Ali Road, and in his second-floor living-room, amid a clutter of stuffed and padded furniture, shared her love on the green Rexine sofa with him. Abbas was fat but kind, and called her the new queen—nai begum—as he wheezed away on her. Later, Abbas gave her chaat to eat and told her how much Shankar loved her. Shankar looked into her black eyes and she warmed to the deep love in them.
The next month he got on to the Rajdhani with her and took her to Bombay. He came back ten days later without her, and when Kaaliya and Chini and Tarjan went to platform seven to find out where she was, he said, ‘What do I look like to you, you fuckers? The head of the missing persons’ bureau? Can any of you even find your own missing mothers that you want me to find some missing bitch? You come here again and I’ll slice your balls off! Maybe you’ll feel like her then!’
The next night when Dhaka came to the gutter, they told him. Dhaka, burning lines of silver at blistering speed, said, ‘Must be the best whore in Kamathipura by now. You hang around with Shankar, you deserve it. Anyway, where do you think we are all going to end up—the Rashtrapati Bhavan? Better a whore with cock between her legs than dead on some iron track!’ Then he turned over and went to sleep and never mentioned her name again.
So more than ten years passed.
In this time Makhi Khan—once the love of Dhaka, the pretty boy from Malliana who had seen his family consumed by fire and
sword, by slogans and screams—was cut into three by the thundering hooves of the Amritsar Shatabdi. By then the delicate boy had travelled way beyond the sniffing of the rag. He was now sucking the wet cloth like an ice lolly, and on days even tilting the little bottles like Coca-Cola directly into his throat. The mullah’s reassuring voice summoning the faithful to prayer played in his head all the time, and just when the shrieking men, bandannas tied around their heads, steel slicing the air in front of them, were about to break through the door and grab his father and brothers, his sisters and mother, he quickly gave the bunched cloth in his palm a deep suck, and the mullah’s soothing voice came sweetly rolling back.
Makhi had long ceased to beg or steal. He had given in to his inherent gift. It was difficult to look at him and not be snared by the soft flare of his hips, the full red mouth, the big brown eyes with long curving lashes. Unhappy men—young and old, married and single, sad and angry—poured through the station night and day, and it was gifted unto him to give them a fleeting moment of joy. Some hurt him and some did not pay him anything, but many were grateful and kind. Some came back, but if they did so too often then he learnt to avoid them. The khakis and the round-caps took him when they wanted. But that was okay. The station, after all, belonged to them.
Makhi used to say that because his mother begged so hysterically for her children, they killed her last, though they did not stop raping her. Her pleading excited them, made them laugh, fuelled their tumescence. He used that learning sometimes—in an empty carriage, bent over a lower berth, when the man was kind and had a fat pocket.
It always worked. The call to mercy provoked harder erections and greater arousal. Men, and power.
He had been wandering back from Sheilapul, pouring the solution into his throat. That day it had been two sadhus from the temple, high on charas, their long matted hair falling over his back as they
grunted. They had paid him nothing, just fifteen rupees, saying he was fortunate to be doing god’s work. And so he was, for he could hear the muezzin’s sweet cry, loud and clear, filling the skies. When he fell on the stones, his legs over the smooth rails, and the Shatabdi thundered in, all flashing lights and faces, the muezzin’s cry grew louder and sweeter bringing on more and more peace.
He was still smiling when the boys reached him. The khakis had put his legs in his gunny sack and were discussing what to do next. Kaaliya tried to bend down and cradle his beautiful head but a khaki uncoiled a kick to his side. ‘Stupid fucking punks! Can’t live cleanly, can’t die cleanly!’ he snarled. ‘Get themselves chopped like vegetables, as if their mothers are waiting to cook them!’
They kept arguing among themselves till he was dead. Two rail karamcharis helped stuff him into a sack. He was left next to a refuse pile at the end of the Paharganj lane that fronted the station. Now he was the municipality’s responsibility. They were good at disposing of assorted limbs and carcasses.
The next to go was Chhotu, chaser of kites, peeper into toilets, befriender of every rat on every platform, the laughing player of pranks, the boy who could not be caught. Chhotu’s feet were running water. Dodging, feinting, taunting, he could elude three chasing men around a narrow platform for as long it took to exhaust them. Nothing slowed him down: not the beatitudes of the solution, not injury, not fever.
Some days, to amuse themselves, the rats would spot a smug group on the platform and say, ‘Go screw them!’ The creativity lay in the provocation: pissing at their feet, smearing snot on their baggage, dropping a kulhad of tea over their clothes, flashing their women. Then came the exchange of abuse, followed by the chase. Threading fatigued passengers, around kiosks and carts, up the stairs, leaping
the banisters, over luggage—all the time the laughing abuse, and above on the roof the roaring audience. In every case the pursuers were doubled up on the floor grasping for breath in less than ten minutes.
But when the rag’s magic vapours filled his being, Chhotu saw none of this. All he heard was his mother’s sweet lullaby and all he saw were the flying kites. Soaring souls, in a hundred colours, in a hundred sizes, in their thousands, filling the blue sky, outfluttering every bird, skating the thermals, skipping and swerving, dipping and dancing, connected by the thin body of their threads to a thousand jerking fingers on a hundred shimmering rooftops.
Chhotu lived to fly the kite, to feel the life of the paper-bird flow through his grimy hands. In those years at the station anyone who saw a pair of bare feet silvering across the corrugated roofs, face tilted upwards, knew instantly who it was. On a windless day when paper was like stone, this runaway son of a constable could lift the bird with his wrists alone; and if the breeze blew he could sail the bird so deep into the heavens that it could no more be seen by the keenest eye. If the skies were crowded he could wield his flying bird like a warrior’s scimitar to clear himself a wide space. His string was the edge of a blade, coated with crushed mirrors in the starch of rice; his palms roughly cross-hatched with lines beyond all ordainings of destiny.
Chhotu’s champagne months were August and September. As the rains passed, leaving behind cool breezes; as Independence Day approached with the pale rituals of freedom speeches; as the bird-men emerged onto the roofs and streets of old Delhi holding their big kites like delicate porcelain, Chhotu became almost completely airborne. There were several other rats too—between the tracks, in the shunting yards, on the roofs—who put up their birds. But they were peasants amid a gladiator, and Chhotu never crossed his singing line with them. Striding the roofs of the station, he hunted the high-fliers, warriors like himself who could swerve and slash at
several hundred feet, with power and precision, whose kites when decapitated were pursued by the peasants who ran and leapt pell-mell over everything to capture the trophy.
Kaaliya said it was apt that Chhotu died doing the two things that defined him—running and flying a kite. Aptly too, he died off the roof of platform four and in the middle of Independence Day celebrations when his father would have been on duty somewhere, guarding some leader or road against the vandalism of the spirit of freedom. On a midday when the air was buzzing with kites like flies on a heap of refuse, and Chhotu was slicing them down like blades of grass, his flying foot rolled on a dented can of Coke someone had flung on to the roof. The rats who saw him plunge said he bounced on the wires like a rubber ball while the wires sang and spat. The spectacle was so riveting that no one quite remembered if he screamed or said anything. But they all recalled that he held on tight to his big wooden spool of string. When he finally fell to the ground, nicely charred, and the khakis arrived to cart him away, he was still holding on to it.
That night Kaaliya said, lying on the roof, ‘Chini, you are next! Take it from me. You look too sweet and innocent. Someone will do away with you just because of that!’ Of course, by then, Chini was neither. He alone among the band had made the journey to the top of the peepul tree at the end of platform one. It was on a summons delivered one night at the garbage hall movie. The other band rats had stood at a distance while he climbed the knotted sinews of the ancient tree that had torn apart the building, grabbed the iron stake and swung himself into the dark leafy space above. Narak, hell, where you only went if you were invited or dragged.
Bizarrely—Chini said later—as he climbed up he was assailed by an acrid smell that he couldn’t recognize, and when he emerged
into the dark cave made by the peepul’s lush canopy he was startled to see a large image of him staring back. He almost tripped back in fear and fell down the hole he had just crawled up. Then he realized it was a big stand-alone mirror in a tiltable wooden frame, of the kind found in old colonial bungalows. A voice cackled from the dark and said mockingly, ‘See! We have a duplicate of everything!’
By now Chini’s stomach was water, and as his eyes adjusted he saw a charpoy with a mattress and bed sheet and pillows and a bald young man lying on it with his arms folded under his head. He was wearing nothing but a black pair of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls shorts, the number 23 luminous in red, its crotch shaped like an igloo. But Shakaal was not the one who had spoken. There were also two wooden chairs and a small table, with young men sitting on all of them. One of them had a thick stubble and a wild grin. The boys called him Kumla Jogi—Mad Joginder—and he tended to blather and was prone to random acts of violence. He had a thick cigar stuck in his mouth and was grinning through it. ‘You are a Chini?’ he said. ‘Do you like eating noodles?’ Chini’s voice had long ago drowned deep in the waters of his belly. When the boy didn’t answer, Kumla Jogi cackled madly, then stopped dead and said, ‘Anyway, take off all your pathetic clothes. We’ve heard Chinis have two cocks—one for pissing and one for fucking. And they can do both at the same time—that’s why they have even more people than us!’ He cackled madly again. ‘Let’s see if it’s true.’
Nothing surprised the boy because he was an aficionado of Bangkok’s cinema. But it certainly hurt. Shakaal was the first in, without taking off his Michael Jordan shorts; then Kumla Jogi, cackling and talking all the while; and finally the third man, who first brutally used his mouth. Later, he kneeled the boy on the edge of the table and simply would not stop. Chini could look through the beautiful peepul leaves and see the lights coming on in the outer reaches of the station, some white, other yellow. He wished he had the rag—it would have soaked up the pain.
The other two were talking among themselves, discussing some new film. The table was screeching rhythmically on the brick floor. Dhaka had told him to stick close to the path of no resistance. Boys had gone up that tree, and come down as cripples. Sometimes even as corpses. There were no reparations possible. Hell and the khakis were one team. Now there was no pain; just the banging. He held on hard to the edges of the table. Finally Shakaal said in his filmy baritone, ‘Stop it now, chutiya, unless you are trying to make India and China into one country!’
Afterwards, Kumla Jogi put the barrel of a big black pistol in his mouth and slowly moved it in and out. ‘My little Bruce Lee that one gives a hot fuck, this one gives a cold fuck! That one shoots life into you, this one shoots death!’ And he cackled madly. ‘So be a good obedient boy always so that you always get life!’ When the boy stumbled down the tree he saw his shadow move in the big mirror.
For five days Lhungdim lay in the gutter, face stuffed into a dripping rag, hearing the sweet sound of rain falling on a thatch roof amid wet green trees at the end of a world he could never again find. From then on, in the garbage hall during the weekend shows, he hid himself, covering his head with a cap, lying low between the rats in a dark corner. But hell knows how to find those it chooses.
Lhungdim. Aladdin. Chini. Catamite. The summons came periodically, and in time he mastered every sinew of the tree, scaling it in a jiffy even in the dead of night. He learnt to relax the tight muscles, and he remembered to take his rag along. The canopy regularly unveiled new bodies, and occasionally he felt he was part of some transaction. Sometimes when he was being banged he’d hear a voice ask, ‘Does he know any Hindi? I have to say Chini ass is better than Indian ass!’ Occasionally he was surprised when someone would pull on a cap before starting on him: of course he realized it was to protect themselves, not him. Its abrasions tore at him for days.
Kaaliya always waited in the platform below, often falling asleep on the undulating concrete bench. He had grown into a wiry young
man full of the sullenness of the unfairly relegated. On the platform, colour of skin was fate. The night-dark son of snakemen loved his friend, and was his guardian and keeper, but he was also forced to stand in the wings and to share him with the masters of the world. In the beginning he would rage, threatening to unleash cobras up the tree. But as Chini’s own anxieties tempered and the hell boys began to hand him hundred-rupee notes, Kaaliya began to see it all as one more line of work. You could collect waste, you could steal, you could sell drugs, you could get fucked, or you could, as most of them did, do a bit of everything. It insulated you against the vagaries of the marketplace.