The Story of My Assassins (45 page)

So more than ten years passed.

In that time they discovered there was a city beyond the station. It was full of a real opulence and a real beauty. For too long they’d imagined these were only attributes of the films they saw in their garbage hall. In Connaught Circus—a mere slingshot away from the gutter they’d always lived in—were dazzling glass-fronted shops and big glowing signs. There were cinema halls with screens the size of a thousand televisions, and on the road big cars that shone like diamonds. In the colonnaded corridors walked women—and men—so beautiful, so sweet smelling, that one felt faint in their very presence. And that was not all. The city, in a similar way, stretched on and on for miles and miles, to an end none of them had ever seen.

In that time they discovered the big world was not for them. They had no tools to take it on—no language, no knowledge, no contacts, no money. On the other hand the station was no longer big enough. New young boys were filling the holes and roofs. They were insolent, energetic, scrappy. To contest them for space and spoils was a diminishment—for Kaaliya and Chini lacked the authority or the wit or the violence to generate awe. And the hell boys of the
peepul tree had no interest in the turf battles of the platforms—they were players in the big stakes of the larger world.

So when they were summoned up the peepul tree one evening, and Shakaal did not unbutton his Jordan shorts and no one took off their pants, and they were offered a new line of work, they were fully ready. Kumla Jogi cackled madly and said, ‘What a pair! Black and white! Night and day! God and demon! It’s perfect!’

They were not put on the drug route, or the arms line, or the fake currency racket. A new con was being tested, and the maibaaps of the hell boys had demanded a few novices, with no police record, and innocence in their eyes. A new revenue stream in white-collar swindling was being opened—no knives, no guns, no blood, no gore, just go to the bank and collect some money.

The maibaap, the government, in its infinite mercy had started a loan scheme for the illiterate handicapped. Kaaliya and Chini were handed medical certificates, sheathed in laminate, declaring them deaf-and-dumb. They were then taken to a small branch of a nationalized bank in Gurgaon. Benighted Mr Lhungdim and Mr Nath applied for a state loan to set up a scooter repairs shop. Billa, the broker, held their thumbs and stuck them into various documents; then he heartily backslapped the thin manager, Mr Pareenja, making the claustrophobic plywood cabin shake. Two weeks later, they collected and cashed a cheque of two hundred thousand rupees. Shakaal gave them four thousand each out of it, and stroking his oiled scalp said, ‘Lucky dogs! Didn’t have to spill a drop of blood for it! Like working in a motherfucking office!’

The next one was a cooperative bank in Najafgarh. The broker Sehwag, fat and unshaven, wore a soiled white kurta-pajama and drove a red battered Maruti. The manager was a young man with a fine moustache that curled upwards, and he gave the two deaf-and-dumb illiterates one hundred fifty thousand rupees to buy buffaloes and set up a dairy milk project. Handing out four thousand each to the serial entrepreneurs, Kumla Jogi cackled madly and said, ‘We’ve
always cursed the motherfucking government for not doing anything for poor people. The fact is you have to just learn to ask nicely!’

Eight months later, Chini and Kaaliya had moved out to a room in Rajinder Nagar. It was above the second floor of a tiny house and you had to climb endless narrow steps to get to it. The toilet and bathroom were out on the small terrace, and each was the size of a large cupboard. They both slept on the single bed and lay low in the neighbourhood, not talking to anyone. The only time they went back to the station was when they had to report to the hell boys. Or on the odd night when sleep would just not come unless they heard the rumble of the trains.

But going there now was an unhappy experience. Most of the rats of their time were dead or gone; even the khakis were unfamiliar. Shoki too had died some years ago, and soon after, they had closed their bank accounts at the fruit mart. The rail lines still lived by the rag, but Salushan Baba’s place had been taken by a younger man—sharply dressed, not wise, not a fakir, just a salesman. Worst of all the movie hall had been cleared out: the garbage dump was now only a garbage dump—stuffed to overflowing—and no video uncle appeared there every weekend with magic in his duffel bags. As terrible was the onslaught of Dhaka’s dreaded ‘pimps of goodness’. Men and women with saintly smiles were crawling all over the station trying to snare the rats into morbid hospices and spiritless schools.

The new life was welcome. Every few months the handicapped duo were shepherded to a new bank to mop up a loan. Kumla Jogi cackled and said, ‘We should buy them suits and ties! Look at them—Mr and Mrs 55! Fultu sahibs, going to banks! Their parents would be proud of them!’

In the long spare hours they sniffed the rag and burnt the silver lines. Sometimes, for days, they were too much at peace to even walk down the stairs. When they could they went to Bangkok, spending entire nights there, inhaling the musk of male desire, finding the perfect peace of oblivion. Even when they got their own Akai TV and
Panasonic video player, they did not cease to seek out the collective frisson of Bangkok.

In October 1996 they were arrested in Ghaziabad while trying to collect a five-lakh loan from the State Bank for a machine-tooling unit. After seven heists the word was out on them. The cops beat them systematically, hurting every bone in their body without breaking it, and pulping every muscle without tearing it. For weeks they were crumpled heaps. No one in more than ten years at the station had hurt them so badly. The cops were in a fury: for one, the two of them had no money to fork out; and then clearly they were street labour, totally dispensable, and their maibaaps, whoever they were, would have no interest in salvaging them. Kumla Jogi bailed them out four months later, and took them back up the peepul tree. Chini’s left cheek had a scar now, from a fight in Dasna jail. The horny Jat who had given him the scar had had a chunk bitten off his chest by Kaaliya. Shakaal rubbed his Michael Jordan crotch and said, ‘Good! Now you’ve finally graduated! Now you are ready for the next level. Tell me, what comes after sahib?’ Kumla Jogi cackled and said, ‘Shaitan!’ Shakaal cracked a smile and said, ‘And after shaitan?’ Kumla Jogi cackled, ‘Sant!’

Sahib. Satan. Saint.

Conformity. Rebellion. Enlightenment.

Shakaal said, his voice sombre, ‘Do you know what Bhagwan Krishna told Arjuna when he was standing around like you looking stupid, in front of a million armed warriors? The great lord said, “Even a wise person acts according to his own nature. Nature drives all beings. Why should you use restraint? Attachment and aversion are certain. But don’t be overcome by those. They are obstacles. Your own dharma, even if followed imperfectly, is superior to someone else’s dharma, even if followed perfectly. It is better to be slain while following your own dharma. Someone else’s dharma is tinged with fear.” ’ At this Kumla Jogi cackled, ‘And what is your dharma, boys?’

To carry and to fetch.

So the order of evolution was laid out for the two former rats, and they were inducted into the life of carriers and couriers: delivering packages, collecting packages, asking no questions, seeking no answers. Knowing no one beyond the hell boys; knowing nothing beyond the next address. In this way in the next few years they travelled all over the country, from Kashmir to Bombay to Guwahati to Calcutta to coastal Gujarat and coastal Tamil Nadu and the frontiers of Pakistan and Nepal and Bangladesh and Burma. Sometimes the cargo was a mere envelope slipped in between their vest and skin; sometimes a smooth cylinder nestled in Chini’s supple ass; sometimes a truck laden with sacks and crates, lashed down tightly, and the two of them in the co-driver’s cabin, sharing a rag, burning a silver line. Only once did Shakaal offer them a pistol—beneath the green canopy of peepul leaves, before sending them on a collection to Ganganagar in Rajasthan—but when they hesitated, afraid, Kumla Jogi took it away and cackled, ‘Oh don’t! Not to Mr and Mrs 55! Look at them! If your hands shake like that you should masturbate, not hold guns!’

They stayed with Dhaka’s legacy of screwdrivers, blades, scalpels, almost never needing to use them, till one day Shakaal summoned them up the tree and twirling a brand-new silver-coloured mobile phone in his hand, said, ‘This whole country is changing, everyone is full of new excitements, don’t you want to do something more with yourselves? Or are you happy being postmen all your life?’

The two of them kept quiet, knowing well that the decision had already been taken for them. Kumla Jogi, who was wearing a green balaclava over his face, its edges sticking out like bunny rabbit ears, cackled and said, ‘Chutiyas, he’s going to make you James Bond! Zero zero seven! Cars, guns, and a licence to kill!’

Chini, lost son of a distant land where the slopes were green and the rain always fell, and Kaaliya, coal-dark offspring of a blood-line that never stopped walking and was forever entwined with the scaled one, were given a piece of paper with an address where they
were to meet a man more fearsome than Dhaka, more fearsome than the hell boys, more fearsome than any they had known, whose chosen weapon of mayhem was an iron hammer, who was dreaded by men whose illicit empires ran across states, who made holes in heads that no surgeon could ever hope to suture.

F
or some reason Jai decided to accompany me. He didn’t need to. The summons was for me. But it was the kind of showy gesture he occasionally indulged in, to show he really cared. I don’t think he did, for anyone, but it flowed with his self-image. Also, I knew he had been dining out on these grimy state-versus-citizen stories—they held a macabre fascination for the kind of well-heeled precious fucks he socialized with; men and women who would pull up their pant legs and stop breathing if you dropped them on a village road. He embroidered into drawing-room theatre everything that I told him: the sinister shadows, the Kafka courtroom, the slippery Sethiji, the menacing Hathi Ram, the clinical assassins led by the brain-curry man, the lethal Kapoorsahib, Bhalla’s line girls. The fools he regaled never realized that, actually, they were part of the same chorus line—the state-and-the-system that had a finger up everyone’s ass. The moment we entered the building, I knew Jai was soon going to command a new silence in the margarita rooms.

It was a concrete block off Chanakyapuri and it rose nine storeys high, featureless and opaque as a cardboard box. A guard in khaki sat near the main entrance on a wooden stall, carefully punching a blue mobile phone, and he didn’t look up as we went in. The foyer was tight and dimly lit, the terrazzo floor and cement walls thick with grime. There were two lifts, next to each other, with steel doors. When you punched the buttons you heard, somewhere in the distance, a deep groaning and cranking followed by a thick whine. The
narrow glass consoles over the doors were playful, displaying some floors and ignoring others. When the lift hit the ground there was a big bang and shudder. But the men in it walked out alive, all nondescript, all in bush shirts and trousers.

It was six in the evening. Only the two of us were going up. When the doors had juddered shut and we were enclosed in the semi-dark, Jai said nervously, ‘You think we should take the stairs?’ Before I could say yes, someone up there pressed a button and with a deep groan and jerk we were on the move.

We emerged on floor eight into a cramped corridor littered with government-issue furniture—iron-frame tables with shiny wooden boards screwed on, chairs with the plastic mesh torn in several places, dented steel almirahs, broken wooden cupboards, even some aluminium trunks with thick locks. The area was badly lit with a few lopsided tubelights coated with streaks of thickly settled dust. The lift went no further, but we had to go to the ninth floor. A pot-bellied man emerged from a door, jostling his crotch. He stopped and looked at us. We asked. He pointed with his free hand to a stairwell behind us.

The winding staircase was reasonably broad but giving way at the edges and without air or illumination. It had banks of windows with latches that ought to have allowed them to open six inches but they were all jammed shut and the panes were so caked with dirt and pigeon shit that not a shard of light could penetrate. A cement banister wound alongside but there was no way we could bring ourselves to put a hand on it. We walked in tandem, me ahead, feeling every step, Jai behind, mumbling abuse at the state of the state.

The ninth floor landing was much like the eighth with the same clutter of third-rate furniture and the same crooked flickering tubelights, except that at both ends of the corridor there were unmarked wood-board walls with doors cut into them.

A faux confidence suddenly seized Jai. He took the lead, wrenching open the door to our right and marching in. A stout man with a
big moustache and a bush shirt open to the fourth button sat behind a small shiny table—wood-board pasted with sunmica—writing in a fat cloth register. He looked up at us without expression, jiggled the back of his pen in his right ear, and went back to writing. Jai asked for the man we had come to meet. He pointed over his shoulder without lifting his head. We went through another wood-board door, flimsy, unpolished, unsteady on its hinges, with a shiny chrome handle stuck into it, and immediately waded into what seemed like a small work hall, with tables and chairs at all angles. Every one of them empty save one at the far end. Two men sat there, facing each other, comparing the text of two documents. One read out a sentence softly and the other read it softly back. Then the first one said, ‘Check!’ loudly. Both officials were clean-shaven, in cream bush shirts, identical in their nondescriptness. If they went back to each other’s homes their wives would not notice.

We went and stood by them, but they did not look at us till they had done about fifteen checks and come to the end of the typewritten page. They had the same incurious look the man outside had worn; weirdos probably pranced through these rooms by the hour. Jai asked, and they wordlessly thumbed us on to another door behind them, immediately returning to their task.