The Story of My Assassins (63 page)

The parlour was a true discovery. Once a week, twice, one could go there and square with the body. I was surprised I had not discovered such a relationship earlier—more honest, less neurotic, than any I had ever had. The body continually forces one to deceit. Here was a way to sidestep it. Along with the manic jogging, it also took care of the moments when Sara would suddenly invade my head.

I also absorbed the advice of the rodent and stopped thinking of the killers—with Sara’s keening voice out of my ear, it was quite easy. In this time there was a last visit from Hathi Ram. His time in the police was done. He was going back to his village in Haryana, the childhood of koel calls, green fields, woodsmoke, and raindrops detonating the aroma in the soil. Sitting in my small study, he caressed
The Naked Lunch
, and said, ‘For the rest of my life I am going to keep a fast on every Monday. I have to atone for thirty-two years of sinning as a policeman. Shiva is the easiest god to please, and Shiva knows all that I have done I had to. Shiva knows that the world has to be continually created and destroyed by the practice of right and wrong, and even those of us who do wrong are playing our designated part in the drama of the universe.’

Near the gate I nodded at the shadow—standing erect in the background—and said, ‘How much longer?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Do I really need him?’ He said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I said, ‘Then why?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Then who will?’ He said, ‘It’s not even worth trying to find out. Do you think we ever know who is really issuing us an order?’ From the gate he turned back and said, ‘Don’t feel guilty about it—just treat it as your rightful share of the great Indian government.’

Now as I sat in the study—all the lights off, my feet on the table—I felt empty. The din of television relationships floated through the closed door—Dolly/folly was drinking in her prime-time serials,
chin in palms. Coal-black Elizabeth—coal-black Felicia had quit six months ago—had already brought me four cups of tea. In the big wide world only two decisions awaited my attention. One, on undertaking the thirty-day Kailash Mansarovar trek to the abode of the gods; two, about taking the television job Jai had put on the table for me. In favour of the trek was getting close to Shiva and fleeing Dolly/folly and the rest. Against it were all the paperwork and medical tests that needed to be done and the misery of being stuck for thirty days on Himalayan trails with shrill, eager, moronic devotees. In favour of the job was the mound of money on offer—clearly television was plugged into a pipeline that print had not yet found. Or it was some equation that said the dumber the medium, the more you were paid to abase yourself on it. That was what was against it, as also the neurosis of how you looked. The stiffness of collar, and the cut of shave. I knew, at the moment, money was winning and god losing. Jai had summed it up: ‘You’ve seen it all by now. Decide. Do you want to be Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey or do you want to be run by Chutiya-Nandan-Pandeys!’

Suddenly in the dark there was an angry buzz and the glow of the phone opened up the room. I had her down in the directory as Kali. The message was one word: call. I hesitated for a moment, but it had been so long that I had lost my fear. She was business-like; a receptionist passing on information. I needed to see her. She had some important things to tell. When I asked where, she said, ‘In front of the Taj Mahal, by moonlight, mr peashooter, where else!’

I told coal-black Elizabeth to tell her memsahib I might not be back for dinner, and I took the shadow along, sitting in the rear seat, his iron hard in his crotch. This one had come only six months ago and had no idea where we were going. She opened the door in a black sarong and a striated white vest, loops of coloured bangles on
her photo arms. The memory of pleasure powered through me like adrenalin, and I wanted to immediately pick her up and hang her on the wall. But before I could say a word, a woman I had never seen appeared behind her. She was thickset, with short hair and wore a wide blue-and-red tennis band on her wrist. She could probably kill with a karate chop.

They were drinking rum with water, and they gave me a mug of tea. Big enough to bathe in. I tried to catch her eye, to create a synapse of intimacy—the sight of her had already undone my resolve—but her look gave nothing away. It seemed as if something fundamental had changed in her. Her nervous energy was low, her voice calm. When we were all seated—I on the cane armchair, she on the sofa, feet under her, and the karateka at the dining-table, chair angled towards us—Sara said, ‘Do you want to know the entire story now?’

I said, ‘Of what?’

She said, ‘Of the building of the Taj Mahal, what else!’

I said, ‘Are you saying you’ve been digging out more stuff on those guys?’

She said, ‘Do you want to know?’

I said, ‘Yes.’

I looked towards the dining-table. The woman was running her forefinger under the wristband and flexing it and looking directly at me. Surely she was accidental to the evening?

Sara said, her voice preternaturally flat and low, ‘As I always thought, you were incidental to the whole plot. The plan to kill you had nothing to do with killing you.’

The rodent and she had been conspiring in the castle.

I said, ‘Yes, I know. Pakistan. The ISI. They wanted to destabilize the Indian government.’

The geopolitical pawn explains his predicament.

She said, tonelessly, ‘You hear nothing. You see nothing. You learn nothing. You are changed by nothing. Data, stimulus, experience,
everything bounces off you like water off a rock. You obsess about your gods and gurus, you screw anything you can find, and you work only for money. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing ever changes you. Nothing ever affects you.’

I kept quiet. She was not angry. She was not baiting me.

‘Everything those guys have been telling you is false. Often they don’t even know it. Often they even believe it to be true. Most of the cops you talk to are themselves unwitting pawns in bigger games. Now listen carefully. The plan to kill you had nothing to do with your exposé or with the ISI. Yes, the boy Tyagi went to Kathmandu. Yes, he met men there who gave him a contract to kill you. Yes, they provided him a cache of weapons—including AK-47s. Yes, they gave him hard currency as an advance. Yes, the team of five men met in a farm outside Gorakhpur. Yes, they worked out the details of the operation there. But no, the primary purpose of the plan was not to kill you. And no, the men who gave out the contract were not from the ISI.’

She was speaking in a measured way, and now she took a break to drain her rum. A fly was buzzing in the room. The karateka rose, rolled a magazine, crouched for a moment, and then in a flash splattered it on the wooden table. Guruji would have said all life is potentially a black blotch.

‘The real targets of the contract and the plan were the killers themselves. Not all of them. Just two of them. The rest were like you. Incidental fodder. Collateral damage. The two—yes, I am sure you guessed one right—were the Tyagi boy and the man they call Chaaku. Someone wanted to get rid of both of them. The real plan was to have them shot just as they were shooting you. You were all supposed to die in a dramatic shoot-out. The men who had sent the killers had also leaked the information of the hit to the police. The first two times they came to recce your house, they were being trailed by an army of plainclothesmen from the special cell. The orders were to shoot to kill. It was a sweet construct. The ISI would
take the rap for your murder, and the police the credit for killing your killers. But something went wrong.’

She stopped and waved her empty glass like a flag. The karateka came over with two bottles and smoothly sloshed them into a perfect drink.

‘It’s still not quite clear what went wrong. But the agreed upon date for the hit came and went. Then, it seems, a new one was set. That too came and went. It’s possible that there was some dispute between the killers and their patrons. Finally—and this even peashooters can confirm by just asking a few questions—the men were not picked up as claimed at the Delhi border on their way to the hit, nor were they picked up on the morning the news was broken to the media. They were picked up a whole day earlier, in the middle of the night, from the small hotel they were staying in, in Shahdara. There was no scuffle, no shoot-out. None of the men retaliated, or made a run for it. Not even the so-called beast, Hathoda Tyagi. For a day they were with the secret branch and did not exist in any paperwork of arrest. Then they were produced before the media and in court.’

I looked at her, the light glancing off her photo shoulders and sharp collarbones. She still needed an urgent inoculation of Vedanta, but she was mad enough to intuit the truths of this mad country. How could I have let her go? Had Guruji met her, he may never have advised me to zip up and run. For a moment I almost felt in love with her. Were it not for the karateka something pulpy might have slipped my mouth.

I said, ‘But if the idea was to kill them, why didn’t the police do it?’

She said, ‘I don’t think the police knew they had to kill them. Whoever was tipping them off on the hit was hoping they would kill them in the heat of the encounter. In the hotel in cold blood would have been impossible—too many cops involved, too many witnesses. Can be done in Bihar; tough in Delhi. Many wouldn’t
believe it, but we do have some kind of a free press and an independent judiciary.’

She said it flatly. Something had certainly settled inside her.

I said, ‘So the main target of—whoever—was the Tyagi boy?’

She said, ‘Yes. It clearly seems so. And to some extent, Chaaku. The other three were just journeymen, filling the numbers on an assignment. Those two platform boys, Kaaliya and Chini, are just happy-go-lucky fellows, content to make do with some money, some drugs, and some sex. Probably more decent than anyone you know. And Kabir—gentle Kabir!—he is a wronged angel. He should be wrapped up in someone’s arms and protected. Even in prison he floats in an aura of peace, chiselling his choozas and giving them to everyone. Demands nothing, says little. Has no lawyer, doesn’t want to file even a bail application. No one bothers him—not the inmates, not the warders. And slowly he is beginning to be called Baba. The Tyagi boy and Chaaku stay away from these three and have nothing to do with them. They stay away from each other too.’

I said, ‘Will they get bail?’

She said, ‘Yes, soon. But by then they will already have served most of their sentence. So it goes in this godforsaken country.’

I said, ‘Where did you find out all this?’

She said, ‘Mr peashooter, if you look you find.’

For the next fifteen minutes I tried hard to plug into the old socket that had electrified us, made our bodies sing and singe around each other. The delicate shoulders, the full black sarong, the caramel skin was filling me with an unexpected ache. I was hoping if I made the connection she would somehow get rid of the tank in the room. But she had thrown a switch and removed herself from my field. It could have been pretence, but she was not even looking at me any more, choosing to talk to the dining-table about some new law regulating inmates in the prisons of Haryana. She was like a bureaucrat who had finished with a petitioner and was, with polite exasperation, waiting for him to leave. For a moment I thought it was the old kind of provocation. But then I saw her eyes and there was nothing for
me there. Besides, I knew if I essayed any move the karateka would pick the chair and break it over my head.

On a weird impulse—triggered by the meeting with Sara—a few days later, on a Sunday morning, I got into my car with my shadow and drove off to Muzaffarnagar. We left Delhi early because we were heading for serious badlands. My shadow—from the equally notorious area of Bulandshahar—said, ‘We must leave that place well before the sun begins to go down. After dark, even armed policemen dare not venture there.’

Even early on a late winter morning—with the mist still hovering over the ditches—the roads were choked, and it seemed as if one would never exit Delhi’s endless sprawl. Concrete finger on concrete finger, the ancient city seemed to extend itself relentlessly to swallow the countryside around. Where once seed of grain sprouted, now septic tanks bloomed. Out of every slain tree had grown a lamp post, and every dead nilgai had been replaced by two cars. The highway was full of sugarcane—on bullock-carts, tractor-trolleys, small trucks—on its way to the factories, and I drove with the windows up to avoid being speared by a swinging stalk.

The moment we were out of the hell of Muzaffarnagar we had to turn right off the highway, and then stop every ten minutes for directions. Gnarled trees with dust-coated leaves were all around and neat blocks of sugarcane ran to the horizon. I had taken the address from the files of the fat penguin, Sethiji. At some point the interior road we were chasing ran out of tar and we were rolling along on dust. A pool of stagnant black marked the entry into the village. The houses in it were a mix of mud and cut-rate brick. Television antennae sprouted like hair. As I drove around the outskirts asking for directions, I saw at least two small Maruti cars, the sun blinding on their skins.

Eventually we had to park by a field and walk a winding path
through juicy green wheat fields and tall sugarcane. On the way was a grove of ageing mango trees, the leaves dull, the barks deathly. From that point the dogs picked us up and howled us all the way to the house.

The main section of the house was in plastered brick, while the rooms on the side were naked brick attachments with thatched roofs. In the front yard, by a long mud trough, five tethered buffaloes and two oxen masticated in tandem. I could see pipes and wires—running water and electricity.

Gyanendra Tyagi was leaning back on a charpoy, two grimy hard pillows under his elbow and an empty Bournvita tin by his side. He looked old. His eyes were rheumy. The white hair on his head, without its turban, showed sparse. His bad leg, clear of his pulled-up dhoti, was thin as a matchstick. Every few minutes he hawked and spat into the empty tin. Like every other Indian he was probably dying of tuberculosis.