THE
STORY OF MY
ASSASSINS TA R U N J . T E J PA L
MELVILLE HOUSE BROOKLYN • LONDON
1
NEWS OF A KILLING
T
he morning I heard I’d been shot I was sitting in my office on the second floor looking out the big glass window at the yellow ringlets of a laburnum tree that had gone in a few days from blindingly golden to faded cream, as if washed in rough detergent. Beyond the balding tree, losing its ringlets prematurely in mid-May, the sky was blamelessly blue. In minutes it would begin to bleach and the sun would paint such a glare on it, it would be impossible to look up, even briefly, to catch the full bellies of groaning aircraft swooping down to land. It was not yet seven in the morning. I had slipped away early from my darkened bedroom with barely a glance at the sleeping splash of my wife, lying spreadeagled on her stomach, arms and legs akimbo, as if quashed by a giant foot. Brushing my teeth in the dining-room sink I had glanced at the weekend newspapers, full of the excitements of food and cinema, and eschewing the tea Felicia had set to brew, quietly let myself out. The lane lay in Sunday morning stupor, not a leaf stirring in the row of gulmohurs or the lone peepul. Rambir, our night watchman, had abandoned his post and was probably sleeping in his bed-sized room or doing the stuff one has to in the morning. The only thing moving was the mongrel of the lane, foraging for discarded food in the heaped refuse in the corner. Cast in many shades of brown with a rodent’s long face, one bad eye and one bad leg, he had been christened Jeevan after the nasal, sneering Hindi film villain of the 1960s, by the cloying old uncle of C-1. The old man, Sharmaji, who cracked silly jokes with the colony children and stroked their arms slowly, would stand outside his gate and call out to the children, and 3
if the dog was around, he’d adopt a nasal sneer. The children, eyes averted, mostly sprinted past his house. Before Jeevan could limp up to me, tail wagging, I rushed to the car and slammed the door shut. For four years I had successfully managed to keep from opening up a relationship with him.That was one thing I could do without. More relationships.
At the office, the parking lot was pleasingly empty but for a plump green Bajaj scooter, battered and old—head cocked, eyes cracked— resting on its stand. Its owner was sprawled just inside the front door, on the armless sofa in the reception.When I walked in he scrambled to his feet, swaying, making a grab for his unbuttoned trousers. I said, ‘Motherfucker Sippy, you’ve again been hitting the bottle all night!’ He said, ‘No sir yes sir no sir.’ Sippy looked like he had been masturbating himself to death for the last fifty years. He had the wasted air of stereotype—hollowed eyes and cheeks, thin strands of hair on a pigmented scalp, arms and legs of stick and the wheedling manner of someone looking for just one more rush. He was struggling to align the buttons on his trousers and find the keys to my room at the same time. I slapped his fumbling hand away from the open drawer, and reaching into the jumble of brass and steel inside, picked up my set of four long slim keys anchored to a miniature high-heeled, knee-length brown leather boot. Someone’s mad European fantasy from a foreign catalogue or film? Who, in all of India, thought up such key chains? When I bounded up the stairs, Sippy was still rummaging purposefully in the drawer. It would be a few minutes before he realized this sequence was over. He was like that, with some kind of delayedresponse metabolism. Changing a light bulb, he’d continue to stroke 4
THE STO R Y OF M Y A S S A S S INS First published in India by HarperCollins Publishers, India Copyright Š 2009, 2010 Tarun J. Tejpal All rights reserved First Melville House printing: September 2012 Melville House Publishing 145 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, New York 11201 and Unit 3 Olympia Trading Estate Coburg Road London, N22 6TZ mhpbooks.com isbn: 978-1-61219-162-1 Manufactured in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 A catalog record is available for this book from the Library of Congress.
it long after it had come alive. Often, while making repairs in the jungle of wires and fuses in the main junction box under the stairs he would touch a naked wire and get a jolt; we’d all see the wires spark angrily, then, several seconds later Sippy would leap up, clutch his hand and scream, ‘Oh, my mother’s dead! My mother’s dead!’ The office boys called him Uncle Tooblite and everyone shouted their instructions at him twice, thrice, four times. If he was ever offended, he didn’t show it. He always met you with a serious expression and a willingness to do whatever he was told. When I pushed open the door of my office on the second floor, the phone was already trilling. It was Sippy asking if I’d like some tea. I had barely turned on the lights and pulled open the plastic blinds when the phone trilled again. Sippy. Wanting to know if he should get me a bun-omelette too. The computer had just finished booting when Sippy was back on the line. One omelette or two? I said, ‘Motherfucker, one hundred! And they should all be round like testicles and pulled out of a hen’s ass!’ After the customary delay, he said, ‘Okay sir.’ I waited as the icons lined themselves up at the top and bottom of the screen, like two teams of football players before the start of a match. After the great era of literacy the world was going back to the pre-literate age. For centuries there had been the hunt to find a word for every image, every sensation, every feeling; now we were working at finding an image for every word, every sensation, every feeling. Advertising, television, cinema, photography, computers, mobiles, graphics, animatronics—everything was geared to turn the squiggle of the word into the splendour of image. Across the globe, Photoshop Picassos crouched at their machines marrying unlike images to produce such unlikely images as no word could hope to withstand.The imagination no longer needed the word to negotiate its darkest recesses. The imagination was having its most fantastical meanderings served up in prefabricated images, for all to share. Our Mordor was the same. Our Frankenstein was the same. Our Tinker 5
Bell was the same. We didn’t have to imagine Davy Jones—a graphics company in Silicon Valley was manufacturing him for us. We all picked our visuals from the universal pool. The individual monster was dead. Private passion was dead. Personal grief was dead. Anger was an icon. Love an image. Sex an organ. The future a matrix. If you could imagine it or feel it, it would be shown to you—in any colour, from every angle—without the exertions of the word. Even god would, finally, be shrunk to size. No larger than the screen. No denser than a pixel. I had not yet put an icon into play when the phone rang again. An unknown voice, in Hindi, asked to speak to me. Sippy must have put the switchboard line on direct before he went out. I said today was Sunday and I would not be in office. The voice said could it speak to anyone else, or could it be given my home number. I said there was no one here on Sunday morning except me, the cleaner, and I was not authorized to give out phone numbers. The voice said it was critically important, critically. I said so is sahib’s Sunday. The voice said, ‘You are a chutiya and you deserve to be a sweeper all your life!’ The players were ready and the screen was still, but there was nothing to do, really. I was just escaping the house. Even surfing the Net was not an option; the server downstairs was shut on Sundays. I looked out the big window in front of me at the laburnum flowers, bleached and dying young, that littered the balcony floor— like a low-wit parable on transient beauty. Laburnum. How melodious the name sounded. How sweetly the Malayali girl had said it before she wet my palm. I had barely noticed the tree until then, but she said its name with more ardour than she did mine, and I was forced to pay attention, feigning curiosity so she wouldn’t stop to move. A botany lesson punctuated with slow deep gasps. A few weeks later, when it was over between us, the only memories that remained with me were the names of some trees and how she’d 6
insist I rub my cheek against hers. I didn’t mind that. I like dark skin, even though my mother had launched a hunt for the fairest girl in north India when she’d wanted me married off. The Punjabi girl she had finally picked hurt the eyes with her whiteness and had tiny bumps on her skin when naked. My mobile phone began to buzz on the table’s glass top like a trapped insect. Mother calling; probably to ask if we were going to visit her today. I put a folded hanky under the phone to dull the noise. Some seconds after the vibrations had ceased, they started up again. Still Mother. I leaned back in my chair and looked at the mobile’s small screen pulsing light. It died; and came alive once more. Not Mother this time but a number I didn’t recognize. The number vanished and was replaced by another one I didn’t recognize. Now Mother was on the line again; now another number I didn’t recognize; now Pramod, the office accountant; now a number that looked like one of the earlier unknown ones; now the home number; now Mother again; now my wife. The jittering mobile moved the hanky slowly across the table. Mother, I knew. What was wrong with the rest of this demented city? On a Sunday morning? Then the land line trilled. I picked it up to deal with Sippy. A vaguely familiar voice in Hindi said, ‘Give me sahib’s mobile number, it’s urgent.’ I said I was not authorized to do so. The voice said, ‘Chutiya, you don’t even deserve to be a sweeper!’ My silver and black Nokia had juddered itself and the hanky to the edge of the table. I waited and, as they plunged, caught both deftly in my left hand like a sharp slip fielder and replaced them on the glass top. The small screen was pulsing light without pause. My sister from Bombay; my wife; Mother; an unknown number; another unknown number; the circulation manager; the space-selling boy who had joined two months ago; Mother. Probably some new bullshit in the papers. The switchboard line rang again. I picked it up. ‘Sippy?’ Sippy said, ‘Sirji, they are saying you are dead.’ 7
I said, ‘Motherfucker, you are if I don’t get my tea now!’ The sun had now climbed past the tree and hit the window.You could see the drip stains on the glass. Fifteen minutes more and the vertical blinds would have to be half closed. The room would then become striped in sunlit lines. It was the backdrop photographers who came to take my picture favoured.Yes please, move back please, just a little, good, very good, eyes in dark, mouth in light, chest in dark, belly in light, groin in dark, thighs in light. Smile please. Sippy came in, weaving slowly, a plastic tray in hand. He wore tattered leather shoes with ragged laces. His leathery skin was grey with unshaven bristles, his eyes swimming in a soup of yellow and red. The first thing he said was, ‘Sorry sir.’ I said, ‘Who called, motherfucker?’ Sippy said, ‘I picked up the phone and the man said, Bloody chutiya! So I said to him, You are a chutiya, your father’s a chutiya, and your son’s a chutiya! He said, Your sahib’s dead, and so should you be! Now give me his mobile number! I said, Why? You want to phone him in heaven?’ The tea already had a skin on it. I peeled it off with the tip of my forefinger and stuck it to the side of the tray. Sippy said, ‘Sirji, should I get you another one?’ I looked at him. He said, ‘Sorry sirji.’ The mobile had been trembling all the while, making its way across the table. Sippy looked at it intently for some time, then said, ‘Sirji, phone.’ I looked at him, stopping mid-bite into my bun-omelette. He said, ‘Sorry sirji.’ The land line trilled. Kept trilling. When I finally picked it up, Sippy asked, ‘Do you want me to pick it up?’ I said, in Hindi, ‘Hello, Sub-inspector Shinde speaking from Kiskiskilee police station.’ Mother screeched into the phone, ‘How bad is it? How bad is 8
it? Why is no one picking your mobile phone? Why must you talk such nonsense even at this time?’ I said, ‘Madam, it is a criminal offence to speak to the Indian police like this.’ Mother screamed, ‘You fool, turn on the TV! Turn on the TV immediately!’ I picked up the remote, swivelled in my chair and detonated the TV. With a soft pop a chorus line of singers exploded into the room, throwing their legs and breasts about. I said, ‘Mother, it’s from Kismet—the hero is about to enter the don’s den.’ Sippy giggled. ‘Kiskiskilee police station. Kis kis ki lee!’ I looked at him. He said, ‘Sorry sirji.’ I flipped channels. An amazing smorgasbord of mythological costumes, American cafes, ornate quiz shows, thrashing crocodiles, goggled cricketers, striding golfers, bare-chested godmen, film stars talking, film stars dancing, film stars acting, all kinds of old and new films flitted past in several languages before I hit a news channel. There was a still of me, with my mouth open. Perhaps from some press conference, caught mid-sentence. The words ‘Breaking News!’ emblazoned in red ran across my chest. I read the ticker below: Attempt on journalist foiled. Five hitmen arrested. I flipped some more. Another news channel. A different picture—from before I had shaved off my moustache. Again, Breaking News! The ticker said: Scribe survives murder attempt. Delhi police foils bid. I turned up the volume. In a grave voice the pretty girl said that I had been saved in the nick of time. The police had been acting on intelligence tip-offs. Sophisticated weapons such as AK-47s and automatic pistols had been recovered. No information had been released yet on the motives, but inside sources hinted these were contract killers. Now Sippy said, ‘Sirji, that is you?’ I put the receiver to my ear. ‘Mother, they are saying I survived.’ 9
Mother screeched, ‘It is the glory of Shiva! It is the mercy of god! It is the power of my prayers!’ I said, ‘Mother, they are saying it is the power of Delhi police.’ There was a moment’s silence.Then she screeched, ‘My son! My sonnnn!’ I threw the receiver over to Sippy. He put it to his ear and said, ‘Hello good morning, Eagle Media Company speaking.’ Dancing on my hanky the mobile had reached the far end of the table again. I leaned across and picked it up. An unknown number glowed angrily. I pressed it to life. A girl’s urgent voice said, ‘Please hold the line—I am putting you through live to the studio.’ The studio voice that came on belonged to a young girl too, but it sounded grave and important. The voice said they had me on the line—live—before anyone else in the country. Fast and furious. The studio girl said, ‘Thank you for coming on our channel exclusively! How are you feeling now?’ I said, ‘Okay.’ ‘Are you badly shaken by the events?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Have you been receiving any threats lately?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you have any idea who the killers are?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you felt any sense of danger in the last few weeks?’ ‘No.’ ‘The police are saying they are contract killers. Do you believe them?’ ‘I cannot say.’ ‘Do you think the government has any hand in all this?’ ‘I cannot say.’ ‘Is your family worried? Scared?’ ‘I cannot say.’ ‘Are you scared? Worried?’ 10
‘Not yet.’ ‘What do you plan to do now?’ Eat the egg pulled out of the hen’s ass. ‘I haven’t thought of it yet.’ ‘Did you have no inkling at all?’ ‘No.’ ‘What did you do when you got to know?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Who informed you?’ ‘Sub-inspector Shinde of Kiskiskilee police station.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Sub-inspector Shinde of Kiskiskilee police station.’ There was a moment’s silence at the other end. Much too long for live television to stomach. Then the voice said, even more urgently, ‘Thank you for coming exclusively on our channel and giving us the first exclusive insights into your murder!’ Then, before I could kill it, the line went dead. Sippy had put the receiver back on the cradle. He said, ‘That was your mother, sirji. She shouted at me for spoiling your life. She thought I was some friend of yours. I told her I am Sippy from the office, electrician-cum-chowkidar. She said I don’t care whether you are a sippy or a hippy, just leave my son alone before you have him killed. She said she’s coming over just now and if she found me here she would pull all my hair out.’ The land line was trilling without a pause and my mobile was beating out an unending string of known and unknown numbers. I got up, popped the TV shut with the remote, slipped the vibrating phone into the pocket of my trousers and told Sippy to lock up the office. I took the stairs down two at a time. When I came out the front door onto the veranda of the shopping complex where our office was, I saw my wife getting out of her small yellow car. She was in light blue jeans and a white tee shirt, her short straight hair pulled back into a tiny tail. Her eyes were hidden 11
behind the fake silver-rimmed Guccis I had bought her from Singapore. She saw me and stopped, in the midst of turning the key in the car door. Uncertainly, she said, ‘Is everything okay?’ I said, ‘Do I look dead?’ She said, ‘You weren’t picking your phone. And everybody was calling the house, and everybody said you weren’t picking your phone.’ I said, ‘I was busy.’ She said, ‘I got very worried. The TV channels were saying all kinds of things. I thought I’d come and check if you were okay.’ ‘So what do you think now?’ She said, ‘Don’t be angry. I was really worried. I barely brushed my teeth—I just rushed here.’ I said, ‘Well, go back and brush them now.’ By now I had reached my car and opened the door. She was still standing by hers, turning the key. Behind us, Sippy was hanging on to the steel shutter of the office, his stick-like arms and legs flailing, struggling to pull it down in slow noisy jerks. She said, ‘Are you coming home?’ I said, ‘Eventually.’ She said, ‘Where are you going now?’ I said, ‘Why? You want to inform the TV channels?’ I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could read her face. She didn’t move. Sippy was on his knees now, trying to push home the rusty latch at the bottom of the shutter and lock it. I got into my car, slammed the door and pulled out of the parking lot. In my rearview mirror I could see her getting into her car, and Sippy swimming steadily on the veranda floor.
She opened the door at the first chime of her singsong bell, glistening with some lotion she had hurriedly slopped on. I brushed my 12
cheek against hers in a half-hug and went straight into her bedroom, cool with the rattling air-conditioner, and lay on her bed. The only light in the room came from a weak yellow table lamp.The window was blocked with heavy blue drapes, tucked around to frame the plastic-grille air-conditioner. The brand name stuck on the creamcoloured grille said ‘Napoleon’, which meant it had been knocked together in some backyard shop in the city. Napoleon air-conditioners, high-heeled leather boot key chains—this country was in imaginative heat. She said, ‘You want some tea?’ I nodded, and began to take off my clothes. The back of the study-table chair had a large flowery towel drying on it. I picked up a corner and sniffed: it was musty. I slid it off, kicked it into a corner, and draped my jeans, shirt and boxers there instead. When she came back with two mugs of tea I was sitting propped up on her side of the double-bed—crumpled and warm from the night—one leg pulled back to conceal what was happening to me. I had pushed her reading pile of papers—NGO reports, magazines, books on development economics, and an anthology of Hunter Thompson’s I had given her that she was making heavy weather of—I had pushed the whole heap to the far corner of the unused bed and thrown a pillow over it to still the fluttering. She gave me my mug and sat down on the edge of the bed, not touching me. In the lamplight I could see the fine down on her upper lip. The sun had roasted her slim arms a darker shade of chocolate.When she lifted her mug to take a sip, the cross-hatch in her armpit was dense. She said, ‘How come you’ve been let out on a Sunday morning?’ I said nothing, looking her in the eye, demanding to change the register of the moment. She said, ‘What? The same old same old? Well, sorry, it’s Sunday, this crèche is closed.’ I put my hand deep into her thighs and she held it tight, her flesh full and smooth. I waited, feeling the heat radiate. Then I saw 13
the moment catch in her eye and come over her. Her muscles relaxed a fraction, letting me in. She was ready. I danced my fingertips slowly, setting up an overture. She gave a start, then grew still, not a muscle moving, holding on to her tea mug, challenging me with her eyes. Time to play. I responded with the length of a finger. She pulled in a short breath and her eyes dilated, but she didn’t move. I pulled my hand out and touched her upper lip with the tips of my shining fingers. She looked back at me, unmoving, in full activist mode. Desire rocketed in me. I straightened my leg and, putting my hand on the side of her head, pushed her down. She fought, stiffening her neck. I pushed harder. I said, ‘Look what you’ve done to me.’ She said, ‘Anyone can do that to you.’ Her head was halfway down now, but she was still holding on to her tea. I put my left hand on the side of her head, and reached out with my right. I said, ‘Give it to me, you whore!’ She looked at me, challenging, demanding. I said, ‘Saali randi!’ She took a long draught of the tea and released her grip on the mug. By the time I set the mug down on the bedside table, I was swimming in a tea-warm mouth. I slumped back, my hand moving slowly in her frizzy hair. Then I began to abuse her, relentlessly, in Hindi, in English, recalling words and phrases I had learnt in school, street words, cheap porno phrases, stringing them out absurdly like overheated boys do. And with each crude volley—especially the Hindi—she became beautifully uncontrollable, giving and taking, giving and taking, in the simplest and most complicated transaction of all. Later, while Napoleon Bonaparte cooled the sweat off us and we drank some more tea, dipping chalk-dry Marie biscuits in it, I looked dispassionately at her naked body as she lay opposite me at the foot of the bed. She had two beautiful halves that belonged to different bodies. Above the waist, from her fine nose to her frail 14
shoulders, to her breasts made for pleasure not lactation, she was narrow and fragile. Below she was full, with the hips and thighs of a woman made for bearing children. Not for the photograph, as she was above, but for real-life excitements. Two trademark moles stamped her body as being a single unit: a gaudy beauty on her right collarbone, and its mysterious twin marking the start of the dense hairline at the top of her right thigh. She had found a solution to her two unmatched halves, dressing in long flared peasant skirts and close-fitting sleeveless cotton blouses: concealing the excess, flaunting the fragility. Now, head propped on her left palm, she was talking. It was what she did best. She was talking politics, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, ecology, all in a magnificent jumble that exhausted and fascinated me. She was dismembering the new liberal economics that was opening up India to the world, cursing the scourge of globalization, abusing patriarchal politics, demanding lower-caste mobilization, declaring the death of the idea of India at the hands of a surging Hindu right. In five years, by 2005, this would be a fascist state. She and I, and those like us, would be in hiding. Everything— every freedom—we took for granted would be gone. It would be worse than the colonial past, because this time we would have done it to ourselves. I think she saw the smile in my eyes for she broke into a rage. She jumped up, rummaged through her bookshelves and brought out an Oxford anthology of English poetry. ‘Listen to this!’ she barked, opening a flagged page: About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. . . She read the poem aloud with a hard anger, with the voice and 15
rhythms of a protestor, not a lover of poetry. She finished and looked at me balefully. ‘You know what Wystan Hugh Auden is saying?’ I shook my head. She said, ‘Wystan’s telling us that fascism is creeping up all around us, and we don’t even know! He’s telling us that we suffer from the Illusion of Normalcy. He’s telling us that the worst horrors take place around us while we go happily about our everyday lives. Just because the newspapers keep coming, the televisions keep humming, the planes keep taking off, the trains keep running— just because our daily crap goes on doesn’t mean all is well. My dear phallo-foolish friend, Icarus has plunged into the ocean and is drowning while we are chattering away merrily on the sailing ship!’ I watched mesmerized. She was walking up and down the room, her two different bodies moving differently. The pleasure legs in rolling motion; the photo arms waving angrily. In her, sexual satiety brought on not the customary torpor, but a great intellectual and moral anxiety. It was the stuff of research. I thought of the wild Hindi profanities she had been urging me to heap on her just minutes back. ‘You,’ she said, rounding on me. ‘You!’ I said, ‘What have I done now?’ ‘Nothing! That’s just it. Nothing. You know who Wystan Hugh was writing for? For people like you—who are worse than people like them! They don’t have a voice so they can’t speak.You have one and you barely whisper. Surely you don’t think your little exposé and stories are all they are cut out to be? You know they are basically ego massages. And that preening, posing partner of yours! Him and you, and your little boys getting their rocks off! Being given a bloody cannon and using it to shoot peas!’ Boy. The postcoital social contract. I was drowsy and no longer interested. The crazy bitch needed a dose of the Vedanta to cleanse her head. Hindi abuse for the body; Hindu philosophy for the soul. 16
Her problem was too little Hinduism, too much occidental crap. I was thinking about what the television channels were saying. I had been shot. By whom? My phone already showed more than forty missed calls, and the count was going up by the minute. I closed my eyes and her words became a fading noise. When I came to, minutes later, she was no longer talking, just pacing up and down, her photo arms folded across her breasts, looking at me with contempt. I washed myself at the sink, draping my smelly hanging flesh over the enamel rim, pumping soap from the Dettol dispenser, splashing water from the tap with a cupped palm. In the frameless mirror it looked like a third-rate postmodern painting. She pushed open the bathroom door and hollered, ‘Stop pissing in my sink you stupid clunk!’ It was all so third-rate.
Back in the parking lot I turned on the engine and the air-conditioner, leaned my seat back as far as it would go and closed my eyes. In the end it was always exhausting. It took no time for every damn relationship to spill out of the functional. Suddenly even the prospect of home seemed like a relief. At least I wouldn’t have to talk, or listen to anything. And if things got insufferable I could shut myself in my tiny study and stew—and bugger you Wystan Hugh—and not see anything either. The sun had obliterated every nuance from the world by now, and was pouring down white heat. No dazzle was permitted in this enclave of the nondescript, of boxy colourless buildings and endless Maruti cars. The trees in the parking lot looked as if they’d had all the green syringed out of them, leaving them coated with settled dust. Most of them seemed stunted, throttled by a tourniquet of concrete. Every now and then an excitable-irritable family—mother, 17
father, couple of sated, snotty kids going to fat—tumbled out of dark holes in the boxy buildings flaunting their Sunday best, scrambled into a car, slammed doors, and left. I had directed all the air vents at myself but was still patchy with sweat. The synthetic grip on the steering wheel was burning, barely touchable. The phone was a trapped insect and had not ceased buzzing for a moment. I began to swiftly parse my missed calls and messages. Everyone I knew had called or messaged. Even as I scrolled the calls the phone kept buzzing and letting new ones in. I was about to pull out of the parking lot when her name began to appear insistently on my phone. When it wouldn’t go away, I said, ‘Yes?’ She said, ‘Moron, why didn’t you tell me?’ She must have turned on the television after I left. I said, ‘There was nothing to tell.’
I sensed the activity even before I turned the car into our lane.There were several unfamiliar vehicles parked at the corner, and men hanging about under the shade of the massive peepul, at least two of them in uniform. I took the turn slowly. Under the overhang of the tiny porch of my house a small crowd milled. The iron gate was wide open, and a police Gypsy was parked right in front of it. Jeevan was checking out its radials with his good eye, wagging his tail and spurting piss. I walked into the tumult to a chaos of greetings, questions and blessings. I could see family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, cops, and media men with eyes growing out of their shoulders—a mad democracy’s ever-open third eye, marrying us all in a grand collective of sorrow and celebration, lament and lust, brands and stars.The masterly sleight: conformity through freedom.What Mao and Stalin could not pull off through violence and coercion. Mother leapt on me like Tom on Jerry and clung to my midriff, 18
mewling, even as I staggered about shaking hands and making incoherent noises. Everyone held a glass with clinking ice; nimbupani was doing the rounds. Everyone had the same questions. What happened, how did it happen, who were they, what did you do, where have you been, are you okay, can I do anything. Yes please, turn around and get the fuck out. My wife was leaning on the door jamb, slim, tall, fair, expressionless—as ever, uncertain of what to do around me, all beauty flattened by joylessness. Her fat mother, eyes red-rimmed with forced tears, was holding her daughter’s right forearm and stroking it. Her balding father sat in the living-room, shrunk into the chair, timidly awaiting his moment. A clerk for all occasions. A portly, round-faced man in a cream-coloured bush shirt, with close cropped hair and a bushy moustache, whom I had never seen before stood to a side, arms crossed on his chest, benignly witnessing the circus. Beneath his loose trousers he was hoofed in pointed black leather shoes. Beside him stood a tall fair young man, almost a boy, with hairless cheeks and a coiled air about him. The loop of a nylon lanyard was visible just under the right edge of his grey safari suit. I shuffled up to them—Mother still draped around my midriff—and gave the portly man my hand. He said, with an understanding smile, in a low flat voice, ‘Shall we sit inside?’ When I had ushered him into my chokingly small study, I stood outside the closed door, peeled my mother away from my body and told her to bugger off. My pretty wife and her ugly mother were hanging by too. I told them both to bugger off as well and to encourage every idiot present to do the same. The party was over. My mother opened her mouth to let out a monster wail but I clamped my hand down hard on her mouth and looked at her with such venom that all three of them quietly melted away. I took the plate of orange-cream biscuits Felicia had brought for us and latching the door behind me sat down on the frayed sofa. He 19
was sitting on one of the two wooden chairs in the room—the one in front of the small work table I sometimes used. He had taken a book from my shelf and was looking at its cover. The Naked Lunch. I set the plate down next to him. He put the book down on the table, took a biscuit in his left hand and gave me a limp right hand. He said, in his low flat voice, ‘We all admire you—you are doing very good service to the nation.’ I said, ‘We all do what we have to do.’ He said, ‘No, we do what we are told.You are doing something different, something great, something for the country.’ I said, ‘You do very important work.’ He picked up The Naked Lunch again and started to caress it. Between slow biscuit bites he said, ‘We do what those above us in the department tell us to do. And they do what those above them tell them to do. And what they tell us is not always right. But it’s not our job to ask why. If we all began to ask why, there would be only a mountain of whys, and no department. When I joined the force our instructor told us every day to always remember that in our line of work nine right and one wrong is wrong, but all ten wrong is right. And so we do what we are told and we are always right even though we are often wrong.’ He said all this in his low flat tone, without a single inflection. His name was Hathi Ram—his father had served as a soldier in the British Indian army in Burma and developed a fascination for elephants. His father had told him to be like a hathi, gentle but strong, obedient but incapable of being pushed around. He said his father was a fool, a simple army man, from another world and time. In the force these days you had to be a bahurupiya, a quick-change artiste, a master of impersonation, capable of putting on a face for every occasion. A mouse in front of seniors, an elephant in front of juniors, a wolf with suspects, a tiger before convicts, a lamb around politicians, a fox with men of money. So he was not always Hathi Ram—sometimes he was Chooha Ram or Lomdi Ram or Sher Ram or Bakri 20
Ram. In the force these days who you were depended on who was sitting in front of you. I said, ‘So who are you now?’ A full smile cracked his face. His close cropped hair was more grey than black, though his bushy moustache was dark with dye. Thick salt and pepper tendrils spilled out from his open shirt collar. He riffled the pages of The Naked Lunch like a pack of cards, and said, ‘Now I am Dost Ram. I am here as a friend. We have to look after you. We don’t want any harm to come to you.’ Through his avuncular pudginess, his eyes were still and hard. I said, ‘What’s happening? Who’s trying to get me?’ He said, ‘We don’t know too much. We are still trying to find out.’ I said, ‘But surely. . .’ He said, ‘I told you, sahib, those above us order us and we do. Our job is not to ask why—otherwise there will be a mountain of whys, and no job.’ I said, ‘How many were they?’ He said, ‘I think five, but I only know from what I heard on TV.’ I said, ‘Hathi Ramji, if you know nothing, then why are you here? Surely not to find out from me?’ He said, ‘Sahib, I did not become a sub-inspector by going to big colleges and answering three-hour examinations. The force is full of lovely boys whose teeth are still milky white and pubic hair still boot-polish black, and I am sure they know things of which I know nothing. I became an SI by dragging my khaki ass through the alleys and byways of this benighted city for thirty years, and one of the things I learnt, wearing out my soles, is that nothing in this city is what it seems. But I also learnt that one of the best ways to deal with things is to keep them simple. Small men like me can go deranged trying to figure out the motives and the means of big men. There are people in the force who spend all their time trying to find out these things. They take news to big men, and they 21
bring back instructions. I don’t. I just do what my officers tell me. I am not washed in milk and I am no angel. But I am a bahurupiya out of necessity, and no more. Sometimes I do right and sometimes I do wrong. But I do it in the line of duty, and it is not for me to judge. I simply follow the Gita. Do what you have to do. Do you think it was right for Arjuna to kill the great Bhishma by shooting from behind Sikhandin? Do you think it was right for the noble Yudhishthira to speak a lie so that the great Dronacharya could be killed? Lord Krishna made them do these things. The Lord alone knows what is right and wrong. Men can only do their duty.’ Not one inflection, just that low flat tone, and a continual riffling of The Naked Lunch.When he finished he picked up an orangecream biscuit, opened its two halves and put into his mouth first the less creamy one and seconds later, the other. I said, ‘And what is your duty today?’ He said, ‘To make sure you are safe, and you stay safe.’
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