JOHNNY GONE DOWN (3 page)

To his credit, Dayaram seemed unfazed at the prospect of ending up in bits of bone and blood in a few minutes. He picked up the revolvers one by one, fingering each one gingerly, and finally chose the .35 Remington.

‘Good choice,’ I said approvingly. ‘Let me unload the cartridges so you can practise.’

I took the pistol, unfastened the lock, removed the cartridges, and gave it back to him.

The handler looked at me appreciatively. I was quick despite my arm. We had obviously been trained in the same school.

‘Can you help him out a bit?’ the handler said. ‘I need to check on a few other things. People should be arriving any moment now.’

He walked towards the door.

By the time Daya found the bump on the temple, he was sweating profusely, his hands clammy and unable to get a firm grip on the barrel. He looked down at himself in disgust.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘You aren’t scared. It’s the heat in the room.’

He looked at me gratefully.

‘They said you are from a big college like IIT, sahib,’ Daya said, once he had practised a few times with a firmer grip. ‘Is that true?’

I winced. My absent arm began to hurt again, the same throbbing, phantom pain that had plagued me for years now.

‘MIT,’ I replied shortly. ‘It’s outside India. I was there a long time ago, but it doesn’t matter now.’

‘I am honoured to do this with you, sahib.’

‘Likewise,’ I said.

‘But I am no IIT graduate. I’m just a naukar in a big man’s house. Now that I am dying, who is going to take care of my family? This money will be like a lottery for us if I win. If I lose, nothing lost, I’m dying anyway.’ His face darkened. ‘They assured me that they will give the money immediately if I win - can I trust them?’

I thought of Marco in the Jocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro, who had almost given up his life for me; good money thrown after bad.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You can trust them with your life.’

The audience, all of them men, began to stream in and the small, airless room turned stuffier and sweatier. They eyed Daya and me curiously as they gathered around the table, sweat glistening on their temples, starched shirts darkened from being in an unsavoury part of town, their faces flushed, either from the stifling Delhi summer or with barely contained excitement.

That could have been me, I thought suddenly as I looked at the smartly-dressed, wealthy looking men. A few different turns and I could have been strolling in here on my way to a Bernard Shaw adaptation or a Beethoven rendition. But the old, naive me probably wouldn’t have believed that such a game could take place in Delhi - or anywhere outside Hollywood. Now, nothing surprised me. I had seen the best of human nature and the worst of it. I believed in the evil of man as much as I trusted in the good.

A dark, well-dressed young man bumped against my chair. I looked up at him. Reflexively, he raised his right foot and rubbed it against his left pant sleeve. Polishing his shoes, I thought. What would he tell his young wife when he got back home?
Honey, I forgot the onions because I bet fifty thousand rupees on someone blowing his brains out.
What kind
of emptiness made these men come here? How could you be so insulated from death that you had to seek it out? Our eyes met. I saw the gleam in his eyes and averted mine so he wouldn’t see the pity in them.

The handler walked up to the table once the fifty-odd men in the audience had huddled around us.

‘Thank you for being here,’ he mumbled, looking uncomfortable at having to speak.

The room fell silent as the suits moved closer, breathing down hard on our necks, a few spare drops of sweat splashing onto the table.

‘Move back, please,’ said the handler authoritatively.

This was the kind of direction he was used to giving. The men complied immediately and shuffled back a few steps.

‘As you know, we have been trying to arrange this for a while,’ the handler continued. ‘Finally, I present before you two fearless men.’

A smattering of applause broke out and seemed to unnerve the handler. The rest of his words came out in a jumbled heap. ‘The rules are simple. The revolver has six rounds, but only one bullet. The other five are blanks. One shoots at himself, passes the gun to the other who shoots at himself, and so on, until one of them falls. Someone could die on
the first shot or on the last shot. But one of them
will
die tonight. Those who bet on the winner will have their money doubled. I will rotate the barrel after every turn. Any questions?’

There seemed to be none.

‘Let’s begin the game. I will rotate the revolver to choose who goes first,’ he said, obviously relieved at being done with the talking. He placed the revolver on the table.

‘Do you want to call or spin?’ he asked Dayaram.

Dayaram’s hands began to tremble as he mumbled something. The reality had finally sunk in, I thought, he was probably thinking of the family he would never see again.

The handler looked disgusted. ‘Are you going to call or spin?’ he repeated impatiently.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘We don’t need the toss. I’ll go first.’

A hush fell upon the room.

‘Are you okay with that?’ the handler asked Dayaram.

He nodded and looked at me gratefully. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

I shook my head dismissively. ‘It doesn’t matter. You will be fine.’

Every eye followed me hungrily as I picked up the revolver. I positioned the gun against my temple. They say your entire life flashes before your eyes when you are about to die. But no such thing
happened to me, perhaps because I was no stranger to death, perhaps because my entire life had been a series of mistakes that I didn’t care to recall in my last moments alive. As I placed the pistol to my temple and cocked the barrel, all I thought of was that beautiful garden where I had sat twenty-five years ago. When I placed my finger on the trigger, I swear I heard Sam laughing. And what was that sudden sweet fragrance? April cherry blossoms in Boston. The dark, cheerless room suddenly seemed to fill with sunlight and hope.

Therefore, o Arjuna, without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for by working without attachment the Karma Yogi attains the Supreme.

Lord Krishna in the
Bhagavad Gita

15 April 1975, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA

‘What about Cambodia?’ Sameer asked.

‘What about it?’ I said.

‘We go there tonight. What else?’

‘Do I have to remind you that you’re from Bhatinda, not Boston?’

He threw the fat
Lonely Planet
in my lap. ‘Read this, you dumb fuck. Cambodia and Bhutan are the only two countries in the world where Indian citizens don’t require a visa - apart from Nepal, of course. Let’s choose one and go there.’

A Chinese woman turned around and glared at us.

‘Sorry,’ I said immediately.

‘About the tickets…’ whispered Sam.

‘Can’t we talk about this later?’ I whispered back.

We were sitting in the last row of the massive student congregation that was MIT’s graduating class of 1975, straining to listen to the keynote speaker. Or at least I was.

‘I don’t want to listen to this fat fucker,’ said Sam after a few minutes of silence. ‘He has nothing new to say. Work hard, take risks, learn from mistakes, be a people person, blah, blah, blah.’

I sighed and moved our chairs further back so
we wouldn’t disturb the others, most of whom were listening in rapt attention as the head of America’s biggest financial services firm dispensed advice on how to be successful in corporate America after graduating from MIT. The soft, pleasant Boston spring contributed to the upbeat mood. We are now MIT graduates, everyone’s expression seemed to say, watch out, will ya?

‘The thing is, I don’t even want to end up like him,’ Sam continued. ‘Who wants to be a fat old turd peddling penny stocks and junk bonds and talking about how the best days of his life were spent at MIT?’

‘I would, for one,’ I said. ‘Unlike you, I don’t have any grandiose visions of happiness. I just want a simple life.’

‘A simple life! See, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what we are going to get in Cambodia,’ he said, back on the subject of our yet unplanned vacation after graduation.

I wanted to do a road trip through the US. He, on the other hand, wanted ‘something big’, as usual.

Reluctantly, I stopped listening to the speaker and turned to Sameer (call me ‘Sam’). The stocky, clumsy son of a poultry farmer from Bhatinda, pencil-thin moustache forming over red, cubby cheeks, now an MIT engineer with outsized ambitions to take over the world.

‘Isn’t there a civil war going on in Cambodia?’ I asked him.

‘There was a war going on in India as well, when we came here four years ago - the ‘71 Indo-Pak War,’ he said. ‘And I had barely heard about it in Bhatinda. Cambodia is as big as a whore’s cunt; we can easily find some place where there is no fighting. Besides, who’s going to harm two Indians? We are non-aligned like Chacha Nehru.’

His face was flush with enthusiasm and I suddenly realized that he was serious about this. We could actually end up on a flight to Cambodia tonight, as we had on a flight to Mexico after our sophomore year. Time to get practical, boy, I thought, else we might end up sleeping in a bus stand for a week like we did in Cancun.

‘Do I have to remind you that we have no money?’ I said. ‘Zilch. Nada. I don’t want this to be another Mexico.’

‘This time it’s taken care of,’ he said triumphantly. He took out a cheque from his pocket with a flourish and waved it at me. ‘Dad’s graduation gift. No one in Bhatinda has ever graduated from an MIT before, not even from the Muzaffarpur Institute of Technology.’ He stared into the distance dreamily, and for a second I thought he was listening to the speaker who was explaining the lessons he had learnt from a recent acquisition.

‘The Angkor Vat is in Cambodia,’ said Sam unexpectedly. ‘The seventh wonder of the world.’

‘Since when have you been interested in historical monuments? You haven’t even seen the Taj Mahal, have you?’

He looked at me contemptuously. ‘There it’s all the same,’ he said. ‘The paagal-khaana is on the same road as the Taj Mahal.’

‘And how does that make the Taj Mahal any less magnificent, fatso?’ I said as we were rewarded with another look of disgust from the Chinese student sitting in front of us.

‘So, are we on?’ Sam asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Somehow, I don’t have a good feeling about this. Why can’t we just do a road trip like everyone else?’

He groaned and began to rock his chair. ‘You realize this is our last chance, don’t you? Three weeks from now, you will start pushing paper at NASA, and I will be sweeping factory floors at GE. It all goes downhill after that. Adulthood and responsibility; marriage, family, kids, finances, the works.’

‘You’ve been saying that for a long time,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t seen your downward journey begin yet.’

As if on cue, he tilted his chair back a little further than he probably intended, and landed on his back. A thunderous applause seemed to greet his fall. The speaker had just completed his speech.
A few folks in the last row tittered as Sam picked himself up.