The Story of My Assassins (12 page)

Sethiji’s smile was getting a little rigid. Yoronour seemed to have started some other consultations on the side with his clerk and another penguin. Sara was looking as ferocious as the brain-curry man. Together they could have dismembered me in minutes, he making a hole in my skull and she uprooting my tool.

‘No. I didn’t believe or disbelieve. I just let them go ahead and do their job.’

‘Good. That’s good. The police must be always left alone to do their job. Even by investigative journalists. So can we say you trust the police?’

‘No, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that.’

‘So mostly you wouldn’t trust them, but in this particular case you did?’

‘Well, yes. As I said, I just left them alone to do their job.’

‘Let us be hypothetical. Do you like hypothesis? I am told all journalists like hypothesis. Do you?’

‘Sure.’

‘Let us hypothetically say the police wanted to fix some innocent fellows. For whatever reasons, personal, political, pecuniary, whatever. This police that you mostly don’t trust. So this police charged them with trying to kill you, gave you police protection and locked them up. Of course the police would never do something like this. We are only trying to form a hypothesis.’

Fuck, was Sara part of his defence team?

The public prosecutor with the alert shopkeeper eyes, who had been smiling and chatting with Sethiji all this time suddenly said, ‘Objection yoronour, what are all these misleading questions? The honourable counsel cannot make up any hypothesis and ask the witness to comment on them. This is a courtroom, not Sheikh Chilli’s adda!’

Sethiji said, ‘Yes, my lord, honourable counsel must stick to the case!’

Pastyface said, ‘Don’t waste the court’s time, Bhandariji. There will be enough time to go into all this.’

The sparrow’s feathers were unruffled. He stroked the lapels of his frayed coat with deliberate slowness and said, ‘Milord, we are talking about the lives of five innocent men. Sometimes there is only a hypothesis between the rope and the neck.’

‘Hurry up, Bhandariji.’ The magistrate had again turned away from us and was talking to the clerk in whispers. Two penguins were leaning over to be part of the confabulations. The general swirl in the room was unabated. Even where I stood answering the questions, I was being continually pushed and jostled.

Turning to me the tiny lawyer said, ‘So shall we say that you mostly don’t trust the police?’

‘Sure.’

‘Shall we say that you have never before in your life seen any of these men?’

‘Sure.’

‘Shall we say that at no time did you have any apprehensions that your life was in danger? No sign at all?’

‘Sure.’

‘Shall we say that you have no reason to assume that these men wish you any harm at all?’

I looked at Hathoda Tyagi. He seemed like he wished to harm all of mankind. Make universal brain curry.

I said, ‘Sure.’

‘Shall we say my little hypothesis could be true? Just as a little hypothesis, nothing more?’

‘Sure.’

Before Sethiji hustled me out of the room, I took a last look at the men. Four of them were shuffling their feet, looking at us, and around us, in a glaze of unknowing. The brain-curry man was motionless, head high, his eyes, unmoving, on me.

When I reached the door I realized Sara had lingered behind. I turned to look for her and she was talking to the little sparrow, her right hand on her chin, her elbow cupped in her left palm. Her unequal body, in a long peasant skirt with a tribal motif and a slim-fit sleeveless shirt, clearly seemed to be emanating some aura, for the swirl was steering clear of her, leaving her and the defence lawyer in a clear island. How tough men fear tough women! She was listening; the sparrow was chirping, no bigger than her, his entire frame delicate as her photo torso.

I sent one of Sethiji’s gelled-gymed junior penguins to nudge her along. The look she turned on the hapless boy was of Kali in the moment before commencing carnage. He hotfooted his way back, ashen faced. One more provocation and she’d have decapitated us and strung our heads in a garland around her neck. Yours truly between Sethiji’s wide smile and gymed boy’s gelled hair, with shopkeeper-eyes right across, just below pasty-faced yoronour.

Our complement—shadows, Sethiji, junior penguins—waited outside in the madness of the corridor, one of many small armies doing opaque battle in the once royal corridors of Patiala House. When she finally emerged she strode right past us, straight into the crush, and we had to scuttle to follow. Sethiji said, nodding his wondrous smiling face, ‘Bhabhiji is not an ordinary woman. No phuddugiri with her. You have to follow her. Not like our sad wives. You cannot just beat her and love her.’

T
he next time I nailed her to the wall I realized she wasn’t quite there with me. I reached deep into my school memories to excavate every obscenity I had traded with my classmates, every vulgarity I had read in the hand-stapled, one-rupee novellas of Mastram Mastana that regularly ignited onanistic mayhem in the back benches. Every boy in the Hindi belt had dirtied his hands on Mastram. His across-the-line carnivals, grubby, taboo-trashing and incestuous—joint families, master–servants, teacher–students, buses, trains, bathrooms, dead-of-night surreptitious encounters—were so direct in the language that often boys succumbed in a weak heap before the first page was done.

But even Mastram unplugged couldn’t cut through to her. The ringing expletives, the hammering, nothing led her eyes to dilate, nothing altered the tone of her voice, nothing instigated abandon in her body. What made it worse was that I could see it was not deliberate. She was not trying to shut me out. She went through the paces—the challenge, the baiting, the abuse, the surrender—but in the desultory way schoolchildren go through their morning prayers at assembly. When I finished and took her off the wall, she was limp not with satiety but with disconnect.

There had been similar retreats in the past, mostly when we hit a vista that we read differently. Thanks to her years in American universities and a ceaseless itinerary of seminars, summits and other modern talkathons, she had acquired occidental eyes. A continual hysteria of rights and wrongs, a continual need to name and frame and explain and blame, a continual urge to display virtue, a continual desire to fix the world as if it were a dollhouse waiting passively.

There was an explanation for the universe, the good, the bad, the rich, the poor, the less, the more, the pain, the pleasure, the eternal, the ephemeral—but it was not be found in the manicured beauty of purdue–brown–harvard–berkeley–yale, in gleaming classrooms and shining skins, in categorizing Olympiads, in bookshops bigger than factories. It lay in the inheritance of her blood; in the millennia-old meditations of naked men with matted hair under hairy ficus trees; in the unsigned, uncopyrighted wisdoms handed down endlessly from master to pupil, from flowing mouth to soaking ear; in the eternal riddles of karma and dharma that were their own answers.

She’d bought this whole occidental bullshit about fixing the world, about the grand march of logic and reason, all the way presumably—with delicate sips of Starbucks—to Auschwitz and Birkenau. The watchtower of rationality over the gateway of progress through which ran the lines of cold iron, the straight railroad to hell. Alight from the cattle cars and breathe the sweet forgetfulness of xylon. Embrace the modern moksha of death by science.

If she’d listened to the inheritance of her blood she would have known the world does not need to be fixed, it only needs to be balanced.

And the art of balance demands you tread lightly, not leap about in a continual frenzy. The art of balance demands you know your designated role in the game of life, not start muscling in on everyone else’s. The art of balance demands an absence of panic, a rippleless internal calm. The art of balance demands knowledge of timelessness, of birth and death and rebirth. The art of balance demands that you know the world cannot be fixed, it must be endured; it must, simply, be kept forever in splendid play.

Sara wanted to fix the world.

She wanted action, answers, victories. Liberty, equality, fraternity. She wanted final solutions. She wanted my killers to be declared innocent, and freed. Nothing anyone said or did was going to deter her from her course. And I was not, I soon realized, to be involved
in this campaign. I was a compromised party. I was on the other side. I had set myself up to be killed.

It took a little while before I realized she was in touch with the tiny lawyer in the oversized coat; that she was lending her formidable energy to help plan the defence of my assassins.

One day, as I lay spent yet frustrated in front of Napoleon, calming my heartbeat after one more insipid nailing, I saw the file on the unused side of her bed where her books and papers always lay in an untidy heap. A dirty brown file, tied with a red string, dirty white papers peeping out of its edges. She was in the bathroom washing me off her, and I pushed aside the newspapers that lay over the file, to discover there was not one dirty brown file but several—five, six—in a thin pile. The neat ink mark of a rubber stamp at the top declared: Advocate M.S. Bhandari, Llb, Llm.

When she came out, in a blue wraparound knotted in a big bow on the right and a thin white slip, her photo nipples provocative against it, she smiled and said, ‘Checking on your killer boys, mr peashooter? Go ahead. We must all know what kills us. And what doesn’t.’

I shut the file that I had just nudged open, flung the newspapers back onto it, and swung myself out of the bed. ‘You’ve lost it,’ I said, pulling on my jeans.

‘Found it, mr peashooter,’ she said. ‘Found it. And tell me when you want me to share it. I’ll be happy to.’

When I told Guruji about all this, he laughed. ‘She’s a spirited one! Blessed are those who choose to do. But doing without thought can often be worse than non-doing. One must understand the lesson of everything. When the guru sends his disciple to empty the ocean with a mug, he is not teaching him the virtue of perseverance, but the lesson of futile action. The stupid disciple empties
the ocean for the rest of his life and finds his peace; the intelligent disciple finds wisdom, throws away the mug, and moves on in search of more. The disciple must not only perform the task, he must also contemplate the task. Action is god, but so is stillness.’

Then his eyes laughing, he patted my shoulder and said, ‘And you know two gods are better than one.’

I was sitting at his feet in his sanctum, in front of the wall stuck over with religious icons. The tiny fairy lights, undraped from the wall, lay rolled in a tangle of wires, heaped in a corner. The doors and windows were open and the last light was pouring in. The splash of sky through the window was shiny orange with the dying sun. The guttural cries of oxen being steered by men cutting the final plough line of the day wafted in from the fields. Bird sounds flowed past in a rush—screeching parakeets, warning crows, questioning lapwings. Guruji was clad as always in his dhoti, luminously frail, his skin, from cheek to ankle, stretched taut over bare bones. His hair was tied, a basanti safa wound around it.

I said, ‘So what is the lesson in all this? Is it for her or for me?’

His eyes laughing, he said, ‘That is for you to find out. The guru can give you the mug but you have to empty the ocean. The guru can show you the path but you have to walk it. Truth cannot be taught, truth must be experienced. The good disciple walks paths even the guru has not, before arriving at the same truths. And sometimes even different ones. That is the wonder of the world, of all creation, that the journey to truth is a pathless one. There are countless ways of feeding the soul, just as there are countless ways of feeding the stomach. Some foods feed us well and thrill us, just as others taste bad, wreck our digestion, and destroy our health and sense of well-being. You have to discover what fits your palate, stomach and body. It may be the same as her, and it may just not.’

His eyes were laughing. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t dead serious. It’s how he addressed everyone’s problems—except on the night when he became the great Pir of Machela. ‘Remember,’ he
always said to the complainants at his feet, ‘there’s always someone with a deeper well of sorrow just around the corner.’

I said, ‘So shall I say nothing? Shall I just go ahead and let her keep doing what she is doing?’

He said, ‘Of course you must not keep quiet. It is about you too. Silence has to be a strategy not a refuge. A weapon, not an escape. Listen to her for a bit, go along with her. She cannot help it. She has to vent the great noise so much education has filled her up with. It is bursting her insides. When it is spent there will be space for wisdom to flow in. In any case, you must never fight a woman if you can avoid it. Bring her to your side, or go over to hers. She is the greatest ally, and the most corrosive enemy.’

Guruji. Doctor of souls. Physician of the practical.

On the other hand, Jai, who didn’t know Sara, did an about-turn. He said, ‘Actually I am not too sure about the talc any more. Your hammer boy doesn’t sound like someone who could be set up easily. And I don’t think we can credit these buggers with such fine efficiencies. The government, we know, leaks like a sieve at the best of times. After seeing these five jokers in court, I doubt these government guys would have the audacity or competence to set them up. They can barely get simple things right, leave alone an elaborate frame-up involving dozens of people. You would need home ministry guys in the loop, police guys in the loop, judicial officers in the loop—too big a sieve, impossible to plug. Bound to leak, and no one could run that risk. My friend, rejoice! I am beginning to believe you may really have genuine assassins on your ass!’

SI Hathi Ram said, banging together biscuit halves like cymbals, ‘For a few rupees. In this country anyone will kill anyone for a few rupees. Sons will kill fathers, brothers will kill brothers, husbands will kill wives—what is it to kill a stranger! Anyway, the bastards are
beginning to sing. First they will sing like bathroom singers, slowly, badly, out of tune—difficult to understand what they are singing. Then they will become drawing-room singers, full of melody and confidence, full of pleasing sounds, too polite to be trusted. And finally they will be like the great qawwals at Nizamuddin, swaying to the god deep within them, chanting in frenetic unison, loud and long, in a wonderful trance of truth-telling.’