The Story of My Assassins (15 page)

Then Sukha showed Tope his other exhibits of flesh art. A thick rope climbing from the inside of his right thigh to his groin; a little pink-red motte on his left shoulder; and then, turning around, a supremely surreal second spinal cord next to his first.

Tope said, ‘Did it pain a lot?’

Sukha said, ‘You must never think of the pain. If you think of
the pain you got, then you can never give it. If you fear getting pain, you will fear giving it. What do our elders always tell us—don’t think, just do. If you think too much then you lose the ability to do. But our elders are wrong when they say, always act with a cool mind. Different situations demand different responses. Sometimes you have to carve beauty, and sometimes you have to repel ugliness. Sometimes the odds are stacked against you, and what you need in the fight is not coolness but madness. You must pump the rage up from the bottom of your stomach, it must scream through you, it must take you beyond all considerations of pain. The knife must become an extension of your arm; it must cut, slice, dig with a fury born in hell. You must become a dervish. At such a time there should be nothing calm in your head or body. I have seen a five-foot mosquito set four big men to fleeing because his fury was bigger than all of them. When you work with a knife you need both skill and courage. No weak man can put a knife into human flesh. I tell you, there are men who cannot even stick it into a live chicken! When you work with a knife you have to be both—artist and madman. And you know, actually, they are the same thing.’

Tope blanched. He knew how he himself recoiled each time his Chacha trapped a chicken between his feet and decapitated it; how he averted his eyes when the blood spurted and the chicken flopped about looking for its missing head. Even the defeathering and skinning repelled him. Only when it was washed and clean, the pink flesh succulent and soulless, would he begin to feel good about it.

By now they had sunk deep into the mound of golden grain, and Sukha was scooping the cool wheat and running it through his fingers, and pouring it over his forearms and legs, his lungi pulled up to his thighs. Tope was playing with the Rampuria, testing its spring, feeling its blade, trying to grip it in different ways, for an underhand drive, for an overhead stab, for a roundhouse slash.

Sukha said, ‘Well done! You are learning.’

Tope said, ‘I want to learn,’ shredding the air ruthlessly.

Sukha laughed and said, ‘You want to be a chaakumaar? Your father blasts bombs from a tank, and you want to be a chaakumaar! Okay, I’ll teach you, but only if you run out now and get me a hot glass of tea.’

It was true. His father’s wielding of the mighty Vijayanta tank, or his grandfather’s exploits in the army, did nothing for him. He had heard their stories all his life. How his father won a mention-in-dispatches in the 1971 war against Pakistan for assisting in the destruction of a Patton tank; how his grandfather was recommended for the Military Cross when he helped his platoon hold off a Japanese charge in Burma towards the end of the Second World War; how his father had been the regimental middle-weight boxing champion for eight continuous years; how his grandfather could bend an iron rod on his thigh or his shoulders—hence the moniker Fauladi Fauji; how Burgess sahib told his grandfather that he was the pride of the British army; and how Major Khan told his father that he was as strong as the tank he manoeuvred. He had seen the old uniforms and ammunition boots packed in the dented black army trunk; he had seen the dull medals and the ceremonial lanyards, and the cummerbunds and the faded ribbons, and the frayed woollen socks and the moth-eaten olive cardigans, and the stiff rain cape with two gaping holes for the arms; and the assortment of jungle hats and berets and balaclavas. There were also the yellowing pictures, stuck on yellowing cardboard, with rows of crew-cut men—in stiff uniforms and floppy sports shorts and battle fatigues—all looking the same, till the old man jabbed his finger and pointed himself out as a young man. The reverence with which they handled this junk bored him; their continual talk of discipline, exercise, obedience, rules, regulations, timings, glory, honour was a pain.

Even at the age of ten he could see they were flakes, cut off from reality, living in some place and time that was mostly make-believe. His grandfather managed to stay in this unreal place by loftily removing himself from everyone else around. He almost never spoke to any of the workers on the farm, had dismissive exchanges with the villagers who chanced by, and was brutally laconic with relatives and visitors. For nearly thirty years, from the time he was pensioned from the army, he had done nothing but bubble his hookah and stare out at the fields. Twice a day, morning and evening, he took a long walk past the outer fields, carrying his military stick—of knotted bamboo—in one hand and an empty brown beer bottle in the other. Chacha said, ‘You have to hand it to him. He makes even a crap look like a regimental inspection.’

Often, when the labour was working the wheel of the fodder chopper, he would, sitting close by on his charpoy, stare at the slicing leaves of grass exploding with rich green aromas, as if locating some deep meaning in it. By speaking minimally, doing nothing, and possessing a legendary past, he had come to be seen as a repository of wisdom and strength. Everyone tiptoed around him; no one crossed him; and when he gifted someone a monosyllabic moment, gratitude and awe flowed back.

The grandchild was no exception to this minimalist treatment. He too was spoken to gruffly, and expected to live in awe. In the beginning, when he had dared ask the grand man some questions, he was always dismissed; children must not be so curious. Later, after Tope had stopped trying to talk to him, the old man would often track him with hard critical eyes, as if walking through the fields without chanting left-right-left-right was a crime. His strategy was good: he conveyed disapproval but never expressed it. That left everyone on the back foot, struggling with it, trying to gauge its extent, and yet never having the opportunity to challenge or rebut it. Tope often found himself hoping his grandfather would just say something nasty to him so he could hit back. But that was not to be. You
had to contend with the lofty disapproval that arose from nothing and was directed at everything, without ever being articulated.

Tope’s father, Dakota Ram—Fauladi’s unit had just been offloaded from such a plane when he received the news of his son’s birth—Dakota Ram was doubly marred. For years he suffered his father’s inarticulate pretensions, and then the army slopped on a fair share of its own. The result was a tragically two-dimensional man: one part receiving orders, instructions, rules, regulations; the other, implementing and executing them to the letter. It was quite likely that a careless impulse had never coursed through his body; an original thought never sparked in his head. He had always done what he was told—by his father, by the army—and every situation he ever faced had set responses that he knew. When he didn’t know he simply asked someone who did. There was nothing about life or the world that had to be examined, analysed, questioned or understood. There were just processes and rules, just the brass and polish, just the doing.

When Dakota Ram came home on his annual two-month leave, he continued to wake before dawn, cut a close shave, exercise twice a day, eat his meals as in the battalion, at six, twelve and seven, and not indulge in small talk with his family. Like his father, he retained the army starch at all times, a clear distance from ordinary frivolities. He was a man who rode in a thousand-ton tank, who could blast holes in the horizon big as houses, who had lived the din of battle, death and destruction, whose officers spoke clippetyclop English and ate with shining cutlery and had fair-skinned wives with buns on their heads big as melons. Whose regiment had a hundred-and-twenty-year-old tradition of bravery and honour, whose grim job it was to defend the country. Sweep, idle village banter, indulgences of petty affection and love, were not for him. He was happy to give a sombre hearing to issues of village development and serious problems, but no backslapping gossip was allowed. He met everyone, including his small son, with a formal handshake. Every evening before dinner, he
knocked back two large tots of dark Hercules rum with four fingers of water but he did it alone, with a sense of ceremony and ritual. In his first year in the regiment Lt Oomen had told him, ‘Dakota, whatever you do, do it with the style of the white man! They shoot you as if they are giving you a medal; they shit as if they are having a conversation in the drawing-room; and they drink as if taking part in a religious ceremony. And look at us! Always down on the ground, shitting, swilling, getting shot!’

Sometimes Chacha was invited to join in, but never to have more than the prescribed two, with Dakota measuring the drinks, holding both glass and bottle up to eye-level as he poured. Chacha would then wander off and quaff his santri, and tell his mother, ‘It’s like giving a berry to a lion! Sher nu ber! Doesn’t even wet my tongue!’ To his father, Dakota gave one large and one small tot. But they sat fifteen feet apart—Fauladi near the chopper; the tank man near the neem tree—and drank in silence, while the tube wells began to rumble water and the fields cleared of the last workers and a final rash of redness bathed the skies and the birds winging home filled the air with the day’s chatter. Behind them, the woodsmoke from the open chulha rose in slow waves and mixing with the aroma of bubbling dal spread through the darkening evening and the chewing of the buffaloes at the feeding trough grew steadily louder, joined by the oxen just in from their labours. The barking of dogs began to mark the scattered homesteads as night fell and a zillion stars burst through the roof of the world. Through the magical transition—which the city can never know—the two army men, father and son, gulped their rum, locked in their individual armour, incapable of giving and incapable of receiving.

The boy stayed close to his Chacha and far away from the stiff stranger under the neem tree. Fleetingly home, the tank man had
nothing to say to his son, nothing to offer him. The regiment taught you nothing about this kind of fatherhood. In the regimental kind, the commanding officer was the father, and he gave you not emotion and affection but orders and a protective umbrella. His was the voice of god. Never to be questioned, in life or death. The other fathering that Dakota Ram had known, of Fauladi’s, had been no different. Regular thrashings, unswerving obedience, and no display of feelings. Recruitment, training, boot camp, while a nightmare for most of his mates, had been a romp for him. With a deep sense of piety, Dakota actually approved of his father’s ruthless rules of upbringing. He felt they had served him well. Made a real man out of him, indifferent to pain and privation, dauntless in the face of death. He too made it a point to thrash his son once every week while he was home on leave. That was a minimum of eight thrashings during his annual leave and two during his casual. Sometimes it troubled him to do so, but he knew any weakness on his part would ruin the boy’s character.

Sometimes it was difficult to locate a reason to beat Tope. The boy tended to steer clear of his path and to keep his voice down. Then Dakota would summon him and berate him for his indifferent performance in school, and follow it up with some really tough time-and-work sums. Tope Singh would struggle with the maths, his limbs and mind already going numb at the thought of the thrashing to come. For variety’s sake, Dakota Ram sometimes used his cane, sometimes his canvas belt, sometimes his army boots, and sometimes just his big hands. He never hit the boy with all his strength—that would have killed him—but with just enough to hurt him. In fact, the rage only rose in Dakota after he had begun to whack him—it was the boy’s squealing that got his juices going. The first blow was always desultory, cold; the last always hard, heated.

His own father, Fauladi, watched it all impassively from his post on the charpoy by the chopper, gurgling on his hookah. And Dakota, occasionally, to earn his father’s unstated approval, gave his son an
extra brutal blow or two. Tope Singh’s mother, Dakota’s wife, was in no position to help matters. The philosophy of regular chastisement that applied to the son applied to her too. Her quota was one thrashing a week, but for the sake of decorum it was carried out indoors. Of course her screams could be heard everywhere. This was also a family tradition Dakota Ram had imbibed from his father: even now the old man gave his old lady an occasional passing blow. The women took it well—fate could have been more cruel: left them unmarried, son-less, widows—and the pain seldom persisted beyond a day unless the buckle or stick caught a bone.

After the beating Tope’s grandmother would heat a stone and wrap it in a chunni and give it to Chacha, who would gently apply it to him while telling him stories from the Mahabharata. In time Tope’s favourite character in the epic became Bhima. The other Pandava brothers—Yudhishthira, Arjuna, Nakul and Sahadeva—were too rule-bound and quiescent. Bhima alone raged at the injustices heaped on them, and threatened vengeance on all who gave them grief. Bhima of the boundless strength, Bhima who would in the great battle seek out and slay each of the hundred Kaurava brothers for the ignominy they had heaped on his wife Draupadi, Bhima who understood that beyond a point moral niceties were a weakness and a sin. Often, when the blows were raining on him or his mother’s screams tearing at his ears, Tope would imagine himself as Bhima, the mace of havoc on his shoulder, wreaking retribution on his father and grandfather as they begged for mercy. When he walked through the fields alone he swung his arms like a warrior, smashing the stalks of wheat, shouting, Bhimsen, Bhimsen, Bhimsen!

As it turned out Tope’s body lived up to neither his own name nor that of his god. He went from twelve to thirteen to fourteen to fifteen with the speed of time, but his frame remained slight, the limbs thin, the shoulders narrow, the chest small. Nor did he gain the expected height, ending up much shorter and much thinner than his father and grandfather, more and more like his Chacha, so far the
runt of the family. As if, by osmosis, the uncle’s love had made the boy’s physicality akin to his own.