The Story of My Assassins (16 page)

The old man’s eyes became even more dismissive. He told Dakota, ‘Tope Singh! Look at him! You should have named him Pistol Singh! Doesn’t even look like you!’ The metronomic chop-chop of the fodder being sliced filled the air. The smell of bleeding green was everywhere. The old man pulled hard on his hookah, coughed, and continued, ‘And which army are you going to send him to—the dwarf and midget brigade?’

The tank man said nothing, just kept gulping from his tumbler of dark rum. After some time he rose, went in, and wordlessly thrashed his wife and son.

At fifteen, the humiliation hurt more than the blows. Tope held his tiny sobbing mother close and said to her, ‘I want to kill him.’ His mother, married as a small girl at thirteen, already an old woman at thirty-two, who in her life had known only two modest homesteads and many beatings, whose only warm memory was the love and care of her own mother, Tope’s sobbing mother said, ‘Don’t say such things! But I know what you mean.’

The boy first tasted blood at sixteen.

It was so much easier than he had imagined. For nearly seven years he had played with the fantasy, sitting alone in the gloom of the grain room, and against the naked brick wall of the tube well, and in the heart of the sword-leafed sugarcane fields, and by the sluggish stream that only surged in the monsoon, and under the hugging date palms, and in the lonely walks to the village school, and under his thick quilt on chill winter nights.

As sound is created by simply turning the knob of a radio, the fantasy began with the flicking open of his knife. His thumb pressed the smooth lever and the blade sprang out, gleaming. Suddenly there
was menace in his eyes, in the angle of his arm, in the sneer on his lips. He didn’t feel small any more. He felt dangerous, lethal, capable of unleashing mayhem. All around him men and women—mostly faceless, but also his father and grandfather—cowered in respect and fear, averting their eyes, treading soundlessly. As he walked through the bazaar, a hushed whisper of awe filled the air. As sound is killed by turning off the radio knob, the fantasy vanished the moment the knife blade was clicked close. Only runty little Tope Singh remained.

For seven years, the boy had treasured the Rampuria like a priceless jewel. He had managed to keep it hidden from all the prying eyes at home and in the fields. The only one who knew about it was Chacha, and he was sworn to secrecy. In turn the uncle had sought a vow that Tope would not ever carry the knife outside the homestead, certainly not till he was twenty-one. In other words, never use it on man or beast.

On the other hand, Sukha, glorious Sukha, freewheeling Sukha, laughing Sukha, the gifter of the blade, the philosopher of the knife, had merely said, ‘Treat it well, handle it with care. Don’t use it to cut vegetables and don’t use it to sharpen pencils. Don’t use it to trim your nails and don’t use it shave your beard. Don’t use it to dig holes and don’t use it to kill chickens. Remember, a Rampuria has only one purpose. It is like a sword or a dagger or a gun. It is a weapon. It’s made to strike fear in the human heart. It’s made to slice open human flesh. Remember, it may be only four inches, but it’ll add many feet to your stature. A Rampuria makes you a man, it makes you a warrior. In a world where respect is hard to come by, it brings you respect. Both money and power—who care neither for character nor kindness—find in themselves respect for a man who sheathes a Rampuria.’ Sukha had then clicked the blade shut, massaged the sleeping knife in his palm for many long moments, and handed it over to the young boy.

Instantly Tope had recognized the truth of everything Sukha said. When he turned fifteen he went to Rafat, the village tailor—an
old squint-eyed Musalman, who had no gift for running a stitch-line straight—and asked him to craft him a tight inner pocket for his trousers.

Rafat’s mud and brick shop was in the outermost circle of the village and a shallow open drain of slow-moving sludge ran past his door. The shop was bare but for a clattering Singer foot-pedal machine, a worn brown and yellow durrie on the uneven mud floor, and the chair on which Rafat sat. A neat stack of tailored clothes stood in one corner and an untidy heap of semi-tailored ones, arms and legs flapping about, were tossed in the other. Rafat wore a faded green measuring tape around his shoulders and a shrapnel of blue chalk in his ear, but seldom took any measurements because he already knew most of his clients’ sizes. The main thrust of his work was not fresh tailoring but the refitting of hand-me-downs doing the endless carousel between fathers, sons, siblings, cousins. There were pieces that he had refitted five, six, seven times, an adult trouser finishing off as a boy’s ‘half-pant’, a man’s kurta ending as a baby’s slip. For years the tailor had altered Dakota Ram’s old olive trousers and shirts for both Chacha and Tope, leaving in the blank epaulettes, the flap pockets, the belt loops, the pleats. When done, they looked as they were—ragged, giveaway army clothes, without the starch, the shine, the finery. Because Rafat was such a poor craftsman, the adapted clothes were always crooked and ill-fitting. When someone made the mistake of complaining, the tailor looked scathingly at him over his glasses. ‘And look at you! Off to dinner with the deputy commissioner!’ Astutely, however, he made up for the bad aesthetics with excessive robustness. He ran and re-ran many wavering lines over every seam so his clothes never came apart, no matter the strain. The only way the clothes died was by being worn threadbare. It gave him a great reputation.

So Rafat gave him a slim pouch, from the inner waistband, along the line of the fly, in his father’s old olive army trousers. He made the pouch from tough khaki canvas, so that an accidental triggering
would not flick open the blade and slice the boy. The knife dug into his flesh, and sometimes when Tope was out for too long it made his skin sore. It was a negligible price to pay. Apart from what it was, where it nestled gave him a heightened sense of potency. Often, when he stood around or walked, he felt for it with his fingers, thick and unyielding along his inner thigh.

He practised drawing it rapidly for a fight, like a revolver from a holster. Often, at midday, he went down to the soft soil by the stream, behind the high sharp rushes, and standing with his feet apart, in one move, shot his hand into the waistband, pulled the knife out of the pouch and flicked it open, shouting ‘Hahh!’ Then he stabbed the swaying rushes, or slashed them shallowly as Sukha had once instructed him, just opening up the skin with the steel tip, causing great pain but not deep injury.

For some time in the beginning he tried to become a knife thrower, practising his skill against the scaly trunks of the embracing date palms across the stream. Standing about ten feet away he chucked the knife at the trunks again and again, but it virtually never stuck. It was not that his aim was bad. He invariably hit the trees but never with the leading tip so that it wedged in. Tope tried tossing it from the shaft, from the blade, underhand, with the wrist turned in, but the knife didn’t seem weighted for attack by throwing. It turned poorly in the air, and never managed a clean trajectory.

After each training session, like a good warrior, he would tend to his weapon, pulling out the smooth five-kilo stone he kept in the rushes by the stream. The stone was shaped like an embryo, smoothed to satin by millennia of running water. Tope would put the embryo on its back and in the curve of its torso begin to strop his blade. He would do this sometimes for nearly an hour, squatting on his haunches, pouring palmfuls of water over the burning steel. Once in a while he brought some mustard oil in a tiny medicine vial and gave the blade a viscous coat. Then it was all rubbed down with soft soil and an old rag.

When Tope first put his knife into Bhupinder’s flesh and in one swift stroke drew an artful cummerbund across his belly, a profound sense of power and ecstasy filled his being. Big Bhupi, bullying Bhupi, with his tight blue turban, his already thick beard, his loud hectoring voice, big Bhupi who had just pushed him in the chest for the second time, took a moment to react. Then blood spurted in a line like juice from a sliced mango and Bhupi screamed, ‘Hai I am dead! Hai the maiovah has killed me!’

Before the sardar found the nerve to reach for the short kirpan in its brass scabbard that hung by his left side, Tope put a neat cross on his left shoulder. Like Eklavya who mastered archery by practising in front of the statue of Drona, Tope had learnt the lessons of Sukha through unflagging repetition. The cuts were shallow, sucking out the blood without severing anything critical; he himself was balanced nicely between rage and calm; and how sweet, how supremely sweet, the unleashed knife felt in his hand. He so hoped that one of the two other boys with Bhupi would make a move, allowing him to extend his sublime dance, to decorate more flesh.

But the boys were in a paralysis of terror, all the laughing bravura of a minute ago silenced by the flick-knife. Bhupi who had picked on him for months, calling him a runt, making him the butt of his schoolyard humour, Bhupi who had hustled him into the guava orchard and asked him to open his pants and show him and his gang the smallness of his penis, Bhupi now held his spurting stomach with his left forearm and the cross on his left shoulder with his right hand. There was blood everywhere, on his shirt, pants, and dripping on to the ground, into the mulch of fallen leaves. The sardar had begun to sob, big tears bubbling out of his frightened eyes: ‘Hai I’ve been killed! Hai the maiovah has killed me! Hai someone call my father! Hai my mother I am dead!’

Tope noticed the guavas on the trees were still deep green and rock hard, thousands of them glistening in the dappled light of mid-afternoon. Another week and they could start plucking them. There
was one strain in this orchard that had pink hearts—he loved eating those, though they never tasted as good as they looked.

Almost playfully, he took a step forward, the knife hard in his extended hand. The three boys immediately recoiled, stumbling back over the mulch. This was the dominant group of the village school, skippered by Bhupi, the biggest landlord’s son. Boys like Tope had been kicked around by them all their lives. His pants had first been yanked off by them when he was eleven, and then whenever they chose. Passively, he had felt the pain and pleasure of their hands and bodies. There was nothing they had not done to him, and he had learnt early that brutality always accompanied the joys of the flesh. He could feel it now, in the way his steel tip opened up Bhupi’s skin, just as the sardar’s had his, so many years ago. Now all he could see in their eyes was fear. It was beautiful. The juices were surging in him. In a delirium of artistry he could have decorated all of them. Festooned them with red ribbons of flesh.

They must have seen it in his eyes. The fervour beginning to swirl the dervish. Bhupi wailed, crumpling to his knees, clutching at his leaking skin, ‘Maiovah, the fauji’s runt has gone bloody mad! He wants to kill all of us! Wait till my father plucks his cock out and feeds it to the mongrels!’

Moving to his own music, Tope cut a divine arc through the air and spliced the forearm of the boy nearest him as he raised it in protection. Like juice from a mango sprang the line incarnadine. Jeeta, of the elephant ears, his family tenant-tillers of Bhupi’s family acres, screeched, ‘Oh fuck my mother’s cunt he’s ripped me too!’ He turned on Tope ready to storm him in anger, but then saw the abandon in his eyes, the slow rotation of the Rampuria in his right hand. Tope followed him a step and slashed the air open with a lazy swing of his arm. Backing in panic, elephant-ears Jeeta stumbled upon Bhupi and fell in a heap. The sardar was now dribbling from his nose too, and the two fallen boys were cowering behind their arms.

The third boy, Bhupi’s fourteen-year-old cousin Lucky, who
had been trying to support the crumpled sardar, now tried to make a run for it. With a graceful lunge, Tope sank the tip of his Rampuria into the fleeing boy’s soft left buttock. The boy fell with a thud and a screech that startled the parakeets from the guava trees. ‘Hai my mother I’ve been killed! Hai I am dead!’ Bhupi moaned. ‘My father will peel the skin off your body. He will break your arse. You will regret that you were ever born.’

Tope turned slowly and with a finely calibrated jab hit the writhing heap of Bhupi right between his arse cheeks. His scream almost scared the feathers off the birds. ‘Oh my mother! My mother! My mother! Fuck my mother!’ Jeeta was trying to bury into the mulch, his head down, eyes averted. Lucky was lying as if dead, on his stomach, both his hands on his arse, one running red. Bhupi was heaving with sobs, but struggling to keep the noise down. The mulch was sticking to the mucus flowing from his eyes and nose.

What an embarrassment of opportunity! Which to decorate next? The sun pouring through the gnarled guava branches fell as filigree on the ground. The three boys lay in heaps, in shade and light, in a gentle choreography of moan and twitch, arms and legs contorted in an attempt to stem the new openings in their bodies.

Tope said, to no one in particular, ‘Show!’

He tried to use the same tone that had been used on him five years ago, and then again and again. Just the word. ‘Show.’

No one moved. The bodies just curled in on themselves even tighter.

‘Show!’

When no one responded, Tope gently put the tip of the Rampuria between Bhupi’s arse cheeks. With an ear-splitting wail, the sardar turned over, crumpled leaves and twigs sticking all over his face, glued in place by the mucus and the beard. His entire shirt was a sticky mud-brown.

‘Show!’

The sardar’s hands were so slippery and shaky that he had trouble
pushing clear the fat button of his trousers, which too were soaked with the thick seeping of his red cummerbund. ‘Show!’ said Tope, bending low and bringing the Rampuria closer. The sardar immediately went into a panic of babbling and tugging. When Rafat’s reinforced last button was yanked free, the last string pulled loose, there lay revealed nothing but purposeless hair and loose flesh.

The true measure of things. The tyrant after the court has vanished; the policeman shorn of his uniform; the man who is no longer a minister; the schoolmaster in the bazaar. The tormentor bereft of his trappings. The molester leached of his tumescence. Nothing to make the juice rise, nothing to inflate the mind and the flesh with power and passion. Just a small mess of loose flesh drowning in purposeless hair.