The Story of My Assassins (35 page)

This we were told was the sum of Kapoorsahib’s professional staff: moneyworms and menofwater. All of them spectral creatures, working an unacknowledged business that produced very real military hardware and very big mountains of cash. Through the open sarong Sara’s thick hair had shone in anger and anticipation. Now and then an inner thigh muscle flexed involuntarily, spurring me to a more eloquent account. The sheer potency of power and pelf! Easy to see why the great stories of the world are always about evil. Guruji was truly Masters & Johnson.

Then Sara asked the question that had been set up. ‘So why you?’

This was complicated. We didn’t know the answer either. I said it was possible Jai’s uncle—given that he may have facilitated some of the spectral activities—had some leverage with Kapoor, but it was doubtful he would have used it to save a dead rag. Jai’s Lincolnite speeches were not likely to have cut any ice with Bhargavaji, government servant extraordinaire, who lived deep in the belly of the beast and had no illusions about its nature.

‘Then?’ said Sara, the soft muscle twitching, the pupils beginning to dilate.

It was difficult to stay with the story. I was looking at the wall, next to the door, where she had to be crucified. So excruciating it was, the way she fought back, with just her hips, killing herself and me with deep stabs. Sometimes—her teeth clenched—she gyrated slowly, and reduced me to a babbling animal.

I said I felt that we were like the swank showrooms—Jai and I and the magazine. Like the silk carpets and the teak furniture and the beautiful woman with a snake for a bindi. Just another kind of smokescreen. And the reason we were needed could have something
to do with the utter mayhem unleashed by the three crazies—hotair, clubman, and hitman—some weeks ago.

It was true the government had not fallen, but the chaos had intensified by the day: Parliament was still comatose; conspiracy theories, each worthy of a book, were bouncing off the walls; and everyone was shouting so much on television that every time you switched it on there were open maws staring you in the face.

Hotair—Jai’s doppelganger—was in the thick of it all, delivering state-of-the-nation sermons that made Jai look like a classroom debater. In an eerie replay, the three of them had—like me, only multiplied manifold—come under the protection of the shadows. You couldn’t miss the uniforms, the carbines, the men in bush shirts with hard iron tucked into their groins on television. Their protective cover, somehow, seemed more legitimate. If someone was out to get me, then these guys were up for being shot, hanged, poisoned and quartered all at once.

I felt—and Jai felt—that Kapoorsahib had come to us thanks largely to these three lunatics. These fuckers had shoved a large stick into the hornet’s nest of arms purchases and stirred it like a glass of lassi. Of course everybody was going to get stung but none feared it more than the spectres, the moneyworms and the menofwater. Kapoor and the other ghosts stood to lose mountains of cash, the very ground everyone stood upon. They needed to set up more and more smokescreens so that the labyrinth of Indian legal and investigative processes took an eternity and more to arrive at their doorstep.

Jai, with his wily brahminical mind, said, ‘You know when they come for him, when they try and nail him, what he’s going to say? He’s going to scream from the rooftops that he’s being targeted because he happens to have an investment in this magazine. This magazine which in the past has annoyed powerful politicians and
bureaucrats, this magazine which has taken on vested interests. And your sad fate, the fact of your killers, will be held up as an example. Kapoorsahib is going to be the victim, the man who was persecuted because he was doing the right thing, the honourable thing. The man who was upholding public interest. We will live yet, my friend, thanks to the wisdom of the crooked!’

Sara’s breath was rasping in her chest and her eyes were completely dilated. I could almost smell her arousal. She hissed, ‘What a dog! And you two too, what fucking dogs!’ I almost sighed with relief: Ah, here comes the sun. I said, ‘Madam, there is a real world out there, and most of us have to negotiate this real world. And unfortunately, the real world is run by men who have money and power.’

She said, face twisted with rage, ‘You are just a dog! You would sell yourself to anyone! And that fucking friend of yours, the bearded one, he would find a rationale for it! And you would just echo it! Bloody maaderchods!’

I lunged for her, grabbed her slim wrists and plunged my face into her open sarong.

‘That’s right!’ she screeched, struggling to free her hands. ‘A fucking dog in every way! Saala kutta!’ I shook my head like a dog inside her hot darkness, and she screamed and began to abuse me in English, porn film stuff. I shook it some more, my face slipping easily, and her invective turned to guttural Hindi, street-level stuff. When she began to repeat herself, I pulled my head out and unleashed a stream of such vulgarity that, in a public place it would have led to instant arrest. It made her face twist and her breath choke. She was trashing my prick in anglicized Hindi when I picked her up—so wonderfully light, so narrow in the torso, so full in the hips—and nailed her to the wall. At the precise spot I had been eyeing for the past hour.

When every syllable of abuse had become an endearment and we had reached the place where all arguments end and we were no longer on the wall but on the bed and I had no more legs left and hardly any arms and I was floating in that happy place that can only fleetingly be any man’s, Sara said, ‘You know their lives are actually worthier than yours.’

And their tools much longer than mine.

Contrary to our calculations, despite the abject surrender of Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey, despite our desperate genuflections, Kapoorsahib did not close the deal with any finality. In the world he came from—where spectres built hard-iron weapons and heaped mountains of cash—in that world men understood the true nature of power. They knew it didn’t stem from the gracious handing out of assurances but from the breeding of uncertainty. The idea was to never let anyone, not even one’s allies, not even the moneyworms and the menofwater, feel secure; the idea was to always keep a hand on the handle that flung open the trapdoor.

These men of the world understood that moral niceties, the rituals of honourable conduct, were for the feeble of heart. The men who were nice were the men who were afraid: afraid of being snubbed, afraid of not being liked, afraid of the law, afraid of others’ disapproval, afraid of being alone, afraid of their reflection in the mirror. They were nice because they were afraid to be un-nice; they were nice in the desperate hope that other men would also be nice to them. But Kapoorsahib was not such a man. He was a man who was not afraid to be un-nice. He understood that the central principle of everything was neither decency nor ethics nor money nor love nor religion. It was power—and its acquiring and wielding. He understood that it was good to keep the men around you in continual fear: it made them into nice men. Afraid men. The path
to power was smoothest when it ran through a forest of frightened men.

Men like Kapoor worked at growing sprawling forests of frightened men. In other countries, in Africa and Asia and South America, men were kept afraid through assault to limb and life. But this was a disappointingly free country, full of pretty ideas and retrograde policies that did not allow men to honestly sell a few weapons. Hard unsentimental guns that would guard the nation. In such a country you made men afraid by assaulting their minds, doing damage to the spongy lobes between their ears, left and right, back and front. You made them believe they did not live in a free country, you surrounded them with stories of assault. So that when they were alone, in the silver dark, they felt they were in Africa or South America, and there were shadows moving outside their walls, testing the windows, trying the doors.

As a master shadow yourself, you made them afraid of every shadow. You never took the police to them but you kept their eye on the door through which the police would soon come. You never took them to the courts but you made them aware of the spreading tentacles of the law everywhere. You never showed them the goon with his gun but you made them see the telltale bulge in every unshaven man’s pants. You maimed the mind. You shrank the heart. You provided no certainty: of freedom, or of serfdom. Of death, or of life. You never said you would invest; and you never said you would not.

And that is how Kapoorsahib dangled us. He did not close the deal with Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey, baiting them continually with the absurdity of the offer, making them grovel to give away what they had started out wanting to sell. At the same time he extended us the thinnest lifeline, loaning us twenty-five lakhs, over forty-five days in five instalments, so we could hobble on for some time more. ‘I know I am burning good money—but I owe too many favours to Bhargavaji!’

From that first meeting when he came to visit us in our office
in his red Pajero and wide-brimmed hat, and we spoke to him as cool equals—the man of means meets the men of words—we had, in a few short weeks, reached the stage of sitting outside his offices, sometimes for hours, in search of a brief appointment.

The desperation was more Jai’s than mine. I think he had delivered too many over-the-top orations to quietly fade away now. Somewhere along the way he had come to believe some of his own helium-pumped words and felt that we just had to survive, that all kinds of bullshit about democracy and freedom was tied to our sorry story.

Sometimes I watched him standing against the window with a set jaw and steely eyes and I thought, the fucker thinks he is in a film and everything will end happily before the curtain comes down. And then I watched him in Kapoorsahib’s big office with its polished mahogany tables and plush leather sofas and golfing doodads everywhere, smiling ingratiatingly, making light wheedling talk, trying to discuss different kinds of golf clubs and courses, and I knew he knew that he was only a serf and would have to behave like one if he was to keep this gig alive.

I mostly kept quiet and, to tell the truth, I no longer cared a fuck who took over the magazine, whether it lived or died. It was clear by now that it was never going to make us rich, and the fame it had brought to us had been mostly dubious, fleeting, and inexplicably accompanied by some weird assassination conspiracy crap. The high of the shadows, the 9mms, the carbines, the walkie-talkies, the screeching escort car, had all thinned over the months. Even Dolly/folly’s mother no longer rushed to the window when we went visiting, and the neighbours did not come knocking to discuss national affairs. All my relatives had crawled back into the holes they had leapt out of, and the media calls for random quotes and responses had fully died. The glory of the globe currently belonged to the three crazies who had stuck a javelin up the defence ministry’s tight ass. All the shadows, all the security hardware, all the Z+ security
and so on, were crawling over them, the media trailing them like a cloud of whining mosquitoes. Presumably their relatives were wriggling out of their holes and their mothers-in-law leaping in through the windows.

I had no time for Jai’s save-the-democracy crap. I had done the story because it had fallen into my lap and because I loved the sweet rush of digging out some exciting dirt and plastering it all over the walls. What a reek is produced when the hidden dirt of pompous men is aired! It makes ordinary men’s garbage seem so sweet smelling.

It happened like this. My cousin from the agriculture ministry had passed on some information, then many papers, and then some more. He was a disgruntled bastard, a cantankerous whiner whose career was unsurprisingly in abeyance. He was the perfect station for collecting dirt. The story was about a huge swindle—in subsidies, in grains. Fictitious invoices, fictitious transportation, fictitious handouts to millions of fictitious poor. Rivers of grain had flowed on paper, without a fistful exchanging hands. Ministers and bureaucrats had been colluding with fatcat traders to cream the exchequer of hundreds of crores.

We knew it was not unusual. It was how every government and department accounted for the poor. The pond was full of crocodiles, but we were only concerned with the one we had by the tail, and we were going to drag it out and string it up. We were stupid enough to not know that we had latched on to the biggest and meanest motherfucking mugger of all—the minister for agriculture—and he would take the government down with him if it came down to the line.

When we’d broken the story, making the charges, we were drowned in denials and threats of lawsuits. That was in week one. In
what we thought was a smart move we had divided the story into two editions. The hard evidence, blowing holes in the denials, came in week two, leaving everyone looking really bad, marooned in their dirty underpants. In hindsight the strategy was not very wise. It’s a dumb idea to leave a strong adversary—in this case, adversaries—with no escape route but to blindly hit back. When the crocodile snapped the rope it had nowhere to go but straight at us. With the second issue, the denials immediately turned into rabid countercharges. We were working at the behest of other political parties. We were on the payroll of a dubious business house. We were agents of the enemy, Pakistan. We were trying to destabilize the government, India, the whole fucking universe.

The media printed and repeated everything. They were like the man with a straight pipe for a stomach. Everything came out the asshole as it went in the mouth—unprocessed, undigested, nothing selected, nothing rejected. If required, you could have put it back into the mouth and pushed it out the asshole once more.

Unlike the internet lunatics who hung madly on to their quarry—the defence minister—through all the epic thrashings, our mean mugger flicked its tail out of our hands in no time and turned on us, its crocodile maw opening wider and wider. Who were we anyway? No one had heard of our magazine. No one had heard of me. Why had I done such a story? There had to be a sinister motive—it was only a matter of time before it was uncovered. The threats of lawsuits changed to threats to life and limb. Somewhere, hired assassins began to limber up for their next assignment.