The Story of My Assassins (38 page)

It was Kaaliya—dark as night, skin shining like glass, a stud glinting in his left ear—who took the weeping boy home that evening, to be assessed by their chieftain. Kaaliya, Chhotu, Makhi Khan, Gudiya, Tarjan, all stood around while Dhaka, squatting at the entrance of their house, pulling on an unfiltered cigarette, took stock with slow scanning eyes.

Around Dhaka’s stringy neck hung an assortment of beads and pendants—an ivory piece shaped like a claw, a rudraksha mala, a silver chain, a couple of necklaces of coloured seeds. They were all of varying lengths and filled the wide open vee of his big-collared shirt. On his wrists he wore red-and-blue wrist bands of the kind used by racquet players and basketballers. Whenever his cigarette was in his mouth, his hands repeatedly ripped and stuck the Velcro of the bands with a satisfying chirring sound. On his left upper arm, under his short-sleeved shirt, could be glimpsed an aluminium tabeez, tightly worn on a black string. There was faint stubble on the boy’s darker-than-Kaaliya skin and it was tough to tell his age—anything between sixteen and twenty-six. The body was thin but muscled; the eyes full of experience and pose. His jeans were tight on his matchstick legs, and as he squatted they rode up over his ankles to reveal black leather boots with a glint of iron at the toes. The blue jeans were grimy like the shirt but the army boots had the gleam of a fresh rub. Washing clothes was an undertaking; getting the shoe-shine boys to spruce up his leather every day was easy.

The weeping boy from the train had run dry of tears by now, but the fear inside him intensified as he looked at the squatting man-boy assessing him with menacing eyes. He noticed that none of the others who had accompanied him here was saying a word. Where in heavens had his uncle gone? His uncle whom he loved so much? His uncle who had come one night and taken him away when his mother did not return at the end of the day. His uncle who had said
he would take care of him always. Maybe this squatting man knew about these things. Maybe he would know where his uncle was.

The man-boy got to the end of his cigarette, and lifting the tip of his right foot and placing the stub under it, killed its burn with a deliberate twist. Then in a mocking voice he said, ‘Who found him?’ Kaaliya raised his hand. ‘What will you bring in next, chutiya? A hubshi from Africa!’ Everyone tittered, including Kaaliya.

Looking at the little boy, the squatting leader said, ‘Do you know your name, son?’ The boy’s narrow eyes pooled with tears. Kaaliya leaned into him and said with gestures, ‘Naam? Name? My name is Kaaliya. Kaaliya the snakeman. What’s yours?’ In a barely audible voice the boy said, ‘Lhungdim.’ The squatting leader said, ‘Aladdin!’ Then turning to Kaaliya, he spat, ‘And I suppose the djinns are also on their way!’ Everyone tittered.

The little boy said again, softly, ‘Lhungdim.’

Standing up now, the leader stretched and clicked his heels together. Then, putting out both hands, he slowly traced the little boy’s slit eyes, his pug nose, and his small thin mouth with his forefingers. ‘Listen Aladdin, from this day on your name is Chini. Get it, Chini! Because that’s what you are, a Chini! Kaaliya will take you now to the waiting room and show you the mirror. And when you look into it, you will see who you are: a Chini! Just like Kaaliya is a kallu! What do you say, Kaaliya? Calling yourself Aladdin doesn’t mean you become an Arabi sheikh, otherwise Kaaliya would call himself Victoria No 203 and become an angrez. The world is full of chutiyas who give themselves grand names imagining that this will make them grand, not realizing that we are only what our skin is and what our stupid faces are!’

The little boy’s throat was a big lump. Throwing his head back, the leader now glanced to his left and said, ‘Arre o Kaaliya, what is my name?’ Kaaliya said, ‘Dhaka, boss.’ The leader said, ‘Dhaka! Did you hear him? My name is Dhaka because my maaderchod father fucked my mother in Dhaka, and then threw her and me out into
this country! And all my life since then, every day for the last twelve years, I have lived here, right here, but I am still Dhaka! Not Paharganj, not Delhi, not India, but Dhaka! It’s our skin and our stupid faces! Nothing can change them! No names, no addresses! So just forget about all these wild fantasies of Aladdin and his magic lamp! You are a Chini! You were born a Chini and you will die a Chini! Think of it this way, I am from under the armpit of this chutiya country, you at least came from on top of its head!’

The boy looked on with uncomprehending, terrified eyes.

The leader said, ‘What? You don’t know any Hindi? Of course you wouldn’t! You are a behanchod Chini! But don’t worry, we’ll teach you Hindi in no time. We’ll teach you many things that no one in China knows anything about. You are going to be okay, little boy, so stop crying. And thank your bloody gods that you are from China and not from London, otherwise we would have called you Lund, and then you would have known what real trouble is!’

Everyone laughed, and Kaaliya clutched the crotch of his dirty short pants and sang, ‘Naam nahin to kaam nahin. Lund nahin to thand nahin.’

The name is the game. The dick, the picnic.

For several months Dhaka did not lay a finger on the little boy. His troops were instructed to break him in, to take care of his needs, and to equip him with enough Hindi to work the carriages. He knew from experience that new entrants needed some time to claw out of the deep hole their minds and memories were trapped in. Blinded inside their own dark hole of grief and memory, they were incapable of even understanding self-interest. They could easily hurt themselves. Once they had crawled out, once they could again see the light and feel the air, once they had again tasted pleasure and laughter, then they were animals who could be trained, who could
calculate the equations of profit and loss, of reward and punishment, who could be full members of the tribe, to do what needed to be done and be done to, in the ways that they were needed to be done.

Dhaka did not think this Chini boy, even though he had no Hindi and had such soft fair skin, would take unusually long to arrive at the point of existential equilibrium where there is no future and no past, just the moment and the day, the immediate exertion and the immediate fruit. In those first weeks the only thing Dhaka did himself was to take the Chini to the no man’s zone beyond platform six to introduce him to the baba whose solutions, each night, collapsed the future and the past into a magical present. In the leader’s experience the crucial thing was that the boy seemed no more than six or seven—the smaller the memory bank the sooner the animal learnt to celebrate the virtues of the immediate.

The only anxiety was that he might be purloined. A fine delicacy had been delivered to his doorstep; Dhaka did not want to wage war to retain it. Instructions were spelled out. Chini was never to be left alone. Not while eating, crapping, sleeping. He was not to be put to work yet. His tears were to be swiftly dried, his smile reclaimed and pasted back. He was to be kept out of sight of the Bihari gang from near the shunting yards, and not brought to the notice of the beat constables. As for the madamji who came from the hospice, her saree tucked hard into her waist, to suck children out into their centre—not a word was to reach her ears about this fair new flower that had bloomed in this squalor. His primary keeper was to be Kaaliya, who had first found him, and who was fully capable of managing him. Kaaliya was to guard him and cosset him, give him the best morsels, the occasional bottle of cola, the softer bed.

Kaaliya was a dodger and a scrapper, to the task born. Like the snakes his forefathers had mastered for generations, he could wriggle and
he could strike. His first conscious memory, from the time he was three, was the feel of a rat snake slithering through his hands. For the toddler, shaking a serpent by its head was like waving a rattle. It was the way of his people, to let the harmless ones flow through their huts and tents, their clothes and bedding, their pots and pans, their sons and daughters. In winter, many of their folk slept with their snakes in their patchwork quilts, their fat fullness as reassuring as a mother’s touch. The more lethal ones were kept apart, in a corner, in wicker baskets, lightly weighted down.

Before he learnt to walk, Kaaliya knew that in these baskets slept the reigning deity of their lives—the flared black one whose mesmeric swaying sustained his people and their wanderings. The world was full of serpents, but there was only one that was god, only one that had an equal measure of beauty, grace, rhythm and venom. No roadside trickster’s sleight-of-hand, no prestidigitator’s cheap illusions, no gambolling acrobat’s twists of limb could match the magic of Lord Shiva’s favourite as it rose to its striking stance and began to slowly sway, its sinuous head flared, its forked tongue darting. No sight in nature, no thunder, no cloudburst, no lightning, no storm, no gale, no hail, no flood, no fury, could stun the heart and fire the imagination like the dance of the divine killer. Loved by the gods, dreaded by men, for more than a thousand years, the dark dancing one had kept his nomadic people alive, travelling with them in their woven baskets, garnering for them food and sustenance, lending to them its own fearsome and celestial aura. Every hut in the cluster had its own embodiment of this deity, and each family treated it with reverence and care. For the deity gave, but could also take away.

Naag. Cobra. The very sound of its name stilled the heart and fired the mind.

Kaaliya knew his own name was a reminder of the power and magic of the black one. In high winter its basket slept under the patchwork quilt of his parents; and it was the one basket that always travelled with his father and uncles when they stepped outside the
house. There were other coiled killers in the baskets, like the jack-in-the-box jalebia, darting to strike, its viper’s sac heavy with death, but none of them were gifted with either majesty or myth. On the road they were a quick preamble before the pungi began to sing and the real show of the black lord commenced.

In the far corner, most often in the sun, there lay the muscular weight of the dozing python. This one was a bad deal: back-breaking to carry, incapable of turning a trick, with an appetite for chickens that was bankrupting, and impossible to hide or make a run with if a khaki or moral policeman suddenly appeared. Its size had an initial gasp-value but in no time at all the beast’s sluggishness and lack of malice leached it of all excitement. Many huts, in fact, no longer kept the big one.

Times had changed and the followers of the timeless Baba Gorakhnath had fallen foul of democracy and modernity. New leaders, new laws, new fads had decreed that animals were more important than men, and that men who studied in colleges and wore pants and shirts and shoes knew more about being kind to animals than the men whose very lives and genes were entwined with the beasts. Had one of the men who pronounced these fiats ever slept with a serpent in their bed? Had one of them ever sliced strips of meat and lovingly fed them down a reptile’s gullet? Had one of them ever changed the soiled clothes in their baskets, and bought them chicks and eggs with scarce money? Had one of them ever wandered the world with no one else as kinsman—no wife, no child, no parent—but the coiled one?

As they travelled through the burning plains of Gujarat and Rajasthan, the waving green fields of Punjab and Haryana, the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in search of a new town and clientele, seeking a vacant lot and an ancient tree under which to set up their tortoise-like tents of bamboo sticks and tarpaulin, little Kaaliya became aware of the cursed life that was their lot. This large, wide world had no place for them, and wherever they went—Kaaliya
riding on the back of the donkey, the cow, his uncles, older siblings—they were unwelcome. Everywhere there was a landlord or a policeman to shoo them away, everywhere he saw his father and uncles beg and plead for a stretch of field where they could set up camp.

At such a time they were not the proud charmers of the dreaded black one, dressed in their resplendent saffron tehmat-kurtas, their regal turbans flashing their tails, their smooth voluptuous pungis issuing a music that identified them as unique in the universe; at such a time they were abject men, in soiled sweaty clothing, itinerant beggars, squatting on their haunches, their hands folded in supplication, asking for a temporary patch of the earth that no one was any more willing to give.

In the evenings, while the women and children and whippets idled about the wood fires and tortoise tents, the men smoked ganja and charas, drank any kind of alcohol they could lay their hands on, and talked up stirring stories of their past.

The story that never wore thin, the story a listener never forgot, was about the thirty-foot king cobra they had tracked thirty-five years ago in the dense jungles of Assam, ten of them for forty days, walking in tandem, working in tandem, pursuing a beast that had terrified entire villages and even felled wild elephants with the lash of its venom. It was said the very sight of the monster transfixed grown men and turned their bowels to water. This monarch of all snakes killed by rearing up to more than six feet—its swaying hood the size of four handspans, its forked tongue shredding the air at blistering speed—and striking between the eyes. It was said that most men were dead before their bodies hit the ground. Those who escaped the bite fell into a state of delirium for weeks, convulsed by the memory of the giant reptile. Every attempt to capture it had floundered. Hunting squads by the villagers, a contingent of the local police, rangers from the far-off rhino sanctuary, and even a platoon requisitioned from the army. Though gigantic, the beast moved like the wind, a blur of black, and it was gone.

On several occasions a volley of firing had convinced the trackers that they had their quarry, but it was as if its shining skin were armour and bullets glanced off it. And then some days later it was there again on a forest path, and a fresh body to be carried out. It was said the bodies were blue like deep water by the time they were brought back to the village. Finally word was sent to the great charmers of the north, and ten of them set forth, travelling by train and bus and jeep and cart for weeks. Kaaliya’s father was the youngest, a mere sixteen, under instructions to always follow the lead. The oldest, over sixty, was a man they called Guru Bijli Nath. He had been given the moniker Bijli, lightning, before he was ten. It was said he was the greatest snake-catcher of his age. Small and sinewy, he was quick as lightning and as blinding. No serpent could escape his hands, and he had a hypnotic gaze that immobilized any snake that looked at him. One walk in the forest after the rains and he would come back with a sackful of serpents that he emptied out in the middle of the settlement, allowing everyone to take their pick. By the time he was thirty he had travelled far and wide—Burma, Borneo, Afghanistan, Iran, Ceylon, Indonesia, Japan—and been christened Guru. If there was anyone who could stop this black demon, this king of serpents, it was Guru Bijli Nath.