The Story of My Assassins (40 page)

But Kaaliya knew there was another way. When he was eight, and they were camped outside a big town full of famous buildings and minarets, one evening there had been a sudden visitor who had created commotion in the group. He was dark like one of them but so beautifully turned out as to almost seem fair. The red shirt, the
grey trousers, the shining black shoes, the oiled hair combed across the forehead, the gleaming gold-coloured watch on the wrist, and most dazzling of all, the ringing laughter and the smiling, confident manner.

Kaaliya and the other children had watched mesmerized from their tents as the young man sat amid the elders, regaling them with stories and talking to them as more than an equal. He was Shambhu Nath’s second son who had fled the fold as a twelve-year-old and gone to the great metropolis of Delhi to find his fortune. Now he worked in an office that printed a famous paper, and his job was to rush around the city on a motor scooter, carrying important messages. He said he was called a Rider, and the outcome of many key events depended on his speed and reliability. Now he narrated ribald stories of the kind of cars the sahibs in his office had, and the things they did in them. The awed and amused charmers said, ‘Arre saale Rider, at least we keep our snakes in baskets, these sahibs of yours carry them around inside their pants!’ Rider, pulling on a cigarette, laughed, ‘Theirs are not like ours, tau. Theirs are small—like a jalebia!’

Kaaliya dreamt of becoming the Rider, tearing around on motor scooters, wearing pants and red shirts, delivering crucial messages, and watching the sahibs in big cars taking out their small jalebias to give to the fair memsahibs. Rider said in Delhi there were joys and pleasures they could not imagine. Sweet-smelling restaurants and cool cinema halls and big shops with glittering wares and beautiful women clogging the streets and parks like paintings and buildings of glass and the amazing Qutub Minar, without a doubt the biggest jalebia in the world. For the rest of his life Kaaliya thought of the great minaret as a giant saw-scaled viper, head pointing into the sky.

That summer day in a small town in Rajasthan, in the searing heat of afternoon, when his thwarted father—with not ten rupees to show for hours of blowing and scraping—began to mercilessly thrash him, Kaaliya was filled with a black rage that knew no limits.
All morning at the top of his small voice he had canvassed the snakes, all morning he had held out his small hands seeking a hard coin, all morning he had felt thirst and hunger claw his insides, all morning he had seen men and women go about their lives asking for nothing, and with every passing moment he had known that his father’s life could not be his. And when his father began to beat him, even banging the voluptuous pungi on his back, he knew he was running away from there. He was going to Delhi; he was going to be the Rider.

Spitting on his father, he tore away from his grip, and as the miserable charmer fell into the sleep of hashish, the little boy ran and ran, the blood pounding in his head. At the station a train was waiting for him and it left the moment he was on board. It took him three days, many queries, and three different trains to reach Delhi, where Dhaka was waiting for him—the black face in the compartment—as Kaaliya wept with fear like Chini would many years later, struck with terror at seeing so many people, so much bustle, so much noise, so many trains.

The charmer’s angry little son never became a Rider, nor did he see rich sahibs in fancy cars showing their little jalebias to fair memsahibs, nor did he for many many years visit a fancy eatery or go to see the biggest jalebia in the world, the Qutub Minar, but he did take to the freedom of the platforms and tracks with a wild exuberance. He turned out an alley cat, snarling, spitting, scratching, biting, forcing respect out of others. He never begged for anything. He always demanded, stole, negotiated, cheated. If he ever came up against a tougher adversary, he located a harmless snake from the Paharganj alleys, and swiftly restored the balance of terror. He never thought of his family and the misery of those nomadic days, but every night when he soaked his rag in Shiva’s prasad and stuck it under his nose he only heard one sound—the haunting, beckoning whine of the
pungi—and saw just the one image, the flaring head of the black king as it rose above the rainforests of Assam, filling the sky and striking awe into the world.

When Dhaka’s mentor Bham Bihari died some years later—many bottles of solution delivering him to eternally juicy green paddy fields—Dhaka became the keeper of his iron trident, the undisputed leader of the gang, and Kaaliya became his chosen henchman. Between Dhaka’s violence and Kaaliya’s cunning their gang never lacked for food or the solution. Only once did the snakeboy feel a pang when he saw a group of weather-beaten charmers alight from a train, their turbans soiled, their clothes frayed, their earrings dulled, their juttis torn, their eyes vacant, carrying little children, baskets of coiled serpents, bulging pungis, bundles of pots and pans, and remaining rags. And yet his instinct was to hide: among them could be someone who once knew him. But the group was sightless with misery, moving inside its own cocoon of aches.

Kaaliya liked Chini from the moment he saw him. He was so different from the rest of them with his smooth fair skin, his small long-lashed eyes, his lovely straight hair. A great maternal urge rose in him. This flower was not to be sullied by all the gutter rats around; this one was to be cherished and nurtured.

With Dhaka feeling the same way, Kaaliya took the little boy into his embrace, gently initiating him into their subterranean way of life, tutoring him in the deep joys of the solution, and earning his loyalty and love by telling him fascinating stories of the coiled ones—the spitters and the strikers, the two-faced and the hooded, the poisonous and the pliant.

The one story little Chini demanded to hear again and again was the tale from his part of the universe—of the great black king. Each time the peerless beast rose to its full striking height in the
clearing of the rainforest and locked eyes with the greatest snake-catcher of his time, the excitement in the boy became so great that he had to clutch his penis to stop himself from peeing.

S
ince the rains had not yet let up, Chini’s first abode was above platform three, beneath the overbridge, wedged snugly between Kaaliya and Makhi Khan. At this point the corrugated iron roof sloped in gently from opposite directions, creating a lovely alcove that was secure and dry except during the worst storms. The breeze wafted in from both ends, day and night, and it was wonderful to lie there and watch the never-ceasing drama of travellers on the platform. It took him a few days to get used to fitting his body into the corrugations and to sleeping at an incline, but once he did, the comfort was complete. It also helped that the roof of their bedroom was only a few feet above their heads and resounded with the reassuring thump of human feet every minute of the waking-sleeping day.

This allowed them to play one of their favourite gambles: Madhuri. Mostly it fell to Gudiya to stand on the high point just outside the opening, peer onto the overbridge, and yell out the results. The wager was to intuit when Madhuri Dixit—Bombay cinema’s reigning queen and everyone’s fantasy—was right on top of them. Periodically a boy would shout Madhuri! and if Gudiya confirmed that at that very moment a beautiful woman had indeed walked over them, the others had to fork out a rupee each. There was an unspoken consensus on who qualified as Madhuri: any woman in jeans or trousers; fair women in churidar-kameez who had some make-up on, especially bright lipstick; newly married ones, in sarees
with their glittering earrings and bangles and their freshly fucked aura. Dark skin was an instant disqualification. On days when something important was brewing at the station—a ceremonial function, a movement of VIPs—and the round-caps and khakis were out in a brutal mood, the boys would lie out of sight under the overbridge, playing Madhuri for hours. Ten per cent of the winnings went to Gudiya, and when Dhaka returned to his fold at night he would ask, ‘Who did Madhuri how many times today?’

A week after his arrival there was a raging monsoon storm. Rain lashed their quarters mercilessly and lightning ripped open the skies. Chini went down with the rest of the gang to sleep above the juicewala’s kiosk on the platform. Away from the screaming elements it was a cosy and secure perch, but Chini hated being there. A scooped-out space with tiny parapets, the juicewala’s roof was dirty and musty, and the old newspapers they laid out under themselves crumpled and tore as they tossed and turned. Worse still was the flatness of the roof: without an incline, without corrugations, it was difficult to fit one’s body into a comfortable position. And then there was that degraded feeling of being part of the platform, in the middle of the foolish swirl of passengers and vendors, their arguments and complaints, their hustling and screams. All through the night, right under them, they could hear people fighting over the price of bananas and oranges, juices and shakes. One unrelenting fair-price seeker was scared witless by an exasperated Dhaka who leaned his face out of the dark roof, and barked, ‘Come up here, fucker! I’ll give you a big banana for free!’

The juicewala, Ashok—Shoki—didn’t mind. He hated asshole customers who behaved as though they were buying not an apple but the Kohinoor. The boys were his friends and allies; there was honour between them. They never stole from his shop and when they brought in fruits purloined or recovered from the trains he shined them up with an old rag, assessed their condition generously, and paid them fair and square.

Shoki was also their banker. Every night, before repairing to their rooftop, each one of them made their deposits at the shop. Shoki made his entries in a minuscule script in the school notebook that he kept above the juicer-mixer-grinder. Except for one boy, MD, no one could read with any facility. And MD too never dared ask to see the accounts. Shoki had a cluster of framed prints of the gods—Lakshmi, Shiva, Krishna, Hanuman, Santoshi Mata—in a tiny wooden alcove, and there were always incense sticks curling sweet smoke in their beatific faces. Pointing to the pantheon, he would say to new boys, ‘If I decided to cheat your skinny ass you wouldn’t know in seven lifetimes, but I have to make my final reckoning with them, and that’s what I worry about!’

Shoki took twenty per cent as his banking charges, and if by any chance any of the boys were picked up by the round-caps or the khakis, he used their deposits to secure a release. There were a few boys on platforms five and six whose past was not a complete black hole. Living on the station was a career choice. There was one from Faizabad and another from Bijnor who had been there nearly ten years. These boys collected a wad from Shoki every few months to give to their families. They were never away for more than a few days. For one, they hated their homes and craved the freedom, the solution, the easy pleasures of the platform. For another, their domains could easily be annexed by new wayfarers. As Dhaka often said, ‘A station boy’s life is as fast as the trains. It’s gone before you know it!’

It was true. Boys vanished routinely. The really tough ones were recruited by the criminal syndicates and dispatched to different parts of the country; some fell foul of the khakis and were condemned to reformatories, and others just suddenly died, their bodies discovered the next morning, killed by accident, drug, gang rivalry, or sexual abuse. If a boy was confirmed dead, Shoki transacted some sort of settlement with his closest buddies and closed the account; if a boy just went missing Shoki kept the page alive, often for years, till the
entire ecosystem on the platform had changed, till no one retained a memory of the boy any more. Shoki made more money as a banker than as a fruit-seller.

It was the reason he tried to teach his son, Kishen, some respect for the boys. But Kishen, who had studied in a decent school in Rajinder Nagar and even done three years of college, was a fool. He had wasted six years studying and appearing for the civil services, logging up tuition expenses of tens of thousands of rupees. He had wanted to be a police or administrative officer. But Shoki knew his blood-line—the fucker didn’t have the wits to be a clerk. Now at twenty-eight, washed up and desperate, he was laying claim to the juice shop. Shoki was okay with that, but Kishen spoke badly to the boys, and Shoki could see the boys doubted his honesty—they always looked at Shoki while handing over their money to his son. Shoki was fifty-three years old and had spent thirty-four years on the platform. He knew nothing was permanent. Big empires died, big companies died, big men died, every train eventually departed. His favourite cliché was, ‘Arre, when Gandhi-Nehru have vanished, who the fuck are we!’ He knew the boys could easily shift their business to one of the other bankers on the platforms—to Gulab, the smiling aaloo-puri vendor at the end of platform four who had lost ground because of his cash credibility; to Malhotra of the bookstall, who pulled out cellophane-wrapped pornography from under the self-help books, but whose cunning eyes forestalled trust. The boys could easily shift to them, and then his idiot son would have to shove a fucking banana and an apple down the throat of every single man who got on and off every train in order to merely survive!

Chini opened his account with Shoki by walking off with a red leather ladies’ handbag from the two-tier A/C sleeper of a train about to leave for Patna.

His face scrubbed and shining, he was escorted into the bogey by Kaaliya, who sat him down at the edge of a berth beside a young mother struggling with three children. Then the dark-skinned son of timeless charmers went out onto the platform and stationed himself outside the window through which he could see the harassed mother jousting with her bawling brats. When the first preparatory tremor shook the iron, Kaaliya thrust his ugly mug in the window, bulging his red eyes and baring his teeth. The three kids gawped through the glass like animals in a zoo. As the train shook itself several times in quick succession, loosening its sinews to take off, Kaaliya pulled out a short fat domukhi from his sack and pressed it against the sullied glass. The children fell back in one motion, screaming. The mother leapt on them, gathering them in her safe arms, shouting voicelessly at the horrible black boy to go away. The train took its first step with a deep shudder. It merged with the shivers coursing through the family of four. The black boy and the fat snake on the glass moved alongside too. The train clicked its limbs more smoothly now as the mother put her hand over the eyes of the youngest to shut out the horror in the window. Soon the nightmare had passed, and there were only the bare buttocks of defecators lining the speeding vista.