The Story of My Assassins (6 page)

We were both coated in sweat.

Without rolling off her, I shouted, ‘Yes?’

In her diffident tribal accent Felicia said, ‘One Huthyam has come to see you.’

I patted Dolly’s damp forehead and got up, knotting my fallen pajama. When I switched on the bedside lamp she turned over on her side, her cherub nightie still around her dipping waist, her fair slim legs curled up, the dark line of her ass sharp and straight, the yellow light catching the wet shine on it. I threw the sheet over her, straightened my kurta, patted my hair in place, and opened the door.

Coal-dark Felicia, rancid with the sweat pouring out of her body, was waiting right outside. She scuttled away, trailing a broom in her hand. She was terrified of me. We had never exchanged a full sentence.

Huthyam was sitting in the study, in his pointed black shoes and loose bush shirt, caressing
The Naked Lunch
. He had been to the barber recently, for the grey hair was spiky like a mowed lawn and the bushy moustache gleaming black with dye. The pudgy avuncular face was smiling; the eyes hard and still.

He gave me a limp hand and said, in his low voice, ‘Saturday is for the wife and the family and I am sorry to bother you, but you know for the police there is no Saturday or Sunday, no holi or diwali, no winter or summer, no day or night, no wrong or right, no mother or father, no wife or girlfriend.’

I said, ‘Hathi Ramji, you all do great service to the nation.’

He said, ‘Please sir, please don’t mock us! We all know how much water there is in this milk. In fact, the whole world knows. No one trusts the police, no one likes the police. And it is true, were we not such eunuchs the very look of this country would change. But we have to just do what we are told to do. We are meant to
serve the people, but those above us decide how we have to serve them. Sometimes when we are working over a misguided boy in the thana and he is screaming too much, we tell him, “Maaderchod, keep quiet, just remember we are serving you, be grateful.” We do what we are told. We cannot ask why. If we start asking why, there will be a mountain of whys and no police. And that would be worse. Some milk in the water is better than none. At least there is the illusion of it. In our poor houses they put two spoons of milk in a glass of water and the child drinks it as milk and is happy. We are a poor country, and we have to feed ourselves illusions when there is no milk. Don’t be harsh on us. We are only one of our great country’s many illusions. Arre sir, if you look around you’ll see that all of us are basically just merchants of fantasies. Khyali pulao, sut-sut ke khao.’

He said all this without a single inflection, in his low even voice, slapping the two halves of the orange-cream biscuit together like a pair of cymbals, providing accompaniment. Such equanimity could come only from a long and intimate association with violence and injustice. I had seen it only in veteran cops, perhaps doctors and dictators have it too. A meditative calm about the nature of the world, far removed from the exhorting moralities of textbooks and art and media and religion. A zone of functionality not inclined to agitate over the death of the body, not inclined to exalt the body’s sacredness. Men died, evil was done, wrong was often—fairly or unfairly—right, and there was nothing to breast-beat about. You could spend your life thinking about it, or deal with it. In fact, even as one spoke, there was more death and chaos storming in through the door. Flood, earthquake, rape, murder, arson, bomb blasts, calamity, germ, terror. So you set aside the ululations, and simply did your job and went home, and sometimes if you had to work on Saturday, you just got out and did it, banging biscuit halves like cymbals and caressing
The Naked Lunch
.

Huthyam said, ‘You are very safe.’

I nodded.

He said, ‘People like you are very important for the country. It is our job to make sure not a hair on your body is harmed. You are very safe.’

I nodded and waited.

He said, ‘We are going to make you even safer.’

I said, ‘What’s happened?’

He said, ‘All is well, no problems. But we are just increasing your security to the next level.’

I said, ‘Hathi Ramji, don’t treat me like a chutiya. I too am a man of the world. Tell me what’s happening.’

He said, in the same flat tone, ‘There is nothing, sir, that I am hiding from you. All is well. Just that we’ve received orders to up your cover.’

I said, ‘But I thought the boys had been caught.’

He said, ‘Yes, they are with us. We are taking care of them, giving them a good time.’

I said, ‘So who are they? You still haven’t told me anything.’

He said, ‘We are talking to them. Gently, patiently. You know how reluctant guests behave? Always slow to open up, taking their time to feel at home, to start speaking freely and happily? We are giving them a good time, settling them in. Soon they will want to share their whole lives with us.’

I said, ‘So there is nothing at all that you can tell me?’

He said, ‘Nothing. Nothing that I know. Except that you are safe. My job is to keep you safe. The investigation is someone else’s work. They will not tell me anything either. I am a very small nut-bolt in a very big machine. The big machine tells me what to do, I cannot ask it why. For if every nut-bolt like me begins to ask why, there will be a big mountain of whys and no machine.’

I just looked at him—so quiet, so unamused, so apparently sincere—as he delicately stuck the two halves of the biscuit together and placed it deep inside his mouth.

Before the weekend was out I had begun to feel like a drug lord, or more aptly like a political villain in a Hindi film. The category to which I had been upped sounded ominously important. Z. The one man thrilled by it was Vijyant. He said to me, ‘Who knows, they might soon make it Z+!’ For him the pomp of my new situation was unbearably giddy.

Well, from having one plainclothes cop with a 9mm pistol as a shadow I had now acquired a virtual platoon:

Three uniformed bodyguards, cradling mean, perforated carbines.

One middle-aged leader of the pack, black 9mm stuffed into crotch.

One white Ambassador car with a civilian driver.

A small heap of sandbags outside my house.

Another small heap of sandbags outside the office.

Two stationary policemen in uniform behind each, with heavy self-loading rifles.

A spotlight that shone bright on the house gate all night, while leaving the sandbagged policemen in the dark.

A large khaki-olive tent—its mouth always half-open as if in dismay—at the end of the back lane, to which the platoon retired by turns.

Next to it—a sackcloth shower cubicle, that began at a height of one foot and ended at four, held up by four bamboo staves, with a floor of flat, loose bricks, supplied water by a rubber pipe pulled from our backyard and slung around the neem tree.

A big police truck that appeared every few hours and with a great clanging of its tailgate dispensed tea and food to the garrison.

And a few sets of walkie-talkies that crackled gibberish at all hours.

The pack leader and two of the carbine boys travelled in the white Ambassador, tailing me ferociously, as if tied to my fender. The third carbine boy travelled with me in my car, sitting next to me
as I drove, the black carbine cradled across his chest, its short barrel, riddled with little holes, pointing out the windscreen.

At the back, mulling his place in the new scheme of things, sat one of the original shadows. If it was Vijyant, it was with a puffed chest and a new sense of importance; if it was belly or phlegm, with a mousy air and a sense of great diminishment.

Jai said, stroking his beard, ‘They are setting you up! Setting you up! Much too clever. The maaderchods are much too clever! They still haven’t told you a thing about who, what, why—in the meantime they are doing all the right things. Making all the appropriate moves. So when the crap hits the ceiling, they’ll shrug their shoulders and say, Look we did everything to take care of him, to protect him, but if he wants the powder up his nose what can we possibly do!’

My in-laws behaved like Vijyant, luxuriating more in my suddenly acquired stature than worrying about an assassin’s bullet. Sangeeta/Dolly/folly, in her fair-foolish way had no opinion on any of it (except to keep repeating in that horribly solemn tone—Please be careful), but her ugly mother would monitor the platoon as if she were a recruiting agent. Where are they? Are they outside? Have they had tea? Biscuits? Shall we send them something to eat? One of them seems to have changed? What happened to that tall Jat? You have a Bengali among them now! That fellow, that Musalman, he doesn’t look trustworthy—ask for him to be replaced. In the DDA block in which she lived she would inform her neighbours when I was visiting and encourage them to peer out their windows to gawk at the army. A buzz would go around the moment our cars stopped and the shadows jumped out, flashing their hardware. Sometimes she would have some fool from next door in for tea, some middling government officer or company executive who would try and give me his stupid thesis on the state of India and ask me searching
questions about things—politics, religion, stock markets, bureaucracy—which made my acid rise. As the man in the iron mask, I’d give differing nods and they would, anxiously and gratefully, supply the answers themselves.

My mother, of course, only wailed. She would look at me, trailed by guns and uniforms, and start loudly lamenting her fate, my fate, the fate of her forefathers; start begging forgiveness for her misdeeds, my misdeeds, her forefathers’ misdeeds; pledge atonement in this life, the next, and the next. ‘My lord let no harm come to my son—take my life instead.’ If I was not looking she would fall upon the platoon: ‘Even if you have to give up your lives, nothing must happen to him. Promise me! All of you promise me! Promise me now!’ She was insufferable.

My father watched it all, her and me and the ululations, in near silence and with averted eyes. Scared to speak to me; scared to speak to her. He stuck quietly to his dietary regime—no oils, no sugar—and to his morning-evening walks and focused simply on the central concern of his life, his unending struggle with paper. The reading of newspapers and the filing of bank statements and tax returns and insurance papers and postal deposits and telephone bills and water bills and cable TV bills and property papers and loan repayments and recurring deposits and share certificates. A full life of hiding behind papers thrown at him; shuffling them all day like a cardsharp waiting for the tables to fill and the big game to begin. Watching him sitting there, in his beige golf cap, which he’d bought in Nainital from a roadside vendor, reading every line of his two newspapers, he filled me with pity and contempt: the cardsharp whose tables would never fill, whose game would never begin. Once, the shuffled papers had been examination-sheets, job applications, account opening forms, passport applications, bank loan applications, housing applications, leave applications, medical applications, departmental memorandums, governmental communiqués, officers’ instructions, transfer requests, promotion requests, school reports.
A life devoted to the management of paper. Like my father-in-law, a clerk for all occasions. The reality of the shadows—the carbines, the walkie-talkies, the pistols—was not something he could easily comprehend. Had the security detail come as a three-page memo, with a formal number to it, some gibberish code of alphabets and numerals, he would have instantly absorbed it and asked me a few questions.

My relatives, of course, thought I’d become the prime minister. They crawled out of every sad hole to phone us, visit us, invite us—people I had not heard from in years, some whose names barely rang a bell, cousins from my father’s side, mother’s side, uncles, aunts, old friends of the family, from parts of Delhi I had never visited, some from places which I had never even heard of. Typically the phone would ring when I was in the middle of a meeting and an energetic unknown voice would exclaim, ‘Oye, we saw you on TV last night! You were looking django! What fun it was! We told everyone! So tell us when are you coming over for dinner? And where’s masiji?’ Worse still were the older lot, who launched into a litany of concern and blessings: ‘You must take care. Don’t go out in the night. Don’t trust anyone. You can’t trust anyone these days. These are very dangerous people. They can do anything. But remember god is with you. Guru Nanak said those the lord picks to protect, nothing in the world can kill. I am going to go to our Santji and get a protective ring for you. Once you start wearing it you won’t need any guard-shards. And when did you grow a moustache?’

When did I grow a moustache? In the thirty years you haven’t seen me.

Soon enough, I had to corner each of the three women individually—mother, mother-in-law and Dolly/folly—and terrorize them into not accepting any invites or inviting anyone home. I did not want to see anyone, or talk to anyone, even on the phone. They were free to go and meet whom they pleased. Dolly/folly looked chastened and compliant, the mother-in-law sullen and swollen, and
Mother let loose a blood-curdling wail. I wanted to bang her head against the wall.

All her life Mother had chanted the Bhagavad Gita every morning, loud and long, not understanding a word of it. Sitting in her gaudy puja corner, surrounded by gods in brass and silver and cheap framed prints in lurid colours, she’d let rip early every morning, after a bath, before a single defiling sip of water had travelled down her gullet. Sitting cross-legged on her prayer mat, her head covered with a dupatta, she’d rock back and forth chanting raucously, the Gita Press hardbound edition from Gorakhpur lying open on a walnut-wood stand in front of her, the cotton wick dipped in thick mustard oil burning strong, and vapours of sharply sweet incense curling about, completing the hokum aspect. When she was done—hitting a crescendo of shouted-out exclamations to the gods—she’d mark her page with an old peacock feather and devoutly wrap the book in a red satin cloth. Eighteen days into the cycle, when she got to chapter 18, the end—Om Tat Sat!—she’d start over. Again and again. Month on month. Year on year. And never understanding a word of it: ‘To protect the righteous and to destroy the sinners and to establish dharma, I manifest myself from yuga to yuga. O Arjuna! He who thus knows the nature of my divine birth and action, he is not born again when he dies, but attains me. Many, purified through the meditation of knowledge, have immersed themselves in me and sought refuge in me, discarding attachment, fear and anger.’