The Story of My Assassins (62 page)

A dour balding man appeared at the half-open door and handed over two glasses of tea without stepping in. Dubeyji slurped his down with noisy relish. Then he sniffed his moustache loudly and resumed: ‘After Sulaiman and Qayoom Ali left, this Tyagi boy stayed on for another week. It’s not clear why—but most probably it was to prepare the plan for bringing the weapons across. What we do know is that he did not step out of Sher Singh Thapa’s house during his entire stay in Kathmandu. He did not go out sightseeing, he did not visit any temples, he did not go to any hotel, restaurant, or red-light area. A local man, known to us only as Naik—probably a former army man—did visit him a few times. We suspect he is the one who organized the delivery of arms across the border.’

He now stood up, placed his left foot on his right knee, clasped his hands above his head, closed his eyes, and stretched. He didn’t look like Shiva. He just looked like a crackpot government officer. When he sat down again he said, ‘If you take bribes at the traffic light all your limbs are exercised. But sitting in this hole you have to teach yourself simple asanas to keep the circulation going.’ He needed to meet Guruji upside down and have his moustache stuffed up his nose.

‘Soon after the deal was settled in Kathmandu the other four men were contacted. It’s still not clear who contacted them—they all give typically vague accounts. Someone called Aloo or Gobhi or
Supari or Sandesh called them and asked them to report for an assignment. Of course they don’t know the real names of any of the men who called! Does Chini expect anyone to know his real name? He doesn’t know it himself. Interestingly, none of them named Hathoda Tyagi as the person who first contacted them. Each of them said when they found out that they would have to work with him on this job they felt both honoured and terrified.’

I said, ‘Did they know the job they were being hired for?’

‘Well, they all claim they did not know it was a killing. According to them, it was to assist in a jewellery shop heist. They are all lying. The men were picked with care and for specific tasks. Kabir, the Musalman, was to be the driver; he was to lift the vehicle they would use for the hit, and lift another for the escape. Chaaku was the man who knew Delhi and was going to navigate them in and out. And those two druggies, Kaaliya and Chini, were to be the back-up hitmen. Once the hit was made, they were to split up. The Musalman would lift a small Maruti, and Hathoda Tyagi and he would melt into the badlands of Meerut and Muzaffarnagar. The druggies would go to the railway station and catch a train to somewhere far away and stay away for some weeks or months. For Chaaku there was no real problem—he would smoothly retreat into the armpits of his political patrons. And you would go to the cremation ground and from there straight to Indralok, where apsaras would be waiting to dance the bharatanatyam for you.’

I looked at him grinning, and I thought maybe his moustache is false and I should pull it off and make him real. I said, ‘What happened then?’

He said, ‘What always does—man proposes, god disposes. But that comes later. First, we know for sure that in the beginning of April they all met at the outskirts of Gorakhpur in a house owned by a local trader-cum-smuggler-cum-politician called Panditji. The house is surrounded by fields and the rail tracks run through it—and they say many trains slow down in that stretch to allow men and
material to be loaded and unloaded. We cannot arrest Panditji because the house is benami and the land is benami. If we start running down that road we won’t be back for ten years, by which time your killers will have grown old and died anyway.’

I said, ‘This Panditji was part of the plot?’

He twitched his rodent nose and grinned. ‘No no, in this case we think he was only a hotelier, providing a place for them to have their conference. Like fine businessmen, criminals also need convention centres. Panditji’s is one of the best in eastern UP. Many national and international summits on murder, smuggling and narcotics are held there. Impossible to get a booking unless you know the owner, or know someone who knows the owner. And we can’t arrest him because it is all benami, and if we go down that road we won’t be back for ten years.’

I said, ‘The government provides you all dialogue writers?’

He said, ‘Dialogue-writers?’

I said, ‘Then what happened?’

He said, ‘Soon after, the Musalman—Kabir—left with the two druggies for Patna and they came back some days later with a stolen Sumo. Over the next week Panditji’s men from the city came and turned the white skin of the Sumo black, changed its numbers, and welded a five-inch deep and four-foot-long steel container under the rear seats. Only one AK-56, two AK-47s and four pistols were tucked in there. The rest of Sulaiman and Qayoom Ali’s cache was left behind with Panditji. Chaaku—the political man—had come there with nice pictures of you—from some newspaper or magazine. He also had a map of your colony, with your house number circled nicely with a green sketch pen. We recovered all these things from them. The plan was first to stop on the outskirts of Delhi, in Ghaziabad, and leave the Sumo there. Then to undertake a survey of your colony. They did so. Only three of them came to your colony, in an auto-rickshaw, and walked past your house and around it. Chaaku, the Musalman and Hathoda Tyagi. Do you have a dog that limps?’

I felt my bowels turn to water and my legs lose all strength. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, they played with it and fed it biscuits. Two days later, when they came for a second survey, Hathoda Tyagi brought your dog some meat and rotis. Then something, it seems, went wrong for a bit. There was some dispute. The strike was first planned for 6 May, then 9 May, and finally it was set for 14 May. We know this because the secret branch of Delhi Police had a tap on one of their mobile phones, on Chaaku’s. He too, it seems, had three phones—but they had the number he was using for this hit job. By the way, the police was already covering you by then—from 4 May itself. Did you get to know at all?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’

Without standing up he struck his mudra again, curving his hands above his head and clasping them and stretching his whole body. ‘More than twenty men! More than twenty policemen were working around the clock to save you! Do you think anyone will give them credit? If you had banged into a pig on the Ring Road and hurt yourself and the pig, everyone would have accused the police of not doing its job, of taking bribes, of destroying the country. Tell me, what can the police possibly do if you and a pig collide? But when they risk their lives to save you from five killers, they get not a word of appreciation from anyone.’

I tried to look solemn. The armpits of his cream shirt had big sweat scallops.

He put his arms down and rotated his shoulders. ‘On the morning of 14 May, at 7 a.m., a traffic policeman stationed at the traffic lights near Ghazipur stopped a white Sumo entering Delhi, to check the licence papers. He insisted that the Musalman step out and show him the papers. Twenty men, most of them from the secret branch, in five vehicles, were stationed all around. All of them were fully armed and none of them was in uniform. The moment the spotter confirmed it was Hathoda Tyagi and his men, two Gypsys banged
themselves in front of and behind the Sumo and the traffic policeman grabbed the Musalman. Everything was over in ten minutes. The two druggies and Chaaku protested their innocence, insisting they had just hitched a ride from Ghaziabad. The other two, the Musalman and the killer, said nothing. And that’s how it has remained. Those two never said a thing ever, and the other three have kept spinning out new accounts every day. In the prison, it seems, they have all gone back to type. The druggies, Chini and Kaaliya, are already a leading part of the prison drug mafia; they appear to be happy; they play carrom and table tennis and hang together all the time. Hathoda Tyagi is a complete loner but is feared by everyone; even the mafia does not provoke him; and it seems he sometimes protects some of the weaker prisoners. Chaaku’s contacts ensure he lives well; money, food, cigarettes, even whisky, are made available to him; the warders treat him with care. The Musalman is the strangest. He knows some English and helps the prisoners in drafting their applications. But mostly he works quietly in the carpentry unit and chisels little wooden choozas all day—there are enough there now to open a full poultry farm.’

He paused for a moment, then said, ‘But they are all third-rate bastards. Gutter insects.’

I said, ‘But who wanted me killed? What does your chargesheet say?’

He said, ‘Pakistan.’

I said, ‘Pakistan.’

He said, ‘The ISI. You know, their secret agency. More powerful than their politicians, more powerful than their prime minister, more powerful than their army. It looks after their national interest. It understands what is national interest. Not like us here—chained dogs that any minor government officer can kick! If we had the powers they have, we could clean up this miserable country. Get rid of every traitor, get rid of all the dogs, like the men who took a contract to kill you.’

And make every window a slim slit impossible to use for suicide, and put up a maze of plywood partitions everywhere so everyone can spend their lives opening and closing doors without arriving anywhere, and give everyone a bushy false moustache to wag at each other.

I said, ‘But why?’

He said, ‘To destabilize our government. Our country. Create chaos.’

I thought of Jai and the geopolitical oration he would have conjured out of this.

I said, ‘No. Really. Why?’

He said, all trace of lightness gone from his voice, his moustache still and spiky, ‘The enemy is cunning, motivated, relentless, and ruthless.’ He was speaking mostly in Hindi now—anger had leached all English niceties out of him. ‘He seizes every opportunity to strike. Because he cannot kill us with a single lunge, he wants to bleed us from a thousand wounds. Those other idiots, with their spy cameras, who messed around in the defence ministry, there is a contract out on them too. By whom? Yes, you guessed it right! And why? Yes, you guessed it right again! All of you—the people of my great country—live in a dream of innocence. And all the while, as you foolishly watch cinema and cricket, as you drink and smoke and eat and sleep, the enemy is hard at work, severing our arteries, slicing our muscles, injecting poison into our flesh, planting explosives under our feet, hollowing us for collapse. You all—I don’t mean you specifically, but your breed—fill the newspapers with so much dung that no one can ever see the true picture. Even when a bomb goes off right under our buttocks we think it is the high note of a Hindi film song. I can tell you the enemy is thrilled with us. He can hardly believe how stupid we are. Hindustan, bada mahaan, mooh mein beedi, haath mein paan.’

Somebody needed to rush him to the nearest multiplex, sit him down in front of a manic multi-starrer and stick his rodent nose into a bucket of popcorn and a Pepsi with ice.

I said, ‘Can I have a copy of the chargesheet?’

He closed the file, put his hand on it, and said, ‘Not yet. It is still confidential.’

Behind the inspector’s head was the lurid green poster on the wall, the handsome man in a peak-cap. Small minds: discuss people. Average minds: discuss events. Big minds: discuss ideas. Great minds: work in silence.

I said, ‘I would like to know.’

He said, ‘One day you will. Don’t worry. We are taking care of everything.’

I said, ‘It’s about my murder.’

He said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’

As I sat in my study I thought, not bad, I’ve done it. Nearly a year had passed since I had seen Sara.

I had taken Guruji’s upside-down advice: zip up and run. And I had taken the advice of the rodent in the castle, Dubeyji: that doesn’t matter. It had proven easier than I had anticipated. The first few times the impulse to see her seized me, I laced up my keds and went for a run, jogging round and round the colony park like Forrest Gump till the children began to stop and point fingers at me, till all thought was thumped out of my head by my pounding feet, till there was nothing to do but go home and collapse.

We kept messaging each other but I erased all play from it, sticking to perfunctory information. I think she was for some time—typically—too self-obsessed to notice. Then, when I excused myself one more time from going over, she caught on. I received an envelope from her one day. In it was a foolscap sheet folded over like a card. On the cover were drawn two oval eggs, cracked open and spilling. Under it was written, A Tale of Leaking Testicles. The subtitle was: The Inspiring Story of Five Killers and a Peashooter. On the inside page she had pasted a colour picture of the goddess Kali,
all her arms in motion, her eyes blazing, the garland of decapitated heads around her neck resplendent. The sign-off was: Your humble wall-hanging, Sara.

Kali, Mahakali, Inder ki Beti, Brahma ki Saali, Tera Vaar Na Jaaye Khali.

I was not sure if it was a provocation—as of old—or a real dismissal. I was tempted to retaliate, to set in motion the spiral that would end in a symphony of abuse against the wall. But I held myself in, and, slowly, her magnetic tug on me waned to the point that days would go by without any thought of her engaging me.

For a while, there was a writer on the features team of the paper I now worked for, an expatriate born and brought up in Birmingham, back on a roots trip. She was darker than Sara and talked incessantly of her pind in the Punjab—the village had emptied out in the fifties as the lower castes took flight to freedom and janitorship in England. We did a couple of lunches, then dinners. She had a nasal voice and a way of clucking that shot my nerves. When we finally got inside her bedroom in Defence Colony, her smell was rank. After that it was a struggle to be rid of her. Thankfully, expectedly, her discovery of India quickly floundered in the face of the heat, the traffic, the testosteronic north Indian male, and the third-rate journalism.

Someone then gave me the number of a massage parlour in Lajpat Nagar. It was in a building in the market, two floors up, with a shop selling steel utensils and bone-china crockery on the ground floor. The stairwell had posters of gods and goddesses and a bright blue print of Jesus on the cross. One of the six-odd parlour girls was the colour of bitter chocolate. She had hardly any takers. They all sat in a row on the plastic chairs, and the men would walk in and pick the fair ones and take them down the short corridor into the wooden cubicles, while bitter-chocolate worked a needle in a wooden frame, embroidering little birds and trees into existence. I picked only her, never asked her name, never spoke to her. Her hair
was kinky, and her skin shiny and tight. And her hands—dipped in oil—were earning her great karma. She was sure to be born a princess in her next life.