But the major transgressions were—no surprise—finely streamlined. All the siphoning off of provisions happened at source and the spoils were shared with the drivers and helpers. The sacks of wheat, rice, gram, cement, marble chips—were neatly unsewn at the mouth and a few kilos drained from each. When the truck drove off, it left a little pile behind, like the dung heap of an animal moving on. This pile was packed into fresh sacks and moved separately into the market.
The cardinal rule here was to not be lax in the accounting just because the droppings came for free. Every kilo, every sack, every brick, every pile of sand and gravel had to be reckoned seriously. The more professional you kept it the less illicit it appeared, and the workers were less likely to treat it like a free-for-all bonanza. Getting a truck to drop dung was business, converting the dung into commercial cakes was business, and in business you counted every unit and squared every rupee; there was no scope for slack.
Tope Singh, alias Chaakumaar, alias the new Prince of Bundpangas, on the other hand, suffered a false start, trying to resume his school education. There was a private school operating out of a two-hundred-fifty-square-yard house in Mohali, where Shauki Mama sent his nephew. The school was called St Green Meadows High School, and its narrow building rose two-and-a-half storeys high, box-like room piled upon box-like room. Many were further subdivided by
plywood partitions, and if the students in one grade were insufficient two classes were arbitrarily collapsed to create a single viable unit: seven children of class seven and nine of class eight to create sixteen in class seven and a half. And may every parent live in wonder.
The maximum number of children were in the primary classes. The numbers dwindled as you went up the order. Like many faux Saint schools of its kind the attrition at Meadows was high: spitting out only one child at the top for every ten it sucked in at the bottom. Only the principal’s room had a window and the whole school smelled of urine, flowing down copiously from the makeshift toilets constructed on the roof. It was on this roof that Tope Singh practised mutual masturbation with the senior boys, and learnt to smoke cigarettes. For the rest of his life the smell of piss would spark in him the craving for a drag and instant arousal.
How inferior are the affectations of class to the flourishes of violence. It took two months and a few slashes of the Rampuria to overcome the handicap of being a village boy. Once the city boys had genuflected to the blade, Tope Singh came to be christened Chaaku, the knife, an honorific that would one day find its way into official documents and crisp newspapers.
Chaaku had never had so much fun. His new friends fought to be close to him and introduced him to the excitements of Chandigarh’s cinema halls, restaurants and ornamental parks. Some of them had scooters and motorcycles and they would tear down the broad roads sucking in the wind, waving their arms, heady with life. Then he learnt to drink, starting with beer and graduating to whisky—and it all became even more grand. Each day, Chaaku wondered at what a reward he had reaped for having gently opened up a few skins, for possessing the constant bulge of the Rampuria in his pants. Sometimes he drank too much and then he ranted and wept about what had been done to his family by the landlord. At such time he and his friends promised each other that soon they would lead a crippling attack on the sardar and his clan and visit on them a
retribution that would not be forgotten for ten generations. Chaaku would say, flicking and furling his knife, ‘I will chop off the pricks of all the maaderchods—even the little children—and pickle them and sell them in jars on GT road!’ After that, like a good butcher, he would elaborate on what he would do to all the body parts, male and female. At the very end he would break down and weep like a child and his friends would hold and console him.
Not being a moralist, Shauki Mama ignored the complaints about his nephew gathering at his door for a long time. Then one day he spoke to him. It was a dialogue not entirely between unequals. Like most successful men, the uncle had built his fortunes not by lecturing others but by understanding the virtues of even the most errant. The older man recognized that the boy had a gift that had led to his expulsion from his own world and quickly earned him a place in a strange new one. In turn, Chaaku reassured his uncle that he was not a fool, and he knew how to use his weapon in a way that married menace with restraint. He would slice skin, never artery; he would put in the fear of life, never take it. People wrongly assume that men are either fearless or fearful. The truth is, like most things, courage has many degrees. Chaaku did not, yet, have the nerve to kill. Even in his most inflamed slashing he was fully conscious of the damage he must not cause. Shauki sighed with relief. This was the city, and it had the media and officials and too many contesting interests. You didn’t run things here on the whim of Sardar Balbir Singh’s cock.
In no time at all, Chaaku became a part of his uncle’s trucking business. With every month his hours at St Green Meadows dwindled, and by the time March came around and he wrote his class ten exams he was primed for failure. Since fleeing the village he had learnt a million things; not one of them in the classroom. The maths paper was a disaster, the English worse.
When the results were declared, his uncle asked, ‘You want to try again?’
Chaaku said, ‘No.’
At the yard he did not slide into the kind of work Chacha was doing, keeping logs and accounts. His Rampuria marked him out as different. To begin with he was put to travelling with the trucks, sitting high up in the cabin in front, understanding the rhythms of drivers and helpers, the metabolism of loadings, unloadings, tea breaks, diesel stops, sleep hours, and most importantly, dung heaps and collections. Shauki Mama instructed the boy to be both friendly and distant: his task was to learn all about the truckers who worked for them and ensure that every trucker feared him. To nudge matters along, the businessman referred to his nephew only as Chaaku in public. The nephew was also obliquely encouraged to cut open some skin at the earliest so that the legend was suitably amplified. This Chaaku soon did, and more. In time he became Shauki Mama’s sword arm, the man sent to make the petty collections that were falling into dispute. The bulge of the flick-knife was always visible in his trousers, and it was mostly enough to do the trick. Sometimes it had to be unveiled in its naked glory; and rarely, very rarely, was he required to play a small game of noughts and crosses on someone’s arm.
By now the first lessons of Sukha and Bhupi had matured into a full education. Chaaku learned that almost all of the world lived in colossal and constant fear. Afraid of everything—the police, officials and courts, the thugs, criminals and mafia; afraid of the establishment and the anti-establishment; afraid of failure and of criticism, of being humiliated and of being mocked, of being ugly and of being bald; afraid of cockroaches and of cats, of the seas and the skies, of lightning and of electricity; afraid of priests and physicians; afraid of dying and of living. More than hope, people’s lives seemed to be defined by fear. Most hope, it seemed, was only about somehow being able to negotiate fears successfully. A tiny minority managed to cross
the line of fear—of the police and courts and failure and censure and priests and cockroaches—and this tiny minority then became the shapers of the world in which the rest lived.
This fearful world, Chaaku realized, was easily terrified by the mere shadow of a knife.
Chaaku also now understood something even more important: that fear was not a line on the ground, it was only a line in the head. Inside everyone’s head. And if people were pushed too far they could sometimes walk over that line in the head and become formidable themselves. The idiot Bhupi, by shoving him one time too many, had sent him—Tope—over that line and paid a big price for it.
It was then that Chaaku understood the lessons of the Gita he’d always heard bandied about: of fearlessness and action and the legitimacy of violence.
In later life, Chaaku looked back at these years as his halcyon period. He owned a Yezdi motorcycle, whose emblem he had turned upside down to read ipzeh. It was full of adornments: extra horns, rear blinkers, leather satchel, faux fur seats, red wheel hubs, and above the headlight a small many-coloured plastic fan that whirred madly and kaleidoscopically when he drove. On lean days his friends and he rode up to Shimla, roaring around the mountain curves without helmets, denim jackets flapping open, guzzling up the cool air. They drank beer from the bottle and tossed the bottles down the ravines. They raced other bikes and cars, and waved at them in triumph. Occasionally they sang Hindi film songs at the top of their voices—songs about friendship and love and the melancholy mysteries of life. In Shimla they walked up and down the old colonial mall road, admiring the pretty women, joking about the honeymooning couples, licking ice creams, eating chicken curry with hot naan and raw onions.
Shauki Mama encouraged these excursions. The last thing he wanted was a fearless knife-wielding nephew getting obsessed with his business. Shauki was not looking for an heir, just a competent bogey man. He need not have worried. Chaaku’s world view was not very different from that of his father or grandfather. Simple soldiers, splendid in the narrow frame—of obeying orders, exhibiting loyalty, displaying courage.
Like a good army man, Chaaku would have soldiered on endlessly—making the dung heaps, riding the trucks, occasionally flicking the knife for collections—had the village not arrived at his doorstep one afternoon.
It was winter and he was dozing on a charpoy at the back of the yard, in the sweet spot where the sun cut past the tamarind tree and the corrugated tin awning of the shed to create an oval pool of hot light. His lunch of tandoori parathas and lassi was heavy inside him, and he had pulled a coarse brown shawl over himself for additional snugness and to keep away the flies. The stop-and-start buzzing of the mechanical lathe as Bauna—the dwarf mechanic—retooled truck parts was a reassuring background sound. A crow had been cawing on the tree since morning. A few flung stones had seen him take off and circle right back. Bauna, his short muscular arms shining with oil and grease, his child’s pants a nondescript black-brown and tattered in a dozen places, had pronounced, ‘We are definitely getting visitors today.’ Driver Jassi, his long hair open after a bath under the handpump, had said, chewing lazily on a sugarcane stick, ‘Yes, of course, your future in-laws, to size you up. I am so happy you’ve come dressed for the occasion!’
Chaaku was wading through a familiar dream. He was hiding in the burning fields on the farm by the embracing palms. The wheat field he was crouching in had not yet caught fire, but he could feel the growing heat as the orange line licked itself steadily towards him. The glow from the fields spread to the dark homestead where he could see armed figures moving about. He could hear his mother’s
screams detonating from inside the house, and see his father and grandfather lashed to the neem tree, which had once been his tank. While Dakota Ram was raging, screaming and straining at the ropes, Fauladi Fauji was as ever unperturbed, calmly bubbling the hookah whose pipe had been left in his mouth. Men were staggering out from the house and washing their fat cocks in the rich gush of the handpump. Working the handle steadily, with a high-pitched mechanical creak, was Pappu. He had no fingers, and was pumping up and down with his palms. In the foreground, double-barrel in hand, strode Sardar Balbir Singh. His eyes were dark with fury, and he seemed bigger than ever before. In fact he appeared to be growing by the minute. Suddenly two men came up—tucking in their cocks—and began to urgently whisper to him. Chaaku wished his mother would stop screaming so he could hear what they were saying. Then one of them pointed to the field in which Chaaku was hiding. The sardar, now looming big as the neem tree, levelled the gun in his direction and bellowed, ‘Tope Singh!’
For some reason, Chaaku did not jump off the charpoy and respond when he heard his name being called. The sun was scalding hot above him now and the rough shawl felt uncomfortable. The voices were coming from the front of the yard, just inside the main iron gate, near the makeshift room of naked brick in which the log of truck movements was entered.
The voices were not familiar but something in their tone spelled a warning. Lifting his shawl a little, Chaaku squinted through the intervening clutter of trucks and makeshift rooms, the sun and the shadows. At this angle all he could discern were several legs and torsos, and the curve of swords in scabbards held in hands, two bamboo staves and the black steel of a double-barrel gun, pointing downwards.
It was his name that saved him. Neither Jassi nor Bauna had heard of any Tope Singh. Nor of a village called Keekarpur, nor of Dakota Ram, nor of Fauladi Fauji. A voice, clearly of the man who
had directed them to the yard, said, ‘They are lying. Of course the boy works here. I have seen him going in and out. He’s thin and short and has a fancy Yezdi motorcycle, with a whirling fan over its headlight.’ Bauna said, in his thin voice, ‘But that’s Chaaku!’ A commanding voice said, ‘Chaaku! Maiovah Chaaku! That’s him! Phuddihondya Chaaku! Where’s he?’
In five bounds, Chaaku had thrown off the blanket, put a foot on the water drum, and leapt on to the tin roof of the lean- to against the back wall that served as the yard toilet. Through the blood pounding in his ears, through the loud clang of the corrugated sheet, he heard voices shout, ‘There’s the fucking runt! Catch the bloody dog! Shoot the maaderchod!’ He vaulted over the wall of the yard and landed in a tumble on the hard earth, just missing the bushes but not the offal the men threw over the walls—used tea leaves, banana and orange peels, rancid food, empty packets and containers, oil-stained rags. The fall soiled his clothes and knocked the wind out of him, but he was up and running without a pause. Instinctively, as he rolled and stood up and ran, he felt for the Rampuria in his pocket and was reassured by its hard length.