This was a suburb just being born, and most of the lots were still empty. Fertile fields—furrowed, fecund, fed by water channels—rolled away on one side, a stark reminder of modern India’s urban amoeba slowly sweeping over older vocations and older ways. Farmers suddenly with thick wads in their pockets but no soil under their feet forced to confront new realities, a life less dignified. In less than a generation an ancient way of existence would be gone, the rhythm of seasons dead, the logic of sky and water and the exploding seed lost, and they would all be petty pawns working the implacable engines of cities, feeding the fantasies of men who had somehow annexed the world by crunching numbers, not growing things or shaping lands or expounding ideas.
Chaaku was pounding through the cabbage lines—like florid buttons on a sere shirt—heading for the square of sugarcane close by,
which the truckers often raided. As the sparrows and mynahs scattered in front of him, he heard the sharp report of a rifle and voices shouting. Looking back without breaking his sprint, he saw several faces above the wall, standing on the tin roof of the lean-to. The barrel of a rifle was tracking him. He crouched low, breaking into a panicky zigzag. There was a second sharp report, then a loud expletive, ‘Maiovah, are you trying to kill the ground or the man!’ Flurries of birds had taken wing and were wheeling around.
Just as Chaaku gained the sugarcane fields, he heard a soft thud and another expletive: ‘O behndiphudimari!’ One of the men had jumped and landed badly, and was struggling to his feet. The sardar with the gun was waving him on angrily from the wall and screaming. As he looked back a second man took the leap.
Chaaku ran through the thicket of sugarcane as if it didn’t exist, the razor leaves opening up his skin everywhere. There was a small nullah on the other side, sluggish with unclean water, and then the road. He tried to leap over the nullah, fell short, into the dirty water, and came to his knees. In a flash he was out, and in the middle of the road, scaring down a young boy on an old Bajaj scooter. By the time the pursuers emerged from the sugarcane patch, the puttering scooter had gained a few hundred metres.
This time the price was paid by his Chacha, Tattu, the mild, meek uncle who had been his protector, guardian, friend and tutor. Sardar Balbir Singh and his henchmen broke one radius, one ulna, two metatarsals, two metacarpals, one rib and one femur; they pulled out some hair from his chest and his pubes; they tested the elasticity of his sphincter with the tip of their bamboo lathis; and they squeezed his testicles by turns till his screams for mercy became high notes of pure gibberish. For his interventions, Bauna had two of his buck teeth pulled out with his own pliers. The sardar said, ‘How
nice he looks now! Do you think we should also lengthen his legs?’ The skinny bhaiya from Bihar, Ram Bharose—who manned the gate, opening and shutting it, and cleaned the yard—was asked if he wanted some dental treatment too. When he gibbered, the sardar delivered a swinging kick between his buttocks that sent him sprawling to the floor where he lay whimpering and unmoving. Even as Chacha continued his testicular wail.
Driver Jassi played it safe, cowering silently on his haunches by the tailgate of his truck—ok tata bye bye—keeping his eyes averted from all that was going on. When he was asked if he too would care to taste some village hospitality, he wordlessly clasped his hands and looked down at the ground. Later he would say, ‘Can there be bravery in committing suicide! Even Guru Gobind Singh had to take flight from Aurangzeb’s much bigger army, and then recoup! Would you like to live with your testicles in your pants or in a jar?’
Shauki raged with a rare fury. But he did not go to the police. These were clan transactions, and uniforms and penal codes had no role to play in them. Something had once been done: retribution was inevitable. Chacha was sent to hospital and put in various plasters. But at least there was a definite upside for him. His account stood squared. Now he could go back to his village and the farm by the embracing palms.
But Chaaku was still in the crosshair. The yard was no longer safe for the boy, nor was the Chandigarh suburb. And the pervasive militancy in the whole area meant that the sardar could always get someone else to do the job, maybe even the cops. The state was awash with vigilantes, terrorists, criminals, compromised policemen, spooks from various central agencies. Shauki’s trucks were commandeered by all sides all the time, and he had to skate the ice with great skill and trepidation to keep it from cracking. There was more illicit money and weaponry floating around in the Punjab than since the Anglo–Afghan and Anglo–Sikh wars. Anyone would break both his legs for a thousand rupees and put a bullet, or many, in him for
less than ten thousand. But the boy was his nephew and the boy still had his uses.
In less than a week of the attack in the yard, Shauki had loaded Chaaku, his gaudy motorcycle and his suitcase of belongings on to one of his trucks heading for Delhi.
Five years of relentless terrorism—assassinations, bus massacres, Hindu killings, bomb explosions, cyclical extortions—had made the Punjab a fragile place to do business. Shauki had begun to hedge his bets, to transfer some resources to Delhi to try and set up a hub there. His son had been travelling by the Haryana Roadways buses, carrying cheap plastic bags in which bundles of soiled cash were buried amid clothes. This money was being funnelled into small properties: a two-bedroom second-floor flat in Punjabi Bagh and a shop in an upcoming market complex in Rohini, another wasteland suburb beginning to protrude out of Delhi.
Built on a two-hundred-square-yard plot, the flat was dark and derelict, all sun and light cut off by the houses crowding it in. It had one bathing bathroom with a leaking brass tap, and one Indian-style crap cubicle with an old-style iron cistern strapped high on the wall with a dangling chain that activated with a heart-stopping clang. Each floor, counter and finish in the house was grey mosaic. Even with all the lights on it felt like a dungeon. All the window sills and grilles were daubed with bird droppings—mostly pigeon—and the bathroom slats had nesting sprouting from them like tufts of hair from an old man’s ears.
Inside, the furnishings were cut-rate and rudimentary. Clunky wooden chairs, a couple of tables, and box double-beds in the rooms, capable of having their bellies prised open and locked after they had been stuffed with crumpled currency. There were only two adornments on the walls: a poster, slightly swollen with moisture, from an
Indian girlie magazine, pasted above the mosaic line in the bathing toilet; and in the drawing-room a framed poster of a famous film actress playing the role of the goddess Santoshi Mata, with a garland of marigolds that had died weeks ago, the yellow petals dried to a dark crisp, strung around it.
The larger bedroom was mostly kept locked and was exclusive to Shauki and his son. Chaaku was told to set up residence in the other. The room already had an inmate. He was called Mr Healthy, and he had been shipped out from Amritsar.
Mr Healthy’s arms and legs were so thin they could be encircled with a thumb and index finger. His face was gaunt and his nose disproportionately long. His chest was less than the span of one hand. All of it was compensated for by the size of his dick. Even flaccid it hung to mid-thigh, thick as a wrist, and when erect it made his body seem like the appendage rather than the other way around. He would sit on his side of the bed, propped against the wall, painfully thin, naked but for his loose cloth underwear, reading the daily papers, his formidable cucumber peeping out. It was hard on the nerves.
But it was not the size of his organ that brought Chaaku under his thrall. It was his razor-sharp mind. He could crunch numbers, he understood money, he understood politics, he could make all the connections, and he knew wonderful words with which he could express complex ideas. Mr Healthy talked about the murky roots of terrorism in Punjab, the impending doom of the Congress party, the Cold War convulsions between America and the Russians, the way the black money economy worked, how mosquitoes were getting the better of quinine. He knew the names of ministers, the different companies industrialists owned, how much cricketers were paid, and which film star was sleeping with whom. Chaaku was
flabbergasted. This nondescript man, living like him in this crummy flat, sleeping in the bed next to him, working, like himself, for his Shauki Mama, how could he possibly know so much?
What made Mr Healthy even more daunting was that he never joked or smiled. There was no easy backslapping, no trivial loose talk that was permitted with him. When they sat in a restaurant or dhaba and there was easy banter all around, he stared at the others with steely eyes. When they emerged from a movie, while everyone around smiled and chatted or cribbed and argued, Mr Healthy set about dissecting it with quiet seriousness. Frivolous interactions were the only kind Chaaku had ever known, and he suddenly felt the sheer smallness of his life so far. All he could do was ride a motorcycle and slash with his Rampuria, and in a small gesture of genuflection he gladly put both these feeble talents at Mr Healthy’s feet.
Chaaku was in awe. He was ready to be Mr Healthy’s slave—to cook for him, clean for him, fetch for him, do as he ordered—even minister to his monstrosity.
In turn the savant gave him an umbrella of confidence and reassurance he had never had. He introduced him to reading the morning newspaper, taught him to think about his life, its purpose, why he was doing what he was. He directed him to posh commercial areas like Connaught Place and Khan Market and South Extension where he pointed out opulent stores and brilliantly turned out men and women alighting from cars and jauntily making packets of purchases. He made him drive them through Lutyens’ Delhi pointing out lane upon lane of sprawling Raj bungalows with famous name-plates and grand old trees and guards with guns and white official Ambassador cars sweeping in and out.
Money and power, he told him. Only two things drove the world. And neither of them had any. But he would change all that. Chaaku must not worry. He must merely have a sense of destiny and a sense of himself. All this after all was only created by men. Not unlike them; not better than them.
He explained all these things by quoting from the Bhagavad Gita. It was the one book, he said, that had all the answers demanded by life. He said it was his father, a schoolteacher in the village, who had first taught him the great wisdoms of the song divine. That always men must act: they must both live their karma and make their karma—and all of it must be done without regard for reward or punishment. Lord Krishna said to the unequalled Agjuna, ‘O Partha! In the three worlds, I have no duties. There is nothing I haven’t attained, there is nothing yet to be attained, yet I am engaged in action. O Partha! If I ever relax and stop performing action, then men will follow my path in every way. If I don’t perform action, then all these worlds will be destroyed. I will be the lord of hybrids and responsible for the destruction of these beings.’
Mr Healthy—he had been so named by a cruel English teacher when he was eleven: his real name was Sukesh Kumar—Mr Healthy did not believe in idols, temples, or rituals. All religion, except for the Gita, was skewered by him in his cool hard voice. He told Chaaku that all of modern Hinduism was a wasteland, full of hokum rites, festivals and places of worship, overrun by ignorant, corrupt priests. In contrast, in this mess, lay the heart of all profound truth, the Gita. And of all the great lessons of the Gita what was the greatest? The idea of detached action.
‘Look at me. Look at me, my boy. Do you ever see me agitated, angry, emotional? When you slash skin with that knife, do it as if you are drawing birds in the air. When you gouge out someone’s entrails do it as if you are digging soil in a flower-bed. And when someone puts a hard blade into you see it as a shower of sudden cold rain that you can do nothing about. When you feel pleasure see it as a passing breeze. When you feel pain see it as a passing breeze. Life itself is only a passing breeze. Detached action.’
The thin man from Amritsar with a cucumber for a cock had been sent to Delhi by Shauki seth to manage the soiled bundles, to buy the properties. This involved parsing the market, hard
negotiations, doing numbers, checking papers, handling illicit cash, getting clearances, taking possession. The boy with the knife was there to protect him, and also to be a check on him. Shauki Mama had assumed his nephew’s loyalty, the family bond. He had failed to see the boy was putty waiting to be moulded; he was not a finished product, just a tragic upshot of his circumstances. Anyone could seize control of him and bend him to his will. Shauki seth was also soon to learn the truth in the saw: never trust a thin man who thinks too much.
In less than four years, without cracking a smile, without Shauki seth’s college-going son—in the next bedroom—having a clue, while getting his big cucumber regularly peeled and polished by Chaaku, the thin man with the ideal of detached action had siphoned enough soiled notes to set up on his own. With even greater cunning he had purloined several of the key papers of the properties he had acquired for his master. This meant that Shauki seth, instead of mounting a revengeful assault on him, had to come begging for truce and friendship. Without the missing documents his properties were valueless; in fact, he was vulnerable. A man as cunning as Mr Healthy could set the officials on him; and there was no way he could sell any of his properties without all the papers.
When his uncle came to meet his mentor, Chaaku sat in the inside room with the door ajar, playing nervously with his knife, opening and closing the blade. The renegade duo now lived in a tiny two-bedroom flat in Saket, a South Delhi colony. The thin man said this was where Delhi would boom in the future. Already this house was better furnished than the one they had first lived in. There was a proper red Rexine sofa suite in the drawing-room with a maroon durrie on the floor, a small dining-table with four chairs next to it, a two-burner gas stove in the kitchen, a white ceramic
cistern in the toilet, which sat behind one’s back and worked with a refined whoosh, box-beds with coir mattresses in the bedrooms, plastic shades over all the bulbs, and semi-transparent muslin curtains on the windows and doors.