The Story of My Assassins (25 page)

So he began to listen, not preach. He became the representative not of a hectoring god but an empathetic one. It made him increasingly popular. The friar became a single gigantic ear—as in the gramophone boxes of another era, only this one sucking in sound, not issuing it. A single gigantic ear, into which could be poured all the misery of the world. His gift was quickly spotted by the grey hairs of the cloak and he was picked to work in the fine schools that the Cappuchian order ran across the spread of the country.

He proved a good teacher and a sound administrator, and as he moved from school to school, he left hundreds of malleable boys with lifelong memories of grace and godliness. Sometimes other things too. In time the friar had discovered the darkness within himself as well. Amid the press of boys, fresh-faced and supple-skinned, he had found torments that ravaged his senses. The lord above knew he fought it every moment, and each time he succumbed he fell in desperate penitence at the altar. He had come to learn that everyone failed the test of their own darkness. It was the lord’s way of keeping men humble.

So Ghulam Masood was fortunate, in this critical moment of his son’s life, to find Fr Conrad sitting across from him. The friar—now grown into a handsome beard of salt and pepper—understood this frail, tremulous clerk’s area of darkness. Not only did he give the man’s son admission to the school, but in a rare exception, he
registered him as only Kabir M. In a crisis Ghulam knew the M could be Mishra, Mehra, Malhotra, Mallick, Mehta, Mahapatra, Modi, Mitra. Fr Conrad, who was a reader of modern literature, told his fellow brothers that it was a stylistic flourish sanctified by Franz Kafka himself, for hadn’t he named his hero Joseph K. Ghulam told his kinsmen that he had shortened the Masood to the letter M so it could merge seamlessly with Mohammed, the one and only.

For the boy himself, in the universe of boys, there were no such easy explanations. Very early he was strung by the rope of the solitary letter. By the time he was in class four he had been firmly christened ‘Muthal’—in recognition of the inherent delights of the stroking fist that his classmates were just beginning to discover. The name was to stay with him through his school years and beyond, to the point that many of his schoolmates never knew his real name. It also gave his wan, gaunt frame a different resonance: the provenance of the initial M was soon lost, and it came to be widely believed the boy’s body was not delicate but wasted, thanks to an excess of self-abuse.

It’s possible Ghulam did not know of the loss of his son’s carefully chosen name, but if he did he could have derived relief from the fact that Muthal was no less secular a name than that of the wise unlettered saint he had chosen.

In any case, for Ghulam Masood, having his son named a masturbator was infinitely more welcome than one day having his organ sliced and his intestines gutted in a fleeting riot. Curiously, Ghulam was so incredibly timorous not because he had been savaged in some religious clash, but precisely because he had never been. It was the fear of it, the apprehension set deep in his bones, that had corroded him since he was a small boy.

Ghulam was not even a teenager when the rumours had begun to burn through their bastis like a forest fire in May: the new country
Gandhi was about to found was to be only for Hindus. They were to have another land, their own. The white man was definitely going, but he was going to leave two countries behind. In Ghulam’s father’s basti the dread word was that this land where they sat, where they lived, where they worked, where they prayed, where they fornicated, where they died, where they were buried—where they had done all this for time beyond recall—was not going to be theirs. Even to those used to being dealt random cards by the universe, this was an inconceivable thought. It sucked the sleep and peace out of every single person in the cluster of hutments.

Every single night of that scorching summer of 1947, as Ghulam and his friends played cops and robbers late into the night, their fathers sat in disarray under the tamarind tree, their vests patched with pockets of sweat, fanning themselves with flats of wood, smoking chillums and beedis and muttering to each other, as weak hurricane-lamps cast pools of shadows.

Inside the hutments, clustered together on their haunches like conferring vultures, sat their mothers holding their heads. Occasionally an old aunt let loose a hair-raising lament, cursing every man whose hand had ever steered the giant ship of India. This invariably provoked a chorus of curses—the arsenal of the ordinary. Till someone at the tamarind took his mouth off the chillum and told the whole bleating lot to shut the fuck up. Young Ghulam loved this moment of womanly excess and manly chastisement.

The basti had one battered battery-operated radio-set, which belonged to Hasanmian. From croaking once every evening under the tree for whoever cared to hear it, it had become a ceaseless mutterer. The men came by turns and put their ear to it, and if someone caught something that was vaguely intelligible, he set off a loud relay that had everyone in a fever of interpretation.

In that basti of artisans and craftsmen and cobblers and tailors, there was only one man who remained resolute about his position. He had neither much education nor the knowledge of the Book,
but he knew his mind. The children called him Ali Baba, though his name was Ali Hussain, because of his long white beard and the wonderful stories he could tell. The tales he told were not originals nor gleaned from old texts. His material came from his workplace. Dramatic tales of emotion and intrigue and fantasy and history—with names like
Toofan Mail, Sikandar, Kismet, Hunterwali
. Stories that were absorbed by Ali Baba over days and unfurled to his young audience over weeks.

Ali Baba was the cleaner, usher, guard at Minerva, the only talkies in the nearby town. He unloaded and loaded the big steel cans of magic tapes when they arrived from Bombay and was always the first to taste their flavour. When Govind the projectionist rolled the spool for a check-out run and the fantasy beam cut through the dark, Ali would always be there, right under it, squatting on his haunches in the middle of the central aisle—never on the tin chairs, or the wooden benches, even though all of them were empty.

Ali Baba had seen enough cinema to know that life posed challenges, but in the end right always won over wrong, the good over bad, the fair over unfair. He had to only look at himself to know that this was beyond dispute: a man of such little worth—no learning, no culture, no artistry, no lineage—had been given a life of contentment, food, a roof, friendly neighbours, and a job that was not a job, but a rare gift, an endless feast of new and newer delights. Each time he squatted in that warm womb of stories he marvelled at the order in the universe, and he was deeply grateful that his simplicity and decency had brought him such rewards.

So Ali Baba refused to succumb to alarm or cynicism. Under the tamarind tree his position remained resolute. He was not going anywhere, and he saw no reason for anyone to go anywhere. This was where he had been born, and this is where he would die: his tenancy of his piece of earth was beyond dispute. The leaders of the Muslim League and the Congress and Lord and Lady Mountbatten and whoever else could divvy up whatever they wished among
themselves—it had no bearing on the simple rights of Ali Hussain. If his patch was named Pakistan that was fine; if they called it India it would do too, thank you. He said, ‘If someone passes an order, give us your wives, will you do it? And will anyone in his right mind expect you to do it? These are political games big men play, they have nothing to do with us in this Rohilla basti!’

Some of the men nodded in agreement and others scoffed: Ali Baba had seen too many films and lost all sense of reality. Also, unlettered as they all were, they could not really understand such things. Hashimmian had just been to Lucknow for his cousin’s wedding and in that family of rich erudite lawyers he had heard long discussions on the new country that was being created for Muslims, where there would no Hindu domination, where Muslims would call the shots, where they would be safe, where they would live by their own religious laws, where they would prosper as they had never before.

Under the tamarind tree, the smoking men asked Hashimmian, ‘Tell us, will Lucknow be in Pakistan? And Rampur? And Badayun? And Shahjahanpur? And Delhi? And Hyderabad? And Moradabad? And Lahore?’

Hashimmian sneered, ‘And what will India be left with? Kabootarwali galli and Chachaji ka gol gumbaz?’

The fact was, Hashimmian reported, no one even in the big city seemed to know anything. Personally, he thought the whole debate was just the fanciful conjecture of the rich and educated. If every Muslim was going to be called Pakistan and every Hindu called India, then so be it. Changing names changed nothing. If Hashimmian was called Ali Baba he still remained Hashimmian. And physically, on the ground, how much could even rich and powerful men really change? Khichdi, he said, was made by mixing dal and rice, but once it was mixed could anyone separate them again? ‘Can any of us, even with our needles, pick them apart? And if we do, what are we left with? Not rice, not dal, not khichdi. Just a chutiya mess not even a dog will put his mouth to!’

Ten-year-old Ghulam heard the squawking radio-set, heard the arguing men, heard the wailing women, and did not know what to make of it. All he knew was that the times were tense and this had some benefits: it allowed him to cut all his classes—school, the scriptures, and his hours at learning his father’s trade of zari-zardozi. It was the last he hated the most. He attributed his father’s cheerless disposition, his curved back, his scrunched eyes, to the endless, painstaking embroidery in gold-silver thread, on yet another tinselly ghaghra, put together for one more rich woman’s wedding.

All the men in his family were embroidering drones—on his mother’s side, his father’s side, all the men married into the family, all the men earmarked for marrying into the family. And they all sat, hunched hopelessly, slit-eyed, ceaselessly snapping their wrists, fashioning tinsel. The only part of the process he found interesting was the old artist Abbajaan’s drawing of the beautiful flowers, with curved leaves and winding stalks, on to the sheets of tracing paper. The old man drew up to ten different floral universes every day. Then the drones set to work.

The design was perforated, a dye of robin blue and kerosene run through it onto the fabric, and the satin cloth stretched taut on the wooden frame, the adda. His father and his fellow embroiderers, as many as five sometimes, all of them thick in the eyes with spectacles, sat down around it, as if settling in for a long meal on a low table. But this was not about moving jaws and easy talk. This was about the lightning dexterity of fingers as each of them picked their flower and leaf and began with blinding monotony to weave it with flashing needles and snipping scissors and shining baubles, into gold. They went on thus, hour after hour, tied down to the small low frame like tethered dogs.

Occasionally, some of the younger boys, working on adjoining addas, tried to crack jokes and make light conversation, but they were censoriously frowned upon by the older artists and craftsmen including his father.

Little Ghulam tried timorously to tell his abba that he did not want to be this kind of tethered animal. That the glittering garments weighing kilos and kilos, the shining threads, the sequins and cowries, the beads and shiny stones, the salma and sitara—none of them held any fascination for him. The thought of hunching over that low wooden frame for the rest of his life struck terror in his small heart. But so timorous was Ghulam’s protest that his father—the artist without imagination—did not even register it.

Instead, the father only kept reiterating the inevitability of Ghulam’s life. That he was fortunate to have been born into a family of craftsmen, to have his calling—and a dignified one at that—safely accounted for. He would never have to work crudely, in the scullery or the street. Never be a cleaner or a labourer, a guard or a barber, a cook or a gardener, a butcher or a cobbler. Nor would he have to labour at the crude crafts, as did many of his brethren in Moradabad and Rampur, hammering together iron tools or banging out brass vessels or weaving bamboo mats.

He was an artist, from an illustrious lineage of artists who had embroidered the rich raiments of landlord and warlord, nobles and kings, all the way back to the grand Mughals. Garments heavier than men, garments more expensive than houses. Such as the glorious robe of golden creepers that Akbar wore as he moved atop his gigantic elephant in the stirring royal procession of thousands of frolicking musicians and hundreds of cheetahs on leashes. Such as the sur coat of dark velvet with dancing flowers that Shah Jahan wore as he anticipated with growing arousal the arrival of his favourite wife, the soon to be memorialized Mumtaz Mahal.

The boy Ghulam could see none of this. All he could see was a tethered dog. So he was glad that the growing furore over the two countries and anxiety about which one they should pick had taken his father’s eye off his son’s zari-zardozi apprenticeship. And he was glad his instinct about the man from the Talkies, the teller of the moving stories, was being proven right.

Slowly, most of the men of the basti had begun to concur with Ali Baba’s resolute position. This was their land, their air, their country. They knew no other. Nor wished to. Nehru and Jinnah could chop and slice the country as they pleased. They would stay exactly where they were, and go wherever the land under their feet went. If it was named Pakistan it was still their basti; if the name was India, it altered nothing, not even the latch on the front door.

Inevitably, the opposition to this philosophy of stasis came from the young. Those whose hair was thick and rich with oil and sharp in the parting; those whose flesh rippled with restless muscles; those whose hearts pumped hot blood; those whose lives lay in wait, ripe with hope—these young men, their eyes set on distant Xanadus, muttered at the inertia of their elders.

Among these boys in their late teens and early twenties, the excitement and hunger grew by the day. They paid no heed to the news of massacres and murders, of the dance of death, the gory tandav that had broken out between the Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs across the country, especially in the Punjab. They talked instead of their dreams—the promised land, brimful of new possibilities, where they would not have to hunch over the adda all day, where they would be able to do new things in new ways; start their own businesses, open their own shops, effortlessly acquire large lands and sprawling houses. A country was being born, it was waiting to be colonized by them. No more this choking basti on the outskirts of town; no more the interminable grind of the shining thread and traced flora.