Free The Story of My Assassins by Tarun J. Tejpal Page A

the horse dining-room and the marble mermaids. And this time it wouldn’t be foreplay for the nailing on the wall, but genuine disgust. I could intuit where the line on these things lay with her and the three bozos were way beyond the boundary.
    All I told her was that the investors were friends of Jai, and I had christened them Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey. That pleased her a great deal. She said, ‘Good! Abuse is the revenge of the proletariat.’
    I didn’t tell anyone—bar Guruji, that is. Over time I had learnt to keep nothing from him, not even Sara. He had a way of divining all that was happening in my life; and this time I desperately needed his guidance. Before we signed the shareholders’ agreement, I jumped into the car one evening and hit the Grand Trunk Road. By eight o’clock I had turned off the Markanda bridge, skirted Shahabad to my right, and in the luminous dark found the old banyan that marked the dirt track to his ashram. With the many lengths of flapping red cloth—some new, most fraying—tied to its branches it appeared alive and moving. Guruji’s followers were growing, their wishes draping the ancient tree.
    I drove slowly, in second gear, the car heaving like a boat on choppy waters. The rains and the tractors and the bullock carts—with their harrows and trolleys—had gouged holes and gullies in the track, and you had to be careful where the wheels went. Each time you got the alignment wrong and hit troughs on both sides, you heard the sickening sound of the undercarriage dragging the ground. The headlights dipped and skewed in a sea of black. Dust rose in small explosions, drenching the car. A few times I had to stop dead for it to settle, so I could see the way ahead. When I stopped I could hear, distantly behind me, on the main road, the screech and roar of tearing trucks.
    Soon the lights of Guruji’s dera were visible. Four of them: one, strong, on the roof; and three, diffuse, catching the extremities of the boundary walls. There was a sentry at the iron gates, and I had to lower my window so he could recognize me. He was an old man with a flowing white beard and a blue turban loosely wound around his head. He carried an old double-barrel with two triggers, its strap made of thick green canvas. A bandolier of red cartridges was slung across his chest.
    Guruji said the covenant of spiritual power was unchanging and clear: he could protect others but not himself; he could enrich others but not himself; he could heal others but not himself. He alone could take care of the multitudes; but the multitudes, collectively, needed to take care of him.
    It was the answer I would have given to the cynicisms of Sara and Jai, if I could be bothered about them. The vanities—and limitations—of reason.
    The dera was rudimentary. Just naked bricks pressed together untidily with grey cement. I parked the car by a makeshift shed of six slim pillars capped by corrugated iron sheets. A part of the open shed was taken up by Guruji’s white Sumo—gifted to him by a grateful flour-mill owner from Yamunanagar, whose truant daughter’s marriage he had salvaged—and the rest was stacked with charpoys that had been stood on their sides. During the day these charpoys were dragged out and clustered around the large neem, each one laden with many a peasant body.
    At this hour the dera was muted. Guruji withdrew from the throng at six every evening to meditate in the inner sanctum and then was only available to some, selectively, after eight, once he had emerged, bathed with cold water and eaten his dinner.
    All around, green fields washed right up against the brick walls of the dera. The fields were in ankle-deep water now—to grow paddy—and the pulsing moonlight bounced off them tantalizingly. Now and then one heard the guttural query of a bull-frog, pickedup and loudly repeated. Sometimes this was followed by a tiny splash as one of them decided to take a swim. The hum of cicadas underlay it all. The main