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

road was not visible from here, but occasional screams of traffic wafted through.
    Someone called out to me from the roof, leaning out over the low cement railing. The straight, steep flight of stairs, without a protective balustrade, was around the back. When I walked around the main hall, where Guruji received his disciples, I could smell the acrid dung cakes being burnt in the open kitchens. There were enough chullahs here to prepare a repast for more than a thousand people—an event which happened twice a year, on Guruji’s birthday and on the samadhi day of his Baba, 31 December.
    Last year, from her little eyehole of Anglo activism, Sara had attacked me. ‘You are as dumb a dick as the guys who prance around at idiotic parties shouting Happy New Year! You want to get your rocks off doing some pseudo mystical shit with pirs and babas! You may as well go and jerk around at Djinns! Get a proper mix of pseudo modernity and pseudo mysticism!’ She was angry. She wanted us to usher in the new year sitting in bed watching Costa-Gavras’s
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. Followed, presumably, by an invective carnival. And at the stroke of midnight I would scream, Saali randi!
    Instead, at the midnight hour, I had chosen to witness a greater frenzy at Guruji’s. As his devotees jammed the dera in their hundreds—wrapped in coarse blankets, faces hooded against the biting cold, children asleep in their arms, sitting, standing, huddled everywhere—as they chanted in a growing fervour, in his small inner room Guruji had begun to sway like a palm tree in high wind.
    He was seated on the old maroon satin cushion with gold tassels that had once belonged to Babaji and was his to sit upon only one night in the year. On the wall behind him were framed pictures ofHindu gods and goddesses, of Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus Christ, and in Persian calligraphy, the praise of Allah, all lit up with special garlands of tiny twinkling lights.
    Guruji was naked but for his dark red dhoti, his body splendid in its spareness, the ribs etched clean, the sinews taut wires. His long thick hair streaked with silver was loose, and in flowing motion, as Guruji rotated with gathering speed from the waist. His legs were crossed—the ankles clear over the thighs—and still as stone. His torso was rubber.
    He sat on a wooden dais. There was no one near him but his old mother, a tiny insect of a woman with delicate features and radiant eyes, her snow-white head covered with a white dupatta. A gold stud shone on her nose but her arms were bereft of bangles. She held on to Guruji’s left ankle with one bony hand. She was there to hold on to him; to keep him, when the moment came, from ascending into unreturnable regions.
    Just six inches below him, off the dais, the room was packed with his most loyal and intimate devotees, some cross-legged, some on their haunches, and some on their knees. Hundreds of incense sticks created a slow swirling mist, drowning out the smell of sweat and blankets.
    I was fighting to retain my position at the open door, which was jammed with people wedged in sideways. My right hand was clamped to the wooden frame above to anchor my place. The small open window opposite was crammed with a dozen wide-eyed faces. Behind us, all the way through the narrow corridor, out into the open courtyard, packed bodies oscillated gently, pushing forward for ingress, being pushed back, their movement keeping time to the chant: Bhole, bhole, bam bhole! Bhole, bhole, bam bhole! Old-fashioned, open-mouthed loudspeakers made of tin were lashed to the pillars and trees, and someone was at the microphone, pacing the believers.
    As the minutes ticked to the stroke of midnight, the chant wentinto allegro and Guruji—in a meditative trance—began to rotate faster and faster at the waist. His old mother held true to his ankle, her eyes washed with the same wonderment that was reflected in every eye in the room. All fidgeting, every distraction, had died. The room was barely breathing.