Read Online The Story of My Assassins by Tarun J. Tejpal - Free Book Online Page A

supply would fluctuate and the feeble invertors die and the thrum of generators and the stench of diesel fumes would stain the air, and the swelter would get under skins and fray the nerves, and the city would curse and scan the festering skies.And Sippy, in his odd moment of lucidity would say, ‘Sirji, it is a curse of the times—just as there is very little milk left in milk, there is very little rain left in the rain.’
    There was time for idle bullshit like the weather because we had nothing else to do. Jai’s friends had by now completely lost their stomach for the enterprise. They had been slowly turning off the taps for months; the magazine had steadily dwindled from a hundred and twelve pages to ninety-six to seventy-two to forty-eight. At each stage Jai had addressed the staff as if he were Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, assuring them that immortality and the turnaround would both be theirs, in fact were just days away. All each of us had to do was to resolutely stand by our posts and keep firing. At what, he didn’t say. The fucker was so eloquent, with his burning eyes and waving arms, that even I fell for his talk. Each time, when the trance broke, I thought: through millennia men like him have led thousands to their untimely graves.
    Now we were down to forty pages—the magazine was as spineless as a pamphlet—and nearly one month’s salaries in arrears. The investors, Jai’s school friends, three of them, christened Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey by us, had stopped taking our calls, and even their executive assistants, though unfailingly polite—‘we’ll certainly pass on the message’—had frost in their voice. Unusually, the accounts man Santoshbhai, an old-timer with a Hitler moustache and six strands of hair glued across his bald pate, was still very warm each time we called him pleading for a transfer of funds. But, of course, he was helpless. ‘Arre bhai, I only count the money, not earn it. If I could give it, you wouldn’t have to ask twice. Just get me one nod from the chhote sahib’ was all he would say. But chhote sahib, Nandan of Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey, was busy imbibing Scotch and slapping flesh and was nowhere to be reached.
    In desperation, not knowing what to do but needing to do something, we’d keep calling Santoshbhai in the crazed hope that one day, suddenly, miraculously, he would be reckless enough to send us the money and explain it to chhote sahib later. Like the old good-hearted family retainer in Hindi films who finally earns the ear of the young Turk.
    I have to say I was not surprised things had gone badly. I had always been sceptical of the trio, and I don’t think they liked me either. In his blindly enthusiastic way Jai had been profuse in spelling out their virtues when we first set out. ‘Good guys, have made their millions, not really chasing money any more, want to do social stuff, things for the soul, I’ve seen them since they were in their chuddies, always been decent chaps not rich brats, anyway there’ll never be the perfect investor for what we want to do, these guys are about as good as it’ll ever get, at least they talk our language, at least we’ll be able to hear each other, think of the guy we went to in CP, who wanted our asset sheets—we didn’t even know what he was talking about, think of the buggers we’ve worked for, surely nothing can be worse than them!’
    Actually these guys were worse. They were complete fools. Not smart enough to just focus on making the money; stupid enough to have bought this magazine thing from Jai in the middle of a wrist-slitting festival one posh evening.
    The very first time Jai took me to meet them, at a hotel bar, I concluded they were chutiyas. Chutiya-Nandan-Pandeys. They were dressed sharply in crisp fresh clothes, with manicured hands and hair, and were awash in cologne. Very briefly, in the beginning, they had American accents—two of them had done university abroad. In between