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

struggling to ask serious questions they had cracked dumb jokes and guffawed loudly, randomly slapping each other’s backs,hands, thighs; they were still in their school dorm getting giggly about the geography teacher’s bra-strap.
    They were all garment exporters and had earned countless millions working sweat factories that supplied dirt-cheap apparel for the big stores of the West. Bondhu Ram fashioning Calvin Klein—that sort of thing. Two of them did undergarments and were called Kuchha King and Kuchha Singh (he was a shorn sardar). The third was called Frock Raja, after his special act. Coming from the same posh school as Jai, incapable of much else, they had been set up by their fathers at a time of great export incentives. Before economic playing fields were levelled, they had made enough for five generations. The chasm between Bondhu Ram and Calvin Klein—between Jaunpur and Fifth Ave—was big enough to accommodate vast wealth and all its excesses.
    The bar was all burnished wood and glass with windows the size of walls through which I watched a white-skinned mamma working the length of the heaven-blue pool on the other side. She wore a yellow bikini and opened her mouth in a big O each time she broke a stroke. She should have worn an orange burqa and kept her mouth closed. The water in the pool sparkled as if each drop had been diligently polished before being flowed in by the super servile waiters who whispered by our side. Most of India would have gladly drunk it, like sherbet.
    Remembering Guruji, I had quickly become the man in the iron mask, dug into the bowl of salted peanuts and settled back to watch the proceedings. Jai had striven to humour his pals with weak smiles and fey ripostes. He had an amazing ability to shrink himself down to the dumbest fuck. Mr Lincoln Goes to the People.
    By the time the third round of whiskies had arrived, they were already talking about the first anniversary party—the venue, the music and the starlets they’d like to invite. They had given up trying to involve me and were in the swim of their own happy lake. I had, meantime, fed my entire bowl of peanuts to the iron mask andwas now burrowing deep into Jai’s, setting in motion the engines of great flatulence.
    The parting was demonstrative, with effusive hugs and loud wisecracks. Mr Lincoln was flung from embrace to embrace. On the granite-floored lobby of the hotel there was much of this, very similar, noisy happiness reverberating all around. The fastest growing national affliction: opulence euphoria.
    I had pumped hands, sick with the peanuts.
    When they had been driven off in their Mercedeses and Pajeros, and we were waiting for our small cars in the foyer, Jai said, ‘So what do you think?’ I said, ‘Chutiya-Nandan-Pandeys.’
    Jai had laughed and said, ‘Who else would back crazies like us?’
    The next time, we were invited to meet them at Frock Raja’s farmhouse. It was five acres of la-la land, just behind the boxy Vasant Kunj flats where Sara lived. There were water-spurting Scandinavian marble mermaids with large Indian breasts, a topiary of dinosaurs, a swimming pool shaped like a flounced skirt—with a submerged bar at the waistband—bulb-lit Halloween masks on pruned branches, undulating manicured lawns with colourful steel birds poised for takeoff, lines of mast trees trimmed to precisely the same height flanking every pathway, piped Clayderman tinkles at every corner of the garden, a Yeats pond with the fifty-nine swans of Coole, a dining-room in a mock stable with two handsome horses tethered in a corner for atmospherics, so you could chew to the music of shuffling flanks and scuffing hooves.
    Inside was an equal riot of the imagination. A mad medley of statuary, paintings, carpets, fabrics, lamps, furniture, antiques, waterfalls—far eastern Buddhas, Greek Aphrodites, Wild West saddles and sombreros, old flintlocks, Japanese silk screens, Amazonian machetes, African masks, a massive ebony