*Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
--George Bernard Shaw*
There are certain people who are awed or intimidated by the size of a book. Me, I generally feel cheated if I have to buy a thin book, or a book which is not so thin, but has large printing. Gimme huge tomes to read, large hard backs, paper backs exceeding 400 pages and I am the happiest soul around, at least till the time the book finishes and I am not searching for the next one.
My tryst with Tarun Tejpal didn’t begin with The Story of My Assassins (henceforth referred to as The story). It began sometime back when a friend recommended The Alchemy of Desire, his debut novel. Even though the treatment of that particular story was off putting at times, I still could not put it down since the author’s prose, his vocabulary, and his almost Ruskin Bondesque imagery held me spell bound.
But I need to read that book once more to write a review, for novels which puzzle you stay with you longer, and somehow you are loathe to share them with the world. Anyways, I am digressing, and The Story might not wait long. To cut a long story short, when I came across The Story during a recent shopping trip, I didn’t have to think twice about picking it up.
The Story of my assassins is about a nameless individual, who is a journalist, and people who have been paid to murder him. Simple? Basic? Not quite! Read on. Turbulence is what surrounds the protagonist of Tejpal’s novel The Story of My Assassins. Whether it is a reported threat from unknown assassins or the rather unhappy conjugal life with a “pretty” wife — the leading character isn’t allowed peace of mind. So he seeks solace in the extra-marital relationship with a young activist called Sara.
The novel starts when the protagonist learns that the police have foiled an assassination attempt against him. Nobody knows who was behind the attempt, and some—like his fiery mistress—doubt it even happened. Its Sara who coerces empathy for his assassins, when she sets out to prove them innocent, of this particular crime at least. The assassins consist of a village weakling who learned early to wield a knife in self-defence, a gentle Muslim boy who learns to find sanctuary in the prison house, a boy from a family of snake-charmers, an abandoned hill boy and a hothead who falls in with the wrong crowd.
Clearly, none of them could have masterminded the attempt. Who, then, is behind the plot? Is there a plot to begin with? Or is it all an elaborate hoax? Even the policeman charged with protecting the protagonist admits: "It’s like a suspense thriller. All very complex. Till the last scene we won’t know who the real killer is." The truth, revealed at the end, makes for an engrossing read.
As the plot is revealed, so is Delhi in its splendor and squalor. In fact, I might just say that The Story is to Delhi what Maximum City is to Mumbai.I have always been charmed by Tejpal’s insight and his word play. At one point in the novel, a stranger tells the narrator about Donullia, a dacoit linked to Uttar Pradesh’s “Chanakya of politics”, a certain (very recognisable) Bajpaisahib.
The narrator, despite being one of India’s leading news editors, knows little about the dacoit. Realising this, the stranger notes wryly, “The problem is, Donullia did not live his life in English. That is why you don’t know about him.” He would have heard of him if the dacoit had spoken “chutterputter English, ” he says. Few of India’s English novelists are as grounded in the Indian reality as Tejpal; and few English novels from here are as finely textured and true-to-life as Assassins. Few Indian authors are not impressed by their own talent so as to use prose light heartedly, and yet deliver a deadly impact.
Tejpal has quoted Gita extensively in the novel, which, now that I look back at it, is an interesting ploy. If we look at it from the author’s point of view, we as a society like to absolve almost everything we do, justify any kind of life. So in a hard hitting novel, its fitting to quote Gita, which we as a so called Learned people like to quote whenever we are trying to justify our lives or deeds. Ultimately it is the story of a charmless man who is nothing more than a loser. And this man is scary coz he represents many among us — people who are removed from the realities of this country, happy to live a purposeless life. Tejpal succeeds in alarming all of us.
If you want to read an unemotional book, which dispassionately looks at the society we are living in, shows a mirror to our apathy, this is your book. If you want to read an author, whose words wont let go of you even when they are filling up your head with despair to the extent you cant breathe, an author who weilds his pen like a caricaturist or a poet, both with equal ease, Tejpal is your man. He uses his words almost like a sledge hammer, but there are times when a sledge hammer, and not a silky feather is required to wake up those of us who are sleeping, eyes wide open.