When Rahim asked his father how long their family had been in this line, killing for the Alams, Qadir had been quiet at first. It was something he would explain to the boy over years. What Rahim didn’t realize was that for his father, to answer this was to answer how the sea began, the stars – to mark the birth of God, of shadows and the etchings in the banyans. In a way, it was almost beyond his conception. As if to imagine a time before time. He told Rahim they’d lived this way ever since anyone could remember. Their blood had soaked into the soil, and the soil belonged to the Alams. There is no reason we can understand, he said. All of this was written for us. All that we are, all that we will be, it is all written.
He heard stories from long ago, though he couldn’t tell you from when. They had been spearmen in times of war. When peace came, they were guards, dacoits, overseeing the labourers in the sweltering poppy fields, dragging them out into the trees when they disobeyed the lord. Their violence had no claims to purity. They fought other men’s battles, ploughed the fields of their masters. Ever since he was a boy, they told him his people killed so effortlessly because of their Bagdi blood, the way it was tainted, because it held the murky, ancient strain of some broken race that ruled these jungles long before history. It was his inheritance, they said – but he didn’t know what to believe. Maybe it was just another ghost story.
Of course, there were many Bagdi boys who’d never gone into this line. Still, most became nothing more than farmers and labourers. Even then, even after all the men he’d killed for the Syndicate, his father couldn’t pay for the surgeries to fix his bones, or wrench out the bullet that had been lodged above his belly for decades. They would salt the earth of a generation before they could move out of their rundown hut on the outskirts of town. When he was drunk on a big-money kill, Qadir would say it didn’t matter, at least their work brought in fish and booze and meat and ganja – a name that couldn’t be uttered around without a moment of silence, a glance over the shoulder. This is what he’d leave them.
These days they fed themselves off their boss’s feud with the sons of Abdallah, a man his father had killed and desecrated on orders from the Alams. It was an act of justice, Qadir said. The man was a rapist and a thief, like all the others. By the time his boys came back years later to contest against the Alams in the local elections, it was something they’d all been waiting for. When they weren’t killing in the fields, they were watching the horizon, biding their time for the return of brothers, of sons.
Rahim knew about the Ghosh brothers, but he didn’t know how many others were out there searching for his father. After field training, he left home on a bicycle with a 9 mm down his jeans, knowing which paths not to take, the fields not to set foot in.
Throughout the day, Rahim and the boys rode the narrow, jagged path through the jungle, looking for a good spot. They left their bicycles and kicked off their slippers and climbed up the banyans. Cradled in the branches, they passed a bottle of Old Monk, their slender bodies marked by the flickering shadows of the leaves. Sometimes they heard the shrieking of animals as bombs went off in the distance, gunfire. It was enough to make them turn to each other, go quiet for a moment, a pause before they went on drinking. You could feel the blasts long after they were over. Their echoes pulsating in the calm, reverberating through wood and bone.
As the shots rang out, Rahim picked up insects from the leaves, scrolled through the photos they’d saved off the village WhatsApp groups. Always the same shit, he said – images of motorcycles, tholis fat with ganja. They sent bodies, severed hands, cough syrup and glamour shots of village girls. Dead fish and low-res porno. Chinese Kalashnikovs laid out on a fadedblue floral sheet. He raised the phone camera, did his hair a little, then flashed the pistol before snapping a photo for his background. Maybe something he’d send a couple of girls when he had data.
There were always killings, and rumours of killings. Amid all this, they wandered through the pitch, playing football or kicking stones across the dirt, looking for a buzz until something came along. A few of the boys did other jobs. Got just enough for a quick high in construction or driving trucks, working at all the paan shops and roadside stalls. Others made bombs down at the factory units on the outskirts of town. During breaks, they were back in the same fields, passing around chillums, waiting for the next call.
Excerpted with permission from The Spider, Aurko Maitra, Seagull Books.
