The Story of My Assassins by Tarun J. Tejpal; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.495; 522 pp
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When one has enough fodder in one’s life to fill the pages of an entire novel, then the only recourse is to do exactly that — write it. Author-journalist and social crusader Tarun J. Tejpal in his second novel (after Alchemy of Desire) charts barely disguised episodes from his life and journalistic career, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Written in the first person, unsurprisingly, the protagonist of this novel is the editor of a weekly news magazine which has recently exposed a scam in the ministry of agriculture. Expecting harsh retaliation from the government, he is astonished to find that suddenly he himself — rather than his exposé — has become sensational news, thanks to a failed assassination attempt against him.
In a bizarre turn of events, the unnamed protagonist is informed that he has just about managed to escape an attempt on his life by five of the country’s most deadly assassins. Over the next few months, he gets drawn into a maelstrom of tightening police security, numerous visits to police headquarters and the courts, where he comes face-to-face with the failed assassins. At first, when his activist girlfriend Sara insists that he is just a pawn in a larger game and it is his accused murderers whose lives are actually at stake, the protagonist is sceptical. But gradually and rather grudgingly he learns the story of each hired assassin.
The parallels between the real-life Tehelka exposé and the storyline of this novel are obvious. Tehelka, now a well-known weekly news and features magazine, first began as a news website in 2000, and hit the headlines in 2001 when its team exposed a match-fixing racket in cricket. This was followed by a sting operation code-named West End, in which a Tehelka team provided proof of an open secret: that defence ministry officials all the way to the top were accepting bribes from agents of armament manufacturers. This exposé kicked up the dirt that led to the resignation of defence minister George Fernandes. The website was forced to shut down because of angry retaliation by the BJP-led NDA government. But nothing loath, Tejpal re-launched it in 2003 as a weekly tabloid which later morphed into a weekly magazine.
In the aftermath of the exposé, an attempt was reportedly made on Tejpal’s life, allegedly by Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence (ISI). Drawing inspiration from these incidents, the author has fleshed out a similar plot in this novel under review.
Yet the twist in this tale is that instead of focusing on the victim of the failed assassination attempt, Tejpal beams the spotlight on the unsuccessful assassins. These are people like the narrator-protagonist of Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger — India’s marginalised, wretched sons of the soil who have recently pushed aside self-indulgent middle and upper class heroes to make their own space in Indian fiction.
The assassins in the story are no picture-book heroes. But their histories are recounted in painstaking detail. Through their individual stories they provide a compelling glimpse of the under-belly of not-so-shining India, where there are no happy people. Only people whose lives are filled with misery, corruption and iniquity. “Never forget that we are small people and it is best for us to lie low — beneath the sweep of every marauding wind and murderous sword. We are not Hindu or Muslim, men or women. We are just small people who can only stay safe by making ourselves invisible,” an assassin’s mother poignantly tells her husband.
Though a page turner, the book tends to stretch in parts. Tejpal has tried to weave all his journalistic experiences into its pages. Therefore he takes excessive time to tell his tale. Yet the descriptions of life and bonding on the streets, railway platforms and in India’s neglected villages ring true. In the new tradition of Slumdog Millionaire, Tejpal also succeeds in throwing light on the wretched majority of shining India.
Amrita Bose