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. The charismatic editor of Tehelka, Tejpal knows India’s elite and underclass alike. In Assassins he weaves their stories together seamlessly.
The novel begins as the world-weary 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.
Struggling to finance the magazine he edits, the protagonist is suffering from compassion fatigue. In the police station to file a report, he casts a jaded eye on those around him: "I didn’t want to know about the villages they came from, the schools they went to, their family problems, their struggling parents, their working woes, their caste, their religion, their dialect, their opinions on politics, nationhood, the economy, Gandhi, Nehru, corruption, crime, cricket, Hindu, Muslim. Nothing."
Yet this is what Tejpal persuades him—and the reader—to do once the would-be assassins are arrested. The protagonist is seduced into empathy for his assassins by his mistress, who, in between having steamy sex with him, sets out to prove them innocent. The reader is seduced by the novel’s narrative voice, a smart, acerbic voice for a tough, edgy story.
As the plot is revealed, so is Delhi in its splendour and squalour. Delhi is the ultimate subject of Assassins.
Tejpal is a marvellously observant writer. He brilliantly evokes the city’s power machinery with a few strokes, as when the narrator sees the high court as a sea of penguins (lawyers in black coats), or enters a fort of a police station, or examines his unlikely assassins: "They looked like each other. Everymen. The roads, bazaars, offices of India were full of men like them."
The novel is also full of laugh-out-loud lines that bring Delhi to life. In Tejpal’s Delhi, journalists ask editors for "red lines"; publishers cower from manuscripts for fear of libel; the television blares inanities 24/7; gurus proffer dubious wisdom; the wealthy ensconce themselves in gaudy farmhouses and the "vaguely famous" gather, self-importantly, at the India International Centre....
Tejpal spares no one among the elite. Yet his focus is unblinkingly on the underclass, the poor from the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who seem to have been put on this earth to be used and then discarded.
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 a thoroughly satisfying read.
In his first novel, The Alchemy of Desire, Tejpal established his joyously earthy sensibility and natural flair for story-telling. He infuses Assassins with an added quest, one for morality in today’s divided India. This quest significantly increases the urgency, and importance, of his fiction. Assassins does not just entertain. It also enlightens. This is set to be the definitive Great Delhi Novel of our times.
(Manjushree Thapa is a Nepali writer. Her books include The Tutor of History, Forget Kathmandu and Tilled Earth)
