So when Saddam spoke of Dussehra, Anjum understood it in all its vast and varied meanings.
“We found the dead cow easily,” Saddam said. “It’s always easy, you just have to know the art of walking straight into the stink. We loaded the carcass on to the Tempo and started driving home. On the way we stopped at the Dulina police station to pay the Station House Officer—his name was Sehrawat—his cut. It was a previously-agreed-upon sum, a per-cow rate. But that day he asked for more. Not just for more, for triple the amount. Which meant we would have actually been losing money to skin that cow. We knew him well, that Sehrawat. I don’t know what came over him that day—maybe he wanted the money to buy alcohol that night, to celebrate Dussehra, or maybe he had a debt to pay off, I don’t know. Maybe he was just trying to take advantage of the political climate of the time. My father and his friends tried to plead with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He got angry when they said they didn’t even have that much money on them. He arrested them on the charge of ‘cow-slaughter’ and put them in the police lock-up. I was left outside. My father didn’t seem worried when he went in, so I wasn’t either. I waited, assuming they were just doing some hard bargaining and would soon come to an agreement. Two hours went by. Crowds of people passed by on their way to the evening fireworks. Some were dressed as gods, Ram, Laxman and Hanuman—little kids with bows and arrows, some with monkey’s tails and their faces painted red, some were demons with black faces, all going to take part in the Ramlila. When they walked past our truck, they all held their noses because of the stink. At sunset, I heard the explosions of the effigies being blown up and the cheers of the people watching. I was upset that I had missed all the fun. In a while people began to return home. There was still no sign of my father and his friends. And then, I don’t know how it happened—maybe the police spread the rumor, or made a few phone calls—but a crowd started to collect outside the police station demanding the ‘cow-killers’ be turned over to them. The dead cow in the Tempo, stinking up the whole area, was proof enough for them. People began to block traffic. I didn’t know what to do, where to hide, so I mingled with the crowd. Some people started shouting Jai Shri Ram! and Vande Mataram! More and more joined in and it turned into a frenzy. A few men went into the police station and brought my father and his three friends out. They began to beat them, at first just with their fists, and with shoes. But then someone brought a crowbar, someone else a carjack. I couldn’t see much, but when the first blows fell I heard their cries…”
Saddam turned to Anjum.
“I have never heard a sound like that…it was a strange, high sound, it wasn’t human. But then the howling of the crowd drowned them. I don’t need to tell you. You know…” Saddam’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Everybody watched. Nobody stopped them.”
He described how once the mob had finished its business the cars switched their headlights on, all together, like an army convoy. How they splashed through puddles of his father’s blood as if it were rainwater, how the road looked like a street in the old city on the day of Bakr-Eid.
“I was part of the mob that killed my father,” Saddam said.
Anjum’s desolate fort with its humming walls and secret dungeons threatened to rise around her again. Saddam and she could almost hear each other’s heartbeats. She couldn’t bring herself to say anything, not even to utter a word of sympathy. But Saddam knew she was listening. It was a while before he spoke again.
“A few months after all this my mother, who was already unwell, died. I was left in the care of my uncle and my grandmother. I dropped out of school, stole some money from my uncle and came to Delhi. I arrived in Delhi with just a little money and the clothes I was wearing. I had only one ambition—I wanted to kill that bastard Sehrawat. Someday I will. I slept on the streets, worked as a truck cleaner, for a few months even as a sewage worker. And then my friend Neeraj, who is from my village, now he works in the Municipal Corporation, you’ve met him—”
“Yes,” Anjum said, “that tall, beautiful-looking boy—”
“Yes, him. He tried to get into modeling but couldn’t…even for that you have to pay pimps. Now he drives a truck for the Municipal Corporation…Anyway, Neeraj helped me to get a job here, in the mortuary, where we first met…A few years after I came to Delhi I was passing a TV showroom, and one of the TVs in the window was playing the evening news. That’s when I first saw the video of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. I didn’t know anything about him, but I was so impressed by the courage and dignity of that man in the face of death. When I got my first mobile phone, I asked the shopkeeper to find that video and download it for me. I watched it again and again. I wanted to be like him. I decided to become a Muslim and take his name. I felt it would give me the courage to do what I had to do and face the consequences, like him.”
“Saddam Hussein was a bastard,” Anjum said. “He killed so many people.”
“Maybe. But he was brave…See…Look at this.”
Saddam took out his fancy new smartphone with its fancy big screen and pulled up a video. He shaded the screen with a cupped palm to cut the glare. It was a TV clip that began with an advertisement for Vaseline Intensive Care moisturizing cream in which a pretty girl oiled her elbows and shins and seemed extremely pleased with the results. Next up was an advertisement by the Jammu & Kashmir Tourism Department—snowy landscapes and happy people in warm clothes sitting in snow sledges. The voice-over said, “Jammu & Kashmir. So White. So Fair. So Exciting.” Then the TV announcer said something in English and Saddam Hussein, former President of Iraq, appeared, elegant, with a salt-and-pepper beard, in a black overcoat and white shirt. He towered over the group of murmuring men wearing peaked, black executioner’s hoods who surrounded him and looked at him through eye-slits. His hands were tied behind his back. He stood still while one of the men tied a black scarf around his neck, making gestures that seemed to suggest that the scarf would help to prevent the skin on his neck getting chafed by the hangman’s rope. Once it was knotted, the scarf made Saddam Hussein look even more elegant. Surrounded by the jabbering, hooded men, he walked to the gallows. The noose was looped over his head and tightened around his neck. He said his prayers. The last expression on his face before he fell through the trapdoor was one of absolute disdain for his executioners.
“I want to be this kind of a bastard,” Saddam said. “I want to do what I have to do and then, if I have to pay a price, I want to pay it like that.”
“I have a friend who lives in Iraq,” Anjum said, seemingly more impressed by Saddam’s phone than with the execution video. “Guptaji. He sends me his photos from Iraq.” She pulled out her phone and showed Saddam the pictures that D. D. Gupta sent her regularly—Guptaji in his flat in Baghdad, Guptaji and his Iraqi mistress on a picnic, and a series of portraits of the blast walls that Guptaji had constructed all over Iraq for the US Army. Some were new and some were already pockmarked with bullet holes and covered with graffiti. Across one of them, someone had scrawled an American army general’s famous words: Be professional, be polite and have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
Anjum couldn’t read English. Saddam could, if he paid careful attention. On this occasion he didn’t.