Between the Assassinations (12 page)

“If they sleep here, they will have to pay the boss,” the sleeper complained.

“What do I do with them? They have to sleep somewhere!”

“Well, you’re taking a risk, but if you have to leave them here, try the far end.”

The alley ended in a wall that leaked continuously; the drainage pipes had been badly fitted. A large garbage bin at this end of the alley emitted a horrible stench.

“Isn’t uncle going to take us to his house, Brother?” Keshava whispered, when the store owner, having given them some advice about how to sleep out in the open, vanished.

Vittal pinched him.

“I’m hungry,” Keshava said after a few minutes. “Can we find uncle and ask him for food?”

The two brothers were lying side by side, wrapped in their bedding, next to the garbage bin.

In response, his brother entirely covered himself in his blanket, and lay inside, still, like a cocoon.

Keshava could not believe he was expected to sleep here—and on an empty stomach. However bad things had been at home, at least there had always been something to eat. Now all the frustrations of the evening, the fatigue, and the confusion combined, and he kicked the shrouded figure hard. His brother, as if he had been waiting for just such a provocation, tore the blanket off, caught Keshava’s head in his hands, and slammed it twice against the ground.

“If you make one more sound, I swear, I will leave you all alone in this city.” Then he covered himself with his bedding once more, and turned his back to his brother.

And though his head had begun to hurt, Keshava was frightened by what his brother had said. He shut up.

Lying there, his head stinging, Keshava wondered, dully, where it was decided that this fellow and this fellow would be brothers; and about how people came into the earth, and how they left it. It was a dull curiosity. Then he began thinking about food. He was in a tunnel, and that tunnel was his hunger, and at the end of the tunnel, if he kept going, he promised himself, there would be a huge heap of rice, covered with hot lentils, with big chunks of chicken.

He opened his eyes; there were stars in the sky. He looked up at them to block the stench of garbage.

When they arrived at the shop the following morning, the shopkeeper was using a long stick to hang plastic bags of malt powder on hooks in the ceiling.

“You,” the shopkeeper said, pointing to Vittal. He showed the boy how each plastic bag was to be fitted to the end of the pole, and then lifted up and snared on a hook in the ceiling.

“It takes forty-five minutes every morning to do this; sometimes an hour. I don’t want you to rush the work. You don’t mind working, do you?”

Then, with the redundancy of speech typical of the rich, he said, “If a man doesn’t work, he doesn’t eat in this world.”

While Vittal hung the plastic bags from the hooks, the shopkeeper told Keshava to sit behind the counter. He gave him six sheets of paper with the faces of film actresses printed on them, and six boxes of incense sticks. The boy was to cut out the pictures, put them on the incense-stick boxes, cover them with cellophane quickly, and Scotch-tape the cellophane to the box.

“With pretty girls on them, you can charge ten paise more,” said the storekeeper. “Do you know who this is?” He showed Keshava the picture he had just cut from the sheet. “She’s famous in Hindi films.”

Keshava began cutting out the next actress from the sheet. In front of them, below the counter, he could see where the store owner had hidden his bottle of hooch.

At noon, the shopkeeper’s wife came with lunch. She looked at Vittal, who avoided her gaze, and at Keshava, who stared at her, and said, “There’s not enough food for both of them. Send one of them to the barber.”

Keshava, following instructions he had memorized, made his way through the unfamiliar streets and came to a part of town where he found a barber working on the street. The barber had set up his stall against a wall, hanging his mirror from a nail hammered between a family-planning sign and an anti-tuberculosis poster.

A customer sat in a chair in front of the mirror, draped in a white cloth, and the barber was shaving him. Keshava waited till the customer had left.

The barber scratched his head and inspected Keshava from head to foot.

“What kind of work can I offer you, boy?”

At first the barber could think of nothing for him to do but hold the mirror for his customers to examine themselves after they had been shaved. Then he asked Keshava to clip the toenails and calluses from the customers’ feet as he shaved them. Then he told the boy to sweep the hair from the pavement.

“Serve him some food too, he’s a good boy,” the barber told his wife when she arrived with tea and biscuits at four o’clock.

“He’s the shopkeeper’s boy, he can get food himself. And he’s a Hoyka, you want him eating with us?”

“He’s a good boy, let him have some food. Just a little.”

It was only as the barber watched the boy wolf down the biscuits that he realized why the shopkeeper had sent the boy to him. “My God! You haven’t eaten all day?”

The next morning, when Keshava showed up, the barber patted him on the back. He still didn’t know exactly what to do with Keshava, but that no longer seemed to be a problem; he knew he could not let this boy, with his sweet face, starve all day at the shopkeeper’s place. In the afternoon, Keshava was given lunch. The barber’s wife grumbled, but her husband splashed Keshava’s plate with large helpings of fish curry.

“He’s a hard worker, he deserves it.”

That evening, Keshava accompanied the barber on a round of house calls; they went from house to house, and waited in the backyards for their customers to come outside. While Keshava set up a small wooden chair in the backyard, the barber threw a white cloth around the customer’s neck and asked him how he wanted his hair cut that day. After each appointment, the barber would flap the white cloth hard, dusting off the curls of hair from them; as they left the house and went to the next, the barber passed a commentary on the customer.

“That customer can’t get it up, you can tell from how limp his mustache is.”

Seeing Keshava’s blank stare, he said, “I guess you don’t know about that bit of life yet, eh, boy?” Then, regretting that confidence, he whispered to the boy, “Don’t repeat that to my wife.”

Each time they crossed the road, the barber seized the boy by the wrist.

“It’s
dangerous
out here,” he said, pronouncing the key word in English, in a tremulous manner, bringing out all the drama in that foreign word. “One moment of not watching out in this city, and your whole life is gone.
Dangerous.
”

In the evening Keshava came back to the alley behind the market. His brother was lying facedown on the ground, fast asleep, too tired even to lay out his bedding. Keshava unfolded the sheet and covered Vittal’s face up to his nose.

Since Vittal was already asleep, he pulled his mattress right next to his brother’s, so that their arms would touch. He fell asleep gazing at the stars.

A horrible noise woke him in the middle of the night: three kittens, chasing each other, right around his body. In the morning, he saw their neighbor feeding the kittens a bowl of milk. They had yellow fur, and their pupils were elongated, like claw marks.

“Have you got the money ready?” the neighbor asked him, when he came over to pet the kittens. He explained that Vittal and Keshava would have to pay a fee to a local “boss”—one of those who collected payments from the homeless of the streets of Kittur in return for “protection”—mainly from himself.

“But where is this boss? My brother and I have never seen him here.”

“You’ll see him tonight. That was the word we received. Have the money ready, or he’ll beat you.”

Over the next few weeks, Keshava developed a routine. In the mornings, he worked at the barber’s; after his work at the barber’s, he was free to do as he wished. He wandered about the market, which seemed to him to be bursting with shining things, expensive things. Even the cows that ate the garbage seemed so much larger in this market than they were back home. He wondered what there was in the garbage here that made the cows so fat. One black cow, an animal with extraordinary horns, walked about like a magical animal from some other land; back in the village he used to ride cows and he wanted to mount this animal, but he was frightened of doing so here in the city. Food seemed to be everywhere in Kittur; even the poor did not starve here. He saw food being scraped into the hands of the poor by the Jain temple. He saw a shopkeeper trying to sleep in the hubbub of the market, covering his head with a scooter helmet. He saw shops selling glass bangles, white shirts and undershirts in cellophane bags, maps of India with her states marked out.

“Hey! Move out of the way, you village hick!”

He turned. The man was driving a bullock cart laden with cardboard boxes stacked into a pyramid; the boy wondered what was in the boxes.

He wished he had a cycle, to ride fast up and down the main road and stick his tongue out at these haughty fellows riding the bullock carts, who were always rude to him. But most of all he wished he were a bus conductor. They hung from the sides of the buses, shouting at people to get in faster, cursing when a rival bus overtook them; they had their khaki uniforms and their black whistles hanging from the red cords around their necks.

One evening, nearly every bystander around the market looked up to see a monkey walking on a telephone wire that went over their heads. Keshava stared at the monkey in wonder. Its pink scrotum dangled between its legs, and huge red balls whacked against the sides of the wire. It leapt onto a building with a blue sun and spreading rays painted on it, and sat there, looking down indifferently at the crowd.

Suddenly an autorickshaw hit Keshava, flinging him down onto the road. Before he could scramble to his feet, he saw the rickshaw driver in front of him, yelling furiously.

“Get up! You son of a bald woman! Get up! Get up!” The driver had made a fist already, and Keshava covered his face with his hands and begged.

“Leave the boy alone.”

A fat man in a blue sarong stood over Keshava, pointing a stick at the autorickshaw driver. The driver grumbled, but turned away and returned to his vehicle.

Keshava wanted to catch the hands of the man in the blue sarong and kiss them, but the man had melted away into the crowd.

Once again, the cats woke Keshava in the middle of the night. Before he could go back to sleep, there was a loud whistle from the far end of the alley. “Brother’s here!” someone cried. A shuffling of clothes and blankets followed; men were getting up all around him. A potbellied man in a white singlet and a blue sarong was standing at the head of the alley, his hands on his hips. He bellowed:

“So, my little darling dumplings, you thought you could avoid payments to your poor bereaved Brother by coming here to this alley, did you?”

The fat man—the one who called himself Brother—went up to each of the men sleeping in the alley one by one. Keshava started: it was his savior from the market. With his stick Brother poked every sleeping person and asked, “How long has it been since you paid me? Huh?”

Vittal was terrified; but a neighbor whispered, “Don’t worry, he’ll only make you do some squats and say sorry, and then he’ll be off. He knows there’s no money in this lane.”

When he reached Vittal, the fat man stopped and inspected him carefully.

“And you, sir, my Maharaja of Mysore, if I may bother you a second,” he said. “Your name?”

“Vittal, son of the barber from Gurupura Village, sir.”

“Hoyka?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did you arrive in this lane?”

“Four months ago,” Vittal said, blurting out the truth.

“And how many payments have you made to me in that period?”

Vittal said nothing.

The fat man slapped him, and he staggered back, tripped on his bedding, and fell on the ground hard.

“Don’t hit him, hit me!”

The man in the blue sarong turned to Keshava.

“He’s my brother, he’s my only relative in the world! Hit me instead. Please!”

The fat man put down his stick; with narrowed eyes he examined the little boy.

“A Hoyka who is so brave? That’s unusual. Your caste is full of cowards, that’s been Brother’s experience in Kittur.”

He pointed at Keshava with his stick and addressed the entire lane:

“Everyone: notice the way he sticks by his brother. Wah, wah. Young fellow, for your sake, I spare your brother’s hide tonight.”

He touched Keshava’s head with the stick. “On Thursday, you’ll come see me. At the bus stand. I have work for brave boys like you there.”

The next morning, the barber was aghast when Keshava told him of his tremendous good fortune.

“But who’s going to hold the mirror?” he said.

He caught the boy by the wrist.

“It’s
dangerous
with those people in the buses. Stay with me, Keshava. You can come and sleep in my house so this Brother doesn’t bother you anymore; you’ll be like a son to me.”

But Keshava had lost his heart to the buses. Every day he went straight to the bus stand at the end of Central Market to scrub the buses clean with a mop and a bucket of water. He was the most enthusiastic of the cleaners. When he was inside the bus, he would take the wheel and pretend he was driving, vroom-vroom!

“A nice little catch here for us,” Brother told them—and the conductors and drivers laughed and agreed.

As long as he was at the wheel, pretending to be driving, he was loud, and used the coarsest language; but if anyone stopped him and asked, “What’s your name, loudmouth?” he would get confused, and roll his eyes, and slap the top of his skull, before saying, “Keshava—yes, that’s it. Keshava. I think that’s my name.” They would roar and say, “He’s a bit touched in the head, this fellow!”

One conductor took a liking to him, and told him to come along on his four p.m. round on the bus. “Only one round, you understand?” he warned the boy sternly. “You’ll have to get off the bus at five-fifteen p.m.”