Between the Assassinations (20 page)

Why do I think so much? These thoughts are like thorns inside my head; I want them out. And even when I drink, they’re there. I wake up in the night, my throat burning, and I find all the thoughts still in my head.

He lay awake in his cart. He was sure he had been hounded by the rich even in his dreams, because he woke up furious and sweating. Then he heard the noise of coitus nearby. Looking around, he saw another cart puller humping the prostitute. Right next to him. He wondered,
Why not me? Why not me?
He knew the fellow had no money; so she was doing it out of charity.
Why not me?

Every sigh, every groan of the coupling pair was like a chastisement; and Chenayya couldn’t take it anymore.

He got off his cart, walked around till he found a puddle of cow dung on the ground, and scooped a handful. He flung the shit at the lovers. There was a cry; he rushed up to them, and dabbed the whore’s face with shit. He put his shit-smeared fingers into her mouth, and kept them there, even though she bit them; the harder she bit, the more he enjoyed it, and he kept his fingers there until the other pullers descended on him and dragged him away.

One day he was given an assignment that took him right out of the city limits, into Bajpe; he was delivering a doorframe to a construction site.

“There used to be a big forest here,” one of the construction workers told him. “But now that’s all that’s left.” He pointed to a distant clump of green.

Chenayya looked at the man and asked, “Is there any work here for me?”

On his way back, he took a detour off the road and went to the patch of green. When he got there, he left his bike and walked around; seeing a high rock, he climbed up and looked at the trees around him. He was hungry, because he had not eaten all day, but he felt all right. Yes, he could live out here. If only he had a little food, what more would he want? His aching muscles could be rested. He lay back on the rock and looked at the sky.

He dreamed of his mother. Then he remembered the thrill with which he had come to Kittur from his village, at the age of seventeen. That first day, he was taken around by a female cousin, who pointed out some of the main sights to him, and he remembered the whiteness of her skin, which doubled the charms of the city. He never saw that cousin again. He remembered what came next: the terrible contraction, the life that got smaller and smaller by the day in the city. The realization came to him now that the first day in a city was destined to be the best: you had already been expelled from paradise the moment you walked into the city.

He thought,
I could be a
sanyasi.
Just eat bushes and herbs and live with the sunrise and sunset.
The wind picked up; the trees nearby rustled, as if they were chuckling at him.

It was nighttime when he cycled back. To get to the shop faster, he took the route down the Lighthouse Hill.

As he was coming down, he saw a red light and then a green light attached to the back of a large silhouette moving down the road; a moment later he realized it was an elephant.

It was the same elephant he had seen earlier; only now it had red-and-green traffic lights tied with string to its rump.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he shouted to the mahout.

The mahout shouted back, “Well, I have to make sure no one bumps into us from behind at night—there are no lights anywhere!”

Chenayya threw his head up and laughed; it was the funniest thing he had ever seen: an elephant with traffic lights on its rump.

“They didn’t pay me,” the mahout said. He had tied the beast to the side of the road, and was chatting with Chenayya. He had some peanuts, and he didn’t want to eat them alone, so he was glad to share a few with Chenayya.

“They made me take their kid on a ride, and they didn’t pay me. You should have seen them drink and drink. And they wouldn’t pay me fifty rupees, which was all I asked for.”

The mahout slapped the side of his elephant. “After all that Rani did for them.”

“That’s the way of the world,” Chenayya said.

“Then it’s a rotten world.” The mahout chewed a few more peanuts.

“A rotten world.” He slapped the side of his elephant. Chenayya looked up at the beast.

The behemoth’s eyes gazed sidelong at him; they glistened darkly, almost as if they were tearing. The beast also seemed to be saying,
Things should not be this way.

The mahout pissed against a wall, turning his head up, arching his back, and exhaling in relief, as if it were the happiest thing he had done all day.

Chenayya kept looking at the elephant, its sad wet eyes. He thought,
I am sorry I ever cursed you, brother.
He spoke gently to it as he rubbed its trunk.

The mahout stood at the wall, watching Chenayya talking to the elephant, a sense of apprehension rising within him.

Outside the ice-cream shop, two kids were licking ice-cream bars and staring right at Chenayya. He lay sprawled on his cart, dead tired after another day’s work.

Don’t you see me?
Chenayya wanted to shout out over the traffic. His stomach was grumbling; he was tired and hungry, and there was still an hour before the Tamilian boy from Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop would come out with dinner.

One of the kids across the street turned away, as if the fury in the cart puller’s eyes had become tangible; but the other one, a fat light-skinned fellow, stayed put, licking his tongue up and down his ice-cream stick, staring nonchalantly at Chenayya.

Don’t you have any shame, any sense of decency, you fat fuck?

He turned around in his cart, and began talking aloud to calm his nerves. His gaze fell on the rusty saw lying at the end of his cart. “What stops me now,” he said aloud, “from crossing the street and slashing that boy into shreds?”

Just the thought made him feel powerful.

A finger began tapping on his shoulder.
If it is the fat motherfucker with his ice-cream bar, I will pick up that saw and slice him in two, I swear to God.

It was the Tamilian assistant from the store.

“Your turn, Chenayya.”

He took his cart to the entrance of the store, where the boy handed him a small package wrapped in newspaper and tied in white string.

“It’s to the same place you went a while back to deliver the TV table to. Mrs. Engineer’s house. We forgot to send the bonus gift, and she’s been complaining.”

“Oh, no,” he groaned. “She doesn’t tip at all. She’s a complete cunt.”

“You have to go, Chenayya. Your number came up.”

He cycled there slowly. At every intersection and traffic light he looked at the saw in his cart.

Mrs. Engineer opened her door herself: she said she was on the phone, and told him to wait outside.

“The food at the Lions Club is so fattening,” he heard her saying. “I’ve put on ten kilos in the past year.”

He looked around quickly. No lights were on in the neighbors’ houses. There seemed to be a night watchman’s shed at the back of the house, but that too was dark.

He snatched the saw and went in. She had her back to him; he saw the whiteness of her flesh in the gap between her blouse and her skirt; he smelled the perfume of her body. He went closer.

She turned around, then covered the receiver with her hand. “Not in here, you idiot! Just put it on the floor and get out!”

He stood there, confused.

“On the floor!” she screamed at him. “Then get out!”

He nodded, and dropped the saw on the floor and ran out.

“Hey! Don’t leave that in here! Oh, my God!”

He ran back, picked up the saw, then left the house, ducking low to avoid the neem-tree leaves. He tossed the saw into the cart: a loud clatter. The bonus gift…where was it? He grabbed the package, ran into the house, left it somewhere, and slammed the door.

There was a startled meow. A cat was sitting up on a branch of the tree, watching him closely. He went close to it. How beautiful its eyes were, he thought. Like a jewel that had fallen off the throne, a hint of a world of beauty beyond his knowledge and reach. He reached up to it, and it came to him.

“Kitty, kitty,” he said, stroking its fur. It wriggled in his arms, restless already.

Somewhere, I hope, a poor man will strike a blow against the world. Because there is no God watching over us. There is no one coming to release us from the jail in which we have locked ourselves.

He wanted to tell all this to the cat; maybe it could tell it to another cart puller—the one who would be brave enough to strike the blow.

He sat down by the wall, still holding on to the cat and stroking its fur.
Maybe I can take you along, kitty.
But how would he feed it? Who would take care of it when he was not around? He released it. He sat with his back to the wall and watched it walking cautiously up to a car and then slink under it; he craned his neck to see what it was doing down there when he heard a shout from above. It was Mrs. Engineer, yelling at him from a window at the top of her mansion:

“I know what you’re up to, you thug—I can read your mind! You won’t get another rupee out of me! Get moving!”

He was no longer angry; and he knew she was right. He had to go back to the store. His number would come up again soon. He got on his cart and pedaled.

There was a traffic jam in the city center, and Chenayya had to go over the Lighthouse Hill again. Traffic was bad here too. It moved a few inches at a time, and then Chenayya had to stop mid-hill, and clamp his foot down on the road to hold his cart in its place. When the horns began to sound, he rose from his seat and pedaled; behind him, a long line of cars and buses moved, as if he were pulling the traffic along with an invisible chain.

The old Cool Water Well is said never to dry up, but it is now sealed, and serves only as a traffic roundabout. The streets around the well house contain a number of middle-class housing colonies. Professional people of all castes—Bunts, Brahmins, and Catholics—live side by side here, although the Muslim rich keep to the Bunder. The Canara Club, the most exclusive club in town, is located here, in a large white mansion with lawns. The neighborhood is the “intellectual” part of town: it boasts a Lions Club, a Rotary Club, a Freemason’s Lodge, a Bahá’í educational group, a Theosophist Society, and a branch of the Alliance Française of Pondicherry. Of the numerous medical institutions located here, the two best-known are the Havelock Henry District Hospital and Dr. Shambhu Shetty’s Happy Smile Orthodontic Clinic. The St. Agnes Girls’ High School, Kittur’s most sought-after girls-only school, is also located close by the junction. The poshest part of the Cool Water Well Junction area is the hibiscus-lined street known as Rose Lane. Mabroor Engineer, believed to be Kittur’s richest man, and Anand Kumar, Kittur’s member of Parliament, have mansions here.

“I
T’S ONE THING
to take a little ganja, roll it inside a chapati, and chew it at the day’s end, just to relax the muscles—I can forgive that in a man, I really can. But to smoke this drug—this
smack
—at seven in the morning, and then lie in a corner with your tongue hanging out, I tolerate that in no man on my construction site. You understand me? Or do you want me to repeat this in Tamil or whatever language your people speak?”

“I understand, sir.”

“What did you say? What did you say, you son of…?”

Holding her brother by the hand, Soumya watched as the foreman chastised her father. The foreman was young, so much younger than her father—but he wore a khaki uniform that the construction company had given him, and twirled a lathi in his left hand, and she saw that the workers, instead of defending her father, were listening quietly to the foreman. He was sitting in a blue chair on an embankment of mud; a gas lamp buzzed noisily from a wooden pole driven into the ground next to the chair. Behind him was the crater around the half-demolished house; the inside of the house was filled with rubble, its roof had mostly fallen in, and its windows were empty. With his baton and his uniform, and his face harshly illuminated by the incandescent paraffin lamp, the foreman looked like a ruler of the underworld at the gate of his kingdom.

A semicircle of construction workers had formed below him. Soumya’s father stood apart from the others, looking furtively at Soumya’s mother, who was muffling her sobs in a corner of her sari. In a tear-racked voice she said, “I keep telling him to give up this
smack.
I keep telling—”

Soumya wondered why her mother had to complain about her father in front of everyone. Raju pressed her hand.

“Why are they all scolding Daddy?”

She pressed back.
Quiet.

All at once the foreman got up from his chair, took a step down the embankment, and raised his stick over Soumya’s father. “Pay attention, I said.” He brought his stick down.

Soumya shut her eyes and turned away.

The workers had returned to their tents, which were scattered about the open field around the dark, half-demolished house. Soumya’s father was lying on his blue mat, apart from everyone else; he was snoring already, his hands over his eyes. In the old days she would have gone to him and snuggled against his side.

Soumya went up to her father. She shook him by his big toe, but he did not respond. She went to where her mother was making rice, and lay down beside her.

Mallets and sledgehammers woke her up in the morning.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Bleary-eyed, she wandered up to the house. Her father was up on the bit of the roof that remained, sitting on one of the black iron crossbeams; he was cutting it with a saw. Two men swung at the wall below with sledgehammers; clouds of dust rose up and covered her father as he sawed. Soumya’s heart leapt.

She ran to her mother and cried:

“Daddy’s working again!”

Her mother was with the other women; they were coming down from the house, carrying large metal saucers on their heads filled to the brim with rubble. “Make sure Raju doesn’t get wet,” she said as she passed Soumya.

Only then did Soumya notice it was drizzling.

Raju was lying on the blanket where his mother had been; Soumya woke him up, and took him into one of the tents. Raju began whimpering, saying he wanted to sleep some more. She went to the blue mat; her father had not touched the rice from last night. Mixing the dry rice with the rainwater, she squeezed it into a gruel, and stuffed morsels into Raju’s mouth. He said he didn’t like it, and bit her fingers each time.

The rain fell harder, and she heard the foreman roar, “You sons of bald women, don’t slow down!”

The moment the rain stopped, Raju wanted to be pushed on the swing. “It’s going to start raining again,” she said, but he wouldn’t change his mind. She carried him in her arms to the old truck-tire swing near the compound wall, and put him on it, and gave him a push, shouting, “One! Two!”

As she pushed, a man appeared before her.

His dark, wet skin was coated in white dust, and it took an instant for her to recognize him.

“Sweetie,” he said, “you must do something for Daddy.”

Her heart was beating too fast for her to say a word. She wanted him to say “sweetie,” not like he was saying it now—as if it were just a word, air that he was breathing out—but like before, when it came from his heart, when it was accompanied by his pulling her to his chest and hugging her deeply and whispering madly into her ear.

He went on speaking, in the same strange, slow, slurred way, and told her what he wanted her to do; then he walked back to the house.

She found Raju, who was cutting an earthworm into smaller bits with a piece of glass he had stolen from the demolition site, and said, “We have to go.”

Raju could not be left alone, even though he would be a real nuisance on a trip like this. Once she had left him alone and he had swallowed a piece of glass.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To the Bunder.”

“Why?”

“There is a place by the Bunder, a garden, where Daddy’s friends are waiting for him to come. Daddy cannot go there—because the foreman will hit him again. You don’t want the foreman to beat Daddy again in front of all the world, do you?”

“No,” Raju said. “And when we get to this garden, what do we do?”

“We give Daddy’s friends at this garden ten rupees, and they will give us something Daddy
really
needs.”

“What?”

She told him.

Raju, already shrewd with money, asked, “How much will it cost?”

“Ten rupees, he said.”

“Did he give you ten rupees?”

“No. Daddy said we’ll have to get it ourselves. We’ll have to beg.”

As the two of them walked down Rose Lane, she kept her eyes on the ground. Once she had found five rupees on the ground—yes, five! You never knew what you’d find in a place where rich people live.

They moved to the side of the lane; a white car paused for a moment to go over a bump on the road, and she shouted at the driver:

“Where is the port, uncle?”

“Far from here,” he shouted back. “Go to the main road, and take a left.”

The tinted windows in the back of the car were rolled up, but through the driver’s window Soumya caught a glimpse of a passenger’s hand covered with gold bangles; she wanted to knock on the window. But she remembered the rule that the foreman had laid down for all the workers’ children. No begging in Rose Lane. Only on the main road. She controlled herself.

All the houses were being demolished and rebuilt in Rose Lane. Soumya wondered why people wanted to tear down these fine, large, whitewashed houses. Maybe houses became uninhabitable after some time, like shoes.

When the lights on the main road turned red, she went from autorickshaw to autorickshaw, opening and closing her fingers.

“Uncle, have pity, I’m starving.”

Her technique was solid. She had gotten it from her mother. It went like this: Even as she begged, for three seconds she kept eye contact; then her eye would begin to wander to the next autorickshaw. “Mother, I’m hungry”—rubbing her tummy—“give me food”—closing her fingers and bringing them to her mouth.

“Big brother, I’m hungry.”

“Grandpa, even a small coin would…”

While she did the road, Raju sat on the ground and was meant to whimper when anyone well dressed passed by. She did not count on him to do much; at least if he sat down he would stay out of other kinds of trouble, like running after cats, or trying to pet stray dogs that might be rabid.

Toward noon, the roads filled with cars. The windows had been rolled up against the rain, and she had to raise both her hands to the glass and scratch like a cat to get attention. The windows in one car were rolled down, and she thought her luck had improved.

A woman in one of the cars had beautiful patterns of gold painted on her hands, and Soumya gaped at them. She heard the woman with the gold hands say to someone else in the car:

“There are beggars everywhere these days in the town. It never used to be like this.”

The other person leaned forward and stared for a moment. “They’re so
dark
…Where are they from?”

“Who knows?”

Only fifty paise, after an hour.

Next she tried to get on the bus when it stopped at the red light, and beg there, but the conductor saw her coming and stood at the door: “Nothing doing.”

“Why not, uncle?”

“Who do you think I am, a rich man like Mr. Engineer? Go ask someone else, you brat!”

Glaring at her, he raised the red cord of his whistle over his head as if it were a whip. She scrambled out.

“He was a real cocksucker,” she told Raju, who had something to show her: a sheet of wrapping plastic, full of round buttons of air that could be popped.

Making sure the conductor couldn’t see, she got down on her knees and put it on the road right in front of the wheel. Raju crouched. “No, it’s not right. The wheels won’t go over it,” he said. “Push it to the right a little.”

When the bus moved again, the wheels ran over the plastic sheets and the buttons exploded, startling the passengers; the conductor poked his head out of the window to see what had happened. The two children ran away.

It began raining again. The two of them crouched under a tree; coconuts came crashing down, and a man who had been standing next to them with an umbrella jumped up, and swore at the tree, and ran. She giggled, but Raju was worried they would get hit by a falling coconut.

When the rain stopped, she found a twig and scratched on the ground, drawing a map of the city, as she imagined it. Here was Rose Lane. Here was where they had come, still close to Rose Lane. Here…was the Bunder. And here—the garden inside the Bunder that they were looking for.

“Do you understand all of this?” she asked Raju. He nodded, excited by the map.

“To get to the Bunder, we have to go”—she drew another arrow—“through the big hotel.”

“And then?”

“And then we go to the garden inside the Bunder…”

“And then?”

“We find the thing Daddy wants us to get.”

“And then?”

The truth was, she had no idea if the hotel was on the way to the port or not: but the rain had driven the vehicles away from the road, and the hotel was the only place where she might be able to beg for the money right now.

“You have to ask for money in English from the tourists,” she teased Raju as they walked to the hotel. “Do you know what to say in English?”

They stopped outside the hotel to watch a group of crows bathing in a puddle of water. The sun was shining on the water, and the black coats of the crows turned glossy as scintillas of water flew from their shaking bodies; Raju declared it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

The man with no arms and legs was sitting in front of the hotel; he yelled curses from the other side of the road.

“Go away, you devil’s children! I told you never to come back here!”

She shouted back, “To hell with you, monster! We told
you:
never come back here!”

He was sitting on a wooden board with wheels. Whenever a car slowed down at the traffic light in front of the hotel, he rolled up on his wooden board and begged from one side; she begged from the other side of the car.

Raju, sitting on the pavement, yawned.

“Why do we need to beg? Daddy is working today. I saw him cutting those things—” He moved his legs apart and began sawing at an imaginary crossbeam below him.

“Quiet.”

Two taxis slowed down near the red light. The man with no arms and legs rushed on his wooden board to the first taxi; she ran to the second one, and put her hands into the open window. A foreigner was sitting inside. He stared at her with an open mouth: she saw his lips making a perfect pink “O.”

“Did you get any money?” Raju asked, when she came back from the car and the white man.

“No. Get up,” she said, and dragged the boy to his feet.

By the time they had crossed two red lights, however, Raju had figured it out. He pointed to her clutched fist.

“You got money from the white man. You have the money!”

She went up to an autorickshaw parked by the side of the road. “Which way is the Bunder?”

The driver yawned. “I don’t have any money. Go away.”

“I’m not asking for money. I’m asking for directions to the Bunder.”

“I told you, I’m not giving you anything!”

She spat at his face. Then she grabbed Raju by the wrist and they ran like mad.

The next autorickshaw driver they asked was a kind man. “It’s a long, long way. Why don’t you take a bus? The number three-forty-three will get you there. Otherwise it’ll be a couple of hours at least, by foot.”