“It detonates, you idiot.” There was laughter. “You use it in a bomb.
“It’s the easiest thing on earth, to make a bomb,” Shabbir said. “Take a bag of fertilizer, and then put this detonator in it, and that’s it.”
“Where would you get it?” someone, not Shankara, asked.
“Mustafa gave it to me,” Shabbir Ali said, almost in an aside.
Mustafa, Mustafa. Shankara clung tightly to the name.
“Where does he live?” asked one of the twins.
“Down by the Bunder. In the pepper market. Why?” Shabbir Ali poked his questioner. “You planning on making a bomb?”
“Why not?”
More giggling. And Shankara had said nothing more that evening, saying, Mustafa, Mustafa, to himself, terrified he would forget the name unless he said nothing else all evening.
As he was stirring his third chikoo shake, two men came and sat down next to him: two policemen. One ordered an orange juice, and the other wanted to know how many types of tea were served at the shop. Shankara got up; then sat down. He knew they would start talking about him. His heart beat faster.
“Only the detonator went off, and it blew the fertilizer all around the room. That idiot who made it thought making a bomb is as simple as sticking a detonator into a bag of fertilizer. It’s a good thing, otherwise some of those boys would have been killed.”
“What is the youth of this country coming to?”
“These days, it’s all sex, sex, and violence. The whole country is going the Punjab way.”
One of the cops caught him staring, and stared back. He turned away. Maybe I should have stuck around with Urmila Auntie. Maybe I should have kept indoors today.
But what guarantee that she-even though she was his auntie-wouldn’t betray him? You never knew with Brahmins. As a boy, he had been taken to a wedding of one of his Brahmin relatives. His mother never came to such events, but his father put him in the car, and then told him to play with his cousins. The Brahmin boys invited him to join in a competition. An inch of salt sat on a slab of vanilla ice cream; the challenge was for someone to eat it. “You idiot,” one of the others shouted, when Shankara put his spoon down, a scoop of salty ice cream in his mouth. “It was just a joke!”
As the years passed, it was always the same. Once, a Brahmin boy in school had invited him home. He took a chance, he liked the fellow, he said yes. The boy and his mother invited Shankara into the drawing room. It was a “modern” family-they had lived abroad. He saw miniature Eiffel Towers and porcelain milkmaids in the drawing room, and he felt reassured that he would not be ill treated here.
He was given tea and biscuits, and made to feel perfectly at home. But as he left, he turned and saw his friend’s mother with a cleaning rag in her left hand. She had begun wiping the sofa where he had been sitting.
His caste seemed to be common knowledge to people who had no business knowing it. One day, when he had gone to play cricket at Nehru Maidan, an old man had stood watching him from the wall of the playground. In the end, he called Shankara over, and examined his face, neck, and wrists for several minutes. Shankara had stood helpless during the examination: he just looked at the wrinkles that radiated from the old man’s eyes.
“You’re the son of Vasudev Kinni and the Hoyka woman, aren’t you?”
He insisted that Shankara walk along with him.
“Your father always was a headstrong man. He would never agree to an arranged marriage. One day he found your mother, and he told all the Brahmins, ‘To hell with you. I am marrying this beautiful creature, whether you like it or not.’ I knew what would happen; you would be a bastard. Neither a Brahmin nor a Hoyka. I told your father this. He would not listen.”
The man patted him on the shoulder. The unselfconscious way in which he touched Shankara suggested that he was not a bigot, not caste-obsessed, but just someone speaking the sad truth of life.
“You too belong to a caste,” said the old fellow. “The Brahmo-Hoykas, in between the two. They are mentioned in the scriptures, and we know that they exist somewhere. They are a people separate entirely from other humans. You should talk to them, and marry one of them. That way everything will be normal again.”
“Yes, sir,” Shankara said, not knowing why he said it.
“Today, there is no such thing as caste,” the man said with regret. “Brahmins eat meat. Kshatriyas get educated and write books. And lower castes convert to Christianity and Islam. You heard what happened at Meenakshipuram, didn’t you? Colonel Gaddafi is trying to destroy Hinduism, and the Christian priests are hand in glove with him.”
They walked along for a while, until they came to the bus stand.
“You must find your own caste,” said the man. “You must find your people.” He lightly embraced Shankara and boarded the bus, where he began to jostle with young men for a seat. Shankara felt sorry for this old Brahmin. He had never in his life had to catch a bus; there was always the chauffeur.
Shankara thought, He is of a higher caste than me, but he is poor. What does this thing mean, then, caste?
Is it just a fable for old men like him? If you just said to yourself, “Caste is a fiction,” would it vanish like smoke; if you said, “I am free,” would you realize you had always been free?
He had finished his fourth chikoo milk shake. He felt sick.
As he left the ice-cream shop, all he wanted to do was to go visit Old Court Road. To sit by that statue of the dark Jesus.
He looked around to see if the police were following him. Of course, on a day like this he could not go anywhere near the Jesus statue. It was suicide. They would be watching all routes into the school.
He thought of Daryl D’Souza. That was the man to go see! In twelve years in the schooling system, Daryl D’Souza was the only one who had been decent to Shankara.
Shankara had first seen the professor at a political rally. This was the Hoyka Pride and Self-Expression Day Rally held at the Nehru Maidan-the greatest political event in the history of Kittur, the newspaper would say the following day. Ten thousand Hoykas had filled the maidan to demand their rights as a full-fledged community, and to ask retribution for the five millennia of injustice done to them.
The warm-up speaker talked about the language issue. The official language of the town should be declared Tulu, the language of the common man, and not Kannada, which was the Brahmin language.
A thunderclap of applause followed.
The professor, although not himself a Hoyka, had been invited as a sympathetic outsider; he was sitting next to the guest of honor, Kittur’s member of Parliament, who was a Hoyka, the pride of his community. A three-time MP, and also a junior member of the Cabinet of India-a sign to the entire community of how high they could aim.
Eventually, after many more preliminary speakers, the member of Parliament got up. He began to shout:
“We, brother and sister Hoykas, were not even allowed into the temple in the old days, did you know? The priest stood at the door, saying, ‘You low-caste!’”
He paused, to let the insult reverberate among his listeners.
“‘Low-caste! Go back!’ But ever since I was elected to Parliament-by you, my people-do the Brahmins dare do that to you? Do they dare call you ‘low-caste’? We are ninety percent of this town! We are Kittur! If they hit us, we will hit them back! If they shame us, we will…”
After the speech, someone recognized Shankara. He was led into a small tent where the member of Parliament was relaxing after the speech, and introduced as the plastic surgeon Kinni’s son. The great man, who was sitting on a wooden chair, a drink in his hand, set his glass down firmly, spilling his drink. He took Shankara’s hand in his hand and gestured for him to squat down on the ground beside him.
“In the light of your family situation, your high status in society, you are the future of the Hoyka community,” the MP said. He paused, and belched.
“Yes, sir.”
“You understand what I said?” asked
the great man.
“Yes, sir.”
“The future is ours. We are ninety percent of this town. All that Brahmin shit is finished,” he said-flicking his wrist.
“Yes, sir.”
“If they hit you, you hit them back. If they…if they…” The great man made circles with his hand, to complete the slurred statement.
Shankara wanted to shout out in joy. “Brahmin shit!” Yes, that was exactly how he would put it himself; and here was a member of Parliament, a cabinet minister in the government of Rajiv Gandhi, talking just as he would!
Then an aide led Shankara from the tent. “Mr. Kinni”-the aide squeezed Shankara’s arm-“if you could make a small donation towards this evening’s function. Just a small amount…”
Shankara emptied his pockets. Fifty rupees. He gave it all to the aide, who bowed deeply and told him once more that he was the future of the Hoyka community.
Shankara watched. Already hundreds of men were getting into lines, where beer and quarter-liter bottles of rum were being distributed to them, as a bribe for having attended the rally and cheered the speakers. He shook his head with disapproval. He didn’t like the idea that he was part of ninety percent of his town. Now it seemed to him that the Brahmins were defenseless-a former elite of Kittur who now lived in constant fear of being robbed of their homes and their wealth by the Hoykas, the Bunts, the Konkanas, and everyone else in town. The sheer averageness of the Hoykas-whatever they did became the average at once, by definition-repulsed him.
The following morning, he read the newspaper, and thought he had been too harsh on the Hoykas. He remembered the professor who had been up onstage, and found out from his chauffeur where he lived. He paced backward and forward outside the front gate of the professor’s house for a while. Finally he opened the gate, approached the house, and pressed the front doorbell.
The professor opened the door. Shankara said, “Sir, I am a Hoyka. You are the only man in this town whom I trust. I wish to talk with you.”
“I know who you are,” Professor D’Souza said. “Come in.”
Professor D’Souza and Shankara sat in the living room and had a long talk.
“Who is that member of Parliament? What is his caste?” the professor asked.
The question confused Shankara.
“He is one of us, sir. A Hoyka.”
“Not quite,” the professor said. “He is a Kollaba. Have you heard the term? There is no such thing as a Hoyka, my dear fellow. The caste is subdivided into seven subcastes. You understand the term? Subcaste? Good. The member of Parliament is a Kollaba, the top of the seven subcastes. The Kollabas have always been millionaires. The British anthropologists of Kittur noted this fact with interest even in the nineteenth century. The Kollabas have exploited the other six Hoyka castes for years. And now once again, this man is playing the Hoyka card to get himself reelected, so he can sit in an office in New Delhi and accept large envelopes filled with cash from businessmen who want to set up garment factories in the Bunder.”
Seven subcastes? The Kollabas? Shankara had never heard any of this. He gaped.
“This is the big problem with you Hindus,” the professor said. “You are mysteries to yourselves!”
Shankara felt ashamed to be a Hindu; what a repulsive thing, this caste system that his ancestors had devised. But at the same time he was annoyed with Daryl D’Souza. Who was this man, to lecture him on caste? How dare the Christians do this? Hadn’t they been Hindus too, at some point? Shouldn’t they have remained Hindus and defeated the Brah mins from within, instead of taking the easy way out by converting?
He crushed his annoyance into a smile.
“What do we do about the caste system, sir? How do we get rid of it?”
“One solution is what the Naxalites have done, just to blow up the upper castes entirely,” said the professor. He had a quaint, womanlike habit of dipping his large round biscuit in milk, and then hurrying to eat it before it got too soggy. “They blow up the entire system; that way you can start from scratch.”
“From scratch”-the American idiom excited Shankar. “I too think we should start from scratch, sir. I think we should destroy the caste system and start from scratch.”
“My dear boy: you are a nihilist,” the professor said, with an approving smile. He bit into his soggy biscuit.
They had not met after that; the professor had been traveling, and Shankara had been too shy to barge in on him a second time. But he had never forgotten the conversation. Now, wandering around town in a daze, the sugar from the milk shakes upsetting his stomach, he thought, He’s the only man who’d understand what I’ve done. I’ll confess everything to him.
The professor’s house was packed with students. A reporter from the Dawn Herald was there, asking the big man questions about terrorism. A black tape recorder sat on the desk. Shankara, who had come to the professor’s house by autorickshaw, waited with the students and watched.
“It is an absolute act of nihilism on the part of some student,” the professor was saying, his eyes on the tape recorder. “He should be caught and thrown into jail.”
“Sir, what does this episode say about today’s India, sir?”
“This is an example of the nihilism of our youth,” said Professor D’Souza. “They are lost and directionless. They have…”-a pause-“lost the moral standards of our nation. Our traditions are being forgotten.”
Shankara felt himself choke with rage.
He stormed out.
He caught an autorickshaw to Shabbir Ali’s house and rang the bell. A bearded man in a North Indian-style kurta, with his chest hair sticking out, opened the door. It took Shankara some time to recognize him as Shabbir Ali’s father, whom he had never before seen.
“He is not allowed to talk to any of his friends,” he said. “You fellows have corrupted my son.” And he slammed the door in Shankara’s face.
So, the great Shabbir Ali, the man who “talked” to women and played with condoms, was locked up in his house. By his father. Shankara wanted to laugh.
He was tired of moving in autorickshaws; so he called home from a pay phone and asked for the car to be sent to Shabbir Ali’s house to pick him up.
Back home, he bolted the door to his room. He lay in bed. He picked up the phone and put it down and counted to five and then picked it up again. Eventually it worked. In Kittur, that was all you had to do to enter into someone else’s world.
He was listening to a “cross-connection.”
The phone line crackled and came to life. A man and woman, possibly husband and wife, were talking. They were speaking in a language he couldn’t understand; he thought it might be Malayalam-the speakers must be Muslim, he thought. He wondered what they were talking about-was the man complaining about his health, was she asking about more money for the household? Why were they on the phone? he wondered. Was the man living away from Kittur? Whatever their situation, whatever they were saying in that foreign language, he felt the intimacy of their conversation. It would be nice to have a wife or a girlfriend, he thought. Not to be so alone all the time. Even a single real friend. Even that would have kept him from planting the bomb and getting into all this trouble.
The man’s tone changed suddenly. He began to whisper.
“I think someone’s breathing on the line,” the man said-or so Shankara imagined.
“Yes, you’re right. Some pervert is listening to us,” the woman replied-or so Shankara imagined.
Then the man hung up.
I have the worst of both castes in my blood, Shankara thought, lying in bed, the receiver of the phone still at his ear. I have the anxiety and fear of the Brahmin, and I have the tendency to act without thinking of the Hoyka. In me the worst of both has fused and produced this monstrosity which is my personality.
He was going mad. Yes, he was convinced of that. He wanted to get out of the house again. He worried that the chauffeur was noticing his restlessness.
He went out the back door and sli
pped out of the house without the driver observing him.
But he probably doesn’t suspect me, he thought. He probably thinks I’m a useless rich brat, like Shabbir Ali.
All these rich fellows like Shabbir Ali, he told himself bitterly, lived out a kind of code. They talked things, but did not do them. They had condoms at home, but did not use them; they kept detonators, but did not explode them. Talk, and talk, and talk. That was their life. It was like the salt on the ice cream. The salt was smeared on the slab of vanilla and left there in the open; but no one was meant to lick it! That was only a joke! It was meant to be talk only, all this bomb-exploding stuff. If you knew the code, you understood it was just talk. Only he had taken them seriously; he had thought that they fucked women and blew up bombs. He did not know about the code, because he did not really belong-either to the Brahmins, or to the Hoykas, or even to the gang of spoiled brats.
He was in a secret caste-a caste of Brahmo-Hoykas, of which he had found only one representative so far, himself, and which put him apart from all the other castes of humankind.
He took another autorickshaw to the junior college, and from there, making sure no one was watching him, walked up Old Court Road with his head to the ground and his hands in his pockets.
He parted the trees, came up to the statue of Jesus, and sat down. The smell of fertilizer was still strong in the air. Closing his eyes, he tried to calm himself. Instead, he began to think about the suicide that had taken place on this road many years ago. He had heard about it from Shabbir Ali. A man had been found hanging from a tree by this road-perhaps even in this spot. A suitcase lay at his feet, broken open. Inside, the police found three gold coins and a note: “In a world without love, suicide is the only transformation possible.” Then there was a letter, addressed to a woman in Bombay.
Shankara opened his eyes. It was as if he could see the man from Bombay, hanging in front of him, his feet dangling in front of the dark Jesus.
He wondered, was that going to be his fate? Would he end up condemned and hanged?
Between the Assassinations Page 6
