Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

  And then: “How many bags?”

  And then: “Where are you from?”

  Keshava assumed that these questions were standard in a big city like Kittur, that an autorickshaw driver was entitled to such inquiries.

  “Is it a long distance away?” Vittal asked desperately.

  The auto driver spat right at their feet. “Of course. This isn’t a village, it’s a city. Everything’s a long distance from everything else.”

  He took a deep breath and sketched a series of loops with his damp finger in the air, showing them the circuitous path that they would have to take. Then he sighed, giving the impression that the market was incalculably far away. Keshava’s heart sank; they had been swindled by the bus driver. He had promised to drop them off within walking distance of Central Market.

  “How much, uncle, to take us there?”

  The driver looked at them from head to toe, and then from toe to head, as if gauging their height, weight, and moral worth: “Eight rupees.”

  “Uncle, it’s too much! Take four!”

  The autorickshaw driver said, “Seven twenty-five,” and motioned for them to get in. But then he kept them waiting in the rickshaw, their bundles on their laps, without any explanation. Two other passengers negotiated a destination and a fare and crammed in; one of them sat on Keshava’s lap without any warning. Still the rickshaw did not move. Only after another passenger joined them, sitting in the front beside the driver, and with six people crammed into the tiny vehicle that had space for three, did the driver start kicking on his engine’s pedal.

  Keshava could barely see where they were going, and thus his first impressions of Kittur were of the man who was sitting on his lap: of the scent of the castor oil that had been used to grease his hair and the hint of shit that he produced when he squirmed. After dropping off the rider in the front seat, and then the two men at the back, the autorickshaw meandered for some time through a quiet, dark area of town, before turning into another cacophonous street, lit by the glaring white light of powerful paraffin lamps.

  “Is this Central Market?” Vittal shouted at the driver, who pointed to a sign:

  KITTUR MUNICIPALITY CENTRAL MARKET:

  ALL MANNER OF VEGETABLES AND FRUIT

  AT FAIR PRICES AND EXCELLENT FRESHNESS

  “Thank you, brother,” Vittal said, overwhelmed with gratitude, and Keshava thanked him too.

  When they got out, they found themselves once again in a vortex of light and noise; they kept very still, waiting for their eyes to make sense of the chaos.

  “Brother,” Keshava said, excited at having found a landmark that he recognized. He pointed: “Brother, isn’t this where we started out?”

  And when they looked around, they realized that they were only a few feet away from where the bus driver had set them down. Somehow they had missed the sign, which had been right behind them all the time.

  “We were cheated!” Keshava said in an excited voice. “That autorickshaw driver cheated us, Brother! He-”

  “Shut up!” Vittal whacked his younger brother on the back of his head. “It’s all your fault! You’re the one who wanted to take an autorickshaw!”

  The two of them had been brothers for only a few days.

  Keshava was dark and chubby; Vittal was tall and lean and fair, and five years older. Their mother had died years ago, and their father had abandoned them; an uncle had raised them, and they had grown up among their cousins (whom they also called “brothers”). Then their uncle had died, and their aunt called Keshava and told him to go with Vittal, who was being dispatched to the big city to work for a relative who ran a grocery shop. And that was, really, how they had come to realize that there was a bond between them deeper than that between cousins.

  They knew that their relative was somewhere in the Central Market of Kittur: that was all. Taking timid steps, they went into a dark market area where vegetables were being sold, and then, through a back door, they went into a well-lit market where fruits were being sold. Here they asked for directions. Then they walked up steps that were covered in rotting garbage and moist straw to the second floor. Here they asked again:

  “Where is Janardhana the store owner from Salt Market Village? He’s our kinsman.”

  “Which Janardhana-Shetty, Rai, or Padiwal?”

  “I don’t know, uncle.”

  “Is your kinsman a Bunt?”

  “No.”

  “Not a Bunt? A Jain, then?”

  “No.”

  “Then of what caste?”

  “He’s a Hoyka.”

  A laugh.

  “There are no Hoykas in this market. Only Muslims and Bunts.”

  But the two boys looked so lost that the man took pity, and asked someone, and found out that there were indeed some Hoykas who had set up shop near the market.

  They walked down the steps, and went out of the market. Janardhana’s shop, they were told, displayed a large poster of a muscular man in a white singlet. They couldn’t miss it. They walked from shop to shop and then Keshava cried, “There!”

  Beneath the image of the man with the big muscles sat a lean shopkeeper, unshaven, who was reading a notebook with his glasses down on the bridge of his nose.

  “We are looking for Janardhana, from Gurupura Village,” Vittal said.

  “Why do you want to know where he is?”

  The man was looking at them suspiciously.

  Vittal burst out, “Uncle, we’re from your village. We’re your kin.”

  The shopkeeper stared. Moistening the tip of a finger, he turned another page in his book.

  “Why do you think you’re my kin?”

  “We were told this, Uncle. By our auntie. One-Eyed Kamala.”

  The shopkeeper put the book down.

  “One-Eyed Kamala’s…ah, I see. And what happened to your parents?”

  “Our mother passed away many years ago, after Keshava’s-this fellow’s-birth. And four years ago, our father lost interest in us and just wandered away.”

  “Wandered away?”

  “Yes, Uncle,” Vittal said. “Some say he’s gone to Varanasi, to do yoga by the banks of the Ganges. Others say he’s in the holy city of Rishikesh. We haven’t seen him in many years; we were raised by our uncle Thimma.”

  “And he…?”

  “Died last year. We stayed on, and then it was too much for our aunt to support us. The drought was very bad this year.”

  The shopkeeper was amazed that they had come all this way, without any prior word, on so thin a connection, just expecting that he would take care of them. He reached down into a counter, bringing out a bottle of arrack, which he uncapped and put to his lips. Then he capped the bottle and hid it again.

  “Every day people come from the villages looking for work. Everyone thinks that we in the towns can support them for nothing. As if we have no stomachs of our own to feed.”

  The shopkeeper took another swig of his bottle; his mood improved. He had rather liked their naïve recounting of that story of daddy having gone to “the holy city of Rishikesh…to do yoga.” Old rascal is probably shacked up with a mistress somewhere, and taking care of a brood of bastards, he thought, smiling in approval at how you can get away with anything in the villages. Stretching his hands high above his head as he yawned, he brought them down onto his stomach with a loud whack.

  “Oh, so you’re orphans now! You poor fellows. One must always stick to one’s family-what else is there in life?” He rubbed his stomach. Look at the way they are staring at me, as if I were a king, he thought, feeling suddenly important. It was not a feeling he had had often since coming to Kittur.

  He scratched his legs. “So, how are things in the village these days?”

  “Except for the drought, everything’s the same, Uncle.”

  “You got here by bus?” the shopkeeper asked. And then, “From the bus stand, you walked over here, I take it?” He got up from his seat. “Autorickshaw? How much did you pay? Those fellows are total crooks.
Seven rupees!” The shopkeeper turned red. “You imbeciles! Cretins!”

  Apparently holding the fact that they had been cheated against them, the shopkeeper ignored them for half an hour.

  Vittal stood in a corner, his eyes to the ground, crushed by humiliation. Keshava looked around. Red-and-white stacks of Colgate-Palmolive toothpaste and jars of Horlicks were piled behind the shopkeeper’s head; shiny packets of malt powder hung from the ceiling like wedding bunting; blue bottles of kerosene and red bottles of cooking oil were stacked in pyramids up at the front of the shop.

  Keshava was dark-skinned, with enormous eyes that stared lingeringly. Some of those who knew him insisted he had the energy of a hummingbird, and was always flapping around, making a nuisance of himself; others found him lazy and melancholic, liable to sit and stare at the ceiling for hours at a time. He smiled and turned his head away when he was scolded for his behavior, as if he had no conception of himself and no opinion on the matter.

  Again the store owner took out the bottle of arrack and sipped a little more. Again this affected his mood for the better.

  “We don’t drink here like they do in the villages,” he said, returning Keshava’s big stare.

  “Only a little sip at a time. The customer never finds out that I am drunk.” He winked.

  “That’s how it is in the city: you can do anything you want, as long as no one finds out.”

  After drawing the shutters on his shop, he took Vittal and Keshava around the market. Everywhere men were sleeping on the ground, covered in thin bedsheets; after asking some questions, Janardhana led the boys to an alley behind the market. Men and women and children were sleeping in a long line all the way down the alley. Keshava and Vittal stood back as the store owner began negotiations with one of the sleepers.

  “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.