Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

  “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.”

  The conductor returned to the stand with Keshava at half past ten.

  “He brings good luck,” he said, ruffling the boy’s hair. “We beat all the Christian buses today; a clean sweep.”

  Soon all the conductors began inviting him on their buses. Brother, who was a superstitious man, observed this develop ment, and declared that Keshava had brought good luck with him from his village.

  “A young fellow like you, with ambition!” He tapped Keshava’s bottom with his stick. “You might even become the conductor of a bus one day, loudmouth!”

  “Really?” Keshava’s eyes widened.

  He went with the number 5 bus when it roared down the Market-Maidan Road at five o’clock, the rush hour, with the number 243 bus right ahead of it.

  He was seated up front, near the driver’s seat, a cheering squad of one. “Are you going to let them beat us?” he asked the driver. “Let the Christians overtake a Hindu bus?”

  The conductor waded his way through the crowd, issuing tickets, collecting money, his whistle in his mouth all the time. The bus picked up speed, just missing a cow. Tearing down the road, the number 5 bus drove parallel to the number 243, as a frightened scooter driver veered leftward for his life, and then-a big cheer from the passengers!-overtook its rival. The Hindu bus had won!

  In the evenings, he washed the buses, and fixed incense sticks to the portraits of the gods Ganapati and Krishna by the drivers’ rearview mirrors.

  On Sundays, he was free after noon. He explored Central Market, from the vegetable sellers at one end to the clothes sellers at the other end.

  He learned to notice what people noticed. He learned what was good value for the money in shirts; what was a rip-off; what made for a good dosa, and a bad one. He acquired the connoisseurship of the market. He learned to spit; not like he had in the past, simply to clear his throat or nose, but with some arrogance-some style. When the rains failed again, and more fresh faces arrived at the market from villages, he mocked them: “Oh, you hicks!” He came to master life in the market; learned how to cross the road despite the continuous traffic, simply by holding his hand as a stop sign and moving briskly, ignoring the loud honks from the irritated drivers.

  When there was a cricket match, the entire market would be abuzz. He went from store to store; each shopkeeper had a small black transistor that emitted a crackly noise of cricket commentary. The entire market was buzzing as if it were a hive, whose every cell secreted cricket commentary.

  At night people ate by the side of the road. They chopped firewood, and fed it into the st
oves, and sat around the fires, burnished by the flickering flames, looking haggard and hard. They cooked broth, and sometimes fried fish. He did petty favors for them, like carrying empty bottles, bread, rice, and blocks of ice to nearby shops on the back of his bicycle, and for this he was invited to eat with them.

  He hardly saw Vittal anymore. By the time he got back to the alley, his brother was wrapped up in his blanket and was snoring softly.

  One evening, he had a surprise: the barber, who worried that Keshava was falling into the influence of the “dangerous” fellows at the bus stand, took him to see a film, holding his hand tightly the whole way to the cinema. When they emerged from the theater, the barber told him to wait as he went to chat with a friend who sold paan leaves outside the cinema. As he waited, Keshava heard a drumbeat and yelling, and followed the noise around the corner to the source. A man stood beating a long drum outside a playground; next to him was a metal board painted with the images of fat men in blue underwear grappling with each other.

  The drumbeater would not let Keshava in. Two rupees admission, he said. Keshava sighed, and turned toward the cinema. On his way back, he saw a group of boys climbing over the side of a wall into the playground; he followed them.

  Two wrestlers were in the sandpit in the middle of the playground-one wore gray shorts, the other wore yellow. Six or seven other wrestlers stood by the pit, shaking their legs and arms. He had never seen men with such slender waists and such enormous shoulders before; it was so exciting just to watch their bodies. “Govind Pehlwan fights Shamsher Pehlwan,” announced a man with a megaphone.

  The man with the megaphone was Brother.

  Both wrestlers touched the ground, and then raised their fingers to their foreheads; then they charged into one another like rams. The one with the gray shorts stumbled and slipped, and the one with the yellow shorts pinned him down; then the situation was reversed. Things continued like this for some time, until Brother separated them, saying, “What a fight that was!”

  The wrestlers, covered in dirt, came to the side of the pit and washed themselves clean. Under their shorts, to Keshava’s surprise, they each wore another pair of shorts, and they bathed in these. Suddenly one of the wrestlers reached over and squeezed the other’s buttock. Keshava rubbed his eyes to make sure he had seen what he had seen.

  “Next up: Balram Pehlwan fights Rajesh Pehlwan,” came the announcement from Brother.

  The pit was now dark in the center, where the wrestling and fighting had been most intense. Spectators sat on a grassy bank near the pit. Brother walked around the pit, offering commentary on the action. “Wah, wah,” he cried, whenever a wrestler pinned another one down. A cloud of mosquitoes swirled overhead, as if they too were excited by the match.

  Keshava walked among the crowd of spectators; he saw boys who were holding each other’s hands, or resting their heads on each other’s chest. He was envious; he wished he had a friend here too, so he could hold his hand.

  “Sneaked in, did you?” Brother had come up to him. He put an arm on Keshava’s shoulder and winked. “Not a good idea-the ticket money comes to me, so you’ve been swindling me, you rascal!”

  “I have to go,” Keshava said, squirming. “The barber is waiting for me.”

  “To hell with the barber!” Brother roared. He sat Keshava next to him, and returned to his commentary with the megaphone.

  “I too was like you,” Brother told him, during the next break in his commentary. “A boy with nothing; I wandered here from my village with empty hands. And look what I’ve done for myself-”

  He spread his arms wide, and Keshava saw them embrace the wrestlers, the sellers of peanuts, the mosquitoes, the man with the drum at the gate: Brother seemed like the ruler of all that was important in the world.

  That night the barber came down the alley and embraced Keshava, who had lain down to sleep. “Hey! Where did you vanish to after the movies? We thought you were lost.” He put his hand on Keshava’s head and ruffled his hair.

  “You’re like my son now, Keshava. I’ll tell my wife, we must take you into our house. Let her agree, then you come with me. This is your last night here.”

  Keshava turned to Vittal, who had pulled down a corner of his blanket to overhear them.

  Vittal pulled his blanket over his head and turned the other way. “Do what you want with him,” he mumbled. “I have enough work to do looking after myself.”

  One evening, as Keshava was scrubbing a bus, a stick tapped the ground next to him.

  “Loudmouth!” It was Brother, in his white singlet. “We need you for the rally.”

  A whole gang of the boys from the bus station was being taken by the number five bus to the Nehru Maidan. An enormous crowd had gathered there. Poles had been stuck up over the maidan, and miniature Congress Party flags hung from them.

  A huge stage had been erected in the middle of the ground, and above the stage hung the enormous painted image of a man with a mustache and thick black glasses, his arms raised as if in universal benediction. Six men in white clothes sat on the stage beneath the painting. A speaker was at a mike:

  “He is a Hoyka, and sits next to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and gives him advice! And so the entire world can see that the Hoykas are trustworthy and reliable, despite the falsehoods that the Bunts and other upper castes spread about us!”

  After a while, the MP himself-the same man whose face was on the painting-got to the mike.

  At once, Brother hissed, “Start shouting.”

  The dozen boys who were standing together at the back of the crowd filled their lungs and bellowed, “Long live the hero of the Hoyka people!”

  They shouted six times, and then Brother told them to shut up.

  The great man spoke for over an hour.

  “There will be a Hoyka temple. No matter what the Brahmins say, no matter what the rich say: there will be a Hoyka temple in this town. With Hoyka priests. And Hoyka gods. And Hoyka goddesses. And Hoyka doors, and Hoyka bells, and even Hoyka doormats and doorknobs! And why? Because we are ninety percent of this town! We have our rights here!”

  “We are ninety percent of this town! We are ninety percent of this town!” Brother instructed the boys to shout. The other boys did as told; Keshava came close to Brother and yelled into his ear:

  “But we are not ninety percent of this town. That isn’t true.”

  “Shut up and shout.”

  After the procession, bottles of liquor were being handed out from trucks, and men jostled each other to grab them.

  “Hey.” Brother signaled to Keshava. “Have a drink, come on, you deserve it.” He slapped him on the back; the others forced the liquor down his throat, and he coughed.

  “Our star slogan shouter!”

  That night, Vittal was waiting for Keshava in the alley with his arms folded.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “So what?” Keshava thumped his chest. “Who are you, my father?”

  Vittal turned to the neighbor, who was playing with his cats, and shouted, “This guy is losing all sense of morality in this city. He can’t tell right from wrong any longer. He hangs out with drunks and thugs.”

  “Don’t say things like that about Brother, I warn you,” Keshava said in a low voice.

  But Vittal continued, “What the hell do you think you are doing, roaming around the city this late? You think I don’t know what kind of animal you’ve become?”

  He swung his fist at Keshava; but his younger brother caught his hand.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  Then, without being entirely aware of what he was doing, he picked up his bedding and walked down the alley.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Vittal shouted.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “And where will you sleep tonight?”

  “With Brother.”

  He was almost out of the alley when he heard Vittal shouting his name. Tears were streaming down his face. Calling his name was not enough; he wanted
Vittal to come running down, to touch him, to embrace him, to beg for him to come back.

  A hand touched his shoulder; his heart leapt. But when he turned around, he saw not Vittal, but the neighbor. A second later, the cats had also come to him, and were licking his feet and meowing ferociously.

  “You know Vittal didn’t mean that! He’s worried about you, that’s all: you have been mixing with a dangerous crowd. Just forget everything he said and come back.”

  Keshava only shook his head.

  It was ten o’clock at night. He walked into the bus-repair stand. In the darkness, two men with masks were cutting metal with a blue flame: fumes, sparks, the smell of acrid smoke, and loud noise.

  After a while, one man in a mask gestured upward with his hand, but not knowing what that meant, Keshava walked right past the buses. He saw a woman crouching on the floor, whom he had never seen before. She was pressing the feet of Brother, who sat bare chested in a cane chair.

  “Brother, take me in, I have nowhere to stay. Vittal has thrown me out.”

  “Poor boy!” Without getting up from the chair, Brother turned to the woman pressing his feet. “You see what is happening to the family structure in our country? Brothers casting brothers out on the street!”

  He led Keshava to a nearby building, which, he explained, was a hostel he ran for the best workers at the bus stand. He opened a door; inside were rows of beds, and on each bed lay a boy. Brother tore the cover off one bed. A boy was lying asleep with his head on his hands.

  Brother slapped the boy awake.

  “Get up, and get out of this house.”

  Without any protest, the boy began scrambling to collect his stuff. He moved into a corner and crouched; he was too confused to know where to go. “Get out! You haven’t shown up to work in three weeks!” Brother shouted.