Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

  It must be noted that few other towns in India can match Kittur’s street language for the richness of its expletives, which come from Urdu, English, Kannada, and Tulu. The most commonly heard term, “son of a bald woman,” requires explanation. Upper-caste widows were once forbidden to remarry and forced to shave their heads to prevent them from attracting men. A child born of a bald woman was very likely to be an illegitimate one.

  DAY FOUR: UMBRELLA STREET

  If you wish to do some shopping while in Kittur, allow yourself a few hours to wander through Umbrella Street, the commercial center of town. Here you will find furniture stores, pharmacies, restaurants, sweet shops, and bookstores. (A few sellers of handmade wooden umbrellas can still be found here, although most have gone out of business because of cheap metal umbrellas imported from China.) The street houses Kittur’s most famous restaurant, the Ideal Traders Ice Cream and Fresh Fruit Juice Parlor, and also the office of the Dawn Herald, “Kittur’s only and finest newspaper.”

  Every Thursday evening, an interesting event takes place in the Ramvittala Temple near Umbrella Street. Two traditional minstrels sit on the veranda of this temple and recite verses from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic of heroism and endurance, all through the night.

  ALL THE EMPLOYEES of the furniture shop had gathered in a semicircle around Mr. Ganesh Pai’s desk. It was a special day: Mrs. Engineer had come to the shop in person. She had chosen her TV table, and now she was approaching Mr. Pai’s desk to finalize the deal.

  His face was smeared with sandalwood, and he wore a loose-fitting silk shirt over which a dark triangle of his chest hair stuck out. On the wall behind his chair, he had hung gold tin foil images of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, and the fat elephant god Ganapati. An incense stick smoked below the images.

  Mrs. Engineer sat down slowly at the desk. Mr. Pai reached into a drawer, and then held out four red cards to her. Mrs. Engineer paused, bit her lip, and snatched at one of the four cards.

  “A set of stainless-steel cups!” Mr. Pai said, showing her the bonus card she had selected. “A truly wonderful gift, madam. Something you’ll treasure for years and years.”

  Mrs. Engineer beamed. She took out a small red purse, counted off four one-hundred-rupee notes, and put them on the desk before Mr. Pai.

  Mr. Pai, moistening the tip of his finger in a small bowl of water that he kept on his desk for just this purpose, counted the notes afresh; then he looked at Mrs. Engineer and smiled, as if expecting something more.

  “The balance on delivery,” she said, getting up from her chair. “And don’t forget to send the bonus gift.”

  “She may be the wife of the richest man in town, but she’s still a stingy old cunt,” Mr. Pai said, after he had seen her out of the store. An assistant laughed behind him. He turned and glared at the assistant-a small, dark Tamilian boy.

  “Get one of the coolies to deliver it, quickly,” Mr. Pai said. “I want the balance before she forgets about it.”

  The Tamilian boy ran out of the shop. The cycle-cart pullers were in their usual position-lying on their carts, staring into space, smoking beedis. Some of them were staring with dull avarice at the store on the other side of the road, the Ideal Traders Ice Cream Parlor; fat kids in T-shirts were licking vanilla cones outside the shop.

  The boy stuck out his index finger and motioned to one of the men. “Chenayya-your number is up!”

  Chenayya pedaled hard. He had been told to take the direct route to Rose Lane, so he had to go over Lighthouse Hill; he struggled to move the cart with the TV table, which was attached to his cycle. Once he was over the hump of the hill, he let the cycle glide. He slowed down in Rose Lane, found the house number, which he had memorized, and rang the bell.

  He was expecting to see a servant, but when a plump, fair-skinned woman opened the door, he knew it was Mrs. Engineer herself.

  Chenayya carried the TV table into the house, and put it down where she indicated.

  He went out, and returned with a saw. He had walked in holding the thing close to his side, but when he got to the dining room, where he had left the table in two separate pieces, Mrs. Engineer watched as he held the tool at arm’s length, and suddenly it seemed enormous: eighteen inches long, with a serrated edge, rusty, but with patches of the original metal-gray color still showing through, like a sculpture of a shark made by a tribal artist.

  Chenayya saw the anxiety in the woman’s eyes. To dispel her fear, he grinned ingratiatingly-it was the exaggerated, death-mask grin of a person not used to groveling-then he looked around as if to remind himself where he had left the table.

  The legs were not of equal length. Chenayya closed an eye and examined the legs one by one; then he took the saw to each of the legs, creating a fine dust on the ground. He moved the saw so slowly, so precisely, that it seemed he was just rehearsing his actions; only the accumulation of wood dust on the ground was evidence to the contrary. He examined the four legs again with one eye closed to make sure they were even, and then dropped his saw. He searched the dirty white sarong he was wearing, which was the only garment on his body, for a relatively clean corner, and wiped down the table.

  “The table is ready, madam.” He folded his hands and waited.

  With an ingratiating smile, he wiped the table again, to make sure that the lady of the house had noticed the care he had taken with her furniture.

  Mrs. Engineer had not been watching; she had retreated into an inner room. She returned and counted off seven hundred and forty-two rupees.

  Hesitating a moment, she added three one-rupee notes to it.

  “Give me something more, madam?” Chenayya blurted. “Give me three more rupees?”

  “Six rupees? Nothing doing,” she said.

  “It’s a long way, madam.” He picked up his saw, and gestured at his neck. “I had to carry it all that way, madam, on my cycle-cart. It hurts my neck very much.”

  “Nothing doing. Get out-or I’ll call the police, you thug-get out, and take your big knife with you!”

  As he walked out of the house, grumbling and sulking, he folded the money into a wad, then tied it into a knot on his loose dirty white sarong. A neem tree grew near the gate of the house, and he had to duck not to scrape his head against its branches. He had left the cycle-cart near the tree. He threw the saw into the cart. Around his cycle’s seat he had wrapped a white cotton cloth; he unfastened it and tied it around his head.

  A cat went running past his leg; two dogs followed it in full flight. The cat leapt up the neem tree and bounded up the limbs; the dogs waited at the foot of the tree, scraping the base of the tree and barking. Chenayya, who had gotten onto his seat, lingered to watch the scene. The moment he started pedaling, he would no longer notice such things around him; he would turn into a pedaling machine that was headed straight back to his boss-man’s shop. He stood there, watching the animals, enjoying consciousness. He picked up a rotting banana skin, and left it draped on the leaves of the neem tree, so that it would startle the owners when they came out.

  He was so pleased with himself for this that he smiled.

  But he still did not want to start pedaling again, which was like handing over the keys of his personality to fatigue and routine.

  About ten minutes later, he was on his cycle again, heading back to Umbrella Street. He was cycling, as always, with his butt elevated off the seat, his spine inclined at sixty degrees. Only at traffic intersections did he straighten himself, relax, and ease back onto the seat. The road, as he drew near Umbrella Street, was jammed once again; pushing his front wheel into the car ahead of him, Chenayya yelled:

  “Son of a bitch, move!”

  At last he saw to his right the sign GANESH PAI FAN AND FURNITURE STORE, and stopped his cycle.

  Chenayya felt the money was burning a hole in his sarong; he wanted to hand it over to his employer as soon as possible. He wiped his palm against his sarong, pushed the door open, went into the store, and crouched by a corner of Mr. Pai’s tab
le. Neither Mr. Pai nor the Tamilian assistant paid any attention to him. Untying the bundle in his sarong, he put his hands between his legs and stared at the floor.

  His neck was hurting again; he moved it side to side to relieve the stress.

  “Stop doing that.” Mr. Pai motioned for him to hand over the cash. Chenayya got up.

  He moved slowly to the boss-man’s desk and handed the notes over to Mr. Ganesh Pai, who moistened his finger in the water bowl and counted off seven hundred and forty-two rupees. Chenayya stared at the water bowl; he noticed how its sides were scalloped to make them look like lotus petals, and how the artisan had even traced the pattern of a trellis around the bottom of the bowl.

  Mr. Pai snapped his fingers. He had tied a rubber band around the notes, and was holding out his palm in Chenayya’s direction.

  “Two rupees short.”

  Chenayya undid the knot in the side of his sarong and handed over two one-rupee notes.

  That was the sum he was expected to hand over to Mr. Pai at the end of every delivery; one rupee for the dinner he would be given at around nine o’clock, and one rupee for the privilege of having been chosen to work for Mr. Ganesh Pai.

  Outside, the Tamilian boy from Mr. Pai’s shop was giving instructions to one of the cycle-cart pullers, a strong young fellow who had recently joined. He was about to start pedaling a cart with two cardboard boxes on it, and the boy from the store was saying, tapping the two boxes, “It’s a mixie in one box, and a four-blade fan in the other. When you take it to the house, you’ve got to make sure they both get plugged in before you return.” He told the cart puller the address he was to go to; then he made the coolie say it aloud, like a teacher with a slow pupil.

  It would be some time before Chenayya’s number was called again, so he walked down the road to a spot where a man was sitting at a desk on the pavement, selling bundles of small rectangular tickets that were as colorful as pieces of candy. He smiled at Chenayya; his fingers began flipping through one of the bundles.

  “Yellow?”

  “First tell me if my number won last time,” Chenayya said. He brought out a dirty piece of paper from the knot on his sarong. The seller found a newspaper and glanced down to the bottom right-hand corner.

  He read aloud, “Winning lottery numbers: 17-8-9-9-643- 455.”

  Chenayya had learned enough about English numerals to know his own ticket number; he squinted for several moments, and then let the ticket float to the ground.

  “People buy for fifteen, sixteen years before they win, Chenayya,” the lottery seller said, by way of consolation. “But in the end, those who believe always win. That is the way the world works.”

  Chenayya hated it when the seller tried to console him like this; that was when he felt he was being ripped off by the men who printed the lottery tickets.

  “I can’t go on this way forever,” he said. “My neck hurts. I can’t go on like this.”

  The lottery seller nodded. “Another yellow?”

  Tying the ticket into his bundle, Chenayya staggered back, then collapsed onto his cart. For a while he lay like that, not feeling refreshed from the rest, but only numb.

  Then a finger tapped on his head.

  “Number’s up, Chenayya.”

  It was the Tamilian boy from the store.

  To be delivered to 54 Suryanarayan Rao Lane. He repeated it aloud: “Fifty-four Suryanarayan…”

  “Good.”

  This route took him uphill over the Lighthouse Hill again. Riding his cycle-cart halfway up the hill, he alighted and began dragging the cycle-cart. His sinews bulged from his neck like webbing; and as he inhaled, the air burned through his chest and lungs. You can’t go on, said his tired limbs, his burning chest. You can’t go on. But at the same time, this was when his sense of resistance to his fate waxed greatest within him: and as he pushed, the restlessness and anger that had been within him all day became articulate at last:

  You will not break me, motherfuckers! You will never break me!

  If the thing to be delivered was light, like a mattress, he was not allowed to take a cycle-cart; it had to be carried on his head. This morning he was taking a mattress to the railway station. Repeating the address to the Tamilian boy from the shop, he set off with a slow, light step, like a fat man jogging. In a short while, the weight of the mattress seemed unbearable; it compressed his neck and spine and sent a shaft of pain down his back. He was virtually in a trance.

  The client turned out to be a North Indian family that was leaving Kittur; the owner, as he had guessed beforehand (from his demeanor, his manner-you can tell which of these rich people have a sense of decency and which don’t), refused to pay him a tip.

  Chenayya stood his ground. “You motherfucker! Give me my money!”

  It was a triumph for him; the man relented and gave him three rupees. On the way out of the station, he thought, I feel elated, but my customer has done no more than pay me what he owes me. This is what my life has been reduced to.

  The odors and the noise of the train station made him feel sick. He squatted down by the tracks, pulled his sarong up, and held his breath. As he was squatting there, the train roared by. He turned around; he wanted to shit into the faces of the people on the train. Yes, that would be good; as the train thundered over the tracks, he would force out the turds into the faces of the passersby.

  Next to him, he saw a pig, which was doing that very thing.

  At once, he thought, God, what am I becoming? He walked to a corner, crawled behind a bush, and defecated there. He told himself, I will never again defecate like this, in a place where I can be seen. There is a difference between man and animal; there is a difference.

  He closed his eyes.

  The scent of basil from near him seemed like evidence that there were good things in the world. But when he opened his eyes, the earth around him was one of thorns and shit and stray animals.

  He looked up and took a deep breath. The sky is clean, he thought. There is purity up there. He tore off a few leaves, wiped himself clean with them, then rubbed his left hand against the earth in a bid to neutralize the smell.

  At two o’clock, he got his next number: the delivery of a giant stack of boxes to an address in Valencia. The Tamilian boy made sure he understood the address exactly: beyond the hospital, and down by the seminary where the Jesuit priests stayed.

  “There’s a lot of work today, Chenayya,” he said. “Make sure you go the quick way-over the Lighthouse Hill.”

  Chenayya grunted, shifted his weight onto the pedals, and was on his way. The rusty iron chain that double-locked the cart to the front wheels of the bicycle began to make noise as he cycled.

  Down the main road, he was stuck in a traffic jam. He stopped, and became aware of his body once again. His neck hurt; the sun seared his back. Once he was conscious of pain, he began to think.

  Why were some mornings difficult, some mornings simple? The other cart pullers never had “good” or “bad” days; they just did their work like machines. Only he had his moods. He looked down, to relieve his painful neck, and stared at the rusty chain by his feet, wound around the metal rod that joined the cycle to the cart. Time to oil the chain, he told himself. Must not forget.

  Uphill again. Leaning forward out of his seat, Chenayya was straining hard; the breath entered his lungs like a hot poker. Halfway up the hill, he saw an elephant walking down toward him with a small bundle of leaves on its back, and a mahout poking its ear with an iron rod.

  He stopped; this was unbelievable. He began to shout at the elephant: “Hey, you, what are you doing with those leaves-take this load from me! It’s more your size, motherfucker!”

  Cars honked behind him. The mahout turned and gesticulated at him with his iron rod. A passerby yelled at him not to obstruct the traffic.

  “Don’t you see that something is wrong with this world?” he said, turning around to the driver of the car behind him, who was jabbing at his horn with the fleshy part of his palm
. “When an elephant gets to lounge downhill doing virtually no work at all, and a human being has to pull such a heavy cart?”

  The cars honked, and the cacophony grew.

  “Don’t you see something is wrong here?” he shouted. They honked back. The world was furious at his fury. It wanted him to move out of its way; but he was enjoying being exactly where he was, blocking all these rich and important people.

  That evening there were great streaks of pink in the sky. After the shop closed, the coolies moved to the alley behind the store; they took turns buying small bottles of country liquor, which they shared among themselves, getting giddy and belting out off-key Kannada film songs.

  Chenayya never joined them. “You’re wasting your money, you idiots!” he sometimes shouted at them; they simply jeered back.

  He would not drink; he had promised himself he would not squander the hard-earned fruits of his labor on alcohol. Yet the smell of liquor in the air made his mouth water; the good humor and bonhomie of the other cart pullers made him lonely. He closed his eyes. A tinkling noise made him open them.

  Nearby, on the steps of an unused building, as was usual, a fat prostitute had emerged to ply her trade. She clapped her hands and advertised her presence by striking two coins together. A customer came up; they began haggling over a price. The deal was not concluded, and the man left, cursing.

  Chenayya, lying in his cart with his feet sticking out, watched the action with a dull grin.

  “Hey, Kamala!” he shouted at the prostitute. “Why not give me a chance this evening?”

  She turned her face from him and kept clinking the coins together. He stared at her plump breasts, at the dark tip of her cleavage that showed through the blouse, at her garishly painted lips.

  He turned his eyes to the sky: he had to stop thinking of sex. Streaks of pink amid the clouds. Isn’t there a God, or someone there, Chenayya wondered, watching down on this earth? One evening, at the train station to deliver a parcel, he had heard a wild Muslim dervish talking in a corner of the station about the Mahdi, the last of the imams, who would come for this earth and give the evil their due. “Allah is the Maker of all men,” the dervish had mumbled. “The poor and the rich alike. And he observes our hurt, and when we suffer, He suffers with us. And He will send, at the End of the Days, the Mahdi, on a white horse with a sword of fire, to put the rich in their place and correct all that is wrong with the world.”