Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

  A few days later, when Chenayya went to a mosque, he found that Muslims stank, so he did not stay there long. Yet he had never forgotten about the Mahdi; each time he saw a streak of pink in the sky, he thought he could detect some God of Fairness watching over the earth and glowering with anger.

  Chenayya closed his eyes, and heard again the tinkling of coins. He turned about restlessly, and then covered his face in a rag so the sun wouldn’t sting him awake and went to sleep. Half an hour later, he woke up with a sharp pain in his ribs. A policeman jabbed his lathi into the bodies of the cart pullers. A truck was entering this part of the market. All you cycle-cart pullers! Get up and move your carts!

  The kite-flying contest took place between two nearby houses. The owners of the kites were hidden; all Chenayya saw, as he brushed his teeth with a stick of neem, were the black and red kites fighting each other in the sky. As always the kid with the black kite was winning; he was flying his kite the highest. Chenayya wondered about the poor kid with the red kite; why couldn’t he ever win?

  He spat, and then walked a few feet so he could urinate onto the side of a wall.

  Behind him he heard jeers. The other pullers were urinating right where they had slept.

  He said nothing to them. Chenayya never talked to his fellow cart pullers. He could barely stand the sight of them-the way they bent and groveled to Mr. Ganesh Pai; yes, he might do the same, but he was furious, he was angry inside. These other fellows seemed incapable of even thinking badly of their employer; and he could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion.

  When the Tamilian boy brought out the tea, he reluctantly rejoined the pullers; he heard them talking once again, as they did just about every morning, about the autorickshaws they were going to buy once they got out of here, or the small tea shop they were going to open.

  Think about it, he wanted to tell them, just think about it.

  Mr. Ganesh Pai allowed them just two rupees for each trip; meaning that, at the rate of three trips a day, they were making six rupees; once you deducted for lotteries and liquor, you were lucky to save two rupees; Sundays were off, as were Hindu holidays, so at the month’s end, they saved forty or forty-five rupees only. A trip to the village, an evening with a whore, an extralong drinking binge, and your whole month’s savings were dust. Assuming you saved everything you could, you were lucky to earn four hundred a year. An autorickshaw would cost twelve, fourteen thousand. A small tea shop four times as much. That meant thirty, thirty-five years of such work before they could do anything else. But did they think their bodies would last that long? Did they find a single cart puller above the age of forty around them?

  Don’t you ever think about such things, you baboons?

  Yet whenever he had tried to get them to understand this, they had refused to demand for more collectively. They thought they were lucky; thousands would take their jobs at a moment’s notice. He knew they were right too.

  Despite their logic, despite their valid fears, their sheer spinelessness grated on him. That was why, he thought, Mr. Ganesh Pai could be confident that a customer could hand over to a cart puller thousands of rupees in cash, and know that it would all come to him, every last rupee, without the cart puller taking a note of it.

  Naturally, Chenayya had long planned on stealing the money that a customer gave him one day. He would take the money and leave the town. This much he was certain he would do-someday very soon.

  That evening, the men were huddled around. A man in a blue safari suit, an important, educated man, was asking them questions; he had a small notepad in his hands. He said he had come from Madras.

  He had asked the cart pullers for their ages. No one was sure. When he said, “Can you make a rough guess?” they simply nodded. When he said, “Are you eighteen, or twenty, or thirty-you must have some idea,” they simply nodded again.

  “I’m twenty-nine,” Chenayya called out from his cart.

  The man nodded. He wrote something down in his notepad.

  “Tell me, who are you?” Chenayya asked. “Why are you asking us all these questions?”

  He said he was a journalist, and the cart pullers were impressed; he worked for an English-language newspaper in Madras, and that impressed them even more.

  They were amazed that a smartly dressed man was talking to them with courtesy, and they begged him to sit down on a cot, which one of them wiped clean with the side of his palm. The man from Madras pulled at the knees of his trousers and sat down.

  Then he wanted to know what they were eating. He made a list of everything they ate every day in his notepad; then he went silent and scratched a lot on the pad with his pen, while they waited expectantly.

  At the end, he put the notepad down, and, with a wide, almost triumphant grin, he declared:

  “The work you are doing exceeds the amount of calories you consume. Every day, every trip you take-you are slowly killing yourselves.”

  He held his notepad, with its squiggles and zigzags and numbers, as proof of his claim.

  “Why don’t you do something else, like work in a factory-or anything else? Why don’t you learn to read and write?”

  Chenayya jumped off his cycle.

  “Don’t patronize us, you son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Those who are born poor in this country are fated to die poor. There is no hope for us, and no need of pity. Certainly not from you, who have never lifted a hand to help us; I spit on you. I spit on your newspaper. Nothing ever changes. Nothing will ever change. Look at me.” He held out his palms. “I am twenty-nine years old. I am already bent and twisted like this. If I live to forty, what is my fate? To be a twisted black rod of a man. You think I don’t know this? You think I need your notepad and your English to tell me this? You keep us like this, you people from the cities, you rich fucks. It is in your interest to treat us like cattle! You fuck! You English-speaking fuck!”

  The man put away his notepad. He looked at the ground, and seemed to be groping for a response.

  Chenayya felt a tapping on his shoulder. It was the Tamilian boy from Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop.

  “Stop talking so much! Your number has come up!”

  Some of the other cart pullers began chuckling, as if to say to Chenayya, Serves you right.

  You see! He glared at the English-speaker from Madras as if to say, Even the privilege of speech is not ours. Even if we raise our voices, we are told to shut up.

  Strangely, the man from Madras was not grinning; he had turned his face away, as if he were ashamed.

  As he went up Lighthouse Hill that day, as he forced his cart over the hump, he felt none of his usual exultation. I am not really moving forward, he thought. Every turn of the wheel undid him and slowed him down. Each time he cycled, he was working the wheel of life backward, crushing muscle and fiber into the pulp from which they were made in his mother’s womb; he was unmaking himself.

  All at once, right in the middle of traffic, he stopped and got off his cart, possessed by the simple and clear thought, I can’t go on like this.

  Why don’t you do something, work in a factory, anything, to improve yourself?

  After all, for years you have delivered things to the gates of factories-it is just a question of getting inside.

  The next day, he went to the factory. He saw thousands of men reporting for work, and he thought, What a fool I have been, never even to try and get work here.

  He sat down, and none of the guards asked any questions, thinking he was waiting to collect a delivery.

  He waited till noon, and then a man came out. From the number of people following him, Chenayya thought he must be the big man. He went running past the guards and got down on his knees:

  “Sir! I want to work.”

  The man stared at him. The guards came running up to drag Chenayya back, but the big man said:

  “I have two thousand workers, and not one of them wants to work, and here is this man, down on his knees, begging for work. That’s the attitude we need to move
this country forward.”

  He pointed at Chenayya. “You won’t get offered any long-term contract. Understand? Day by day.”

  “Anything, anything you want.”

  “What kind of work can you do?”

  “Anything, anything you want.”

  “All right, come back tomorrow. We don’t need a coolie right now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The big man took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

  “Hear what this man has to say,” he said, as a group of other men, who were also smoking, gathered around him.

  And Chenayya repeated that he would do anything, under any conditions, for any sort of pay.

  “Say it again!” the big man ordered, and another group of men came up and listened to Chenayya.

  That evening, he came back to Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop and shouted at the other workers, “I’ve found a real job, you motherfuckers. I’m out of here.”

  The Tamilian boy alone cautioned him. “Chenayya, why don’t you wait a day and make sure the other job is good? Then you can quit here.”

  “Nothing doing, I quit!” he yelled, and walked away.

  The next day at dawn, he was back at the factory gate. “I want to see the big man,” he said, shaking the bars of the gate for attention. “He told me to come today.”

  The guard, who was reading the newspaper, looked up at him fiercely. “Get out!”

  “Don’t you remember me? I came-”

  “Get out!”

  He waited near the gate; after an hour it opened, and a car with tinted windows pulled out. Running side by side with the car, he banged on the windows. “Sir! Sir! Sir!” A dozen hands seized him from behind; he was shoved to the ground and kicked.

  When Chenayya wandered back to Mr. Pai’s shop that evening, the Tamilian boy was waiting for him. He said, “I never told the boss you quit.”

  The other cart pullers did not tease Chenayya that night. One of them left him a bottle of liquor, still half full.

  The rain fell without pause. He rode his cycle through the downpour, splashing down the road. He wore a long white plastic sheet over his body like a shroud; a black cloth tied it around his head, giving it the look of an Arab’s cape and caftan.

  This was the most dangerous time for the coolies. Wherever the road was broken up into a pothole, he had to slow down to avoid tipping his cycle-cart over.

  Waiting at the traffic intersection, he saw to his left a fat kid sitting on the seat of an autorickshaw. The rain made him playful; he stuck out his tongue at the fellow. The boy did likewise, and the game went on for several turns, until the autorickshaw driver chided the boy and glared at Chenayya.

  The pain in his neck began biting again. I can’t go on like this, he thought.

  From across the road, one of the other cart pullers, a young boy, drove his cart alongside Chenayya’s. “Have to deliver this fast and get back,” he said. “Boss said he’s depending on me to be back within an hour.” He grinned, and Chenayya wanted to shove his fist into the grin. God, how full of suckers the world is, he thought, counting to ten to calm himself. How happy this boy seemed to be, to destroy himself with overwork. You baboon! he wanted to shout. You and all the others! Baboons!

  He put his head down, and suddenly it seemed a great strain to move the cart.

  “You’ve got no air in one tire!” the baboon shouted. “You’ll have to stop!” He grinned and rode on.

  Stop? Chenayya thought. No, that is what a baboon would do: not me. Putting his head down, he pedaled on, forcing his flat tire along:

  Move!

  And slowly and noisily, rattling its old wheels and its unoiled chains, the cart moved.

  It’s raining now, Chenayya thought, lying in his cart that night, a plastic sheet over him to protect him from the rain. That means half the year is over. It must be June or July. I must be nearly thirty now.

  He pulled the sheet down, and lifted his head to relieve the pain in his neck. He could not believe his eyes: even in this rain, some motherfucker was flying a kite! It was the kid with the black kite. As if taunting the heavens, the lightning, to come strike him. Chenayya watched, and forgot his pain.

  In the morning, two men in khaki uniforms came into the alley: autorickshaw drivers. They had come to wash their hands in the tap at the end of the alley. The cart pullers instinctively moved to the side and let the two men in uniforms through. As they washed their hands, Chenayya heard them talk about an autorickshaw driver who had been locked up by the police for hitting a customer.

  “Why not?” one autorickshaw driver said to the other. “He had every right to hit that man! I only wish he had gone further, and killed that bastard before the police got to him!”

  After brushing his teeth, Chenayya went to the lottery seller. A boy, a total stranger, was sitting at the desk, kicking his legs merrily.

  “What happened to the old fellow?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Gone into politics.”

  The boy described what had happened to the old seller. He had joined the campaign of a BJP candidate for the Corporation elections. His candidate was likely to win in the elections. Then he would sit on the veranda of the candidate’s house; if you wanted to see the politician, you would have to pay the old seller fifty rupees first.

  “That’s the politician’s life-it’s the fastest way to get rich,” the boy said. He flipped through his colored paper pieces. “What’ll you have, uncle? A yellow? Or a green?”

  Chenayya turned away without buying any of the colored tickets.

  Why, he thought that night, can’t that be me-the fellow who goes into politics to get rich? He did not want to forget what he had just heard, so he pinched himself sharply at the ankle.

  It was Sunday again. His free day. Chenayya woke up when it got too hot, then brushed his teeth lazily, looking up to see if kites were flying in the sky. The other pullers were going to see the new Hoyka temple that the member of Parliament had opened, just for Hoykas, with their own Hoyka deity and Hoyka priests.

  “Aren’t you coming, Chenayya?” the others shouted to him.

  “What has any god ever done for me?” he shouted back; they giggled at his recklessness.

  Baboons, he thought, as he lay down in the cart again. Going to worship some statue in a temple, thinking it’ll make them rich.

  Baboons!

  He lay with one arm over his face; then he heard the tinkling of coins.

  “Come over, Kamala,” he called out to the prostitute, who was in her usual spot, playing with the coins. When he taunted her for the sixth time, she snapped:

  “Get lost, or I’ll call Brother.”

  At this reference to the kingpin who ran the brothels in this part of town, Chenayya sighed and turned over in his cart.

  He thought, Perhaps it is time for me to get married.

  He had lost contact with all his relatives; plus he did not actually want to get married. Bring children-into what future? That was the most baboonlike thing the other coolies did: procreate, as if to say they were satisfied with their fate, they were happy to replenish the world that had consigned them to this task.

  There was nothing in him but anger, and if he married he thought he would lose his anger.

  As he turned around in his cart, he noticed a welt on his foot. He frowned, trying hard to remember how he had gotten it.

  The next morning, returning from a delivery, he made a diversion and rode his cart to the office of the Congress Party on Umbrella Street. He crouched on the veranda of the office and waited for someone important-looking to come out.

  A sign outside showed Indira Gandhi raising her hand, with the slogan: MOTHER INDIRA WILL PROTECT THE POOR. He smirked.

  Were they completely nuts? Did they really think that anyone would believe a politician would protect the poor?

  But then he thought, Maybe this woman, Indira Gandhi, had been someone special; maybe they were right. In the end, she wa
s shot dead, wasn’t she? That seemed evidence to him that she had wanted to help people. Suddenly it seemed that the world did have good-hearted men and women-he felt he had cut himself off from all of them by his bitterness. Now he wished he hadn’t been so rude to that journalist from Madras…

  A man in loose white clothes appeared, followed by two or three hangers-on; Chenayya rushed up to him and got down on his knees with his palms folded.

  All the following week, whenever he knew his number was not going to be called for a while, he rode around on his cycle, sticking up posters of the Congress candidates in all the Muslim-dominated streets, shouting, “Vote for Congress-the party of Muslims! Defeat the BJP!”

  The week passed. The elections took place, the results were declared. Chenayya rode his cycle to the Congress Party office, parked it outside, went to the doorkeeper, and asked to see the candidate.

  “He’s a busy man now; just wait out here a moment,” said the doorkeeper. He placed a hand on Chenayya’s back. “You really helped us do well in the Bunder, Chenayya. The BJP defeated us everywhere else, but you got the Muslims to vote for us!”

  Chenayya beamed. He waited outside the party headquarters, and watched the cars arrive and disgorge rich and important men, who hurried in to see the candidate. He saw them and thought, This is where I will wait to collect money from the rich. Not much. Just five rupees from everyone who comes to see the candidate. That should do.

  His heart beat from excitement. An hour passed.