Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

  Chenayya decided to go into the waiting room, to make sure that he too got to see the man when he finally emerged. There were benches and stools in the waiting room; a dozen other men were waiting. Chenayya saw an empty chair and wondered if he should sit down. Why not, had he not worked for the victory too? He was about to sit down when the doorkeeper said:

  “Use the floor, Chenayya.”

  Another hour passed. Everyone in the waiting room was told to go in and see the big man; but Chenayya was still squatting outside, his face between his palms, waiting.

  Finally, the doorkeeper came up to him with a box full of round yellow sweets. “Take one.”

  Chenayya took a sweet, almost put it in his mouth, and then put it back. “I don’t want a sweet.” His voice rose quickly. “I hung posters all over this town! Now I want to see the big man! I want to get a job with-”

  The doorkeeper slapped him.

  I am the biggest fool here, Chenayya thought, back at his alley; the other pullers were lying in their carts, snoring hard. It was late that night, and he was the only one who could not sleep. I am the biggest fool; I am the biggest baboon here.

  On the way to his first assignment the next morning, there was another traffic jam on Umbrella Street -the biggest one he had ever seen.

  He slowed down, spitting on the road every few minutes to help himself pass the time.

  When he finally got to his destination, he found that he was delivering to a foreign man. The man insisted on helping Chenayya unload the furniture, which confused Chenayya terribly. The whole time, the foreigner spoke to Chenayya in English, as if he expected everyone in Kittur to be familiar with the language.

  He held his hand out at the end to shake Chenayya’s hand, and gave him a fifty-rupee note.

  Chenayya was in a panic-where was he expected to get change? He tried to explain, but the European just grinned and shut the door.

  Then he understood. He bowed deeply to the closed door.

  When he returned to the alley with two bottles of liquor, the other cart pullers stared at him.

  “Where did you get money for that from, Chenayya?”

  “None of your business.”

  He drank a bottle dry; then drank the second. Then he went over to the liquor shop and bought another bottle of hooch; when he woke next morning he realized he had spent all his money on liquor.

  All of it.

  He put his face in his hands and began to cry.

  On an assignment to the train station, he went to the tap to drink; nearby, he overheard autorickshaw drivers talking about that driver who had hit his customer.

  “A man has a right to do what he has to do,” one said. “The condition of the poor is becoming intolerable here.”

  But they were not poor themselves, Chenayya thought, slathering his dry forearm with water; they lived in houses, they owned their vehicles. You have to attain a certain level of richness before you can complain about being poor, he thought. When you are this poor, you are not given the right to complain.

  “Look-that’s what the rich of this town want to turn us into!” the autorickshaw man said, and Chenayya realized that he was being pointed at. “They want to swindle us out of our money until we turn into that!”

  He cycled out of the train station, but he could not stop hearing those words. He could not switch off his mind. Like a tap it dripped. Think, think, think. He passed by a statue of Gandhi, and he began thinking again. Gandhi dressed like a poor man-he dressed like Chenayya did. But what did Gandhi do for the poor?

  Did Gandhi even exist? he wondered. These things- India, the River Ganges, the world beyond India -were they even real?

  How would he ever know?

  Only one group was lower than he was. The beggars. One misstep, and he would be down with them, he thought. One accident. And that would be him. How did the others deal with this? They did not. They preferred not to think.

  When he stopped at an intersection that night, an old beggar put his hands in front of Chenayya.

  He turned his face away, and went down the road back to Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop.

  The following morning, he was going over the hill again, with five cardboard crates piled up one above the other in his cart, thinking:

  Because we let them. Because we do not dare run away with that wad of fifty thousand rupees-because we know other poor people will catch us and drag us back before the rich man. We poor have built the prison around ourselves.

  In the evening, he lay down exhausted. The others had built a fire. Someone would come and give him some rice. He was the hardest worker, so the boss-man had let it be known that he ought to be fed regularly.

  He saw two dogs humping. There was no passion in what they were doing: it was just a release. That is all I want to do right now, he thought. Hump something. But instead of humping, I have to lie here, thinking.

  The fat prostitute sat outside. “Let me come up,” he said. She did not look at him; she shook her head.

  “Just one time. I’ll pay you next time.”

  “Get out of here, or I’ll call Brother,” she said. He gave in; he bought a small bottle of liquor, and he began drinking.

  Why do I think so much? These thoughts are like thorns inside my head; I want them out. And even when I drink, they’re there. I wake up in the night, my throat burning, and I find all the thoughts still in my head.

  He lay awake in his cart. He was sure he had been hounded by the rich even in his dreams, because he woke up furious and sweating. Then he heard the noise of coitus nearby. Looking around, he saw another cart puller humping the prostitute. Right next to him. He wondered, Why not me? Why not me? He knew the fellow had no money; so she was doing it out of charity. Why not me?

  Every sigh, every groan of the coupling pair was like a chastisement; and Chenayya couldn’t take it anymore.

  He got off his cart, walked around till he found a puddle of cow dung on the ground, and scooped a handful. He flung the shit at the lovers. There was a cry; he rushed up to them, and dabbed the whore’s face with shit. He put his shit-smeared fingers into her mouth, and kept them there, even though she bit them; the harder she bit, the more he enjoyed it, and he kept his fingers there until the other pullers descended on him and dragged him away.

  One day he was given an assignment that took him right out of the city limits, into Bajpe; he was delivering a doorframe to a construction site.

  “There used to be a big forest here,” one of the construction workers told him. “But now that’s all that’s left.” He pointed to a distant clump of green.

  Chenayya looked at the man and asked, “Is there any work here for me?”

  On his way back, he took a detour off the road and went to the patch of green. When he got there, he left his bike and walked around; seeing a high rock, he climbed up and looked at the trees around him. He was hungry, because he had not eaten all day, but he felt all right. Yes, he could live out here. If only he had a little food, what more would he want? His aching muscles could be rested. He lay back on the rock and looked at the sky.

  He dreamed of his mother. Then he remembered the thrill with which he had come to Kittur from his village, at the age of seventeen. That first day, he was taken around by a female cousin, who pointed out some of the main sights to him, and he remembered the whiteness of her skin, which doubled the charms of the city. He never saw that cousin again. He remembered what came next: the terrible contraction, the life that got smaller and smaller by the day in the city. The realization came to him now that the first day in a city was destined to be the best: you had already been expelled from paradise the moment you walked into the city.

  He thought, I could be a sanyasi. Just eat bushes and herbs and live with the sunrise and sunset. The wind picked up; the trees nearby rustled, as if they were chuckling at him.

  It was nighttime when he cycled back. To get to the shop faster, he took the route down the Lighthouse Hill.

  As he was coming down, he saw a
red light and then a green light attached to the back of a large silhouette moving down the road; a moment later he realized it was an elephant.

  It was the same elephant he had seen earlier; only now it had red-and-green traffic lights tied with string to its rump.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he shouted to the mahout.

  The mahout shouted back, “Well, I have to make sure no one bumps into us from behind at night-there are no lights anywhere!”

  Chenayya threw his head up and laughed; it was the funniest thing he had ever seen: an elephant with traffic lights on its rump.

  “They didn’t pay me,” the mahout said. He had tied the beast to the side of the road, and was chatting with Chenayya. He had some peanuts, and he didn’t want to eat them alone, so he was glad to share a few with Chenayya.

  “They made me take their kid on a ride, and they didn’t pay me. You should have seen them drink and drink. And they wouldn’t pay me fifty rupees, which was all I asked for.”

  The mahout slapped the side of his elephant. “After all that Rani did for them.”

  “That’s the way of the world,” Chenayya said.

  “Then it’s a rotten world.” The mahout chewed a few more peanuts.

  “A rotten world.” He slapped the side of his elephant. Chenayya looked up at the beast.

  The behemoth’s eyes gazed sidelong at him; they glistened darkly, almost as if they were tearing. The beast also seemed to be saying, Things should not be this way.

  The mahout pissed against a wall, turning his head up, arching his back, and exhaling in relief, as if it were the happiest thing he had done all day.

  Chenayya kept looking at the elephant, its sad wet eyes. He thought, I am sorry I ever cursed you, brother. He spoke gently to it as he rubbed its trunk.

  The mahout stood at the wall, watching Chenayya talking to the elephant, a sense of apprehension rising within him.

  Outside the ice-cream shop, two kids were licking ice-cream bars and staring right at Chenayya. He lay sprawled on his cart, dead tired after another day’s work.

  Don’t you see me? Chenayya wanted to shout out over the traffic. His stomach was grumbling; he was tired and hungry, and there was still an hour before the Tamilian boy from Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop would come out with dinner.

  One of the kids across the street turned away, as if the fury in the cart puller’s eyes had become tangible; but the other one, a fat light-skinned fellow, stayed put, licking his tongue up and down his ice-cream stick, staring nonchalantly at Chenayya.

  Don’t you have any shame, any sense of decency, you fat fuck?

  He turned around in his cart, and began talking aloud to calm his nerves. His gaze fell on the rusty saw lying at the end of his cart. “What stops me now,” he said aloud, “from crossing the street and slashing that boy into shreds?”

  Just the thought made him feel powerful.

  A finger began tapping on his shoulder. If it is the fat motherfucker with his ice-cream bar, I will pick up that saw and slice him in two, I swear to God.

  It was the Tamilian assistant from the store.

  “Your turn, Chenayya.”

  He took his cart to the entrance of the store, where the boy handed him a small package wrapped in newspaper and tied in white string.

  “It’s to the same place you went a while back to deliver the TV table to. Mrs. Engineer’s house. We forgot to send the bonus gift, and she’s been complaining.”

  “Oh, no,” he groaned. “She doesn’t tip at all. She’s a complete cunt.”

  “You have to go, Chenayya. Your number came up.”

  He cycled there slowly. At every intersection and traffic light he looked at the saw in his cart.

  Mrs. Engineer opened her door herself: she said she was on the phone, and told him to wait outside.

  “The food at the Lions Club is so fattening,” he heard her saying. “I’ve put on ten kilos in the past year.”

  He looked around quickly. No lights were on in the neighbors’ houses. There seemed to be a night watchman’s shed at the back of the house, but that too was dark.

  He snatched the saw and went in. She had her back to him; he saw the whiteness of her flesh in the gap between her blouse and her skirt; he smelled the perfume of her body. He went closer.

  She turned around, then covered the receiver with her hand. “Not in here, you idiot! Just put it on the floor and get out!”

  He stood there, confused.

  “On the floor!” she screamed at him. “Then get out!”

  He nodded, and dropped the saw on the floor and ran out.

  “Hey! Don’t leave that in here! Oh, my God!”

  He ran back, picked up the saw, then left the house, ducking low to avoid the neem-tree leaves. He tossed the saw into the cart: a loud clatter. The bonus gift…where was it? He grabbed the package, ran into the house, left it somewhere, and slammed the door.

  There was a startled meow. A cat was sitting up on a branch of the tree, watching him closely. He went close to it. How beautiful its eyes were, he thought. Like a jewel that had fallen off the throne, a hint of a world of beauty beyond his knowledge and reach. He reached up to it, and it came to him.

  “Kitty, kitty,” he said, stroking its fur. It wriggled in his arms, restless already.

  Somewhere, I hope, a poor man will strike a blow against the world. Because there is no God watching over us. There is no one coming to release us from the jail in which we have locked ourselves.

  He wanted to tell all this to the cat; maybe it could tell it to another cart puller-the one who would be brave enough to strike the blow.

  He sat down by the wall, still holding on to the cat and stroking its fur. Maybe I can take you along, kitty. But how would he feed it? Who would take care of it when he was not around? He released it. He sat with his back to the wall and watched it walking cautiously up to a car and then slink under it; he craned his neck to see what it was doing down there when he heard a shout from above. It was Mrs. Engineer, yelling at him from a window at the top of her mansion:

  “I know what you’re up to, you thug-I can read your mind! You won’t get another rupee out of me! Get moving!”

  He was no longer angry; and he knew she was right. He had to go back to the store. His number would come up again soon. He got on his cart and pedaled.

  There was a traffic jam in the city center, and Chenayya had to go over the Lighthouse Hill again. Traffic was bad here too. It moved a few inches at a time, and then Chenayya had to stop mid-hill, and clamp his foot down on the road to hold his cart in its place. When the horns began to sound, he rose from his seat and pedaled; behind him, a long line of cars and buses moved, as if he were pulling the traffic along with an invisible chain.

  DAY FOUR (AFTERNOON): THE COOL WATER WELL JUNCTION

  The old Cool Water Well is said never to dry up, but it is now sealed, and serves only as a traffic roundabout. The streets around the well house contain a number of middle-class housing colonies. Professional people of all castes-Bunts, Brahmins, and Catholics-live side by side here, although the Muslim rich keep to the Bunder. The Canara Club, the most exclusive club in town, is located here, in a large white mansion with lawns. The neighborhood is the “intellectual” part of town: it boasts a Lions Club, a Rotary Club, a Freemason’s Lodge, a Bahá’í educational group, a Theosophist Society, and a branch of the Alliance Française of Pondicherry. Of the numerous medical institutions located here, the two best-known are the Havelock Henry District Hospital and Dr. Shambhu Shetty’s Happy Smile Orthodontic Clinic. The St. Agnes Girls’ High School, Kittur’s most sought-after girls-only school, is also located close by the junction. The poshest part of the Cool Water Well Junction area is the hibiscus-lined street known as Rose Lane. Mabroor Engineer, believed to be Kittur’s richest man, and Anand Kumar, Kittur’s member of Parliament, have mansions here.

  “IT’S ONE THING to take a little ganja, roll it inside a chapati, and chew it at the day’s end, just
to relax the muscles-I can forgive that in a man, I really can. But to smoke this drug-this smack-at seven in the morning, and then lie in a corner with your tongue hanging out, I tolerate that in no man on my construction site. You understand me? Or do you want me to repeat this in Tamil or whatever language your people speak?”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “What did you say? What did you say, you son of…?”

  Holding her brother by the hand, Soumya watched as the foreman chastised her father. The foreman was young, so much younger than her father-but he wore a khaki uniform that the construction company had given him, and twirled a lathi in his left hand, and she saw that the workers, instead of defending her father, were listening quietly to the foreman. He was sitting in a blue chair on an embankment of mud; a gas lamp buzzed noisily from a wooden pole driven into the ground next to the chair. Behind him was the crater around the half-demolished house; the inside of the house was filled with rubble, its roof had mostly fallen in, and its windows were empty. With his baton and his uniform, and his face harshly illuminated by the incandescent paraffin lamp, the foreman looked like a ruler of the underworld at the gate of his kingdom.

  A semicircle of construction workers had formed below him. Soumya’s father stood apart from the others, looking furtively at Soumya’s mother, who was muffling her sobs in a corner of her sari. In a tear-racked voice she said, “I keep telling him to give up this smack. I keep telling-”

  Soumya wondered why her mother had to complain about her father in front of everyone. Raju pressed her hand.

  “Why are they all scolding Daddy?”

  She pressed back. Quiet.

  All at once the foreman got up from his chair, took a step down the embankment, and raised his stick over Soumya’s father. “Pay attention, I said.” He brought his stick down.

  Soumya shut her eyes and turned away.

  The workers had returned to their tents, which were scattered about the open field around the dark, half-demolished house. Soumya’s father was lying on his blue mat, apart from everyone else; he was snoring already, his hands over his eyes. In the old days she would have gone to him and snuggled against his side.