Between the Assassinations

  That evening, Keshava accompanied the barber on a round of house-calls; they went from house to house, and waited in the back yards for their customers to come outside. While Keshava set up a small wooden chair in the back yard, 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 curlets of hair; 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 moustache 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’s hand 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 face down on the ground, fast asleep, too tired even to lay out his bedding. Keshava turned Vittal over, unfolded the sheet and covered his 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 neighbour feeding the kittens a bowl of milk. They had yellow flesh, and their pupils were elongated, like claw-marks.

  ‘Have you got the money ready?’ the neighbour 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 extra -ordinary 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 shop -keeper, 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.

  ‘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 leaped 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 bedsheets followed; men were getting up all around him. A pot-bellied 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 saviour 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 neighbour 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 Maharajah 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 down put 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 station. 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 any more; 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 station 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 cond
uctors 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 roared and said: ‘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 4 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 5.15 p.m.’

  The conductor returned to the station 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 development 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 buses when they roared down the market road at five o’clock, the rush hour, with the number 77 bus right ahead of them.

  He was seated up the 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 the Hindu buses?’

  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’ rear-view 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 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: ‘O, 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 stoves, and sat around the fires, burnished by the flickering flames, looking haggard and hard. They cooked broth and sometimes fried fish. He did petty favours 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 any more. By the time he got back to the alley, his brother was wrapped up in his bedsheet 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 station, took him to see a film, holding his hand tightly the whole way to the cinema. When they emerged from the theatre, the barber told him to wait as he went to chat up a friend who sold paan-leaves outside the cinema. As he waited, Keshava heard a drum-beat 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 drum-beater would not let Keshava in. Two rupees admission, he said. Keshava sighed and turned towards 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 grey 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 grey 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 more time, until Brother separated them, saying: ‘What a fight that was!’

  The wrestlers, covered in dirt, came to the side 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 pale mud in the pit was now dark in the centre, 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, when -ever 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 another’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 mega -phone.

  ‘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 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 the 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 were being taken by a number 5 bus to the Nehru Maidan. An enormous crowd had gathered there. Poles had been stuck up over the gr
ound 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 moustache 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 sits next to the 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 per cent of this town! We have our rights here!’

  ‘We are ninety per cent of this town! We are ninety per cent 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 per cent 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 signalled 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, when Keshava finally got back to the alley, Vittal was waiting for him with his arms folded.

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘So what?’ Keshava thumped his chest. ‘Who are you, my father?’