Between the Assassinations

  Vittal turned to the neighbour, 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 leaped. But when he turned around, he saw not Vittal, but the neighbour. 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 shop. 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 upwards with his hand, and 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 station. 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 showed up to work in three weeks!’ Brother shouted.

  Keshava felt sorry for the crouching figure, and he wanted to shout out: no, don’t throw him out, Brother! But he understood: it was either this boy or him in this bed tonight.

  A few seconds later, the crouching figure had vanished.

  A long clothesline had been fixed between two of the crossbeams of the ceiling, and the white cotton sarongs of the boys hung from it, overlapping each other like ghosts stuck together. Posters of film actresses and the god Ayappa, sitting on his peacock, covered the walls. The boys were clustered around the beds, staring at him and taunting him.

  Ignoring them, he took out his things: a spare shirt, a comb, half a bottle of hair oil, some Scotch tape, and six pictures of film actresses that he had stolen from his relative’s shop. He stuck the pictures up over his bed with the Scotch tape.

  At once, the other boys gathered round.

  ‘Do you know the names of these Bombay chicks? Tell us.’

  ‘Here’s Hema Malini,’ he said. ‘Here’s Rekha, she’s married to Amitabh Bachchan.’

  The statement provokes giggles from the boys around him.

  ‘Hey, boy, she’s not his wife. She’s his girlfriend. He sticks it to her every Sunday in a house in Bombay.’

  He felt so angry when they said this that he got to his feet and shouted incoherently at them. He lay his face down in bed for an hour after that.

  ‘Moody fellow. Like a lady, so delicate and moody.’

  He pulled the pillow over his head; he began thinking of Vittal, wondering where he was right now, why he was not sleeping at his side. He began to cry into the pillow.

  Another boy came over: ‘Are you a Hoyka?’ He asked.

  Keshava nodded.

  ‘Me too,’ the boy said. ‘The rest of these boys are Bunts. They look down on us. You and I, we should stick together.’

  He whispered: ‘There’s something I have to warn you about. In the night, one of the boys walks around tapping guys’ cocks.’

  Keshava started. ‘Which one does that?’

  He stayed awake all night, sitting up whenever anyone came anywhere near his bed. Only in the morning, watching the other boys giggling hysterically as they brushed their teeth, did he realize that he had been had.

  Inside a week, it seemed as though he had always lived at the hostel.

  Some weeks later, Brother came for him.

  ‘It’s your big day, Keshava,’ he said. ‘One of the conductors was killed last night in a fight at a liquor-shop.’ He held Keshava’s arm up high, as if he had won a wrestling match.

  ‘The first Hoyka bus conductor in our company! He’s a pride to his people!’

  Keshava was promoted to chief conductor of one of the twenty-six buses that plied the number 5 route. He was issued a brand-new khaki uniform, his own black whistle on a red cord, and books of tickets, marked in maroon, green, and grey, all bearing the number 5.

  As they drove, he stood leaning out of the bus, holding on to a metal bar, with his whistle in his mouth, blowing sharply once to tell the driver to stop and twice to tell him not to. As soon as the bus stopped, he jumped down onto the road and shouted at the passengers: ‘Get in, get in.’ Waiting until the bus moved again, he jumped onto the metal steps that led down from the entrance and hung from the bus, holding on to the rail. Shoving and yelling and pushing his way inside the packed bus, he collected money and gave out tickets. There was no need for tickets – he knew every customer by sight; but it was the tradition for tickets to be issued, and he did so, ripping them out and handing them to the customers, or sending them through the air to inaccesible customers.

  In the evenings, the other cleaning boys, awed by his swift promotion, gathered around him at the bus station.

  ‘Fix this thing!’ He shouted, pointing to the metal bar by which he hung from the bus. ‘I can hear it rattling all day long, it’s so loose.’

  ‘It’s not so much fun,’ he said when the work was done and the boys crouched around, gazing at him with star-struck eyes. ‘Sure there are girls on the bus, but you can’t pester them – you’re the conductor, after all. Then there’s the constant worry about whether those Christian bastards will beat us and steal the customers. No, sir, it’s not all fun at all.’

  When the rains started, he had to lower the leather canvas above the windows so that the passengers would remain dry; but water always seeped in anyway and the bus became dank. The front glass of the bus was besmirched with rain; blotches of silvery water clung to the screen like blobs of mercury; the world outside became hazy, and he would grip the bar and lean outside to make sure the driver could find his way.

  In the evening, as he lay on his bed in the hostel, having his hair dried with a white towel by one boy and getting his feet massaged by another (these were his new privileges), Brother came to the dormitory, bringing in a rusty old bike behind him.

  ‘You can’t go walking around town any more, you’re a bigshot now. I expect my conductors to travel in style.’

  Keshava pulled the bike to his bed; that night, to the amusement of the other boys, he went to sleep with the bike next to him.

  One
evening, at the bus station, he saw a cripple sitting and blowing at his tea with his legs crossed, exposing the wooden stub of his artificial leg.

  One of the boys chuckled.

  ‘Don’t you recognize your patron?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The boy said: ‘That’s the man whose bike you ride these days!’

  He explained that the cripple had himself once been a bus conductor, like Keshava; but he had fallen from the bus, crushing his legs under a passing lorry, and had to have an amputation.

  ‘And thanks to that, you now have a bike of your own!’ he guffawed, slapping Keshava heartily on the back.

  The cripple drank his tea slowly, staring at it intensely, as if it were the only pleasure in his life.

  When Keshava was not conducting the bus, Brother had a string of bicycle delivery jobs for him; once he had to strap a block of ice on the back of his cycle and ride all the way downtown to drop it off at the house of Mabroor Engineer, the richest man in town, who had run out of ice for his whisky. But in the evenings, he was allowed to ride the bike for his pleasure; which meant, usually, taking it at full speed down the main road next to Central Market. On either side, the shops glowed with the light of paraffin lamps, and all the lights and colour got him so excited that he took both hands off the handlebars and whooped for joy, braking just in time to stop himself running into an autorickshaw.

  Everything seemed to be going so well for him; yet one morning his neighbours found him lying in bed, staring at the picture of the film actresses and refusing to move.

  ‘He’s being morose again,’ his neighbours said. ‘Hey, why don’t you jerk off, it’ll make you feel better?’

  The next morning he went back to see the barber. The old man was not in. His wife was sitting in the barber’s chair, combing her hair. ‘Just wait for him, he’s always talking about you. He misses you very much, you know.’

  Keshava nodded; he cracked his knuckles and walked round the chair three or four times.

  That night at the dormitory, the other boys seized him as he was brushing his hair and dragged him out the door.

  ‘This fellow’s been morose for days now. It’s time for him to be taken to a woman.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not tonight. I have to visit the barber. I promised I’d come for—’

  ‘We’ll take you to a barber, all right! She’ll shave you good!’

  They put him in an autorickshaw and drove him down to the Bunder. A prostitute was ‘seeing’ men in a house by the shirt factories, and though he shouted at them and said he didn’t want to do it, they told him that doing it would cure his moods and make him normal like everyone else.

  He did seem more normal in the days that followed. One evening, at the end of his shift, he saw a new cleaning boy, one of Brother’s recent hires, spit on the ground as he was cleaning the bus; calling him over, Keshava slapped him.

  ‘Don’t spit anywhere near the bus, understood?’

  That was the first time he ever slapped anyone.

  It made him feel good. From then on, he regularly hit the cleaning boys, like all the other conductors did.

  On the number 5, he got better and better at his job. No trick escaped him any more. To the schoolboys who tried to get free rides back from the movie theatre on their school passes, he’d say: ‘Nothing doing. The passes work only when you’re going to class, or going back from class. If it’s a joy ride, you pay the full fare.’

  One boy was a consistent problem – a tall, handsome fellow, whose friends called him Shabbir. Keshava watched people staring at the shirt enviously. He wondered why this boy was taking the bus at all; people like him had their own cars and drivers.

  One evening, when the bus stopped at the women’s college, the rich boy went down to the seats earmarked for women and leaned over to one of the girls.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Rita. I just want to talk to you.’

  The girl turned her face towards the window; shifting her body away from him.

  ‘Why won’t you just talk to me?’ the boy with the Bombay shirt asked, with a rakish grin. His friends up the back whistled and clapped.

  Keshava bounded up to him. ‘Enough!’ He seized the rich boy by the arm and pulled him away from the girl. ‘No one pesters women on my bus.’

  The boy called Shabbir glared. Keshava glared back at him.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ he tore a ticket and flicked it at the rich boy’s face to underline the warning. ‘Did you hear me?’

  The rich boy smiled. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and put out his hand to the conductor as if for a handshake. Confused, Keshava took his hand; the boys in the back row howled with laughter. When the conductor withdrew his hand, he found a five-rupee note in it.

  Keshava flung the note at the rich boy’s feet.

  ‘Try it again, you son of a bald woman and I’ll send you flying out the bus.’

  As she stepped down from the bus, the girl looked at Keshava: he saw the gratitude in her eye, and he knew he had done the right thing.

  One of the passengers whispered: ‘Do you know who that boy is? His father owns that video-lending store and he’s best friends with the Member of Parliament. See that insignia that says “CD” on the pocket of his shirt? His father buys those shirts from a shop in Bombay and brings them for his son. Each shirt costs a hundred rupees, or maybe even two hundred rupees, they say.’

  Keshava said: ‘On my bus, he’d better behave. There’s no rich or poor here; everyone buys the same ticket. And no one troubles the women.’

  That evening, when Brother heard this story, he embraced Keshava: ‘My valiant bus conductor! I’m so proud of you!’

  He raised Keshava’s hand up high, and the others applaud -ed. ‘This little village boy has shown the rich of this town how to behave on a number 5 bus!’

  The following morning, as Keshava was hanging from the metal bar of the bus and blowing his whistle to encourage the driver, the bar creaked—and then it snapped. Keshava fell from the speeding bus, hit the road, rolled, and slammed his head into the side of the kerb.

  For some days afterwards, the boarders at the hostel would find him hunched over his bed, on the verge of tears. The bandage had come off his head and the bleeding had stopped. But he was still silent. When they gave him a good shake, Keshava would nod his head and smile, as if to say, yes, he was okay.

  ‘Then why don’t you get out and go back to work?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘He’s morose all day long. We’ve never seen him like this.’

  But then after not turning up at work for four days, they saw him leaning out of the bus, and yelling at the passengers, looking every bit his old self.

  Two weeks passed. One morning, he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. Brother himself had come to see him.

  ‘I hear that you’ve turned up for work only one day in the last ten. This is very bad, my son. You can’t be morose.’ Brother made a fist. ‘You have to be full of life.’ He shook his fist at Keshava, as if to demonstrate the fullness of life.

  A boy nearby tapped his head. ‘Nothing gets to him. He’s touched. That blow on the head has turned him into an imbecile.’

  ‘He always was an imbecile,’ said another boarder, combing his hair at a mirror. ‘Now he just wants to sleep and eat for free in the hostel.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Brother said. He swished his stick at them. ‘No one talks about my star slogan-shouter like that!’

  He gently tapped his stick on Keshava’s head. ‘You see what they’re saying about you, Keshava? That you’re putting on this act just to steal food and bed from Brother? You see the insults they spread about you?’

  Keshava began to cry. He drew his knees up to his chest and put his head in them, and cried.

  ‘My poor boy!’ Brother himself was almost in tears. He got onto the bed and hugged the boy.

  ‘Someone’s got to tell the boy’s family,’ he said, on the way out. ‘We can’t keep him here if he’s not working.??
?

  ‘We did tell his brother,’ the neighbours replied.

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s not interested in hearing about Keshava. He says there’s no connection between them any more.’

  Brother slammed his fist against the wall.

  ‘You see the extent to which family life has deteriorated these days!’ He shook his fist, which was aching from the blow. ‘That fellow has to take care of his brother. He has no other option!’ He shouted. He whipped his stick through the air: ‘I will show that piece of shit! I will force him to remember his duty to his younger brother!’

  Although no one actually threw him out, one evening when Keshava came back, someone else was sitting on his bed. The fellow was tracing his finger along the outlines of the actresses’ faces, and the other boys were teasing him: ‘O, so she’s his wife, is she? She’s not, you idiot!’

  It was as if he had always been there, and they had always been his neighbours.

  Keshava simply wandered away. He felt no desire to fight to get his bed back.

  He sat by the closed doors of the Central Market that night, and some of the streetside sellers recognized him and fed him. He did not thank them; did not even say hello. This went on for a few days. Finally, one of them said to him: ‘In this world, a fellow who doesn’t work doesn’t eat. It’s not too late; go to Brother and apologize and beg him to give you your old job back. You know he thinks of you as family…’

  For a few nights, he wandered outside the market. One day he drifted back to the hostel. Brother was sitting in the drawing room again, as his feet were massaged by the woman. ‘That was a lovely dress Rekha wore in the movie, don’t you think…’ Keshava wandered into the room.

  ‘What do you want?’ Brother asked, getting up. Keshava tried to put it into words. He held his arms out to the man in the blue sarong.

  ‘This Hoyka idiot is mad! And he stinks! Get him out of here!’

  Hands dragged him for some distance and pushed him to the ground. Leather shoes kicked him in the ribs.

  A little later, he heard footsteps, and then someone lifted him up. Wooden crutches tapped on the earth, and a man’s voice said: ‘So Brother’s got no use for you either, eh…?’