Between the Assassinations

  He vaguely sensed that he was being offered something to eat. He sniffed; it reeked of castor oil and shit, and he rejected it. He smelled garbage around him, and turned his head towards the sky; his eyes were full of the stars when they closed.

  THE HISTORY OF KITTUR

  (abridged from A Short History of Kittur

  by Father Basil d’Essa, S.J.)

  ‘The word “Kittur” is a corruption either of “Kiri Uru”, “Small Town”, or of “Kittamma’s Uru” – Kittamma being a goddess specializing in repelling smallpox whose temple stood near today’s train station. A letter from a Syrian Christian merchant written in 1091 recommends to his peers the excellent natural harbour of the town of Kittur, on the Malabar Coast. During the entire twelfth century, however, the town appears to have vanished; Arab merchants who visited Kittur in 1141 and 1190 record only wilderness. In the fourteenth century a dervish named Yusuf Ali began curing lepers at the Bunder; when he died, his body was entombed in a white dome, and the structure – the Dargah of Hazrat Yusuf Ali – has remained an object of pilgrimage to the present day. In the late fifteenth century, “Kittore, also known as the citadel of elephants”, is listed in the tax-collection records of the Vijayanagara rulers as one of the provinces of their empire. In 1649, a four-man Portuguese missionary delegation led by Father Cristoforo d’Almeida, S.J., trekked down the coast from Goa to Kittur; it found “a deplorable mess of idolators, Mohameddans, and elephants”. The Portuguese drove out the Mohammeddans, pulverized the idols, and distilled the wild elephants into a rubble of dirty ivory. Over the next hundred years, Kittur – now renamed Valencia – passed back and forth between the Portuguese, the Marathas, and the kingdom of Mysore. In 1780, Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore, defeated an army of the East India Company near the Bunder; by the Treaty of Kittur, signed that year, the Company renounced its claims on “Kittore, also called Valencia or The Bunder”. The Company violated the treaty after Hyder Ali’s death in 1782, by setting up a military camp near the Bunder; in retaliation, Tippu, the son of Hyder Ali, constructed the Sultan’s Battery, a formidable fortress of black stone, mounted with French guns. After Tippu’s death in 1799, Kittur became Company property and was annexed into the Madras Presidency. The town, like most of South India, took no part in the great anti-British mutiny of 1857 In 1921, an activist of the Indian National Congress raised a tricolour at the old lighthouse: the freedom struggle had come to Kittur.’

  Day Three (Afternoon): ANGEL TALKIES

  Nightlife in Kittur centres on the Angel Talkies cinema. Every Thursday morning, the walls of the town are plastered with hand-painted posters featuring a sketch of a full-bodied woman brushing her hair with her fingers; below is the title of the movie: HER NIGHTS, WINE AND WOMEN, MYSTERIES OF GROWTH, UNCLE’S FAULT The words ‘Malayalam Colour’ and Adults Only’ are prominently featured on the posters. By 8 a.m., a long line of unemployed men has queued outside Angel Talkies. Show times are 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., 4 p.m. and 7.10 p.m. Seat prices range from Rs 2.20 for a seat at the front to Rs 4.50 for a ‘Family Circle’ seat up in the balcony. Not far from the theatre is the Hotel Woodside, whose attractions include a famous Paris cabaret, featuring Ms Zeena from Bombay, every Friday, and Ms Ayesha and Ms Zimboo from Bahrain, every second Sunday. A travelling sexologist, Dr Kurvilla, MBBS, MD, M.Ch., MS, DDBS, PCDB, visits the hotel on the first Monday of every month. Less expensive and seedier in appearance than the Woodside are a nearby series of bars, restaurants, hostels, and apartments. Thanks to the presence of a YMCA in the neighbourhood, however, men of decency also have the option of a moral and clean hostel.

  The door of the YMCA swung open at two in the morning; a short figure walked out.

  He was a small man with a huge protruding forehead, which gave him the look of a professor in a caricature. His hair, thick and wavy like a teenager’s, was oiled and firmly pressed down; it was greying around the temples and in the sideburns. He had walked out of the YMCA looking at the ground; and now, as if noticing for the first time that he was in the real world, he stopped for a moment, looked this way and that, and then headed towards the market.

  A series of whistles assaulted him at once. A policeman in uniform, cycling down the street, slowed to a halt and put a foot on the pavement.

  ‘What is your name, fellow?’

  The man who looked like a professor said: ‘Gururaj Kamath.’

  ‘And what work do you do that makes you walk alone at night?’

  ‘I look for the truth.’

  ‘Now don’t get funny, all right?’

  ‘Journalist.’

  ‘For which paper?’

  ‘How many papers do we have?’

  The policeman, who may have been hoping to uncover some irregularity associated with this man, and hence either to bully or to bribe him, both acts which he enjoyed, looked disappointed, and then rode away. He had hardly gone a few yards when a thought hit him and he stopped again and turned towards to the little man.

  ‘Gururaj Kamath. You wrote the column on the riots, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the little man.

  The policeman looked down at the ground.

  ‘My name is Aziz.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You’ve done every minority in this town a great service, sir. My name is Aziz. I want to…to thank you.’

  ‘I was only doing my job. I told you: I look for the truth.’

  ‘I want to thank you anyway. If more people did what you do, there wouldn’t be any more riots in this town, sir.’

  Not a bad fellow after all, Gururaj thought, as he watched Aziz cycle off. Just doing his job.

  He continued his walk.

  No one was watching him, so he let himself smile with pride.

  In the days after the riots, the voice of this little man had been the voice of reason in the midst of chaos. In precise, biting prose he had laid out for his readers the destruction caused by the Hindu fanatics who had ransacked the shops of Muslim shopkeepers; in a calm, unemotional tone he had blasted bigotry and stood up for the rights of religious minorities. He had wanted nothing more from his columns than to help the victims of the riots: instead, Gururaj now found himself some -thing of a celebrity in Kittur. A star.

  A fortnight ago, he had suffered the greatest blow of his life. His father had passed away from pneumonia. The day after Gururaj returned to Kittur from his ancestral village, having shaved his head and sat with a priest by the water-tank in his ancestral temple to recite Sanskrit verses to bid his father’s soul farewell, he discovered that he had been promoted to Deputy Executive Editor, the number two position at the newspaper where he had worked for twenty years.

  It was life’s way of evening things out, Gururaj told himself.

  The moon shone brightly, with a large halo around it. He had forgotten how beautiful a nocturnal walk could be. The light was strong and clean, and it laminated the earth’s surface; every object carved sharp shadows in it. He thought it might be the day after a full moon.

  Even at this hour of the night, work continued. He heard a low, continuous sound, like the audible respiration of the nocturnal world: an open-back truck was collecting mud, probably for some construction site. The driver was asleep at the wheel; his arm stuck out of one window, his feet out of the other one. As if ghosts were doing the work behind, morsels of mud came flying into the truck from behind. The back of Gururaj’s shirt became damp, and he thought: but I will catch a cold. I should go back. That thought made him feel old, and he decided to go on; he took a few steps to his left and began to walk right down the middle of Umbrella Street; it had been a childhood fantasy of his to walk down the middle of a main road, but he had never been able to sneak away from his father’s watchful eyes long enough to fulfil the fantasy.

  He came to a halt, right in the middle of the road. Then he quickly went into a side alley.

  Two dogs were mating. He crouched down and tried to see exactly what was happening.

  After completi
ng the act, the dogs separated. One went down the alley and the other headed towards Gururaj, running with postcoital vigour and almost brushing his trousers as it went past. He followed.

  The dog came into main road and sniffed at a newspaper. Taking the newspaper in its mouth, it ran back into the alley, and Gururaj ran behind it. Deeper and deeper the dog ran into the side alleys, as the editor followed. Finally, it dropped its bundle; turning, it snarled at Gururaj and then tore the newspaper to shreds.

  ‘Good dog! Good dog!’

  Gururaj turned to his right to confront the speaker. He found himself face to face with an apparition; a man in khaki, carrying an old Second World War-era rifle, his yellowish, leathery face covered with nicks and scars. His eyes were narrow and slanting. Drawing closer, Gururaj thought: of course. He’s a Gurkha.

  The Gurkha was sitting on a wooden chair out on the pavement, in front of a bank’s rolled-down shutter.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ said Gururaj. ‘Why are you praising the dog for destroying a paper?’

  ‘The dog is doing the right thing. Because not a word in the newspaper is true.’

  The Gurkha – Gururaj took him for an all-night security guard for the bank – rose from his chair and took a step to the dog.

  At once it dropped the paper and ran away. Picking up the torn and mangled and saliva-stained paper with care, the Gurkha turned the pages.

  Gururaj winced.

  ‘Tell me what you’re looking for: I know everything that’s in that newspaper.’

  The Gurkha let the dirty paper go.

  ‘There was an accident last night. Near Flower Market Street. A hit and run.’

  ‘I know the case,’ Gururaj said. It had not been his story, but he read the proofs of the entire paper every day. ‘An employee of Mr Engineer’s was involved.’

  ‘The newspaper said that. But it was not the employee who did it.’

  ‘Really?’ Gururaj smiled. ‘Then who did it?’

  The Gurkha looked right into Gururaj’s eyes. He smiled and then pointed the barrel of the ancient gun at him. ‘I can tell you, but I’d have to shoot you afterwards.’

  Looking at the barrel of the rifle, Gururaj thought: I’m talking to a madman.

  The next day, Gururaj was in his office at 6 a.m. First to get there, as always. He began by checking the telex machine, inspecting the reels of badly smudged news it was printing out from Delhi and Colombo and other cities he would never visit in his life. At seven he turned on the radio and began jotting down the main points of the morning’s column.

  At eight o’clock, Ms D’Mello arrived. The chattering of a typewriter broke the peace of the office.

  She was writing her usual column, ‘Twinkle Twinkle’. It was a daily beauty column; a women’s hair salon owner sponsored it and Ms D’Mello answered readers’ questions about hair care, offering advice and gently nudging her correspondents in the direction of the salon owner’s products.

  Gururaj never spoke to Ms D’Mello. He resented the fact that his newspaper ran a paid-for column, a practice he considered unethical. But there was another reason to be cool towards Ms D’Mello: she was an unmarried woman and he didn’t want anyone to assume that he might have the slightest interest in her.

  Relatives and friends of his father had told Guru for years that he ought to move out of the YMCA and marry, and he had almost given in, thinking that the woman would be needed to nurse his father in his growing senility, when the need for a wife was removed entirely. Now he was determined not to lose his independence to anyone.

  By eleven, when Gururaj came out of his room again, the office was full of smoke – the only aspect of his workplace that he disliked. The reporters were at their desks, drinking tea and smoking. The teleprinter machine, off to the side, was vomiting out rolls of smudged and misspelled news reports from Delhi.

  After lunch, he sent the office boy to find Menon, a young journalist and a rising star at the paper. Menon came into his room with the top two buttons of his shirt open, a shiny gold necklace flashing at his neck. ‘Sit down,’ Gururaj said.

  He showed him two articles about the car crash on Flower Market Street, which he had dug out of the newspaper’s archives that morning. The first (he pointed to it) had appeared before the trial; the second after the verdict.

  ‘You wrote both articles, didn’t you?’

  Menon nodded.

  ‘In the first article, the car that hits the dead man is a red Maruti Suzuki. In the second, it is a white Fiat. Which one was it, really?’

  Menon inspected the two articles.

  ‘I just filed according to the police reports.’

  ‘You didn’t bother looking at the vehicle yourself, I take it?’

  That night he ate the dinner that the caretaker at the YMCA brought up to his room; she talked a lot, but he was worried she was trying to marry him off to her daughter and he said as little as possible to her.

  As he went to sleep he set the alarm for two o’clock.

  He woke up with his heart racing fast; he turned on the lights, left his room, and squinted at his clock. It was twenty minutes to two. He put on his trousers, patted his wavy strands of hair back into place, and almost ran down the stairs and out of the gate of the YMCA, and in the direction of the bank.

  The Gurkha was there at his chair, with his ancient rifle.

  ‘Listen here, did you see this accident with your own eyes?’

  ‘Of course not. I was sitting right here. This is my job.’

  ‘Then how the hell did you know the cars had been changed in the police—’

  ‘Through the grapevine.’

  The Gurkha talks quietly. He explains to the newspaper editor that a network of nightwatchmen passes information around Kittur; every nightwatchman comes to the next for a cigarette and tells him something, and that one visits the next one for a cigarette in turn. In this way, word gets around. Secrets get spread. The truth – what really happened during the daytime – is preserved.

  This is insane, this is impossible – Gururaj wipes the sweat from his forehead.

  ‘So what actually happened – Engineer hit a man on his way back home?’

  ‘Left him for dead.’

  ‘It can’t be true.’

  The Gurkha’s eyes flashed. ‘You’ve lived here long enough, sir. You know it can be. Engineer was drunk; he was coming back from his mistress’s home; he hit the fellow like some stray dog and drove away, leaving him there, with his guts spilled out on the street. In the morning the newspaper boy found him like that. The police know perfectly who drives down that road at night drunk. So the next morning two con -stables go to his house. Hasn’t even washed the blood off the front wheels of the car.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘He is the richest man in this town. He owns the tallest building in this town. He cannot be arrested. He gets one of the employees at his factory to say that he was driving the car when it happened. The guy gives the police a sworn affidavit. I was driving under the influence on the night of 12 May when I hit the unfortunate victim. Then Mr Engineer gave the judge six thousand rupees, and the police something less, perhaps four thousand or five, because the judiciary is of course more noble than the police, to keep quiet. Then he wants his Maruti Suzuki back, because it’s a new car and a fashion statement and he likes driving it, so he gives the police another thousand to change the identity of the killer car to a Fiat, and he has his car back and he’s driving around town again.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘The employee got four years. The judge could have given him a harsher sentence, but he felt sorry for the bugger. Couldn’t let him off for free, of course. So’ – the nightwatchman brought down an imaginary gavel – ‘four years.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Gururaj said. ‘Kittur isn’t that kind of place.’

  The foreigner narrowed his cunning eyes and smiled. He looked at the glowing tip of his beedi for a while and then offered the beedi to Gururaj.

 
In the morning Gururaj opened the only window in his room. He looked down on Umbrella Street, on the heart of the town where he was born, and where he had grown to maturity and where he would almost certainly die. He sometimes thought he knew every building, every tree, every tile on the roof of every house in Kittur. Glowing in the morning light, Umbrella Street seemed to say: No, the Gurkha’s story can’t be true. The clarity of the stencilling on an advertisement, the glistening spokes of the bicycle wheel ridden by the man delivering newspapers, said: No, the Gurkha is lying. But as Gururaj walked to his office, he saw the dense dark shade of the banyan tree lying across the road, like a patch of night left unswept by the morning’s broom, and his soul was in turmoil again.

  Work began. He calmed down. He avoided Ms D’Mello.

  That evening, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper summoned him to his room. He was a plump old man, with sagging jowls and thick white eyebrows that looked like frosting and hands that trembled as he drank his tea. The tendons on his neck stood out in deep relief, and every part of his body seemed to be calling out for retirement.

  If he did retire, Gururaj would inherit his chair.

  ‘Regarding this story you’ve asked Menon to reinvestigate…’ said the editor-in-chief, sipping the tea. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘There was a discrepancy over the cars—’

  The old man shook his head. ‘The police made a mistake on the first filing, that was all.’ His voice changed into the quiet, casual tone Gururaj had come to recognize as final. He sipped more tea, and then some more.

  The slurping sound of the tea being sipped, the abruptness of the old man’s manner, the fatigue of so many nights of bro -ken sleep got on Gururaj’s nerves and he said: ‘A man might have been sent to jail for no good reason; a guilty man might be walking free. And all you can say is, let’s drop the matter.’

  The old man sipped his tea; Gururaj thought he could detect his head move, as if in the affirmative.