Between the Assassinations (15 page)

Nightlife in Kittur centers 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 Color” and “Adults Only” are prominently featured on the posters. By eight a.m., a long line of unemployed men has queued outside Angel Talkies. Showtimes are ten a.m., noon, two p.m., four p.m., and seven-ten p.m. Seat prices range from 2.20 rupees for a seat at the front to 4.50 rupees for a “Family Circle” seat up in the balcony. Not far from the theater 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 traveling sexologist, Dr. Kurvilla, MBBS, MD, Mch, 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 neighborhood, however, men of decency also have the option of a moral and clean hostel.

T
HE 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 graying 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 toward 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 toward 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 something 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-backed 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 that direction. 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 fulfill 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 completing the act, the dogs separated. One went down the alley and the other headed toward Gururaj, running with postcoital vigor and almost brushing his trousers as it went past. He followed.

The dog came onto the 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 World War II–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 toward 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 six 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 toward 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 telex 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.

Gururaj 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 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 talked quietly. He explained to the newspaper editor that a network of night watchmen passed information around Kittur; every night watchman came to the next for a cigarette and told him something, and that one visited the next one for a cigarette in turn. In this way, word got around. Secrets got spread. The truth—what really happened during the daytime—was preserved.

This is insane, this is impossible
—Gururaj wiped 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 well who drives down that road at night drunk. So the next morning two constables 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 May twelfth 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 night watchman 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 stenciling 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 a 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.