Between the Assassinations (18 page)

At two o’clock, he got his next number: the delivery of a giant stack of boxes to an address in Valencia. The Tamilian boy made sure he understood the address exactly: beyond the hospital, and down by the seminary where the Jesuit priests stayed.

“There’s a lot of work today, Chenayya,” he said. “Make sure you go the quick way—over the Lighthouse Hill.”

Chenayya grunted, shifted his weight onto the pedals, and was on his way. The rusty iron chain that double-locked the cart to the front wheels of the bicycle began to make noise as he cycled.

Down the main road, he was stuck in a traffic jam. He stopped, and became aware of his body once again. His neck hurt; the sun seared his back. Once he was conscious of pain, he began to think.

Why were some mornings difficult, some mornings simple? The other cart pullers never had “good” or “bad” days; they just did their work like machines. Only he had his moods. He looked down, to relieve his painful neck, and stared at the rusty chain by his feet, wound around the metal rod that joined the cycle to the cart.
Time to oil the chain,
he told himself.
Must not forget.

Uphill again. Leaning forward out of his seat, Chenayya was straining hard; the breath entered his lungs like a hot poker. Halfway up the hill, he saw an elephant walking down toward him with a small bundle of leaves on its back, and a mahout poking its ear with an iron rod.

He stopped; this was unbelievable. He began to shout at the elephant: “Hey, you, what are you doing with those leaves—take this load from me! It’s more your size, motherfucker!”

Cars honked behind him. The mahout turned and gesticulated at him with his iron rod. A passerby yelled at him not to obstruct the traffic.

“Don’t you see that something is wrong with this world?” he said, turning around to the driver of the car behind him, who was jabbing at his horn with the fleshy part of his palm. “When an elephant gets to lounge downhill doing virtually no work at all, and a human being has to pull such a heavy cart?”

The cars honked, and the cacophony grew.

“Don’t you see something is wrong here?” he shouted. They honked back. The world was furious at his fury. It wanted him to move out of its way; but he was enjoying being exactly where he was, blocking all these rich and important people.

That evening there were great streaks of pink in the sky. After the shop closed, the coolies moved to the alley behind the store; they took turns buying small bottles of country liquor, which they shared among themselves, getting giddy and belting out off-key Kannada film songs.

Chenayya never joined them. “You’re wasting your money, you idiots!” he sometimes shouted at them; they simply jeered back.

He would not drink; he had promised himself he would not squander the hard-earned fruits of his labor on alcohol. Yet the smell of liquor in the air made his mouth water; the good humor and bonhomie of the other cart pullers made him lonely. He closed his eyes. A tinkling noise made him open them.

Nearby, on the steps of an unused building, as was usual, a fat prostitute had emerged to ply her trade. She clapped her hands and advertised her presence by striking two coins together. A customer came up; they began haggling over a price. The deal was not concluded, and the man left, cursing.

Chenayya, lying in his cart with his feet sticking out, watched the action with a dull grin.

“Hey, Kamala!” he shouted at the prostitute. “Why not give me a chance this evening?”

She turned her face from him and kept clinking the coins together. He stared at her plump breasts, at the dark tip of her cleavage that showed through the blouse, at her garishly painted lips.

He turned his eyes to the sky: he had to stop thinking of sex. Streaks of pink amid the clouds.
Isn’t there a God, or someone there,
Chenayya wondered,
watching down on this earth?
One evening, at the train station to deliver a parcel, he had heard a wild Muslim dervish talking in a corner of the station about the Mahdi, the last of the imams, who would come for this earth and give the evil their due. “Allah is the Maker of all men,” the dervish had mumbled. “The poor and the rich alike. And he observes our hurt, and when we suffer, He suffers with us. And He will send, at the End of the Days, the Mahdi, on a white horse with a sword of fire, to put the rich in their place and correct all that is wrong with the world.”

A few days later, when Chenayya went to a mosque, he found that Muslims stank, so he did not stay there long. Yet he had never forgotten about the Mahdi; each time he saw a streak of pink in the sky, he thought he could detect some God of Fairness watching over the earth and glowering with anger.

Chenayya closed his eyes, and heard again the tinkling of coins. He turned about restlessly, and then covered his face in a rag so the sun wouldn’t sting him awake and went to sleep. Half an hour later, he woke up with a sharp pain in his ribs. A policeman jabbed his lathi into the bodies of the cart pullers. A truck was entering this part of the market. All you cycle-cart pullers! Get up and move your carts!

The kite-flying contest took place between two nearby houses. The owners of the kites were hidden; all Chenayya saw, as he brushed his teeth with a stick of neem, were the black and red kites fighting each other in the sky. As always the kid with the black kite was winning; he was flying his kite the highest. Chenayya wondered about the poor kid with the red kite; why couldn’t he ever win?

He spat, and then walked a few feet so he could urinate onto the side of a wall.

Behind him he heard jeers. The other pullers were urinating right where they had slept.

He said nothing to them. Chenayya never talked to his fellow cart pullers. He could barely stand the sight of them—the way they bent and groveled to Mr. Ganesh Pai; yes, he might do the same, but he was furious, he was angry inside. These other fellows seemed incapable of even thinking badly of their employer; and he could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion.

When the Tamilian boy brought out the tea, he reluctantly rejoined the pullers; he heard them talking once again, as they did just about every morning, about the autorickshaws they were going to buy once they got out of here, or the small tea shop they were going to open.

Think about it,
he wanted to tell them,
just think about it.

Mr. Ganesh Pai allowed them just two rupees for each trip; meaning that, at the rate of three trips a day, they were making six rupees; once you deducted for lotteries and liquor, you were lucky to save two rupees; Sundays were off, as were Hindu holidays, so at the month’s end, they saved forty or forty-five rupees only. A trip to the village, an evening with a whore, an extralong drinking binge, and your whole month’s savings were dust. Assuming you saved everything you could, you were lucky to earn four hundred a year. An autorickshaw would cost twelve, fourteen thousand. A small tea shop four times as much. That meant thirty, thirty-five years of such work before they could do anything else. But did they think their bodies would last that long? Did they find a single cart puller above the age of forty around them?

Don’t you ever think about such things, you baboons?

Yet whenever he had tried to get them to understand this, they had refused to demand for more collectively. They thought they were lucky; thousands would take their jobs at a moment’s notice. He knew they were right too.

Despite their logic, despite their valid fears, their sheer spinelessness grated on him. That was why, he thought, Mr. Ganesh Pai could be confident that a customer could hand over to a cart puller thousands of rupees in cash, and know that it would all come to him, every last rupee, without the cart puller taking a note of it.

Naturally, Chenayya had long planned on stealing the money that a customer gave him one day. He would take the money and leave the town. This much he was certain he would do—someday very soon.

That evening, the men were huddled around. A man in a blue safari suit, an important, educated man, was asking them questions; he had a small notepad in his hands. He said he had come from Madras.

He had asked the cart pullers for their ages. No one was sure. When he said, “Can you make a rough guess?” they simply nodded. When he said, “Are you eighteen, or twenty, or thirty—you must have
some
idea,” they simply nodded again.

“I’m twenty-nine,” Chenayya called out from his cart.

The man nodded. He wrote something down in his notepad.

“Tell me, who are you?” Chenayya asked. “Why are you asking us all these questions?”

He said he was a journalist, and the cart pullers were impressed; he worked for an English-language newspaper in Madras, and that impressed them even more.

They were amazed that a smartly dressed man was talking to them with courtesy, and they begged him to sit down on a cot, which one of them wiped clean with the side of his palm. The man from Madras pulled at the knees of his trousers and sat down.

Then he wanted to know what they were eating. He made a list of everything they ate every day in his notepad; then he went silent and scratched a lot on the pad with his pen, while they waited expectantly.

At the end, he put the notepad down, and, with a wide, almost triumphant grin, he declared:

“The work you are doing exceeds the amount of calories you consume. Every day, every trip you take—you are slowly killing yourselves.”

He held his notepad, with its squiggles and zigzags and numbers, as proof of his claim.

“Why don’t you do something else, like work in a factory—or anything else? Why don’t you learn to read and write?”

Chenayya jumped off his cycle.

“Don’t patronize us, you son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Those who are born poor in this country are fated to die poor. There is no hope for us, and no need of pity. Certainly not from you, who have never lifted a hand to help us; I spit on you. I spit on your newspaper. Nothing ever changes. Nothing will ever change. Look at me.” He held out his palms. “I am twenty-nine years old. I am already bent and twisted like this. If I live to forty, what is my fate? To be a twisted black rod of a man. You think I don’t know this? You think I need your notepad and your English to tell me this? You keep us like this, you people from the cities, you rich fucks. It is in your interest to treat us like cattle! You fuck! You English-speaking fuck!”

The man put away his notepad. He looked at the ground, and seemed to be groping for a response.

Chenayya felt a tapping on his shoulder. It was the Tamilian boy from Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop.

“Stop talking so much! Your number has come up!”

Some of the other cart pullers began chuckling, as if to say to Chenayya,
Serves you right.

You see!
He glared at the English-speaker from Madras as if to say,
Even the privilege of speech is not ours. Even if we raise our voices, we are told to shut up.

Strangely, the man from Madras was not grinning; he had turned his face away, as if he were ashamed.

As he went up Lighthouse Hill that day, as he forced his cart over the hump, he felt none of his usual exultation.
I am not really moving forward,
he thought. Every turn of the wheel undid him and slowed him down. Each time he cycled, he was working the wheel of life backward, crushing muscle and fiber into the pulp from which they were made in his mother’s womb; he was unmaking himself.

All at once, right in the middle of traffic, he stopped and got off his cart, possessed by the simple and clear thought,
I can’t go on like this.

Why don’t you do something, work in a factory, anything, to improve yourself?

After all, for years you have delivered things to the gates of factories—it is just a question of getting inside.

The next day, he went to the factory. He saw thousands of men reporting for work, and he thought,
What a fool I have been, never even to try and get work here.

He sat down, and none of the guards asked any questions, thinking he was waiting to collect a delivery.

He waited till noon, and then a man came out. From the number of people following him, Chenayya thought he must be the big man. He went running past the guards and got down on his knees:

“Sir! I want to work.”

The man stared at him. The guards came running up to drag Chenayya back, but the big man said:

“I have two thousand workers, and not one of them wants to work, and here is this man, down on his knees, begging for work. That’s the attitude we need to move this country forward.”

He pointed at Chenayya. “You won’t get offered any long-term contract. Understand? Day by day.”

“Anything, anything you want.”

“What kind of work can you do?”

“Anything, anything you want.”

“All right, come back tomorrow. We don’t need a coolie right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

The big man took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“Hear what this man has to say,” he said, as a group of other men, who were also smoking, gathered around him.

And Chenayya repeated that he would do anything, under any conditions, for any sort of pay.

“Say it again!” the big man ordered, and another group of men came up and listened to Chenayya.

That evening, he came back to Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop and shouted at the other workers, “I’ve found a real job, you motherfuckers. I’m out of here.”

The Tamilian boy alone cautioned him. “Chenayya, why don’t you wait a day and make sure the other job is good? Then you can quit here.”

“Nothing doing, I quit!” he yelled, and walked away.

The next day at dawn, he was back at the factory gate. “I want to see the big man,” he said, shaking the bars of the gate for attention. “He told me to come today.”