Between the Assassinations (19 page)

The guard, who was reading the newspaper, looked up at him fiercely. “Get out!”

“Don’t you remember me? I came—”

“Get out!”

He waited near the gate; after an hour it opened, and a car with tinted windows pulled out. Running side by side with the car, he banged on the windows. “Sir! Sir! Sir!” A dozen hands seized him from behind; he was shoved to the ground and kicked.

When Chenayya wandered back to Mr. Pai’s shop that evening, the Tamilian boy was waiting for him. He said, “I never told the boss you quit.”

The other cart pullers did not tease Chenayya that night. One of them left him a bottle of liquor, still half full.

The rain fell without pause. He rode his cycle through the downpour, splashing down the road. He wore a long white plastic sheet over his body like a shroud; a black cloth tied it around his head, giving it the look of an Arab’s cape and caftan.

This was the most dangerous time for the coolies. Wherever the road was broken up into a pothole, he had to slow down to avoid tipping his cycle-cart over.

Waiting at the traffic intersection, he saw to his left a fat kid sitting on the seat of an autorickshaw. The rain made him playful; he stuck out his tongue at the fellow. The boy did likewise, and the game went on for several turns, until the autorickshaw driver chided the boy and glared at Chenayya.

The pain in his neck began biting again.
I can’t go on like this,
he thought.

From across the road, one of the other cart pullers, a young boy, drove his cart alongside Chenayya’s. “Have to deliver this fast and get back,” he said. “Boss said he’s depending on me to be back within an hour.” He grinned, and Chenayya wanted to shove his fist into the grin.
God, how full of suckers the world is,
he thought, counting to ten to calm himself. How happy this boy seemed to be, to destroy himself with overwork.
You baboon!
he wanted to shout.
You and all the others! Baboons!

He put his head down, and suddenly it seemed a great strain to move the cart.

“You’ve got no air in one tire!” the baboon shouted. “You’ll have to stop!” He grinned and rode on.

Stop?
Chenayya thought.
No, that is what a baboon would do: not me.
Putting his head down, he pedaled on, forcing his flat tire along:

Move!

And slowly and noisily, rattling its old wheels and its unoiled chains, the cart moved.

It’s raining now,
Chenayya thought, lying in his cart that night, a plastic sheet over him to protect him from the rain.
That means half the year is over. It must be June or July. I must be nearly thirty now.

He pulled the sheet down, and lifted his head to relieve the pain in his neck. He could not believe his eyes: even in this rain, some motherfucker was flying a kite! It was the kid with the black kite. As if taunting the heavens, the lightning, to come strike him. Chenayya watched, and forgot his pain.

In the morning, two men in khaki uniforms came into the alley: autorickshaw drivers. They had come to wash their hands in the tap at the end of the alley. The cart pullers instinctively moved to the side and let the two men in uniforms through. As they washed their hands, Chenayya heard them talk about an autorickshaw driver who had been locked up by the police for hitting a customer.

“Why not?” one autorickshaw driver said to the other. “He had every right to hit that man! I only wish he had gone further, and killed that bastard before the police got to him!”

After brushing his teeth, Chenayya went to the lottery seller. A boy, a total stranger, was sitting at the desk, kicking his legs merrily.

“What happened to the old fellow?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone into politics.”

The boy described what had happened to the old seller. He had joined the campaign of a BJP candidate for the Corporation elections. His candidate was likely to win in the elections. Then he would sit on the veranda of the candidate’s house; if you wanted to see the politician, you would have to pay the old seller fifty rupees first.

“That’s the politician’s life—it’s the fastest way to get rich,” the boy said. He flipped through his colored paper pieces. “What’ll you have, uncle? A yellow? Or a green?”

Chenayya turned away without buying any of the colored tickets.

Why,
he thought that night,
can’t that be me—the fellow who goes into politics to get rich?
He did not want to forget what he had just heard, so he pinched himself sharply at the ankle.

It was Sunday again. His free day. Chenayya woke up when it got too hot, then brushed his teeth lazily, looking up to see if kites were flying in the sky. The other pullers were going to see the new Hoyka temple that the member of Parliament had opened, just for Hoykas, with their own Hoyka deity and Hoyka priests.

“Aren’t you coming, Chenayya?” the others shouted to him.

“What has any god ever done for me?” he shouted back; they giggled at his recklessness.

Baboons,
he thought, as he lay down in the cart again.
Going to worship some statue in a temple, thinking it’ll make them rich.

Baboons!

He lay with one arm over his face; then he heard the tinkling of coins.

“Come over, Kamala,” he called out to the prostitute, who was in her usual spot, playing with the coins. When he taunted her for the sixth time, she snapped:

“Get lost, or I’ll call Brother.”

At this reference to the kingpin who ran the brothels in this part of town, Chenayya sighed and turned over in his cart.

He thought,
Perhaps it is time for me to get married.

He had lost contact with all his relatives; plus he did not actually want to get married. Bring children—into what future? That was the most baboonlike thing the other coolies did: procreate, as if to say they were satisfied with their fate, they were happy to replenish the world that had consigned them to this task.

There was nothing in him but anger, and if he married he thought he would lose his anger.

As he turned around in his cart, he noticed a welt on his foot. He frowned, trying hard to remember how he had gotten it.

The next morning, returning from a delivery, he made a diversion and rode his cart to the office of the Congress Party on Umbrella Street. He crouched on the veranda of the office and waited for someone important-looking to come out.

A sign outside showed Indira Gandhi raising her hand, with the slogan:
MOTHER INDIRA WILL PROTECT THE POOR
. He smirked.

Were they completely nuts? Did they really think that anyone would believe a politician would protect the poor?

But then he thought,
Maybe this woman, Indira Gandhi, had been someone special; maybe they were right.
In the end, she was shot dead, wasn’t she? That seemed evidence to him that she had wanted to help people. Suddenly it seemed that the world did have good-hearted men and women—he felt he had cut himself off from all of them by his bitterness. Now he wished he hadn’t been so rude to that journalist from Madras…

A man in loose white clothes appeared, followed by two or three hangers-on; Chenayya rushed up to him and got down on his knees with his palms folded.

All the following week, whenever he knew his number was not going to be called for a while, he rode around on his cycle, sticking up posters of the Congress candidates in all the Muslim-dominated streets, shouting, “Vote for Congress—the party of Muslims! Defeat the BJP!”

The week passed. The elections took place, the results were declared. Chenayya rode his cycle to the Congress Party office, parked it outside, went to the doorkeeper, and asked to see the candidate.

“He’s a busy man now; just wait out here a moment,” said the doorkeeper. He placed a hand on Chenayya’s back. “You really helped us do well in the Bunder, Chenayya. The BJP defeated us everywhere else, but you got the Muslims to vote for us!”

Chenayya beamed. He waited outside the party headquarters, and watched the cars arrive and disgorge rich and important men, who hurried in to see the candidate. He saw them and thought,
This is where I will wait to collect money from the rich. Not much. Just five rupees from everyone who comes to see the candidate. That should do.

His heart beat from excitement. An hour passed.

Chenayya decided to go into the waiting room, to make sure that he too got to see the man when he finally emerged. There were benches and stools in the waiting room; a dozen other men were waiting. Chenayya saw an empty chair and wondered if he should sit down. Why not, had he not worked for the victory too? He was about to sit down when the doorkeeper said:

“Use the floor, Chenayya.”

Another hour passed. Everyone in the waiting room was told to go in and see the big man; but Chenayya was still squatting outside, his face between his palms, waiting.

Finally, the doorkeeper came up to him with a box full of round yellow sweets. “Take one.”

Chenayya took a sweet, almost put it in his mouth, and then put it back. “I don’t want a sweet.” His voice rose quickly. “I hung posters all over this town! Now I want to see the big man! I want to get a job with—”

The doorkeeper slapped him.

I am the biggest fool here,
Chenayya thought, back at his alley; the other pullers were lying in their carts, snoring hard. It was late that night, and he was the only one who could not sleep.
I am the biggest fool; I am the biggest baboon here.

On the way to his first assignment the next morning, there was another traffic jam on Umbrella Street—the biggest one he had ever seen.

He slowed down, spitting on the road every few minutes to help himself pass the time.

When he finally got to his destination, he found that he was delivering to a foreign man. The man insisted on helping Chenayya unload the furniture, which confused Chenayya terribly. The whole time, the foreigner spoke to Chenayya in English, as if he expected everyone in Kittur to be familiar with the language.

He held his hand out at the end to shake Chenayya’s hand, and gave him a fifty-rupee note.

Chenayya was in a panic—where was he expected to get change? He tried to explain, but the European just grinned and shut the door.

Then he understood. He bowed deeply to the closed door.

When he returned to the alley with two bottles of liquor, the other cart pullers stared at him.

“Where did you get money for that from, Chenayya?”

“None of your business.”

He drank a bottle dry; then drank the second. Then he went over to the liquor shop and bought another bottle of hooch; when he woke next morning he realized he had spent all his money on liquor.

All of it.

He put his face in his hands and began to cry.

On an assignment to the train station, he went to the tap to drink; nearby, he overheard autorickshaw drivers talking about that driver who had hit his customer.

“A man has a right to do what he has to do,” one said. “The condition of the poor is becoming intolerable here.”

But they were not poor themselves, Chenayya thought, slathering his dry forearm with water; they lived in houses, they owned their vehicles.
You have to attain a certain level of richness before you can complain about being poor,
he thought.
When you are this poor, you are not given the right to complain.

“Look—that’s what the rich of this town want to turn us into!” the autorickshaw man said, and Chenayya realized that he was being pointed at. “They want to swindle us out of our money until we turn into that!”

He cycled out of the train station, but he could not stop hearing those words. He could not switch off his mind. Like a tap it dripped. Think, think, think. He passed by a statue of Gandhi, and he began thinking again. Gandhi dressed like a poor man—he dressed like Chenayya did. But what did Gandhi do for the poor?

Did Gandhi even exist? he wondered. These things—India, the River Ganges, the world beyond India—were they even real?

How would he ever know?

Only one group was lower than he was. The beggars. One misstep, and he would be down with them, he thought. One accident. And that would be him. How did the others deal with this? They did not. They preferred not to think.

When he stopped at an intersection that night, an old beggar put his hands in front of Chenayya.

He turned his face away, and went down the road back to Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop.

The following morning, he was going over the hill again, with five cardboard crates piled up one above the other in his cart, thinking:

Because we let them. Because we do not dare run away with that wad of fifty thousand rupees—because we know other poor people will catch us and drag us back before the rich man. We poor have built the prison around ourselves.

In the evening, he lay down exhausted. The others had built a fire. Someone would come and give him some rice. He was the hardest worker, so the boss-man had let it be known that he ought to be fed regularly.

He saw two dogs humping. There was no passion in what they were doing: it was just a release.
That is all I want to do right now,
he thought.
Hump something. But instead of humping, I have to lie here, thinking.

The fat prostitute sat outside. “Let me come up,” he said. She did not look at him; she shook her head.

“Just one time. I’ll pay you next time.”

“Get out of here, or I’ll call Brother,” she said. He gave in; he bought a small bottle of liquor, and he began drinking.