Shining Hero (23 page)

‘It seems to me that every mother in this bustee has called her son after the unlucky hero of the Mahabharata,’ laughed Bhima to the crowd. ‘Is there any boy here who is not called Karna?’

‘It is hopeless,’ sighed Shivarani as she and Bhima pressed on through the slimed and drain-wet lanes.

‘Come on, Shiv. Don’t give up,’ cried Bhima. ‘I’m sure we’ll find him in the end. He can’t just have vanished. We won’t give up searching till we find him.’

Back in Malti’s mother’s house Shivarani felt defeated and told herself, if it had not been for Bhima she would not go on. How could I live without Bhima? she thought. He was always there when she needed help and yet she had never been able to do anything for him, however much she longed to. He was always so broke and she wanted to shower gifts upon him, to take him out to restaurants, to drive him over the countryside, to buy a plane ticket for him to take him on a foreign holiday. She wanted to buy him a new
watch, a pair of cufflinks, new clothes, but of course all these things were unthinkable for Bhima would be far too proud to accept such gifts. She would have liked to invite him to come and live with her in the Hatibari bungalow instead of, as he was at present, staying in the YMCA. Other boys who had been in college with them already owned motor scooters and could afford to buy new clothes but Bhima’s clothes were growing as tattered as Karna’s had been the day he scrambled up the car and showed his bottom. Bhima’s chappals had been repaired so often they were now more string than rubber. Shivarani wished Bhima would stop giving up all his time to charity and politics and instead earn some money so that his life could be more comfortable, but there was another reason too.

‘I would like to get married,’ he told her. ‘But I can’t afford to do that till I have a job, of course. What do you think, Shiv? Do you think I will make a good husband?’

‘Yes, very good,’ she had said, but really wanted to tell him, ‘The best husband in the whole world.’ She remembered again him playing with the children at the centre, and how she had imagined him being a father but she did not say that aloud either.

Raki heard of Shivarani’s visit to the bustee and wondered if the name of his new messenger was ‘Karna’. If so, he thought, it was lucky the child was out of the bustee that day for everyone had recognised the memsahib as Shivarani, the Naxalite politician. ‘If you are that Karna and she gets a sniff of you and finds what you’ve been doing,’ Raki warned the boy, ‘then the police will beat you till you’re pulped like a sucking mango. For this memsahib is a politician like the one who put my previous partners into prison.’

At first Karna did not know what to do. He had left behind him, among the kigalis, all the clothes that he had bought in the hopes of convincing Shivarani but all the same felt he ought to keep on trying for his mother’s sake. On the other hand he had only promised his mother to get an education, and this was exactly what the goonda was giving him. He was giving Karna a salary too, which is more than his mother had ever expected. For a day or two he hovered this way and that between escaping from the goonda and presenting
himself to Shivarani. But why should she believe him this time any more than before? She only wanted him so as to get the gold piece back, and he knew the goonda was right. And she might easily get him beaten up and imprisoned. Also he was starting to be happy with the goonda. He decided to stay where he was.

At first, after Sadas and Pashi were arrested, Raki was not worried, for he had paid up his due to the police with absolute regularity and down to every paisa. Unfortunately, though, the new Communist government was demonstrating its incorruptibility and instead of the two dealers being released after a few hours they had been incarcerated ever since. Raki was a member of a fifteen-goonda gang who gave protection to most of the main shops of the town. Protection was a profitable business for any firm that refused the goondas’ services quickly regretted it. Their premises would be smashed up and their legs broken. But though Raki had offered every other goonda the jobs of Sadas and Pashi, he had not persuaded one. That kind of thing, they all said, was far too dangerous in this new Mr Clean Communist period and they preferred to stay with protection. It was in desperation that Raki had at last hit on the idea of getting a child to do his dealing.

Raki took Karna to meet his dealer, Nasrullah Amir Ahmed, a pot-bellied Muslim from the Punjab. Ahmed sat on embroidered satin cushions and leant against a sequinned bolster. His black beard was glossy and luxuriant, his kurta and churidars perfectly laundered and starched. He wore a long dark atchkan with diamond buttons and a richly embroidered rose-coloured cap.

‘You are very smart, Nasrullah sahib,’ said Raki, who even Karna could see was looking dishevelled in comparison, in spite of all the gold.

‘This is because I am well looked after by my beloved bibi,’ sighed Nasrullah. ‘She is the best wife in the world and when are you going to get a wife for yourself, Mr Raki?’

Raki’s lips did a bitter little twist. ‘Who will give their daughter to a goonda with a limp?’

‘What is the matter with you Hindus?’ cried Nasrullah, throwing
up his hands in mock despair. ‘It is a pity you are not a Muslim, or I would give my own daughter to you for I would be happy to see her settled with such a fine rich fellow who is also in the business.’

Raki, not believing a word of it, smiled at the compliment, then gesturing to Karna, said, ‘This fellow will work for me till Sadas and Pashi return. Go, go, Kamala, do namaskar to the sahib.’

‘I am not a girl,’ said Karna grumpily.

‘Do you want to work for me or not?’ demanded Raki. Nasrullah watched chuckling. ‘Do as I say or I will fish in the heap for another boy.’ Hastily Karna went over, and, bending, touched the Muslim’s feet. ‘Good boy, good boy,’ said the dealer, patting Karna on the shoulder. ‘Of course you are not a girl. Anyone can see that but all the same you are better-looking than those other two and I expect they will look even worse if, praise Allah, they are ever let out.’ He examined Karna, then said to Raki, ‘He’s very small, though.’

‘This is all I can get in such hard times,’ said Raki morosely.

Raki went with Karna to start with, teaching him the principle of the job, though only selling ballpoint pens at first. At home Raki showed Karna the quick, almost magical hand movements required in the selling of the controversial products and taught him how to avoid the police. The situation had been much safer with Sadas and Pashi. They had worked together, one selling, the other standing nearby, ready to rush in defence if danger threatened. Raki’s product was much more vulnerable now, with only a child selling and only himself guarding it, but what else could he do?

The boy was quick to learn and it was not long before he had mastered most of the tricks. Raki had been impressed from the start with the way Karna had fought him and if the child had put up less of a fight that first day, he probably would have dumped him and gone back for another. The child had courage, spirit and speed, three qualities required for the business and now Karna was proving to be clever too.

‘Do not think for one moment of making off with my money,’ Raki told Karna on the boy’s first day in the business. ‘For we goondas are involved in everything that happens in the town. We have contacts
everywhere, from the poorest bustee to the richest bank, and will find you anywhere.’

Karna felt terribly pleased and proud on his first day of trading on his own as he stood with his tray of ballpoint pens slung from his neck and under it, the shelf of little packets which he could handle like a conjuror, bringing them into sight and out of it as though by magic. He knew what kind of person to sell to, how to let them test the product secretly, he knew how to take their money with no one seeing him. He would approach the likely customer, and before the foreigner or suitable desi person could rush on without a look at unwanted ballpoints, say in a special trading voice, ‘I’ve got something very exciting. Would you like to see?’ He had learnt to say it in Hindi and English. Raki and Karna had worked hard together at Karna’s tone which was low and adult and did not come easily to the vocal cords of an unbroken voice. Then, when the potential purchaser’s attention was engaged, Karna would show a fingertip smudged with white powder. ‘Very high quality,’ Karna would announce in his rich seductive whisper. How proud Dolly would be, he thought, that her son was earning so much money, and selling something so valuable that even rich people from Billaty bent down and tasted it. At last he had found a way of doing what she wanted and making something of his life.

Karna bought himself a new shirt with his first wages and carefully put aside the filthy old one on which were buttons his mother had once fastened, and a collar she had turned down. Later, when he found Raki using the rag to wipe up spilled milk, Karna became so furious that Raki, the proud goonda, who had never done dhobi work in his life, took it down to the pump and washed it with his own hands while the women looked on, jeering. What a sight, a goonda washing clothes. And what a tattered garment. Even our poorest people don’t wear a bit of filth like that. When the fragment was dry, Raki brought it back up to the room and carefully folded it while Karna watched, thinking to himself, ‘This is how a father would be,’ and feeling something warm and trembly happen in his heart. The goonda said, ‘There it will be safe,’ and laid the little
broken shirt with the female outfit, that, he said, had once belonged to Sadas’ woman.

Karna decided that the next thing he would buy was reading and writing lessons, for Dolly had always wanted him to learn those things but had never been able to afford it. When he could read properly, she would not think she had spoiled his life by bringing him up as a pavement child. Karna felt sure that Arjuna was not making two hundred rupees a month, even though he did live in a grand house, went to a posh school and had everything bought for him. Arjuna, although only a year younger than Karna, was still an absolute baby and no one could imagine Arjuna selling heroin to tourists and managing day after day to escape being captured by the police or robbed by a drug-crazed customer. Arjuna would probably have been imprisoned or even murdered long before. Karna had in fact had a couple of near disasters in spite of all his care and Raki’s training. As one man bent to sniff and taste Karna’s white finger Karna had seen a policeman’s shirt collar show under the kurta and was down the road and round the corner before the man was even straightened from his inspection. Then there had been the crazy foreign lady. Her very thin arms were covered in puncture marks and she had grabbed at his tray and, shaking it as though to rattle ripe mangoes off a tree, had started screaming words in English. He had not understood them but had known what they meant from the frantic desperation in her face. It was people like her, as much as Raki’s warnings, that kept Karna from taking the magic powder himself. ‘You will only need to take it once, and that will be your last day of trading, for you will lose your concentration and then be captured. So many goondas who have worked for me have lost the work like that and I would not like to see you coming to the end of such a promising career at your young age.’

Karna looked forward all day to that moment in the evening when he got back to the room in the bustee, dumped the money wads onto Raki’s lap and waited for the goonda to pat him on the head and say, ‘You are a clever boy.’

He could go to the cinema as often as he wanted, these days. Films
were, and always had been, his greatest joy and now he could afford to sit in decent seats. His favourite actress was still Poopay Patalya. Karna wept when he saw her in her first grown-up part, playing a Harijan girl. She was acting with Zeenat Aman and there was a terrible scene in which thakurs wearing black leather jackets, dark shades and riding motorbikes, beat up Poopay because she had taken water from their well. That night and for many thereafter, Karna dreamt of rushing in to rescue Poopay and during the day he became absent-minded, working out the ways he would take revenge on the vile thakurs who had defiled his goddess.

The goonda protection gang met at intervals in Raki’s room to discuss business over tumblers of arrak and on these occasions Raki insisted Karna slept in the corridor. ‘Our discussions are private and also if you are to keep mind clear and body alert you will need proper sleep.’ Sometimes the goondas would laughingly protest, when Karna was being sent away. ‘Let the boy stay and drink a glass of arrak with us before he sleeps, for one day he will grow up and become one of us.’ But Raki was adamant. ‘This fellow must allow no drop of spirit to pass his lips for his full attention is needed for trading tomorrow.’ So Karna would go out, wrap himself in a blanket and lie down on the concrete passage floor, whose hardness, each time, reminded him of being on the pavement by his mother. He would lie, listening to the muffled shouting voices of the drunken goondas, while his body and mind strained with the longing to have Dolly’s arms around him and to hear her words of love. He would fall asleep wanting her, while the voices of the goondas became ever louder and more incoherent. Sometimes it would only be at dawn that the conversation ceased altogether and the gang felt into snoring drunken sleep.

Shivarani had paid to have posters put up in the town, with a description of Karna. ‘He wears a gold medal bearing the name of his mother and anyone with information leading to finding him will get a reward of rupees ten thousand.’ Karna saw them, and even read
them but he did not believe a word of it. Why should these people want him now, when his mother was dead? It was some trick to get the golden disc back. He was amazed that such rich people should be so desperate for a little piece of gold, but he decided that trickers like them would probably not even pay out the reward if Karna was handed over. Or perhaps the Naxalite Memsahib was hunting for him because she knew he dealt in drugs. In that case if she caught him he would end up like Sadas and Pashi. He was not going to let that happen. Raki saw the posters too but he could not read and assumed that this was some new government rule, which Raki knew would not be obeyed or some new notice of traffic arrangement, that he knew would not work. It was Nasrullah who told him what the posters said. Raki had gone round to settle up for the month and the dealer, as he gathered up the money, said jokingly, ‘Has that Kamala of yours got a golden disc round his neck?’ then laughed till his belly wobbled at the unlikeliness of such a thing. Raki flinched with shock. ‘Please tell me what you mean, Nasrullah Sahib.’