Shining Hero (24 page)

‘Haven’t you seen the posters?’ The dealer was too pleased with his own funniness to notice Raki’s reaction. Still laughing he said, ‘My own boy has been circumcised so is clearly not a Hindu otherwise I might have tried to offer him to Shivarani Memsahib and claim the rupees ten thousand for myself, though, of course my young fellow does not wear this golden disc.’

‘What is this about, Nasrullah Sahib?’ asked Raki. ‘Please tell me more.’

‘They are offering the sum for the person who finds a boy wearing a golden medal that bears his mother’s name.’

Flustered as he was, as Raki hurried out of the dealer’s home and set off for the bustee, he began to add things up. And they all made sense. The Naxalite minister had gone looking for a boy called ‘Karna’ and even at the time Raki had thought that his new boy might be that very one. The boy said his mother was a zamindar who had thrown him away. Karna had a golden disc on a chain round his neck with what he said was his mother’s name, and now there were posters round town offering a huge reward for such a boy. If
the reward had been on offer two years ago, when Karna had first come to him, Raki would have rushed Karna off to the Shivarani Memsahib, to claim it, but things were different now. Karna knew too much about the business. He knew the dealer, knew where Raki lived and had met Raki’s customers. Karna could identify them all and what use would money be if Raki was sent off to join the other two goondas in prison? Raki would be ruined if Karna was returned to Shivarani. But ten thousand rupees? But no, but no. Or yes, yes. Raki’s mind rushed this way and that. All kinds of worries began to circulate in his mind. Just as he had caught sight of that disc two years ago, sooner or later someone else would too. And now anyone who saw it would not just try to steal it. They would tell the Naxalite minister and put Raki in dreadful danger. He decided the only hope was to get the disc off the boy’s neck for without it, no matter what Karna said, no one would believe him.

That evening when Karna came home, Raki said, ‘This week we have saved up rupees one hundred so let us celebrate.’ And he brought out a bottle of arrak. Karna was surprised. ‘But you are always telling me never to take anything that will slow my reactions and muddle my mind, Dada. I have seen people reeling and falling around the streets after drinking this stuff.’

‘For this once, because I can see from how you have now become a grown-up man, we will relax that rule, and become like true brothers. Come, sit by me and we will drink together to our success.’ He poured a thick glass tumbler full of arrak and passed it to the boy.

‘What about you?’ said Karna. Hastily pouring a tumblerful for himself as well, Raki took a took a carefully judged mouthful, not so little as to cause suspicion, not so much as to dim his alertness. He would need all of that if he was going to succeed in getting that gold off the boy’s neck. When he had swallowed, he smiled, smacked his lips, and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand said, ‘Wonderful. Now you, my dear Kamala. Go on. Take a sip. What do you think?’

Karna sipped, swallowed, and at once began choking and spluttering. ‘Oh yukk oh yarr,’ he screamed, sending spat sprays of arrak into
Raki’s face. ‘I’m not drinking that stuff. It burns my mouth.’ Raki sighed and all the rest of the evening he tried to think of other ways of achieving his objective. Even members of his gang would claim the reward for themselves if they found out who Karna really was.

Raki tried a new tactic. ‘I think it is dangerous, going out in the streets with that valuable thing round your neck. Why not leave it with me. I will look after it here while you are outside. I am worried for your safety.’

Karna, though moved at Raki’s concern, refused firmly, but on an impulse bought an imported American baseball cap as a present for the goonda. Raki received the gift with an initial disbelief. ‘This is for me? You have bought it for me?’ Then he had put it on his head and examined his reflection in the cracked piece of mirror.

‘You look like a very fine gentleman now,’ said Karna.

‘Thank you, Kamala,’ said Raki.

After that, every time Karna saw the hat on Raki’s head, he felt a flush of proud pleasure.

By now people were going round town catching boys as though they were fish in the Hoogly. They would put little medals round the boys’ necks with the names of women on then haul the children off to Shivarani or snatch at the shirts of little street boys to see if there was a gold chain underneath. It was as though everyone was engaged in some enormous treasure-boy hunt. Jokes on the radio were made about the hunt for the boy with the golden disc, cartoons were drawn of him in the papers, the jewellers were doing brisk trade in writing on gold medallions, for how many female names could there be? Sooner or later someone must hit on the right one, then claim the reward.

Karna learnt to be alert all the time when living with Raki for after many hours of drinking with his fellow goondas, Raki would become violent and attack Karna, kicking his sleeping body or punching him with his fists. Once he even got his gun out and tried to shoot the boy, but was so drunk that he could not get his fingers round the trigger. Sometimes Raki would try to beat Karna when he was sober and then Karna would have to dart and dash and scuttle to avoid the flailing fists while Raki came after him, roaring, ‘Why so little today?

Have you been playing with your kigali friends instead of working for me? Have you been giving my good money away to those no-good beggar people again?’ This was a side of Karna that Raki had tried hard to eradicate. ‘What is this, giving good cash to some female called Laika?’

‘I only give her my own money, Raki Dada, I promise you,’ Karna assured him. ‘She wants to stop being a beggar and turn into a prostitute but her face is too ugly. She is collecting up for an operation.’

Laika got her skin graft and was able to open her eye and move her lips but her scars remained and she told him that sometimes men still shrank from her. Karna ran his finger along one of Laika’s red lines. ‘When I was little you told me these were a map of India’s rivers,’ said Karna.

Laika laughed. ‘Did I tell you that?’

‘There’s the Ganges by your eyebrow and that’s the Jummuna near your nose. The Hoogly flows beside your mouth. How can people not love somebody who has holy rivers on their face?’

‘That is so sweet,’ laughed Laika and, opening her choli, folded his face between her breasts.

Raki was outraged when a kigali was bitten by a rabid dog and Karna paid for his injections. ‘What do you want to waste money on that kind of scum for?’

‘He will die otherwise,’ protested Karna.

‘Why does that matter? There are too many of his kind around already. You are a very stupid boy, and I should have chosen a cleverer one, then,’ raged Raki, whacking Karna in the stomach.

The goonda was unpredictable too. The first time Karna described how he had teased a couple of police constables, letting them get quite close to him then darting out of their reach just when they thought they had got him, Raki roared with laughter. But a week later when Karna did it again, this time letting the police get even closer before giving them the slip, Raki became livid with rage, and, taking the boy by surprise, grabbed him and beat him so hard and long that Karna could hardly walk next day. ‘What? Why?’ asked Karna, biting back sobs.

‘You stupid little salah. Next time they will really catch you and then what will happen to all of us?’

But when Karna got back, his pockets tight with money, the packets all sold and Raki said, ‘You are becoming better than Sadas and Pashi,’ all the punches and the beating would be forgotten and Karna, who had never been praised for anything since Dolly died, would feel truly happy.

‘Arjun,’ said the faithful Krishna
.
‘Arduous is thy cruel quest
.
But thy foaming coursers falter
and they need a moment’s rest.’

As he sat on the river bank, looking furiously across to the land that belonged to Ravi who had murdered his father, and caused the death of his mother and was being rewarded by ever greater riches and acclaim, Arjuna was filled with anger at the way the good got punished and the wicked rewarded. Ravi had been made a minister by now and owned another house in Delhi. From the Hatibari river bank you could see his marble palace, twice the size of the Hatibari and growing bigger ever week.

To forget his anger and his loneliness and to avoid having to look upon the injustice of Ravi’s fortune, Arjuna began to go into the village where the misti wallah pressed sticky sweets on him and the rickshaw wallah begged him to step into his vehicle without charge. The darjees would call out, as the boy went past, ‘Come here and be measured, Arjuna Baba, and we will stitch you the best shirt you have ever worn.’ Women would pluck mangoes off their trees and press them into Arjuna’s hands, girls would clamber out from under the buffalo they were milking and offer the boy a mug of the thick sweet white milk to drink there and then, hot from the udder and salty from their fingers. They would hold the mug, then, to his lips as though he was another baby calf, laugh with happiness as he drank and let their fingertips trail across his white-frothed lip as they drew
the cup away. The people of the village felt guilty about Arjuna, as though it was their fault that the boy was now an orphan. The boatmen would take Arjuna for trips along the river, Arjuna sitting on the scarlet cushions where once his great-grandfather had leant. The river was filled with memories for Arjuna. Here his mother had waded along beside him, her thighs pale pillars glimmering in the water, her unfashionable bathing suit frilled out around his head as she tried to teach him swimming. Along this bit, and now Arjuna did not want to think it but the thoughts came all the same, the Sun God had come swimming to his mother. And this was the place where, before he was born, the hand of Durga had carried his newborn brother. He forbade the boatmen to take him near the house of Ravi though for he could not bear to look upon the place. The puntsmen told Arjuna stories of the places they were passing, ‘That was once the house of Warren Hastings, and he and your grandfather would listen to music in that place. Dancing girls performed before them.’ Or ‘In that house your great-grandfather had a secret woman.’ ‘This is the place where your father, Pandu, met a girl called Shonali.’ The village boys would set up games of cricket and nowadays they fought to have Arjuna on their side, because since he had been going to school he had become a champion bat. If he happened to cycle past the Hatipur primary school, the schoolmaster would rush all the children out into the yard and order them to chant, ‘Good morning, Zamindar Arjuna.’

DR Uncle, worried that the boy was spending so much time with peasants and forgetting the dignity of his station, bought Arjuna a pony and hired a man called Piara Singh to come from Calcutta to teach him how to ride. ‘All your ancestors could gallop towards a charging wild boar and sink a long lance into its shoulder. It will be a shame if, in this generation, the horsemanship skill is lost.’ The pony was a little Katiawari mare called Janci whose ear tips met at the top so that Arjuna had to lean down and look through the ring they made, to see his way ahead. The teacher came every day for a month, first taking Arjuna round and round the lawns on a long rein, then progressing so that he rode on his own in the enclosure of the
weedy tennis court until the boy was able to ride well. Then Piara took Arjuna galloping over the bunds, the little mud walls built to retain the water for the rice paddy in the growing season and ideal for jumping when the crop had been reaped and the fields were dry.

Raki feared he was growing soft, for lately he had started to feel affection for the boy, Karna. In the morning when he woke and saw the boy sleeping at his side, something warm and cosy would happen in Raki’s heart which alarmed him. This kind of weakness was dangerous for a goonda, who must make self-preservation and the interests of the business his prime objective.

When Karna got home to find Raki waiting with a meal ready Karna would be filled with a kind of happiness he had not known since Dolly died. To Karna, who supposed beatings and unpredictability to be paternal characteristics and even signs of affection, Raki felt like a father to him. As he stood on street corners, watching out for customers, he would sing aloud, his tremulous renderings making passers-by smile. People with not the least wish for a ballpoint pen would stop and buy one, then linger on, intrigued, when the little singer of grown-up love songs began to whisper, ‘I’ve got something very interesting here.’ There might be one or two people in the world who are now addicted to drugs because of a Hindi film song.

Karna and Raki were sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating mutton curry and rice, when they heard someone or something coming up the four flights of cement stairs so slowly that the creeping crawling sound went on for half-an-hour. Then there came a scrabbling at the door which Raki and Karna ignored, thinking this was some arrak drunk who would soon go away. But after a while the door opened.

For a moment Karna did not recognise them as people at all. They crawled in, groping, unable to see because their eyes were hidden under purple and orange swellings the size of too-ripe mangoes and something had been done to their legs so they could not stand on
them. Even Raki seemed taken aback. Sadas and Pashi tried to speak but when they opened their mouths, most teeth were missing, their gums were pulped and their words were incomprehensible.

‘You see how careful you must be,’ Raki told Karna, gesturing to his returned partners. ‘If you let the police catch you or this Naxalite lady minister finds out where you are, this is what will happen to you.’

Neither Pashi nor Sadas would say what had happened to them in the prison, but if Pashi saw a piece of string he would shrink away whimpering and Sadas would let out screams of fear at the sight of a ballpoint pen so that Karna’s merchandise had to be stored in the outside locked godown where Raki kept the bulk of his product and also all the weaponry required by the goonda protectors. Sometimes Raki would worry slightly that the boy should have easy access to all his most precious goods, but there seemed nothing else that he could do for the screaming and gibbering of Sadas made it impossible to keep it upstairs. For weeks Sadas and Pashi could not walk or eat or pee and Karna learnt to sleep through the sound of their yells and groans of pain and their screams of nightmare terror. Raki would pulp rice with milk and drip it through their crushed lips and even then it would take agonised ages before they could swallow.

The police were paying Karna ever greater attention and one day one of them almost caught him. For a moment Karna thought that he was done for as he ran with the policeman at his heels. But when he looked back and saw the overweight, sweating policeman lumbering along, and realised how easily he, Karna, could outstrip the fellow, the boy could not resist turning and with an insulting gesture, letting out a jeering laugh before sprinting on. He was enjoying his games with these two policemen more and more and revelled in the furious expressions on their faces when they realised that once again Karna had escaped.

‘Don’t make fun of the police,’ Raki warned. ‘These fellows can be very vengeful,’ and as he spoke realised that he was definitely
getting soft because he did not want Karna to get injured like Sadas and Pashi.

‘They will never catch me,’ boasted Karna. ‘I am cleverer and quicker than any policeman.’

Raki went on feeling anxious, though. ‘Don’t tease them. It’s a very dangerous thing to do.’

‘Karna is not afraid of the police. Karna is not afraid of anything,’ the kigali would tell each other. Karna had become their hero and their benefactor. In the winter when he found them shivering in the park he bought them shawls. And when Satish, a boy of his own age, had his hand crushed by a taxi he was catching, Karna set him up as a shoelace seller. Raki however was contemptuous of the kigalis and annoyed at Karna’s helping them. ‘Why do you waste your money on such trash? You save up and buy yourself a motor scooter and leave those dirty children to solve their own shit.’ Or ‘Hang onto all the money you can because although you are young now, one day you will need a woman and they are expensive.’

Sadas was the first one to start improving and a month later his words began to make sense.

‘Hey, Kamala, come here, Kamala,’ Sadas muttered one day, when Raki was out. Pashi leant against the wall and watched, grinning.

‘I am a boy and not a girl,’ said Karna.

‘Come here, baby, come to me, Kamala, and let me hold you.’ The battered goonda crept across the floor, his arms outstretched. ‘I had a woman once, a real one. Oh, how I loved her, with what joy I fucked her. Come to me, Kamala, and let me fuck you too.’

Karna made for the door but Pashi leapt in front of it and blocked Karna’s way. As he ran past Pashi to escape Sadas, the former put out his foot and sent Karna crashing to the floor, then Pashi threw himself on top of the boy and held him down while Sadas crawled over the room, to where the clothes were kept. Throwing aside Karna’s little shirt, the goonda pulled out the clothes and make-up that had once belonged to his woman.

Then Pashi held Karna’s head and Sadas painted scarlet on the boy’s lips saying, ‘This is the very one I put on my woman’s mouth before I
strangled her.’ He could not stand without support but his arms were strong and his grip ferocious.

‘You are a pig. You are disgusting,’ screamed Karna, as scarlet smudged his teeth and tongue but each time he tried to get away, they punched him in the throat or stomach so that in the end he had so little wind left that he could not resist them. Then the goondas dressed Karna in the murdered woman’s blouse and sari and thrust bangles on his wrists. They mascaraed his eyes and drew under them in lamp black. They put rings on his fingers and painted his toenails. They smudged rouge on his cheeks. Sometimes Karna would get away from them, and make dashes towards the door and they would watch, laughing, and catch him at the very last moment, just before he managed to escape. They had tossed aside his kukri, as they pulled out the woman’s clothes and several times Karna almost managed to grab it. His struggles amused the goondas greatly. But Karna’s strength and wind and hope were spent at last and when they tried to put earrings on him and finding his ears un-pierced, chopped large and bleeding holes in his lobes with a knife tip that was blunt, he could do nothing more than scream. And go on screaming as they pushed gold rings into the gout of blood. At last Karna lay very still and afraid because soon they would put necklaces on him and they would find the thing he already wore around his neck. In the end that was the only way in which the goddess blessed him. There were no necklaces among the dead woman’s jewels.

Three hours later it was over. Sadas and Pashi looked at each other, and as though waking to reality, their expressions became worried. ‘What will Raki say?’

‘We should kill him and hide the body,’ suggested Sadas. ‘Then tell Raki that he ran away.’

As they spoke, Karna staggered up, grabbed his kukri and rushed at them. They were tired and he was young. He chopped wildly, slashing Pashi across the face and Sadas in the arm then made a dash for the door. As they tried to stem their bleeding, the pair made an effort to
stop him but Karna was out, and racing down the stairs. Blood, from where they had cut his ears, mixed with the widely smeared lipstick. Mascara smudged across the swollen bruises on his face. One eye was closed completely. He ran staggeringly because of the things they had done inside his body. His own blood and the goondas’ body fluids stained the silk cloth of the murdered prostitute’s now tattered sari. Bangles shattered from his arms as he scrambled downwards.

Pashi and Sadas crept to the head of the stairs and watched him go. ‘Bring back my gold,’ screamed Sadas.

‘Leave him,’ said Pashi. ‘He will have to come back, for where will he go to otherwise? Perhaps Raki will not believe him.’

Sadas said, ‘If Raki could see what Karna looks like now, he would love us more than Karna, certainly.’ Then he and Pashi crept back into the blood-and-semen spattered room.

Karna burst into his little godown and took out his pen tray. Then, bruised and bleeding, dry sobs racking his hurting body and with his kukri in his hand and the pen tray round his neck, Karna ran through the streets of Calcutta. He did not know where he was going, he was running to be as far from the filthy goondas as he could. As he ran, pieces of broken gold kept falling from his body but he never stopped to gather them. He ran as wildly and as mindlessly as the day his mother had been dying and he had tried to find a way to save her. Round his neck, his cardboard pen tray bobbed with ballpoints falling but he did not stop to get them. Underneath the little bags banged softly in their hidden drawer and Karna felt a little relief, amongst all the horror, that he had had the sense to bring along the valuable product, so that he had some means of living from now on.

Raki had been with the other goondas, in a distant village, providing political protection and when he returned that evening, he climbed the stairs feeling surprised that no delicious smells of simmering mutton korma was reaching his nostrils. Karna had become good at cooking lately, and Raki looked forward to the tasty meal after his long journey. But when Raki opened his door, he forgot all about the food in the shock at what he saw inside his room.