Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

“What do I do with them? They have to sleep somewhere!”

“Well, you’re taking a risk, but if you have to leave them here, try the far end.”

The alley ended in a wall that leaked continuously; the drainage pipes had been badly fitted. A large garbage bin at this end of the alley emitted a horrible stench.

“Isn’t uncle going to take us to his house, Brother?” Keshava whispered, when the store owner, having given them some advice about how to sleep out in the open, vanished.

Vittal pinched him.

“I’m hungry,” Keshava said after a few minutes. “Can we find uncle and ask him for food?”

The two brothers were lying side by side, wrapped in their bedding, next to the garbage bin.

In response, his brother entirely covered himself in his blanket, and lay inside, still, like a cocoon.

Keshava could not believe he was expected to sleep here-and on an empty stomach. However bad things had been at home, at least there had always been something to eat. Now all the frustrations of the evening, the fatigue, and the confusion combined, and he kicked the shrouded figure hard. His brother, as if he had been waiting for just such a provocation, tore the blanket off, caught Keshava’s head in his hands, and slammed it twice against the ground.

“If you make one more sound, I swear, I will leave you all alone in this city.” Then he covered himself with his bedding once more, and turned his back to his brother.

And though his head had begun to hurt, Keshava was frightened by what his brother had said. He shut up.

Lying there, his head stinging, Keshava wondered, dully, where it was decided that this fellow and this fellow would be brothers; and about how people came into the earth, and how they left it. It was a dull curiosity. Then he began thinking about food. He was in a tunnel, and that tunnel was his hunger, and at the end of the tunnel, if he kept going, he promised himself, there would be a huge heap of rice, covered with hot lentils, with big chunks of chicken.

He opened his eyes; there were stars in the sky. He looked up at them to block the stench of garbage.

When they arrived at the shop the following morning, the shopkeeper was using a long stick to hang plastic bags of malt powder on hooks in the ceiling.

“You,” the shopkeeper said, pointing to Vittal. He showed the boy how each plastic bag was to be fitted to the end of the pole, and then lifted up and snared on a hook in the ceiling.

“It takes forty-five minutes every morning to do this; sometimes an hour. I don’t want you to rush the work. You don’t mind working, do you?”

Then, with the redundancy of speech typical of the rich, he said, “If a man doesn’t work, he doesn’t eat in this world.”

While Vittal hung the plastic bags from the hooks, the shopkeeper told Keshava to sit behind the counter. He gave him six sheets of paper with the faces of film actresses printed on them, and six boxes of incense sticks. The boy was to cut out the pictures, put them on the incense-stick boxes, cover them with cellophane quickly, and Scotch-tape the cellophane to the box.

“With pretty girls on them, you can charge ten paise more,” said the storekeeper. “Do you know who this is?” He showed Keshava the picture he had just cut from the sheet. “She’s famous in Hindi films.”

Keshava began cutting out the next actress from the sheet. In front of them, below the counter, he could see where the store owner had hidden his bottle of hooch.

At noon, the shopkeeper’s wife came with lunch. She looked at Vittal, who avoided her gaze, and at Keshava, who stared at her, and said, “There’s not enough food for both of them. Send one of them to the barber.”

Keshava, following instructions he had memorized, made his way through the unfamiliar streets and came to a part of town where he found a barber working on the street. The barber had set up his stall against a wall, hanging his mirror from a nail hammered between a family-planning sign and an anti-tuberculosis poster.

A customer sat in a chair in front of the mirror, draped in a white cloth, and the barber was shaving him. Keshava waited till the customer had left.

The barber scratched his head and inspected Keshava from head to foot.

“What kind of work can I offer you, boy?”

At first the barber could think of nothing for him to do but hold the mirror for his customers to examine themselves after they had been shaved. Then he asked Keshava to clip the toenails and calluses from the customers’ feet as he shaved them. Then he told the boy to sweep the hair from the pavement.

“Serve him some food too, he’s a good boy,” the barber told his wife when she arrived with tea and biscuits at four o’clock.

“He’s the shopkeeper’s boy, he can get food himself. And he’s a Hoyka, you want him eating with us?”

“He’s a good boy, let him have some food. Just a little.”

It was only as the barber watched the boy wolf down the biscuits that he realized why the shopkeeper had sent the boy to him. “My God! You haven’t eaten all day?”

The next morning, when Keshava showed up, the barber patted him on the back. He still didn’t know exactly what to do with Keshava, but that no longer seemed to be a problem; he knew he could not let this boy, with his sweet face, starve all day at the shopkeeper’s place. In the afternoon, Keshava was given lunch. The barber’s wife grumbled, but her husband splashed Keshava’s plate with large helpings of fish curry.

“He’s a hard worker, he deserves it.”

That evening, Keshava accompanied the barber on a round of house calls; they went from house to house, and waited in the backyards for their customers to come outside. While Keshava set up a small wooden chair in the backyard, the barber threw a white cloth around the customer’s neck and asked him how he wanted his hair cut that day. After each appointment, the barber would flap the white cloth hard, dusting off the curls of hair from them; as they left the house and went to the next, the barber passed a commentary on the customer.

“That customer can’t get it up, you can tell from how limp his mustache is.”

Seeing Keshava’s blank stare, he said, “I guess you don’t know about that bit of life yet, eh, boy?” Then, regretting that confidence, he whispered to the boy, “Don’t repeat that to my wife.”

Each time they crossed the road, the barber seized the boy by the wrist.

“It’s dangerous out here,” he said, pronouncing the key word in English, in a tremulous manner, bringing out all the drama in that foreign word. “One moment of not watching out in this city, and your whole life is gone. Dangerous. ”

In the evening Keshava came back to the alley behind the market. His brother was lying facedown on the ground, fast asleep, too tired even to lay out his bedding. Keshava unfolded the sheet and covered Vittal’s face up to his nose.

Since Vittal was already asleep, he pulled his mattress right next to his brother’s, so that their arms would touch. He fell asleep gazing at the stars.

A horrible noise woke him in the middle of the night: three kittens, chasing each other, right around his body. In the morning, he saw their neighbor feeding the kittens a bowl of milk. They had yellow fur, and their pupils were elongated, like claw marks.

“Have you got the money ready?” the neighbor asked him, when he came over to pet the kittens. He explained that Vittal and Keshava would have to pay a fee to a local “boss”-one of those who collected payments from the homeless of the streets of Kittur in return for “protection”-mainly from himself.

“But where is this boss? My brother and I have never seen him here.”

“You’ll see him tonight. That was the word we received. Have the money ready, or he’ll beat you.”