Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

“I hear that you’ve turned up for work only one day in the last ten. This is very bad, my son. You can’t be morose.” Brother made a fist. “You have to be full of life.” He shook his fist at Keshava, as if to demonstrate the fullness of life.

A boy nearby tapped his head. “Nothing gets to him. He’s touched. That blow on the head has turned him into an imbecile.”

“He always was an imbecile,” said another boarder, combing his hair at a mirror. “Now he just wants to sleep and eat for free in the hostel.”

“Shut up!” Brother said. He swished his stick at them. “No one talks about my star slogan shouter like that!”

He gently tapped his stick on Keshava’s head. “You see what they’re saying about you, Keshava? That you’re putting on this act just to steal food and bed from Brother? You see the insults they spread about you?”

Keshava began to cry. He drew his knees up to his chest, put his head on them, and cried.

“My poor boy!” Brother himself was almost in tears. He got onto the bed and hugged the boy.

“Someone’s got to tell the boy’s family,” he said on the way out. “We can’t keep him here if he’s not working.”

“We did tell his brother,” the neighbors replied.

“And?”

“He’s not interested in hearing about Keshava. He says there’s no connection between them anymore.”

Brother slammed his fist against the wall. “You see the extent to which family life has deteriorated these days!” He shook his fist, which was aching from the blow. “That fellow has to take care of his brother. He has no other option!” he shouted. He whipped his stick through the air. “I will show that piece of shit! I will force him to remember his duty to his younger brother!”

Although no one actually threw him out, one evening when Keshava came back, someone else was sitting on his bed. The fellow was tracing his finger along the outlines of the actresses’ faces, and the other boys were teasing him:

“Oh, so she’s his wife, is she? She’s not, you idiot!”

It was as if he had always been there and they had always been his neighbors.

Keshava simply wandered away. He felt no desire to fight to get his bed back.

He sat by the closed doors of the Central Market that night, and some of the streetside sellers recognized him and fed him. He did not thank them; did not even say hello. This went on for a few days. Finally, one of them said to him:

“In this world, a fellow who doesn’t work doesn’t eat. It’s not too late; go to Brother and apologize and beg him to give you your old job back. You know he thinks of you as family…”

For a few nights, he wandered outside the market. One day he drifted back to the hostel. Brother was sitting in the drawing room again, as his feet were massaged by the woman. “That was a lovely dress Rekha wore in the movie, don’t you think?” Keshava wandered into the room.

“What do you want?” Brother asked, getting up. Keshava tried to put it into words. He held his arms out to a man in a blue sarong.

“This Hoyka idiot is mad! And he stinks! Get him out of here!”

Hands dragged him for some distance, and pushed him to the ground. Leather shoes kicked him in the ribs.

A little later, he heard footsteps, and then someone lifted him up. Wooden crutches tapped on the earth, and a man’s voice said, “So Brother’s got no use for you either, eh…?”

He vaguely sensed that he was being offered something to eat. He sniffed; it reeked of castor oil and shit, and he rejected it. He smelled garbage around him, and turned his head toward the sky; his eyes were full of the stars when they closed.

(abridged from A Short History of Kittur by Father Basil d’Essa, S.J.)

The word “Kittur” is a corruption either of “Kiri Uru,” meaning “small town,” or of “Kittamma’s Uru”-Kittamma being a goddess specializing in repelling smallpox and whose temple stood near today’s train station. A letter from a Syrian Christian merchant written in 1091 recommends to his peers the excellent natural harbour of the town of Kittur, on the Malabar Coast. During the entire twelfth century, however, the town appears to have vanished; Arab merchants who visited Kittur in 1141 and 1190 record only wilderness. In the fourteenth century a dervish named Yusuf Ali began curing lepers at the Bunder; when he died, his body was entombed in a white dome, and the structure-the Dargah of Hazrat Yusuf Ali-has remained an object of pilgrimage to the present day. In the late fifteenth century, “Kittore, also known as the citadel of elephants” is listed in the tax-collection records of the Vijayanagara rulers as one of the provinces of their empire. In 1649, a four-man Portuguese missionary delegation led by Fr. Cristoforo d’Almeida, S.J., trekked down the coast from Goa to Kittur; it found “a deplorable mess of idolators, Mohammedans, and elephants.” The Portuguese drove out the Mohammedans, pulverised the idols, and distilled the wild elephants into a rubble of dirty ivory. Over the next hun dred years, Kittur-now renamed Valencia -passed back and forth between the Portuguese, the Marathas, and the kingdom of Mysore. In 1780, Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore, defeated an army of the East India Company near the Bunder; by the Treaty of Kittur, signed that year, the Company renounced its claims on “Kittore, also called Valencia or The Bunder.” The Company violated the treaty after Hyder Ali’s death in 1782, by setting up a military camp near the Bunder; in retaliation, Tippu, the son of Hyder Ali, constructed the Sultan’s Battery, a formidable fortress of black stone mounted with French guns. After Tippu’s death in 1799, Kittur became Company property, and was annexed into the Madras Presidency. The town, like most of South India, took no part in the great anti-British mutiny of 1857. In 1921, an activist of the Indian National Congress raised a tricolour at the old lighthouse: the freedom struggle had come to Kittur.

Nightlife in Kittur centers on the Angel Talkies cinema. Every Thursday morning, the walls of the town are plastered with hand-painted posters featuring a sketch of a full-bodied woman brushing her hair with her fingers; below is the title of the movie: HER NIGHTS, WINE AND WOMEN, MYSTERIES OF GROWTH, UNCLE’S FAULT. The words “Malayalam Color” and “Adults Only” are prominently featured on the posters. By eight a.m., a long line of unemployed men has queued outside Angel Talkies. Showtimes are ten a.m., noon, two p.m., four p.m., and seven-ten p.m. Seat prices range from 2.20 rupees for a seat at the front to 4.50 rupees for a “Family Circle” seat up in the balcony. Not far from the theater is the Hotel Woodside, whose attractions include a famous Paris cabaret, featuring Ms. Zeena from Bombay every Friday, and Ms. Ayesha and Ms. Zimboo from Bahrain every second Sunday. A traveling sexologist, Dr. Kurvilla, MBBS, MD, Mch, MS, DDBS, PCDB, visits the hotel on the first Monday of every month. Less expensive and seedier in appearance than the Woodside are a nearby series of bars, restaurants, hostels, and apartments. Thanks to the presence of a YMCA in the neighborhood, however, men of decency also have the option of a moral and clean hostel.

THE DOOR OF the YMCA swung open at two in the morning; a short figure walked out.

He was a small man with a huge protruding forehead, which gave him the look of a professor in a caricature. His hair, thick and wavy like a teenager’s, was oiled and firmly pressed down; it was graying around the temples and in the sideburns. He had walked out of the YMCA looking at the ground; and now, as if noticing for the first time that he was in the real world, he stopped for a moment, looked this way and that, and then headed toward the market.