Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

After lunch, he sent the office boy to find Menon, a young journalist and a rising star at the paper. Menon came into his room with the top two buttons of his shirt open, a shiny gold necklace flashing at his neck. “Sit down,” Gururaj said.

Gururaj showed him two articles about the car crash on Flower Market Street, which he had dug out of the newspaper’s archives that morning. The first (he pointed to it) had appeared before the trial; the second after the verdict.

“You wrote both articles, didn’t you?”

Menon nodded.

“In the first article, the car that hits the dead man is a red Maruti Suzuki. In the second, it is a white Fiat. Which one was it, really?”

Menon inspected the two articles.

“I just filed according to the police reports.”

“You didn’t bother looking at the vehicle yourself, I take it?”

That night he ate the dinner that the caretaker at the YMCA brought up to his room; she talked a lot, but he was worried she was trying to marry him off to her daughter, and he said as little as possible to her.

As he went to sleep he set the alarm for two o’clock.

He woke up with his heart racing fast; he turned on the lights, left his room, and squinted at his clock. It was twenty minutes to two. He put on his trousers, patted his wavy strands of hair back into place, and almost ran down the stairs and out the gate of the YMCA and in the direction of the bank.

The Gurkha was there at his chair, with his ancient rifle.

“Listen here, did you see this accident with your own eyes?”

“Of course not. I was sitting right here. This is my job.”

“Then how the hell did you know the cars had been changed in the police-”

“Through the grapevine.”

The Gurkha talked quietly. He explained to the newspaper editor that a network of night watchmen passed information around Kittur; every night watchman came to the next for a cigarette and told him something, and that one visited the next one for a cigarette in turn. In this way, word got around. Secrets got spread. The truth-what really happened during the daytime-was preserved.

This is insane, this is impossible -Gururaj wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“So what actually happened-Engineer hit a man on his way back home?”

“Left him for dead.”

“It can’t be true.”

The Gurkha’s eyes flashed. “You’ve lived here long enough, sir. You know it can be. Engineer was drunk; he was coming back from his mistress’s home; he hit the fellow like some stray dog and drove away, leaving him there with his guts spilled out on the street. In the morning the newspaper boy found him like that. The police know perfectly well who drives down that road at night drunk. So the next morning two constables go to his house. Hasn’t even washed the blood off the front wheels of the car.”

“Then why-”

“He is the richest man in this town. He owns the tallest building in this town. He cannot be arrested. He gets one of the employees at his factory to say that he was driving the car when it happened. The guy gives the police a sworn affidavit. I was driving under the influence on the night of May twelfth when I hit the unfortunate victim. Then Mr. Engineer gave the judge six thousand rupees, and the police something less, perhaps four thousand or five, because the judiciary is of course more noble than the police, to keep quiet. Then he wants his Maruti Suzuki back, because it’s a new car and a fashion statement and he likes driving it, so he gives the police another thousand to change the identity of the killer car to a Fiat, and he has his car back and he’s driving around town again.”

“My God.”

“The employee got four years. The judge could have given him a harsher sentence, but he felt sorry for the bugger. Couldn’t let him off for free, of course. So”-the night watchman brought down an imaginary gavel-“four years.”

“I can’t believe it,” Gururaj said. “Kittur isn’t that kind of place.”

The foreigner narrowed his cunning eyes and smiled. He looked at the glowing tip of his beedi for a while, and then offered the beedi to Gururaj.

In the morning Gururaj opened the only window in his room. He looked down on Umbrella Street, on the heart of the town where he was born and where he had grown to maturity and where he would almost certainly die. He sometimes thought he knew every building, every tree, every tile on the roof of every house in Kittur. Glowing in the morning light, Umbrella Street seemed to say, No, the Gurkha’s story can’t be true. The clarity of the stenciling on an advertisement, the glistening spokes of the bicycle wheel ridden by the man delivering newspapers, said, No, the Gurkha is lying. But as Gururaj walked to his office, he saw the dense dark shade of a banyan tree lying across the road, like a patch of night left unswept by the morning’s broom, and his soul was in turmoil again.

Work began. He calmed down. He avoided Ms. D’Mello.

That evening, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper summoned him to his room. He was a plump old man, with sagging jowls and thick white eyebrows that looked like frosting and hands that trembled as he drank his tea. The tendons in his neck stood out in deep relief, and every part of his body seemed to be calling out for retirement.

If he did retire, Gururaj would inherit his chair.

“Regarding this story you’ve asked Menon to reinvestigate…” said the editor-in-chief, sipping the tea. “Forget it.”

“There was a discrepancy over the cars-”

The old man shook his head. “The police made a mistake on the first filing, that was all.” His voice changed into the quiet, casual tone Gururaj had come to recognize as final. He sipped more tea, and then some more.

The slurping sound of the tea being sipped, the abruptness of the old man’s manner, the fatigue of nights of broken sleep, got on Gururaj’s nerves and he said:

“A man might have been sent to jail for no good reason; a guilty man might be walking free. And all you can say is, let’s drop the matter.”

The old man sipped his tea; Gururaj thought he could detect his head move, as if in the affirmative.

He went back to the YMCA, and walked up a flight of stairs to his room. He lay down on the bed with his eyes open. He was still awake at two in the morning, when the alarm went off. When he emerged, he heard a whistling sound; the policeman, passing by him, waved heartily, as if to an old friend.

The moon was shrinking fast; in a few days it would be entirely dark at night. He walked the same route now, as if it were a ritual formula: first slowly, then crossing to the center of the road, and then dashing into the side alley until he reached the bank. The Gurkha was in his chair, his rifle on his shoulder, a glowing beedi in his fingers.

“What does the grapevine tell you tonight?”

“Nothing tonight.”

“Then tell me something from a few nights ago. Tell me what else the paper has published that is untrue.”

“The riots. The newspaper got that wrong, completely.”

Gururaj thought his heart would skip a beat. “How so?”

“The newspaper said that it was Hindus fighting Muslims, see?”

“It was Hindus fighting Muslims. Everyone knows that.”

“Ha.”

The next morning Gururaj did not turn up at the office. He went straight down to the Bunder, the first time since he had gone there to talk to the shopkeepers in the aftermath of the riots. He traced every restaurant and fish market that had been burned down in the riots.

He went back to the newspaper, rushed into the office of the editor-in-chief, and said:

“I heard the most incredible story last night about the Hindu-Muslim riots. Shall I tell you what I heard?”