Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

The boy stuck out his index finger and motioned to one of the men. “Chenayya-your number is up!”

Chenayya pedaled hard. He had been told to take the direct route to Rose Lane, so he had to go over Lighthouse Hill; he struggled to move the cart with the TV table, which was attached to his cycle. Once he was over the hump of the hill, he let the cycle glide. He slowed down in Rose Lane, found the house number, which he had memorized, and rang the bell.

He was expecting to see a servant, but when a plump, fair-skinned woman opened the door, he knew it was Mrs. Engineer herself.

Chenayya carried the TV table into the house, and put it down where she indicated.

He went out, and returned with a saw. He had walked in holding the thing close to his side, but when he got to the dining room, where he had left the table in two separate pieces, Mrs. Engineer watched as he held the tool at arm’s length, and suddenly it seemed enormous: eighteen inches long, with a serrated edge, rusty, but with patches of the original metal-gray color still showing through, like a sculpture of a shark made by a tribal artist.

Chenayya saw the anxiety in the woman’s eyes. To dispel her fear, he grinned ingratiatingly-it was the exaggerated, death-mask grin of a person not used to groveling-then he looked around as if to remind himself where he had left the table.

The legs were not of equal length. Chenayya closed an eye and examined the legs one by one; then he took the saw to each of the legs, creating a fine dust on the ground. He moved the saw so slowly, so precisely, that it seemed he was just rehearsing his actions; only the accumulation of wood dust on the ground was evidence to the contrary. He examined the four legs again with one eye closed to make sure they were even, and then dropped his saw. He searched the dirty white sarong he was wearing, which was the only garment on his body, for a relatively clean corner, and wiped down the table.

“The table is ready, madam.” He folded his hands and waited.

With an ingratiating smile, he wiped the table again, to make sure that the lady of the house had noticed the care he had taken with her furniture.

Mrs. Engineer had not been watching; she had retreated into an inner room. She returned and counted off seven hundred and forty-two rupees.

Hesitating a moment, she added three one-rupee notes to it.

“Give me something more, madam?” Chenayya blurted. “Give me three more rupees?”

“Six rupees? Nothing doing,” she said.

“It’s a long way, madam.” He picked up his saw, and gestured at his neck. “I had to carry it all that way, madam, on my cycle-cart. It hurts my neck very much.”

“Nothing doing. Get out-or I’ll call the police, you thug-get out, and take your big knife with you!”

As he walked out of the house, grumbling and sulking, he folded the money into a wad, then tied it into a knot on his loose dirty white sarong. A neem tree grew near the gate of the house, and he had to duck not to scrape his head against its branches. He had left the cycle-cart near the tree. He threw the saw into the cart. Around his cycle’s seat he had wrapped a white cotton cloth; he unfastened it and tied it around his head.

A cat went running past his leg; two dogs followed it in full flight. The cat leapt up the neem tree and bounded up the limbs; the dogs waited at the foot of the tree, scraping the base of the tree and barking. Chenayya, who had gotten onto his seat, lingered to watch the scene. The moment he started pedaling, he would no longer notice such things around him; he would turn into a pedaling machine that was headed straight back to his boss-man’s shop. He stood there, watching the animals, enjoying consciousness. He picked up a rotting banana skin, and left it draped on the leaves of the neem tree, so that it would startle the owners when they came out.

He was so pleased with himself for this that he smiled.

But he still did not want to start pedaling again, which was like handing over the keys of his personality to fatigue and routine.

About ten minutes later, he was on his cycle again, heading back to Umbrella Street. He was cycling, as always, with his butt elevated off the seat, his spine inclined at sixty degrees. Only at traffic intersections did he straighten himself, relax, and ease back onto the seat. The road, as he drew near Umbrella Street, was jammed once again; pushing his front wheel into the car ahead of him, Chenayya yelled:

“Son of a bitch, move!”

At last he saw to his right the sign GANESH PAI FAN AND FURNITURE STORE, and stopped his cycle.

Chenayya felt the money was burning a hole in his sarong; he wanted to hand it over to his employer as soon as possible. He wiped his palm against his sarong, pushed the door open, went into the store, and crouched by a corner of Mr. Pai’s table. Neither Mr. Pai nor the Tamilian assistant paid any attention to him. Untying the bundle in his sarong, he put his hands between his legs and stared at the floor.

His neck was hurting again; he moved it side to side to relieve the stress.

“Stop doing that.” Mr. Pai motioned for him to hand over the cash. Chenayya got up.

He moved slowly to the boss-man’s desk and handed the notes over to Mr. Ganesh Pai, who moistened his finger in the water bowl and counted off seven hundred and forty-two rupees. Chenayya stared at the water bowl; he noticed how its sides were scalloped to make them look like lotus petals, and how the artisan had even traced the pattern of a trellis around the bottom of the bowl.

Mr. Pai snapped his fingers. He had tied a rubber band around the notes, and was holding out his palm in Chenayya’s direction.

“Two rupees short.”

Chenayya undid the knot in the side of his sarong and handed over two one-rupee notes.

That was the sum he was expected to hand over to Mr. Pai at the end of every delivery; one rupee for the dinner he would be given at around nine o’clock, and one rupee for the privilege of having been chosen to work for Mr. Ganesh Pai.

Outside, the Tamilian boy from Mr. Pai’s shop was giving instructions to one of the cycle-cart pullers, a strong young fellow who had recently joined. He was about to start pedaling a cart with two cardboard boxes on it, and the boy from the store was saying, tapping the two boxes, “It’s a mixie in one box, and a four-blade fan in the other. When you take it to the house, you’ve got to make sure they both get plugged in before you return.” He told the cart puller the address he was to go to; then he made the coolie say it aloud, like a teacher with a slow pupil.

It would be some time before Chenayya’s number was called again, so he walked down the road to a spot where a man was sitting at a desk on the pavement, selling bundles of small rectangular tickets that were as colorful as pieces of candy. He smiled at Chenayya; his fingers began flipping through one of the bundles.

“Yellow?”

“First tell me if my number won last time,” Chenayya said. He brought out a dirty piece of paper from the knot on his sarong. The seller found a newspaper and glanced down to the bottom right-hand corner.

He read aloud, “Winning lottery numbers: 17-8-9-9-643- 455.”

Chenayya had learned enough about English numerals to know his own ticket number; he squinted for several moments, and then let the ticket float to the ground.

“People buy for fifteen, sixteen years before they win, Chenayya,” the lottery seller said, by way of consolation. “But in the end, those who believe always win. That is the way the world works.”

Chenayya hated it when the seller tried to console him like this; that was when he felt he was being ripped off by the men who printed the lottery tickets.

“I can’t go on this way forever,” he said. “My neck hurts. I can’t go on like this.”