Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

“Kitty, kitty,” he said, stroking its fur. It wriggled in his arms, restless already.

Somewhere, I hope, a poor man will strike a blow against the world. Because there is no God watching over us. There is no one coming to release us from the jail in which we have locked ourselves.

He wanted to tell all this to the cat; maybe it could tell it to another cart puller-the one who would be brave enough to strike the blow.

He sat down by the wall, still holding on to the cat and stroking its fur. Maybe I can take you along, kitty. But how would he feed it? Who would take care of it when he was not around? He released it. He sat with his back to the wall and watched it walking cautiously up to a car and then slink under it; he craned his neck to see what it was doing down there when he heard a shout from above. It was Mrs. Engineer, yelling at him from a window at the top of her mansion:

“I know what you’re up to, you thug-I can read your mind! You won’t get another rupee out of me! Get moving!”

He was no longer angry; and he knew she was right. He had to go back to the store. His number would come up again soon. He got on his cart and pedaled.

There was a traffic jam in the city center, and Chenayya had to go over the Lighthouse Hill again. Traffic was bad here too. It moved a few inches at a time, and then Chenayya had to stop mid-hill, and clamp his foot down on the road to hold his cart in its place. When the horns began to sound, he rose from his seat and pedaled; behind him, a long line of cars and buses moved, as if he were pulling the traffic along with an invisible chain.

The old Cool Water Well is said never to dry up, but it is now sealed, and serves only as a traffic roundabout. The streets around the well house contain a number of middle-class housing colonies. Professional people of all castes-Bunts, Brahmins, and Catholics-live side by side here, although the Muslim rich keep to the Bunder. The Canara Club, the most exclusive club in town, is located here, in a large white mansion with lawns. The neighborhood is the “intellectual” part of town: it boasts a Lions Club, a Rotary Club, a Freemason’s Lodge, a Bahá’í educational group, a Theosophist Society, and a branch of the Alliance Française of Pondicherry. Of the numerous medical institutions located here, the two best-known are the Havelock Henry District Hospital and Dr. Shambhu Shetty’s Happy Smile Orthodontic Clinic. The St. Agnes Girls’ High School, Kittur’s most sought-after girls-only school, is also located close by the junction. The poshest part of the Cool Water Well Junction area is the hibiscus-lined street known as Rose Lane. Mabroor Engineer, believed to be Kittur’s richest man, and Anand Kumar, Kittur’s member of Parliament, have mansions here.

“IT’S ONE THING to take a little ganja, roll it inside a chapati, and chew it at the day’s end, just to relax the muscles-I can forgive that in a man, I really can. But to smoke this drug-this smack -at seven in the morning, and then lie in a corner with your tongue hanging out, I tolerate that in no man on my construction site. You understand me? Or do you want me to repeat this in Tamil or whatever language your people speak?”

“I understand, sir.”

“What did you say? What did you say, you son of…?”

Holding her brother by the hand, Soumya watched as the foreman chastised her father. The foreman was young, so much younger than her father-but he wore a khaki uniform that the construction company had given him, and twirled a lathi in his left hand, and she saw that the workers, instead of defending her father, were listening quietly to the foreman. He was sitting in a blue chair on an embankment of mud; a gas lamp buzzed noisily from a wooden pole driven into the ground next to the chair. Behind him was the crater around the half-demolished house; the inside of the house was filled with rubble, its roof had mostly fallen in, and its windows were empty. With his baton and his uniform, and his face harshly illuminated by the incandescent paraffin lamp, the foreman looked like a ruler of the underworld at the gate of his kingdom.

A semicircle of construction workers had formed below him. Soumya’s father stood apart from the others, looking furtively at Soumya’s mother, who was muffling her sobs in a corner of her sari. In a tear-racked voice she said, “I keep telling him to give up this smack. I keep telling-”

Soumya wondered why her mother had to complain about her father in front of everyone. Raju pressed her hand.

“Why are they all scolding Daddy?”

She pressed back. Quiet.

All at once the foreman got up from his chair, took a step down the embankment, and raised his stick over Soumya’s father. “Pay attention, I said.” He brought his stick down.

Soumya shut her eyes and turned away.

The workers had returned to their tents, which were scattered about the open field around the dark, half-demolished house. Soumya’s father was lying on his blue mat, apart from everyone else; he was snoring already, his hands over his eyes. In the old days she would have gone to him and snuggled against his side.

Soumya went up to her father. She shook him by his big toe, but he did not respond. She went to where her mother was making rice, and lay down beside her.

Mallets and sledgehammers woke her up in the morning. Thump! Thump! Thump! Bleary-eyed, she wandered up to the house. Her father was up on the bit of the roof that remained, sitting on one of the black iron crossbeams; he was cutting it with a saw. Two men swung at the wall below with sledgehammers; clouds of dust rose up and covered her father as he sawed. Soumya’s heart leapt.

She ran to her mother and cried:

“Daddy’s working again!”

Her mother was with the other women; they were coming down from the house, carrying large metal saucers on their heads filled to the brim with rubble. “Make sure Raju doesn’t get wet,” she said as she passed Soumya.

Only then did Soumya notice it was drizzling.

Raju was lying on the blanket where his mother had been; Soumya woke him up, and took him into one of the tents. Raju began whimpering, saying he wanted to sleep some more. She went to the blue mat; her father had not touched the rice from last night. Mixing the dry rice with the rainwater, she squeezed it into a gruel, and stuffed morsels into Raju’s mouth. He said he didn’t like it, and bit her fingers each time.

The rain fell harder, and she heard the foreman roar, “You sons of bald women, don’t slow down!”

The moment the rain stopped, Raju wanted to be pushed on the swing. “It’s going to start raining again,” she said, but he wouldn’t change his mind. She carried him in her arms to the old truck-tire swing near the compound wall, and put him on it, and gave him a push, shouting, “One! Two!”

As she pushed, a man appeared before her.

His dark, wet skin was coated in white dust, and it took an instant for her to recognize him.

“Sweetie,” he said, “you must do something for Daddy.”

Her heart was beating too fast for her to say a word. She wanted him to say “sweetie,” not like he was saying it now-as if it were just a word, air that he was breathing out-but like before, when it came from his heart, when it was accompanied by his pulling her to his chest and hugging her deeply and whispering madly into her ear.

He went on speaking, in the same strange, slow, slurred way, and told her what he wanted her to do; then he walked back to the house.

She found Raju, who was cutting an earthworm into smaller bits with a piece of glass he had stolen from the demolition site, and said, “We have to go.”