Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

She spat at his face. Then she grabbed Raju by the wrist and they ran like mad.

The next autorickshaw driver they asked was a kind man. “It’s a long, long way. Why don’t you take a bus? The number three-forty-three will get you there. Otherwise it’ll be a couple of hours at least, by foot.”

“We don’t have money, uncle.”

He gave them a rupee coin and asked, “Where are your parents?”

They got onto a bus and paid the conductor. “Where are you getting off?” he shouted.

“The port.”

“This bus doesn’t go to the port. You need the number three-forty-three. This is the number…”

They got out and walked.

They were near the Cool Water Well Junction now. They found the one-armed, one-legged boy working there, as he always did; he went hopping about from car to car, begging before she could get to them. Someone had given him a radish today, so he went about begging with a large white radish in his hand, tapping it on the windshields to get the attention of the passengers.

“Don’t you dare bring your begging here, you sons of bitches!” he shouted at them, waving the radish threateningly.

The two of them stuck their tongues out at him and shouted, “Freak! Disgusting freak!”

Raju began crying after an hour and refused to walk anymore, so she picked in a rubbish can for some food. There was a carton with two biscuits, and they had one each.

They walked some more. After a while, Raju’s nostrils began bubbling.

“I can smell the sea from here.”

She could too.

They walked faster. They saw a man painting a sign in English by the side of the road; two cats fighting on the roof of a white Fiat; a horse cart, loaded with chopped wood; an elephant, walking down the road with a mound of neem leaves; a car that had been smashed up in an accident; and a dead crow with its claws drawn in stiffly to its chest, its belly open and swarming with black ants.

Then they were at the Bunder.

The sun was setting over the sea, and they went past the packed markets, looking for a garden.

“There are no gardens here in the Bunder. That’s why the air is so bad here,” an old Muslim peanut seller told them. “You’ve got the wrong directions.”

Looking at their crestfallen faces, he offered them a handful of peanuts to munch on.

Raju whined. He was hungry…to hell with the peanuts! He thrust them back at the Muslim man, who called him a devil.

That made Raju so angry he left his sister and ran, and she ran after him until Raju came to a stop.

“Look!” he shrieked, pointing at a row of mutilated men with bandaged limbs, sitting in front of a building with a white dome.

Gingerly they walked around the lepers. And then she saw a man lying down on a bench, his palms crossed over his face, breathing heavily. She came near the bench, and saw, right at the water’s edge, fenced off by a small stone wall, a little green park.

Raju was quiet now.

When they got to the park, there was shouting. A policeman was slapping a very dark man. “Did you steal the shoes? Did you?”

The very dark man shook his head. The policeman hit him harder. “Son of a bald woman, you take these drugs, and then you steal things, and you-son of a bald woman, you-!”

Three white-haired men, hiding in a bush near her, gestured to Soumya to come and hide with them. She took Raju into the bush, and they waited there for the policeman to leave.

She whispered to the three white-haired men, “I’m the daughter of Ramachandran, the man who smashes rich people’s houses in Rose Lane.”

None of the three knew her father.

“What do you want, little girl?”

She said the word, as well as she could remember, “… ack. ”

One of the men, who appeared to be their leader, frowned. “Say it again.”

He nodded when she said the strange word the second time. Taking a pouch made of newspaper out of his pocket, he tapped it: white powder, like crushed chalk, poured out. He took out a cigarette from another pocket, sliced it open, tapped out the tobacco, filled the paper with the white powder, and rolled it tight. He held the cigarette up in the air and gestured with his other hand to Soumya.

“Twelve rupees.”

“I’ve got only nine,” she said. “You’ll have to take nine.”

“Ten.”

She gave them the money; she took the cigarette. A horrible doubt seized her.

“If you’re robbing me, if you’re cheating me…Raju and I’ll come back with Daddy-and beat you all.” The three men crouched together. They began shaking, and then they were laughing together. Something was wrong with them. She grabbed Raju by the wrist and she and her brother ran.

Glimpses of the scene to come flashed through her mind. She would show Daddy what she had brought for him from so far away. “Sweetie,” he would say-the way he used to say it-and hold her in a frenzy of affection, and the two would go mad with love for each other.

Her left foot began to burn after a while, and she flexed her toes and stared at them. Raju insisted on being carried; but fair enough, she thought-the little fellow had done well today.

It began raining again. Raju cried. She had to threaten to leave him behind three times; once she actually left him and walked a whole block before he came running after her, telling her of a giant dragon that was chasing him.

They got onto a bus.

“Tickets,” the driver shouted, but she winked at him and said, “Big brother, let us on for free, please…”

His face softened, and he let them stay near the back.

It was pitch-black when they got back to Rose Lane. They saw the lamps lit up in all the mansions. The foreman was sitting under his gas lamp, talking to one of the workers. The house looked smaller: all the crossbeams had been sawn off.

“Did you go begging in this neighborhood?” the foreman shouted when he saw the two of them.

“No, we didn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me! You were gone all day-and doing what? Begging on Rose Lane!”

She raised her upper lip in contempt. “Why don’t you ask if we begged here before accusing us?”

The foreman glared at them, but kept quiet, defeated by the girl’s logic.

Raju ran ahead, screaming for his mother. They found her asleep, alone, in her rain-dampened sari. Raju ran up to her, butted his head into her side, and began rubbing against her body for warmth like a kitten; the sleeping woman groaned and turned over to the other side. One of her arms began swatting Raju away.

“Amma,” he said, shaking her. “Amma! I’m hungry! Soumya gave me nothing to eat all day! She made me walk and walk and take this bus and that, and no food! A white man gave her a hundred rupees but she never gave me anything to eat or drink.”

“Don’t lie!” Soumya hissed. “What about the biscuits?”

But he kept shaking her: “Amma! Soumya gave me nothing to eat or drink all day!”

The two children began wrestling each other. Then a hand lightly tapped Soumya’s shoulder.

“Sweetie.”

When he saw their father, Raju began to simper; he turned and ran to his mother. Soumya and her father walked to one side.

“Do you have it, sweetie? Do you have the thing?”

She drew a breath. “Here,” she said, and put the packet into his hands. He lifted it up to his nose, sniffed, and then put it under his shirt: she saw his hands reach through his sarong into his groin. He took his hand out. She knew it was coming now: his caress.

He caught her wrist; his fingers cut into her flesh.

“What about the hundred rupees that the white man gave you? I heard Raju.”

“No one gave me a hundred rupees, Daddy. I swear. Raju is lying, I swear.”

“Don’t lie. Where is the hundred rupees?”