Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

“Are you mad?”

Getting down on his knees, Ratna gave the boy a good shake, and asked the same question again and again.

And then, at last, he saw the boy’s eyes. They had changed since he had last observed them: teary and red, they were like pickled vegetables of some kind.

He relaxed his grip on the boy’s shoulder.

“You’ll have to pay me, all right, for my help? I don’t do charity.”

Half an hour later, the two men got off a bus near the railway station. They walked together through streets that became progressively narrower and darker, until they reached a shop whose awning was marked with a large red medical cross. From inside the shop, a radio blared out a popular Kannada film song.

“Buy something here, and leave me alone.”

Ratna tried to walk away, but the boy clutched his wrist. “Wait. Pick the medicine for me and then go.”

Ratna walked quickly in the direction of the bus stop, but again he heard the footsteps behind him. He turned, and there was the boy, arms laden with green bottles.

Regretting that he had ever agreed to bring him here, Ratna walked faster. Still he heard the light, desperate footsteps again, as though a ghost were following him.

For several hours that night Ratna lay awake, turning in his bed and disturbing his wife.

The next day, in the evening, he took the bus into the city, back to Umbrella Street. When he reached the firecracker shop he stood at a distance with his arms folded, waiting until the boy saw him. The two of them walked together in silence for a while, and then sat down on a bench outside a sugarcane juice stall. As the machines turned, crushing the cane, Ratna said:

“Go to the hospital. They’ll help you.”

“I can’t go there. They know me. They’ll tell my father.”

Ratna had a vision of that immense man with the tufts of white hair growing out of his ears, sitting in front of his arsenal of firecrackers and paper bombs.

The following day, as Ratna was folding his wooden stand and packing his case, he was conscious of a shadow on the ground in front of him. He walked around the Dargah, past the long line of pilgrims waiting to pray at the tomb of Yusuf Ali, past the rows of lepers, and past the man with one leg, lying on the ground, twitching from the hip, and chanting, “Al-lah, Al-laaah! Al-lah!”

He looked up at the white dome for a moment.

He went down to the sea, and the shadow followed him. A low stone wall ran along the sea’s edge, and he put his right foot up on it. The waves were coming in violently; now and then water crashed against the wall, and thick white foam rose up into the air and spread out, like a peacock’s tail emerging from the sea. Ratna turned around.

“What choice do I have? If I don’t sell those boys the pills, how will I marry off my daughters?”

The boy, avoiding his gaze, stared at the ground and shifted his weight uncomfortably.

The two of them caught the number five bus and took it all the way into the heart of the city, disembarking near Angel Talkies. The boy carried the wooden stool, and Ratna searched up and down the main road, until he located a large billboard of a husband and a wife standing together in wedding clothes:

HAPPY LIFE CLINIC

Consulting Specialist: Doctor M. V. Kamath

MBBS (Mysore), BMec (Allahabad), DBBS (Mysore),

MCh (Calcutta), GCom (Varanasi).

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

“You see those letters after his name?” Ratna whispered into the boy’s ear. “He’s a real doctor. He’ll save you.”

In the waiting room, a half dozen lean, nervous men sat on black chairs, and in a corner, one married couple. Ratna and the boy sat down between the single men and the couple. Ratna looked curiously at the men. These were the same ones who came to him: older, sadder versions; men who had been trying to shake off venereal disease for years, who had thrown bottle after bottle of white pills at it, to find no improvement-who were now at the end of a long journey of despair, a journey that led from his booth at the Dargah, through a long trail of other hucksters, to this doctor’s clinic, where they would be told at last the truth.

One by one, the lean, wasted men went into the doctor’s room and the door shut behind them. Ratna looked at the married couple and thought, At least they are not alone in this ordeal. At least they have each other.

Then the man got up to see the doctor; the woman stayed back. She went in later, after the man had left. Of course they are not husband and wife, Ratna told himself. When he gets this disease, this disease of sex, every man is alone in the universe.

“And who are you in relation to the patient?” the doctor asked.

They had taken their seats, at last, at his consulting desk. On the wall behind the doctor a giant chart depicted a cross-section of a man’s urinary and reproductive organs. Ratna looked at it for a moment, marveling at the diagram’s beauty, and said:

“His uncle.”

The doctor made the boy take off his shirt; then he sat next to him, made him put his tongue out, peered into his eyes, and put his stethoscope to the boy’s chest, pressing it to one side and then the other.

Ratna thought, To get a disease like this, on his very first time! Where is the justice in that?

After examining the boy’s genitals, the doctor moved to a washbasin with a mirror above; he pulled a cord, and a tube light flickered to life above the mirror.

Letting the water run into the basin, he gargled and spat, and then turned off the light. He wiped a corner of the basin with his palm, lowered a blind over the window, inspected his green plastic wastebasket.

When he ran out of things to do, he returned to his desk, looked at his feet, and practiced breathing for a while.

“His kidneys are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone,” the doctor said.

He turned to the boy, who was trembling hard in his seat.

“Are you unnatural in your tastes?”

The boy covered his face in his hands. Ratna answered for him.

“Look, he got it from a prostitute, there’s no sin in that. He’s not an unnatural fellow. He just didn’t know enough about this world we live in.”

The doctor nodded. He turned to the diagram and put his finger on the kidneys, and said:

“Gone.”

Ratna and the boy went to the bus station together at six in the morning the following day, to catch the bus to Manipal; he had heard that there was a doctor at the medical college who specialized in the kidneys. A man with a blue sarong, sitting on the bench in the station, told them that the bus to Manipal was always late, maybe fifteen minutes, maybe thirty, maybe more. “Everything’s been falling apart in this country since Mrs. Gandhi was shot,” the man in the blue sarong said, kicking his legs about. “Buses are late. Trains are late. Everything’s falling apart. We’ll have to hand this country back to the British or the Russians or someone, I tell you. We’re not meant to be masters of our own fate, I tell you.”

Telling the boy to wait for a moment by the bus stand, Ratna returned with peanuts in a paper cone which he had bought for twenty paise, and said, “You haven’t had break fast, have you?” But the boy reminded him that the doctor had warned against eating anything spicy; it would irritate his penis. So Ratna went back to the vendor and exchanged the peanuts for the unsalted kind. They munched together for a while, until the boy ran to a wall and began to throw up. Ratna stood over him, patting his back, as the boy retched again and again. The man in the blue sarong watched with greedy eyes; then he came up to Ratna and whispered, “What’s the kid got? It’s serious, isn’t it?”

“Nonsense; he’s just got a flu,” Ratna said. The bus arrived at the station an hour late.