Between the Assassinations

“But…he used to be an honest little fellow…” the drunk recalled.

“Maybe he had been stealing all along, and we just never knew it. You can’t trust anyone these days.”

The bottles in the icebox rattled. Ziauddin had stopped his work.

“I’m a Pathan!” He slapped his chest. “From the land of the Pathans, far up north, where there are mountains full of snow! I’m not a Hindu! I don’t do hanky-panky!”

Then he walked into the back of the shop.

“What the hell is this?” asked the drunk.

The shopkeeper explained that Ziauddin was now spouting this Pathan-Wathan gibberish all the time; he thought the boy must have picked it up from some mullah in the north of the state.

Thimma roared. He put his hands on his hips and shouted into the back of the shop, “Ziauddin, Pathans are white skinned, like Imran Khan; you’re as black as an African!”

The next morning there was a storm at the tea-and-samosa store. This time Ziauddin had been caught red-handed. Holding him by the collar of his shirt and dragging him out in front of the customers, Ramanna Shetty said:

“Tell me the truth-you son of a bald woman. Did you steal it? Tell me the truth this time, and I might give you another chance.”

“I am telling the truth,” Ziauddin said, touching his pink, vitiligo-discolored lips with a crooked finger. “I didn’t touch even one of the samosas.”

Ramanna grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him to the ground, kicked him, and then shoved him out of the tea shop, while the other boys huddled together and watched impassively, as sheep do when watching one of their flock being shorn. Then Ramanna howled: he raised one of his fingers, which was bleeding.

“He bit me-the animal!”

“I’m a Pathan!” Ziauddin shouted back, as he rose to his knees. “We came here and built the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort in Delhi. Don’t you dare treat me like this, you son of a bald woman, you-”

Ramanna turned to the ring of customers who had gathered around them and were staring at him and at Ziauddin, trying to make up their minds as to who was right and who was wrong: “There is no work here for a Muslim, and he has to fight with the one man who gives him a job.”

A few days later, Ziauddin passed by the tea shop, driving a cycle with a cart attached to it; large canisters of milk clanged together in the cart.

“Look at me,” he mocked his former employer. “The milk people trust me!”

But that job did not last long either; once again he was accused of theft. He publicly swore never to work for a Hindu again.

New Muslim restaurants were being opened at the far side of the railway station, where the Muslim immigrants were settling, and Ziauddin found work in one of these restaurants. He made omelets and toast at an outdoor grill, and shouted in Urdu and Malayalam, “Muslim men, wherever in the world you are from, Yemen or Kerala or Arabia or Bengal, come eat at a genuine Muslim shop!”

But even this job did not last-he was again charged with theft by his employer, who slapped him when he talked back-and he was next seen in a red uniform at the railway station, carrying mounds of luggage on his head and fighting bitterly with the passengers over his pay.

“I’m the son of a Pathan; I have the blood of a Pathan in me. You hear; I’m no cheat!”

When he glared at them, his eyeballs bulged, and the tendons in his neck stood out in high relief. He had become another of those lean, lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India, smoking their beedis in a corner and looking ready to hit or kill someone at a moment’s notice. Yet when old customers from Ramanna’s shop called him by his name, he grinned, and then they saw something of the boy with the big smile who had slammed glasses of tea down on their tables and mangled their English. They wondered what on earth had happened to him.

In the end, Ziauddin picked fights with the other porters, got kicked out of the train station too, and wandered aimlessly for a few days, cursing Hindu and Muslim alike. Then he was back at the station, carrying bags on his head again. He was a good worker; everyone had to concede that much. And there was plenty of work now for everyone. Several trains full of soldiers had arrived in Kittur-there was talk in the market that a new army base was being set up on the route to Cochin-and for days after the soldiers left, freight trains followed in their wake, carrying large crates that needed to be off-loaded. Ziauddin shut his mouth and carried the crates off the train and out of the station, where army trucks were waiting to be packed.

One Sunday, he lay on the platform of the station, still asleep at ten in the morning, dead tired from the week’s labor. He woke up with his nostrils twitching: the smell of soap was in the air. Rivulets of foam and bubble flowed beside him. A line of thin black bodies were bathing at the edge of the platform.

The fragrance of their foam made Ziauddin sneeze.

“Hey, bathe somewhere else! Leave me alone!”

The men laughed and shouted and pointed their lathered white fingers at Ziauddin: “We’re not all unclean animals, Zia! Some of us are Hindus!”

“I’m a Pathan!” he yelled back at the bathers. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

As he was shouting at them, something strange happened-the bathers all rushed away from him, crying, “A coolie, sir? A coolie?”

A stranger had materialized on the platform, even though no train had pulled up: a tall, fair-skinned man holding a small black bag. He wore a clean white business shirt and gray cotton trousers and everything about him smelled of money; this drove the other porters wild, and they crowded around him, still covered in lather, like men with a horrible disease gathering around a doctor who might have a cure. But he rejected them all, and walked up to the only porter who was not covered in lather.

“Which hotel?” Ziauddin asked, struggling to his feet.

The stranger shrugged, as if to say, Your choice. He looked with disapproval at the other porters, who were still hovering around, nearly nude and covered in soap. After sticking his tongue out at the other porters, Zia set off with the stranger.

The two of them walked toward the cheap hotels that lined the roads around the station. Stopping at a building that was covered in signs-for electrical shops, chemists, pharmacists, plumbers- Ziauddin pointed out a red sign on the second floor.

HOTEL DECENT

BOARDING AND LODGING

ALL FOODS AND SERVICES HERE

NORTH INDIAN SOUTH INDIAN CHINESE WESTERN

TIBETAN DISHES

TAXI PASSPORT VISA XEROX

TRUNK CALL FOR ALL COUNTRIES

“How about this one, sir? It’s the best place in town.” He put a hand on his heart. “I give you my word.”

The Hotel Decent had a good deal with all the railway porters: a cut of two and a half rupees for every customer they brought in.

The stranger lowered his voice confidentially. “My dear fellow, is it a good place, though?”

He emphasized the critical word by saying it in English.

“Very good,” Zia said with a wink. “Very, very good.”

The stranger crooked his finger and beckoned Zia closer. He spoke into Zia’s ear:

“My dear fellow: I am a Muslim.”

“I know, sir. So am I.”

“Not just any Muslim. I’m a Pathan.”

It was as if Ziauddin had heard a magic spell. He gaped at the stranger.

“Forgive me, sir…I…didn’t…I…Allah has sent you to exactly the right porter, sir! And this is not the right hotel for you at all, sir. In fact, it is a very bad hotel. And this is not the right…”

Tossing the foreign bag from hand to hand, he took the stranger around the station to the other side-where the hotels were Muslim owned, and where cuts were not given to the porters. He stopped at one place and said, “Will this do?”

HOTEL DARUL-ISLAM

BOARDING AND LOGING

The stranger contemplated the sign, the green archway into the hotel, the image of the Great Mosque of Mecca above the doorway; then he put a hand into a pocket of his gray trousers and brought out a five-rupee note.

“It’s too much, sir, for one bag. Just give me two rupees.”

Zia bit his lip.

“No, even that is too much.”

The stranger smiled. “An honest man.” He tapped two fingers of his left hand on his right shoulder. “I’ve got a bad arm, my friend. I wouldn’t have been able to carry the bag here without a lot of pain.” He pressed the money into Zia’s hands. “You deserve even more.”

Ziauddin took the money; he looked at the stranger’s face. “Are you really a Pathan, sir?”

The boy’s body shivered at the stranger’s answer.

“Me too!” he shouted, and then ran like crazy, yelling, “Me too! Me too!”

That night Ziauddin dreamt of snow-covered mountains and a race of fair-skinned, courteous men who tipped like gods. In the morning, he returned to the guesthouse, and found the stranger on one of the benches outside, sipping from a yellow teacup.

“Will you have tea with me, little Pathan?”

Confused, Ziauddin shook his head, but the stranger was already snapping his fingers. The proprietor, a fat man with a clean-shaven lip and a full, fluffy white beard like a crescent moon, looked unhappily at the filthy porter before indicating, with a grunt, that he was allowed to sit down at the tables today.

The stranger asked, “So you’re also a Pathan, little friend?”

Ziauddin nodded. He informed the stranger of the name of the man who had told him he was a Pathan. “He was a learned man, sir: he had been to Saudi Arabia for a year.”

“Ah,” the stranger said, shaking his head. “Ah, I see. I see now.”

A few minutes passed in silence. Ziauddin said, “I hope you’re not staying here a long time, sir. It’s a bad town.”

The Pathan arched his eyebrows.

“For Muslims like us, it’s bad. The Hindus don’t give us jobs; they don’t give us respect. I speak from experience, sir.”