Between the Assassinations

After the drink, he realized he couldn’t go home; his wife would smell the liquor on him the moment he got past the threshold. There would be another scene. She never could understand why he drank so much.

He drove up to the Bunder. He parked the car next to a rubbish dump and walked across to a tea shop. Beyond a small beach the sea was visible; the smell of roasted fish wafted through the air.

A blackboard outside the tea shop proclaimed, in letters of white chalk, WE CHANGE PAKISTANI MONEY AND CURRENCY. The walls of the shop were adorned with a photograph of the Great Mosque of Mecca along with a poster of a boy and a girl bowing to the Taj Mahal. Four benches had been arranged in an outdoor veranda. A dappled white and brown goat was tied to a pole at one end of the veranda; it was chewing on dried grass.

Men were sitting on one of the benches. Abbasi touched one of the men on his shoulder; he turned around.

“Abbasi.”

“Mehmood, my brother. Make some room for me.”

Mehmood, a fat man with a fringe beard and no mustache, did so, and Abbasi squeezed in next to him. Abbasi had heard that Mehmood stole cars; he had heard that Mehmood’s four sons drove them to a village on the Tamil Nadu border, a village whose only business was the purchase and sale of stolen cars.

Alongside Mehmood, Abbasi recognized Kalam, who was rumored to import hashish from Bombay and ship it to Sri Lanka; Saif, who had knifed a man in Trivandrum; and a small white-haired man who was only called the Professor-and who was believed to be the shadiest of the lot.

These men were smugglers, car thieves, thugs, and worse; but while they sipped tea together, nothing would happen to Abbasi. It was the culture of the Bunder. A man might be stabbed in daylight, but never at night, and never while sipping tea. In any case, the sense of solidarity among the Muslims at the Bunder had deepened ever since the riots.

The Professor was finishing up a story of Kittur in the twelfth century, about an Arab sailor named bin Saad who sighted the town just when he had given up hope of finding land. He had raised his hands to Allah and promised that if he arrived safely on land, he would never again drink liquor or gamble.

“Did he keep his word?”

The Professor winked. “Take a guess.”

The Professor was always welcome at late-night chitchats at the tea shop because he knew many fascinating things about the port: how its history went back to the Middle Ages, for instance, or how Tippu Sultan had once installed a battery of French-made cannons here to scare away the British. He pointed a finger at Abbasi: “You’re not your usual self. What’s on your mind?”

“Corruption,” Abbasi said. “Corruption. It’s like a demon sitting on my brain and eating it with a fork and knife.”

The others drew closer to listen. Abbasi was a rich man; he must have an intimacy with corruption that exceeded theirs. He told them about the morning.

Kalam, the drug dealer, smiled and said, “That’s nothing, Abbasi.” He gestured toward the sea. “I have a ship, half full of cement and half full of something else, that has been waiting two hundred meters out at sea for a month. Why? Because this inspector at the port is squeezing me. I pay him and he wants to squeeze me even more, too much more. So the ship is just drifting out there, half full of cement and half full of something else.”

“I thought things would get better with this young fellow Rajiv taking over the country,” Abbasi said. “But he’s let us all down. As bad as any other politician.”

“We need one man to stand up to them,” the Professor said. “Just one honest, brave man. That fellow would do more for this country than Gandhi or Nehru did.”

The remark was greeted by a chorus of agreement.

“Yes,” Abbasi agreed, stroking his beard. “And the next morning he would be floating in the Kaliamma River. Like this.”

He mimicked a corpse.

There was general agreement over this too. But even as the words left his mouth, Abbasi was already thinking, Is it really true? Is there nothing we can do to fight back?

Tucked into the Professor’s trousers he saw the glint of a knife. The effect of the whiskey was wearing off, but it had carried him to a strange place, and his mind was filling up with strange thoughts.

Another round of tea was ordered by the car thief, but Abbasi, yawning, crossed his hands in front of him and shook his head.

The next day, he turned up to work at ten-forty, his head throbbing with pain.

Ummar opened the door for him. Abbasi nodded, and took the mail from him. With his head down to the floor, he moved to the stairs that led up to his office; then he stopped. At the threshold of the door that led to the factory floor, one of the stitching women was standing staring at him.

“I’m not paying you to waste time,” he snapped.

She turned and fled. He hurried up the stairs.

He put on his glasses, read the mail, read the newspaper, yawned, drank tea, and opened a ledger bearing the logo of the Karnataka Bank; he went down a list of customers who had paid and not paid. He kept thinking of the previous evening’s game of snooker.

The door creaked open; Ummar’s face popped in.

“What?”

“They’re here.”

“Who?”

“The government.”

Two men in polyester shirts and ironed blue bell-bottoms pushed Ummar aside and walked in. One of them, a burly fellow with a big potbelly and a mustache like that of a wrestler in a village fair, said, “Income Tax Department.”

Abbasi got up. “Ummar! Don’t just stand there! Get one of the women to run and bring tea from the tea shop by the sea. And some of those round Bombay biscuits as well.”

The big tax man sat down at the table without being invited. His companion, a lean fellow with arms intertwined, hesitated in a fidgety kind of way, until the other gestured for him to sit down too.

Abbasi smiled. The tax man with the mustache talked.

“We have just walked around your factory floor. We have just seen the women who work for you, and the quality of the shirts they stitch.”

Abbasi smiled and waited for it.

It came quickly this time.

“We think you are making a lot more money than you have declared to us.”

Abbasi’s heart beat hard; he told himself to calm down. There was always a way out.

“A lot, lot, lot more.”

“Sahib, sahib,” Abbasi said, patting the air with conciliatory gestures. “We have a custom in this shop. Everyone who comes in will receive a gift before they leave.”

Ummar, who knew already what he had to do, was waiting outside the office with two shirts. With a fawning smile, he presented them to the two tax officers. They accepted the bribes without a word, the lean fellow looking to the big one for approval before snatching his gift.

Abbasi asked, “What else can I do for you two sahibs?”

The one with the mustache smiled. His partner also smiled. The one with the mustache held up three fingers.

“Each.”

Three hundred per head was too low; real pros from the Income Tax Department wouldn’t have settled for anything under five hundred. Abbasi guessed that the two men were doing this for the first time. In the end, they would settle for a hundred each, plus the shirts.

“Let me offer you a little boost first. Do the sahibs take Red Label?”

The fidgety fellow almost jumped out of his seat in excitement, but the big one glared at him.

“Red Label would be acceptable.”

They’ve probably never been offered anything better than hooch, Abbasi realized.

He walked into the pantry, took out the bottle. He poured into three glasses with the Air India maharaja logo. He opened the fridge. He dropped two ice cubes into each glass, and added a thin stream of ice water from a bottle. He spat in two of the glasses, and arranged them farthest away on the tray.

The thought fell into his mind like a meteor from a purer heaven. No. Slowly it spread itself across his mind. No, he could not give this whiskey to these men. It might be counterfeit stuff, sold in cartons bought under false premises, but it was still a thousand times too pure to be touched by their lips.

He drank one whiskey, and then the second, and then the third.

Ten minutes later, he came back into the room with heavy steps. He bolted the door behind him and let his body fall heavily against it.

The big tax man turned sharply. “Why are you closing the door?”

“Sahibs. This is the port city of the Bunder, which has ancient traditions and customs dating back centuries and centuries. Any man is free to come here of his own will, but he can only leave with the permission of the locals.”

Whistling, Abbasi walked to his desk and picked up the phone; he shoved it, like a weapon, right in the face of the bigger tax man.

“Shall I call the Income Tax Department right now? Shall I find out if you have been authorized to come? Shall I?”

They looked uncomfortable. The lean man was sweating. Abbasi thought, My guess is right. They are doing this for the first time.

“Look at your hands. You have accepted shirts from me, which are bribes. You are holding the evidence in your hands.”

“Look here-”

“No! You look here!” Abbasi shouted. “You are not going to leave these premises alive until you sign a confession of what you were trying to do. Let us see how you get out. This is the port city. I have friends in all four directions. You will both be dead and floating in the Kaliamma River if I snap my fingers now. Do you doubt me?”

The big tax man looked at the ground, while the other fellow produced an extraordinary amount of sweat.

Abbasi unbolted the door and held it open. “Get out.” Then, with a wide smile, he bowed down to them:

“Sahibs.”

The two men scurried out without a word. He heard the thump of their feet on the staircase; and then a cry of surprise from Ummar, who was walking up the stairs with a tray of tea and Britannia biscuits.

He let his head rest on the cool wood of the table and wondered what he had done. Any moment soon, he was expecting that the electricity would be cut off; the income tax officials would return, with more men and an arrest warrant.

He walked around and around the room, thinking, What is happening to me?

Ummar stared at him silently.

After an hour, to Abbasi’s surprise, there had been no call from the Income Tax Department. The fans were still working. The light was still on.