Between the Assassinations

“Is this Central Market?” Vittal shouted at the driver, who pointed to a sign:

KITTUR MUNICIPALITY CENTRAL MARKET:

ALL MANNER OF VEGETABLES AND FRUIT

AT FAIR PRICES AND EXCELLENT FRESHNESS

“Thank you, brother,” Vittal said, overwhelmed with gratitude, and Keshava thanked him too.

When they got out, they found themselves once again in a vortex of light and noise; they kept very still, waiting for their eyes to make sense of the chaos.

“Brother,” Keshava said, excited at having found a landmark that he recognized. He pointed: “Brother, isn’t this where we started out?”

And when they looked around, they realized that they were only a few feet away from where the bus driver had set them down. Somehow they had missed the sign, which had been right behind them all the time.

“We were cheated!” Keshava said in an excited voice. “That autorickshaw driver cheated us, Brother! He-”

“Shut up!” Vittal whacked his younger brother on the back of his head. “It’s all your fault! You’re the one who wanted to take an autorickshaw!”

The two of them had been brothers for only a few days.

Keshava was dark and chubby; Vittal was tall and lean and fair, and five years older. Their mother had died years ago, and their father had abandoned them; an uncle had raised them, and they had grown up among their cousins (whom they also called “brothers”). Then their uncle had died, and their aunt called Keshava and told him to go with Vittal, who was being dispatched to the big city to work for a relative who ran a grocery shop. And that was, really, how they had come to realize that there was a bond between them deeper than that between cousins.

They knew that their relative was somewhere in the Central Market of Kittur: that was all. Taking timid steps, they went into a dark market area where vegetables were being sold, and then, through a back door, they went into a well-lit market where fruits were being sold. Here they asked for directions. Then they walked up steps that were covered in rotting garbage and moist straw to the second floor. Here they asked again:

“Where is Janardhana the store owner from Salt Market Village? He’s our kinsman.”

“Which Janardhana-Shetty, Rai, or Padiwal?”

“I don’t know, uncle.”

“Is your kinsman a Bunt?”

“No.”

“Not a Bunt? A Jain, then?”

“No.”

“Then of what caste?”

“He’s a Hoyka.”

A laugh.

“There are no Hoykas in this market. Only Muslims and Bunts.”

But the two boys looked so lost that the man took pity, and asked someone, and found out that there were indeed some Hoykas who had set up shop near the market.

They walked down the steps, and went out of the market. Janardhana’s shop, they were told, displayed a large poster of a muscular man in a white singlet. They couldn’t miss it. They walked from shop to shop and then Keshava cried, “There!”

Beneath the image of the man with the big muscles sat a lean shopkeeper, unshaven, who was reading a notebook with his glasses down on the bridge of his nose.

“We are looking for Janardhana, from Gurupura Village,” Vittal said.

“Why do you want to know where he is?”

The man was looking at them suspiciously.

Vittal burst out, “Uncle, we’re from your village. We’re your kin.”

The shopkeeper stared. Moistening the tip of a finger, he turned another page in his book.

“Why do you think you’re my kin?”

“We were told this, Uncle. By our auntie. One-Eyed Kamala.”

The shopkeeper put the book down.

“One-Eyed Kamala’s…ah, I see. And what happened to your parents?”

“Our mother passed away many years ago, after Keshava’s-this fellow’s-birth. And four years ago, our father lost interest in us and just wandered away.”

“Wandered away?”

“Yes, Uncle,” Vittal said. “Some say he’s gone to Varanasi, to do yoga by the banks of the Ganges. Others say he’s in the holy city of Rishikesh. We haven’t seen him in many years; we were raised by our uncle Thimma.”

“And he…?”

“Died last year. We stayed on, and then it was too much for our aunt to support us. The drought was very bad this year.”

The shopkeeper was amazed that they had come all this way, without any prior word, on so thin a connection, just expecting that he would take care of them. He reached down into a counter, bringing out a bottle of arrack, which he uncapped and put to his lips. Then he capped the bottle and hid it again.

“Every day people come from the villages looking for work. Everyone thinks that we in the towns can support them for nothing. As if we have no stomachs of our own to feed.”

The shopkeeper took another swig of his bottle; his mood improved. He had rather liked their naive recounting of that story of daddy having gone to “the holy city of Rishikesh…to do yoga.” Old rascal is probably shacked up with a mistress somewhere, and taking care of a brood of bastards, he thought, smiling in approval at how you can get away with anything in the villages. Stretching his hands high above his head as he yawned, he brought them down onto his stomach with a loud whack.

“Oh, so you’re orphans now! You poor fellows. One must always stick to one’s family-what else is there in life?” He rubbed his stomach. Look at the way they are staring at me, as if I were a king, he thought, feeling suddenly important. It was not a feeling he had had often since coming to Kittur.

He scratched his legs. “So, how are things in the village these days?”

“Except for the drought, everything’s the same, Uncle.”

“You got here by bus?” the shopkeeper asked. And then, “From the bus stand, you walked over here, I take it?” He got up from his seat. “Autorickshaw? How much did you pay? Those fellows are total crooks. Seven rupees!” The shopkeeper turned red. “You imbeciles! Cretins!”

Apparently holding the fact that they had been cheated against them, the shopkeeper ignored them for half an hour.

Vittal stood in a corner, his eyes to the ground, crushed by humiliation. Keshava looked around. Red-and-white stacks of Colgate-Palmolive toothpaste and jars of Horlicks were piled behind the shopkeeper’s head; shiny packets of malt powder hung from the ceiling like wedding bunting; blue bottles of kerosene and red bottles of cooking oil were stacked in pyramids up at the front of the shop.

Keshava was dark-skinned, with enormous eyes that stared lingeringly. Some of those who knew him insisted he had the energy of a hummingbird, and was always flapping around, making a nuisance of himself; others found him lazy and melancholic, liable to sit and stare at the ceiling for hours at a time. He smiled and turned his head away when he was scolded for his behavior, as if he had no conception of himself and no opinion on the matter.

Again the store owner took out the bottle of arrack and sipped a little more. Again this affected his mood for the better.

“We don’t drink here like they do in the villages,” he said, returning Keshava’s big stare.

“Only a little sip at a time. The customer never finds out that I am drunk.” He winked.

“That’s how it is in the city: you can do anything you want, as long as no one finds out.”

After drawing the shutters on his shop, he took Vittal and Keshava around the market. Everywhere men were sleeping on the ground, covered in thin bedsheets; after asking some questions, Janardhana led the boys to an alley behind the market. Men and women and children were sleeping in a long line all the way down the alley. Keshava and Vittal stood back as the store owner began negotiations with one of the sleepers.

“If they sleep here, they will have to pay the boss,” the sleeper complained.

“What do I do with them? They have to sleep somewhere!”

“Well, you’re taking a risk, but if you have to leave them here, try the far end.”

The alley ended in a wall that leaked continuously; the drainage pipes had been badly fitted. A large garbage bin at this end of the alley emitted a horrible stench.

“Isn’t uncle going to take us to his house, Brother?” Keshava whispered, when the store owner, having given them some advice about how to sleep out in the open, vanished.

Vittal pinched him.

“I’m hungry,” Keshava said after a few minutes. “Can we find uncle and ask him for food?”

The two brothers were lying side by side, wrapped in their bedding, next to the garbage bin.

In response, his brother entirely covered himself in his blanket, and lay inside, still, like a cocoon.

Keshava could not believe he was expected to sleep here-and on an empty stomach. However bad things had been at home, at least there had always been something to eat. Now all the frustrations of the evening, the fatigue, and the confusion combined, and he kicked the shrouded figure hard. His brother, as if he had been waiting for just such a provocation, tore the blanket off, caught Keshava’s head in his hands, and slammed it twice against the ground.

“If you make one more sound, I swear, I will leave you all alone in this city.” Then he covered himself with his bedding once more, and turned his back to his brother.

And though his head had begun to hurt, Keshava was frightened by what his brother had said. He shut up.

Lying there, his head stinging, Keshava wondered, dully, where it was decided that this fellow and this fellow would be brothers; and about how people came into the earth, and how they left it. It was a dull curiosity. Then he began thinking about food. He was in a tunnel, and that tunnel was his hunger, and at the end of the tunnel, if he kept going, he promised himself, there would be a huge heap of rice, covered with hot lentils, with big chunks of chicken.

He opened his eyes; there were stars in the sky. He looked up at them to block the stench of garbage.

When they arrived at the shop the following morning, the shopkeeper was using a long stick to hang plastic bags of malt powder on hooks in the ceiling.

“You,” the shopkeeper said, pointing to Vittal. He showed the boy how each plastic bag was to be fitted to the end of the pole, and then lifted up and snared on a hook in the ceiling.