It was ten o’clock at night. He walked into the bus-repair stand. In the darkness, two men with masks were cutting metal with a blue flame: fumes, sparks, the smell of acrid smoke, and loud noise.
After a while, one man in a mask gestured upward with his hand, but not knowing what that meant, Keshava walked right past the buses. He saw a woman crouching on the floor, whom he had never seen before. She was pressing the feet of Brother, who sat bare chested in a cane chair.
“Brother, take me in, I have nowhere to stay. Vittal has thrown me out.”
“Poor boy!” Without getting up from the chair, Brother turned to the woman pressing his feet. “You see what is happening to the family structure in our country? Brothers casting brothers out on the street!”
He led Keshava to a nearby building, which, he explained, was a hostel he ran for the best workers at the bus stand. He opened a door; inside were rows of beds, and on each bed lay a boy. Brother tore the cover off one bed. A boy was lying asleep with his head on his hands.
Brother slapped the boy awake.
“Get up, and get out of this house.”
Without any protest, the boy began scrambling to collect his stuff. He moved into a corner and crouched; he was too confused to know where to go. “Get out! You haven’t shown up to work in three weeks!” Brother shouted.
Keshava felt sorry for the crouching figure, and he wanted to shout out,
A few seconds later, the crouching figure had vanished.
A long clothesline had been fixed between two of the crossbeams of the ceiling, and the white cotton sarongs of the boys hung from it, overlapping one another like ghosts stuck together. Posters of film actresses and the god Ayappa, sitting on his peacock, covered the walls. The boys clustered around the beds, staring at Keshava and taunting him.
Ignoring them, Keshava took out his things: a spare shirt, a comb, half a bottle of hair oil, some Scotch tape, and six pictures of film actresses that he had stolen from his relative’s shop. He stuck the pictures up over his bed with the Scotch tape.
At once the other boys gathered around.
“Do you know the names of these Bombay chicks? Tell us.”
“Here’s Hema Malini,” he said. “Here’s Rekha, she’s married to Amitabh Bachchan.” The statement provoked giggles from the boys around him.
“Hey, boy, she’s not his wife. She’s his
Keshava felt so angry when they said this that he got to his feet and shouted incoherently at them. He lay facedown in bed for an hour after that.
“Moody fellow. Like a lady, so delicate and moody.”
He pulled the pillow over his head; he began thinking of Vittal, wondering where he was right now, why he was not sleeping at his side. He began to cry into the pillow.
Another boy came over. “Are you a Hoyka?” he asked.
Keshava nodded.
“Me too,” the boy said. “The rest of these boys are Bunts. They look down on us. You and I, we should stick together.”
He whispered, “There’s something I have to warn you about. In the night, one of the boys walks around tapping guys’ cocks.”
Keshava started. “Which one does that?”
He stayed awake all night, sitting up whenever anyone came anywhere near his bed. Only in the morning, watching the other boys giggling hysterically as they brushed their teeth, did he realize that he had been had.
Inside a week, it seemed as though he had always lived at the hostel.
Some weeks later, Brother came for him.
“It’s your big day, Keshava,” he said. “One of the conductors was killed last night in a fight at a liquor shop.” He held Keshava’s arm up high, as if he had won a wrestling match.
“The first Hoyka bus conductor in our company! He’s a pride to his people!”
Keshava was promoted to chief conductor of one of the twenty-six buses that plied the number five route. He was issued a brand-new khaki uniform, his own black whistle on a red cord, and books of tickets marked in maroon, green, and gray, all bearing the number 5.
As they traveled their route, he stood leaning out of the bus, holding on to a metal bar, with his whistle in his mouth, blowing sharply once to tell the driver to stop, and twice to tell him not to. As soon as the bus stopped, he jumped down onto the road and shouted at the passengers, “Get in, get in.” Waiting until the bus moved again, he jumped onto the metal steps that led down from the entrance and hung from the bus, holding on to the rail. Shoving and yelling and pushing his way inside the packed bus, he collected money and gave out tickets. There was no need for tickets-he knew every customer by sight; but it was the tradition for tickets to be issued, and he did so, ripping them out and handing them to the customers, or sending them through the air to inaccessible customers.
In the evenings, the other cleaning boys, awed by his swift promotion, gathered around him at the bus stand.
“Fix this thing!” he shouted, pointing to the metal bar on which he hung from the bus. “I can hear it rattling all day long, it’s so loose.”
“It’s not so much fun,” he said when the work was done, and the boys crouched around, gazing at him with starstruck eyes. “Sure, there are girls on the bus, but you can’t pester them-you’re the conductor, after all. Then there’s the constant worry about whether those Christian bastards will beat us and steal the customers. No, sir, it’s not all fun at all.”
When the rains started, he had to lower the leather canvas above the windows so that the passengers would remain dry; but water always seeped in anyway, and the bus became dank. The front glass of the bus was besmirched with rain; blotches of silvery water clung to the screen like blobs of mercury; the world outside became hazy, and he would grip the bar and lean outside to make sure the driver could find his way.
In the evening, as Keshava lay on his bed in the hostel, having his hair dried with a white towel by one boy and getting his feet massaged by another (these were his new privileges), Brother came to the dormitory, bringing in a rusty old bike.
“You can’t go walking around town anymore, you’re a big shot now. I expect my conductors to travel in style.”
Keshava pulled the bike to his bed; that night, to the amusement of the other boys, he went to sleep with the bike next to him.
One evening, at the bus stand, he saw a cripple sitting and blowing at his tea, with his legs crossed, exposing the wooden stub of an artificial leg.
One of the boys chuckled. “Don’t you recognize your patron?”
“What do you mean?”
The boy said, “That’s the man whose bike you ride these days!”
He explained that the cripple had once himself been a bus conductor, like Keshava; but he had fallen from the bus, crushing his legs under a passing truck, and had to have an amputation.
“And thanks to that, you now have a bike of your own!” The boy guffawed, slapping Keshava heartily on the back.
The cripple drank his tea slowly, staring at it intensely, as if it were the only pleasure in his life.
When Keshava was not conducting the bus, Brother had a string of bicycle delivery jobs for him; once he had to strap a block of ice on the back of his cycle and ride all the way downtown to drop it off at the house of Mabroor Engineer, the richest man in town, who had run out of ice for his whiskey. But in the evenings he was allowed to ride the bike for his pleasure; which meant, usually, taking it at full speed down the main road next to Central Market. On either side, the shops glowed with the light of paraffin lamps, and all the lights and color got him so excited that he took both hands off the handlebars and whooped for joy, braking just in time to stop himself from running into an autorickshaw.
Everything seemed to be going so well for him; yet one morning his neighbors found him lying in bed, staring at the pictures of the film actresses, and refusing to move.
“He’s being morose again,” his neighbors said. “Hey, why don’t you jerk off? It’ll make you feel better.”
The next morning he went back to see the barber. The old man was not in. His wife was sitting in the barber’s chair, combing her hair. “Just wait for him, he’s always talking about you. He misses you very much, you know.”
Keshava nodded; he cracked his knuckles and walked around the chair three or four times.
That night at the hostel, the other boys seized him as he was brushing his hair, and dragged him out the door. “This fellow’s been morose for days now. It’s time for him to be taken to a woman.”
“No,” he said. “Not tonight. I have to visit the barber. I promised I’d come for-”
“We’ll take you to a barber, all right! She’ll shave you good!”
They put him in an autorickshaw and drove him down to the Bunder. A prostitute was “seeing” men in a house by the shirt factories, and though he shouted at the boys and said he didn’t want to do it, they told him that doing it would cure his moods, and make him normal like everyone else.
He did seem more normal in the days that followed. One evening, at the end of his shift, he saw a new cleaning boy, one of Brother’s recent hires, spit on the ground as he was cleaning the bus; calling him over, Keshava slapped him.
“Don’t spit anywhere near the bus, understood?”
That was the first time he had ever slapped anyone.
It made him feel good. From then on, he regularly hit the cleaning boys, like all the other conductors did.
On the number five, he got better and better at his job. No trick escaped him anymore. To the schoolboys who tried to get free rides back from the movie theater on their school passes, he’d say, “Nothing doing. The passes work only when you’re going to class, or going back from class. If it’s a joyride, you pay the full fare.”
One boy was a consistent problem-a tall, handsome fellow whose friends called him Shabbir. Keshava watched people staring at the boy’s Bombay shirt enviously. He wondered why this boy was taking the bus at all; people like him had their own cars and drivers.
One evening, after the bus stopped at the women’s college, the rich boy went down to the seats earmarked for women and leaned over to one of the girls.
“Excuse me, Miss Rita. I just want to talk to you.”
The girl turned her face toward the window, shifting her body away from him.
“Why won’t you just talk to me?” the boy with the Bombay shirt asked with a rakish grin. His friends at the back whistled and clapped.
Keshava bounded up to him. “Enough!” He seized the rich boy by the arm and pulled him away from the girl. “No one pesters women on my bus.”
The boy called Shabbir glared. Keshava glared back at him.
“Did you hear me?” He tore a ticket and flicked it at the rich boy’s face to underline the warning. “Did you hear me?”
The rich boy smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said, and put out his hand to the conductor as if for a handshake. Confused, Keshava took his hand; the boys in the back row howled with laughter. When the conductor withdrew his hand, he found a five-rupee note in it.
Keshava flung the note at the rich boy’s feet.
“Try it again, you son of a bald woman, and I’ll send you flying out the bus.”
