Between the Assassinations

He wandered at night, passing by the dim buildings, by the sleeping multitudes. He passed by large, still, darkened buildings, each containing hundreds of bodies lying in a stupor. I am the only man who is awake now, he told himself. Once, up on a hill to his left, he saw a large housing block burning with light. Seven windows were lit up, and the building blazed; it seemed to him to be a living creature, a kind of monster of light, shining from its entrails.

Gururaj understood: The Gurkha had not abandoned him at all. He had not done what everyone else in his life had done. He had left something behind: a gift. Gururaj would now hear the grapevine on his own. He lifted his arms toward the building burning with lights; he felt full of occult power.

One day as he came into work, late again, he heard a whisper behind him: “It happened to the father too, in his last days…”

He thought, I must be careful that others do not notice this change that is happening inside me.

When he reached his office, he saw that the peon was removing his nameplate from the door. I am losing everything I worked so hard for, for so many years, he thought. But he felt no regret or emotion; it was as if these things were happening to someone else. He saw the new nameplate on the door:

KRISHNA MENON

DEPUTY EDITOR

DAWN HERALD

KITTUR’S ONLY AND FINEST NEWSPAPER

“Gururaj! I didn’t want to do it, I-”

“No explanation is necessary. In your position, I’d have done the same.”

“Do you want me to speak to someone, Gururaj? We can arrange it for you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you have no father now…But we can arrange a wedding for you, with a girl of a good family.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We think you are ill. You ought to know that many of us in this office have been saying that for some time. I insist that you take a week off. Or two weeks. Go somewhere on holiday. Go to the Western Ghats and watch the clouds for a while.”

“Fine. I’ll take three weeks off.”

For three weeks he slept through the day and walked through the night. The late-night policeman no longer said, “Hello, editor,” as he had before, and Gururaj could see the man, as he cycled past, turn and stare at him. The night watchmen also looked at him oddly; and he grinned. Even here, even in this Hades of the middle of the night, I have become an outsider, a man who frightens others. The thought excited him.

He bought a child’s square blackboard one day, and a piece of chalk. That night he wrote at the top of the blackboard:

THE TRUTH ALONE SHALL TRIUMPH.

A NOCTURNAL NEWSPAPER

Sole correspondent, editor, advertiser, and subscriber:

Gururaj Manjeshwar Kamath, Esq.

Copying out the headline from the morning’s newspaper:

BJP City Councillor Blasts Congressman

He rubbed and scratched and rewrote it:

2 October 1989

BJP City Councillor, who needs money in a hurry to build a new mansion on Rose Lane, blasts congressman. Tomorrow he will receive a brown bag full of cash from the Congress Party, and then he will stop blasting the congressman.

Then he lay in bed and closed his eyes, eager for the darkness to arrive and make his town a decent place again.

One night he thought, There is only one night of my vacation left. The dawn was breaking already, and he hurried back to the YMCA. He stopped. He was sure that he was seeing an elephant outside the building. Was he dreaming? What on earth would an elephant be doing, at this hour, in the middle of his town? It was beyond the bounds of reason. Yet it looked real and tangible to his eyes; only one thing made him think it was not a real elephant-it was absolutely still. He said to himself, Elephants move and make some noise all the time, therefore you are not really seeing an elephant. He closed his eyes and walked up to the entrance of the YMCA; and when he opened them again he was staring at a tree. He touched the bark, and thought:

This is the first hallucination I have had in my life.

When he returned to the office the next day, everyone said Gururaj was back to his old self. He had missed his office life; he had wanted to come back.

“Thank you for your offer to arrange a marriage,” he told the editor-in-chief, as they had tea together in his room. “But I’m married to my work anyway.”

Sitting in the newsroom with young men just out of college, he edited stories with all his old cheer. After all the young men were gone, he stayed back, digging through the archives. He had come back to work with a purpose. He was going to write a history of Kittur. An infernal history of Kittur-in it every event in the past twenty years would be reinterpreted. He took out old newspapers, and carefully read each front page. Then, a red pen in hand, he scratched out and rewrote words, which fulfilled two purposes-one, it defaced the newspapers of the past, and two, it allowed him to figure out the true relationship between the words and the characters in the news events. At first, designating Hindi-the Gurkha’s language-as the language of the truth, he rewrote the Kannada-language headlines of the newspaper in Hindi; then he switched to English, and finally he adopted a code in which he substituted each letter of the Roman alphabet for the one immediately after it-he had read somewhere that Julius Caesar had invented this code for his army-and, to complicate matters further, he invented symbols for certain words; for instance, a triangle with a dot inside represented the word “bank.” Other symbols were ironically inspired; for instance, a Nazi swastika represented the Congress Party, and the nuclear disarmament symbol the BJP, and so on. One day, looking back over the past week’s notes, he found that he had forgotten half the symbols, and he no longer understood what he had written. Good, he thought, that is the way it should be. Even the writer of the truth should not know the truth entire. Every true word, upon being written, is like the full moon, and daily it wanes, and then passes entirely into obscurity. That is the way of all things.

When he was done reinterpreting each issue of the newspaper, he deleted the words “The Dawn Herald” from the masthead and wrote in their place, “THE TRUTH ALONE SHALL TRIUMPH.”

“What the hell are you doing to our newspapers?”

It was the editor in chief. He and Menon had sneaked up on Gururaj in the office one evening.

The editor in chief turned page after page of defaced newspapers in the archives without a word, while Menon tried to peek over his shoulder. They saw pages covered in squiggles, red marks, slashes, triangles, pictures of girls with pigtails and bloody teeth, images of copulating dogs. Then the old man slammed the archives shut.

“I told you to get married.”

Gururaj smiled. “Listen, old friend, those are symbolic marks. I can interpret-”

The editor in chief shook his head. “Get out of this office. At once. I’m sorry, Gururaj.”

Gururaj smiled, as if to say that no explanation was necessary. The editor in chief’s eyes were teary, and the tendons of his neck moved up and down as he swallowed again and again. The tears came to Guru’s eyes as well. He thought, How hard it has been for this old man to do this. How hard he must have tried to protect me. He imagined closed-door meetings where colleagues had been baying for his blood, and this decent old man alone had defended him to the end. I am sorry, my friend, for letting you down, he wanted to say.

That night, Gururaj walked, telling himself he was happier than he had ever been in his life. He was a free man now. When he got back, just before dawn, to the YMCA, he saw the elephant again. This time it did not melt into an Ashoka tree, even when he came close. He walked right up to the beast, saw its constantly flapping ears, which had the color and shape and movement of a pterodactyl’s wing; he walked around it, and saw that from the back, each of its ears had a fringe of pink and was striped with veins. How can this wealth of detail be unreal? he thought. This creature was real, and if the rest of the world could not see it, then the rest of the world was the poorer for that.

Just make one sound! He pleaded with the elephant. So I know for sure that I am not deluded, that you are for real. The elephant understood; it raised its trunk and roared so loudly that he thought he had been deafened.

“You are free now,” the elephant said, in words so loud they seemed like newspaper headlines to him. “Go and write the true history of Kittur.”

Some months later, there was news of Gururaj. Four young reporters went to investigate.

They muffled their giggles as they pushed open the door to the municipal reading room in the lighthouse. The librarian had been waiting for them; he ushered them in with a finger to his lips.

The journalists found Gururaj sitting at a bench, reading a newspaper that was partially covering his face. The old editor’s shirt was in tatters, but he seemed to have gained weight, as if idleness had suited him.

“He won’t say a word anymore,” the librarian said. “He just sits there till sunset, holding the paper to his face. The only time he said anything was when I told him I admired his articles on the riots, and then he shouted at me.”

One of the young journalists put his finger on the top edge of the newspaper and lowered it slowly; Gururaj offered no resistance. The journalist yelped, and stepped back.

There was a moist dark hole in the innermost sheet of the paper. Pieces of newsprint stuck to the corners of Gururaj’s mouth, and his jaw was moving.