Between the Assassinations

hand corner.

He read aloud, “Winning lottery numbers: 17-8-9-9-643- 455.”

Chenayya had learned enough about English numerals to know his own ticket number; he squinted for several moments, and then let the ticket float to the ground.

“People buy for fifteen, sixteen years before they win, Chenayya,” the lottery seller said, by way of consolation. “But in the end, those who believe always win. That is the way the world works.”

Chenayya hated it when the seller tried to console him like this; that was when he felt he was being ripped off by the men who printed the lottery tickets.

“I can’t go on this way forever,” he said. “My neck hurts. I can’t go on like this.”

The lottery seller nodded. “Another yellow?”

Tying the ticket into his bundle, Chenayya staggered back, then collapsed onto his cart. For a while he lay like that, not feeling refreshed from the rest, but only numb.

Then a finger tapped on his head.

“Number’s up, Chenayya.”

It was the Tamilian boy from the store.

To be delivered to 54 Suryanarayan Rao Lane. He repeated it aloud: “Fifty-four Suryanarayan…”

“Good.”

This route took him uphill over the Lighthouse Hill again. Riding his cycle-cart halfway up the hill, he alighted and began dragging the cycle-cart. His sinews bulged from his neck like webbing; and as he inhaled, the air burned through his chest and lungs. You can’t go on, said his tired limbs, his burning chest. You can’t go on. But at the same time, this was when his sense of resistance to his fate waxed greatest within him: and as he pushed, the restlessness and anger that had been within him all day became articulate at last:

You will not break me, motherfuckers! You will never break me!

If the thing to be delivered was light, like a mattress, he was not allowed to take a cycle-cart; it had to be carried on his head. This morning he was taking a mattress to the railway station. Repeating the address to the Tamilian boy from the shop, he set off with a slow, light step, like a fat man jogging. In a short while, the weight of the mattress seemed unbearable; it compressed his neck and spine and sent a shaft of pain down his back. He was virtually in a trance.

The client turned out to be a North Indian family that was leaving Kittur; the owner, as he had guessed beforehand (from his demeanor, his manner-you can tell which of these rich people have a sense of decency and which don’t), refused to pay him a tip.

Chenayya stood his ground. “You motherfucker! Give me my money!”

It was a triumph for him; the man relented and gave him three rupees. On the way out of the station, he thought, I feel elated, but my customer has done no more than pay me what he owes me. This is what my life has been reduced to.

The odors and the noise of the train station made him feel sick. He squatted down by the tracks, pulled his sarong up, and held his breath. As he was squatting there, the train roared by. He turned around; he wanted to shit into the faces of the people on the train. Yes, that would be good; as the train thundered over the tracks, he would force out the turds into the faces of the passersby.

Next to him, he saw a pig, which was doing that very thing.

At once, he thought, God, what am I becoming? He walked to a corner, crawled behind a bush, and defecated there. He told himself, I will never again defecate like this, in a place where I can be seen. There is a difference between man and animal; there is a difference.

He closed his eyes.

The scent of basil from near him seemed like evidence that there were good things in the world. But when he opened his eyes, the earth around him was one of thorns and shit and stray animals.

He looked up and took a deep breath. The sky is clean, he thought. There is purity up there. He tore off a few leaves, wiped himself clean with them, then rubbed his left hand against the earth in a bid to neutralize the smell.

At two o’clock, he got his next number: the delivery of a giant stack of boxes to an address in Valencia. The Tamilian boy made sure he understood the address exactly: beyond the hospital, and down by the seminary where the Jesuit priests stayed.

“There’s a lot of work today, Chenayya,” he said. “Make sure you go the quick way-over the Lighthouse Hill.”

Chenayya grunted, shifted his weight onto the pedals, and was on his way. The rusty iron chain that double-locked the cart to the front wheels of the bicycle began to make noise as he cycled.

Down the main road, he was stuck in a traffic jam. He stopped, and became aware of his body once again. His neck hurt; the sun seared his back. Once he was conscious of pain, he began to think.

Why were some mornings difficult, some mornings simple? The other cart pullers never had “good” or “bad” days; they just did their work like machines. Only he had his moods. He looked down, to relieve his painful neck, and stared at the rusty chain by his feet, wound around the metal rod that joined the cycle to the cart. Time to oil the chain, he told himself. Must not forget.

Uphill again. Leaning forward out of his seat, Chenayya was straining hard; the breath entered his lungs like a hot poker. Halfway up the hill, he saw an elephant walking down toward him with a small bundle of leaves on its back, and a mahout poking its ear with an iron rod.

He stopped; this was unbelievable. He began to shout at the elephant: “Hey, you, what are you doing with those leaves-take this load from me! It’s more your size, motherfucker!”

Cars honked behind him. The mahout turned and gesticulated at him with his iron rod. A passerby yelled at him not to obstruct the traffic.

“Don’t you see that something is wrong with this world?” he said, turning around to the driver of the car behind him, who was jabbing at his horn with the fleshy part of his palm. “When an elephant gets to lounge downhill doing virtually no work at all, and a human being has to pull such a heavy cart?”

The cars honked, and the cacophony grew.

“Don’t you see something is wrong here?” he shouted. They honked back. The world was furious at his fury. It wanted him to move out of its way; but he was enjoying being exactly where he was, blocking all these rich and important people.

That evening there were great streaks of pink in the sky. After the shop closed, the coolies moved to the alley behind the store; they took turns buying small bottles of country liquor, which they shared among themselves, getting giddy and belting out off-key Kannada film songs.

Chenayya never joined them. “You’re wasting your money, you idiots!” he sometimes shouted at them; they simply jeered back.

He would not drink; he had promised himself he would not squander the hard-earned fruits of his labor on alcohol. Yet the smell of liquor in the air made his mouth water; the good humor and bonhomie of the other cart pullers made him lonely. He closed his eyes. A tinkling noise made him open them.

Nearby, on the steps of an unused building, as was usual, a fat prostitute had emerged to ply her trade. She clapped her hands and advertised her presence by striking two coins together. A customer came up; they began haggling over a price. The deal was not concluded, and the man left, cursing.

Chenayya, lying in his cart with his feet sticking out, watched the action with a dull grin.

“Hey, Kamala!” he shouted at the prostitute. “Why not give me a chance this evening?”

She turned her face from him and kept clinking the coins together. He stared at her plump breasts, at the dark tip of her cleavage that showed through the blouse, at her garishly painted lips.

He turned his eyes to the sky: he had to stop thinking of sex. Streaks of pink amid the clouds. Isn’t there a God, or someone there, Chenayya wondered, watching down on this earth? One evening, at the train station to deliver a parcel, he had heard a wild Muslim dervish talking in a corner of the station about the Mahdi, the last of the imams, who would come for this earth and give the evil their due. “Allah is the Maker of all men,” the dervish had mumbled. “The poor and the rich alike. And he observes our hurt, and when we suffer, He suffers with us. And He will send, at the End of the Days, the Mahdi, on a white horse with a sword of fire, to put the rich in their place and correct all that is wrong with the world.”

A few days later, when Chenayya went to a mosque, he found that Muslims stank, so he did not stay there long. Yet he had never forgotten about the Mahdi; each time he saw a streak of pink in the sky, he thought he could detect some God of Fairness watching over the earth and glowering with anger.

Chenayya closed his eyes, and heard again the tinkling of coins. He turned about restlessly, and then covered his face in a rag so the sun wouldn’t sting him awake and went to sleep. Half an hour later, he woke up with a sharp pain in his ribs. A policeman jabbed his lathi into the bodies of the cart pullers. A truck was entering this part of the market. All you cycle-cart pullers! Get up and move your carts!

The kite-flying contest took place between two nearby houses. The owners of the kites were hidden; all Chenayya saw, as he brushed his teeth with a stick of neem, were the black and red kites fighting each other in the sky. As always the kid with the black kite was winning; he was flying his kite the highest. Chenayya wondered about the poor kid with the red kite; why couldn’t he ever win?

He spat, and then walked a few feet so he could urinate onto the side of a wall.

Behind him he heard jeers. The other pullers were urinating right where they had slept.

He said nothing to them. Chenayya never talked to his fellow cart pullers. He could barely stand the sight of them-the way they bent and groveled to Mr. Ganesh Pai; yes, he might do the same, but he was furious, he was angry inside. These other fellows seemed incapable of even thinking badly of their employer; and he could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion.

When the Tamilian boy brought out the tea, he reluctantly rejoined the pullers; he heard them talking once again, as they did just about every morning, about the autorickshaws they were going to buy once they got out of here, or the small tea shop they were going to open.

Think about it, he wanted to tell them, just think about it.

Mr. Ganesh Pai allowed them just two rupees for each trip; meaning that, at the rate of three trips a day, they were making six rupees; once you deducted for lotteries and liquor, you were lucky to save two rupees; Sundays were off, as were Hindu holidays, so at the month’s end, they saved forty or forty-five rupees only. A trip to the village, an evening with a whore, an extralong drinking binge, and your whole month’s savings were dust. Assuming you saved everything you could, you were lucky to earn four hundred a year. An autorickshaw would cost twelve, fourteen thousand. A small tea shop four times as much. That meant thirty, thirty-five years of such work before they could do anything else. But did they think their bodies would last that long? Did they find a single cart puller above the age of forty around them?

Don’t you ever think about such things, you baboons?

Yet whenever he had tried to get them to understand this, they had refused to demand for more collectively. They thought they were lucky; thousands would take their jobs at a moment’s notice. He knew they were right too.

Despite their logic, despite their valid fears, their sheer spinelessness grated on him. That was why, he thought, Mr. Ganesh Pai could be confident that a customer could hand over to a cart puller thousands of rupees in cash, and know that it would all come to him, every last rupee, without the cart puller taking a note of it.