Between the Assassinations

Naturally, Chenayya had long planned on stealing the money that a customer gave him one day. He would take the money and leave the town. This much he was certain he would do-someday very soon.

That evening, the men were huddled around. A man in a blue safari suit, an important, educated man, was asking them questions; he had a small notepad in his hands. He said he had come from Madras.

He had asked the cart pullers for their ages. No one was sure. When he said, “Can you make a rough guess?” they simply nodded. When he said, “Are you eighteen, or twenty, or thirty-you must have some idea,” they simply nodded again.

“I’m twenty-nine,” Chenayya called out from his cart.

The man nodded. He wrote something down in his notepad.

“Tell me, who are you?” Chenayya asked. “Why are you asking us all these questions?”

He said he was a journalist, and the cart pullers were impressed; he worked for an English-language newspaper in Madras, and that impressed them even more.

They were amazed that a smartly dressed man was talking to them with courtesy, and they begged him to sit down on a cot, which one of them wiped clean with the side of his palm. The man from Madras pulled at the knees of his trousers and sat down.

Then he wanted to know what they were eating. He made a list of everything they ate every day in his notepad; then he went silent and scratched a lot on the pad with his pen, while they waited expectantly.

At the end, he put the notepad down, and, with a wide, almost triumphant grin, he declared:

“The work you are doing exceeds the amount of calories you consume. Every day, every trip you take-you are slowly killing yourselves.”

He held his notepad, with its squiggles and zigzags and numbers, as proof of his claim.

“Why don’t you do something else, like work in a factory-or anything else? Why don’t you learn to read and write?”

Chenayya jumped off his cycle.

“Don’t patronize us, you son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Those who are born poor in this country are fated to die poor. There is no hope for us, and no need of pity. Certainly not from you, who have never lifted a hand to help us; I spit on you. I spit on your newspaper. Nothing ever changes. Nothing will ever change. Look at me.” He held out his palms. “I am twenty-nine years old. I am already bent and twisted like this. If I live to forty, what is my fate? To be a twisted black rod of a man. You think I don’t know this? You think I need your notepad and your English to tell me this? You keep us like this, you people from the cities, you rich fucks. It is in your interest to treat us like cattle! You fuck! You English-speaking fuck!”

The man put away his notepad. He looked at the ground, and seemed to be groping for a response.

Chenayya felt a tapping on his shoulder. It was the Tamilian boy from Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop.

“Stop talking so much! Your number has come up!”

Some of the other cart pullers began chuckling, as if to say to Chenayya, Serves you right.

You see! He glared at the English-speaker from Madras as if to say, Even the privilege of speech is not ours. Even if we raise our voices, we are told to shut up.

Strangely, the man from Madras was not grinning; he had turned his face away, as if he were ashamed.

As he went up Lighthouse Hill that day, as he forced his cart over the hump, he felt none of his usual exultation. I am not really moving forward, he thought. Every turn of the wheel undid him and slowed him down. Each time he cycled, he was working the wheel of life backward, crushing muscle and fiber into the pulp from which they were made in his mother’s womb; he was unmaking himself.

All at once, right in the middle of traffic, he stopped and got off his cart, possessed by the simple and clear thought, I can’t go on like this.

Why don’t you do something, work in a factory, anything, to improve yourself?

After all, for years you have delivered things to the gates of factories-it is just a question of getting inside.

The next day, he went to the factory. He saw thousands of men reporting for work, and he thought, What a fool I have been, never even to try and get work here.

He sat down, and none of the guards asked any questions, thinking he was waiting to collect a delivery.

He waited till noon, and then a man came out. From the number of people following him, Chenayya thought he must be the big man. He went running past the guards and got down on his knees:

“Sir! I want to work.”

The man stared at him. The guards came running up to drag Chenayya back, but the big man said:

“I have two thousand workers, and not one of them wants to work, and here is this man, down on his knees, begging for work. That’s the attitude we need to move this country forward.”

He pointed at Chenayya. “You won’t get offered any long-term contract. Understand? Day by day.”

“Anything, anything you want.”

“What kind of work can you do?”

“Anything, anything you want.”

“All right, come back tomorrow. We don’t need a coolie right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

The big man took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“Hear what this man has to say,” he said, as a group of other men, who were also smoking, gathered around him.

And Chenayya repeated that he would do anything, under any conditions, for any sort of pay.

“Say it again!” the big man ordered, and another group of men came up and listened to Chenayya.

That evening, he came back to Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop and shouted at the other workers, “I’ve found a real job, you motherfuckers. I’m out of here.”

The Tamilian boy alone cautioned him. “Chenayya, why don’t you wait a day and make sure the other job is good? Then you can quit here.”

“Nothing doing, I quit!” he yelled, and walked away.

The next day at dawn, he was back at the factory gate. “I want to see the big man,” he said, shaking the bars of the gate for attention. “He told me to come today.”

The guard, who was reading the newspaper, looked up at him fiercely. “Get out!”

“Don’t you remember me? I came-”

“Get out!”

He waited near the gate; after an hour it opened, and a car with tinted windows pulled out. Running side by side with the car, he banged on the windows. “Sir! Sir! Sir!” A dozen hands seized him from behind; he was shoved to the ground and kicked.

When Chenayya wandered back to Mr. Pai’s shop that evening, the Tamilian boy was waiting for him. He said, “I never told the boss you quit.”

The other cart pullers did not tease Chenayya that night. One of them left him a bottle of liquor, still half full.

The rain fell without pause. He rode his cycle through the downpour, splashing down the road. He wore a long white plastic sheet over his body like a shroud; a black cloth tied it around his head, giving it the look of an Arab’s cape and caftan.

This was the most dangerous time for the coolies. Wherever the road was broken up into a pothole, he had to slow down to avoid tipping his cycle-cart over.

Waiting at the traffic intersection, he saw to his left a fat kid sitting on the seat of an autorickshaw. The rain made him playful; he stuck out his tongue at the fellow. The boy did likewise, and the game went on for several turns, until the autorickshaw driver chided the boy and glared at Chenayya.

The pain in his neck began biting again. I can’t go on like this, he thought.

From across the road, one of the other cart pullers, a young boy, drove his cart alongside Chenayya’s. “Have to deliver this fast and get back,” he said. “Boss said he’s depending on me to be back within an hour.” He grinned, and Chenayya wanted to shove his fist into the grin. God, how full of suckers the world is, he thought, counting to ten to calm himself. How happy this boy seemed to be, to destroy himself with overwork. You baboon! he wanted to shout. You and all the others! Baboons!

He put his head down, and suddenly it seemed a great strain to move the cart.

“You’ve got no air in one tire!” the baboon shouted. “You’ll have to stop!” He grinned and rode on.

Stop? Chenayya thought. No, that is what a baboon would do: not me. Putting his head down, he pedaled on, forcing his flat tire along:

Move!

And slowly and noisily, rattling its old wheels and its unoiled chains, the cart moved.

It’s raining now, Chenayya thought, lying in his cart that night, a plastic sheet over him to protect him from the rain. That means half the year is over. It must be June or July. I must be nearly thirty now.

He pulled the sheet down, and lifted his head to relieve the pain in his neck. He could not believe his eyes: even in this rain, some motherfucker was flying a kite! It was the kid with the black kite. As if taunting the heavens, the lightning, to come strike him. Chenayya watched, and forgot his pain.

In the morning, two men in khaki uniforms came into the alley: autorickshaw drivers. They had come to wash their hands in the tap at the end of the alley. The cart pullers instinctively moved to the side and let the two men in uniforms through. As they washed their hands, Chenayya heard them talk about an autorickshaw driver who had been locked up by the police for hitting a customer.

“Why not?” one autorickshaw driver said to the other. “He had every right to hit that man! I only wish he had gone further, and killed that bastard before the police got to him!”

After brushing his teeth, Chenayya went to the lottery seller. A boy, a total stranger, was sitting at the desk, kicking his legs merrily.

“What happened to the old fellow?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone into politics.”

The boy described what had happened to the old seller. He had joined the campaign of a BJP candidate for the Corporation elections. His candidate was likely to win in the elections. Then he would sit on the veranda of the candidate’s house; if you wanted to see the politician, you would have to pay the old seller fifty rupees first.

“That’s the politician’s life-it’s the fastest way to get rich,” the boy said. He flipped through his colored paper pieces. “What’ll you have, uncle? A yellow? Or a green?”

Chenayya turned away without buying any of the colored tickets.

Why, he thought that night, can’t that be me-the fellow who goes into politics to get rich? He did not want to forget what he had just heard, so