Between the Assassinations

with an image of an angel on the front-and shook his head in disbelief.

“That fucking untouchable’s son, thinking he’s going to photocopy The Satanic Verses. What balls.”

He sat at the inspector’s desk and shouted at him, “I told you this would happen if you didn’t punish him! You’re responsible for all this.”

Ramesh glared at Xerox, who was lying penitently on a bed, as he had been ordered to do.

“I don’t think anyone saw him selling it. Things will be fine.”

To calm the lawyer down, Ramesh asked a constable to go fetch a bottle of Old Monk rum. The two of them talked for a while.

Ramesh read passages from out of the book and said, “I don’t get what the fuss is all about, really.”

“Muslims,” D’Souza said, shaking his head. “Violent people. Violent.”

The bottle of Old Monk arrived. They drank it in half an hour, and the constable went to fetch another. In his cell, Xerox lay perfectly still, looking at the ceiling. The policeman and the lawyer went on drinking. D’Souza told Ramesh his frustrations, and the inspector told the lawyer his frustrations. One had wanted to be a pilot, soaring in the clouds and chasing stewardesses, and the other-he had never wanted anything but to dabble in the stock market. That was all.

At midnight, Ramesh asked the lawyer, “Do you want to know a secret?” Stealthily, he walked the lawyer to the cell and showed him the secret. One of the bars of the cell could be removed. The policeman removed it, and swung it, and then put it back in place. “That’s how the evidence is hidden,” he said. “Not that that kind of thing happens often at this station, mind you-but that’s how it is done, when it is done.”

The lawyer giggled. He loosened the bar, slung it over his shoulder, and said, “Don’t I look like Hanuman now?”

“Just like on TV,” the policeman said.

The lawyer asked that the cell door be opened, and it was. The two of them saw the sleeping prisoner lying on his cot, an arm over his face to keep out the jabbing light of the naked bulb above him. A sliver of naked skin was exposed beneath his cheap polyester shirt; a creeper of thick black hair, which looked to his two onlookers like an outgrowth from his groin, was just visible.

“That fucking son of an untouchable. See him snoring.”

“His father took out the shit-and this fellow thinks he’s going to dump shit on us!”

“Selling The Satanic Verses. He’ll sell it under my nose, will he?”

“These people think they own India now. Don’t they? They want all the jobs, and all the university degrees, and all the…”

Ramesh pulled down the snoring man’s trousers; he lifted the bar high up, while the lawyer said, “Do it like Hanuman does on TV!” Xerox woke up screaming. Ramesh handed the bar to D’Souza. The policeman and the lawyer took turns: they smashed the bar against Xerox’s legs just at the knee joint, like the monkey god did on TV, and then they smashed the bar against Xerox’s legs just below the knee joint, like the monkey god did on TV, and then they smashed it into Xerox’s legs just above the knee joint, and then, laughing and kissing each other, the two staggered out, shouting for someone to lock the station up behind them.

Periodically through the night, when he woke up, Xerox resumed his screaming.

In the morning, Ramesh came back, was told by a constable about Xerox, and said, “Shit, it wasn’t a dream, then.” He ordered the constables to take the man in the cell to the Havelock Henry District Hospital, and asked for a copy of the morning paper so he could check the stock market prices.

The next week, Xerox arrived, noisily, because he was on crutches, at the police station, with his daughter behind him.

“You can break my legs, but I can’t stop selling books. I’m destined to do this, sir,” he said. He grinned.

Ramesh grinned too, but he avoided the man’s eyes.

“I’m going up the hill, sir,” Xerox said, lifting up one of his crutches. “I’m going to sell the book.”

Ramesh and the other cops gathered around Xerox and his daughter and begged. Xerox wanted them to phone D’Souza, which they did. The lawyer came with his wig, along with two assistants, also in black gowns and wigs. When he heard why the policemen had summoned him, D’Souza burst into laughter.

“This fellow is just teasing you,” he told Ramesh. “He can’t possibly go up the hill with his legs like that.”

D’Souza pointed a finger at the middle part of Xerox’s body. “And if you do try to sell it, mind-it won’t be just your legs that we break next time.”

A constable laughed.

Xerox looked at Ramesh with his usual ingratiating smile. He bent low with folded palms and said, “So be it.”

D’Souza sat down to drink Old Monk rum with the police men, and they settled into another game of cards. Ramesh said he had lost money on the market the past week; the lawyer sucked at his teeth and shook his head, and said that in a big city like Bombay everyone was a cheat or a liar or a thug.

Xerox turned around on his crutches and walked out of the station. His daughter came behind him. They headed for the Lighthouse Hill. The climb took two hours and a half, and they stopped six times for Xerox to drink tea, or a glass of sugarcane juice. Then his daughter spread out the blue sheet in front of Deshpremi Hemachandra Rao Park, and Xerox lowered himself. He sat on the sheet, stuck his legs out slowly, and put a large paperback down next to him. His daughter sat down too, keeping watch over the book, her back stiff and upright. The book was banned throughout the Republic of India and it was the only thing that Xerox intended to sell that day: The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie.

DAY TWO (AFTERNOON): ST. ALFONSO’S BOYS’ HIGH SCHOOL AND JUNIOR COLLEGE

A short walk from the park rises a massive gray Gothic tower on which is painted a coat of arms and the slogan LUCET ET ARDET. This is the St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School and Junior College, established 1858, one of the oldest educational establishments in the state of Karnataka. The Jesuit-run school is Kittur’s most famous, and many of its alumni have gone on to the Indian Institute of Technology, the Karnataka Regional Engineering College, and other prestigious universities in India and abroad.

SEVERAL SECONDS, PERHAPS even a full minute, had passed since the explosion, but Lasrado, the chemistry professor, had not moved. He sat at his desk, his arms spread apart, his mouth open. Smoke was billowing from the bench at the back of the room, a yellow dust like pollen had filled the room, and the stench of fireworks was in the air. The students had all left the classroom by now; they watched from the safety of the door.

Gomati Das, the calculus teacher, arrived from next door with most of his class; then came Professor Noronha, the English and ancient history man, bringing his own flock of curious eyes. Father Almeida, the principal, pushed his way through the crowd and entered the acrid classroom, his palm over his nose and mouth. He lowered his hand and cried, “What is the meaning of this nonsense?”

Only Lasrado was left in the classroom; he stood at his desk like the heroic boy who would not leave the burning deck. He replied in a monotone.

“A bomb in class, Pather. The bench all the way in the back. It went opp during the lecture. About one minute apter I began talking.”

Father Almeida squinted at the thick smoke, and then turned to the boys. “The youth of this country have gone to hell and will ruin the names of their fathers and grandfathers-!”

Covering his face with his arm, he walked gingerly to the bench, which had toppled over from the blast.

“The bomb is still smoking,” he shouted. “Shut the doors and call the police.”

He touched Lasrado on the shoulder. “Did you hear me? We must shut the doors and-”

Red faced with shame, quivering with wrath, Lasrado turned suddenly and-addressing principal, teachers, students-yelled:

“You puckers! Puckers!”

In moments the entire junior college emptied; the boys gathered in the garden, or in the corridor of the Science and Natural History Wing, where the skeleton of a shark that had washed up on the beach some decades ago had been suspended from the ceiling as a scientific curiosity. Five of the boys kept apart from all the others, under the shade of a large banyan tree. They were distinguishable from the others by the pleated trousers that they wore, brand-name labels visible on the back pockets or at the side, and by their general air of cockiness. They were Shabbir Ali, whose father owned the only video rental store in town; the Bakht twins, Irfan and Rizvan, children of the black marketeer; Shankara P. Kinni, whose father was a plastic surgeon in the Gulf; and Pinto, the scion of a coffee-estate family.

One of them had planted the bomb. Each of this group had been subjected to multiple periods of suspension from classes for bad behavior, had been kept back a year because of poor marks, and had been threatened with expulsion for insubordination. If anyone would plant a bomb, it had to be one of this lot.

They seemed to think so themselves.

“Did you do it?” Shabbir Ali asked Pinto, who shook his head.

Ali looked at the others, silently repeating the question. “I didn’t do it either,” he stated at the end.

“Maybe God did it,” Pinto said, and all of them giggled. Yet they were aware that everyone in the school suspected them. The Bakht twins said they would go down to the Bunder to eat mutton biryani and watch the waves; Shabbir Ali would go to his father’s video store, or watch a pornographic movie at home; Pinto would probably tag along with him.

Only one of them remained at the school.

He could not leave yet; he loved it too much, the smoke and confusion. He kept his fist clenched.

He mingled among the crowd, listening to the hubbub, drinking it in like honey. Some of the boys had gone back into the building; they stood out on the balconies of the three floors of the college and shouted down to those on the ground; and this added to the hum, as if the college were a beehive struck with a pole. He knew that it was his hubbub-the students were talking about him, the professors were cursing him. He was the god of the morning.

For so many years the institution had spoken to him-spoken rudely: teachers had caned him, headmasters had suspended and threatened to expel him. (And, he was sure, behind his back, it had mocked him for being a Hoyka, a lower caste.) Now he had spoken back to it. He kept his fist clenched.

“Do you think it’s the terrorists?” he heard some boy say. “The Kashmiris, or the Punjabis?”

No, you morons! he wanted to shout. It’s me! Shankara! The lower caste!

There-he watched Professor Lasrado, his hair still disheveled, surrounded by his favorite students, the “good boys,” seeking support and succor from them.

Oddly enough, he felt an urge to go up to Lasrado and touch him on the shoulder, as if to say, Man, I feel your grief, I understand your humiliation, I sympathize with your rage, and thus end the long strife between him and the chemistry professor. He felt the desire to be one of the students whom Lasrado trusted at such moments, one of his “good boys.” But this was a lesser desire.

The main thing was to exult. He watched Lasrado’s suffering and smiled.

He turned to his left; someone in the crowd had said, “The police are coming.”

He hurried to the backyard of the college, opened a gate, and walked down the long flight of stone steps that led to the Junior School. After the new passageway had been opened through the playground, hardly anyone used this route anymore.