Between the Assassinations

The road was called Old Court Road. The court had long ago relocated and the lawyers had moved, and the road had been closed down for years-after the suicide of a visiting businessman here. Shankara had been coming down this road ever since he was a boy; it was his favorite part of town. Even though Shankara could summon his chauffeur up to the college, the man was instructed to wait for him down at the bottom of the steps.

The road was lined with banyan trees; but even strolling in the shade, Shankara had worked up a terrific sweat. (He was always like that, quick to sweat, as if some irrepressible heat were building up inside him.) Most boys had handkerchiefs placed in their pockets by their mothers, but Shankara had never carried one, and to dry himself he had adopted a savage method: he tore large leaves off a nearby tree and scraped his arms and legs over and over, until the skin was red and raw.

Now he felt dry.

About halfway down the hill, he left the road, parting a growth of trees, and walked into a clearing that was completely hidden except to those who knew it. Inside this bower was a statue of Jesus made of dark bronze. Shankara had known of this statue for years, ever since stumbling upon it as a boy while playing hide-and-seek. There was something wrong with the statue; with its dark skin, the lopsided expression on its lips, its bright eyes, it seemed more like an icon of the devil than of the Savior. Even the words at the base-I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE-seemed like a taunt to God.

He saw that there was still some fertilizer around the foot of the statue-the remains of the same powder that he had used to detonate his bomb. Quickly he covered the powder with dry leaves. Then he leaned against the base of the Jesus statue. “Puckers,” he said-and giggled.

But as he did so, he felt as if his great triumph had been reduced to that one giggle.

He sat at the foot of the dark Jesus, and the tension and thrill slowly left him. He always relaxed around images of Jesus. There was a time when he had thought about converting to Christianity; among Christians there were no castes. Every man was judged by what he had done with his own life. But after the way the Jesuit priests had treated him-caning him once on a Monday morning in the assembly grounds, in full view of the entire school-he had sworn never to become a Christian. There was no better institution to stop Hindus from converting to Christianity than the Catholic boys’ school.

Waving good-bye to the Jesus, and having checked that there was no fertilizer visible around the base of the statue, he continued downhill.

His chauffeur, a small dark man in a bedraggled khaki uniform, was waiting for him halfway down the road.

“What are you doing here?” he shouted. “I told you: wait at the bottom of the hill for me. Never come up this road!”

The driver bent low with his palms folded. “Sir…don’t be angry…I heard…a bomb…your mother asked me to make sure you were…”

How quickly news had spread. It was bigger than him; it was taking on a life of its own.

“The bomb-oh, it was nothing important,” he told the driver as they walked down. Was that a mistake, he wondered-should he have exaggerated instead?

It was not an appealing irony. His mother had sent the driver to look for him, as if he were a little baby-he, who had exploded the bomb! He gritted his teeth. The driver opened the door of the white Ambassador car for him, but instead of getting into the car, he began shouting.

“You bastard! Son of a bald woman!”

He paused for breath, and then said, “You pucker! You pucker!”

Laughing hysterically, he got into the car, while the driver stared at him.

On the way home, he thought how any other master could expect loyalty from his chauffeur. Yet Shankara expected nothing; he suspected his chauffeur of being a Brahmin.

As they paused at a red light, he heard two ladies in an adjacent Ambassador talking about the bomb blast: “…The police have sealed off the entire school and college now, they say. No one can leave until they find the terrorist.”

It occurred to him he had had a lucky escape; had he stayed any longer, he would have fallen into the trap of the police.

When he got to his mansion, he ran in through the back door and bounded up the steps to his room. He had thought, at one point, of sending a manifesto to the Dawn Herald: “The man Lasrado is a fool, and the bomb was burst in his class to prove this to the whole world.” He could not believe he had left it lying on his desk; he tore it up at once. Then, uncertain whether the pieces could be reassembled and the message re-created, he thought about swallowing them all, but decided instead to swallow only some of the key syllables-“rado,” “bo,” “m,” “class.” The rest he set fire to with his pocket lighter.

Besides, he thought, slightly sick from the sensation of paper settling into his stomach, that was not the right message to send to the press, because ultimately his anger was not solely directed at Lasrado, it went much deeper. If the police asked him for a statement, what he would say was this:

I have burst a bomb to end the five-thousand-year-old caste system that still operates in our country. I have burst a bomb to show that no man should be judged, as I have been, merely by the accident of his birth.

And the lofty sentences made him feel better. He was sure he would be treated differently in prison, as a martyr of some kind. The Hoyka self-advancement committees would organize marches for him, and the police would not dare touch him. Perhaps, when he was released, large crowds would greet him-he would be launched on a political career.

Now he felt he had to send an anonymous letter to the newspaper at all costs. He took a fresh piece of paper and began writing, even as his stomach was churning from the paper he had swallowed.

There! He was done. He read it over:

“The Manifesto of a Wronged Hoyka. Why the Bomb was Burst Today!”

But then he reconsidered. It was well known that he was a Hoyka. Everyone knew it. They gossiped about it, and their gossip was like that faceless buzz out of the black doors of the classrooms today. Everyone in his school, in this entire town, knew that as rich as Shankara Prasad Kinni was, he was only a Hoyka woman’s son. If he sent that letter, they would know it was he who had planted the bomb.

He jumped. It was only the cry of the vegetable seller, who had brought his cart right up outside the back wall of the house: “Tomatoes, tomatoes, ripe red tomatoes, come get your ripe red tomatoes.”

He wanted to go down to the Bunder, check into a cheap hotel, and say he was someone else. No one would ever find him there.

He paced around his room, and then slammed the door; he dived into his bed and pulled the sheet over him. Inside the darkness of the bedsheet he could still hear the vendor shouting, “Tomatoes, ripe red tomatoes, hurry before they all rot!”

In the morning, his mother was watching an old black-and-white Hindi film that she had rented from Shabbir Ali’s father’s video store. This was how she spent every morning these days, addicted to old melodramas.

“Shankara, I heard there was some brouhaha in school,” she said, turning as she heard him come down. He ignored her and sat at the table. He could not remember the last time he had spoken a full sentence to his mother.

“Shankara,” his mother said, putting toast on the table before him. “Your Urmila Auntie is coming. Please stay around the house today.”

He bit into the toast, saying nothing to his mother. He found her possessive, and pesky, and hectoring. But he knew that she was in awe of her half-Brahmin son; she felt beneath him, because she was a full-blooded Hoyka.

“Shankara! Please tell me: Will you stay around? Will you be nice to me just today?”

Dropping his toast onto his plate, he got to his feet and headed for the stairs.

“Shan-ka-ra! Come back!”

Even as he cursed her, he understood her fears. She did not want to face the Brahmin woman alone. Her sole claim to acceptance, to respectability, was the production of a male child, an heir- and if he wasn’t in the house, then she had nothing to show. She was just a Hoyka trespassing onto a Brahmin’s household.

He thought, It is her own fault if she feels wretched in their presence. Again and again he had told her, “Mother, ignore our Brahmin relatives. Don’t continually humiliate yourself in front of them. If they don’t want us, let us not want them.”

But she could not do that; she still wanted to be accepted. And her ticket of acceptance was Shankara. Not that he himself was fully acceptable to the Brahmins. They viewed him as the product of a buccaneering adventure on the part of his father; they associated him (he was sure) with an entire range of corruptions. Mix one part premarital sex and one part caste violation in a black pot and what do you get? This cute little Satan: Shankara.

Some Brahmin relatives, like Urmila Auntie, had visited him for years, although they never seemed to enjoy fondling his cheeks, or sending flying kisses his way, or doing the other repellent things aunties did to nephews. He got the feeling, around her, that he was being tolerated.

Fuck, he did not like being tolerated.

He had the driver take him to Umbrella Street, and he gazed blankly out of the window as the car passed the furniture shops and sugarcane juice stands. He got off at White Stallion Talkies. “Don’t wait for me; I’ll call you when I’m done with the movie.”

As he was climbing the steps, he saw the owner of a store nearby waving at him vigorously. A relative, on his mother’s side. The man flashed him enormous smiles; then he began gesturing for him to come sit in his shop. Shankara was always treated as someone special among his Hoyka relatives: because he was half Brahmin, and hence so much higher than them in caste terms; or because he was so rich, and hence so much higher than them in class terms. Swearing to himself, he kept going up the stairs. Didn’t these stupid Hoykas understand? There was nothing he hated more than their groveling to him because of his half-Brahminness. If they had been contemptuous to him, if they had forced him to crawl into their shops to expiate the sin of being half Brahmin, then wouldn’t he have come to see them every day!

There was another reason for him not to visit this particular relative. He had heard a rumor that the plastic surgeon Kinni had kept a mistress in this part of town-another Hoyka girl. He suspected that the relative would know of this woman, that he would be thinking constantly, This fellow Shankara-poor, poor Shankara-little does he know of his father’s treachery. Shankara knew all about his father’s treachery-this father whom he had not seen for six years, who no longer even wrote or called over the phone, although he still sent home packages of candies and foreign-made chocolates. Yet somehow he felt that his father knew what life was about. A Hoyka mistress near the theater, and another beautiful Hoyka woman for a wife. Now he was leading a life of ease and luxury in the Gulf, fixing the noses and lips of rich Arab women. Another mistress there, for sure. Fellows like his father belonged to no caste or religion or race; they lived for themselves. They were the only real men in this world.

The box office was shuttered up. NEXT SHOW 8:30 P.M. He came down the stairs quickly, avoiding eye contact with his relative. Turning down a couple of streets in a hurry, he went into the Ideal Traders Ice Cream Parlor and ordered a chikoo milk shake.

He sucked it down quickly, and with the sugar in his brain he leaned back and chuckled and said to himself:

“Pucker!”

So he had done it; he had humiliated Lasrado for having humiliated him.

“One more chikoo milk shake!” he shouted. “With double ice cream!”

Shankara had always been one of the rotten apples at school. Since the age of eight or nine, he had been in trouble. But the most trouble he had ever had was with this chemistry teacher with the speech impediment. One morning, Lasrado had caught him smoking a cigarette in the sugarcane juice stand outside the college.

“Smoking bepore the age of twenty will arrest your development as a normal human being,” Mr. Lasrado had shouted. “Ip your pather were here, and not in the Gulp, he would do exactly what I am doing now…”