Between the Assassinations (14 page)

He whispered, “There’s something I have to warn you about. In the night, one of the boys walks around tapping guys’ cocks.”

Keshava started. “Which one does that?”

He stayed awake all night, sitting up whenever anyone came anywhere near his bed. Only in the morning, watching the other boys giggling hysterically as they brushed their teeth, did he realize that he had been had.

Inside a week, it seemed as though he had always lived at the hostel.

Some weeks later, Brother came for him.

“It’s your big day, Keshava,” he said. “One of the conductors was killed last night in a fight at a liquor shop.” He held Keshava’s arm up high, as if he had won a wrestling match.

“The first Hoyka bus conductor in our company! He’s a pride to his people!”

Keshava was promoted to chief conductor of one of the twenty-six buses that plied the number five route. He was issued a brand-new khaki uniform, his own black whistle on a red cord, and books of tickets marked in maroon, green, and gray, all bearing the number 5.

As they traveled their route, he stood leaning out of the bus, holding on to a metal bar, with his whistle in his mouth, blowing sharply once to tell the driver to stop, and twice to tell him not to. As soon as the bus stopped, he jumped down onto the road and shouted at the passengers, “Get in, get in.” Waiting until the bus moved again, he jumped onto the metal steps that led down from the entrance and hung from the bus, holding on to the rail. Shoving and yelling and pushing his way inside the packed bus, he collected money and gave out tickets. There was no need for tickets—he knew every customer by sight; but it was the tradition for tickets to be issued, and he did so, ripping them out and handing them to the customers, or sending them through the air to inaccessible customers.

In the evenings, the other cleaning boys, awed by his swift promotion, gathered around him at the bus stand.

“Fix this thing!” he shouted, pointing to the metal bar on which he hung from the bus. “I can hear it rattling all day long, it’s so loose.”

“It’s not so much fun,” he said when the work was done, and the boys crouched around, gazing at him with starstruck eyes. “Sure, there are girls on the bus, but you can’t pester them—you’re the conductor, after all. Then there’s the constant worry about whether those Christian bastards will beat us and steal the customers. No, sir, it’s not all fun at all.”

When the rains started, he had to lower the leather canvas above the windows so that the passengers would remain dry; but water always seeped in anyway, and the bus became dank. The front glass of the bus was besmirched with rain; blotches of silvery water clung to the screen like blobs of mercury; the world outside became hazy, and he would grip the bar and lean outside to make sure the driver could find his way.

In the evening, as Keshava lay on his bed in the hostel, having his hair dried with a white towel by one boy and getting his feet massaged by another (these were his new privileges), Brother came to the dormitory, bringing in a rusty old bike.

“You can’t go walking around town anymore, you’re a big shot now. I expect my conductors to travel in style.”

Keshava pulled the bike to his bed; that night, to the amusement of the other boys, he went to sleep with the bike next to him.

One evening, at the bus stand, he saw a cripple sitting and blowing at his tea, with his legs crossed, exposing the wooden stub of an artificial leg.

One of the boys chuckled. “Don’t you recognize your patron?”

“What do you mean?”

The boy said, “That’s the man whose bike you ride these days!”

He explained that the cripple had once himself been a bus conductor, like Keshava; but he had fallen from the bus, crushing his legs under a passing truck, and had to have an amputation.

“And thanks to that, you now have a bike of your own!” The boy guffawed, slapping Keshava heartily on the back.

The cripple drank his tea slowly, staring at it intensely, as if it were the only pleasure in his life.

When Keshava was not conducting the bus, Brother had a string of bicycle delivery jobs for him; once he had to strap a block of ice on the back of his cycle and ride all the way downtown to drop it off at the house of Mabroor Engineer, the richest man in town, who had run out of ice for his whiskey. But in the evenings he was allowed to ride the bike for his pleasure; which meant, usually, taking it at full speed down the main road next to Central Market. On either side, the shops glowed with the light of paraffin lamps, and all the lights and color got him so excited that he took both hands off the handlebars and whooped for joy, braking just in time to stop himself from running into an autorickshaw.

Everything seemed to be going so well for him; yet one morning his neighbors found him lying in bed, staring at the pictures of the film actresses, and refusing to move.

“He’s being morose again,” his neighbors said. “Hey, why don’t you jerk off? It’ll make you feel better.”

The next morning he went back to see the barber. The old man was not in. His wife was sitting in the barber’s chair, combing her hair. “Just wait for him, he’s always talking about you. He misses you very much, you know.”

Keshava nodded; he cracked his knuckles and walked around the chair three or four times.

That night at the hostel, the other boys seized him as he was brushing his hair, and dragged him out the door. “This fellow’s been morose for days now. It’s time for him to be taken to a woman.”

“No,” he said. “Not tonight. I have to visit the barber. I promised I’d come for—”

“We’ll take you to a barber, all right! She’ll shave you good!”

They put him in an autorickshaw and drove him down to the Bunder. A prostitute was “seeing” men in a house by the shirt factories, and though he shouted at the boys and said he didn’t want to do it, they told him that doing it would cure his moods, and make him normal like everyone else.

He did seem more normal in the days that followed. One evening, at the end of his shift, he saw a new cleaning boy, one of Brother’s recent hires, spit on the ground as he was cleaning the bus; calling him over, Keshava slapped him.

“Don’t spit anywhere near the bus, understood?”

That was the first time he had ever slapped anyone.

It made him feel good. From then on, he regularly hit the cleaning boys, like all the other conductors did.

On the number five, he got better and better at his job. No trick escaped him anymore. To the schoolboys who tried to get free rides back from the movie theater on their school passes, he’d say, “Nothing doing. The passes work only when you’re going to class, or going back from class. If it’s a joyride, you pay the full fare.”

One boy was a consistent problem—a tall, handsome fellow whose friends called him Shabbir. Keshava watched people staring at the boy’s Bombay shirt enviously. He wondered why this boy was taking the bus at all; people like him had their own cars and drivers.

One evening, after the bus stopped at the women’s college, the rich boy went down to the seats earmarked for women and leaned over to one of the girls.

“Excuse me, Miss Rita. I just want to talk to you.”

The girl turned her face toward the window, shifting her body away from him.

“Why won’t you just talk to me?” the boy with the Bombay shirt asked with a rakish grin. His friends at the back whistled and clapped.

Keshava bounded up to him. “Enough!” He seized the rich boy by the arm and pulled him away from the girl. “No one pesters women on my bus.”

The boy called Shabbir glared. Keshava glared back at him.

“Did you hear me?” He tore a ticket and flicked it at the rich boy’s face to underline the warning. “Did you hear me?”

The rich boy smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said, and put out his hand to the conductor as if for a handshake. Confused, Keshava took his hand; the boys in the back row howled with laughter. When the conductor withdrew his hand, he found a five-rupee note in it.

Keshava flung the note at the rich boy’s feet.

“Try it again, you son of a bald woman, and I’ll send you flying out the bus.”

As she stepped down from the bus, the girl looked at Keshava: he saw the gratitude in her eyes, and he knew he had done the right thing.

One of the passengers whispered, “Do you know who that boy is? His father owns that video-lending store and he’s best friends with the member of Parliament. See that insignia that says
CD
on the pocket of his shirt? His father buys those shirts from a shop in Bombay and brings them for his son. Each shirt costs a hundred rupees, or maybe even two hundred rupees, they say.”

Keshava said, “On my bus, he’d better behave. There’s no rich or poor here; everyone buys the same ticket. And no one troubles the women.”

That evening, when Brother heard this story, he embraced Keshava. “My valiant bus conductor! I’m so proud of you!”

He raised Keshava’s hand up high, and the others applauded. “This little village boy has shown the rich of this town how to behave on a number five bus!”

The following morning, as Keshava was hanging from the metal bar of the bus and blowing his whistle to encourage the driver, the bar creaked—and then it snapped. Keshava fell from the speeding bus, hit the road, rolled, and slammed his head into a side of the curb.

For some days afterward, the boarders at the hostel would find him hunched over in his bed, on the verge of tears. The bandage had come off his head, and the bleeding had stopped. But he was still silent. When they would give him a good shake, Keshava would nod his head and smile, as if to say, yes, he was okay.

“Then why don’t you get out and go back to work?”

He would say nothing.

“He’s morose all day long. We’ve never seen him like this.”

But then, after he failed to turn up at work for four days, they saw him once more leaning out of the bus and yelling at the passengers, looking every bit his old self.

Two weeks passed. One morning, he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. Brother himself had come to see him.

“I hear that you’ve turned up for work only one day in the last ten. This is very bad, my son. You can’t be morose.” Brother made a fist. “You have to be full of life.” He shook his fist at Keshava, as if to demonstrate the fullness of life.

A boy nearby tapped his head. “Nothing gets to him. He’s touched. That blow on the head has turned him into an imbecile.”

“He always was an imbecile,” said another boarder, combing his hair at a mirror. “Now he just wants to sleep and eat for free in the hostel.”

“Shut up!” Brother said. He swished his stick at them. “No one talks about my star slogan shouter like that!”

He gently tapped his stick on Keshava’s head. “You see what they’re saying about you, Keshava? That you’re putting on this act just to steal food and bed from Brother? You see the insults they spread about you?”

Keshava began to cry. He drew his knees up to his chest, put his head on them, and cried.

“My poor boy!” Brother himself was almost in tears. He got onto the bed and hugged the boy.

“Someone’s got to tell the boy’s family,” he said on the way out. “We can’t keep him here if he’s not working.”

“We did tell his brother,” the neighbors replied.

“And?”

“He’s not interested in hearing about Keshava. He says there’s no connection between them anymore.”

Brother slammed his fist against the wall. “You see the extent to which family life has deteriorated these days!” He shook his fist, which was aching from the blow. “That fellow has to take care of his brother. He has no other option!” he shouted. He whipped his stick through the air. “I will show that piece of shit! I will force him to remember his duty to his younger brother!”

Although no one actually threw him out, one evening when Keshava came back, someone else was sitting on his bed. The fellow was tracing his finger along the outlines of the actresses’ faces, and the other boys were teasing him:

“Oh, so she’s his
wife,
is she? She’s not, you idiot!”

It was as if he had always been there and they had always been his neighbors.

Keshava simply wandered away. He felt no desire to fight to get his bed back.

He sat by the closed doors of the Central Market that night, and some of the streetside sellers recognized him and fed him. He did not thank them; did not even say hello. This went on for a few days. Finally, one of them said to him:

“In this world, a fellow who doesn’t work doesn’t eat. It’s not too late; go to Brother and apologize and beg him to give you your old job back. You know he thinks of you as family…”

For a few nights, he wandered outside the market. One day he drifted back to the hostel. Brother was sitting in the drawing room again, as his feet were massaged by the woman. “That was a lovely dress Rekha wore in the movie, don’t you think?” Keshava wandered into the room.

“What do you want?” Brother asked, getting up. Keshava tried to put it into words. He held his arms out to a man in a blue sarong.

“This Hoyka idiot is mad! And he stinks! Get him out of here!”

Hands dragged him for some distance, and pushed him to the ground. Leather shoes kicked him in the ribs.

A little later, he heard footsteps, and then someone lifted him up. Wooden crutches tapped on the earth, and a man’s voice said, “So Brother’s got no use for you either, eh…?”

He vaguely sensed that he was being offered something to eat. He sniffed; it reeked of castor oil and shit, and he rejected it. He smelled garbage around him, and turned his head toward the sky; his eyes were full of the stars when they closed.

THE HISTORY OF KITTUR

(abridged from
A Short History of Kittur
by Father Basil d’Essa, S.J.)

The word “Kittur” is a corruption either of “Kiri Uru,” meaning “small town,” or of “Kittamma’s Uru”—Kittamma being a goddess specializing in repelling smallpox and whose temple stood near today’s train station. A letter from a Syrian Christian merchant written in 1091 recommends to his peers the excellent natural harbour of the town of Kittur, on the Malabar Coast. During the entire twelfth century, however, the town appears to have vanished; Arab merchants who visited Kittur in 1141 and 1190 record only wilderness. In the fourteenth century a dervish named Yusuf Ali began curing lepers at the Bunder; when he died, his body was entombed in a white dome, and the structure—the Dargah of Hazrat Yusuf Ali—has remained an object of pilgrimage to the present day. In the late fifteenth century, “Kittore, also known as the citadel of elephants” is listed in the tax-collection records of the Vijayanagara rulers as one of the provinces of their empire. In 1649, a four-man Portuguese missionary delegation led by Fr. Cristoforo d’Almeida, S.J., trekked down the coast from Goa to Kittur; it found “a deplorable mess of idolators, Mohammedans, and elephants.” The Portuguese drove out the Mohammedans, pulverised the idols, and distilled the wild elephants into a rubble of dirty ivory. Over the next hundred years, Kittur—now renamed Valencia—passed back and forth between the Portuguese, the Marathas, and the kingdom of Mysore. In 1780, Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore, defeated an army of the East India Company near the Bunder; by the Treaty of Kittur, signed that year, the Company renounced its claims on “Kittore, also called Valencia or The Bunder.” The Company violated the treaty after Hyder Ali’s death in 1782, by setting up a military camp near the Bunder; in retaliation, Tippu, the son of Hyder Ali, constructed the Sultan’s Battery, a formidable fortress of black stone mounted with French guns. After Tippu’s death in 1799, Kittur became Company property, and was annexed into the Madras Presidency. The town, like most of South India, took no part in the great anti-British mutiny of 1857. In 1921, an activist of the Indian National Congress raised a tricolour at the old lighthouse: the freedom struggle had come to Kittur.