Between the Assassinations (4 page)

The others drew closer to listen. Abbasi was a rich man; he must have an intimacy with corruption that exceeded theirs. He told them about the morning.

Kalam, the drug dealer, smiled and said, “That’s nothing, Abbasi.” He gestured toward the sea. “I have a ship, half full of cement and half full of something else, that has been waiting two hundred meters out at sea for a month. Why? Because this inspector at the port is squeezing me. I pay him and he wants to squeeze me even more, too much more. So the ship is just drifting out there, half full of cement and half full of something else.”

“I thought things would get better with this young fellow Rajiv taking over the country,” Abbasi said. “But he’s let us all down. As bad as any other politician.”

“We need one man to stand up to them,” the Professor said. “Just one honest, brave man. That fellow would do more for this country than Gandhi or Nehru did.”

The remark was greeted by a chorus of agreement.

“Yes,” Abbasi agreed, stroking his beard. “And the next morning he would be floating in the Kaliamma River. Like this.”

He mimicked a corpse.

There was general agreement over this too. But even as the words left his mouth, Abbasi was already thinking,
Is it really true? Is there nothing we can do to fight back?

Tucked into the Professor’s trousers he saw the glint of a knife. The effect of the whiskey was wearing off, but it had carried him to a strange place, and his mind was filling up with strange thoughts.

Another round of tea was ordered by the car thief, but Abbasi, yawning, crossed his hands in front of him and shook his head.

The next day, he turned up to work at ten-forty, his head throbbing with pain.

Ummar opened the door for him. Abbasi nodded, and took the mail from him. With his head down to the floor, he moved to the stairs that led up to his office; then he stopped. At the threshold of the door that led to the factory floor, one of the stitching women was standing staring at him.

“I’m not paying you to waste time,” he snapped.

She turned and fled. He hurried up the stairs.

He put on his glasses, read the mail, read the newspaper, yawned, drank tea, and opened a ledger bearing the logo of the Karnataka Bank; he went down a list of customers who had paid and not paid. He kept thinking of the previous evening’s game of snooker.

The door creaked open; Ummar’s face popped in.

“What?”

“They’re here.”

“Who?”

“The government.”

Two men in polyester shirts and ironed blue bell-bottoms pushed Ummar aside and walked in. One of them, a burly fellow with a big potbelly and a mustache like that of a wrestler in a village fair, said, “Income Tax Department.”

Abbasi got up. “Ummar! Don’t just stand there! Get one of the women to run and bring tea from the tea shop by the sea. And some of those round Bombay biscuits as well.”

The big tax man sat down at the table without being invited. His companion, a lean fellow with arms intertwined, hesitated in a fidgety kind of way, until the other gestured for him to sit down too.

Abbasi smiled. The tax man with the mustache talked.

“We have just walked around your factory floor. We have just seen the women who work for you, and the quality of the shirts they stitch.”

Abbasi smiled and waited for it.

It came quickly this time.

“We think you are making a lot more money than you have declared to us.”

Abbasi’s heart beat hard; he told himself to calm down. There was always a way out.

“A lot, lot, lot more.”

“Sahib, sahib,” Abbasi said, patting the air with conciliatory gestures. “We have a custom in this shop. Everyone who comes in will receive a gift before they leave.”

Ummar, who knew already what he had to do, was waiting outside the office with two shirts. With a fawning smile, he presented them to the two tax officers. They accepted the bribes without a word, the lean fellow looking to the big one for approval before snatching his gift.

Abbasi asked, “What else can I do for you two sahibs?”

The one with the mustache smiled. His partner also smiled. The one with the mustache held up three fingers.

“Each.”

Three hundred per head was too low; real pros from the Income Tax Department wouldn’t have settled for anything under five hundred. Abbasi guessed that the two men were doing this for the first time. In the end, they would settle for a hundred each, plus the shirts.

“Let me offer you a little boost first. Do the sahibs take Red Label?”

The fidgety fellow almost jumped out of his seat in excitement, but the big one glared at him.

“Red Label would be acceptable.”

They’ve probably never been offered anything better than hooch,
Abbasi realized.

He walked into the pantry, took out the bottle. He poured into three glasses with the Air India maharaja logo. He opened the fridge. He dropped two ice cubes into each glass, and added a thin stream of ice water from a bottle. He spat in two of the glasses, and arranged them farthest away on the tray.

The thought fell into his mind like a meteor from a purer heaven.
No.
Slowly it spread itself across his mind. No, he could not give this whiskey to these men. It might be counterfeit stuff, sold in cartons bought under false premises, but it was still a thousand times too pure to be touched by their lips.

He drank one whiskey, and then the second, and then the third.

Ten minutes later, he came back into the room with heavy steps. He bolted the door behind him and let his body fall heavily against it.

The big tax man turned sharply. “Why are you closing the door?”

“Sahibs. This is the port city of the Bunder, which has ancient traditions and customs dating back centuries and centuries. Any man is free to come here of his own will, but he can only leave with the permission of the locals.”

Whistling, Abbasi walked to his desk and picked up the phone; he shoved it, like a weapon, right in the face of the bigger tax man.

“Shall I call the Income Tax Department right now? Shall I find out if you have been authorized to come? Shall I?”

They looked uncomfortable. The lean man was sweating. Abbasi thought,
My guess is right. They
are
doing this for the first time.

“Look at your hands. You have accepted shirts from me, which are bribes. You are holding the evidence in your hands.”

“Look here—”

“No! You look here!” Abbasi shouted. “You are not going to leave these premises alive until you sign a confession of what you were trying to do. Let us see how you get out. This is the port city. I have friends in all four directions. You will both be dead and floating in the Kaliamma River if I snap my fingers now. Do you doubt me?”

The big tax man looked at the ground, while the other fellow produced an extraordinary amount of sweat.

Abbasi unbolted the door and held it open. “Get out.” Then, with a wide smile, he bowed down to them:

“Sahibs.”

The two men scurried out without a word. He heard the thump of their feet on the staircase; and then a cry of surprise from Ummar, who was walking up the stairs with a tray of tea and Britannia biscuits.

He let his head rest on the cool wood of the table and wondered what he had done. Any moment soon, he was expecting that the electricity would be cut off; the income tax officials would return, with more men and an arrest warrant.

He walked around and around the room, thinking,
What is happening to me?

Ummar stared at him silently.

After an hour, to Abbasi’s surprise, there had been no call from the Income Tax Department. The fans were still working. The light was still on.

Abbasi began to hope. These guys were raw—tyros. Maybe they’d just gone back to the office and gotten on with their work. Even if they had complained, the government officials had been wary of the Bunder ever since the riots; it was possible they would not want to antagonize a Muslim businessman at this point. He looked out of the window at the Bunder: this violent, rotten, garbage-strewn port, crawling with pickpockets and knife-carrying thugs—it seemed the only place where a man was safe from the corruption of Kittur.

“Ummar!” he shouted. “I’m leaving early today for the club—give Sunil Shetty a call to say that he should come today too. I have great news for him! I beat the Income Tax Department!”

He came running down the stairs, and stopped at the last step. To his right, the doorway opened onto the factory floor. In the six weeks since his factory had reopened, he had not once gone through this doorway; Ummar had handled the affairs of the factory floor. But now the doorway to his right, black and yawning, had become inescapable.

He felt he had no option but to go in. He realized now that the morning’s events had all been, somehow, a trap: to bring him to this place, to make him do what he had avoided doing since reopening his factory.

The women were sitting on the floor of the dimly lit room, pale fluorescent lights flickering overhead, each at a workstation indicated by a numeral in red letters painted on the wall. They held the white shirts close to their eyes and stitched gold thread into them; they stopped when he came in. He flicked his wrist, indicating that they should keep working. He didn’t want their eyes looking at him: those eyes that were being damaged, as their fingers created golden shirts that he could sell to American ballroom dancers.

Damaged? No, that was not the right word. That was not the reason he had shunted them into a side room.

Everyone in that room was going blind.

He sat down on a chair in the center of the room.

The optometrist had been clear about that: the kind of detailed stitchwork needed for the shirts scarred the women’s retinas. He had used his fingers to show Abbasi how thick the scars were. No amount of improved lighting would reduce the impact on the retinas. Human eyes were not meant to stare for hours at designs this intricate. Two women had already gone blind; that was why he had shut down the factory. When he reopened, all his old workers came back at once. They knew their fate; but there was no other work to be had.

Abbasi closed his eyes. He wanted nothing more than for Ummar to shout that he was urgently needed upstairs.

But no one came to release him, and he sat in the chair, while the women around him stitched, and their stitching fingers kept talking to him:
We are going blind; look at us!

“Does your head hurt, sahib?” a woman’s voice was asking him. “Do you want me to get you some Dispirin and water?”

Unable to look at her, Abbasi said, “All of you please go home. Come back tomorrow. But please go home today. You’ll all be paid.”

“Is sahib unhappy with us for some reason?”

“No, please. Go home now. You’ll all be paid for the whole day. Come back tomorrow.”

He heard the rustle of their feet and he knew they must be gone now.

They had left their shirts at their workstations, and he picked one up; the dragon was half stitched. He kneaded the cloth between his fingers. He could feel, between his fingers, the fine-spun fabric of corruption.

The factory is closed,
he wanted to shout out to the dragon.
There—you happy with me? The factory is closed.

And after that? Who would send his son to school? Would he sit by the docks with a knife and smuggle cars like Mehmood? The women would go elsewhere and do the same work.

He slapped his hand against his thigh.

Thousands, sitting in tea shops and universities and workplaces every day and every night, were cursing corruption. Yet not one fellow had found a way to slay the demon without giving up his share of the loot of corruption. So why did he—an ordinary businessman given to whiskey and snooker and listening to gossip from thugs—have to come up with an answer?

But just a moment later, he realized he already had an answer.

He offered Allah a compromise. He would be taken to jail, but his factory would go on with its work: he closed his eyes and prayed to his God to accept this deal.

But an hour passed, and still no one had come to arrest him.

Abbasi opened a window in his office. He could see only buildings, a congested road, and old walls. He opened all the windows, but still he saw nothing but walls. He climbed up to the roof of his building, and ducked under a clothesline to walk out onto the terrace. Coming to the edge, he placed a foot on the tiled roof that protruded over the front of his shop.

From here, a man could see the limits of Kittur. At the very edge of the town, one after the other, stood a minaret, a church steeple, and a temple tower, like signposts to identify the three religions of the town to voyagers from the ocean.

Abbasi saw the Arabian Sea stretching away from Kittur. The sun was shining over it. A ship was slowly leaving the Bunder, edging to where the blue waters of the sea changed color and turned a deeper hue. It was about to hit a large patch of brilliant sunshine, an oasis of pure light.

After a lunch of prawn curry and rice at the Bunder, you may want to visit the Lighthouse Hill and its vicinity. The famous lighthouse, built by the Portuguese and renovated by the British, is no longer in use. An old guard in a blue uniform sits at the foot of the lighthouse. If visitors are poorly dressed, or speak to him in Tulu or Kannada, he will say, “Can’t you see it’s closed?” If visitors are well dressed or speak English, he will say, “Welcome.” He will take them into the lighthouse and up the spiral staircase to the top, which affords a spectacular view of the Arabian Sea. In recent years, the City Corporation has begun running a reading room inside the lighthouse; the collection includes Father Basil d’Essa, S.J.’s
A Short History of Kittur.
The Deshpremi Hemachandra Rao Park around the lighthouse is named in honor of the freedom fighter who hung a Congress tricolor from the lighthouse during British rule.

I
T HAPPENS AT
least twice a year. The prisoner, handcuffs on his wrists, is striding toward the Lighthouse Hill police station with his head held high and a look of insolent boredom on his face, while, following him, almost scampering to catch up, are the two policemen holding a chain attached to the handcuffs. The odd part is that the man in handcuffs seems to be dragging along the policemen, like a fellow taking two monkeys out for a walk.

In the past nine years, the man known as “Xerox” Ramakrishna has been arrested twenty-one times on the granite pavement in front of Deshpremi Hemachandra Rao Park for the sale, at discounted rates, of illegally photocopied or printed books to the students of St. Alfonso’s College. A policeman comes in the morning, when Ramakrishna is sitting with his books spread out on a blue bedsheet; he places his lathi on the books and says, “Let’s go, Xerox.”

The bookseller turns to his eleven-year-old daughter, Ritu, who sells books with him, and says, “Go home and be a good girl, dear.” Then he holds his hands out for the cuffs.

In jail, Xerox is unchained and put in a cell. Holding on to the bars, he regales the policemen with ingratiating stories. He may tell them a smutty tale about some college girl whom he saw that morning wearing blue jeans in the American style, or a new swear word in Tulu he has heard on the bus while going to Salt Market Village, or perhaps, if they are in the mood for longer entertainment, he will narrate to them, as he has done so many times before, the story of what his father did for a living all his life—taking the crap out of the houses of rich landlords, the traditional occupation of people of his caste. All day long, his old man would hang around the back wall of the landlord’s house, waiting for the smell of human shit; as soon as he smelled that smell, he came up to the house and waited, with bent knees, like a wicketkeeper waits for the ball. (Xerox bent his knees and showed how.) Then, as soon as he heard the thud of the boom-box being shut, he had to pull out the chamber pot through a hole in the wall, empty it into the rosebushes, wipe it clean with his loincloth, and insert it back before the next person came to use the toilet. That was the job he did his
whole
life, can you believe it!

The jailors will laugh.

They bring Xerox samosas wrapped in paper; they offer him chai. They consider him a decent fellow. They let him out at midday; he bows low to them and says, “Thank you.” Then Miguel D’Souza, the lawyer for the publishers and booksellers on Umbrella Street, will call the station and yell, “Have you let him off again? Doesn’t the law of the land mean anything to you?” The inspector of the station, Ramesh, keeps the receiver at a distance from his ear and reads the newspaper, looking at the Bombay stock market quotes. That is all Ramesh really wants to do in life: read the stock market quotes.

By late afternoon, Xerox is back at it. Photocopied or cheaply printed copies of Karl Marx,
Mein Kampf,
published books, and films and albums are arranged on the blue cloth spread out on the pavement on Lighthouse Hill, and little Ritu sits stiff backed, with her long unbroken nose and faint mustache, watching as the customers pick up the books and flip through them.

“Put that back in place,” she will say, when a customer has rejected a book. “Put it back exactly where you picked it up from.”

“
Accounting for Entrance Exams
?” one customer shouts at Xerox. “
Advanced Obstetrics
?” cries another.

“
The Joy of Sex
?”

“
Mein Kampf
?”

“Lee Iacocca?”

“What’s your best price?” a young man asks, flipping through the book.

“Seventy-five rupees.”

“Oh, you’re
raping
me! It’s too much.”

The young man walks away, turns around, comes back, and says, “What’s your final best price? I have no time to waste.”

“Seventy-two rupees. Take it or leave it. I’ve got other customers.”

The books are photocopied, or sometimes printed, at an old printing press in Salt Market Village. Xerox loves being around the machinery. He strokes the photocopier; he adores the machine, the way it flashes like lightning as it works, the way it whirs and hums. He cannot read English, but he knows that English words have power, and that English books have an aura. He looks at the image of Adolf Hitler from the cover of
Mein Kampf,
and he feels his power. He looks at the face of Khalil Gibran, poetic and mysterious, and he feels the mystery and poetry. He looks at the face of Lee Iacocca, relaxed with his hands behind his head, and he feels relaxed. That’s why he once told Inspector Ramesh, “I have no wish to make any trouble for you or for the publishers, sir; I just love books: I love making them, holding them, and selling them. My father took out shit for a living, sir; he couldn’t even read or write. He’d be so proud if he could see that I make my living from books.”

Only one time has Xerox really been in trouble with the police. That was when someone called the station and said that Xerox was selling copies of Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses
in violation of the laws of the Republic of India. This time when he was brought to the station in handcuffs there were no courtesies, no cups of chai.

Ramesh slapped him.

“Don’t you know the book is banned, you son of a bald woman? You think you are going to start a riot among the Muslims? And get me and every other policeman here transferred to Salt Market Village?”

“Forgive me,” Xerox begged. “I had no idea that this was a banned book, really…I’m just the son of a man who took out shit, sir. He waited all day long for the boom-box to make a noise. I know my place, sir. I wouldn’t dream of challenging you. It was just a mistake, sir. Forgive me, sir.”

D’Souza, the booksellers’ lawyer, a small man with black oily hair and a neat mustache, heard what had happened and came to the station. He looked at the banned book—a massive paperback 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 policemen, 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.