Between the Assassinations

DAY TWO (EVENING): MARKET AND MAIDAN

The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Maidan (formerly King George V Memorial Maidan) is an open ground in the center of Kittur. In the evenings, it fills up with people playing cricket, flying kites, and teaching their children to ride bicycles. At the edges of the maidan, ice cream and ice candy sellers peddle their wares. All major political rallies in Kittur are held in the maidan. The Hyder Ali Road leads from the maidan to Central Market, Kittur’s largest market for fresh produce. The Town Hall of Kittur, the new law court, the Havelock Henry District Hospital, and both the premier hotels in Kittur-the Hotel Premier Intercontinental and the Taj Mahal International-are within walking distance of the market. In 1988, the first temple meant exclusively for the use of Kittur’s Hoyka community opened for worship in the vicinity of the maidan.

WITH HAIR LIKE that, and eyes like those, he could easily have passed himself off as a holy man, and earned a living sitting cross-legged on a saffron cloth near the temple. That was what the shopkeepers at the market said. Yet all this crazy fellow did, morning and evening, was crouch on the central railing of the Hyder Ali Road and stare at the passing buses and cars. In the sunset, his hair-a gorgon’s head of brown curls-shone like bronze, and his irises glowed. While the evening lasted, he was like a Sufi poet, full of mystic fire. Some of the shopkeepers could tell stories about him: one evening they had seen him on the back of a black bull, riding it down the main road, swinging his hands and shouting, as if the Lord Shiva himself were riding into town on his bull, Nandi.

Sometimes he behaved like a rational man, crossing the road carefully, or sitting patiently outside the Kittamma Devi Temple with the other homeless, as they waited for the leftovers of meals from weddings or thread ceremonies to be scraped into their clustered hands. At other times he would be seen picking through piles of dog shit.

No one knew his name, religion, or caste, so no one made any attempt to talk to him. Only one man, a cripple with a wooden leg who came to the temple in the evenings once or twice a month, would stop to give him food.

“Why do you pretend not to know this fellow?” the cripple would shout, pointing one of his crutches at the fellow with the brown curls. “You’ve seen him so many times before! He used to be the king of the number five bus!”

For a moment the attention of the market would turn to the wild man; but he would only squat and stare at a wall, his back to them and the city.

Two years ago, he had come to Kittur with a name, a caste, and a brother.

“I am Keshava, son of Lakshminarayana, the barber of Gurupura Village,” he had said at least six times on his way to Kittur, to bus conductors, toll gatherers, and strangers who asked. This formula, a bag of bedding tucked beneath his arm, and the light pressure of his brother’s fingers at his elbow whenever they were in a crowd were all he had brought with him.

His brother had ten rupees, a bag of bedding that he too tucked under his right arm, and the address of a relative written on a paper chit that he kept crushed in his left hand.

The two brothers had arrived in Kittur on the five p.m. bus. They got off at the bus station; it was their first visit to a town. Right in the middle of the Hyder Ali Road, in the center of the biggest road in all of Kittur, the conductor had told them that their six rupees and twenty paise would take them no farther. Buses charged around them, with men in khaki uniforms hanging from their doors, whistles in their mouths that they blew on screechingly, shouting at the passengers, “Stop gaping at the girls, you sons of bitches! We’re running late!”

Keshava held on to the hem of his brother’s shirt. Two cycles swerved around him, nearly running over his feet; in every direction, cycles, autorickshaws, and cars threatened to crush his toes. It was as if he were at the beach, with the road shifting beneath him like sand beneath the waves.

After a while, they summoned up the courage to approach a bystander, a man whose lips were discolored by vitiligo.

“Where is Central Market, uncle?”

“Oh, that…It’s down by the Bunder.”

“How far is the Bunder from here?”

The stranger directed them to an autorickshaw driver, who was massaging his gums with a finger.

“We need to go to the market,” Vittal said.

The driver stared at them, his finger still in his mouth, revealing his long gums. He examined the moist tip of his finger. “Lakshmi Market or Central Market?”

“Central Market.”

“How many of you?”

And then: “How many bags?”

And then: “Where are you from?”

Keshava assumed that these questions were standard in a big city like Kittur, that an autorickshaw driver was entitled to such inquiries.

“Is it a long distance away?” Vittal asked desperately.

The auto driver spat right at their feet. “Of course. This isn’t a village, it’s a city. Everything’s a long distance from everything else.”

He took a deep breath and sketched a series of loops with his damp finger in the air, showing them the circuitous path that they would have to take. Then he sighed, giving the impression that the market was incalculably far away. Keshava’s heart sank; they had been swindled by the bus driver. He had promised to drop them off within walking distance of Central Market.

“How much, uncle, to take us there?”

The driver looked at them from head to toe, and then from toe to head, as if gauging their height, weight, and moral worth: “Eight rupees.”

“Uncle, it’s too much! Take four!”

The autorickshaw driver said, “Seven twenty-five,” and motioned for them to get in. But then he kept them waiting in the rickshaw, their bundles on their laps, without any explanation. Two other passengers negotiated a destination and a fare and crammed in; one of them sat on Keshava’s lap without any warning. Still the rickshaw did not move. Only after another passenger joined them, sitting in the front beside the driver, and with six people crammed into the tiny vehicle that had space for three, did the driver start kicking on his engine’s pedal.

Keshava could barely see where they were going, and thus his first impressions of Kittur were of the man who was sitting on his lap: of the scent of the castor oil that had been used to grease his hair and the hint of shit that he produced when he squirmed. After dropping off the rider in the front seat, and then the two men at the back, the autorickshaw meandered for some time through a quiet, dark area of town, before turning into another cacophonous street, lit by the glaring white light of powerful paraffin lamps.

“Is this Central Market?” Vittal shouted at the driver, who pointed to a sign:

KITTUR MUNICIPALITY CENTRAL MARKET:

ALL MANNER OF VEGETABLES AND FRUIT

AT FAIR PRICES AND EXCELLENT FRESHNESS

“Thank you, brother,” Vittal said, overwhelmed with gratitude, and Keshava thanked him too.

When they got out, they found themselves once again in a vortex of light and noise; they kept very still, waiting for their eyes to make sense of the chaos.

“Brother,” Keshava said, excited at having found a landmark that he recognized. He pointed: “Brother, isn’t this where we started out?”

And when they looked around, they realized that they were only a few feet away from where the bus driver had set them down. Somehow they had missed the sign, which had been right behind them all the time.

“We were cheated!” Keshava said in an excited voice. “That autorickshaw driver cheated us, Brother! He-”

“Shut up!” Vittal whacked his younger brother on the back of his head. “It’s all your fault! You’re the one who wanted to take an autorickshaw!”

The two of them had been brothers for only a few days.

Keshava was dark and chubby; Vittal was tall and lean and fair, and five years older. Their mother had died years ago, and their father had abandoned them; an uncle had raised them, and they had grown up among their cousins (whom they also called “brothers”). Then their uncle had died, and their aunt called Keshava and told him to go with Vittal, who was being dispatched to the big city to work for a relative who ran a grocery shop. And that was, really, how they had come to realize that there was a bond between them deeper than that between cousins.

They knew that their relative was somewhere in the Central Market of Kittur: that was all. Taking timid steps, they went into a dark market area where vegetables were being sold, and then, through a back door, they went into a well-lit market where fruits were being sold. Here they asked for directions. Then they walked up steps that were covered in rotting garbage and moist straw to the second floor. Here they asked again:

“Where is Janardhana the store owner from Salt Market Village? He’s our kinsman.”

“Which Janardhana-Shetty, Rai, or Padiwal?”

“I don’t know, uncle.”

“Is your kinsman a Bunt?”

“No.”

“Not a Bunt? A Jain, then?”

“No.”

“Then of what caste?”

“He’s a Hoyka.”

A laugh.

“There are no Hoykas in this market. Only Muslims and Bunts.”

But the two boys looked so lost that the man took pity, and asked someone, and found out that there were indeed some Hoykas who had set up shop near the market.

They walked down the steps, and went out of the market. Janardhana’s shop, they were told, displayed a large poster of a muscular man in a white singlet. They couldn’t miss it. They walked from shop to shop and then Keshava cried, “There!”

Beneath the image of the man with the big muscles sat a lean shopkeeper, unshaven, who was reading a notebook with his glasses down on the bridge of his nose.

“We are looking for Janardhana, from Gurupura Village,” Vittal said.

“Why do you want to know where he is?”

The man was looking at them suspiciously.

Vittal burst out, “Uncle, we’re from your village. We’re your kin.”

The shopkeeper stared. Moistening the tip of a finger, he turned another page in his book.

“Why do you think you’re my kin?”

“We were told this, Uncle. By our auntie. One-Eyed Kamala.”

The shopkeeper put the book down.

“One-Eyed Kamala’s…ah, I see. And what happened to your parents?”

“Our mother passed away many years ago, after Keshava’s-this fellow’s-birth. And four years ago, our father lost interest in us and just wandered away.”

“Wandered away?”

“Yes, Uncle,” Vittal said. “Some say he’s gone to Varanasi, to do yoga by the banks of the Ganges. Others say he’s in the holy city of Rishikesh. We haven’t seen him in many years; we were raised by our uncle Thimma.”

“And he…?”

“Died last year. We stayed on, and then it was too much for our aunt to support us. The drought was very bad this year.”

The shopkeeper was amazed that they had come all this way, without any prior word, on so thin a connection, just expecting that he would take care of them. He reached down into a counter, bringing out a bottle of arrack, which he uncapped and put to his lips. Then he capped the bottle and hid it again.

“Every day people come from the villages looking for work. Everyone thinks that we in the towns can support them for nothing. As if we have no stomachs of our own to feed.”

The shopkeeper took another swig of his bottle; his mood improved. He had rather liked their naïve recounting of that story of daddy having gone to “the holy city of Rishikesh…to do yoga.” Old rascal is probably shacked up with a mistress somewhere, and taking care of a brood of bastards, he thought, smiling in approval at how you can get away with anything in the villages. Stretching his hands high above his head as he yawned, he brought them down onto his stomach with a loud whack.

“Oh, so you’re orphans now! You poor fellows. One must always stick to one’s family-what else is there in life?” He rubbed his stomach. Look at the way they are staring at me, as if I were a king, he thought, feeling suddenly important. It was not a feeling he had had often since coming to Kittur.

He scratched his legs. “So, how are things in the village these days?”

“Except for the drought, everything’s the same, Uncle.”

“You got here by bus?” the shopkeeper asked. And then, “From the bus stand, you walked over here, I take it?” He got up from his seat. “Autorickshaw? How much did you pay? Those fellows are total crooks. Seven rupees!” The shopkeeper turned red. “You imbeciles! Cretins!”

Apparently holding the fact that they had been cheated against them, the shopkeeper ignored them for half an hour.

Vittal stood in a corner, his eyes to the ground, crushed by humiliation. Keshava looked around. Red-and-white stacks of Colgate-Palmolive toothpaste and jars of Horlicks were piled behind the shopkeeper’s head; shiny packets of malt powder hung from the ceiling like wedding bunting; blue bottles of kerosene and red bottles of cooking oil were stacked in pyramids up at the front of the shop.

Keshava was dark-skinned, with enormous eyes that stared lingeringly. Some of those who knew him insisted he had the energy of a hummingbird, and was always flapping around, making a nuisance of himself; others found him lazy and melancholic, liable to sit and stare at the ceiling for hours at a time. He smiled and turned his head away when he was scolded for his behavior, as if he had no conception of himself and no opinion on the matter.

Again the store owner took out the bottle of arrack and sipped a little more. Again this affected his mood for the better.

“We don’t drink here like they do in the villages,” he said, returning Keshava’s big stare.

“Only a little sip at a time. The customer never finds out that I am drunk.” He winked.

“That’s how it is in the city: you can do anything you want, as long as no one finds out.”

After drawing the shutters on his shop, he took Vittal and Keshava around the market. Everywhere men were sleeping on the ground, covered in thin bedsheets; after asking some questions, Janardhana led the boys to an alley behind the market. Men and women and children were sleeping in a long line all the way down the alley. Keshava and Vittal stood back as the store owner began negotiations with one of the sleepers.

“If they sleep here, they will have to pay the boss,” the sleeper complained.

“What do I do with them? They have to sleep somewhere!”

“Well, you’re taking a risk, but if you have to leave them here, try the far end.”

The alley ended in a wall that leaked continuously; the drainage pipes had been badly fitted. A large garbage bin at this end of the alley emitted a horrible stench.

“Isn’t uncle going to take us to his house, Brother?” Keshava whispered, when the store owner, having given them some advice about how to sleep out in the open, vanished.

Vittal pinched him.

“I’m hungry,” Keshava said after a few minutes. “Can we find uncle and ask him for food?”

The two brothers were lying side by side, wrapped in their bedding, next to the garbage bin.

In response, his brother entirely covered himself in his blanket, and lay inside, still, like a cocoon.

Keshava could not believe he was expected to sleep here-and on an empty stomach. However bad things had been at home, at least there had always been something to eat. Now all the frustrations of the evening, the fatigue, and the confusion combined, and he kicked the shrouded figure hard. His brother, as if he had been waiting for just such a provocation, tore the blanket off, caught Keshava’s head in his hands, and slammed it twice against the ground.

“If you make one more sound, I swear, I will leave you all alone in this city.” Then he covered himself with his bedding once more, and turned his back to his brother.

And though his head had begun to hurt, Keshava was frightened by what his brother had said. He shut up.

Lying there, his head stinging, Keshava wondered, dully, where it was decided that this fellow and this fellow would be brothers; and about how people came into the earth, and how they left it. It was a dull curiosity. Then he began thinking about food. He was in a tunnel, and that tunnel was his hunger, and at the end of the tunnel, if he kept going, he promised himself, there would be a huge heap of rice, covered with hot lentils, with big chunks of chicken.

He opened his eyes; there were stars in the sky. He looked up at them to block the stench of garbage.

When they arrived at the shop the following morning, the shopkeeper was using a long stick to hang plastic bags of malt powder on hooks in the ceiling.

“You,” the shopkeeper said, pointing to Vittal. He showed the boy how each plastic bag was to be fitted to the end of the pole, and then lifted up and snared on a hook in the ceiling.

“It takes forty-five minutes every morning to do this; sometimes an hour. I don’t want you to rush the work. You don’t mind working, do you?”

Then, with the redundancy of speech typical of the rich, he said, “If a man doesn’t work, he doesn’t eat in this world.”

While Vittal hung the plastic bags from the hooks, the shopkeeper told Keshava to sit behind the counter. He gave him six sheets of paper with the faces of film actresses printed on them, and six boxes of incense sticks. The boy was to cut out the pictures, put them on the incense-stick boxes, cover them with cellophane quickly, and Scotch-tape the cellophane to the box.

“With pretty girls on them, you can charge ten paise more,” said the storekeeper. “Do you know who this is?” He showed Keshava the picture he had just cut from the sheet. “She’s famous in Hindi films.”

Keshava began cutting out the next actress from the sheet. In front of them, below the counter, he could see where the store owner had hidden his bottle of hooch.

At noon, the shopkeeper’s wife came with lunch. She looked at Vittal, who avoided her gaze, and at Keshava, who stared at her, and said, “There’s not enough food for both of them. Send one of them to the barber.”

Keshava, following instructions he had memorized, made his way through the unfamiliar streets and came to a part of town where he found a barber working on the street. The barber had set up his stall against a wall, hanging his mirror from a nail hammered between a family-planning sign and an anti-tuberculosis poster.

A customer sat in a chair in front of the mirror, draped in a white cloth, and the barber was shaving him. Keshava waited till the customer had left.

The barber scratched his head and inspected Keshava from head to foot.

“What kind of work can I offer you, boy?”

At first the barber could think of nothing for him to do but hold the mirror for his customers to examine themselves after they had been shaved. Then he asked Keshava to clip the toenails and calluses from the customers’ feet as he shaved them. Then he told the boy to sweep the hair from the pavement.

“Serve him some food too, he’s a good boy,” the barber told his wife when she arrived with tea and biscuits at four o’clock.

“He’s the shopkeeper’s boy, he can get food himself. And he’s a Hoyka, you want him eating with us?”

“He’s a good boy, let him have some food. Just a little.”

It was only as the barber watched the boy wolf down the biscuits that he realized why the shopkeeper had sent the boy to him. “My God! You haven’t eaten all day?”

The next morning, when Keshava showed up, the barber patted him on the back. He still didn’t know exactly what to do with Keshava, but that no longer seemed to be a problem; he knew he could not let this boy, with his sweet face, starve all day at the shopkeeper’s place. In the afternoon, Keshava was given lunch. The barber’s wife grumbled, but her husband splashed Keshava’s plate with large helpings of fish curry.

“He’s a hard worker, he deserves it.”

That evening, Keshava accompanied the barber on a round of house calls; they went from house to house, and waited in the backyards for their customers to come outside. While Keshava set up a small wooden chair in the backyard, the barber threw a white cloth around the customer’s neck and asked him how he wanted his hair cut that day. After each appointment, the barber would flap the white cloth hard, dusting off the curls of hair from them; as they left the house and went to the next, the barber passed a commentary on the customer.

“That customer can’t get it up, you can tell from how limp his mustache is.”

Seeing Keshava’s blank stare, he said, “I guess you don’t know about that bit of life yet, eh, boy?” Then, regretting that confidence, he whispered to the boy, “Don’t repeat that to my wife.”

Each time they crossed the road, the barber seized the boy by the wrist.

“It’s dangerous out here,” he said, pronouncing the key word in English, in a tremulous manner, bringing out all the drama in that foreign word. “One moment of not watching out in this city, and your whole life is gone. Dangerous.”

In the evening Keshava came back to the alley behind the market. His brother was lying facedown on the ground, fast asleep, too tired even to lay out his bedding. Keshava unfolded the sheet and covered Vittal’s face up to his nose.

Since Vittal was already asleep, he pulled his mattress right next to his brother’s, so that their arms would touch. He fell asleep gazing at the stars.

A horrible noise woke him in the middle of the night: three kittens, chasing each other, right around his body. In the morning, he saw their neighbor feeding the kittens a bowl of milk. They had yellow fur, and their pupils were elongated, like claw marks.

“Have you got the money ready?” the neighbor asked him, when he came over to pet the kittens. He explained that Vittal and Keshava would have to pay a fee to a local “boss”-one of those who collected payments from the homeless of the streets of Kittur in return for “protection”-mainly from himself.

“But where is this boss? My brother and I have never seen him here.”

“You’ll see him tonight. That was the word we received. Have the money ready, or he’ll beat you.”

Over the next few weeks, Keshava developed a routine. In the mornings, he worked at the barber’s; after his work at the barber’s, he was free to do as he wished. He wandered about the market, which seemed to him to be bursting with shining things, expensive things. Even the cows that ate the garbage seemed so much larger in this market than they were back home. He wondered what there was in the garbage here that made the cows so fat. One black cow, an animal with extraordinary horns, walked about like a magical animal from some other land; back in the village he used to ride cows and he wanted to mount this animal, but he was frightened of doing so here in the city. Food seemed to be everywhere in Kittur; even the poor did not starve here. He saw food being scraped into the hands of the poor by the Jain temple. He saw a shopkeeper trying to sleep in the hubbub of the market, covering his head with a scooter helmet. He saw shops selling glass bangles, white shirts and undershirts in cellophane bags, maps of India with her states marked out.

“Hey! Move out of the way, you village hick!”

He turned. The man was driving a bullock cart laden with cardboard boxes stacked into a pyramid; the boy wondered what was in the boxes.

He wished he had a cycle, to ride fast up and down the main road and stick his tongue out at these haughty fellows riding the bullock carts, who were always rude to him. But most of all he wished he were a bus conductor. They hung from the sides of the buses, shouting at people to get in faster, cursing when a rival bus overtook them; they had their khaki uniforms and their black whistles hanging from the red cords around their necks.

One evening, nearly every bystander around the market looked up to see a monkey walking on a telephone wire that went over their heads. Keshava stared at the monkey in wonder. Its pink scrotum dangled between its legs, and huge red balls whacked against the sides of the wire. It leapt onto a building with a blue sun and spreading rays painted on it, and sat there, looking down indifferently at the crowd.

Suddenly an autorickshaw hit Keshava, flinging him down onto the road. Before he could scramble to his feet, he saw the rickshaw driver in front of him, yelling furiously.

“Get up! You son of a bald woman! Get up! Get up!” The driver had made a fist already, and Keshava covered his face with his hands and begged.

“Leave the boy alone.”

A fat man in a blue sarong stood over Keshava, pointing a stick at the autorickshaw driver. The driver grumbled, but turned away and returned to his vehicle.

Keshava wanted to catch the hands of the man in the blue sarong and kiss them, but the man had melted away into the crowd.

Once again, the cats woke Keshava in the middle of the night. Before he could go back to sleep, there was a loud whistle from the far end of the alley. “Brother’s here!” someone cried. A shuffling of clothes and blankets followed; men were getting up all around him. A potbellied man in a white singlet and a blue sarong was standing at the head of the alley, his hands on his hips. He bellowed:

“So, my little darling dumplings, you thought you could avoid payments to your poor bereaved Brother by coming here to this alley, did you?”

The fat man-the one who called himself Brother-went up to each of the men sleeping in the alley one by one. Keshava started: it was his savior from the market. With his stick Brother poked every sleeping person and asked, “How long has it been since you paid me? Huh?”

Vittal was terrified; but a neighbor whispered, “Don’t worry, he’ll only make you do some squats and say sorry, and then he’ll be off. He knows there’s no money in this lane.”

When he reached Vittal, the fat man stopped and inspected him carefully.

“And you, sir, my Maharaja of Mysore, if I may bother you a second,” he said. “Your name?”

“Vittal, son of the barber from Gurupura Village, sir.”

“Hoyka?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did you arrive in this lane?”

“Four months ago,” Vittal said, blurting out the truth.

“And how many payments have you made to me in that period?”

Vittal said nothing.

The fat man slapped him, and he staggered back, tripped on his bedding, and fell on the ground hard.

“Don’t hit him, hit me!”

The man in the blue sarong turned to Keshava.

“He’s my brother, he’s my only relative in the world! Hit me instead. Please!”

The fat man put down his stick; with narrowed eyes he examined the little boy.

“A Hoyka who is so brave? That’s unusual. Your caste is full of cowards, that’s been Brother’s experience in Kittur.”

He pointed at Keshava with his stick and addressed the entire lane:

“Everyone: notice the way he sticks by his brother. Wah, wah. Young fellow, for your sake, I spare your brother’s hide tonight.”

He touched Keshava’s head with the stick. “On Thursday, you’ll come see me. At the bus stand. I have work for brave boys like you there.”

The next morning, the barber was aghast when Keshava told him of his tremendous good fortune.

“But who’s going to hold the mirror?” he said.

He caught the boy by the wrist.

“It’s dangerous with those people in the buses. Stay with me, Keshava. You can come and sleep in my house so this Brother doesn’t bother you anymore; you’ll be like a son to me.”

But Keshava had lost his heart to the buses. Every day he went straight to the bus stand at the end of Central Market to scrub the buses clean with a mop and a bucket of water. He was the most enthusiastic of the cleaners. When he was inside the bus, he would take the wheel and pretend he was driving, vroom-vroom!

“A nice little catch here for us,” Brother told them-and the conductors and drivers laughed and agreed.

As long as he was at the wheel, pretending to be driving, he was loud, and used the coarsest language; but if anyone stopped him and asked, “What’s your name, loudmouth?” he would get confused, and roll his eyes, and slap the top of his skull, before saying, “Keshava-yes, that’s it. Keshava. I think that’s my name.” They would roar and say, “He’s a bit touched in the head, this fellow!”

One conductor took a liking to him, and told him to come along on his four p.m. round on the bus. “Only one round, you understand?” he warned the boy sternly. “You’ll have to get off the bus at five-fifteen p.m.”

The conductor returned to the stand with Keshava at half past ten.

“He brings good luck,” he said, ruffling the boy’s hair. “We beat all the Christian buses today; a clean sweep.”

Soon all the conductors began inviting him on their buses. Brother, who was a superstitious man, observed this develop ment, and declared that Keshava had brought good luck with him from his village.

“A young fellow like you, with ambition!” He tapped Keshava’s bottom with his stick. “You might even become the conductor of a bus one day, loudmouth!”

“Really?” Keshava’s eyes widened.

He went with the number 5 bus when it roared down the Market-Maidan Road at five o’clock, the rush hour, with the number 243 bus right ahead of it.

He was seated up front, near the driver’s seat, a cheering squad of one. “Are you going to let them beat us?” he asked the driver. “Let the Christians overtake a Hindu bus?”

The conductor waded his way through the crowd, issuing tickets, collecting money, his whistle in his mouth all the time. The bus picked up speed, just missing a cow. Tearing down the road, the number 5 bus drove parallel to the number 243, as a frightened scooter driver veered leftward for his life, and then-a big cheer from the passengers!-overtook its rival. The Hindu bus had won!

In the evenings, he washed the buses, and fixed incense sticks to the portraits of the gods Ganapati and Krishna by the drivers’ rearview mirrors.

On Sundays, he was free after noon. He explored Central Market, from the vegetable sellers at one end to the clothes sellers at the other end.

He learned to notice what people noticed. He learned what was good value for the money in shirts; what was a rip-off; what made for a good dosa, and a bad one. He acquired the connoisseurship of the market. He learned to spit; not like he had in the past, simply to clear his throat or nose, but with some arrogance-some style. When the rains failed again, and more fresh faces arrived at the market from villages, he mocked them: “Oh, you hicks!” He came to master life in the market; learned how to cross the road despite the continuous traffic, simply by holding his hand as a stop sign and moving briskly, ignoring the loud honks from the irritated drivers.

When there was a cricket match, the entire market would be abuzz. He went from store to store; each shopkeeper had a small black transistor that emitted a crackly noise of cricket commentary. The entire market was buzzing as if it were a hive, whose every cell secreted cricket commentary.

At night people ate by the side of the road. They chopped firewood, and fed it into the stoves, and sat around the fires, burnished by the flickering flames, looking haggard and hard. They cooked broth, and sometimes fried fish. He did petty favors for them, like carrying empty bottles, bread, rice, and blocks of ice to nearby shops on the back of his bicycle, and for this he was invited to eat with them.

He hardly saw Vittal anymore. By the time he got back to the alley, his brother was wrapped up in his blanket and was snoring softly.

One evening, he had a surprise: the barber, who worried that Keshava was falling into the influence of the “dangerous” fellows at the bus stand, took him to see a film, holding his hand tightly the whole way to the cinema. When they emerged from the theater, the barber told him to wait as he went to chat with a friend who sold paan leaves outside the cinema. As he waited, Keshava heard a drumbeat and yelling, and followed the noise around the corner to the source. A man stood beating a long drum outside a playground; next to him was a metal board painted with the images of fat men in blue underwear grappling with each other.

The drumbeater would not let Keshava in. Two rupees admission, he said. Keshava sighed, and turned toward the cinema. On his way back, he saw a group of boys climbing over the side of a wall into the playground; he followed them.

Two wrestlers were in the sandpit in the middle of the playground-one wore gray shorts, the other wore yellow. Six or seven other wrestlers stood by the pit, shaking their legs and arms. He had never seen men with such slender waists and such enormous shoulders before; it was so exciting just to watch their bodies. “Govind Pehlwan fights Shamsher Pehlwan,” announced a man with a megaphone.

The man with the megaphone was Brother.

Both wrestlers touched the ground, and then raised their fingers to their foreheads; then they charged into one another like rams. The one with the gray shorts stumbled and slipped, and the one with the yellow shorts pinned him down; then the situation was reversed. Things continued like this for some time, until Brother separated them, saying, “What a fight that was!”

The wrestlers, covered in dirt, came to the side of the pit and washed themselves clean. Under their shorts, to Keshava’s surprise, they each wore another pair of shorts, and they bathed in these. Suddenly one of the wrestlers reached over and squeezed the other’s buttock. Keshava rubbed his eyes to make sure he had seen what he had seen.

“Next up: Balram Pehlwan fights Rajesh Pehlwan,” came the announcement from Brother.

The pit was now dark in the center, where the wrestling and fighting had been most intense. Spectators sat on a grassy bank near the pit. Brother walked around the pit, offering commentary on the action. “Wah, wah,” he cried, whenever a wrestler pinned another one down. A cloud of mosquitoes swirled overhead, as if they too were excited by the match.

Keshava walked among the crowd of spectators; he saw boys who were holding each other’s hands, or resting their heads on each other’s chest. He was envious; he wished he had a friend here too, so he could hold his hand.

“Sneaked in, did you?” Brother had come up to him. He put an arm on Keshava’s shoulder and winked. “Not a good idea-the ticket money comes to me, so you’ve been swindling me, you rascal!”

“I have to go,” Keshava said, squirming. “The barber is waiting for me.”

“To hell with the barber!” Brother roared. He sat Keshava next to him, and returned to his commentary with the megaphone.

“I too was like you,” Brother told him, during the next break in his commentary. “A boy with nothing; I wandered here from my village with empty hands. And look what I’ve done for myself-”

He spread his arms wide, and Keshava saw them embrace the wrestlers, the sellers of peanuts, the mosquitoes, the man with the drum at the gate: Brother seemed like the ruler of all that was important in the world.

That night the barber came down the alley and embraced Keshava, who had lain down to sleep. “Hey! Where did you vanish to after the movies? We thought you were lost.” He put his hand on Keshava’s head and ruffled his hair.

“You’re like my son now, Keshava. I’ll tell my wife, we must take you into our house. Let her agree, then you come with me. This is your last night here.”

Keshava turned to Vittal, who had pulled down a corner of his blanket to overhear them.

Vittal pulled his blanket over his head and turned the other way. “Do what you want with him,” he mumbled. “I have enough work to do looking after myself.”

One evening, as Keshava was scrubbing a bus, a stick tapped the ground next to him.

“Loudmouth!” It was Brother, in his white singlet. “We need you for the rally.”

A whole gang of the boys from the bus station was being taken by the number five bus to the Nehru Maidan. An enormous crowd had gathered there. Poles had been stuck up over the maidan, and miniature Congress Party flags hung from them.

A huge stage had been erected in the middle of the ground, and above the stage hung the enormous painted image of a man with a mustache and thick black glasses, his arms raised as if in universal benediction. Six men in white clothes sat on the stage beneath the painting. A speaker was at a mike:

“He is a Hoyka, and sits next to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and gives him advice! And so the entire world can see that the Hoykas are trustworthy and reliable, despite the falsehoods that the Bunts and other upper castes spread about us!”

After a while, the MP himself-the same man whose face was on the painting-got to the mike.

At once, Brother hissed, “Start shouting.”

The dozen boys who were standing together at the back of the crowd filled their lungs and bellowed, “Long live the hero of the Hoyka people!”

They shouted six times, and then Brother told them to shut up.

The great man spoke for over an hour.

“There will be a Hoyka temple. No matter what the Brahmins say, no matter what the rich say: there will be a Hoyka temple in this town. With Hoyka priests. And Hoyka gods. And Hoyka goddesses. And Hoyka doors, and Hoyka bells, and even Hoyka doormats and doorknobs! And why? Because we are ninety percent of this town! We have our rights here!”

“We are ninety percent of this town! We are ninety percent of this town!” Brother instructed the boys to shout. The other boys did as told; Keshava came close to Brother and yelled into his ear:

“But we are not ninety percent of this town. That isn’t true.”

“Shut up and shout.”

After the procession, bottles of liquor were being handed out from trucks, and men jostled each other to grab them.

“Hey.” Brother signaled to Keshava. “Have a drink, come on, you deserve it.” He slapped him on the back; the others forced the liquor down his throat, and he coughed.

“Our star slogan shouter!”

That night, Vittal was waiting for Keshava in the alley with his arms folded.

“You’re drunk.”

“So what?” Keshava thumped his chest. “Who are you, my father?”

Vittal turned to the neighbor, who was playing with his cats, and shouted, “This guy is losing all sense of morality in this city. He can’t tell right from wrong any longer. He hangs out with drunks and thugs.”

“Don’t say things like that about Brother, I warn you,” Keshava said in a low voice.

But Vittal continued, “What the hell do you think you are doing, roaming around the city this late? You think I don’t know what kind of animal you’ve become?”

He swung his fist at Keshava; but his younger brother caught his hand.

“Don’t touch me.”

Then, without being entirely aware of what he was doing, he picked up his bedding and walked down the alley.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Vittal shouted.

“I’m leaving.”

“And where will you sleep tonight?”

“With Brother.”

He was almost out of the alley when he heard Vittal shouting his name. Tears were streaming down his face. Calling his name was not enough; he wanted Vittal to come running down, to touch him, to embrace him, to beg for him to come back.

A hand touched his shoulder; his heart leapt. But when he turned around, he saw not Vittal, but the neighbor. A second later, the cats had also come to him, and were licking his feet and meowing ferociously.

“You know Vittal didn’t mean that! He’s worried about you, that’s all: you have been mixing with a dangerous crowd. Just forget everything he said and come back.”

Keshava only shook his head.

It was ten o’clock at night. He walked into the bus-repair stand. In the darkness, two men with masks were cutting metal with a blue flame: fumes, sparks, the smell of acrid smoke, and loud noise.

After a while, one man in a mask gestured upward with his hand, but not knowing what that meant, Keshava walked right past the buses. He saw a woman crouching on the floor, whom he had never seen before. She was pressing the feet of Brother, who sat bare chested in a cane chair.

“Brother, take me in, I have nowhere to stay. Vittal has thrown me out.”

“Poor boy!” Without getting up from the chair, Brother turned to the woman pressing his feet. “You see what is happening to the family structure in our country? Brothers casting brothers out on the street!”

He led Keshava to a nearby building, which, he explained, was a hostel he ran for the best workers at the bus stand. He opened a door; inside were rows of beds, and on each bed lay a boy. Brother tore the cover off one bed. A boy was lying asleep with his head on his hands.

Brother slapped the boy awake.

“Get up, and get out of this house.”

Without any protest, the boy began scrambling to collect his stuff. He moved into a corner and crouched; he was too confused to know where to go. “Get out! You haven’t shown up to work in three weeks!” Brother shouted.

Keshava felt sorry for the crouching figure, and he wanted to shout out, No, don’t throw him out, Brother! But he understood: it was either this boy or him in this bed tonight.

A few seconds later, the crouching figure had vanished.

A long clothesline had been fixed between two of the crossbeams of the ceiling, and the white cotton sarongs of the boys hung from it, overlapping one another like ghosts stuck together. Posters of film actresses and the god Ayappa, sitting on his peacock, covered the walls. The boys clustered around the beds, staring at Keshava and taunting him.

Ignoring them, Keshava took out his things: a spare shirt, a comb, half a bottle of hair oil, some Scotch tape, and six pictures of film actresses that he had stolen from his relative’s shop. He stuck the pictures up over his bed with the Scotch tape.

At once the other boys gathered around.

“Do you know the names of these Bombay chicks? Tell us.”

“Here’s Hema Malini,” he said. “Here’s Rekha, she’s married to Amitabh Bachchan.” The statement provoked giggles from the boys around him.

“Hey, boy, she’s not his wife. She’s his girlfriend. He sticks it to her every Sunday in a house in Bombay.”

Keshava felt so angry when they said this that he got to his feet and shouted incoherently at them. He lay facedown in bed for an hour after that.

“Moody fellow. Like a lady, so delicate and moody.”

He pulled the pillow over his head; he began thinking of Vittal, wondering where he was right now, why he was not sleeping at his side. He began to cry into the pillow.

Another boy came over. “Are you a Hoyka?” he asked.

Keshava nodded.

“Me too,” the boy said. “The rest of these boys are Bunts. They look down on us. You and I, we should stick together.”

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.