Between the Assassinations

DAY THREE: ANGEL TALKIES

Nightlife in Kittur centers on the Angel Talkies cinema. Every Thursday morning, the walls of the town are plastered with hand-painted posters featuring a sketch of a full-bodied woman brushing her hair with her fingers; below is the title of the movie: HER NIGHTS, WINE AND WOMEN, MYSTERIES OF GROWTH, UNCLE’S FAULT. The words “Malayalam Color” and “Adults Only” are prominently featured on the posters. By eight a.m., a long line of unemployed men has queued outside Angel Talkies. Showtimes are ten a.m., noon, two p.m., four p.m., and seven-ten p.m. Seat prices range from 2.20 rupees for a seat at the front to 4.50 rupees for a “Family Circle” seat up in the balcony. Not far from the theater is the Hotel Woodside, whose attractions include a famous Paris cabaret, featuring Ms. Zeena from Bombay every Friday, and Ms. Ayesha and Ms. Zimboo from Bahrain every second Sunday. A traveling sexologist, Dr. Kurvilla, MBBS, MD, Mch, MS, DDBS, PCDB, visits the hotel on the first Monday of every month. Less expensive and seedier in appearance than the Woodside are a nearby series of bars, restaurants, hostels, and apartments. Thanks to the presence of a YMCA in the neighborhood, however, men of decency also have the option of a moral and clean hostel.

THE DOOR OF the YMCA swung open at two in the morning; a short figure walked out.

He was a small man with a huge protruding forehead, which gave him the look of a professor in a caricature. His hair, thick and wavy like a teenager’s, was oiled and firmly pressed down; it was graying around the temples and in the sideburns. He had walked out of the YMCA looking at the ground; and now, as if noticing for the first time that he was in the real world, he stopped for a moment, looked this way and that, and then headed toward the market.

A series of whistles assaulted him at once. A policeman in uniform, cycling down the street, slowed to a halt and put a foot on the pavement.

“What is your name, fellow?”

The man who looked like a professor said:

“Gururaj Kamath.”

“And what work do you do, that makes you walk alone at night?”

“I look for the truth.”

“Now, don’t get funny, all right?”

“Journalist.”

“For which paper?”

“How many papers do we have?”

The policeman, who may have been hoping to uncover some irregularity associated with this man, and hence either to bully or to bribe him, both acts which he enjoyed, looked disappointed, and then rode away. He had hardly gone a few yards when a thought hit him and he stopped again and turned toward the little man.

“Gururaj Kamath. You wrote the column on the riots, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said the little man.

The policeman looked down at the ground. “My name is Aziz.”

“And?”

“You’ve done every minority in this town a great service, sir. My name is Aziz. I want to…to thank you.”

“I was only doing my job. I told you: I look for the truth.”

“I want to thank you anyway. If more people did what you do, there wouldn’t be any more riots in this town, sir.”

Not a bad fellow after all, Gururaj thought, as he watched Aziz cycle off. Just doing his job.

He continued his walk.

No one was watching him, so he let himself smile with pride.

In the days after the riots, the voice of this little man had been the voice of reason in the midst of chaos. In precise, biting prose he had laid out for his readers the destruction caused by the Hindu fanatics who had ransacked the shops of Muslim shopkeepers; in a calm, unemotional tone he had blasted bigotry and stood up for the rights of religious minorities. He had wanted nothing more from his columns than to help the victims of the riots: instead, Gururaj now found himself something of a celebrity in Kittur. A star.

A fortnight ago, he had suffered the greatest blow of his life. His father had passed away from pneumonia. The day after Gururaj returned to Kittur from his ancestral village, having shaved his head and sat with a priest by the water tank in his ancestral temple to recite Sanskrit verses to bid his father’s soul farewell, he discovered that he had been promoted to deputy executive editor, the number two position at the newspaper where he had worked for twenty years.

It was life’s way of evening things out, Gururaj told himself.

The moon shone brightly, with a large halo around it. He had forgotten how beautiful a nocturnal walk could be. The light was strong and clean, and it laminated the earth’s surface; every object carved sharp shadows in it. He thought it might be the day after a full moon.

Even at this hour of the night, work continued. He heard a low, continuous sound, like the audible respiration of the nocturnal world: an open-backed truck was collecting mud, probably for some construction site. The driver was asleep at the wheel, his arm stuck out of one window, his feet out of the other one. As if ghosts were doing the work behind, morsels of mud came flying into the truck from that direction. The back of Gururaj’s shirt became damp, and he thought, But I will catch a cold. I should go back. That thought made him feel old, and he decided to go on; he took a few steps to his left and began to walk right down the middle of Umbrella Street; it had been a childhood fantasy of his to walk down the middle of a main road, but he had never been able to sneak away from his father’s watchful eyes long enough to fulfill the fantasy.

He came to a halt, right in the middle of the road. Then he quickly went into a side alley.

Two dogs were mating. He crouched down and tried to see exactly what was happening.

After completing the act, the dogs separated. One went down the alley and the other headed toward Gururaj, running with postcoital vigor and almost brushing his trousers as it went past. He followed.

The dog came onto the main road and sniffed at a newspaper. Taking the newspaper in its mouth, it ran back into the alley, and Gururaj ran behind it. Deeper and deeper the dog ran into the side alleys, as the editor followed. Finally, it dropped its bundle; turning, it snarled at Gururaj, and then tore the newspaper to shreds.

“Good dog! Good dog!”

Gururaj turned to his right to confront the speaker. He found himself face-to-face with an apparition: a man in khaki, carrying an old World War II-era rifle, his yellowish, leathery face covered with nicks and scars. His eyes were narrow and slanting. Drawing closer, Gururaj thought, Of course. He’s a Gurkha.

The Gurkha was sitting on a wooden chair out on the pavement, in front of a bank’s rolled-down shutter.

“Why do you say that?” said Gururaj. “Why are you praising the dog for destroying a paper?”

“The dog is doing the right thing. Because not a word in the newspaper is true.”

The Gurkha-Gururaj took him for an all-night security guard for the bank-rose from his chair and took a step toward the dog.

At once it dropped the paper and ran away. Picking up the torn and mangled and saliva-stained paper with care, the Gurkha turned the pages.

Gururaj winced.

“Tell me what you’re looking for: I know everything that’s in that newspaper.”

The Gurkha let the dirty paper go.

“There was an accident last night. Near Flower Market Street. A hit-and-run.”

“I know the case,” Gururaj said. It had not been his story, but he read the proofs of the entire paper every day. “An employee of Mr. Engineer’s was involved.”

“The newspaper said that. But it was not the employee who did it.”

“Really?” Gururaj smiled. “Then who did it?”

The Gurkha looked right into Gururaj’s eyes. He smiled, and then pointed the barrel of the ancient gun at him. “I can tell you, but I’d have to shoot you afterwards.”

Looking at the barrel of the rifle, Gururaj thought, I’m talking to a madman.

The next day, Gururaj was in his office at six a.m. First to get there, as always. He began by checking the telex machine, inspecting the reels of badly smudged news it was printing out from Delhi and Colombo and other cities he would never visit in his life. At seven he turned on the radio and began jotting down the main points of the morning’s column.

At eight o’clock, Ms. D’Mello arrived. The chattering of a typewriter broke the peace of the office.

She was writing her usual column, “Twinkle Twinkle.” It was a daily beauty column; a women’s hair-salon owner sponsored it, and Ms. D’Mello answered readers’ questions about hair care, offering advice and gently nudging her correspondents in the direction of the salon owner’s products.

Gururaj never spoke to Ms. D’Mello. He resented the fact that his newspaper ran a paid-for column, a practice he considered unethical. But there was another reason to be cool toward Ms. D’Mello: she was an unmarried woman, and he didn’t want anyone to assume that he might have the slightest interest in her.

Relatives and friends of his father had told Guru for years that he ought to move out of the YMCA and marry, and he had almost given in, thinking that the woman would be needed to nurse his father in his growing senility, when the need for a wife was removed entirely. Now he was determined not to lose his independence to anyone.

By eleven, when Gururaj came out of his room again, the office was full of smoke-the only aspect of his workplace that he disliked. The reporters were at their desks, drinking tea and smoking. The telex machine, off to the side, was vomit ing out rolls of smudged and misspelled news reports from Delhi.

After lunch, he sent the office boy to find Menon, a young journalist and a rising star at the paper. Menon came into his room with the top two buttons of his shirt open, a shiny gold necklace flashing at his neck. “Sit down,” Gururaj said.

Gururaj showed him two articles about the car crash on Flower Market Street, which he had dug out of the newspaper’s archives that morning. The first (he pointed to it) had appeared before the trial; the second after the verdict.

“You wrote both articles, didn’t you?”

Menon nodded.

“In the first article, the car that hits the dead man is a red Maruti Suzuki. In the second, it is a white Fiat. Which one was it, really?”

Menon inspected the two articles.

“I just filed according to the police reports.”

“You didn’t bother looking at the vehicle yourself, I take it?”

That night he ate the dinner that the caretaker at the YMCA brought up to his room; she talked a lot, but he was worried she was trying to marry him off to her daughter, and he said as little as possible to her.

As he went to sleep he set the alarm for two o’clock.

He woke up with his heart racing fast; he turned on the lights, left his room, and squinted at his clock. It was twenty minutes to two. He put on his trousers, patted his wavy strands of hair back into place, and almost ran down the stairs and out the gate of the YMCA and in the direction of the bank.

The Gurkha was there at his chair, with his ancient rifle.

“Listen here, did you see this accident with your own eyes?”

“Of course not. I was sitting right here. This is my job.”

“Then how the hell did you know the cars had been changed in the police-”

“Through the grapevine.”

The Gurkha talked quietly. He explained to the newspaper editor that a network of night watchmen passed information around Kittur; every night watchman came to the next for a cigarette and told him something, and that one visited the next one for a cigarette in turn. In this way, word got around. Secrets got spread. The truth-what really happened during the daytime-was preserved.

This is insane, this is impossible-Gururaj wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“So what actually happened-Engineer hit a man on his way back home?”

“Left him for dead.”

“It can’t be true.”

The Gurkha’s eyes flashed. “You’ve lived here long enough, sir. You know it can be. Engineer was drunk; he was coming back from his mistress’s home; he hit the fellow like some stray dog and drove away, leaving him there with his guts spilled out on the street. In the morning the newspaper boy found him like that. The police know perfectly well who drives down that road at night drunk. So the next morning two constables go to his house. Hasn’t even washed the blood off the front wheels of the car.”

“Then why-”

“He is the richest man in this town. He owns the tallest building in this town. He cannot be arrested. He gets one of the employees at his factory to say that he was driving the car when it happened. The guy gives the police a sworn affidavit. I was driving under the influence on the night of May twelfth when I hit the unfortunate victim. Then Mr. Engineer gave the judge six thousand rupees, and the police something less, perhaps four thousand or five, because the judiciary is of course more noble than the police, to keep quiet. Then he wants his Maruti Suzuki back, because it’s a new car and a fashion statement and he likes driving it, so he gives the police another thousand to change the identity of the killer car to a Fiat, and he has his car back and he’s driving around town again.”

“My God.”

“The employee got four years. The judge could have given him a harsher sentence, but he felt sorry for the bugger. Couldn’t let him off for free, of course. So”-the night watchman brought down an imaginary gavel-“four years.”

“I can’t believe it,” Gururaj said. “Kittur isn’t that kind of place.”

The foreigner narrowed his cunning eyes and smiled. He looked at the glowing tip of his beedi for a while, and then offered the beedi to Gururaj.

In the morning Gururaj opened the only window in his room. He looked down on Umbrella Street, on the heart of the town where he was born and where he had grown to maturity and where he would almost certainly die. He sometimes thought he knew every building, every tree, every tile on the roof of every house in Kittur. Glowing in the morning light, Umbrella Street seemed to say, No, the Gurkha’s story can’t be true. The clarity of the stenciling on an advertisement, the glistening spokes of the bicycle wheel ridden by the man delivering newspapers, said, No, the Gurkha is lying. But as Gururaj walked to his office, he saw the dense dark shade of a banyan tree lying across the road, like a patch of night left unswept by the morning’s broom, and his soul was in turmoil again.

Work began. He calmed down. He avoided Ms. D’Mello.

That evening, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper summoned him to his room. He was a plump old man, with sagging jowls and thick white eyebrows that looked like frosting and hands that trembled as he drank his tea. The tendons in his neck stood out in deep relief, and every part of his body seemed to be calling out for retirement.

If he did retire, Gururaj would inherit his chair.

“Regarding this story you’ve asked Menon to reinvestigate…” said the editor-in-chief, sipping the tea. “Forget it.”

“There was a discrepancy over the cars-”

The old man shook his head. “The police made a mistake on the first filing, that was all.” His voice changed into the quiet, casual tone Gururaj had come to recognize as final. He sipped more tea, and then some more.

The slurping sound of the tea being sipped, the abruptness of the old man’s manner, the fatigue of nights of broken sleep, got on Gururaj’s nerves and he said:

“A man might have been sent to jail for no good reason; a guilty man might be walking free. And all you can say is, let’s drop the matter.”

The old man sipped his tea; Gururaj thought he could detect his head move, as if in the affirmative.

He went back to the YMCA, and walked up a flight of stairs to his room. He lay down on the bed with his eyes open. He was still awake at two in the morning, when the alarm went off. When he emerged, he heard a whistling sound; the policeman, passing by him, waved heartily, as if to an old friend.

The moon was shrinking fast; in a few days it would be entirely dark at night. He walked the same route now, as if it were a ritual formula: first slowly, then crossing to the center of the road, and then dashing into the side alley until he reached the bank. The Gurkha was in his chair, his rifle on his shoulder, a glowing beedi in his fingers.

“What does the grapevine tell you tonight?”

“Nothing tonight.”

“Then tell me something from a few nights ago. Tell me what else the paper has published that is untrue.”

“The riots. The newspaper got that wrong, completely.”

Gururaj thought his heart would skip a beat. “How so?”

“The newspaper said that it was Hindus fighting Muslims, see?”

“It was Hindus fighting Muslims. Everyone knows that.”

“Ha.”

The next morning Gururaj did not turn up at the office. He went straight down to the Bunder, the first time since he had gone there to talk to the shopkeepers in the aftermath of the riots. He traced every restaurant and fish market that had been burned down in the riots.

He went back to the newspaper, rushed into the office of the editor-in-chief, and said:

“I heard the most incredible story last night about the Hindu-Muslim riots. Shall I tell you what I heard?”

The old man sipped his tea.

“I heard that our MP, along with the Mafia down at the Bunder, instigated the riots. And I heard that the hoodlums and the MP have transferred all the burned and destroyed property into the hands of their own men, under the name of a fictitious trust called the New Kittur Port Development Trust. The violence was planned. Muslim goons burned Muslim shops and Hindu goons burned Hindu shops. It was a real estate transaction masquerading as a religious riot.”

The editor stopped sipping. “Who told you this?”

“A friend. Is it true?”

“No.”

Gururaj smiled and said, “I didn’t think so either. Thanks.” He walked out of the room while his boss watched him with concern.

The next morning he arrived at the office late once again. The office boy turned up at his desk and shouted, “Editor-in-chief wants to see you.”

“Why didn’t you turn up at the City Corporation Office today?” the old man asked him as he sipped another cup of tea. “The mayor asked for you to be there; he released a statement on Hindu-Muslim unity and attacking the BJP that he wanted you to hear. You know he respects your work.”

Gururaj pressed his hair down; he had not oiled it this morning and it was unruly. “Who cares?”

“Excuse me, Gururaj?”

“You think anyone in this office doesn’t know that all this political fighting is just make-believe? That in reality the BJP and the Congress cut each other deals and share the bribe money they take on construction projects in Bajpe? You and I have known for years that this is true and yet we pretend to report things otherwise. Doesn’t this strike you as bizarre? Look here. Let’s just write nothing but the truth and the whole truth in the newspaper today. Just today. One day of nothing but the truth. That’s all I want to do. No one may even notice. Tomorrow we’ll go back to the usual lies. But for one day I want to report, write, and edit the truth. One day in my life I’d like to be a proper journalist. What do you say to that?”

The editor-in-chief frowned, as if thinking about it, and then said, “Come to my house after dinner tonight.”

At nine o’clock, Gururaj walked up Rose Lane, to a home with a big garden and a blue statue of Krishna with his flute in a niche in the front, and rang the bell.

The editor let him into the drawing room and closed the door. He asked Gururaj to sit down, gesturing at a brown sofa.

“You’d better tell me what’s bothering you.”

Gururaj told him.

“Let’s assume you have proof of this thing. You write about it. You’re not only saying that the police force is rotten, but also that the judiciary is corrupt. The judge will call you for contempt of court. You will be arrested-even if what you are saying is true. You and I and people in the press pretend that there is freedom of the press in this country, but we know the truth.”

“What about the Hindu-Muslim riots? Can’t we write the truth about that either?”

“What is the truth about it, Gururaj?”

Gururaj told him the truth, and the editor-in-chief smiled. He put his head in his hands and, in a laugh that seemed to rock the entire night, he laughed his heart out.

“Even if what you’re saying is indeed the truth,” the old man said, regaining control of himself, “and observe that I neither admit nor contradict any of it, there would be no way for us to publish it.”

“Why not?”

The editor smiled. “Who do you think owns this newspaper?”

“Ramdas Pai,” Gururaj said, naming a businessman in Umbrella Street whose name appeared as proprietor on the front page.

The editor shook his head. “He doesn’t own it. Not all of it.”

“Who does?”

“Use your brains.”

Gururaj looked at the editor-in-chief with new eyes. It was as if the old man had a nimbus around him, of all the things he had learned over the length of his career and could never publish; this secret knowledge glowed around his head like the halo around the nearly full moon. This is the fate of every journalist in this town and in this state and in this country and maybe in this whole world, thought Gururaj.

“Had you never guessed any of this before, Gururaj? It must come from the fact that you are not yet married. Not having had a woman, you have never understood the ways of the world.”

“And you have understood the ways of the world far too well.”

The two men stared, each feeling tremendously sorry for the other.

The following morning, as he walked to the office, Gururaj thought, It is a false earth I am walking on. An innocent man is behind bars, and a guilty man walks free. Everyone knows that this is so and not one has the courage to change it.

From then on, every night, Gururaj went down the dirty stairwell of the YMCA, gazing blankly at the profanities and graffiti scribbled on the walls, and walked down Umbrella Street, ignoring the barking and skulking and copulating stray dogs, until he got to the Gurkha, who would lift up his old rifle in recognition and smile. They were friends now.

The Gurkha told him how much rottenness there could be in a small town: who had killed whom in the past few years, how much the judges of Kittur had asked for in bribe money, how much the police chiefs had asked. They talked until it was nearly dawn and it was time for Gururaj to leave so he could get some sleep before going to work. He hesitated: “I still don’t know your name.”

“Gaurishankar.”

Gururaj waited for him to ask him his name; he wanted to say, Now that my father has died, you are my only friend, Gaurishankar.

The Gurkha sat with his eyes closed.

At four in the morning, walking back to the YMCA, he was thinking, Who is this man, this Gurkha? From some reference he had made to being a manservant in the house of a retired general, Gururaj deduced that he had been in the army, in the Gurkha regiment. But how he ended up in Kittur, why he hadn’t gone back home to Nepal, all this was still a mystery. Tomorrow I should ask him all this. Then I can tell him about myself.

There was an Ashoka tree near the entrance to the YMCA, and Gururaj stopped to look at the tree. The moonlight lay on it, and it seemed different somehow tonight; as if it were on the verge of growing into something else.

They are not my fellow workers; they are lower than animals.

Gururaj could no longer stand the sight of his colleagues; he averted his eyes as he came into the building, scurrying into his office and slamming his door shut as soon as he got to work. Although he continued to edit the copy he was given, he could no longer bear to look at the newspaper. What especially terrified him was catching his own name in print; for this reason he asked to be relieved from what had been his greatest pleasure, writing his column, and insisted only on editing. Although in the old days he used to stay up to midnight, now he left the office at five o’clock every evening, hurrying back to his room to fall on his bed.

At two o’clock sharp, he woke up. To save himself the trouble of finding his trousers in the dark, he had taken to sleeping in all his clothes. He almost ran down the stairs and thrust open the door of the YMCA, so he could speak to the Gurkha.

Then one night, at last, it happened. The Gurkha was not sitting outside the bank. Someone else had taken his chair.

“What do I know, sir?” the new night watchman said. “I was appointed to this job last night; they didn’t tell me what happened to the old fellow.”

Gururaj ran from shop to shop, from house to house, asking every night watchman he met what had happened to the Gurkha.

“Gone to Nepal,” one night watchman finally told him. “Back to his family. He was saving money all these years, and now he’s gone.”

Gururaj took the news like a physical blow. Only one man had known what was happening in this town, and that one man had vanished to another country. Seeing him gasping for air, the night watchmen gathered around him, made him sit down, and brought him cool, clean water in a plastic bottle. He tried explaining to them what had happened between him and the Gurkha all these weeks, what he had lost.

“That Gurkha, sir?” One watchman shook his head. “Are you sure you talked about these things with him? He was a complete idiot. His brain had been damaged in the army.”

“What about the grapevine? Is it still working?” Gururaj asked. “Will one of you tell me what you hear now?”

The night watchmen stared. In their eyes, he could see doubt turning into a kind of fear. They seem to think I’m mad, he thought.

He wandered at night, passing by the dim buildings, by the sleeping multitudes. He passed by large, still, darkened buildings, each containing hundreds of bodies lying in a stupor. I am the only man who is awake now, he told himself. Once, up on a hill to his left, he saw a large housing block burning with light. Seven windows were lit up, and the building blazed; it seemed to him to be a living creature, a kind of monster of light, shining from its entrails.

Gururaj understood: The Gurkha had not abandoned him at all. He had not done what everyone else in his life had done. He had left something behind: a gift. Gururaj would now hear the grapevine on his own. He lifted his arms toward the building burning with lights; he felt full of occult power.

One day as he came into work, late again, he heard a whisper behind him: “It happened to the father too, in his last days…”

He thought, I must be careful that others do not notice this change that is happening inside me.

When he reached his office, he saw that the peon was removing his nameplate from the door. I am losing everything I worked so hard for, for so many years, he thought. But he felt no regret or emotion; it was as if these things were happening to someone else. He saw the new nameplate on the door:

KRISHNA MENON

DEPUTY EDITOR

DAWN HERALD

KITTUR’S ONLY AND FINEST NEWSPAPER

“Gururaj! I didn’t want to do it, I-”

“No explanation is necessary. In your position, I’d have done the same.”

“Do you want me to speak to someone, Gururaj? We can arrange it for you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you have no father now…But we can arrange a wedding for you, with a girl of a good family.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We think you are ill. You ought to know that many of us in this office have been saying that for some time. I insist that you take a week off. Or two weeks. Go somewhere on holiday. Go to the Western Ghats and watch the clouds for a while.”

“Fine. I’ll take three weeks off.”

For three weeks he slept through the day and walked through the night. The late-night policeman no longer said, “Hello, editor,” as he had before, and Gururaj could see the man, as he cycled past, turn and stare at him. The night watchmen also looked at him oddly; and he grinned. Even here, even in this Hades of the middle of the night, I have become an outsider, a man who frightens others. The thought excited him.

He bought a child’s square blackboard one day, and a piece of chalk. That night he wrote at the top of the blackboard:

THE TRUTH ALONE SHALL TRIUMPH.

A NOCTURNAL NEWSPAPER

Sole correspondent, editor, advertiser, and subscriber:

Gururaj Manjeshwar Kamath, Esq.

Copying out the headline from the morning’s newspaper:

BJP City Councillor Blasts Congressman

He rubbed and scratched and rewrote it:

2 October 1989

BJP City Councillor, who needs money in a hurry to build a new mansion on Rose Lane, blasts congressman. Tomorrow he will receive a brown bag full of cash from the Congress Party, and then he will stop blasting the congressman.

Then he lay in bed and closed his eyes, eager for the darkness to arrive and make his town a decent place again.

One night he thought, There is only one night of my vacation left. The dawn was breaking already, and he hurried back to the YMCA. He stopped. He was sure that he was seeing an elephant outside the building. Was he dreaming? What on earth would an elephant be doing, at this hour, in the middle of his town? It was beyond the bounds of reason. Yet it looked real and tangible to his eyes; only one thing made him think it was not a real elephant-it was absolutely still. He said to himself, Elephants move and make some noise all the time, therefore you are not really seeing an elephant. He closed his eyes and walked up to the entrance of the YMCA; and when he opened them again he was staring at a tree. He touched the bark, and thought:

This is the first hallucination I have had in my life.

When he returned to the office the next day, everyone said Gururaj was back to his old self. He had missed his office life; he had wanted to come back.

“Thank you for your offer to arrange a marriage,” he told the editor-in-chief, as they had tea together in his room. “But I’m married to my work anyway.”

Sitting in the newsroom with young men just out of college, he edited stories with all his old cheer. After all the young men were gone, he stayed back, digging through the archives. He had come back to work with a purpose. He was going to write a history of Kittur. An infernal history of Kittur-in it every event in the past twenty years would be reinterpreted. He took out old newspapers, and carefully read each front page. Then, a red pen in hand, he scratched out and rewrote words, which fulfilled two purposes-one, it defaced the newspapers of the past, and two, it allowed him to figure out the true relationship between the words and the characters in the news events. At first, designating Hindi-the Gurkha’s language-as the language of the truth, he rewrote the Kannada-language headlines of the newspaper in Hindi; then he switched to English, and finally he adopted a code in which he substituted each letter of the Roman alphabet for the one immediately after it-he had read somewhere that Julius Caesar had invented this code for his army-and, to complicate matters further, he invented symbols for certain words; for instance, a triangle with a dot inside represented the word “bank.” Other symbols were ironically inspired; for instance, a Nazi swastika represented the Congress Party, and the nuclear disarmament symbol the BJP, and so on. One day, looking back over the past week’s notes, he found that he had forgotten half the symbols, and he no longer understood what he had written. Good, he thought, that is the way it should be. Even the writer of the truth should not know the truth entire. Every true word, upon being written, is like the full moon, and daily it wanes, and then passes entirely into obscurity. That is the way of all things.

When he was done reinterpreting each issue of the newspaper, he deleted the words “The Dawn Herald” from the masthead and wrote in their place, “THE TRUTH ALONE SHALL TRIUMPH.”

“What the hell are you doing to our newspapers?”

It was the editor in chief. He and Menon had sneaked up on Gururaj in the office one evening.

The editor in chief turned page after page of defaced newspapers in the archives without a word, while Menon tried to peek over his shoulder. They saw pages covered in squiggles, red marks, slashes, triangles, pictures of girls with pigtails and bloody teeth, images of copulating dogs. Then the old man slammed the archives shut.

“I told you to get married.”

Gururaj smiled. “Listen, old friend, those are symbolic marks. I can interpret-”

The editor in chief shook his head. “Get out of this office. At once. I’m sorry, Gururaj.”

Gururaj smiled, as if to say that no explanation was necessary. The editor in chief’s eyes were teary, and the tendons of his neck moved up and down as he swallowed again and again. The tears came to Guru’s eyes as well. He thought, How hard it has been for this old man to do this. How hard he must have tried to protect me. He imagined closed-door meetings where colleagues had been baying for his blood, and this decent old man alone had defended him to the end. I am sorry, my friend, for letting you down, he wanted to say.

That night, Gururaj walked, telling himself he was happier than he had ever been in his life. He was a free man now. When he got back, just before dawn, to the YMCA, he saw the elephant again. This time it did not melt into an Ashoka tree, even when he came close. He walked right up to the beast, saw its constantly flapping ears, which had the color and shape and movement of a pterodactyl’s wing; he walked around it, and saw that from the back, each of its ears had a fringe of pink and was striped with veins. How can this wealth of detail be unreal? he thought. This creature was real, and if the rest of the world could not see it, then the rest of the world was the poorer for that.

Just make one sound! He pleaded with the elephant. So I know for sure that I am not deluded, that you are for real. The elephant understood; it raised its trunk and roared so loudly that he thought he had been deafened.

“You are free now,” the elephant said, in words so loud they seemed like newspaper headlines to him. “Go and write the true history of Kittur.”

Some months later, there was news of Gururaj. Four young reporters went to investigate.

They muffled their giggles as they pushed open the door to the municipal reading room in the lighthouse. The librarian had been waiting for them; he ushered them in with a finger to his lips.

The journalists found Gururaj sitting at a bench, reading a newspaper that was partially covering his face. The old editor’s shirt was in tatters, but he seemed to have gained weight, as if idleness had suited him.

“He won’t say a word anymore,” the librarian said. “He just sits there till sunset, holding the paper to his face. The only time he said anything was when I told him I admired his articles on the riots, and then he shouted at me.”

One of the young journalists put his finger on the top edge of the newspaper and lowered it slowly; Gururaj offered no resistance. The journalist yelped, and stepped back.

There was a moist dark hole in the innermost sheet of the paper. Pieces of newsprint stuck to the corners of Gururaj’s mouth, and his jaw was moving.