Between the Assassinations

DAY ONE: THE RAILWAY STATION

The arches of the railway station frame your first view of Kittur as you arrive as a passenger on the Madras Mail (arrival early morning) or the West Coast Express (arrival afternoon). The station is dim, dirty, and littered with discarded lunch bags into which stray dogs poke their noses; in the evening, the rats emerge.

The walls are covered with the image of a jolly, plump, potbellied, and entirely naked man, his genitalia strategically covered by his crossed legs, who floats above a caption in Kannada that says: A SINGLE WORD FROM THIS MAN CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE. He is the spiritual leader of a local Jain sect that runs a free hospital and lunchroom in the town.

The famous Kittamma Devi Temple, a modern structure built in the Tamil style, stands on the site where an ancient shrine to the goddess is believed to have existed. It is within walking distance of the train station, and is often the first port of call for visitors to the town.

NONE OF THE other shopkeepers near the railway station would hire a Muslim, but Ramanna Shetty, who ran the Ideal Store, a tea-and-samosa place, had told Ziauddin it was okay for him to stay.

Provided he promised to work hard. And keep away from all hanky-panky.

The little dust-covered creature let its bag drop to the ground; a hand went up to its heart.

“I’m a Muslim, sir. We don’t do hanky-panky.”

Ziauddin was small and black, with baby fat in his cheeks, and an elfin grin that exposed big, white, rabbity teeth. He boiled tea for the customers in an enormous, pitted stainless-steel kettle, watching with furious concentration as the water seethed, overspilled, and sizzled into the gas flame. Periodically, he dug his palm into one of the battered stainless-steel boxes at his side to toss black tea powder, or a handful of white sugar, or a piece of crushed ginger into the brew. He sucked in his lips, held his breath, and with his left forearm tipped the kettle into a strainer: hot tea dripped through its clogged pores into small, tapering glasses that sat in the slots of a carton originally designed to hold eggs.

Taking the glasses one at a time to the tables, he delighted the rough men who frequented the tea shop by interrupting their conversations with shouts of “One-a! Two-a! Three-a-” as he slammed the glasses down in front of them. Later, the men would see him squatting by the side of the shop, soaking dishes in a large trough filled with murky bilge water; or wrapping greasy samosas in pages ripped from college trigonometry textbooks so they could be home-delivered; or scooping the gunk of tea leaves out of the strainer; or tightening, with a rusty screwdriver, a loose nail in the back of a chair. When a word was said in English, all work stopped: he would turn around and repeat it at the top of his voice (“Sunday-Monday, Good-bye, Sexy!”), and the entire shop shook with laughter.

Late one evening, just as Ramanna Shetty was ready to close up, Thimma, a local drunk, who bought three cigarettes every night, roared with delight to see Ziauddin, his butt and thighs pressed against the giant icebox, shoving it back into the shop, inch by inch.

“Look at that whippersnapper!” Thimma said, clapping. “The icebox is bigger than him, but what a fighter he is!”

Calling the whippersnapper close, he put a twenty-five-paisa coin in his palm. The little boy looked at the shopkeeper’s eyes for approval. When Ramanna Shetty nodded, he closed his fist and yelped in English:

“Thanks you, sir!”

One evening, pressing a hand down on the boy’s head, Ramanna Shetty brought him over to the drunk and asked, “How old do you think he is? Take a guess.”

Thimma learned that the whippersnapper was nearly twelve. He was the sixth of eleven children from a farm-laboring family up in the north of the state; as soon as the rains ended, his father had put him on a bus, with instructions to get off at Kittur and walk around the market until someone took him in. “They packed him off without even one paisa,” Ramanna said. “This fellow was left entirely to his own wits.”

He again placed a hand on Ziauddin’s head.

“Which, I can tell you, aren’t much, even for a Muslim!”

Ziauddin had made friends with the six other boys who washed dishes and ran Ramanna’s shop and slept together in a tent they had pitched behind the shop. On Sunday, at noon, Ramanna pulled down the shutters and slowly rode his blue-and-cream-colored Bajaj scooter over to the Kittamma Devi Temple, letting the boys follow on foot. As he entered the temple to offer a coconut to the goddess, they sat around the green cushion of the scooter, discussing the bold red words written in Kannada on the cornice of the temple:

HONOR THY NEIGHBOR, THY GOD.

“That means the person in the house next door is your God,” one boy theorized.

“No, it means God is close to you if you really believe in Him,” retorted another.

“No, it means, it means-” Ziauddin tried to explain.

But they wouldn’t let him finish: “You can’t read or write, you hick!”

When Ramanna shouted for them to come into the temple, Ziauddin darted in with the others a few feet, hesitated, and then ran back to the scooter. “I’m a Muslim, I can’t go in.”

He had said the word in English, and with such solemnity that the other boys were silent for a moment, and then grinned.

A week before the rains were due to start, the boy collected his bundle and said, “I’m going home.” He was going to his duty to his family, to work alongside his father and mother and brothers, weeding or sowing or harvesting some rich man’s fields for a few rupees a day. Ramanna gave him an “extra” of five rupees (minus ten paise for each of two bottles of Thums Up he had broken), to make sure he would return from his village.

Four months later, when Ziauddin came back, he had developed vitiligo, and pink skin streaked his lips and speckled his fingers and earlobes. The baby fat in his face had evaporated over the summer; he returned lean and sunburned, and with a wildness in his eyes.

“What happened to you?” Ramanna demanded, after releasing him from a hug. “You were supposed to come back a month and a half ago.”

“Nothing happened,” the boy said, rubbing a finger over his discolored lips.

Ramanna ordered a plate of food at once; Ziauddin grabbed it and stuffed his face like a little animal, and the shopkeeper had to say, “Didn’t they feed you anything back home?”

The “whippersnapper” was displayed to all the customers, many of whom had been asking for him for months; some who had drifted to the newer and cleaner tea shops opening up around the train station came back to Ramanna’s place just to see him. At night, Thimma hugged him several times, and then slipped him two twenty-five-paisa coins, which Ziauddin accepted silently, sliding them into his trousers. Ramanna shouted to the drunk, “Don’t leave him tips! He’s become a thief!”

The boy had been caught stealing samosas meant for a client, Ramanna said. Thimma asked the shopkeeper if he was joking.

“I wouldn’t have believed it myself,” Ramanna mumbled. “But I saw it with my own eyes. He was taking a samosa from the kitchen, and…” Ramanna bit into an imaginary samosa.

Gritting his teeth, Ziauddin had begun pushing the icebox into the shop with the back of his legs.

“But…he used to be an honest little fellow…” the drunk recalled.

“Maybe he had been stealing all along, and we just never knew it. You can’t trust anyone these days.”

The bottles in the icebox rattled. Ziauddin had stopped his work.

“I’m a Pathan!” He slapped his chest. “From the land of the Pathans, far up north, where there are mountains full of snow! I’m not a Hindu! I don’t do hanky-panky!”

Then he walked into the back of the shop.

“What the hell is this?” asked the drunk.

The shopkeeper explained that Ziauddin was now spouting this Pathan-Wathan gibberish all the time; he thought the boy must have picked it up from some mullah in the north of the state.

Thimma roared. He put his hands on his hips and shouted into the back of the shop, “Ziauddin, Pathans are white skinned, like Imran Khan; you’re as black as an African!”

The next morning there was a storm at the tea-and-samosa store. This time Ziauddin had been caught red-handed. Holding him by the collar of his shirt and dragging him out in front of the customers, Ramanna Shetty said:

“Tell me the truth-you son of a bald woman. Did you steal it? Tell me the truth this time, and I might give you another chance.”

“I am telling the truth,” Ziauddin said, touching his pink, vitiligo-discolored lips with a crooked finger. “I didn’t touch even one of the samosas.”

Ramanna grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him to the ground, kicked him, and then shoved him out of the tea shop, while the other boys huddled together and watched impassively, as sheep do when watching one of their flock being shorn. Then Ramanna howled: he raised one of his fingers, which was bleeding.

“He bit me-the animal!”

“I’m a Pathan!” Ziauddin shouted back, as he rose to his knees. “We came here and built the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort in Delhi. Don’t you dare treat me like this, you son of a bald woman, you-”

Ramanna turned to the ring of customers who had gathered around them and were staring at him and at Ziauddin, trying to make up their minds as to who was right and who was wrong: “There is no work here for a Muslim, and he has to fight with the one man who gives him a job.”

A few days later, Ziauddin passed by the tea shop, driving a cycle with a cart attached to it; large canisters of milk clanged together in the cart.

“Look at me,” he mocked his former employer. “The milk people trust me!”

But that job did not last long either; once again he was accused of theft. He publicly swore never to work for a Hindu again.

New Muslim restaurants were being opened at the far side of the railway station, where the Muslim immigrants were settling, and Ziauddin found work in one of these restaurants. He made omelets and toast at an outdoor grill, and shouted in Urdu and Malayalam, “Muslim men, wherever in the world you are from, Yemen or Kerala or Arabia or Bengal, come eat at a genuine Muslim shop!”

But even this job did not last-he was again charged with theft by his employer, who slapped him when he talked back-and he was next seen in a red uniform at the railway station, carrying mounds of luggage on his head and fighting bitterly with the passengers over his pay.

“I’m the son of a Pathan; I have the blood of a Pathan in me. You hear; I’m no cheat!”

When he glared at them, his eyeballs bulged, and the tendons in his neck stood out in high relief. He had become another of those lean, lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India, smoking their beedis in a corner and looking ready to hit or kill someone at a moment’s notice. Yet when old customers from Ramanna’s shop called him by his name, he grinned, and then they saw something of the boy with the big smile who had slammed glasses of tea down on their tables and mangled their English. They wondered what on earth had happened to him.

In the end, Ziauddin picked fights with the other porters, got kicked out of the train station too, and wandered aimlessly for a few days, cursing Hindu and Muslim alike. Then he was back at the station, carrying bags on his head again. He was a good worker; everyone had to concede that much. And there was plenty of work now for everyone. Several trains full of soldiers had arrived in Kittur-there was talk in the market that a new army base was being set up on the route to Cochin-and for days after the soldiers left, freight trains followed in their wake, carrying large crates that needed to be off-loaded. Ziauddin shut his mouth and carried the crates off the train and out of the station, where army trucks were waiting to be packed.

One Sunday, he lay on the platform of the station, still asleep at ten in the morning, dead tired from the week’s labor. He woke up with his nostrils twitching: the smell of soap was in the air. Rivulets of foam and bubble flowed beside him. A line of thin black bodies were bathing at the edge of the platform.

The fragrance of their foam made Ziauddin sneeze.

“Hey, bathe somewhere else! Leave me alone!”

The men laughed and shouted and pointed their lathered white fingers at Ziauddin: “We’re not all unclean animals, Zia! Some of us are Hindus!”

“I’m a Pathan!” he yelled back at the bathers. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

As he was shouting at them, something strange happened-the bathers all rushed away from him, crying, “A coolie, sir? A coolie?”

A stranger had materialized on the platform, even though no train had pulled up: a tall, fair-skinned man holding a small black bag. He wore a clean white business shirt and gray cotton trousers and everything about him smelled of money; this drove the other porters wild, and they crowded around him, still covered in lather, like men with a horrible disease gathering around a doctor who might have a cure. But he rejected them all, and walked up to the only porter who was not covered in lather.

“Which hotel?” Ziauddin asked, struggling to his feet.

The stranger shrugged, as if to say, Your choice. He looked with disapproval at the other porters, who were still hovering around, nearly nude and covered in soap. After sticking his tongue out at the other porters, Zia set off with the stranger.

The two of them walked toward the cheap hotels that lined the roads around the station. Stopping at a building that was covered in signs-for electrical shops, chemists, pharmacists, plumbers-Ziauddin pointed out a red sign on the second floor.

HOTEL DECENT

BOARDING AND LODGING

ALL FOODS AND SERVICES HERE

NORTH INDIAN SOUTH INDIAN CHINESE WESTERN

TIBETAN DISHES

TAXI PASSPORT VISA XEROX

TRUNK CALL FOR ALL COUNTRIES

“How about this one, sir? It’s the best place in town.” He put a hand on his heart. “I give you my word.”

The Hotel Decent had a good deal with all the railway porters: a cut of two and a half rupees for every customer they brought in.

The stranger lowered his voice confidentially. “My dear fellow, is it a good place, though?”

He emphasized the critical word by saying it in English.

“Very good,” Zia said with a wink. “Very, very good.”

The stranger crooked his finger and beckoned Zia closer. He spoke into Zia’s ear:

“My dear fellow: I am a Muslim.”

“I know, sir. So am I.”

“Not just any Muslim. I’m a Pathan.”

It was as if Ziauddin had heard a magic spell. He gaped at the stranger.

“Forgive me, sir…I…didn’t…I…Allah has sent you to exactly the right porter, sir! And this is not the right hotel for you at all, sir. In fact, it is a very bad hotel. And this is not the right…”

Tossing the foreign bag from hand to hand, he took the stranger around the station to the other side-where the hotels were Muslim owned, and where cuts were not given to the porters. He stopped at one place and said, “Will this do?”

HOTEL DARUL-ISLAM

BOARDING AND LOGING

The stranger contemplated the sign, the green archway into the hotel, the image of the Great Mosque of Mecca above the doorway; then he put a hand into a pocket of his gray trousers and brought out a five-rupee note.

“It’s too much, sir, for one bag. Just give me two rupees.”

Zia bit his lip.

“No, even that is too much.”

The stranger smiled. “An honest man.” He tapped two fingers of his left hand on his right shoulder. “I’ve got a bad arm, my friend. I wouldn’t have been able to carry the bag here without a lot of pain.” He pressed the money into Zia’s hands. “You deserve even more.”

Ziauddin took the money; he looked at the stranger’s face. “Are you really a Pathan, sir?”

The boy’s body shivered at the stranger’s answer.

“Me too!” he shouted, and then ran like crazy, yelling, “Me too! Me too!”

That night Ziauddin dreamt of snow-covered mountains and a race of fair-skinned, courteous men who tipped like gods. In the morning, he returned to the guesthouse, and found the stranger on one of the benches outside, sipping from a yellow teacup.

“Will you have tea with me, little Pathan?”

Confused, Ziauddin shook his head, but the stranger was already snapping his fingers. The proprietor, a fat man with a clean-shaven lip and a full, fluffy white beard like a crescent moon, looked unhappily at the filthy porter before indicating, with a grunt, that he was allowed to sit down at the tables today.

The stranger asked, “So you’re also a Pathan, little friend?”

Ziauddin nodded. He informed the stranger of the name of the man who had told him he was a Pathan. “He was a learned man, sir: he had been to Saudi Arabia for a year.”

“Ah,” the stranger said, shaking his head. “Ah, I see. I see now.”

A few minutes passed in silence. Ziauddin said, “I hope you’re not staying here a long time, sir. It’s a bad town.”

The Pathan arched his eyebrows.

“For Muslims like us, it’s bad. The Hindus don’t give us jobs; they don’t give us respect. I speak from experience, sir.”

The stranger took out a notebook and began writing. Zia watched. He looked again at the stranger’s handsome face, his expensive clothes; he inhaled the scent from his fingers and face. This man is a countryman of yours, Zia, the boy said to himself. A countryman of yours!

The Pathan finished his tea and yawned. As if he had forgotten all about Zia, he went back into his guesthouse and shut the door behind him.

As soon as his foreign guest had disappeared into the guesthouse, the owner of the place caught Ziauddin’s eye and jerked his head, and the dirty coolie knew that his tea was not coming. He went back to the train station, where he stood in his usual spot and waited for a passenger to approach him with steel trunks or leather bags to be carried to the train. But his soul was shining with pride, and he fought with no one that day.

The following morning, he woke up to the smell of fresh laundry. “A Pathan always rises at dawn, my friend.”

Yawning and stretching himself, Ziauddin opened his eyes: a pair of beautiful pale blue eyes was looking down on him, eyes such as a man might get when he gazes on snow for a long time. Stumbling to his feet, Ziauddin apologized to the stranger, then shook his hand, and almost kissed his face.

“Have you had something to eat?” the Pathan asked.

Zia shook his head; he never ate before noon.

The Pathan took him to one of the tea-and-samosa stands near the station. It was the place where Zia had once worked, and the boys watched in astonishment as he sat down at the table and cried:

“A plate of your best! Two Pathans need to be fed this morning!”

The stranger leaned over to him and said, “Don’t say it aloud. They shouldn’t know about us: it’s our secret.”

And then he quickly passed a note into Zia’s hands. Uncrumpling the note, the boy saw a tractor and a rising red sun. Five rupees!

“You want me to take your bag all the way to Bombay? That’s how far this note goes in Kittur.”

He leaned back in his chair as a serving-boy put down two cups of tea and a plate holding a large samosa, sliced into two and covered with watery ketchup, in front of them. The Pathan and Zia each chewed on his half of the samosa. Then the man picked a piece of the samosa from his teeth, and told Ziauddin what he expected for his five rupees.

Half an hour later, Zia sat down at a corner of the train station, outside the waiting room. When customers asked him to carry their luggage, he shook his head and said, “I’ve got another job today.” When the trains came into the station, he counted them. But since it was not easy to remember the total, he moved farther away and sat under the shade of a tree that grew within the station: each time an engine whistled past he made a mark in the mud with his big toe, crossing off each batch of five. Some of the trains were packed; some had entire carriages full of soldiers with guns; and some were almost entirely empty. He wondered where they were going to, all these trains, all these people…he shut his eyes and began to doze; the engine of a train startled him, and he scraped another mark with his big toe. When he got up to his feet to go for lunch, he realized he had been sitting on some part of the markings and they had been smudged under his weight; and then he had to try desperately to decipher them.

In the evening, he saw the Pathan sitting on one of the benches outside the guesthouse, sipping tea. The big man smiled when he saw Ziauddin, and slapped a spot on the bench next to him three times.

“They didn’t give me tea yesterday evening,” Ziauddin complained, and explained what had happened. The Pathan’s face darkened; Ziauddin saw that the stranger was righteous. He was also powerful: without saying a word, he turned to the proprietor and glowered at him; within a minute a boy came running out of the hotel holding a yellow cup and put it down in front of Zia. He inhaled the flavors of cardamom and sweet steaming milk, and said, “Seventeen trains came into Kittur. And sixteen left Kittur. I counted every one of them just like you asked.”

“Good,” the Pathan said. “Now tell me: How many of these trains had Indian soldiers in them?”

Ziauddin stared.

“How-many-of-them-had-Indian-soldiers-in-them?”

“All of them had soldiers…I don’t know…”

“Six trains had Indian soldiers in them,” the Pathan said. “Four going to Cochin, two coming back.”

The next day, Ziauddin sat down at the tree in the corner of the station half an hour before the first train pulled in. He marked the earth with his big toe; between trains he went to the snack shop inside the station.

“You can’t come here!” the shopkeeper shouted. “We don’t want any trouble again!”

“You won’t have any trouble from me,” Zia said. “I’ve got money on me today.” He placed a one-rupee note on the table. “Put that note into your money box, and then give me a chicken samosa.”

That evening Zia reported to the Pathan that eleven trains had arrived with soldiers.

“Well done,” said the man.

The Pathan, reaching out with his weak arm, exerted a little pressure on each of Ziauddin’s cheeks. He produced another five-rupee note, which the boy accepted without hesitation.

“Tomorrow I want you to notice how many of the trains had a red cross marked on the sides of the compartments.”

Ziauddin closed his eyes and repeated, “Red cross marked on sides.” He jumped to his feet, gave a military salute, and said, “Thanks you, sir!”

The Pathan laughed: a warm, hearty, foreign laugh.

The next day, Ziauddin sat under the tree once again, scrawling numbers in three rows with his toe. One, number of trains. Two, number of trains with soldiers in them. Three, number of trains marked with red crosses.

Sixteen, eleven, eight.

Another train passed by; Zia looked up, squinted, then moved his toe into position over the first of the three rows.

He held his toe like that, in midair, for an instant, and then let it fall to the ground, taking care that it not smudge any of the markings. The train left, and immediately behind it another one pulled into the station, full of soldiers, but Ziauddin did not add to his tally. He simply stared at the scratches he had already made, as if he had seen something new in them.

The Pathan was at the guesthouse when Ziauddin got there at four. The tall man’s hands were behind his back, and he had been pacing around the benches. He came to the boy with quick steps.

“Did you get the number?”

Ziauddin nodded.

But after the two of them had sat down, he asked, “What’re you making me do these things for?”

The Pathan leaned all the way across the table with his weak arm and tried to touch Ziauddin’s hair.

“At last you ask. At last.” He smiled.

The guesthouse proprietor, with the beard like the moon, came out without prompting; he put two cups of tea down on the table, then stepped back and rubbed his palms and smiled. The Pathan dismissed him with a movement of his head. He sipped his tea; Ziauddin did not touch his.

“Do you know where those trains full of soldiers and marked with red crosses are going?”

Ziauddin shook his head.

“Towards Calicut.”

The stranger brought his face closer. The boy saw things he had not seen before: scars on the Pathan’s nose and cheeks, and a small tear in his left ear.

“The Indian army is setting up a base somewhere between Kittur and Calicut. For one reason and one reason only-” He held up a thick finger. “To do to the Muslims of South India what they are doing to Muslims in Kashmir.”

Ziauddin looked down at the tea. A rippled skin of milk fat was congealing on its surface.

“I’m a Muslim,” he said. “The son of a Muslim too.”

“Exactly. Exactly.” The foreigner’s thick fingers covered the surface of the teacup. “Now listen: Each time you watch the trains, there will be a little reward for you. Mind-it won’t always be five rupees, but it will be something. A Pathan takes care of other Pathans. It’s simple work. I am here to do the hard work. You’ll-”

Ziauddin said, “I’m not well. I can’t do it tomorrow.”

The foreigner thought about this, and then said, “You are lying to me. May I ask why?”

A finger passed over a pair of vitiligo-discolored lips. “I’m a Muslim. The son of a Muslim too.”

“There are fifty thousand Muslims in this town.” The foreigner’s voice crackled with irritation. “Every one of them seethes. Every one of them is ready for action. I was only offering this job to you out of pity. Because I see what the Indians have done to you. Otherwise I would have offered the job to any of these other fifty thousand fellows.”

Ziauddin kicked back his chair and stood up. “Then get one of those fifty thousand fellows to do it.”

Outside the compound of the guesthouse, he turned around. The Pathan was looking at him; he spoke in a soft voice.

“Is this any way to repay me, little Pathan?”

Ziauddin said nothing. He looked down at the ground. His big toe slowly scratched a figure into the earth: a large circle. He sucked in fresh air, and released a hoarse, wordless hiss.

Then he ran. He ran out of the hotel, ran around the train station to the Hindu side, ran all the way to Ramanna Shetty’s tea shop, and then ran around the back of the shop and into the blue tent where the boys lived. There he sat with his mottled lips pressed together and his fingers laced tightly around his knees.

“What’s got into you?” the other boys asked. “You can’t stay here, you know. Shetty will throw you out.” They hid him there that night for old times’ sake. When they woke up he was gone. Later in the day he was once again seen at the railway station, fighting with his customers and shouting at them:

“-don’t do hanky-panky!”