Between the Assassinations

DAY ONE (AFTERNOON): THE BUNDER

You have walked down the Cool Water Well Road, past Masjid Road, and you have begun to smell the salt in the air and note the profusion of open-air fish stalls, full of prawns, mussels, shrimp, and oysters; you are now not far from the Arabian Sea.

The Bunder, or the area around the port, is now mostly Muslim. The major landmark here is the Dargah, or tomb-shrine, of Yusuf Ali, a domed white structure to which thousands of Muslims from across southern India make pilgrimage each year. The ancient banyan tree growing behind the saint’s tomb is always festooned in ribbons of green and gold and is believed to have the power to cure the crippled. Dozens of lepers, amputees, geriatrics, and victims of partial paralysis squat outside the shrine begging alms from visitors.

If you walk to the other end of the Bunder, you will find the industrial area, where dozens of textile sweatshops operate in dingy old buildings. The Bunder has the highest crime rate in Kittur, and is the scene of frequent stabbings, police raids, and arrests. In 1987, riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims near the Dargah, and the police shut down the Bunder area for six days. The Hindus have since been moving out to Bajpe and Salt Market Village.

ABBASI UNCORKED THE bottle-Johnnie Walker Red Label blended, the second-finest whiskey known to God or man-and poured a small peg each into two glasses embossed with the Air India maharaja logo. He opened the old fridge, took out a bucket of ice, and dropped three cubes by hand into each glass. He poured cold water into the glasses, found a spoon, and stirred. He bent his head low, and prepared to spit into one of the glasses.

Oh, too simple, Abbasi. Too simple.

He swallowed the spittle. Unzipping his cotton trousers, he let them slide down. Pressing the middle and index fingers of his right hand together, he stuck them deep into his rectum; then he dipped them into one of the glasses of whiskey and stirred.

He pulled up his trousers and zipped them. He frowned at the tainted whiskey; now came the tricky part-things had to be arranged so that the right man took the right glass.

He left the pantry carrying the tray.

The official from the state Electricity Board, sitting at Abbasi’s table, grinned. He was a fat, dark man in a blue safari suit, a steel ballpoint pen in his jacket pocket. Abbasi carefully placed the tray on the table in front of the gentleman.

“Please,” Abbasi said, with redundant hospitality; the official had taken the glass closer to him, and was sipping and licking his lips. He finished the whiskey in slow gulps, and put the glass down.

“A man’s drink.”

Abbasi smiled ironically.

The official placed his hands on his tummy.

“Five hundred,” he said. “Five hundred rupees.”

Abbasi was a small man, with a streak of gray in his beard that he did not attempt to disguise with dye, as many middle-aged men in Kittur did; he thought the white streak gave him a look of ingenuity, which he felt he needed, because he knew that his reputation among his friends was that of a simpleminded creature prone to regular outbreaks of idealism.

His ancestors, who had served in the royal darbars of Hyderabad, had bequeathed him an elaborate sense of courtesy and good manners, which he had adapted for the realities of the twentieth century with touches of sarcasm and self-parody.

He folded his palms into a Hindu’s namaste and bowed low before the official. “Sahib, you know we have just reopened the factory. There have been many costs. If you could show some-”

“Five hundred. Five hundred rupees.”

The official twirled his glass around, and gazed at the Air India logo with one eye, as if some small part of him were embarrassed by what he was doing. He gestured at his mouth with his fingers: “A man has to eat these days, Mr. Abbasi. Prices are rising so fast. Ever since Mrs. Gandhi died, this country has begun to fall apart.”

Abbasi closed his eyes. He reached toward his desk, pulled out a drawer, took out a wad of notes, counted them, and placed the money in front of the official. The fat man, moistening his finger for each note, counted them one by one; producing a blue rubber band from a pocket of his trousers, he strapped it around the notes twice.

But Abbasi knew the ordeal was not over yet. “Sahib, we have a tradition in this factory that we never let a guest depart without a gift.”

He rang the bell for Ummar, his manager, who entered almost at once with a shirt in his hands. He had been waiting outside the whole time.

The official took the white shirt out of its cardboard box. He looked at the design: a golden dragon whose tail spread around onto the back of the shirt.

“It’s gorgeous.”

“We ship them to the United States. They are worn by men who dance professionally. They call it ‘ballroom dancing.’ They put on this shirt and swirl under red disco lights.” Abbasi held his hands over his head and spun around, shaking his hips and buttocks suggestively; the official watched him with lascivious eyes.

He clapped, and said, “Dance for me one more time, Abbasi.”

Then he put the shirt to his nose and sniffed it three times.

“This pattern…” He pressed on the outlines of the dragon with his thick finger. “It is wonderful.”

“That dragon is the reason I closed,” Abbasi said. “To stitch the dragon takes very fine embroidery work. The eyes of the women doing this work get damaged. One day this was brought to my attention; I thought, I don’t want to answer to Allah for the damage done to the eyes of my workers. So I said to them, go home, and I closed the factory.”

The official smiled ironically. Another of those Muslims who drink whiskey and mention Allah in every other sentence.

He put the shirt back in its box and tucked it under his arm. “What made you reopen the factory, then?”

Abbasi bunched his fingers and jabbed them into his mouth. “A man has to eat, sahib.”

They went down the stairs together, Ummar following three steps behind. When they reached the bottom, the official saw a dark opening to his right. He took a step toward the darkness. In the dim light of the room, he saw women with white shirts on their laps, stitching threads into half-finished dragons. He wanted to see more, so Abbasi said, “Why don’t you go in, sahib? I’ll wait out here.”

He turned and looked at the wall, while Ummar took the official around the factory floor, introduced him to some of the workers, and led him back out. The official extended his hand to Abbasi just before he left.

I shouldn’t have touched him, Abbasi thought, the moment he closed the door.

At six p.m., half an hour after the women left the stitching room for the day, Abbasi closed the factory, got into his Ambassador car, and drove from the Bunder toward Kittur; he could think about one thing only.

Corruption. There was no end to it in this country. In the past four months, since he had decided to reopen his shirt factory, he had had to pay off:

The electricity man; the Water Board man; half the Income Tax Department of Kittur; half the Excise Department of Kittur; six different officials of the Telephone Board; a land tax official of the Kittur City Corporation; a sanitary inspector from the Karnataka State Health Board; a health inspector from the Karnataka State Sanitation Board; a delegation of the All India Small Factory Workers’ Union; and delegations of the Kittur Congress Party, the Kittur BJP, the Kittur Communist Party, and the Kittur Muslim League.

The white Ambassador car went up the driveway of a large, whitewashed mansion. At least four evenings a week Abbasi came to the Canara Club, to a small air-conditioned room with a green billiards table, to play snooker and drink with his friends. He was a good shot, and his aim deteriorated after his second whiskey, so his friends liked to play long sets with him.

“What’s bothering you, Abbasi?” asked Sunil Shetty, who owned another shirt factory in the Bunder. “You’re playing very rashly tonight.”

“Another visit from the Electricity Department. A real bastard this time. Dark-skinned fellow. Lower caste of some kind.”

Sunil Shetty purred in sympathy; Abbasi missed his shot.

Halfway through the game, the players all moved away from the table, while a mouse scurried across the floor, running along the walls until it found a hole to vanish into.

Abbasi banged his fist on the edge of the table. “Where does all our membership money go? They can’t even keep the floors clean! You see how corrupt the management of the club is?”

After that, he sat quietly with his back to the sign that said RULES OF THE GAME MUST BE FOLLOWED AT ALL TIMES and watched the others play, while resting his chin on the end of his cue stick.

“You are tense, Abbasi,” said Ramanna Padiwal, who owned a silk and rayon store on Umbrella Street and was the best snooker-shark in town.

To dispel this myth, Abbasi ordered whiskeys for everyone, and they stopped playing and held their glasses wrapped in paper napkins as they sipped. As always, what they talked about first was the whiskey itself.

“You know that chap who goes around from house to house offering to pay twenty rupees if you sell him your old cartons of Johnnie Walker Red Label?” Abbasi said. “To whom does he sell those cartons in return?”

The others laughed.

“For a Muslim, you’re a real innocent, Abbasi,” Padiwal, the silk and rayon salesman, said with a laugh. “Of course he sells them to the bootlegger. That’s why the Johnnie Walker Red you buy from the store, even if it comes in a genuine bottle and genuine carton, is bootlegged.”

Abbasi spoke slowly, drawing circles in the air with his finger: “So I sold the carton…to the man who will sell it to the man who will bootleg the stuff and sell it back to me? That means I’ve cheated myself?”

Padiwal shot a look of wonderment at Sunil Shetty and said, “For a Muslim, this fellow is a real…”

This was a sentiment that was widespread among the industrialists-ever since Abbasi had shut down his factory because the work was damaging the eyesight of his employees. Most of the snooker players owned, or had invested in, factories that employed women in the same manner; none had dreamed of closing a factory down because a woman here or a woman there went blind.

Sunil Shetty said, “The other day I read in the Times of India that the chief of Johnnie Walker said there is more Red Label consumed in the average small Indian town than is produced in all of Scotland. When it comes to three things”-he counted them off-“black marketing, counterfeiting, and corruption, we are the world champions. If they were included in the Olympic Games, India would always win gold, silver, and bronze in those three.”

After midnight, Abbasi staggered out of the club, leaving a coin with the guard, who got up from his chair to salute him and help him into his car.

Drunk by now, he raced out of the town and up to the Bunder, finally slowing down when the smell of sea breeze got to him.

Stopping by the side of the road when his house came into view, he decided he needed one more drink. He always kept a small bottle of whiskey under his seat, where his wife would not find it; reaching down, he slapped his hand around the floor of the car. His head banged against the dashboard. He found the bottle, and a glass.

After the drink, he realized he couldn’t go home; his wife would smell the liquor on him the moment he got past the threshold. There would be another scene. She never could understand why he drank so much.

He drove up to the Bunder. He parked the car next to a rubbish dump and walked across to a tea shop. Beyond a small beach the sea was visible; the smell of roasted fish wafted through the air.

A blackboard outside the tea shop proclaimed, in letters of white chalk, WE CHANGE PAKISTANI MONEY AND CURRENCY. The walls of the shop were adorned with a photograph of the Great Mosque of Mecca along with a poster of a boy and a girl bowing to the Taj Mahal. Four benches had been arranged in an outdoor veranda. A dappled white and brown goat was tied to a pole at one end of the veranda; it was chewing on dried grass.

Men were sitting on one of the benches. Abbasi touched one of the men on his shoulder; he turned around.

“Abbasi.”

“Mehmood, my brother. Make some room for me.”

Mehmood, a fat man with a fringe beard and no mustache, did so, and Abbasi squeezed in next to him. Abbasi had heard that Mehmood stole cars; he had heard that Mehmood’s four sons drove them to a village on the Tamil Nadu border, a village whose only business was the purchase and sale of stolen cars.

Alongside Mehmood, Abbasi recognized Kalam, who was rumored to import hashish from Bombay and ship it to Sri Lanka; Saif, who had knifed a man in Trivandrum; and a small white-haired man who was only called the Professor-and who was believed to be the shadiest of the lot.

These men were smugglers, car thieves, thugs, and worse; but while they sipped tea together, nothing would happen to Abbasi. It was the culture of the Bunder. A man might be stabbed in daylight, but never at night, and never while sipping tea. In any case, the sense of solidarity among the Muslims at the Bunder had deepened ever since the riots.

The Professor was finishing up a story of Kittur in the twelfth century, about an Arab sailor named bin Saad who sighted the town just when he had given up hope of finding land. He had raised his hands to Allah and promised that if he arrived safely on land, he would never again drink liquor or gamble.

“Did he keep his word?”

The Professor winked. “Take a guess.”

The Professor was always welcome at late-night chitchats at the tea shop because he knew many fascinating things about the port: how its history went back to the Middle Ages, for instance, or how Tippu Sultan had once installed a battery of French-made cannons here to scare away the British. He pointed a finger at Abbasi: “You’re not your usual self. What’s on your mind?”

“Corruption,” Abbasi said. “Corruption. It’s like a demon sitting on my brain and eating it with a fork and knife.”

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

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

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

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

The remark was greeted by a chorus of agreement.

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

He mimicked a corpse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She turned and fled. He hurried up the stairs.

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

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

“What?”

“They’re here.”

“Who?”

“The government.”

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

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

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

Abbasi smiled. The tax man with the mustache talked.

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

Abbasi smiled and waited for it.

It came quickly this time.

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

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

“A lot, lot, lot more.”

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

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

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

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

“Each.”

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

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

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

“Red Label would be acceptable.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Look here-”

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

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

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

“Sahibs.”

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

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

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

Ummar stared at him silently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone in that room was going blind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is sahib unhappy with us for some reason?”

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

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

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

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

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

He slapped his hand against his thigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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