Between the Assassinations E-Book

Adiga Aravind

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The dazzling new book from the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize: one of the summer's most eagerly anticipated works of fiction. In his compelling new work of fiction, Aravind Adiga has imagined the small Indian city of Kittur, an everytown nestling on the coast south of Goa and north of Calicut. Through the myriad and distinctive voices of its inhabitants, an entire Indian world comes vividly and unforgettably to life. From a middle-aged Communist to an Islamic terrorist; from the young children of a Tamil building-site worker to a privileged and alienated schoolboy; from an idealistic journalist to a Brahmin housemaid, Adiga has produced a microcosm of Indian life in the 80s, the years Between the Assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. Muslim, Christian and Hindu, high-caste and low-caste, rich and poor: all of Indian life - the 'sorrowful parade of humanity' - is here. Journeying through Kittur's streets and schoolyards, bedrooms and businesses, its inner workings and outer limits, Adiga conjures a remarkable fictional landscape. Sizzling with acid observations, and textured with wicked humour and gentle humanity, Between the Assassinations is a triumph of voice and imagination.

Leseprobe

Praise for Between the Assassinations:

‘Poverty, corruption, class and caste resentment and gross inequality are [Adiga’s] big themes… There is nothing subtle about his prose or its intention. It knocks you about the head like a sledgehammer.’ Chitra Ramaswamy, Scotland on Sunday

‘Between the Assassinations is unified by its preoccupation with the inner lives of Indians mired in an intricate system of social control. In increments of concretely realized detail, Adiga builds his portrait of Kittur… Impassioned and involving.’ Kevin Power, Sunday Business Post

‘Adiga observes this human tragedy with compassionate detachment... The have-nots either cannot write or write for their minority and therefore go largely unheard. Has Adiga given them a voice? Of course not. Rather he has given them his own voice, which is no cheap gift.’ Alan Taylor, Glasgow Herald

‘Adiga’s stories resemble those of Maupassant in depicting lives so restricted that the slightest gesture can cause disaster; and the pressure of desire is ever present, although its workings are devious… The collection has an impressive range and displays an alert, comic tenderness which can register delicate movements of indistinct feeling and the dignity of deflected lives.’ Bernard Manzo, Financial Times

Also by Aravind Adiga

The White Tiger

Copyright

First published in India in 2008 by Picador India.

First published in Great Britain in 2009 in hardback by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Aravind Adiga, 2008, 2009

The moral right of Aravind Adiga to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-1-848-87747-4

For Ramin Bahrani

Contents

Cover

Praise for Between the Assassinations

Copyright

Arriving in Kittur

Day One (Morning): The Railway Station

How the Town is Laid Out

Day One (Afternoon): The Bunder

Day Two (Morning): Lighthouse Hill

Day Two (Afternoon): St Alfonso’s Boys’ High School and Junior College

Day Two (Evening): Lighthouse Hill (The Foot of the Hill)

Day Three (Morning): Market and Maidan

The History of Kittur

Day Three (Afternoon): Angel Talkies

The Languages of Kittur

Day Four (Morning): Umbrella Street

Day Four (Afternoon): The Cool Water Well Junction

Kittur: Basic Facts

Day Five (Morning): Valencia (To the First Crossroads)

Day Five (Evening): The Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia

Day Six (Morning): The Sultan’s Battery

Day Six (Evening): Bajpe

Day Seven: Salt Market Village

Chronology

ARRIVING IN KITTUR

Kittur is on India’s south-western coast, between Goa and Calicut, and almost equidistant from the two. It is bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west, and by the Kaliamma river to the south and east. The terrain of the town is hilly; the soil is black and mildly acidic. The monsoons arrive in June and besiege the town through September. The following three months are dry and cool and are the best time to visit Kittur. Given the town’s richness of history and scenic beauty, and diversity of religion, race, and language, a minimum stay of a week is recommended.

Day One (Morning): 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, pot-bellied, 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 lunch-room 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 of 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 teashop 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 in the evening, just as Ramanna Shetty was ready to close up, Thimma, a local drunk, who had bought three cigarettes every night, would roar with delight to see Ziaud din, his bum and thighs pressed against the giant fridge, shoving it back into the shop, inch by inch.

‘Look at that whippersnapper!’ Thimma clapped. ‘The fridge 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-labouring 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-coloured 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 on the green cushion of the scooter, discussing the bold red words written in Kannada on the cornice of the temple: ‘Honour thy neighbour, 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, he 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 do his duty to his family, and 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 sun burned, 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 discoloured 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 teashops 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 25-paise 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 fridge 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 fridge 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 Ideal 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-discoloured 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 teashop, 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 teashop, 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 omelette 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 offloaded. Ziauddin shut his mouth, and carried the crates off the train and out of the station, where army trucks were waiting to load them.

One Sunday, he lay on the platform of the station, still asleep at ten in the morning, dead tired from the week’s labour. 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.’

He began shouting at them when 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 grey 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 towards the cheap hotels that filled 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 grey 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 dreamed of snow-covered mountains and a race of fair-skinned, courteous men who tipped like gods. In the morning, he returned to the guest house, 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 for -gotten all about Zia, he went back into his guest house and shut the door behind him.

As soon as his foreign guest had disappeared into the guest house, 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 a 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 further 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 guest house, 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 he 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 flavours 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 mid-air, 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 an -other 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 guest house 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 when 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 guest house 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-discoloured 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 guest house, 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 teashop, 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!’

HOW THE TOWN IS LAID OUT

In the geographical centre of Kittur stands the peeling stucco façade of Angel Talkies, a pornographic cinema theatre; regrettably, when the townsfolk give directions, they use Angel Talkies as a reference point. The cinema lies halfway down Umbrella Street, the heart of the commercial district. A significant chunk of Kittur’s economy consists of the manufacture of hand-rolled beedis; no wonder, then, that the tallest building in town is the Engineer Beedi Building on Umbrella Street, owned by Mabroor Engineer, reputed to be the town’s richest man. Not far from it lies Kittur’s most famous icecream shop, The Ideal Traders Ice Cream and Fresh Fruit Juice Parlour; White Stallion Talkies, the town’s only exclusively English-language film theatre, is another nearby attraction. Ming Palace, the first Chinese restaurant in Kittur, opened on Umbrella Street in 1986. The Ganapati Temple in this street is modelled on a famous temple in Goa and is the site of an annual pooja to the elephant-headed deity. Continue on Umbrella Street north of Angel Talkies and you will reach, via the Nehru Maidan and the train station, the Roman Catholic suburb of Valencia, whose main landmark is the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia. The Double Gate, a colonial-era arched gateway at the far end of Valencia, leads into Bajpe, once a forest, but today a fastexpanding suburb. To the south of Angel Talkies, the road goes uphill into the Lighthouse Hill, and down to the Cool Water Well. From a busy junction near the Well begins the road that leads to the Bunder, or the area around the port. Further south from the Bunder may be seen Sultan’s Battery, a black fort, which overlooks the road that leads out over the Kaliamma river into Salt Market Village, the southernmost extension of Kittur.

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, shrimps 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 whisky known to God or man – and poured a small peg each into two glasses embossed with the Air India maharajah 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 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 whisky and stirred.

He pulled up his trousers and zipped them. He frowned at the tainted whisky; 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 whisky 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 grey in his beard which 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 simple-minded 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 towards 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.’