Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

  He remembered again the fateful events. After the conversation at Shabbir Ali’s house, he had gone down to the Bunder. He had asked for Mustafa, describing him as a man who sold fertilizers; he had been directed to a market. He found a row of vegetable sellers, he asked for Mustafa, and was told, “Go upstairs.” He climbed the stairs. He found himself in a pitch-black space where a thousand men seemed to be coughing at once. He too began to cough. As his eyes got used to the dark, he realized he was in a pepper market. Giant gunnysacks were stacked up against the grimy walls, and coolies, coughing incessantly, were hauling them around. Then the darkness ended, and he arrived in an open courtyard. Once again he asked:

  “Where is Mustafa?”

  He was directed by a man lying on a cart of old vegetables toward an open door.

  He went in and found three men at a round table playing cards.

  “Mustafa’s not in,” said a man with narrow eyes. “What do you want?”

  “A bag of fertilizer.”

  “Why?”

  “I am growing lentils,” Shankara said.

  The man laughed. “What kind?”

  “Beans. Green gram. Horse gram.”

  The man laughed again. He put his cards down, went into a room, and hauled out an enormous gunnysack, putting it down by Shankara’s feet.

  “What else do you need to grow your beans?”

  “A detonator,” Shankara said.

  The men at the table all put down their cards together.

  In the inner room of the house, he was sold a detonator; he was told how to turn the dial and set the timer. It would cost more than Shankara had on him at that moment, so he came back the next week with the money, and took the bag and the detonator back with him by autorickshaw, and got off at the bottom of Old Court Road. He had hidden it all near the statue of Jesus.

  One Sunday, he went around the school. It was like the movie Papillon, one of his favorites, the scene where the hero plans on how to escape from jail-it was as exciting as that. He was seeing his school as if for the first time, with all the keenness of a fugitive’s eye. After that, on that fateful Monday, he took the bag of fertilizer with him to school and attached the detonator to it, turned the timer to one hour, and left it under the back row, where he knew no one would sit.

  Then he waited, counting off the hour minute by minute, like the hero in Papillon.

  At midnight, the phone began ringing.

  It was Shabbir Ali.

  “Lasrado wants to see us all in his office, man! Tomorrow, first thing!”

  All five of them had to be there in his office. The police would be present.

  “He’s going to have a lie detector.”

  Shabbir paused. Then he shouted, “I know you did it! Why don’t you confess? Why don’t you confess at once!”

  Shankara’s blood went chill. “Fuck you!” he yelled back, and slammed down the phone. But then he thought, My God, so Shabbir knew all along. Of course! Everyone knew all along. Everyone in the bad boys’ gang must have known; and by now they must have told the whole town. He thought, Let me confess right now. It would be best. Perhaps the police would give him some credit for having turned himself in. He dialed 100, which he thought was the police number.

  “I want to speak to the deputy inspector general, please.”

  “Ha?”

  The voice was followed by a shriek of incomprehension.

  Thinking he’d get better results, he spoke in English: “I want to confess. I planted the bomb.”

  “Ha?”

  “The bomb. It was me.”

  “Ha?”

  Another pause. The phone was transferred.

  He repeated his message to another person on the other line.

  Another pause.

  “Sorrysorrysorry?”

  He put the phone down in exasperation. Damn Indian police-couldn’t even answer a phone call properly; how the hell were they going to catch him?

  Then the phone rang again: Irfan, calling on behalf of the twins.

  “Shabbir just called us; he says we did it, man. I didn’t do it! Rizvan didn’t do it either! Shabbir is lying!”

  Then he understood: Shabbir had called everyone, and accused them all-hoping to extract a confession! Relief mingled with anger. He had almost been trapped! Now he felt anxious that the police might trace his 100 call back to his phone. He needed a plan, he thought, a plan. Yes, he got it: he would say, if they asked, that he was calling to report Shabbir Ali for the crime. Shabbir is a Muslim, he would say. He wanted to do this to punish India for Kashmir.

  The following morning, Lasrado was in the principal’s office, sitting next to Father Almeida, who was at his desk. The two men stared at the five suspects.

  “I have scientipic evidence,” Lasrado said. “Pingerprints survive on the black stub of the bomb.” He sensed incredulity among the accused, so he added, “Pingerprints have survived even on the loaves of bread lept behind in the Paraoh’s tomb. They are indestructible. We will pind the pucker who has done this, rest assured.”

  He pointed a finger.

  “And you, Pinto, a Christian boy-shame on you!”

  “I didn’t do it, sir,” Pinto said.

  Shankara wondered. Should he also throw in an interjection of his innocence, just to be safe?

  Lasrado looked at them piercingly, waiting for the guilty party to turn himself in. Minutes passed. Shankara understood: He has no fingerprints. He has no lie detector. He is desperate. He has been humiliated, mocked, and rendered a joke in college, and he wants revenge.

  “You puckers!” Lasrado shouted. And then, again, in a trembling voice, “Are you lapping at me? Are you lapping because I cannot say the letter ‘epp’?”

  Now the boys could barely control themselves. Shankara saw that even the principal, having turned his face to the ground, was trying to suppress his laughter. Lasrado knew this; you could see it on his face. Shankara thought, This man has been mocked his whole life because of his speech impediment. That’s why he has been such a jerk in class. And now his entire life’s work has been destroyed by this bomb; he will never be able to look back on his life with the pride, however false, that other professors do; never be able to say, at his farewell party, “My students, although I was strict, loved me.” Always there would be someone whispering at the back, “Yes, they loved you so much they exploded a bomb in your class!”

  At that moment, Shankara thought, I wish I had just left this man alone. I wish I had not humiliated him, as so many have humiliated me and my mother.

  “I did it, sir.”

  Everyone in the room turned to Shankara.

  “I did it,” he said. “Now stop bothering these other boys and punish me.”

  Lasrado banged his hand on the desk. “Motherpucker, is this a joke?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Op course it is a joke!” Lasrado shouted. “You are mocking me! You are mocking me in public!”

  “No, sir-”

  “Shut up!” Lasrado said. “Shut up!” He flexed a finger and pointed it wildly around the room.

  “Puckers! Puckers! Get out!”

  Shankara walked out with the four innocent ones. He could see that they did not believe his confession: they too thought he had been mocking the teacher to his face.

  “You went too far there,” Shabbir Ali said. “You really have no respect for anything in this world, man.”

  Shankara waited outside the college, smoking. He was waiting for Lasrado. When the door to the staff room opened and the chemistry professor walked out, Shankara threw the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with a scrape of his shoe. He watched his teacher for a while. He wished there were some way he could go up to him and say he was sorry.

  DAY TWO (EVENING): LIGHTHOUSE HILL (THE FOOT OF THE HILL)

  You are on a road surrounded by ancient banyan trees; the smell of neem is in the air, an eagle glides overhead. Old Court Road-a long, desolate road with a reputation as a hangout for prostitute
s and pimps-leads down from the top of the hill to St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School and Junior College.

  Next to the school you will find a whitewashed mosque dating back to the time of Tippu Sultan; according to local legend, Christians from Valencia suspected of being British sympathizers were tortured here. The mosque is the focus of a legal tussle between the school authorities and a local Islamic organization, both of which claim possession of the land on which it stands. Muslim students from the school are allowed, every Friday, to leave classes for an hour to offer namaz at this mosque, provided they bring a signed note from their fathers, or in case of boys whose fathers are working in the Gulf, from a male guardian. From a bus stand in front of the mosque, express buses go to Salt Market Village.

  At least four stalls stand outside the mosque, selling sugarcane juice and Bombay-style bhelpuri and charmuri to passengers at the bus stand.

  A FLURRY OF alarm bells rang at ten to nine, warning that this was no ordinary morning. It was a Morning of Martyrs, the thirty-seventh anniversary of the day Mahatma Gandhi had sacrificed his life so that India might live.

  Thousands of miles away, in the heart of the nation, in chilly New Delhi, the President was about to bow his head before a sacred torch. Echoing through the massive Gothic edifice of St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School-through thirty-six classrooms with vaulted ceilings, two outdoor lavatories, a chemistry-cum-biology laboratory, and a refectory where some of the priests were still finishing breakfast-the alarm bells announced that it was time for the school to do the same.

  In the Staff Room, Mr. D’Mello, assistant headmaster, folded his copy of the newspaper, noisily, like a pelican folding its wings. Tossing the paper on a sandalwood table, Mr. D’Mello struggled against his paunch to get to his feet. He was the last to leave the Staff Room.

  Six hundred and twenty-three boys, pouring out of classrooms and eventually merging into one long line, proceeded into the Assembly Square. In ten minutes they had formed a geometrical pattern, a tight grid around the flagpole at the center of the square.

  By the flagpole stood an old wooden platform. And next to the platform stood Mr. D’Mello, drawing the morning air into his lungs and shouting:

  “A-ten-shannn!”

  The students shuffled in concert. Thump! Their feet knocked the chatter out of the square. Now the morning was ready for the somber ceremony.

  The guest of honor had fallen asleep. From the top of the flagpole, the national tricolor hung, limp and crumpled, entirely uninterested in the events organized for its benefit. Alvarez, the old school peon, tugged on a blue cord to goad the recalcitrant piece of cloth into a respectable tautness.

  Mr. D’Mello sighed and gave up on the flag. His lungs swelled again:

  “Sa-loot!”

  The wooden platform began to creak noisily: Father Mendonza, Junior School headmaster, was ascending the steps. At a sign from Mr. D’Mello, he cleared his throat into the booming mike, and launched into a speech on the glories of dying young for your country.

  A series of black boxes amplified his nervous voice across the square. The boys listened to their headmaster spellbound. The Jesuit told them the blood of Bhagat Singh and Indira Gandhi fertilized the earth on which they stood, and they brimmed with pride.

  Mr. D’Mello, squinting fiercely, kept an eye on the little patriots. He knew that the whole humbug would end any moment. After thirty-three years in an all-boys’ school, no secret of human nature was hidden from him.

  The headmaster lumbered toward the crucial part of the morning’s speech.

  “It is of course customary on Martyrs’ Day for the government to issue every school in the state with Free Film Day tickets for that following Sunday,” he said. It was as if an electric current had jolted the square. The boys became breathless with anticipation.

  “But this year…” The headmaster’s voice quavered. “I regret to announce that there will be no Free Film Day.”

  For a moment, not a sound. Then the entire square let out one big, aching, disbelieving groan.

  “The government has made a terrible mistake,” the head master said, trying to explain. “A terrible, terrible mistake…They have asked you to go to a house of sin…”

  Mr. D’Mello wondered what the headmaster was prattling on about. It was time to bring the speech to an end and send the brats back to class.

  “I cannot even find the words to tell you…it has been a terrible mix-up. I am sorry. I…am…”

  Mr. D’Mello was looking around for Girish when a movement at the back of the square caught his eye. Trouble had begun. The assistant headmaster, hindered by his massive paunch, struggled to descend from the podium, but then, with a surprising litheness, he slipped through the rows of boys and homed in on the danger zone. Students turned on their toes to watch him as he made his way to the back. His right hand trembled.

  A brown dog had climbed up from the playground below the Assembly Square and was loping about behind the boys. Some troublemakers were trying to persuade it to draw nearer with soft whistles and clicks of their tongue.

  “Stop that at once!” D’Mello-he was gasping for breath already-stamped his foot toward the dog. The indulged animal mistook the fat man’s advance for another blandishment. The teacher lunged at the dog, and it pulled back, but as he stopped to breathe, it raced back toward him.

  The boys were laughing openly now. Waves of confusion spread throughout the square. Over the speaker system the headmaster’s voice wobbled, with a hint of desperation.

  “…You boys have no right to misbehave…The Free Film Day is a privilege, not a right…”

  “Stone it! Stone it!” someone shouted at D’Mello.

  In a moment of panic, the teacher obeyed. Whack! The stone caught the dog on the belly. The animal yelped in pain-he saw a gleam of betrayal in its eyes-before it bounded out of the square and ran down the steps of the playground.

  A sensation of sickness tightened in Mr. D’Mello’s gut. The poor animal had been hurt. Turning around, he saw a sea of grinning boys. One of them had goaded him to stone the animal; he swung around, picked a boy at random-only hesitating for a split second to make sure that it wasn’t Girish-and slapped him hard, twice.

  When Mr. D’Mello walked into the Staff Room, he found all the other teachers gathered around the sandalwood table. The men were dressed alike, in light-colored half-sleeve shirts, closely checked, with brown or blue trousers that widened into bell-bottoms, while the few women wore peach or yellow polyester-and-cotton-blended saris.

  Mr. Rogers, the biology-cum-geology teacher, was reading aloud a schedule of the Free Film Day from the Kannada-language newspaper.

  Film One: Save the Tiger

  Film Two: The Importance of Physical Exercise

  Bonus Reel: The Advantages of Native Sports (with special attention to Kabbadi and Kho-Kho)

  After that harmless listing came the bombshell.

  Where to send your son or daughter on Free Film Day (1985):

  1. St. Milagres Boys’ High School: surnames A to N, White Stallion Talkies; O to Z, Belmore Theater.

  2. St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School: surnames A to N, Belmore Theater; O to Z, Angel Talkies.

  “Half our school!” Mr. Rogers’s voice whistled in excitement. “Half our school to Angel Talkies!”

  Young Mr. Gopalkrishna Bhatt, only a year out of the teachers’ college in Belgaum, tended to supply the chorus on such occasions. He raised his arms fatalistically:

  “What a mix-up! Sending our children to that place!”

  Mr. Pundit, senior Kannada language teacher, scoffed at the naïveté of his colleagues. He was a short silver-haired man of startling opinions.

  “This is no mix-up, it’s deliberate! The Angel Talkies has bribed all those bloody politicians in Bangalore so they’d send our boys to a house of sin!”

  Now the teachers were divided between those who thought it was a mix-up, and those who thought it was a deliberate ploy to corrupt the youth.


  “What do you think, Mr. D’Mello?” young Mr. Bhatt called out.

  Instead of replying, Mr. D’Mello dragged a cane chair from the sandalwood table toward an open window at the far end of the Staff Room. It was a sunny morning: he had a blue sky, rolling hills, a private vista of the Arabian Sea.

  The sky was a dazzling light blue, a thing meant for meditation. A few perfectly formed clouds, like wishes that had been granted, floated through the azure. The arc of Heaven deepened in color as it stretched toward the horizon and touched a crest of the Arabian Sea. Mr. D’Mello invited the morning’s beauty into his agitated mind.

  “What a mix-up, eh, Mr. D’Mello?”

  Gopalkrishna Bhatt hopped onto the window ledge, block ing the view of the sea. Dangling his legs gleefully, the young man flashed a gap-toothed smile at his senior colleague.

  “The only mix-up, Mr. Bhatt,” said the assistant headmaster, “was made on fifteen August 1947, when we thought this country could be run by a people’s democracy instead of a military dictatorship.”

  The young teacher nodded his head. “Yes, yes, how true. What about the Emergency, sir-wasn’t that a good thing?”

  “We threw that chance away,” Mr. D’Mello said. “And now they’ve shot dead the only politician we ever had who knew how to give this country the medicine it needed.” He closed his eyes again, and concentrated on an image of an empty beach in an attempt to dispel Mr. Bhatt’s presence.

  Mr. Bhatt said, “Your favorite’s name is in the paper this morning, Mr. D’Mello. Page four, near the top. You must be a proud man.”

  Before Mr. D’Mello could stop him, Mr. Bhatt had begun reading:

  The Midtown Rotary Club announces the Winners of its Fourth Annual Inter-School English Elocution Contest.

  Theme: Science-A Boon or Curse for the Human Race?

  First Prize: Harish Pai, St. Milagres Boys’ High School (Science as a Boon)

  Second Prize: Girish Rai, St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School (Science as a Curse)

  The assistant headmaster pulled the newspaper from the hands of his junior colleague. “Mr. Bhatt,” he snarled, “I have often said this publicly: I have no favorites among the boys.”