THE DOOR OF the YMCA swung open at two in the morning; a short figure walked out.
He was a small man with a huge protruding forehead, which gave him the look of a professor in a caricature. His hair, thick and wavy like a teenager’s, was oiled and firmly pressed down; it was graying around the temples and in the sideburns. He had walked out of the YMCA looking at the ground; and now, as if noticing for the first time that he was in the real world, he stopped for a moment, looked this way and that, and then headed toward the market.
A series of whistles assaulted him at once. A policeman in uniform, cycling down the street, slowed to a halt and put a foot on the pavement.
“What is your name, fellow?”
The man who looked like a professor said:
“Gururaj Kamath.”
“And what work do you do, that makes you walk alone at night?”
“I look for the truth.”
“Now, don’t get funny, all right?”
“Journalist.”
“For which paper?”
“How many papers do we have?”
The policeman, who may have been hoping to uncover some irregularity associated with this man, and hence either to bully or to bribe him, both acts which he enjoyed, looked disappointed, and then rode away. He had hardly gone a few yards when a thought hit him and he stopped again and turned toward the little man.
“Gururaj Kamath. You wrote the column on the riots, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said the little man.
The policeman looked down at the ground. “My name is Aziz.”
“And?”
“You’ve done every minority in this town a great service, sir. My name is Aziz. I want to…to thank you.”
“I was only doing my job. I told you: I look for the truth.”
“I want to thank you anyway. If more people did what you do, there wouldn’t be any more riots in this town, sir.”
Not a bad fellow after all, Gururaj thought, as he watched Aziz cycle off. Just doing his job.
He continued his walk.
No one was watching him, so he let himself smile with pride.
In the days after the riots, the voice of this little man had been the voice of reason in the midst of chaos. In precise, biting prose he had laid out for his readers the destruction caused by the Hindu fanatics who had ransacked the shops of Muslim shopkeepers; in a calm, unemotional tone he had blasted bigotry and stood up for the rights of religious minorities. He had wanted nothing more from his columns than to help the victims of the riots: instead, Gururaj now found himself something of a celebrity in Kittur. A star.
A fortnight ago, he had suffered the greatest blow of his life. His father had passed away from pneumonia. The day after Gururaj returned to Kittur from his ancestral village, having shaved his head and sat with a priest by the water tank in his ancestral temple to recite Sanskrit verses to bid his father’s soul farewell, he discovered that he had been promoted to deputy executive editor, the number two position at the newspaper where he had worked for twenty years.
It was life’s way of evening things out, Gururaj told himself.
The moon shone brightly, with a large halo around it. He had forgotten how beautiful a nocturnal walk could be. The light was strong and clean, and it laminated the earth’s surface; every object carved sharp shadows in it. He thought it might be the day after a full moon.
Even at this hour of the night, work continued. He heard a low, continuous sound, like the audible respiration of the nocturnal world: an open-backed truck was collecting mud, probably for some construction site. The driver was asleep at the wheel, his arm stuck out of one window, his feet out of the other one. As if ghosts were doing the work behind, morsels of mud came flying into the truck from that direction. The back of Gururaj’s shirt became damp, and he thought, But I will catch a cold. I should go back. That thought made him feel old, and he decided to go on; he took a few steps to his left and began to walk right down the middle of Umbrella Street; it had been a childhood fantasy of his to walk down the middle of a main road, but he had never been able to sneak away from his father’s watchful eyes long enough to fulfill the fantasy.
He came to a halt, right in the middle of the road. Then he quickly went into a side alley.
Two dogs were mating. He crouched down and tried to see exactly what was happening.
After completing the act, the dogs separated. One went down the alley and the other headed toward Gururaj, running with postcoital vigor and almost brushing his trousers as it went past. He followed.
The dog came onto the main road and sniffed at a newspaper. Taking the newspaper in its mouth, it ran back into the alley, and Gururaj ran behind it. Deeper and deeper the dog ran into the side alleys, as the editor followed. Finally, it dropped its bundle; turning, it snarled at Gururaj, and then tore the newspaper to shreds.
“Good dog! Good dog!”
Gururaj turned to his right to confront the speaker. He found himself face-to-face with an apparition: a man in khaki, carrying an old World War II-era rifle, his yellowish, leathery face covered with nicks and scars. His eyes were narrow and slanting. Drawing closer, Gururaj thought, Of course. He’s a Gurkha.
The Gurkha was sitting on a wooden chair out on the pavement, in front of a bank’s rolled-down shutter.
“Why do you say that?” said Gururaj. “Why are you praising the dog for destroying a paper?”
“The dog is doing the right thing. Because not a word in the newspaper is true.”
The Gurkha-Gururaj took him for an all-night security guard for the bank-rose from his chair and took a step toward the dog.
At once it dropped the paper and ran away. Picking up the torn and mangled and saliva-stained paper with care, the Gurkha turned the pages.
Gururaj winced.
“Tell me what you’re looking for: I know everything that’s in that newspaper.”
The Gurkha let the dirty paper go.
“There was an accident last night. Near Flower Market Street. A hit-and-run.”
“I know the case,” Gururaj said. It had not been his story, but he read the proofs of the entire paper every day. “An employee of Mr. Engineer’s was involved.”
“The newspaper said that. But it was not the employee who did it.”
“Really?” Gururaj smiled. “Then who did it?”
The Gurkha looked right into Gururaj’s eyes. He smiled, and then pointed the barrel of the ancient gun at him. “I can tell you, but I’d have to shoot you afterwards.”
Looking at the barrel of the rifle, Gururaj thought, I’m talking to a madman.
The next day, Gururaj was in his office at six a.m. First to get there, as always. He began by checking the telex machine, inspecting the reels of badly smudged news it was printing out from Delhi and Colombo and other cities he would never visit in his life. At seven he turned on the radio and began jotting down the main points of the morning’s column.
At eight o’clock, Ms. D’Mello arrived. The chattering of a typewriter broke the peace of the office.
She was writing her usual column, “Twinkle Twinkle.” It was a daily beauty column; a women’s hair-salon owner sponsored it, and Ms. D’Mello answered readers’ questions about hair care, offering advice and gently nudging her correspondents in the direction of the salon owner’s products.
Gururaj never spoke to Ms. D’Mello. He resented the fact that his newspaper ran a paid-for column, a practice he considered unethical. But there was another reason to be cool toward Ms. D’Mello: she was an unmarried woman, and he didn’t want anyone to assume that he might have the slightest interest in her.
Relatives and friends of his father had told Guru for years that he ought to move out of the YMCA and marry, and he had almost given in, thinking that the woman would be needed to nurse his father in his growing senility, when the need for a wife was removed entirely. Now he was determined not to lose his independence to anyone.
By eleven, when Gururaj came out o
f his room again, the office was full of smoke-the only aspect of his workplace that he disliked. The reporters were at their desks, drinking tea and smoking. The telex machine, off to the side, was vomit ing out rolls of smudged and misspelled news reports from Delhi.
After lunch, he sent the office boy to find Menon, a young journalist and a rising star at the paper. Menon came into his room with the top two buttons of his shirt open, a shiny gold necklace flashing at his neck. “Sit down,” Gururaj said.
Gururaj showed him two articles about the car crash on Flower Market Street, which he had dug out of the newspaper’s archives that morning. The first (he pointed to it) had appeared before the trial; the second after the verdict.
“You wrote both articles, didn’t you?”
Menon nodded.
“In the first article, the car that hits the dead man is a red Maruti Suzuki. In the second, it is a white Fiat. Which one was it, really?”
Menon inspected the two articles.
“I just filed according to the police reports.”
“You didn’t bother looking at the vehicle yourself, I take it?”
That night he ate the dinner that the caretaker at the YMCA brought up to his room; she talked a lot, but he was worried she was trying to marry him off to her daughter, and he said as little as possible to her.
As he went to sleep he set the alarm for two o’clock.
He woke up with his heart racing fast; he turned on the lights, left his room, and squinted at his clock. It was twenty minutes to two. He put on his trousers, patted his wavy strands of hair back into place, and almost ran down the stairs and out the gate of the YMCA and in the direction of the bank.
The Gurkha was there at his chair, with his ancient rifle.
“Listen here, did you see this accident with your own eyes?”
“Of course not. I was sitting right here. This is my job.”
“Then how the hell did you know the cars had been changed in the police-”
“Through the grapevine.”
The Gurkha talked quietly. He explained to the newspaper editor that a network of night watchmen passed information around Kittur; every night watchman came to the next for a cigarette and told him something, and that one visited the next one for a cigarette in turn. In this way, word got around. Secrets got spread. The truth-what really happened during the daytime-was preserved.
This is insane, this is impossible-Gururaj wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“So what actually happened-Engineer hit a man on his way back home?”
“Left him for dead.”
“It can’t be true.”
The Gurkha’s eyes flashed. “You’ve lived here long enough, sir. You know it can be. Engineer was drunk; he was coming back from his mistress’s home; he hit the fellow like some stray dog and drove away, leaving him there with his guts spilled out on the street. In the morning the newspaper boy found him like that. The police know perfectly well who drives down that road at night drunk. So the next morning two constables go to his house. Hasn’t even washed the blood off the front wheels of the car.”
“Then why-”
“He is the richest man in this town. He owns the tallest building in this town. He cannot be arrested. He gets one of the employees at his factory to say that he was driving the car when it happened. The guy gives the police a sworn affidavit. I was driving under the influence on the night of May twelfth when I hit the unfortunate victim. Then Mr. Engineer gave the judge six thousand rupees, and the police something less, perhaps four thousand or five, because the judiciary is of course more noble than the police, to keep quiet. Then he wants his Maruti Suzuki back, because it’s a new car and a fashion statement and he likes driving it, so he gives the police another thousand to change the identity of the killer car to a Fiat, and he has his car back and he’s driving around town again.”
“My God.”
“The employee got four years. The judge could have given him a harsher sentence, but he felt sorry for the bugger. Couldn’t let him off for free, of course. So”-the night watchman brought down an imaginary gavel-“four years.”
“I can’t believe it,” Gururaj said. “Kittur isn’t that kind of place.”
The foreigner narrowed his cunning eyes and smiled. He looked at the glowing tip of his beedi for a while, and then offered the beedi to Gururaj.
In the morning Gururaj opened the only window in his room. He looked down on Umbrella Street, on the heart of the town where he was born and where he had grown to maturity and where he would almost certainly die. He sometimes thought he knew every building, every tree, every tile on the roof of every house in Kittur. Glowing in the morning light, Umbrella Street seemed to say, No, the Gurkha’s story can’t be true. The clarity of the stenciling on an advertisement, the glistening spokes of the bicycle wheel ridden by the man delivering newspapers, said, No, the Gurkha is lying. But as Gururaj walked to his office, he saw the dense dark shade of a banyan tree lying across the road, like a patch of night left unswept by the morning’s broom, and his soul was in turmoil again.
Work began. He calmed down. He avoided Ms. D’Mello.
That evening, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper summoned him to his room. He was a plump old man, with sagging jowls and thick white eyebrows that looked like frosting and hands that trembled as he drank his tea. The tendons in his neck stood out in deep relief, and every part of his body seemed to be calling out for retirement.
If he did retire, Gururaj would inherit his chair.
“Regarding this story you’ve asked Menon to reinvestigate…” said the editor-in-chief, sipping the tea. “Forget it.”
“There was a discrepancy over the cars-”
The old man shook his head. “The police made a mistake on the first filing, that was all.” His voice changed into the quiet, casual tone Gururaj had come to recognize as final. He sipped more tea, and then some more.
The slurping sound of the tea being sipped, the abruptness of the old man’s manner, the fatigue of nights of broken sleep, got on Gururaj’s nerves and he said:
“A man might have been sent to jail for no good reason; a guilty man might be walking free. And all you can say is, let’s drop the matter.”
The old man sipped his tea; Gururaj thought he could detect his head move, as if in the affirmative.
He went back to the YMCA, and walked up a flight of stairs to his room. He lay down on the bed with his eyes open. He was still awake at two in the morning, when the alarm went off. When he emerged, he heard a whistling sound; the policeman, passing by him, waved heartily, as if to an old friend.
The moon was shrinking fast; in a few days it would be entirely dark at night. He walked the same route now, as if it were a ritual formula: first slowly, then crossing to the center of the road, and then dashing into the side alley until he reached the bank. The Gurkha was in his chair, his rifle on his shoulder, a glowing beedi in his fingers.
“What does the grapevine tell you tonight?”
“Nothing tonight.”
“Then tell me something from a few nights ago. Tell me what else the paper has published that is untrue.”
“The riots. The newspaper got that wrong, completely.”
Gururaj thought his heart would skip a beat. “How so?”
“The newspaper said that it was Hindus fighting Muslims, see?”
“It was Hindus fighting Muslims. Everyone knows that.”
“Ha.”
The next morning Gururaj did not turn up at the office. He went straight down to the Bunder, the first time since he had gone there to talk to the shopkeepers in the aftermath of the riots. He traced every restaurant and fish market that had been burned down in the riots.
He went back to the newspaper, rushed into the office of the editor-in-chief, and said:
“I heard the most incredible story last night about the Hindu-Muslim riots. Shall I tell you what I heard?”
The old man sipped his tea.
“I
heard that our MP, along with the Mafia down at the Bunder, instigated the riots. And I heard that the hoodlums and the MP have transferred all the burned and destroyed property into the hands of their own men, under the name of a fictitious trust called the New Kittur Port Development Trust. The violence was planned. Muslim goons burned Muslim shops and Hindu goons burned Hindu shops. It was a real estate transaction masquerading as a religious riot.”
The editor stopped sipping. “Who told you this?”
“A friend. Is it true?”
“No.”
Gururaj smiled and said, “I didn’t think so either. Thanks.” He walked out of the room while his boss watched him with concern.
The next morning he arrived at the office late once again. The office boy turned up at his desk and shouted, “Editor-in-chief wants to see you.”
“Why didn’t you turn up at the City Corporation Office today?” the old man asked him as he sipped another cup of tea. “The mayor asked for you to be there; he released a statement on Hindu-Muslim unity and attacking the BJP that he wanted you to hear. You know he respects your work.”
Gururaj pressed his hair down; he had not oiled it this morning and it was unruly. “Who cares?”
Between the Assassinations Page 13