Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

  “Excuse me, Gururaj?”

  “You think anyone in this office doesn’t know that all this political fighting is just make-believe? That in reality the BJP and the Congress cut each other deals and share the bribe money they take on construction projects in Bajpe? You and I have known for years that this is true and yet we pretend to report things otherwise. Doesn’t this strike you as bizarre? Look here. Let’s just write nothing but the truth and the whole truth in the newspaper today. Just today. One day of nothing but the truth. That’s all I want to do. No one may even notice. Tomorrow we’ll go back to the usual lies. But for one day I want to report, write, and edit the truth. One day in my life I’d like to be a proper journalist. What do you say to that?”

  The editor-in-chief frowned, as if thinking about it, and then said, “Come to my house after dinner tonight.”

  At nine o’clock, Gururaj walked up Rose Lane, to a home with a big garden and a blue statue of Krishna with his flute in a niche in the front, and rang the bell.

  The editor let him into the drawing room and closed the door. He asked Gururaj to sit down, gesturing at a brown sofa.

  “You’d better tell me what’s bothering you.”

  Gururaj told him.

  “Let’s assume you have proof of this thing. You write about it. You’re not only saying that the police force is rotten, but also that the judiciary is corrupt. The judge will call you for contempt of court. You will be arrested-even if what you are saying is true. You and I and people in the press pretend that there is freedom of the press in this country, but we know the truth.”

  “What about the Hindu-Muslim riots? Can’t we write the truth about that either?”

  “What is the truth about it, Gururaj?”

  Gururaj told him the truth, and the editor-in-chief smiled. He put his head in his hands and, in a laugh that seemed to rock the entire night, he laughed his heart out.

  “Even if what you’re saying is indeed the truth,” the old man said, regaining control of himself, “and observe that I neither admit nor contradict any of it, there would be no way for us to publish it.”

  “Why not?”

  The editor smiled. “Who do you think owns this newspaper?”

  “Ramdas Pai,” Gururaj said, naming a businessman in Umbrella Street whose name appeared as proprietor on the front page.

  The editor shook his head. “He doesn’t own it. Not all of it.”

  “Who does?”

  “Use your brains.”

  Gururaj looked at the editor-in-chief with new eyes. It was as if the old man had a nimbus around him, of all the things he had learned over the length of his career and could never publish; this secret knowledge glowed around his head like the halo around the nearly full moon. This is the fate of every journalist in this town and in this state and in this country and maybe in this whole world, thought Gururaj.

  “Had you never guessed any of this before, Gururaj? It must come from the fact that you are not yet married. Not having had a woman, you have never understood the ways of the world.”

  “And you have understood the ways of the world far too well.”

  The two men stared, each feeling tremendously sorry for the other.

  The following morning, as he walked to the office, Gururaj thought, It is a false earth I am walking on. An innocent man is behind bars, and a guilty man walks free. Everyone knows that this is so and not one has the courage to change it.

  From then on, every night, Gururaj went down the dirty stairwell of the YMCA, gazing blankly at the profanities and graffiti scribbled on the walls, and walked down Umbrella Street, ignoring the barking and skulking and copulating stray dogs, until he got to the Gurkha, who would lift up his old rifle in recognition and smile. They were friends now.

  The Gurkha told him how much rottenness there could be in a small town: who had killed whom in the past few years, how much the judges of Kittur had asked for in bribe money, how much the police chiefs had asked. They talked until it was nearly dawn and it was time for Gururaj to leave so he could get some sleep before going to work. He hesitated: “I still don’t know your name.”

  “Gaurishankar.”

  Gururaj waited for him to ask him his name; he wanted to say, Now that my father has died, you are my only friend, Gaurishankar.

  The Gurkha sat with his eyes closed.

  At four in the morning, walking back to the YMCA, he was thinking, Who is this man, this Gurkha? From some reference he had made to being a manservant in the house of a retired general, Gururaj deduced that he had been in the army, in the Gurkha regiment. But how he ended up in Kittur, why he hadn’t gone back home to Nepal, all this was still a mystery. Tomorrow I should ask him all this. Then I can tell him about myself.

  There was an Ashoka tree near the entrance to the YMCA, and Gururaj stopped to look at the tree. The moonlight lay on it, and it seemed different somehow tonight; as if it were on the verge of growing into something else.

  They are not my fellow workers; they are lower than animals.

  Gururaj could no longer stand the sight of his colleagues; he averted his eyes as he came into the building, scurrying into his office and slamming his door shut as soon as he got to work. Although he continued to edit the copy he was given, he could no longer bear to look at the newspaper. What especially terrified him was catching his own name in print; for this reason he asked to be relieved from what had been his greatest pleasure, writing his column, and insisted only on editing. Although in the old days he used to stay up to midnight, now he left the office at five o’clock every evening, hurrying back to his room to fall on his bed.

  At two o’clock sharp, he woke up. To save himself the trouble of finding his trousers in the dark, he had taken to sleeping in all his clothes. He almost ran down the stairs and thrust open the door of the YMCA, so he could speak to the Gurkha.

  Then one night, at last, it happened. The Gurkha was not sitting outside the bank. Someone else had taken his chair.

  “What do I know, sir?” the new night watchman said. “I was appointed to this job last night; they didn’t tell me what happened to the old fellow.”

  Gururaj ran from shop to shop, from house to house, asking every night watchman he met what had happened to the Gurkha.

  “Gone to Nepal,” one night watchman finally told him. “Back to his family. He was saving money all these years, and now he’s gone.”

  Gururaj took the news like a physical blow. Only one man had known what was happening in this town, and that one man had vanished to another country. Seeing him gasping for air, the night watchmen gathered around him, made him sit down, and brought him cool, clean water in a plastic bottle. He tried explaining to them what had happened between him and the Gurkha all these weeks, what he had lost.

  “That Gurkha, sir?” One watchman shook his head. “Are you sure you talked about these things with him? He was a complete idiot. His brain had been damaged in the army.”

  “What about the grapevine? Is it still working?” Gururaj asked. “Will one of you tell me what you hear now?”

  The night watchmen stared. In their eyes, he could see doubt turning into a kind of fear. They seem to think I’m mad, he thought.

  He wandered at night, passing by the dim buildings, by the sleeping multitudes. He passed by large, still, darkened buildings, each containing hundreds of bodies lying in a stupor. I am the only man who is awake now, he told himself. Once, up on a hill to his left, he saw a large housing block burning with light. Seven windows were lit up, and the building blazed; it seemed to him to be a living creature, a kind of monster of light, shining from its entrails.

  Gururaj understood: The Gurkha had not abandoned him at all. He had not done what everyone else in his life had done. He had left something behind: a gift. Gururaj would now hear the grapevine on his own. He lifted his arms toward the building burning with lights; he felt full of occult power.

  One day as he came into work, late again, he heard a whisper behind him:
“It happened to the father too, in his last days…”

  He thought, I must be careful that others do not notice this change that is happening inside me.

  When he reached his office, he saw that the peon was removing his nameplate from the door. I am losing everything I worked so hard for, for so many years, he thought. But he felt no regret or emotion; it was as if these things were happening to someone else. He saw the new nameplate on the door:

  KRISHNA MENON

  DEPUTY EDITOR

  DAWN HERALD

  KITTUR’S ONLY AND FINEST NEWSPAPER

  “Gururaj! I didn’t want to do it, I-”

  “No explanation is necessary. In your position, I’d have done the same.”

  “Do you want me to speak to someone, Gururaj? We can arrange it for you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you have no father now…But we can arrange a wedding for you, with a girl of a good family.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We think you are ill. You ought to know that many of us in this office have been saying that for some time. I insist that you take a week off. Or two weeks. Go somewhere on holiday. Go to the Western Ghats and watch the clouds for a while.”

  “Fine. I’ll take three weeks off.”

  For three weeks he slept through the day and walked through the night. The late-night policeman no longer said, “Hello, editor,” as he had before, and Gururaj could see the man, as he cycled past, turn and stare at him. The night watchmen also looked at him oddly; and he grinned. Even here, even in this Hades of the middle of the night, I have become an outsider, a man who frightens others. The thought excited him.

  He bought a child’s square blackboard one day, and a piece of chalk. That night he wrote at the top of the blackboard:

  THE TRUTH ALONE SHALL TRIUMPH.

  A NOCTURNAL NEWSPAPER

  Sole correspondent, editor, advertiser, and subscriber:

  Gururaj Manjeshwar Kamath, Esq.

  Copying out the headline from the morning’s newspaper:

  BJP City Councillor Blasts Congressman

  He rubbed and scratched and rewrote it:

  2 October 1989

  BJP City Councillor, who needs money in a hurry to build a new mansion on Rose Lane, blasts congressman. Tomorrow he will receive a brown bag full of cash from the Congress Party, and then he will stop blasting the congressman.

  Then he lay in bed and closed his eyes, eager for the darkness to arrive and make his town a decent place again.

  One night he thought, There is only one night of my vacation left. The dawn was breaking already, and he hurried back to the YMCA. He stopped. He was sure that he was seeing an elephant outside the building. Was he dreaming? What on earth would an elephant be doing, at this hour, in the middle of his town? It was beyond the bounds of reason. Yet it looked real and tangible to his eyes; only one thing made him think it was not a real elephant-it was absolutely still. He said to himself, Elephants move and make some noise all the time, therefore you are not really seeing an elephant. He closed his eyes and walked up to the entrance of the YMCA; and when he opened them again he was staring at a tree. He touched the bark, and thought:

  This is the first hallucination I have had in my life.

  When he returned to the office the next day, everyone said Gururaj was back to his old self. He had missed his office life; he had wanted to come back.

  “Thank you for your offer to arrange a marriage,” he told the editor-in-chief, as they had tea together in his room. “But I’m married to my work anyway.”

  Sitting in the newsroom with young men just out of college, he edited stories with all his old cheer. After all the young men were gone, he stayed back, digging through the archives. He had come back to work with a purpose. He was going to write a history of Kittur. An infernal history of Kittur-in it every event in the past twenty years would be reinterpreted. He took out old newspapers, and carefully read each front page. Then, a red pen in hand, he scratched out and rewrote words, which fulfilled two purposes-one, it defaced the newspapers of the past, and two, it allowed him to figure out the true relationship between the words and the characters in the news events. At first, designating Hindi-the Gurkha’s language-as the language of the truth, he rewrote the Kannada-language headlines of the newspaper in Hindi; then he switched to English, and finally he adopted a code in which he substituted each letter of the Roman alphabet for the one immediately after it-he had read somewhere that Julius Caesar had invented this code for his army-and, to complicate matters further, he invented symbols for certain words; for instance, a triangle with a dot inside represented the word “bank.” Other symbols were ironically inspired; for instance, a Nazi swastika represented the Congress Party, and the nuclear disarmament symbol the BJP, and so on. One day, looking back over the past week’s notes, he found that he had forgotten half the symbols, and he no longer understood what he had written. Good, he thought, that is the way it should be. Even the writer of the truth should not know the truth entire. Every true word, upon being written, is like the full moon, and daily it wanes, and then passes entirely into obscurity. That is the way of all things.

  When he was done reinterpreting each issue of the newspaper, he deleted the words “The Dawn Herald” from the masthead and wrote in their place, “THE TRUTH ALONE SHALL TRIUMPH.”

  “What the hell are you doing to our newspapers?”

  It was the editor in chief. He and Menon had sneaked up on Gururaj in the office one evening.

  The editor in chief turned page after page of defaced newspapers in the archives without a word, while Menon tried to peek over his shoulder. They saw pages covered in squiggles, red marks, slashes, triangles, pictures of girls with pigtails and bloody teeth, images of copulating dogs. Then the old man slammed the archives shut.

  “I told you to get married.”

  Gururaj smiled. “Listen, old friend, those are symbolic marks. I can interpret-”

  The editor in chief shook his head. “Get out of this office. At once. I’m sorry, Gururaj.”

  Gururaj smiled, as if to say that no explanation was necessary. The editor in chief’s eyes were teary, and the tendons of his neck moved up and down as he swallowed again and again. The tears came to Guru’s eyes as well. He thought, How hard it has been for this old man to do this. How hard he must have tried to protect me. He imagined closed-door meetings where colleagues had been baying for his blood, and this decent old man alone had defended him to the end. I am sorry, my friend, for letting you down, he wanted to say.

  That night, Gururaj walked, telling himself he was happier than he had ever been in his life. He was a free man now. When he got back, just before dawn, to the YMCA, he saw the elephant again. This time it did not melt into an Ashoka tree, even when he came close. He walked right up to the beast, saw its constantly flapping ears, which had the color and shape and movement of a pterodactyl’s wing; he walked around it, and saw that from the back, each of its ears had a fringe of pink and was striped with veins. How can this wealth of detail be unreal? he thought. This creature was real, and if the rest of the world could not see it, then the rest of the world was the poorer for that.

  Just make one sound! He pleaded with the elephant. So I know for sure that I am not deluded, that you are for real. The elephant understood; it raised its trunk and roared so loudly that he thought he had been deafened.

  “You are free now,” the elephant said, in words so loud they seemed like newspaper headlines to him. “Go and write the true history of Kittur.”

  Some months later, there was news of Gururaj. Four young reporters went to investigate.

  They muffled their giggles as they pushed open the door to the municipal reading room in the lighthouse. The librarian had been waiting for them; he ushered them in with a finger to his lips.

  The journalists found Gururaj sitting at a bench, reading a newspaper that was partially covering his face. The old editor’s shir
t was in tatters, but he seemed to have gained weight, as if idleness had suited him.

  “He won’t say a word anymore,” the librarian said. “He just sits there till sunset, holding the paper to his face. The only time he said anything was when I told him I admired his articles on the riots, and then he shouted at me.”

  One of the young journalists put his finger on the top edge of the newspaper and lowered it slowly; Gururaj offered no resistance. The journalist yelped, and stepped back.

  There was a moist dark hole in the innermost sheet of the paper. Pieces of newsprint stuck to the corners of Gururaj’s mouth, and his jaw was moving.

  THE LANGUAGES OF KITTUR:

  Kannada, one of the major languages of South India, is the official language of the state of Karnataka, in which Kittur is located. The local paper, the Dawn Herald, is published in Kannada. Although understood by virtually everyone in the town, Kannada is the mother tongue only of some of the Brahmins. Tulu, a regional language that has no written script-although it is believed to have possessed a script centuries ago-is the lingua franca. Two dialects of Tulu exist. The “upper-caste” dialect is still used by a few Brahmins, but is dying out as Tulu-speaking Brahmins switch to Kannada. The other dialect of Tulu, a rough, bawdy language cherished for the diversity and pungency of its expletives, is used by the Bunts and Hoykas-this is the language of the Kittur street. Around Umbrella Street, the commercial center, the dominant language changes to Konkani: this is the language of the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, originally from Goa, who own most of the shops here. (Although Tulu-and Kannada-speaking Brahmins began intermarrying in the 1960s, the Konkani Brahmins have so far rejected all marriage proposals from outsiders.) A very different dialect of Konkani, corrupted with Portuguese, is spoken in the suburb of Valencia by the Catholics who live there. Most of the Muslims, especially those in the Bunder, speak a dialect of Malayalam as their mother tongue; a few of the richer Muslims, being descendants of the old Hyderabad aristocracy, speak Hyderabadi Urdu. Kittur’s large migrant worker population, which floats around the town from construction site to construction site, is mostly Tamil-speaking. English is understood by the middle class.