“It’s not the money I’m worried about, Mukesh—”
“I know, I know.”
The Mongoose put his hand on Mr. Ashok’s shoulder—just the way Kishan had put his hand on my shoulder so many times.
We were driving past a slum: one of those series of makeshift tents where the workers at some construction site were living. The Mongoose was saying something, but Mr. Ashok wasn’t paying attention—he was looking out the window.
My eyes obeyed his eyes. I saw the silhouettes of the slum dwellers close to one another inside the tents; you could make out one family—a husband, a wife, a child—all huddled around a stove inside one tent, lit up by a golden lamp. The intimacy seemed so complete—so crushingly complete. I understood what Mr. Ashok was going through.
He lifted his hand—I prepared for his touch—but he wrapped it around the Mongoose’s shoulder.
“When I was in America, I thought family was a burden, I don’t deny it. When you and Father tried to stop me from marrying Pinky because she wasn’t a Hindu I was furious with you, I don’t deny it. But without family, a man is nothing. Absolutely nothing. I had nothing but this driver in front of me for five nights. Now at last I have someone real by my side: you.”
I went up to the apartment with them; the Mongoose wanted me to make a meal for them, and I made a daal and chapattis, and a dish of okra. I served them, and then I cleaned the utensils and plates.
During dinner, the Mongoose said, “If you’re getting depressed, Ashok, why don’t you try yoga and meditation? There’s a yoga master on TV, and he’s very good—this is what he does every morning on his program.” He closed his eyes, breathed in, and then exhaled slowly, saying, “Ooooooom.”
When I came out of the kitchen, wiping my hands on the sides of my pants, the Mongoose said, “Wait.”
He took a piece of paper from his pocket and dangled it with a big grin, as if it were a prize for me.
“You have a letter from your granny. What is her name?” He began to cut the letter open with a thick black finger.
“Kusum, sir.”
“Remarkable woman,” he said, and rubbed his forearms up and down.
I said, “Sir, don’t bother yourself. I can read.”
He cut the letter open. He began reading it aloud.
Mr. Ashok spoke in English—and I guessed what he said: “Doesn’t he have the right to read his own letters?”
And his brother replied in English, and again I guessed, rather than understood, his meaning: “He won’t mind a thing like this. He has no sense of privacy. In the villages there are no separate rooms so they just lie together at night and fuck like that. Trust me, he doesn’t mind.”
He turned so that the light was behind him and began to read aloud:
“Dear grandson. This is being written by Mr. Krishna, the schoolteacher. He remembers you fondly and refers to you by your old nickname, the White Tiger. Life has become hard here. The rains have failed. Can you ask your employer for some money for your family? And remember to send the money home.”
The Mongoose put the letter down.
“That’s all these servants want. Money, money, money. They’re called your servants, but they suck the lifeblood out of you, don’t they?”
He continued reading the letter.
“With your brother Kishan I said, ‘Now is the time,’ and he did it—he married. With you, I do not order. You are different from all the others. You are deep, like your mother. Even as a boy you were so; when you would stop near the pond and stare at the Black Fort with your mouth open, in the morning, and evening, and night. So I do not order you to marry. But I tempt you with the joys of married life. It is good for the community. Every time there is a marriage there is more rain in the village. The water buffalo will get fatter. It will give more milk. These are known facts. We are all so proud of you, being in the city. But you must stop thinking only about yourself and think about us too. First you must visit us and eat my chicken curry. Your loving Granny. Kusum.”
The Mongoose was about to give me the letter, but Mr. Ashok took it from him and read it again.
“Sometimes they express themselves so movingly, these villagers,” he said, before flinging the letter on the table for me to pick up.
In the morning, I drove the Mongoose to the railway station, and got him his favorite snack, the dosa, once again, from which I removed the potatoes, flinging them on the tracks, before handing it over to him. I got down onto the platform and waited. He chomped on the dosa in his seat; down below on the tracks, a mouse nibbled on the discarded potatoes.
I drove back to the apartment block. I took the elevator to the thirteenth floor. The door was open.
“Sir!” I shouted, when I saw what was going on in the living room. “Sir, this is madness!”
He had put his feet in a plastic bucket and was massaging them himself.
“You should have told me, I would have massaged you!” I shouted, and reached down to his feet.
He shrieked. “No!”
I said, “Yes, sir, you must—I’m failing in my duty if I let you do it yourself!” and forced my hands into the dirty water in the bucket, and squeezed his feet.
“No!”
Mr. Ashok kicked the bucket, and the water spilled all over the floor.
“How stupid can you people get?” He pointed to the door. “Get out! Can you leave me alone for just five minutes in a day? Do you think you can manage that?”
That evening I had to drive him to the mall again. I stayed inside the car after he got out; I did not mix with any of the other drivers.
Even at night, the construction work goes on in Gurgaon—big lights shine down from towers, and dust rises from pits, scaffolding is being erected, and men and animals, both shaken from their sleep and bleary and insomniac, go around and around carrying concrete rubble or bricks.
A man from one of these construction sites was leading an ass; it wore a bright red saddle, and on this saddle were two metal troughs, filled to the brim with rubble. Behind this ass, two smaller ones, of the same color, were also saddled with metal troughs full of rubble. These smaller asses were walking slower, and the lead ass stopped often and turned to them, in a way that made you think it was their mother.
At once I knew what was troubling me.
I did not want to obey Kusum. She was blackmailing me; I understood why she had sent that letter through the Mongoose. If I refused, she would blow the whistle on me—tell Mr. Ashok I hadn’t been sending money home.
Now, it had been a long time since I had dipped my beak into anything, sir, and the pressure had built up. The girl would be so young—seventeen or eighteen—and you know what girls taste like at that age, like watermelons. Any diseases, of body or mind, get cured when you penetrate a virgin. These are known facts. And then there was the dowry that Kusum would screw out of the girl’s family. All that twenty-four-karat gold, all that cash fresh from the bank. At least some of it I’d keep for myself. All these were sound arguments in favor of marriage.
But on the other hand.
See, I was like that ass now. And all I would do, if I had children, was teach them to be asses like me, and carry rubble around for the rich.
I put my hands on the steering wheel, and my fingers tightened into a strangling grip.
The way I had rushed to press Mr. Ashok’s feet, the moment I saw them, even though he hadn’t asked me to! Why did I feel that I had to go close to his feet, touch them and press them and make them feel good—why? Because the desire to be a servant had been bred into me: hammered into my skull, nail after nail, and poured into my blood, the way sewage and industrial poison are poured into Mother Ganga.
I had a vision of a pale stiff foot pushing through a fire.
“No,” I said.
I pulled my feet up onto the seat, got into the lotus position, and said, “Om,” over and over again. How long I sat that evening in the car with my eyes closed and legs crossed like the Buddha I don’t know
, but the giggling and scratching noise made me open my eyes. All the other drivers had gathered around me—one of them was scratching the glass with his fingernails. Someone had seen me in the lotus position inside the locked car. They were gaping at me as if I were something in a zoo.
I scrambled out of the lotus position at once. I put a big grin on my face—I got out of the car to a volley of thumps and blows and shrieks of laughter, all of which I meekly accepted, while murmuring, “Just trying it out, yoga—they show it on TV all the time, don’t they?”
The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs.
Yes, that’s the sad truth, Mr. Premier.
The coop is guarded from the inside.
Mr. Premier, you must excuse me—the phone is ringing. I’ll be back in a minute.
Alas: I’ll have to stop this story for a while. It’s only 1:32 in the morning, but we’ll have to break off here. Something has come up, sir—an emergency. I’ll be back, trust me.
The Sixth Morning
Pardon me, Your Excellency, for the long intermission. It’s now 6:20, so I’ve been gone five hours. Unfortunately, there was an incident that threatened to jeopardize the reputation of an outsourcing company I work with.
A fairly serious incident, sir. A man has lost his life in this incident. (No: Don’t misunderstand. I had nothing to do with his death! But I’ll explain later.)
Now, excuse me a minute while I turn the fan on—I’m still sweating, sir—and let me sit down on the floor, and watch the fan chop up the light of the chandelier.
The rest of today’s narrative will deal mainly with the sorrowful tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity, and wickedness.
All these changes happened in me because they happened first in Mr. Ashok. He returned from America an innocent man, but life in Delhi corrupted him—and once the master of the Honda City becomes corrupted, how can the driver stay innocent?
Now, I thought I knew Mr. Ashok, sir. But that’s presumption on the part of any servant.
The moment his brother left, he changed. He began wearing a black shirt with the top button open, and changed his perfume.
“To the mall, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Which mall, sir? The one where Madam used to go?”
But Mr. Ashok would not take the bait. He was punching the buttons of his cell phone and he just grunted, “Sahara Mall, Balram.”
“That’s the one Madam liked going to, sir.”
“Don’t keep talking about Madam in every other sentence.”
I sat outside the mall and wondered what he was doing there. There was a flashing red light on the top floor, and I guessed that it was a disco. Lines of young men and women were standing outside the mall, waiting to go up to that red light. I trembled with fear to see what these city girls were wearing.
Mr. Ashok didn’t stay long in there, and he came out alone. I breathed out in relief.
“Back to Buckingham, sir?”
“Not yet. Take me to the Sheraton Hotel.”
As I drove into the city, I noticed that something was different about the way Delhi looked that night.
Had I never before seen how many painted women stood at the sides of the roads? Had I never seen how many men had stopped their cars, in the middle of the traffic, to negotiate a price with these women?
I closed my eyes; I shook my head. What’s happening to you tonight?
At this point, something took place that cleared my confusion—but also proved very embarrassing to me and to Mr. Ashok. I had stopped the car at a traffic signal; a girl began crossing the road in a tight T-shirt, her chest bobbing up and down like three kilograms of brinjals in a bag. I glanced at the rearview mirror—and there was Mr. Ashok, his eyes also bobbing up and down.
I thought, Aha! Caught you, you rascal!
And his eyes shone, for he had seen my eyes, and he was thinking the exact same thing: Aha! Caught you, you rascal!
We had caught each other out.
(This little rectangular mirror inside the car, Mr. Jiabao—has no one ever noticed before how embarrassing it is? How, every now and then, when master and driver find each other’s eyes in this mirror, it swings open like a door into a changing room, and the two of them have suddenly caught each other naked?)
I was blushing. Mercifully, the light turned green, and I drove on.
I swore not to look in the rearview mirror again that night. Now I understood why the city looked so different—why my beak was getting stiff as I was driving.
Because he was horny. And inside that sealed car, master and driver had somehow become one body that night.
It was with great relief that I drove the Honda into the gate of the Maurya Sheraton Hotel, and brought that excruciating trip to an end.
Now, Delhi is full of grand hotels. In ring roads and sewage plants you might have an edge in Beijing, but in pomp and splendor, we’re second to none in Delhi. We’ve got the Sheraton, the Imperial, the Taj Palace, Taj Mansingh, the Oberoi, the InterContinental, and many more. Now, the five-star hotels of Bangalore I know inside out, having spent thousands of rupees eating kebabs of chicken, mutton, and beef in their restaurants, and picking up sluts of all nationalities in their bars, but the five-stars of Delhi are things of mystery to me. I’ve been to them all, but I’ve never stepped past the front door of one. We’re not allowed to do that; there’s usually a fat guard at the glass door up at the front, a man with a waxed mustache and beard, who wears a ridiculous red circus turban and thinks he’s someone important because the American tourists want to have their photo taken with him. If he so much as sees a driver near the hotel, he’ll glare—he’ll shake a finger like a schoolteacher.
That’s the driver’s fate. Every other servant thinks he can boss over us.
There are strict rules at the five-stars about where the drivers keep their cars while their masters are inside. Sometimes they put you in a parking spot downstairs. Sometimes in the back. Sometimes up at the front, near the trees. And you sit there and wait, for an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, yawning and doing nothing, until the guard at the door, the fellow with the turban, mumbles into a microphone, saying, “Driver So-and-So, you may come to the glass door with the car. Your master is waiting for you.”
The drivers were waiting near the parking lot of the hotel, in their usual key-chain-swirling, paan-chewing, gossipmongering, ammonia-releasing circle. Crouching and jabbering like monkeys.
The driver with the diseased lips was sitting apart from them, engrossed in his magazine. On this week’s cover, there was a photo of a woman lying on a bed, her clothes undone; her lover stood next to her, raising a knife over her head.
MURDER WEEKLY
RUPEES 4.50
EXCLUSIVE TRUE STORY:
“HE WANTED HIS MASTER’S WIFE.”
LOVE—RAPE—REVENGE!
“Been thinking about what I said, Country-Mouse?” he asked me, as he flipped through a story.
“About getting your master something he’d like? Hashish, or girls, or golf balls? Genuine golf balls from the U.S. Consulate?”
“He’s not that kind.”
The pink lips twisted into a smile. “Want to know a secret? My master likes film actresses. He takes them to a hotel in Jangpura, with a big, glowing T sign on it, and hammers them there.”
He named three famous Mumbai actresses his master had “hammered.”
“And yet he looks like a goody-goody. Only I know—and I tell you, all the masters are the same. One day you’ll believe me. Now come read a story with me.”
We read like that, in total silence. After the third murder story, I went to the side, to a clump of trees, to take an ammonia break. He walked along with me.
Our piss hit the bark of the tree just inches apart.
“I’ve got a question for you.”
“
About city girls again?”
“No. About what happens to old drivers.”
“Huh?”
“I mean what will happen to me a few years from now? Do I make enough money to buy a house and then set up a business of my own?”
“Well,” he said, “a driver is good till he’s fifty or fifty-five. Then the eyes go bad and they kick you out, right? That’s thirty years from now, Country-Mouse. If you save from today, you’ll make enough to buy a small home in some slum. If you’ve been a bit smarter and made a little extra on the side, then you’ll have enough to put your son in a good school. He can learn English, he can go to university. That’s the best-case scenario. A house in a slum, a kid in college.”
“Best-case?”
“Well, on the other hand, you can get typhoid from bad water. Boss sacks you for no reason. You get into an accident—plenty of worst-case scenarios.”
I was still pissing, but he put a hand on me. “There’s something I’ve got to ask you, Country-Mouse. Are you all right?”
I looked at him sideways. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but some of the drivers are talking about it openly. You sit by yourself in your master’s car the whole time, you talk to yourself…You know what you need? A woman. Have you seen the slum behind the malls? They’re not bad-looking—nice and plump. Some of us go there once a week. You can come too.”
“DRIVER BALRAM, WHERE ARE YOU?”
It was the call from the microphone at the gate of the hotel. Mr. Turban was at the microphone—speaking in the most pompous, stern voice possible: “DRIVER BALRAM REPORT AT ONCE TO THE DOOR. NO DELAY. YOUR MASTER WANTS YOU.”
I zipped up and ran, wiping my wet fingers on the back of my pants.
Mr. Ashok was walking out of the hotel with his hands around a girl when I brought the car up to the gate.
She was a slant-eyed one, with yellow skin. A foreigner. A Nepali. Not even of his caste or background. She sniffed about the seats—the seats that I had polished—and jumped on them.
Mr. Ashok put his hands on the girl’s bare shoulders. I took my eyes away from the mirror.
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