Between the Assassinations (3 page)

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, shrimp, 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.

A
BBASI UNCORKED THE
bottle—Johnnie Walker Red Label blended, the second-finest whiskey known to God or man—and poured a small peg each into two glasses embossed with the Air India maharaja 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 the 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 whiskey and stirred.

He pulled up his trousers and zipped them. He frowned at the tainted whiskey; 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 whiskey 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 gray in his beard that 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 simpleminded 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 toward 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.”

He rang the bell for Ummar, his manager, who entered almost at once with a shirt in his hands. He had been waiting outside the whole time.

The official took the white shirt out of its cardboard box. He looked at the design: a golden dragon whose tail spread around onto the back of the shirt.

“It’s gorgeous.”

“We ship them to the United States. They are worn by men who dance professionally. They call it ‘ballroom dancing.’ They put on this shirt and swirl under red disco lights.” Abbasi held his hands over his head and spun around, shaking his hips and buttocks suggestively; the official watched him with lascivious eyes.

He clapped, and said, “Dance for me one more time, Abbasi.”

Then he put the shirt to his nose and sniffed it three times.

“This pattern…” He pressed on the outlines of the dragon with his thick finger. “It is wonderful.”

“That dragon is the reason I closed,” Abbasi said. “To stitch the dragon takes very fine embroidery work. The eyes of the women doing this work get damaged. One day this was brought to my attention; I thought, I don’t want to answer to Allah for the damage done to the eyes of my workers. So I said to them, go home, and I closed the factory.”

The official smiled ironically. Another of those Muslims who drink whiskey and mention Allah in every other sentence.

He put the shirt back in its box and tucked it under his arm. “What made you reopen the factory, then?”

Abbasi bunched his fingers and jabbed them into his mouth. “A man has to eat, sahib.”

They went down the stairs together, Ummar following three steps behind. When they reached the bottom, the official saw a dark opening to his right. He took a step toward the darkness. In the dim light of the room, he saw women with white shirts on their laps, stitching threads into half-finished dragons. He wanted to see more, so Abbasi said, “Why don’t you go in, sahib? I’ll wait out here.”

He turned and looked at the wall, while Ummar took the official around the factory floor, introduced him to some of the workers, and led him back out. The official extended his hand to Abbasi just before he left.

I shouldn’t have touched him,
Abbasi thought, the moment he closed the door.

At six p.m., half an hour after the women left the stitching room for the day, Abbasi closed the factory, got into his Ambassador car, and drove from the Bunder toward Kittur; he could think about one thing only.

Corruption. There was no end to it in this country. In the past four months, since he had decided to reopen his shirt factory, he had had to pay off:

The electricity man; the Water Board man; half the Income Tax Department of Kittur; half the Excise Department of Kittur; six different officials of the Telephone Board; a land tax official of the Kittur City Corporation; a sanitary inspector from the Karnataka State Health Board; a health inspector from the Karnataka State Sanitation Board; a delegation of the All India Small Factory Workers’ Union; and delegations of the Kittur Congress Party, the Kittur BJP, the Kittur Communist Party, and the Kittur Muslim League.

The white Ambassador car went up the driveway of a large, whitewashed mansion. At least four evenings a week Abbasi came to the Canara Club, to a small air-conditioned room with a green billiards table, to play snooker and drink with his friends. He was a good shot, and his aim deteriorated after his second whiskey, so his friends liked to play long sets with him.

“What’s bothering you, Abbasi?” asked Sunil Shetty, who owned another shirt factory in the Bunder. “You’re playing very rashly tonight.”

“Another visit from the Electricity Department. A real bastard this time. Dark-skinned fellow. Lower caste of some kind.”

Sunil Shetty purred in sympathy; Abbasi missed his shot.

Halfway through the game, the players all moved away from the table, while a mouse scurried across the floor, running along the walls until it found a hole to vanish into.

Abbasi banged his fist on the edge of the table. “Where does all our membership money go? They can’t even keep the floors clean! You see how corrupt the management of the club is?”

After that, he sat quietly with his back to the sign that said
RULES OF THE GAME MUST BE FOLLOWED AT ALL TIMES
and watched the others play, while resting his chin on the end of his cue stick.

“You are tense, Abbasi,” said Ramanna Padiwal, who owned a silk and rayon store on Umbrella Street and was the best snooker-shark in town.

To dispel this myth, Abbasi ordered whiskeys for everyone, and they stopped playing and held their glasses wrapped in paper napkins as they sipped. As always, what they talked about first was the whiskey itself.

“You know that chap who goes around from house to house offering to pay twenty rupees if you sell him your old cartons of Johnnie Walker Red Label?” Abbasi said. “To whom does he sell those cartons in return?”

The others laughed.

“For a Muslim, you’re a real innocent, Abbasi,” Padiwal, the silk and rayon salesman, said with a laugh. “Of course he sells them to the bootlegger. That’s why the Johnnie Walker Red you buy from the store, even if it comes in a genuine bottle and genuine carton, is bootlegged.”

Abbasi spoke slowly, drawing circles in the air with his finger: “So I sold the carton…to the man who will sell it to the man who will bootleg the stuff and sell it back to me? That means I’ve cheated myself?”

Padiwal shot a look of wonderment at Sunil Shetty and said, “For a Muslim, this fellow is a real…”

This was a sentiment that was widespread among the industrialists—ever since Abbasi had shut down his factory because the work was damaging the eyesight of his employees. Most of the snooker players owned, or had invested in, factories that employed women in the same manner; none had dreamed of closing a factory down because a woman here or a woman there went blind.

Sunil Shetty said, “The other day I read in the
Times of India
that the chief of Johnnie Walker said there is more Red Label consumed in the average small Indian town than is produced in all of Scotland. When it comes to three things”—he counted them off—“black marketing, counterfeiting, and corruption, we are the world champions. If they were included in the Olympic Games, India would always win gold, silver, and bronze in those three.”

After midnight, Abbasi staggered out of the club, leaving a coin with the guard, who got up from his chair to salute him and help him into his car.

Drunk by now, he raced out of the town and up to the Bunder, finally slowing down when the smell of sea breeze got to him.

Stopping by the side of the road when his house came into view, he decided he needed one more drink. He always kept a small bottle of whiskey under his seat, where his wife would not find it; reaching down, he slapped his hand around the floor of the car. His head banged against the dashboard. He found the bottle, and a glass.

After the drink, he realized he couldn’t go home; his wife would smell the liquor on him the moment he got past the threshold. There would be another scene. She never could understand why he drank so much.

He drove up to the Bunder. He parked the car next to a rubbish dump and walked across to a tea shop. Beyond a small beach the sea was visible; the smell of roasted fish wafted through the air.

A blackboard outside the tea shop proclaimed, in letters of white chalk,
WE CHANGE PAKISTANI MONEY AND CURRENCY
. The walls of the shop were adorned with a photograph of the Great Mosque of Mecca along with a poster of a boy and a girl bowing to the Taj Mahal. Four benches had been arranged in an outdoor veranda. A dappled white and brown goat was tied to a pole at one end of the veranda; it was chewing on dried grass.

Men were sitting on one of the benches. Abbasi touched one of the men on his shoulder; he turned around.

“Abbasi.”

“Mehmood, my brother. Make some room for me.”

Mehmood, a fat man with a fringe beard and no mustache, did so, and Abbasi squeezed in next to him. Abbasi had heard that Mehmood stole cars; he had heard that Mehmood’s four sons drove them to a village on the Tamil Nadu border, a village whose only business was the purchase and sale of stolen cars.

Alongside Mehmood, Abbasi recognized Kalam, who was rumored to import hashish from Bombay and ship it to Sri Lanka; Saif, who had knifed a man in Trivandrum; and a small white-haired man who was only called the Professor—and who was believed to be the shadiest of the lot.

These men were smugglers, car thieves, thugs, and worse; but while they sipped tea together, nothing would happen to Abbasi. It was the culture of the Bunder. A man might be stabbed in daylight, but never at night, and never while sipping tea. In any case, the sense of solidarity among the Muslims at the Bunder had deepened ever since the riots.

The Professor was finishing up a story of Kittur in the twelfth century, about an Arab sailor named bin Saad who sighted the town just when he had given up hope of finding land. He had raised his hands to Allah and promised that if he arrived safely on land, he would never again drink liquor or gamble.

“Did he keep his word?”

The Professor winked. “Take a guess.”

The Professor was always welcome at late-night chitchats at the tea shop because he knew many fascinating things about the port: how its history went back to the Middle Ages, for instance, or how Tippu Sultan had once installed a battery of French-made cannons here to scare away the British. He pointed a finger at Abbasi: “You’re not your usual self. What’s on your mind?”

“Corruption,” Abbasi said. “Corruption. It’s like a demon sitting on my brain and eating it with a fork and knife.”