Three Bargains: A Novel Page 19
Tahir finally extricated a torn corner of a restaurant menu and flashed it in triumph at Madan, and then touched his breast pocket where a bottle of typewriter correction fluid nestled in the folds. The white, pasty fluid was Tahir’s own train station to nowhere. A few sniffs and the gray cast descending over his eyes took him away from this broken-down scooter, the rawness of his bitten-down nails and whatever had caused the puckered scars laced across his jaw. The same kind of bottle sat by the typewriter in Mr. D’Silva’s office in Gorapur. Madan could see it clearly. Every rattle of the door or wobble of the desk knocked the tiny bottle over, and each time it aimlessly rolled about until someone righted it.
Madan ground his cigarette butt into the pavement, surprised to see it didn’t go up in flames. The midmorning sun baked the concrete pavers. He could feel the heat burning the soles of his feet through his flimsy canvas shoes. A dip in the cool, flowing waters of the canal would soothe the web of mosquito bites drilled across his back and arms and wash away the sticky layer of dirt welded to him. But a bucket of tepid water back at his rented room would have to suffice, if the room was still his. With Tahir there was only money for today and none for tomorrow. It was not a bad way to survive when who knew if the light of the morning would be yours to enjoy.
A flock of pigeons landed in a feathery jumble in the median of the road, as if the few scraggly trees around them were not worth their while. To their credit, the only real green was the slash of jade-green uniformly adorning the blaring three-wheeled auto-rickshaws. They pecked between the pavement cracks, and the sewer pipe boys waited for a break in the traffic before running across the road to shoo and chase the birds back into the air for the fun of it.
What did they think, these sewer boys, about what this day or the next would hold for them? Life would not allow them to spend it chasing pigeons. They weaved through the traffic, joining the other beggars knocking on car windows, pleading and lamenting their situations for some change. What had the boys been told when they fought off the night’s cold wrapped up in day-old newspapers or went another day without a dry chappati in their bloated bellies? He watched the old man dragging his wooden plank for legs from car window to car window, and the lady with the baby disintegrating in her arms, and the water seller breaking his back pushing his heavy cart to sell a glass of cold water for a measly five paisa, and felt that they must know something that eluded him. If this was all there was to life, why did they cling to it so desperately, insisting on living when there seemed no need for them to do so?
Tahir was trying to read the information on the scrap of paper. He claimed he had completed elementary school, but it was probably a lie. Madan whipped his arm around Tahir’s neck in a headlock, twisting tighter as Tahir choked and flailed about, pulling at Madan’s vise-like grip.
“Garment factory?” Madan spat out. “What do we know about making clothes, you idiot?”
Tahir had been living off the streets much longer than Madan, and with a forceful grunt he leaned into Madan and propelled himself off the scooter, which listed to the side as he toppled them both over with a thump. They tussled and jabbed. Pedestrians hustled by without the time or inclination to interrupt or get involved. Just as quickly as they had started, the two of them stopped. Madan was the first to jump up. He noticed Tahir flinch as he thought Madan was going to come back at him. Putting his hand out, Madan helped Tahir up, and they dusted themselves off. Tahir straightened the scooter and Madan vaulted onto the backseat.
“Motherfucker,” Tahir said. “Can’t even help this guy without a fight.”
The deep, sonorous gong delineated the day workers from the night, and caused a commotion among the labor as they gulped their morning tea from the stall outside the metal factory gate. The smog suffocating the sun turned the sky a pallid white, but the good thing about factory work was there was no time to look up and contemplate the color of the sky. Madan streamed in with the morning shift, skirting the throng of laborers gathered outside the small temple beside the gate. At his annual Diwali address, the potbellied proprietor of Choice Leather Works had encouraged everyone to start their day’s labor by remembering God, and on the days he appeared with the morning gong instead of after lunch, he stood up front and led the morning prayers. For most of the laborers, it was a good way to put off work for five minutes.
In the honeycomb of garment factories along the unpaved roads in this industrial pocket of the city, work was constant if temporary. When there was a big order and the machines were at full charge and trucks needed loading and unloading, there was work. But when the orders were scant, the factory took a large chunk of the workforce off their books until the next time. Madan had become used to being let go and rehired. There was always the next factory close by, and if there was a skill he could claim to have—it was factory work.
Tahir chafed against the routine of the work, the strictures of labor. “It’s not my style,” he said, and left. If Madan knew where to go, he would have left too. Tahir’s solace was in the streets at night, smoking under overpasses, sleeping the afternoons away in a haze of ganja, earning enough to eat and buy a couple of bottles of something to help him forget. Fine for Tahir, but Madan had lost the ability to forget.
“Wait for me!” Dinesh pumped his thickset arms to keep up with Madan, his shirt stretched taut by the speed bumps of muscles across his chest. When not hauling skins off the tannery truck, Dinesh spent his time at the bodybuilding gym. The red smear on his forehead told Madan he had come from the temple.
“What are you doing after work?” Dinesh asked.
“Busy.”
“Doing what? I want to tell you about—”
“Not interested,” Madan interrupted.
“It’ll take a minute. One minute, and your life will be different! Let me help you.”
“I’ve already told you how you can help. You said you’d speak to the supervisor to make me permanent. After this week I’ll be on the streets again, and you’ll be scratching your ass in here.”
“What’re you saying?” Dinesh said. “I’ve spoken to Ketan-bhai. I swear. He said when a space opens up he’ll talk to us. Just listen to me for a minute.” Dinesh tried to reach for Madan’s arm, but Madan was going too fast. Dinesh always had some hustle going.
“You won’t be able to say no to this,” Dinesh said. “I swear.”
Madan shook him away and loped off to work. He didn’t care if he made it onto the full-time roster, but it had been the only thing he could think of when Dinesh had asked for help with some bank paperwork and Madan wasn’t about to do the work for free or it would be a never-ending list of requests. Though it would be a nice change to have a regular place to come to every morning, and not have to scrounge around for his next job. And he was grateful for the bone-deep exhaustion that came with the grind and toil of manual labor, so he could collapse into a dreamless sleep every night, keeping off the streets and away from the temptations of the train station.
It was after one in the afternoon when Madan stepped out of the factory gate. The lunch-crowd rush was huddled around the lunch vendor’s wooden cart. Workers sat on concrete slabs, eating, smoking or dozing against the sun-warmed wall spattered orange and brown with tobacco spittle and mud. Madan bought a dried-leaf plate of beans and rice and found a spot to read his newspaper while he ate, tuning out the drone of the numerous conversations swirling around him.
“All I’m saying is this is a chance, not a small chance, not a big chance, but an enormous chance to set yourself up for life.” Dinesh was talking loud enough for the whole group to hear.
“But I don’t understand,” said a worker.
“I know these things can seem complicated on the surface, but really it’s very simple.” Dinesh stood up to make his point and to make sure that more people could hear him. It worked. Men turned to listen to him as they smoked their last beedi before going back to work.
“Vladimir, who runs the gym I go to, was with the Russian heavyweight
Olympic team. He’s an expert in body and health. He’s developed this powder. You suffer from tiredness, your joints ache, you catch a cold easily, your skin is dull—this powder can fix all these things and more. Mix one spoon in your dal or your beans, in your curd, or make your rotis with it, and you’ll get all the health benefits, all the vitamins you need to have a long and healthy life.”
“But how’ll we make money from the powder?”
“He’s going to sell this powder in shops everywhere, in gyms, in chemist shops. Even your vegetable seller will carry it.” Dinesh put up his hand as someone tried to ask a question, not letting them speak. “Listen carefully, because you’re getting in from the start. You contribute to the starting fund, say five percent of your salary. He’s going to use this fund to manufacture and distribute the powder. Not only will he give you this powder free every month, but every time you bring in another person, you will get two percent from their five percent and one percent from everyone your investor brings in.”
The man who handled the account books lit a cigarette, puffing a stream of smoke in their general direction. He stood with Ketan-bhai, the general supervisor, who sniffed disapprovingly at the cigarette smoke. Ketan-bhai’s neatly pressed safari suit and polite, firm manner of talking distinguished him from most of the workforce, and Madan had often seen him walking the floor fiddling with the reading glasses folded away in his breast pocket.
“All of you are out here,” said the accountant. “And who is going to do the work?”
“Listen to Dinesh, Accountant-saab. He’s telling us something very interesting.”
Dinesh repeated his pitch to the accountant and Ketan-bhai. “Bring in your brother, your neighbor, your uncle, already you have three contacts and have made a six percent return on your investment. But don’t stop there. What about your in-laws, and your friends? Now you’ve eight, ten, twelve percent return. Money from all directions. You only have to look.”
“What’s in this powder?” Ketan-bhai asked.
“A good question,” Dinesh said, removing a glass jar from his bag that was filled with a grainy brown powder. “I can’t tell you everything that it’s made of. That’s secret. Some of the main ingredients are fenugreek and almond powder.”
There was a groan from the crowd, and Dinesh looked offended.
“Madan,” Dinesh said. “Come on, my friend. At least you try it, and tell them.”
Madan turned his face away and tried to shrug off Dinesh’s hand.
“Just give it a try,” Dinesh insisted.
“Who is this?” Ketan-bhai asked. “I think I’ve seen you before.”
“Remember, Ketan-bhai?” Dinesh said. “This is the boy who I was telling you about.” Ketan-bhai looked puzzled. Clearly, in spite of swearing up and down that he had, Dinesh had never spoken to Ketan-bhai as he’d claimed.
“You worked at Forex Garments, I think,” Ketan-bhai said.
“He’s worked here previously as well,” said the accountant.
“Where’re you from?” Ketan-bhai asked.
“Looks like he’s from this side,” said the accountant. “Haryana? Punjab?”
“What do you think, Madan?” asked one of the workers. “You’re always reading those big books and these newspapers. I have to get my sister married soon. I need to make some extra money fast.”
“Our fund is just the way. Vladimir won a gold medal. He knows what he is doing,” Dinesh said. “Take it from me in writing, you’ll be giving your sister a wedding so grand we’ll all be talking about it.”
The man looked dubious. “Would you do it?” he asked Madan again.
“I’m not interested,” Madan said.
“Don’t listen to him. He’s not interested in changing his life. Do you ever hear him complain? He likes this dog’s life we lead here.”
Madan had had enough. “It’s an interesting proposition,” he said to the worker, and a few curious ones turned to listen to him and sat back down.
Dinesh smiled and said, “See? Now he’s making sense.”
“But if I were you, I wouldn’t give my hard-earned money to some guy who could disappear tomorrow. If you ever want your money back, where will this Vladimir be? Laughing at you all the way from Russia. And I’d ask what proof is there that this powder is good for health. If I don’t know what’s in it, why would I eat it? Why would I give it to my family and friends?”
Dinesh’s face turned red, and he laughed and frowned and laughed again. “What do you know?” he shouted at Madan. “Bloody rogue.” He addressed the group. “Are you going to trust this motherfucker who came into our midst yesterday? You know me. I tell you, Vladimir is a trustworthy man. Not like this one. Who the hell is he? Does anyone know?”
Ignoring Dinesh’s bluster, they turned to Ketan-bhai for his advice. Ketan-bhai looked like he found the whole exchange distasteful, but he answered with tact. “This is not the place for your schemes, Dinesh,” he said. “It’s time for all of you to go back to work,” he told the workers. “You’re better off putting your money in a fixed-deposit account with a bank. Your return may be less, but at least your money is safe.”
“That’s what we thought,” the workers murmured.
“Can’t believe Dinesh is such a fucking cunt. I was ready to bring the cash tomorrow.”
“Has anyone even seen Vladimir’s gold medal?”
They disappeared inside the gate, and Madan, released from Dinesh’s grip, got up to follow them.
“You bastard, why don’t you mind your own business?” Dinesh snarled.
“I was trying to,” Madan said, tossing his lunch plate and newspaper in the pile of trash by the electricity pole. All at once he was furious. How dare Dinesh force him to get involved in a scheme so ridiculous? He wasn’t beholden to anybody, not anymore, and certainly he wasn’t about to let a slimy idiot like Dinesh jerk him around. Madan whipped back around and grabbed Dinesh’s waist. Using the force of his body, he took Dinesh down. Dinesh’s head caught on the edge of the concrete slab but it did not knock him out.
Madan flipped Dinesh onto his back and held him in place with a knee on his chest. Blood trickled out of the gash on Dinesh’s forehead.
He slammed his head down into Dinesh’s face. It should have been Dinesh screaming in pain, but Madan heard his own scream of rage.
He looked up into the void before him. Where was he and how had he gotten here? He stared blearily at Ketan-bhai, standing straight, rooted tightly in place. The accountant’s cigarette hung loosely from his lips.
Madan let go of Dinesh and straightened up, leaving Dinesh writhing on the ground.
“He’s broken my arm,” Dinesh screamed. “Motherfucker, asshole. I can’t feel my hand. I am dying.”
Madan raised his arm to wipe the sweat and blood off his forehead. Ketan-bhai and the accountant reflexively took a step back. Only a few people remained around them. They kept their distance.
Madan was suddenly sorry. Dinesh was a chump and a moron, but these shortcomings were no reason to attack him. Madan was becoming what Pandit Bansi Lal had prophesized, was turning into the uncouth goon his mother had accused him of being with her silences. He was Avtaar Singh’s domesticated dog set free, not knowing how to behave without its master. He wished he could have reacted differently, shaken Dinesh off and walked away, but he seemed not to know how to control himself. Madan knelt down next to Dinesh and tried to work his arm under Dinesh’s back. He tried to get Dinesh to sit up.
“Don’t touch me! Stop him!” Dinesh bellowed.
His last plea moved Ketan-bhai, who had not taken his eyes off Madan. Surely Ketan-bhai was going to fire Madan for this outburst, or worse. “What are you doing to him?”
Ignoring Dinesh’s whimpering and wailing, Madan continued to try and lift Dinesh up. “I’m taking him to the doctor,” Madan said.
“The doctor?” Ketan-bhai repeated. He exchanged a baffled glance with the accountant. “You’re taking him to the doctor?”
“You broke his arm,” Ketan-bhai stated, as if filling Madan in on something he had missed.
“I think it’s his wrist.”
“And now you’re taking him to the doctor?” Ketan-bhai turned disbelievingly again to the accountant.
Together, Madan and Ketan-bhai maneuvered Dinesh into an auto-rickshaw. All the way to the hospital, Madan propped Dinesh up while Ketan-bhai kept his injured arm steady, the older man’s eyes wide with confusion and a grudging respect.
“What is your full name? Kumar?” he repeated when Madan told him. “A common enough name that tells me nothing about you.”
“I am what you see,” Madan said.
The smell coming from the toilet was sharpest in the morning, when the hole in the ground was in most demand. It would be overflowing and unusable if he didn’t hurry. His room was a recess in the wall of a building, its threshold crossed in two steps. Rolling up his sleeping mat, he collected the bucket sitting by the door for his wash. The plastic bag slouching against the bucket tipped over, spilling out pieces of leather and bits of crepe, chenille, cotton, georgette and velvet. The day before, in the garbage bin at the back of the factory, he’d come across a jagged piece of goat hide which he could not leave behind even though his bag of discarded cuttings was almost full to bursting. The star-shaped piece would delight Swati. Stuffing the scraps back into the bag, he secured the top with a tight knot.
From the narrow ledge out his door, he descended the steep spiral staircase to a long lane of crumbling plaster. Out of corroded grilled windows on either side poured sounds of babies crying, bells tinkling in morning prayer and hymns sung in stilted voices, muffled shouts of argument and calls for cups of tea. Skittish goats with matchstick legs and jute sacks slung over their backs for warmth bleated and tugged at the ropes leashing them to doorways and window bars. He washed up quickly under the broken pipe protruding from the wall, the cool water from the municipality spurting out with a pounding force at this time of the morning. A gurgle of soap suds from the previous bather oozed around his feet, flowing down along the sloping gradient of the street. After his quick bath, he filled his bucket to take back to the room. By the time he returned in the evening the copious flow from the pipe would be down to a trickle, and he could do with one less inconvenience. He should be used to the shrill noises, the mordant smells, the slimy concrete blocks beneath his wet feet, but every small vexation, every tiresome moment, counted toward the drip of hurt and bitterness slowly filling his heart.