Free Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

community.
    Shankara watched. Already hundreds of men were getting into lines, where beer and quarter-liter bottles of rum were being distributed to them, as a bribe for having attended the rally and cheered the speakers. He shook his head with disapproval. He didn’t like the idea that he was part of ninety percent of his town. Now it seemed to him that the Brahmins were defenseless—a former elite of Kittur who now lived in constant fear of being robbed of their homes and their wealth by the Hoykas, the Bunts, the Konkanas, and everyone else in town. The sheer averageness of the Hoykas—whatever they did became the average at once, by definition—repulsed him.
    The following morning, he read the newspaper, and thought he had been too harsh on the Hoykas. He remembered the professor who had been up onstage, and found out from his chauffeur where he lived. He paced backward and forward outside the front gate of the professor’s house for a while. Finally he opened the gate, approached the house, and pressed the front doorbell.
    The professor opened the door. Shankara said, “Sir, I am a Hoyka. You are the only man in this town whom I trust. I wish to talk with you.”
    “I know who you are,” Professor D’Souza said. “Come in.”
    Professor D’Souza and Shankara sat in the living room and had a long talk.
    “Who is that member of Parliament? What is his caste?” the professor asked.
    The question confused Shankara.
    “He is one of us, sir. A Hoyka.”
    “Not quite,” the professor said. “He is a Kollaba. Have you heard the term? There is no such thing as a Hoyka, my dear fellow. The caste is subdivided into seven subcastes. You understand the term? Subcaste? Good. The member of Parliament is a Kollaba, the top of the seven subcastes. The Kollabas have always been millionaires. The British anthropologists of Kittur noted this fact with interest even in the nineteenth century. The Kollabas have exploited the other six Hoyka castes for years. And now once again, this man is playing the Hoyka card to get himself reelected, so he can sit in an office in New Delhi and accept large envelopes filled with cash from businessmen who want to set up garment factories in the Bunder.”
    Seven subcastes? The Kollabas? Shankara had never heard any of this. He gaped.
    “This is the big problem with you Hindus,” the professor said. “You are mysteries to yourselves!”
    Shankara felt ashamed to be a Hindu; what a repulsive thing, this caste system that his ancestors had devised. But at the same time he was annoyed with Daryl D’Souza. Who was this man, to lecture him on caste? How dare the Christians do this? Hadn’t they been Hindus too, at some point? Shouldn’t they have remained Hindus and defeated the Brahmins from within, instead of taking the easy way out by converting?
    He crushed his annoyance into a smile.
    “What do we do about the caste system, sir? How do we get rid of it?”
    “One solution is what the Naxalites have done, just to blow up the upper castes entirely,” said the professor. He had a quaint, womanlike habit of dipping his large round biscuit in milk, and then hurrying to eat it before it got too soggy. “They blow up the entire system; that way you can start from scratch.”
    “From scratch”—the American idiom excited Shankar. “I too think we should start from scratch, sir. I think we should destroy the caste system and start from scratch.”
    “My dear boy: you are a nihilist,” the professor said, with an approving smile. He bit into his soggy biscuit.
    They had not met after that; the professor had been traveling, and Shankara had been too shy to barge in on him a second time. But he had never forgotten the conversation. Now, wandering around town in a daze, the sugar from the milk shakes upsetting his stomach, he thought, He’s the only man who’d understand what I’ve done. I’ll confess everything to him.
     
     
    The professor’s house was packed with students. A