Free Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga Page A

reporter from the Dawn Herald was there, asking the big man questions about terrorism. A black tape recorder sat on the desk. Shankara, who had come to the professor’s house by autorickshaw, waited with the students and watched.
    “It is an absolute act of nihilism on the part of some student,” the professor was saying, his eyes on the tape recorder. “He should be caught and thrown into jail.”
    “Sir, what does this episode say about today’s India, sir?”
    “This is an example of the nihilism of our youth,” said Professor D’Souza. “They are lost and directionless. They have…”—a pause—“lost the moral standards of our nation. Our traditions are being forgotten.”
    Shankara felt himself choke with rage.
    He stormed out.
    He caught an autorickshaw to Shabbir Ali’s house and rang the bell. A bearded man in a North Indian–style kurta, with his chest hair sticking out, opened the door. It took Shankara some time to recognize him as Shabbir Ali’s father, whom he had never before seen.
    “He is not allowed to talk to any of his friends,” he said. “You fellows have corrupted my son.” And he slammed the door in Shankara’s face.
    So, the great Shabbir Ali, the man who “talked” to women and played with condoms, was locked up in his house. By his father. Shankara wanted to laugh.
    He was tired of moving in autorickshaws; so he called home from a pay phone and asked for the car to be sent to Shabbir Ali’s house to pick him up.
    Back home, he bolted the door to his room. He lay in bed. He picked up the phone and put it down and counted to five and then picked it up again. Eventually it worked. In Kittur, that was all you had to do to enter into someone else’s world.
    He was listening to a “cross-connection.”
     
     
    The phone line crackled and came to life. A man and woman, possibly husband and wife, were talking. They were speaking in a language he couldn’t understand; he thought it might be Malayalam—the speakers must be Muslim, he thought. He wondered what they were talking about—was the man complaining about his health, was she asking about more money for the household? Why were they on the phone? he wondered. Was the man living away from Kittur? Whatever their situation, whatever they were saying in that foreign language, he felt the intimacy of their conversation. It would be nice to have a wife or a girlfriend, he thought. Not to be so alone all the time. Even a single real friend. Even that would have kept him from planting the bomb and getting into all this trouble.
    The man’s tone changed suddenly. He began to whisper.
    “I think someone’s breathing on the line,” the man said—or so Shankara imagined.
    “Yes, you’re right. Some pervert is listening to us,” the woman replied—or so Shankara imagined.
    Then the man hung up.
    I have the worst of both castes in my blood, Shankara thought, lying in bed, the receiver of the phone still at his ear. I have the anxiety and fear of the Brahmin, and I have the tendency to act without thinking of the Hoyka. In me the worst of both has fused and produced this monstrosity which is my personality.
    He was going mad. Yes, he was convinced of that. He wanted to get out of the house again. He worried that the chauffeur was noticing his restlessness.
    He went out the back door and slipped out of the house without the driver observing him.
    But he probably doesn’t suspect me, he thought. He probably thinks I’m a useless rich brat, like Shabbir Ali.
    All these rich fellows like Shabbir Ali, he told himself bitterly, lived out a kind of code. They talked things, but did not do them. They had condoms at home, but did not use them; they kept detonators, but did not explode them. Talk, and talk, and talk. That was their life. It was like the salt on the ice cream. The salt was smeared on the slab of vanilla and left there in the open; but no one was meant to lick it! That was only a joke! It was meant to be talk only, all