There's good money in public service! Now, imagine that I'm a doctor. I beg and borrow the money and give it to the Great Socialist, while touching his feet. He gives me the job. I take an oath to God and the Constitution of India and then I put my boots up on my desk in the state capital. I take out my big government ledger. I shout out, 'Dr. Ram Pandey. I saluted him: "Yes, sir!
Ram Pandey—will kindly put one-third of your salary in my palm. Good boy. In return, I do this. Forget the village. Because according to this ledger you've been there. You've treated my wounded leg. You've healed that girl's jaundice. Even the ward boys, who had gathered around us to listen, nodded their heads in appreciation. Stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren't they? When Kishan put some food into Father's mouth, he spat it out with blood.
His lean black body began to convulse, spewing blood this way and that. The girls with the yellow eyes began to wail. The other patients moved away from my father. He's been coughing for a while, but we didn't know what it was. I've seen it before in rickshaw-pullers. They get weak from their work. Well, maybe the doctor will turn up in the evening. Around six o'clock that day, as the government ledger no doubt accurately reported, my father was permanently cured of his tuberculosis.
The ward boys made us clean up after Father before we could remove the body. A goat came in and sniffed as we were mopping the blood off the floor. The ward boys petted her and fed her a plump carrot as we mopped our father's infected blood off the floor. Kishan's marriage took place a month after the cremation.
It was one of the good marriages. We had the boy, and we screwed the girl's family hard. I remember exactly what we got in dowry from the girl's side, and thinking about it even now makes my mouth fill up with water: five thousand rupees cash, all crisp new unsoiled notes fresh from the bank, plus a Hero bicycle, plus a thick gold necklace for Kishan.
After the wedding, Kusum Granny took the five thousand rupees and the Hero cycle and the thick gold necklace; Kishan got two weeks to dip his beak into his wife, and then he was packed off to Dhanbad.
My cousin Dilip and I came along with him. We three found work in a tea shop in Dhanbad—the owner had heard good things about Kishan's work at the tea shop in Laxmangarh. Luckily for us, he hadn't heard anything about me. Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop— men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys.
I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity—and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience. Instead of wiping out spots from tables and crushing coals for the oven, I used my time at the tea shop in Laxmangarh to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear everything they said.
I decided that this was how I would keep my education going forward—that's the one good thing I'll say for myself. I've always been a big believer in education—especially my own.
The owner of the shop sat up at the front, below the big photo of Gandhi, stirring a slow-boiling broth of sugar syrup. He knew what I was up to! Whenever he saw me loafing around a table or pretending to be doing a spot of wiping just so I could hear more of a conversation, he would shout, "You thug!
The burning syrup singed me wherever the ladle touched, and left a series of spots on my ears which people sometimes mistake for vitiligo or another skin disease; a network of pink by which you can still identify me, although the police, predictably, missed it. Eventually I got sent home. No one else in Laxmangarh would hire me after that, even as a field hand.
So it was mostly for my sake that Kishan and Dilip had come to Dhanbad—to give me a chance to start my career as a human spider afresh. In his journey from village to city, from Laxmangarh to Delhi, the entrepreneur's path crosses any number of provincial towns that have the pollution and noise and traffic of a big city— without any hint of the true city's sense of history, planning, and grandeur.
Half-baked cities, built for half-baked men. There was money in the air in Dhanbad. I saw buildings with sides made entirely of glass, and men with gold in their teeth.
And all this glass and gold—all of it came from the coal pits. Outside the town, there was coal, more coal than you would find anywhere else in the Darkness, maybe more coal than anywhere else in the world. Miners came to eat at my tea shop—I always gave them the best service, because they had the best tales to tell. They said that the coal mines went on and on for miles and miles outside the town. In some places there were fires burning under the earth and sending smoke into the air—fires that had been burning continuously for a hundred years!
And it was at the tea shop in this city built by coal, while wiping a table and lingering to overhear a conversation, that my life changed. What else can people like you and me become? One thousand seven hundred rupees a month! I ran to Kishan, who was cleaning out the insides of an oven. After my father's death, it was Kishan who took care of me. But he had no entrepreneurial spunk at all. He would have been happy to let me sink in the mud. It was going to cost me three hundred rupees to learn how to drive a car.
Three hundred rupees! Today, in Bangalore, I can't get enough people for my business. People come and people go. Good men never stay. I'm even thinking of advertising in the newspaper.
Go to any pub or bar in Bangalore with your ears open and it's the same thing you hear: can't get enough call-center workers, can't get enough software engineers, can't get enough sales managers. There are twenty, twenty-five pages of job advertisements in the newspaper every week. Things are different in the Darkness. There, every morning, tens of thousands of young men sit in the tea shops, reading the newspaper, or lie on a charpoy humming a tune, or sit in their rooms talking to a photo of a film actress.
They have no job to do today. They know they won't get any job today. They've given up the fight. They're the smart ones. The stupid ones have gathered in a field in the center of the town.
Every now and then a truck comes by, and all the men in the field rush to it with their hands outstretched, shouting, "Take me! Take me! They were off on some construction or digging job—the lucky bastards. Another half hour of waiting. Another truck came. Another scramble, another fight. After the fifth or sixth fight of the day, I finally found myself at the head of the crowd, face-to-face with the truck driver.
He was a Sikh, a man with a big blue turban. In one hand he held a wooden stick, and he swung the stick to drive back the crowd. I've got to see a man's nipples before I give him a job! Fuck off! I fell down, and others rushed to take my place. I sat on the ground, rubbed my ear, and watched the truck leave in a big cloud of dust. The shadow of an eagle passed over my body.
I burst into tears. There you are! Great news! Granny had agreed to let them invest in my driving classes. She wants you to swear by all the gods in heaven that you won't forget her once you get rich. An old man in a brown uniform, which was like an ancient army outfit, was smoking a hookah that was warmed up by a bowl of live coals.
Kishan explained the situation to him. The old driver asked, "What caste are you? You make sweets. How can you learn to drive? Mastering a car"—he moved the stick of an invisible gearbox—"it's like taming a wild stallion—only a boy from the warrior castes can manage that. You need to have aggression in your blood. Muslims, Rajputs, Sikhs—they're fighters, they can become drivers.
You think sweet-makers can last long in fourth gear? Three hundred rupees, plus a bonus, will do that. We practiced in a taxi. Each time I made a mistake with the gears, he slapped me on the skull. You've got to become a driver.
You've got to get the right attitude, understand? Anyone tries to overtake you on the road, do this"—he clenched his fist and shook it—"and call him a sister-fucker a few times. The road is a jungle, get it? A good driver must roar to get ahead on it. I've got a reward for you. It was evening. We went through dim streets and markets.
We walked for half an hour, while everything around us grew dark—and then it was as if we had stepped out into fireworks. The street was full of colored doors and colored windows, and in each door and each window, a woman was looking out at me with a big smile. Ribbons of red paper and silver foil glittered between the rooftops of the street; tea was being boiled in stalls by the sides of the road.
Four men rushed at us at once. The old driver explained that they should keep away, since it was my first time. That's the best part of this game, isn't it—the looking! The old driver explained the nature of the wares on offer. Up in one building, sitting on a windowsill in such a way that we could see the full spread of their gleaming dark legs, were the "Americans": girls in short skirts and high platform shoes, carrying pink handbags with names in English written on them in sequins.
They were slim and athletic—for men who like the Western kind. In this corner, sitting in the threshold of an open house, the "traditionals"—fat, chunky types in saris, for those who like value for their money. There were eunuchs in one window— teenagers in the next window. The face of a small boy appeared from between a woman's legs and then vanished. A blinding flash of light: a blue door opened, and four light-skinned Nepali women, in gorgeous red petticoats, looked out.
My first time! Half an hour later, when the old driver and I staggered back, drunk and happy, to his house, I put coals in his hookah. I brought him the hookah and watched as he took a deep, contented suck on the pipe. Smoke came out of his nostrils. I've taught you to be a driver and a man—what more do you want? I'll work for free at first. I need a job. How the fuck can I help you? Now get lost. Everyone said no. You didn't get a job that way. You had to know someone in the family to get a job.
Not by knocking on the gate and asking. There's no reward for entrepreneurship in most of India, Your Excellency. It's a sad fact. Every evening I came home tired and close to tears, but Kishan said, "Keep trying. Someone will say yes in the end. Finally, after two weeks of asking and being told to get lost, I got to a house with ten-foot-high walls, and a cage of iron grilles around each window.
A sly, slant-eyed Nepali with a white mustache peered at me through the bars of the gate. I've got four years' experience. My master recently died, so I—" "Fuck off.
We have a driver already," the Nepali said. He twirled a big bunch of keys and grinned. My heart sank, and I was about to turn away—when I saw a figure on the terrace, a fellow in long loose white clothes, walking around and around, lost deep in thought.
I swear by God, sir— I swear by all thirty-six million and four of them—the moment I saw his face, I knew: This is the master for me.
Some dark fate had tied his lifeline to mine, because at that very moment he looked down. I knew he was coming down to save me. I just had to divert this Nepali fucker as long as possible. I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't steal. Get lost, at once—" "I don't gossip about my masters, I don't steal, I don't blaspheme. But it was not the man on the terrace—it was an older man, with a big white mustache that was thick, and curved, and pointy at the tips.
Begging for money. I am from Laxmangarh! The village near the Black Fort! Your village! He stared at me for the longest time, and then he told the Nepali guard, "Let the boy in. No Olympic runner could have gone in as fast as I did through those gates; the Nepali had no chance at all of blocking me.
You should have seen me that day—what a performance of wails and kisses and tears! You'd think I'd been born into a caste of performing actors! And all the time, while clutching the Stork's feet, I was staring at his huge, dirty, uncut toenails, and thinking, What is he doing in Dhanbad? Why isn't he back home, screwing poor fishermen of their money and humping their daughters? Ashok—the man on the terrace, of course—was by his side now.
I used to work in the tea shop—the one with the big photo of Gandhi in it. I used to break coals there. You came once to have tea.
It's been three years since I was there. He turned to Mr. Call Mukesh too. Let's go for a spin. Ashok had come back from America just the previous day; a car had been bought for him.
A driver was needed for the car. And on that day I had turned up. Now, there were two cars in the garage. One was your standard Maruti Suzuki—that little white car you see all over India—and the other was the Honda City. Now, the Maruti is a small, simple fellow, a perfect servant to the driver; the moment you turn the ignition key, he does exactly what the driver wants him to.
The Honda City is a larger car, a more sophisticated creature, with a mind of his own; he has power steering, and an advanced engine, and he does what he wants to. Given that I was so nervous then, if the Stork had told me to take the driving test in the Honda City, that would have been the end of me, sir. But luck was on my side. They made me drive the Maruti Suzuki. The Stork and Mr. Ashok got into the back; a small dark man—Mukesh Sir, the Stork's other son—got into the front seat and gave me orders.
The Nepali guard watched with a darkened face as I took the car out of the gates—and into the city of Dhanbad. They made me drive them around for half an hour, and then told me to head back.
What's your last name again? Even Indians get confused about this word, especially educated Indians in the cities. They'll make a mess of explaining it to you. But it's simple, really. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in Hardcover format. The main characters of this fiction, cultural story are Balram Halwai, Ashok.
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He learns, develops and eventually excels in this diverse array of new skills, and earns multiple awards and certifications in acknowledgement of his accomplishments.
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A boy's adventure of tiger hunting in Nepal. High schools—Fiction. Details on the book: Author: Sandra Brown. The first edition of the novel was published in March 10th , and was written by Laurann Dohner.
The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in ebook format.
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