Well, Eyes, I know about this. When I was starving I sold my blood to get food.
“Eight hundred rupees a bottle Lilabai had to pay!”
“What? That fucker Chunaram sorry for cursing gave me only eighty!”
“Who is this Chunaram?” asks Zafar kindly, removing his specs to wipe them. Freed from the prisons of the lenses his eyes appear a little watery, as if he has not been sleeping.
“Has a chai shop in the Nutcracker. Mr. Ninefingers.”
“Ah,” says he, as if this explains everything.
I tell them how Chunaram once got the idea of selling blood, he could store it in his fridge. He needed a supply and I was the first one he bled.
“What happened to this plan?” asks Nisha.
“Somebody put it about that he was selling animal blood.”
“I wonder who?” She raises an eyebrow at me, but I’ve replied nothing.
“Part of our work,” Zafar says, returning to that matter, “is getting money to those who need it. Cash has to be carried, it’s something you can do.”
“You’d trust me?”
“Are you not trustworthy?”
“I don’t know. No one has ever trusted me with anything before.”
“So we’ll find out. What other work can you do?”
Work? I had no clue. I had tried a few jobs while I was on the street, scavenging for rags, tin cans, plastic and the like, I wasn’t good at it because if you go on all fours you have only one hand plus mouth free to carry things. I tell this to Zafar who listens thoughtfully. He has reworn his glasses, chin’s propped on his fingers, which somehow are still finding ways to irritate the beard.
“What about the scams?” It’s Nisha, all grinning mischief.
“I told you, I don’t do such things.”
Says Zafar, “You know the bloodstain scam?”
“No idea what you are talking about.”
“How about the spilled channa scam? No, that one you wouldn’t be able to convince.”
Well I’m impressed. The bloodstain scam is not often seen, at least in Khaufpur. As for the spilled channa, it must be played by a boy who sits in the street surrounded by roasted gram. He has to know how to cry well, and moan that his father will beat him. A bent tray must be lying there, so it looks as if he’s a street-seller who’s tripped up. Obviously he’d have been carrying the tray on his head, which is why I could not have done it.
“How come you know such things?”
“Lost coins you could do, broken bottle you could try but no one would believe.”
“What do you mean?” says I, who’ve performed that trick more times than I can remember.
“Aha,” he says, smiling. “So you do know. Well, I’m not interested in what you have done, but in what you will do.”
“I’m an animal, I can’t do much.” I say this to put an end to him feeling superior and also, if I am honest, to annoy him.
“You’ve the gift of the gab.”
“An animal must use its mouth, no other tool does it have.”
“How does it see?”
“Uses its eyes.”
“You can do that,” says he. “How does it find food?”
“Smells it out.”
“We need a good sniffer. Your dog,” he says, indicating Jara who is lying in the sun asleep. “How does she know when to play dead?”
“There’s a word.”
“She hears, plus is clever enough to understand. We need someone like her. Use eyes, nose, ears, brain, this is another job.”
“Namispond! Jamispond!”
“Shabaash,” says he with a grin.
“I would like this job better than carrying cash.”
“That we’ll see,” says Zafar. He shades his eyes to glance at the sun and tells Nisha he has to be going because it’s nearly four o’clock.
“So! What do you think of Zafar?” Nisha asks as his motorcycle farts away through the Claw.
“Such an important fellow should at least get a watch.”
Nisha says, “You’ll understand when you get to know him.”
From her I heard Zafar’s story. Seems he’d been a scholar who left his studies to take up the cause of the poor.
“I met his old professor once,” Nisha said. “He told me Zafar was his most brilliant student. He could have been anything, but when he got news of that night, he straight away quit his college and came to Khaufpur to organise the fight against the Kampani, which he has been doing ever since. Who do you suppose has kept the case against the Kampani alive so long? So many times they have tried to stop him. He’s been threatened, beaten, but Zafar is not afraid of anything or anyone. He speaks the truth and he never gives up. These are the things that make the ordinary people love him.”
You too, I thought, getting the drift.
So Eyes, this was my job, to keep my eyes and ears open and report to Zafar if anything unusual was going on in the bastis. I was to listen in the streets and chai shops, find out what the government, munsipal etc. were up to, because those buggers are always up to no good. Thus within weeks I caught a plan to evict some people from near the railway and told Zafar, who put an end to it. People showed me respect because I was one of Zafar’s.
Zafar’s gang, how would you describe us? Saints, said the slum folk who could never take the name of Zafar without adding a spice of blessing. Subversives, said Zahreel Khan, he’s Khaufpur’s Minister for Poison Relief. To me, if I’m honest, we were just a bunch of fucking do-gooders. Okay, we did good, what else should do-gooders do, but I couldn’t be bothered with the political shit, I hated all that talk of “poison victims,” I don’t want to be pitied, I refuse to be some fucking bhonsdi-ka victim. As for Saint Zafar, don’t make me laugh. I’d seen the lust in the man’s eyes when he looked at Nisha, saints and angels don’t feel lust, which is how I know I’m not one.
Such feelings I kept to myself. Four hundred rupees a month I earned for my work, which was easy, in this life good fortune too seldom comes along and when it does you don’t want to be twisting its balls. Chunaram soon got wind of my new riches because Zafar for some reason had taken a shine to him, his chai shop in the Nutcracker became like a second headquarters. Chunaram told me that four hundred rupees was a lot of money, he offered to keep it safe for me but I wasn’t falling for that. Instead, I gave it to Nisha. She said I should open a bank account.
“How can I, who can neither read nor write?”
“Then I must teach you.”
At that time she was enrolled at Iqbal Bahadur Women’s College in the walled city, but I think she was not taking her studies very seriously.
“You shouldn’t come home at midday,” her father said.
“Then what will you do for lunch? Papa, Zafar gets me back in time for my afternoon lectures, plus this boy needs at least one good meal a day, if he will insist on sleeping rough instead of under a roof like a human being.”
“You could leave some chappatis in a tiffin,” I said, giving a glance at her dad, of whom I was afraid. Grim, terrifying bastard he was, but with good cause, when you knew his story. “Plus I’m not a human being.”
“Don’t you like my cooking?”
“Animal’s right,” said her father.
“I could get something outside,” says I, who’d newly discovered the pleasure of spending a little of my earnings on a samosa here, pau bhaji there.
“Should my dad also eat street food?”
“I can manage fine,” her father said. Both of us knew that it was not for our sakes that she came home. Zafar too came, most days. He would eat with her father, spend some time with Nisha, then take her back to college on his motorbike.