The boy had been caught stealing samosas meant for a client, Ramanna said. Thimma asked the shopkeeper if he was joking.
“I wouldn’t have believed it myself,” Ramanna mumbled. “But I saw it with my own eyes. He was taking a samosa from the kitchen, and…” Ramanna bit into an imaginary samosa.
Gritting his teeth, Ziauddin had begun pushing the icebox into the shop with the back of his legs.
“But…he used to be an honest little fellow…” the drunk recalled.
“Maybe he had been stealing all along, and we just never knew it. You can’t trust anyone these days.”
The bottles in the icebox rattled. Ziauddin had stopped his work.
“I’m a Pathan!” He slapped his chest. “From the land of the Pathans, far up north, where there are mountains full of snow! I’m not a Hindu! I don’t do hanky-panky!”
Then he walked into the back of the shop.
“What the hell is this?” asked the drunk.
The shopkeeper explained that Ziauddin was now spouting this Pathan-Wathan gibberish all the time; he thought the boy must have picked it up from some mullah in the north of the state.
Thimma roared. He put his hands on his hips and shouted into the back of the shop, “Ziauddin, Pathans are white skinned, like Imran Khan; you’re as black as an African!”
The next morning there was a storm at the tea-and-samosa store. This time Ziauddin had been caught red-handed. Holding him by the collar of his shirt and dragging him out in front of the customers, Ramanna Shetty said:
“Tell me the truth-you son of a bald woman. Did you steal it? Tell me the truth this time, and I might give you another chance.”
“I am telling the truth,” Ziauddin said, touching his pink, vitiligo-discolored lips with a crooked finger. “I didn’t touch even one of the samosas.”
Ramanna grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him to the ground, kicked him, and then shoved him out of the tea shop, while the other boys huddled together and watched impassively, as sheep do when watching one of their flock being shorn. Then Ramanna howled: he raised one of his fingers, which was bleeding.
“He bit me-the animal!”
“I’m a Pathan!” Ziauddin shouted back, as he rose to his knees. “We came here and built the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort in Delhi. Don’t you dare treat me like this, you son of a bald woman, you-”
Ramanna turned to the ring of customers who had gathered around them and were staring at him and at Ziauddin, trying to make up their minds as to who was right and who was wrong: “There is no work here for a Muslim, and he has to fight with the one man who gives him a job.”
A few days later, Ziauddin passed by the tea shop, driving a cycle with a cart attached to it; large canisters of milk clanged together in the cart.
“Look at me,” he mocked his former employer. “The milk people trust me!”
But that job did not last long either; once again he was accused of theft. He publicly swore never to work for a Hindu again.
New Muslim restaurants were being opened at the far side of the railway station, where the Muslim immigrants were settling, and Ziauddin found work in one of these restaurants. He made omelets and toast at an outdoor grill, and shouted in Urdu and Malayalam, “Muslim men, wherever in the world you are from, Yemen or Kerala or Arabia or Bengal, come eat at a genuine Muslim shop!”
But even this job did not last-he was again charged with theft by his employer, who slapped him when he talked back-and he was next seen in a red uniform at the railway station, carrying mounds of luggage on his head and fighting bitterly with the passengers over his pay.
“I’m the son of a Pathan; I have the blood of a Pathan in me. You hear; I’m no cheat!”
When he glared at them, his eyeballs bulged, and the tendons in his neck stood out in high relief. He had become another of those lean, lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India, smoking their beedis in a corner and looking ready to hit or kill someone at a moment’s notice. Yet when old customers from Ramanna’s shop called him by his name, he grinned, and then they saw something of the boy with the big smile who had slammed glasses of tea down on their tables and mangled their English. They wondered what on earth had happened to him.
In the end, Ziauddin picked fights with the other porters, got kicked out of the train station too, and wandered aimlessly for a few days, cursing Hindu and Muslim alike. Then he was back at the station, carrying bags on his head again. He was a good worker; everyone had to concede that much. And there was plenty of work now for everyone. Several trains full of soldiers had arrived in Kittur-there was talk in the market that a new army base was being set up on the route to Cochin-and for days after the soldiers left, freight trains followed in their wake, carrying large crates that needed to be off-loaded. Ziauddin shut his mouth and carried the crates off the train and out of the station, where army trucks were waiting to be packed.
One Sunday, he lay on the platform of the station, still asleep at ten in the morning, dead tired from the week’s labor. He woke up with his nostrils twitching: the smell of soap was in the air. Rivulets of foam and bubble flowed beside him. A line of thin black bodies were bathing at the edge of the platform.
The fragrance of their foam made Ziauddin sneeze.
“Hey, bathe somewhere else! Leave me alone!”
The men laughed and shouted and pointed their lathered white fingers at Ziauddin: “We’re not all unclean animals, Zia! Some of us are Hindus!”
“I’m a Pathan!” he yelled back at the bathers. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
As he was shouting at them, something strange happened-the bathers all rushed away from him, crying, “A coolie, sir? A coolie?”
A stranger had materialized on the platform, even though no train had pulled up: a tall, fair-skinned man holding a small black bag. He wore a clean white business shirt and gray cotton trousers and everything about him smelled of money; this drove the other porters wild, and they crowded around him, still covered in lather, like men with a horrible disease gathering around a doctor who might have a cure. But he rejected them all, and walked up to the only porter who was not covered in lather.
“Which hotel?” Ziauddin asked, struggling to his feet.
The stranger shrugged, as if to say, Your choice. He looked with disapproval at the other porters, who were still hovering around, nearly nude and covered in soap. After sticking his tongue out at the other porters, Zia set off with the stranger.
The two of them walked toward the cheap hotels that lined the roads around the station. Stopping at a building that was covered in signs-for electrical shops, chemists, pharmacists, plumbers-Ziauddin pointed out a red sign on the second floor.
HOTEL DECENT
BOARDING AND LODGING
ALL FOODS AND SERVICES HERE
NORTH INDIAN SOUTH INDIAN CHINESE WESTERN
TIBETAN DISHES
TAXI PASSPORT VISA XEROX
TRUNK CALL FOR ALL COUNTRIES
“How about this one, sir? It’s the best place in town.” He put a hand on his heart. “I give you my word.”
The Hotel Decent had a good deal with all the railway porters: a cut of two and a half rupees for every customer they brought in.
The stranger lowered his voice confidentially. “My dear fellow, is it a good place, though?”
He emphasized the critical word by saying it in English.
“Very good,” Zia said with a wink. “Very, very good.”
The stranger crooked his finger and beckoned Zia closer. He spoke into Zia’s ear:
“My dear fellow: I am a Muslim.”
“I know, sir. So am I.”
“Not just any Muslim. I’m a Pathan.”
It was as if Ziauddin had heard a magic spell. He gaped at the stranger.
“Forgive me, sir…I…didn’t…I…Allah has sent you to exactly the right porter, sir! And this is not the right hotel for you at all, sir. In fact, it is a very bad hotel. And this is not the right…”