“Hey! Move out of the way, you village hick!”
He turned. The man was driving a bullock cart laden with cardboard boxes stacked into a pyramid; the boy wondered what was in the boxes.
He wished he had a cycle, to ride fast up and down the main road and stick his tongue out at these haughty fellows riding the bullock carts, who were always rude to him. But most of all he wished he were a bus conductor. They hung from the sides of the buses, shouting at people to get in faster, cursing when a rival bus overtook them; they had their khaki uniforms and their black whistles hanging from the red cords around their necks.
One evening, nearly every bystander around the market looked up to see a monkey walking on a telephone wire that went over their heads. Keshava stared at the monkey in wonder. Its pink scrotum dangled between its legs, and huge red balls whacked against the sides of the wire. It leapt onto a building with a blue sun and spreading rays painted on it, and sat there, looking down indifferently at the crowd.
Suddenly an autorickshaw hit Keshava, flinging him down onto the road. Before he could scramble to his feet, he saw the rickshaw driver in front of him, yelling furiously.
“Get up! You son of a bald woman! Get up! Get up!” The driver had made a fist already, and Keshava covered his face with his hands and begged.
“Leave the boy alone.”
A fat man in a blue sarong stood over Keshava, pointing a stick at the autorickshaw driver. The driver grumbled, but turned away and returned to his vehicle.
Keshava wanted to catch the hands of the man in the blue sarong and kiss them, but the man had melted away into the crowd.
Once again, the cats woke Keshava in the middle of the night. Before he could go back to sleep, there was a loud whistle from the far end of the alley. “Brother’s here!” someone cried. A shuffling of clothes and blankets followed; men were getting up all around him. A potbellied man in a white singlet and a blue sarong was standing at the head of the alley, his hands on his hips. He bellowed:
“So, my little darling dumplings, you thought you could avoid payments to your poor bereaved Brother by coming here to this alley, did you?”
The fat man-the one who called himself Brother-went up to each of the men sleeping in the alley one by one. Keshava started: it was his savior from the market. With his stick Brother poked every sleeping person and asked, “How long has it been since you paid me? Huh?”
Vittal was terrified; but a neighbor whispered, “Don’t worry, he’ll only make you do some squats and say sorry, and then he’ll be off. He knows there’s no money in this lane.”
When he reached Vittal, the fat man stopped and inspected him carefully.
“And you, sir, my Maharaja of Mysore, if I may bother you a second,” he said. “Your name?”
“Vittal, son of the barber from Gurupura Village, sir.”
“Hoyka?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When did you arrive in this lane?”
“Four months ago,” Vittal said, blurting out the truth.
“And how many payments have you made to me in that period?”
Vittal said nothing.
The fat man slapped him, and he staggered back, tripped on his bedding, and fell on the ground hard.
“Don’t hit him, hit me!”
The man in the blue sarong turned to Keshava.
“He’s my brother, he’s my only relative in the world! Hit me instead. Please!”
The fat man put down his stick; with narrowed eyes he examined the little boy.
“A Hoyka who is so brave? That’s unusual. Your caste is full of cowards, that’s been Brother’s experience in Kittur.”
He pointed at Keshava with his stick and addressed the entire lane:
“Everyone: notice the way he sticks by his brother. Wah, wah. Young fellow, for your sake, I spare your brother’s hide tonight.”
He touched Keshava’s head with the stick. “On Thursday, you’ll come see me. At the bus stand. I have work for brave boys like you there.”
The next morning, the barber was aghast when Keshava told him of his tremendous good fortune.
“But who’s going to hold the mirror?” he said.
He caught the boy by the wrist.
“It’s dangerous with those people in the buses. Stay with me, Keshava. You can come and sleep in my house so this Brother doesn’t bother you anymore; you’ll be like a son to me.”
But Keshava had lost his heart to the buses. Every day he went straight to the bus stand at the end of Central Market to scrub the buses clean with a mop and a bucket of water. He was the most enthusiastic of the cleaners. When he was inside the bus, he would take the wheel and pretend he was driving, vroom-vroom!
“A nice little catch here for us,” Brother told them-and the conductors and drivers laughed and agreed.
As long as he was at the wheel, pretending to be driving, he was loud, and used the coarsest language; but if anyone stopped him and asked, “What’s your name, loudmouth?” he would get confused, and roll his eyes, and slap the top of his skull, before saying, “Keshava-yes, that’s it. Keshava. I think that’s my name.” They would roar and say, “He’s a bit touched in the head, this fellow!”
One conductor took a liking to him, and told him to come along on his four p.m. round on the bus. “Only one round, you understand?” he warned the boy sternly. “You’ll have to get off the bus at five-fifteen p.m.”
The conductor returned to the stand with Keshava at half past ten.
“He brings good luck,” he said, ruffling the boy’s hair. “We beat all the Christian buses today; a clean sweep.”
Soon all the conductors began inviting him on their buses. Brother, who was a superstitious man, observed this develop ment, and declared that Keshava had brought good luck with him from his village.
“A young fellow like you, with ambition!” He tapped Keshava’s bottom with his stick. “You might even become the conductor of a bus one day, loudmouth!”
“Really?” Keshava’s eyes widened.
He went with the number 5 bus when it roared down the Market-Maidan Road at five o’clock, the rush hour, with the number 243 bus right ahead of it.
He was seated up front, near the driver’s seat, a cheering squad of one. “Are you going to let them beat us?” he asked the driver. “Let the Christians overtake a Hindu bus?”
The conductor waded his way through the crowd, issuing tickets, collecting money, his whistle in his mouth all the time. The bus picked up speed, just missing a cow. Tearing down the road, the number 5 bus drove parallel to the number 243, as a frightened scooter driver veered leftward for his life, and then-a big cheer from the passengers!-overtook its rival. The Hindu bus had won!
In the evenings, he washed the buses, and fixed incense sticks to the portraits of the gods Ganapati and Krishna by the drivers’ rearview mirrors.
On Sundays, he was free after noon. He explored Central Market, from the vegetable sellers at one end to the clothes sellers at the other end.
He learned to notice what people noticed. He learned what was good value for the money in shirts; what was a rip-off; what made for a good dosa, and a bad one. He acquired the connoisseurship of the market. He learned to spit; not like he had in the past, simply to clear his throat or nose, but with some arrogance-some style. When the rains failed again, and more fresh faces arrived at the market from villages, he mocked them: “Oh, you hicks!” He came to master life in the market; learned how to cross the road despite the continuous traffic, simply by holding his hand as a stop sign and moving briskly, ignoring the loud honks from the irritated drivers.