One of the boys chuckled. “Don’t you recognize your patron?”
“What do you mean?”
The boy said, “That’s the man whose bike you ride these days!”
He explained that the cripple had once himself been a bus conductor, like Keshava; but he had fallen from the bus, crushing his legs under a passing truck, and had to have an amputation.
“And thanks to that, you now have a bike of your own!” The boy guffawed, slapping Keshava heartily on the back.
The cripple drank his tea slowly, staring at it intensely, as if it were the only pleasure in his life.
When Keshava was not conducting the bus, Brother had a string of bicycle delivery jobs for him; once he had to strap a block of ice on the back of his cycle and ride all the way downtown to drop it off at the house of Mabroor Engineer, the richest man in town, who had run out of ice for his whiskey. But in the evenings he was allowed to ride the bike for his pleasure; which meant, usually, taking it at full speed down the main road next to Central Market. On either side, the shops glowed with the light of paraffin lamps, and all the lights and color got him so excited that he took both hands off the handlebars and whooped for joy, braking just in time to stop himself from running into an autorickshaw.
Everything seemed to be going so well for him; yet one morning his neighbors found him lying in bed, staring at the pictures of the film actresses, and refusing to move.
“He’s being morose again,” his neighbors said. “Hey, why don’t you jerk off? It’ll make you feel better.”
The next morning he went back to see the barber. The old man was not in. His wife was sitting in the barber’s chair, combing her hair. “Just wait for him, he’s always talking about you. He misses you very much, you know.”
Keshava nodded; he cracked his knuckles and walked around the chair three or four times.
That night at the hostel, the other boys seized him as he was brushing his hair, and dragged him out the door. “This fellow’s been morose for days now. It’s time for him to be taken to a woman.”
“No,” he said. “Not tonight. I have to visit the barber. I promised I’d come for-”
“We’ll take you to a barber, all right! She’ll shave you good!”
They put him in an autorickshaw and drove him down to the Bunder. A prostitute was “seeing” men in a house by the shirt factories, and though he shouted at the boys and said he didn’t want to do it, they told him that doing it would cure his moods, and make him normal like everyone else.
He did seem more normal in the days that followed. One evening, at the end of his shift, he saw a new cleaning boy, one of Brother’s recent hires, spit on the ground as he was cleaning the bus; calling him over, Keshava slapped him.
“Don’t spit anywhere near the bus, understood?”
That was the first time he had ever slapped anyone.
It made him feel good. From then on, he regularly hit the cleaning boys, like all the other conductors did.
On the number five, he got better and better at his job. No trick escaped him anymore. To the schoolboys who tried to get free rides back from the movie theater on their school passes, he’d say, “Nothing doing. The passes work only when you’re going to class, or going back from class. If it’s a joyride, you pay the full fare.”
One boy was a consistent problem-a tall, handsome fellow whose friends called him Shabbir. Keshava watched people staring at the boy’s Bombay shirt enviously. He wondered why this boy was taking the bus at all; people like him had their own cars and drivers.
One evening, after the bus stopped at the women’s college, the rich boy went down to the seats earmarked for women and leaned over to one of the girls.
“Excuse me, Miss Rita. I just want to talk to you.”
The girl turned her face toward the window, shifting her body away from him.
“Why won’t you just talk to me?” the boy with the Bombay shirt asked with a rakish grin. His friends at the back whistled and clapped.
Keshava bounded up to him. “Enough!” He seized the rich boy by the arm and pulled him away from the girl. “No one pesters women on my bus.”
The boy called Shabbir glared. Keshava glared back at him.
“Did you hear me?” He tore a ticket and flicked it at the rich boy’s face to underline the warning. “Did you hear me?”
The rich boy smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said, and put out his hand to the conductor as if for a handshake. Confused, Keshava took his hand; the boys in the back row howled with laughter. When the conductor withdrew his hand, he found a five-rupee note in it.
Keshava flung the note at the rich boy’s feet.
“Try it again, you son of a bald woman, and I’ll send you flying out the bus.”
As she stepped down from the bus, the girl looked at Keshava: he saw the gratitude in her eyes, and he knew he had done the right thing.
One of the passengers whispered, “Do you know who that boy is? His father owns that video-lending store and he’s best friends with the member of Parliament. See that insignia that says CD on the pocket of his shirt? His father buys those shirts from a shop in Bombay and brings them for his son. Each shirt costs a hundred rupees, or maybe even two hundred rupees, they say.”
Keshava said, “On my bus, he’d better behave. There’s no rich or poor here; everyone buys the same ticket. And no one troubles the women.”
That evening, when Brother heard this story, he embraced Keshava. “My valiant bus conductor! I’m so proud of you!”
He raised Keshava’s hand up high, and the others applauded. “This little village boy has shown the rich of this town how to behave on a number five bus!”
The following morning, as Keshava was hanging from the metal bar of the bus and blowing his whistle to encourage the driver, the bar creaked-and then it snapped. Keshava fell from the speeding bus, hit the road, rolled, and slammed his head into a side of the curb.
For some days afterward, the boarders at the hostel would find him hunched over in his bed, on the verge of tears. The bandage had come off his head, and the bleeding had stopped. But he was still silent. When they would give him a good shake, Keshava would nod his head and smile, as if to say, yes, he was okay.
“Then why don’t you get out and go back to work?”
He would say nothing.
“He’s morose all day long. We’ve never seen him like this.”
But then, after he failed to turn up at work for four days, they saw him once more leaning out of the bus and yelling at the passengers, looking every bit his old self.
Two weeks passed. One morning, he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. Brother himself had come to see him.
“I hear that you’ve turned up for work only one day in the last ten. This is very bad, my son. You can’t be morose.” Brother made a fist. “You have to be full of life.” He shook his fist at Keshava, as if to demonstrate the fullness of life.
A boy nearby tapped his head. “Nothing gets to him. He’s touched. That blow on the head has turned him into an imbecile.”
“He always was an imbecile,” said another boarder, combing his hair at a mirror. “Now he just wants to sleep and eat for free in the hostel.”
“Shut up!” Brother said. He swished his stick at them. “No one talks about my star slogan shouter like that!”
He gently tapped his stick on Keshava’s head. “You see what they’re saying about you, Keshava? That you’re putting on this act just to steal food and bed from Brother? You see the insults they spread about you?”
Keshava began to cry. He drew his knees up to his chest, put his head on them, and cried.
“My poor boy!” Brother himself was almost in tears. He got onto the bed and hugged the boy.
“Someone’s got to tell the boy’s family,” he said on the way out. “We can’t keep him here if he’s not working.”
“We did tell his brother,” the neighbors replied.
“And?”