“Sahib, sahib,” Abbasi said, patting the air with conciliatory gestures. “We have a custom in this shop. Everyone who comes in will receive a gift before they leave.”
Ummar, who knew already what he had to do, was waiting outside the office with two shirts. With a fawning smile, he presented them to the two tax officers. They accepted the bribes without a word, the lean fellow looking to the big one for approval before snatching his gift.
Abbasi asked, “What else can I do for you two sahibs?”
The one with the mustache smiled. His partner also smiled. The one with the mustache held up three fingers.
“Each.”
Three hundred per head was too low; real pros from the Income Tax Department wouldn’t have settled for anything under five hundred. Abbasi guessed that the two men were doing this for the first time. In the end, they would settle for a hundred each, plus the shirts.
“Let me offer you a little boost first. Do the sahibs take Red Label?”
The fidgety fellow almost jumped out of his seat in excitement, but the big one glared at him.
“Red Label would be acceptable.”
They’ve probably never been offered anything better than hooch, Abbasi realized.
He walked into the pantry, took out the bottle. He poured into three glasses with the Air India maharaja logo. He opened the fridge. He dropped two ice cubes into each glass, and added a thin stream of ice water from a bottle. He spat in two of the glasses, and arranged them farthest away on the tray.
The thought fell into his mind like a meteor from a purer heaven. No. Slowly it spread itself across his mind. No, he could not give this whiskey to these men. It might be counterfeit stuff, sold in cartons bought under false premises, but it was still a thousand times too pure to be touched by their lips.
He drank one whiskey, and then the second, and then the third.
Ten minutes later, he came back into the room with heavy steps. He bolted the door behind him and let his body fall heavily against it.
The big tax man turned sharply. “Why are you closing the door?”
“Sahibs. This is the port city of the Bunder, which has ancient traditions and customs dating back centuries and centuries. Any man is free to come here of his own will, but he can only leave with the permission of the locals.”
Whistling, Abbasi walked to his desk and picked up the phone; he shoved it, like a weapon, right in the face of the bigger tax man.
“Shall I call the Income Tax Department right now? Shall I find out if you have been authorized to come? Shall I?”
They looked uncomfortable. The lean man was sweating. Abbasi thought, My guess is right. They are doing this for the first time.
“Look at your hands. You have accepted shirts from me, which are bribes. You are holding the evidence in your hands.”
“Look here-”
“No! You look here!” Abbasi shouted. “You are not going to leave these premises alive until you sign a confession of what you were trying to do. Let us see how you get out. This is the port city. I have friends in all four directions. You will both be dead and floating in the Kaliamma River if I snap my fingers now. Do you doubt me?”
The big tax man looked at the ground, while the other fellow produced an extraordinary amount of sweat.
Abbasi unbolted the door and held it open. “Get out.” Then, with a wide smile, he bowed down to them:
“Sahibs.”
The two men scurried out without a word. He heard the thump of their feet on the staircase; and then a cry of surprise from Ummar, who was walking up the stairs with a tray of tea and Britannia biscuits.
He let his head rest on the cool wood of the table and wondered what he had done. Any moment soon, he was expecting that the electricity would be cut off; the income tax officials would return, with more men and an arrest warrant.
He walked around and around the room, thinking, What is happening to me?
Ummar stared at him silently.
After an hour, to Abbasi’s surprise, there had been no call from the Income Tax Department. The fans were still working. The light was still on.
Abbasi began to hope. These guys were raw-tyros. Maybe they’d just gone back to the office and gotten on with their work. Even if they had complained, the government officials had been wary of the Bunder ever since the riots; it was possible they would not want to antagonize a Muslim businessman at this point. He looked out of the window at the Bunder: this violent, rotten, garbage-strewn port, crawling with pickpockets and knife-carrying thugs-it seemed the only place where a man was safe from the corruption of Kittur.
“Ummar!” he shouted. “I’m leaving early today for the club-give Sunil Shetty a call to say that he should come today too. I have great news for him! I beat the Income Tax Department!”
He came running down the stairs, and stopped at the last step. To his right, the doorway opened onto the factory floor. In the six weeks since his factory had reopened, he had not once gone through this doorway; Ummar had handled the affairs of the factory floor. But now the doorway to his right, black and yawning, had become inescapable.
He felt he had no option but to go in. He realized now that the morning’s events had all been, somehow, a trap: to bring him to this place, to make him do what he had avoided doing since reopening his factory.
The women were sitting on the floor of the dimly lit room, pale fluorescent lights flickering overhead, each at a workstation indicated by a numeral in red letters painted on the wall. They held the white shirts close to their eyes and stitched gold thread into them; they stopped when he came in. He flicked his wrist, indicating that they should keep working. He didn’t want their eyes looking at him: those eyes that were being damaged, as their fingers created golden shirts that he could sell to American ballroom dancers.
Damaged? No, that was not the right word. That was not the reason he had shunted them into a side room.
Everyone in that room was going blind.
He sat down on a chair in the center of the room.
The optometrist had been clear about that: the kind of detailed stitchwork needed for the shirts scarred the women’s retinas. He had used his fingers to show Abbasi how thick the scars were. No amount of improved lighting would reduce the impact on the retinas. Human eyes were not meant to stare for hours at designs this intricate. Two women had already gone blind; that was why he had shut down the factory. When he reopened, all his old workers came back at once. They knew their fate; but there was no other work to be had.
Abbasi closed his eyes. He wanted nothing more than for Ummar to shout that he was urgently needed upstairs.
But no one came to release him, and he sat in the chair, while the women around him stitched, and their stitching fingers kept talking to him: We are going blind; look at us!
“Does your head hurt, sahib?” a woman’s voice was asking him. “Do you want me to get you some Dispirin and water?”
Unable to look at her, Abbasi said, “All of you please go home. Come back tomorrow. But please go home today. You’ll all be paid.”
“Is sahib unhappy with us for some reason?”
“No, please. Go home now. You’ll all be paid for the whole day. Come back tomorrow.”
He heard the rustle of their feet and he knew they must be gone now.
They had left their shirts at their workstations, and he picked one up; the dragon was half stitched. He kneaded the cloth between his fingers. He could feel, between his fingers, the fine-spun fabric of corruption.
The factory is closed, he wanted to shout out to the dragon. There-you happy with me? The factory is closed.
And after that? Who would send his son to school? Would he sit by the docks with a knife and smuggle cars like Mehmood? The women would go elsewhere and do the same work.
He slapped his hand against his thigh.