Between the Assassinations Read Online Free PDF Page A

off—“black marketing, counterfeiting, and corruption, we are the world champions. If they were included in the Olympic Games, India would always win gold, silver, and bronze in those three.”
    After midnight, Abbasi staggered out of the club, leaving a coin with the guard, who got up from his chair to salute him and help him into his car.
    Drunk by now, he raced out of the town and up to the Bunder, finally slowing down when the smell of sea breeze got to him.
    Stopping by the side of the road when his house came into view, he decided he needed one more drink. He always kept a small bottle of whiskey under his seat, where his wife would not find it; reaching down, he slapped his hand around the floor of the car. His head banged against the dashboard. He found the bottle, and a glass.
    After the drink, he realized he couldn’t go home; his wife would smell the liquor on him the moment he got past the threshold. There would be another scene. She never could understand why he drank so much.
    He drove up to the Bunder. He parked the car next to a rubbish dump and walked across to a tea shop. Beyond a small beach the sea was visible; the smell of roasted fish wafted through the air.
    A blackboard outside the tea shop proclaimed, in letters of white chalk, WE CHANGE PAKISTANI MONEY AND CURRENCY . The walls of the shop were adorned with a photograph of the Great Mosque of Mecca along with a poster of a boy and a girl bowing to the Taj Mahal. Four benches had been arranged in an outdoor veranda. A dappled white and brown goat was tied to a pole at one end of the veranda; it was chewing on dried grass.
    Men were sitting on one of the benches. Abbasi touched one of the men on his shoulder; he turned around.
    “Abbasi.”
    “Mehmood, my brother. Make some room for me.”
    Mehmood, a fat man with a fringe beard and no mustache, did so, and Abbasi squeezed in next to him. Abbasi had heard that Mehmood stole cars; he had heard that Mehmood’s four sons drove them to a village on the Tamil Nadu border, a village whose only business was the purchase and sale of stolen cars.
    Alongside Mehmood, Abbasi recognized Kalam, who was rumored to import hashish from Bombay and ship it to Sri Lanka; Saif, who had knifed a man in Trivandrum; and a small white-haired man who was only called the Professor—and who was believed to be the shadiest of the lot.
    These men were smugglers, car thieves, thugs, and worse; but while they sipped tea together, nothing would happen to Abbasi. It was the culture of the Bunder. A man might be stabbed in daylight, but never at night, and never while sipping tea. In any case, the sense of solidarity among the Muslims at the Bunder had deepened ever since the riots.
    The Professor was finishing up a story of Kittur in the twelfth century, about an Arab sailor named bin Saad who sighted the town just when he had given up hope of finding land. He had raised his hands to Allah and promised that if he arrived safely on land, he would never again drink liquor or gamble.
    “Did he keep his word?”
    The Professor winked. “Take a guess.”
    The Professor was always welcome at late-night chitchats at the tea shop because he knew many fascinating things about the port: how its history went back to the Middle Ages, for instance, or how Tippu Sultan had once installed a battery of French-made cannons here to scare away the British. He pointed a finger at Abbasi: “You’re not your usual self. What’s on your mind?”
    “Corruption,” Abbasi said. “Corruption. It’s like a demon sitting on my brain and eating it with a fork and knife.”
    The others drew closer to listen. Abbasi was a rich man; he must have an intimacy with corruption that exceeded theirs. He told them about the morning.
    Kalam, the drug dealer, smiled and said, “That’s nothing, Abbasi.” He gestured toward the sea. “I have a ship, half full of cement and half full of something else, that has been waiting two hundred meters out at sea for a