Between the Assassinations Read Online Free PDF

month. Why? Because this inspector at the port is squeezing me. I pay him and he wants to squeeze me even more, too much more. So the ship is just drifting out there, half full of cement and half full of something else.”
    “I thought things would get better with this young fellow Rajiv taking over the country,” Abbasi said. “But he’s let us all down. As bad as any other politician.”
    “We need one man to stand up to them,” the Professor said. “Just one honest, brave man. That fellow would do more for this country than Gandhi or Nehru did.”
    The remark was greeted by a chorus of agreement.
    “Yes,” Abbasi agreed, stroking his beard. “And the next morning he would be floating in the Kaliamma River. Like this.”
    He mimicked a corpse.
    There was general agreement over this too. But even as the words left his mouth, Abbasi was already thinking, Is it really true? Is there nothing we can do to fight back?
    Tucked into the Professor’s trousers he saw the glint of a knife. The effect of the whiskey was wearing off, but it had carried him to a strange place, and his mind was filling up with strange thoughts.
    Another round of tea was ordered by the car thief, but Abbasi, yawning, crossed his hands in front of him and shook his head.
    The next day, he turned up to work at ten-forty, his head throbbing with pain.
    Ummar opened the door for him. Abbasi nodded, and took the mail from him. With his head down to the floor, he moved to the stairs that led up to his office; then he stopped. At the threshold of the door that led to the factory floor, one of the stitching women was standing staring at him.
    “I’m not paying you to waste time,” he snapped.
    She turned and fled. He hurried up the stairs.
    He put on his glasses, read the mail, read the newspaper, yawned, drank tea, and opened a ledger bearing the logo of the Karnataka Bank; he went down a list of customers who had paid and not paid. He kept thinking of the previous evening’s game of snooker.
    The door creaked open; Ummar’s face popped in.
    “What?”
    “They’re here.”
    “Who?”
    “The government.”
    Two men in polyester shirts and ironed blue bell-bottoms pushed Ummar aside and walked in. One of them, a burly fellow with a big potbelly and a mustache like that of a wrestler in a village fair, said, “Income Tax Department.”
    Abbasi got up. “Ummar! Don’t just stand there! Get one of the women to run and bring tea from the tea shop by the sea. And some of those round Bombay biscuits as well.”
    The big tax man sat down at the table without being invited. His companion, a lean fellow with arms intertwined, hesitated in a fidgety kind of way, until the other gestured for him to sit down too.
    Abbasi smiled. The tax man with the mustache talked.
    “We have just walked around your factory floor. We have just seen the women who work for you, and the quality of the shirts they stitch.”
    Abbasi smiled and waited for it.
    It came quickly this time.
    “We think you are making a lot more money than you have declared to us.”
    Abbasi’s heart beat hard; he told himself to calm down. There was always a way out.
    “A lot, lot, lot more.”
    “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