AFTER HE GETS out of the hole, Mukundan will know how much he has blurted out in his dying slumber. The Beards will be wary of him as they would be of a fragile man with a conscience who knows a bit too much about them. But he might be able to win their trust again. It is a relief that even in his delirium he did not say anything about his decade-long sting on the Squad.
AKHILA RESUMES HER crawl to fresh air, but she stops when she hears him again.
‘Akhila.’
‘I am here.’
‘Who won?’
‘Won what?’
‘The elections.’
‘Damodarbhai.’
‘He is my god.’
‘Right. Mine too.’
MUKUNDAN WILL WAIT another five years. Then another five, if he has to. But a day will come when Damodarbhai will lose an election. And Mukundan will go to slay the Beards.
He imagines the faces of the Beards when they figure out that they have been done, and a funny thought occurs to him.
THERE ARE FACES only an Indian can make. Like that baffled face when he is shocked by the most logical outcome of his actions. He crosses the road like a cow, and he is startled by a truck. A vehicle on the road? How? He walks across the railway track, and he finds a train hurtling towards him. A train on a railway track? He is stunned. Cops who don’t wear bulletproof vests break into a house to fight militants, and they are shot in their paunches. They stagger out looking bewildered. That baffled face, when boys fall off trains because they were dangling from the doorways, when illegal homes built on infirm soil collapse, when pilgrims are squashed in annual stampedes inside narrow temples.
But then the foes of the republic, too, find the face. Sooner or later they all do. Enemies of humanity, criminals, psychotics, all of them. The republic is a giant prank. It lures all into believing that they can do anything and get away with it. And they do get away with a lot. But then one day, inevitably, surprise.
Mukundan is unable to hold it back any more even though it is going to hurt his back.
AKHILA, CRAWLING TOWARDS respite, hears a faint melodious laughter fill the tunnel.
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About the Author
MANU JOSEPH is the author of two previous widely acclaimed and bestselling novels, Serious Men (winner of the Hindu Literary Prize and the PEN/Open Book Award) and The Illicit Happiness of Other People (shortlisted for the Encore Award and the Hindu Literature Prize). A former columnist for the International New York Times, he lives in Delhi and writes for Mint Lounge.
Copyright
First published in the UK 2018 by
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First printing
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Originally published in India by Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers India
Copyright © Manu Joseph 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN (pbk): 978–1–912408–10–8
ISBN (ebk): 978–1–912408–11–5
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