The doorkeeper slapped him.

I am the biggest fool here, Chenayya thought, back at his alley; the other pullers were lying in their carts, snoring hard. It was late that night, and he was the only one who could not sleep. I am the biggest fool; I am the biggest baboon here.

On the way to his first assignment the next morning, there was another traffic jam on Umbrella Street -the biggest one he had ever seen.

He slowed down, spitting on the road every few minutes to help himself pass the time.

When he finally got to his destination, he found that he was delivering to a foreign man. The man insisted on helping Chenayya unload the furniture, which confused Chenayya terribly. The whole time, the foreigner spoke to Chenayya in English, as if he expected everyone in Kittur to be familiar with the language.

He held his hand out at the end to shake Chenayya’s hand, and gave him a fifty-rupee note.

Chenayya was in a panic-where was he expected to get change? He tried to explain, but the European just grinned and shut the door.

Then he understood. He bowed deeply to the closed door.

When he returned to the alley with two bottles of liquor, the other cart pullers stared at him.

“Where did you get money for that from, Chenayya?”

“None of your business.”

He drank a bottle dry; then drank the second. Then he went over to the liquor shop and bought another bottle of hooch; when he woke next morning he realized he had spent all his money on liquor.

All of it.

He put his face in his hands and began to cry.

On an assignment to the train station, he went to the tap to drink; nearby, he overheard autorickshaw drivers talking about that driver who had hit his customer.

“A man has a right to do what he has to do,” one said. “The condition of the poor is becoming intolerable here.”

But they were not poor themselves, Chenayya thought, slathering his dry forearm with water; they lived in houses, they owned their vehicles. You have to attain a certain level of richness before you can complain about being poor, he thought. When you are this poor, you are not given the right to complain.

“Look-that’s what the rich of this town want to turn us into!” the autorickshaw man said, and Chenayya realized that he was being pointed at. “They want to swindle us out of our money until we turn into that!”

He cycled out of the train station, but he could not stop hearing those words. He could not switch off his mind. Like a tap it dripped. Think, think, think. He passed by a statue of Gandhi, and he began thinking again. Gandhi dressed like a poor man-he dressed like Chenayya did. But what did Gandhi do for the poor?

Did Gandhi even exist? he wondered. These things- India, the River Ganges, the world beyond India -were they even real?

How would he ever know?

Only one group was lower than he was. The beggars. One misstep, and he would be down with them, he thought. One accident. And that would be him. How did the others deal with this? They did not. They preferred not to think.

When he stopped at an intersection that night, an old beggar put his hands in front of Chenayya.

He turned his face away, and went down the road back to Mr. Ganesh Pai’s shop.

The following morning, he was going over the hill again, with five cardboard crates piled up one above the other in his cart, thinking:

Because we let them. Because we do not dare run away with that wad of fifty thousand rupees-because we know other poor people will catch us and drag us back before the rich man. We poor have built the prison around ourselves.

In the evening, he lay down exhausted. The others had built a fire. Someone would come and give him some rice. He was the hardest worker, so the boss-man had let it be known that he ought to be fed regularly.

He saw two dogs humping. There was no passion in what they were doing: it was just a release. That is all I want to do right now, he thought. Hump something. But instead of humping, I have to lie here, thinking.

The fat prostitute sat outside. “Let me come up,” he said. She did not look at him; she shook her head.

“Just one time. I’ll pay you next time.”

“Get out of here, or I’ll call Brother,” she said. He gave in; he bought a small bottle of liquor, and he began drinking.

Why do I think so much? These thoughts are like thorns inside my head; I want them out. And even when I drink, they’re there. I wake up in the night, my throat burning, and I find all the thoughts still in my head.

He lay awake in his cart. He was sure he had been hounded by the rich even in his dreams, because he woke up furious and sweating. Then he heard the noise of coitus nearby. Looking around, he saw another cart puller humping the prostitute. Right next to him. He wondered, Why not me? Why not me? He knew the fellow had no money; so she was doing it out of charity. Why not me?

Every sigh, every groan of the coupling pair was like a chastisement; and Chenayya couldn’t take it anymore.

He got off his cart, walked around till he found a puddle of cow dung on the ground, and scooped a handful. He flung the shit at the lovers. There was a cry; he rushed up to them, and dabbed the whore’s face with shit. He put his shit-smeared fingers into her mouth, and kept them there, even though she bit them; the harder she bit, the more he enjoyed it, and he kept his fingers there until the other pullers descended on him and dragged him away.

One day he was given an assignment that took him right out of the city limits, into Bajpe; he was delivering a doorframe to a construction site.

“There used to be a big forest here,” one of the construction workers told him. “But now that’s all that’s left.” He pointed to a distant clump of green.

Chenayya looked at the man and asked, “Is there any work here for me?”

On his way back, he took a detour off the road and went to the patch of green. When he got there, he left his bike and walked around; seeing a high rock, he climbed up and looked at the trees around him. He was hungry, because he had not eaten all day, but he felt all right. Yes, he could live out here. If only he had a little food, what more would he want? His aching muscles could be rested. He lay back on the rock and looked at the sky.

He dreamed of his mother. Then he remembered the thrill with which he had come to Kittur from his village, at the age of seventeen. That first day, he was taken around by a female cousin, who pointed out some of the main sights to him, and he remembered the whiteness of her skin, which doubled the charms of the city. He never saw that cousin again. He remembered what came next: the terrible contraction, the life that got smaller and smaller by the day in the city. The realization came to him now that the first day in a city was destined to be the best: you had already been expelled from paradise the moment you walked into the city.

He thought, I could be a sanyasi. Just eat bushes and herbs and live with the sunrise and sunset. The wind picked up; the trees nearby rustled, as if they were chuckling at him.

It was nighttime when he cycled back. To get to the shop faster, he took the route down the Lighthouse Hill.

As he was coming down, he saw a red light and then a green light attached to the back of a large silhouette moving down the road; a moment later he realized it was an elephant.

It was the same elephant he had seen earlier; only now it had red-and-green traffic lights tied with string to its rump.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he shouted to the mahout.

The mahout shouted back, “Well, I have to make sure no one bumps into us from behind at night-there are no lights anywhere!”