Read Online I Am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran - Free Book Online

palm-roofed platform, but it bore the seal of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. And I was its manager. Yes, its manager—at the tender age of twenty-four. See, we Rombachinnapattinam Iyers have a comfortable kind of greatness in our genes, a tendency toward the early achievement of plummy bureaucratic positions—a trait I urge you (wouldn’t writing be easier if you found a sinecure?) not to squander. In my case, success was the consequence of certain strategic positionings on the part of my mother. Through her extensive network of distant family connections, she had secured for me a marriage to the niece of the aforementioned Manager of Outbound Trains. The engagement ceremony was some months hence, but I was already enjoying the fruits of the union.
    My managerial post was made immeasurably more pleasant by the presence of my cleaning person and Man Friday, Dhananjayan Rajesupriyan. Dhanu was diligent, neat, and responsible; indeed, I delegated to him much of the drudging work of managing the station—selling tickets, cleaning and maintaining the tracks, raising and lowering the flags—and he ably handled it all, on top of his more menial chores. But his youth made him sometimes impulsive and irritable.
    For example, later that day, he apologized to me most gravely for having spilled the tea. I assured him it was no matter, but then he frowningly added, “But I don’t like that fellow.”
    “Don’t like him!” I asked, surprised but not a little amused by his effrontery. “Bold boy! Why not?”
    “Because I think he is
odd
.”
    “Why, Dhananjayan Rajesupriyan, he is no odder than you, my good man,” I laughed. In truth, I was a little touched. Dhananjayan was very protective of me, and he felt obliged to be skeptical on my behalf.
    “Dhanu,” I asked, in a mood to express my appreciation, “after work today, take me to your father’s tin shop.”
    “But my father is not there today,” Dhananjayan protested.
    “And do you need your father for everything, silly boy?” I asked. “Can’t you do me a simple favor by yourself?”
    As my peon and I walked away from work that afternoon, and found ourselves alone outside the empty tin shop, and I had glared into silence the nakedly staring neighbors, some of whom had the temerity to shout rudely at me as I passed; after we were inside and had closed the door, Dhananjayan did not bother to point out that my roof was of tile, not tin. And after I had taken from Dhanu the rough, sweet kisses and greedy caresses for which I relied on the boy, I removed two annas from my cloth purse and pressed them in his palm, telling him all the while that he was a badly behaved young man, who, unless he shaped up, would amount to absolutely nothing—our respite over and my tenderness requited, my manager’s personality was again ascending.
    (May I interrupt myself? The preceding paragraph is unspeakable, disgusting, implausible, and totally unlike me. You have a vulgar imagination! I know that to you I am just a man in a photograph—and indeed, I appreciate your efforts in bringing me to a kind of puppetlike life and transcribing my words as I speak them, even down to these too clever asides—but please consider that no doubt I was a real man, with an impeccable reputation in my time. What will people think? In any case, I am eager to get through this and have done with it, so leave it be.)
    Like you, Dhananjayan—diligent, dutiful chap—smiled grimly, ignoring my admonishments. He endured my affectionate pinchon his nose, and clasped the money perfunctorily. What was going on in young Dhanu’s head, I don’t know, but I meant those annas only as a token of affection, not as a price for his silence!
    And in any event, the next day, Dhanu and I spoke not a word of our pleasures the previous evening—pleasures which in the moment seemed each time simple and necessary, but which nevertheless gave me afterward a queasy feeling, a sense that I was doing something