Read Online Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid - Free Book Online Page B

you, threaten you, and have the bad luck of being in your way. What about killing humans? Well, aside from a few die-hard individualists on the fringe, the general consensus among people these days seems to be that eating and wearing other people is just not on. Wearing a suit which costs as much as a farmer will make in his lifetime is acceptable, but actually putting his eyeballs on a string and letting them dangle above tastefully exposed cleavage is bad form.
    ‘That said, killing someone because of the other reasons we mentioned above (smell, looks, bother, threat, or bad luck) is quite acceptable. You want deodorants, you know that one in 6.87 million will die from a violent allergic reaction, you shrug and churn the stuff out, and some poor fellow suffers a pain in the armpit beyond imagining and dies, and that’s that: acceptable. You drive cars, knowing eventually you will probably kill somebody or be killed, but “Hurry up, I don’t want to be late for my threading,” and you’re off. No regrets. Or someone who has never been to your farm and seen the cute dimples your youngest daughter is already showing when she smiles decides a line on a piece of paper should be a little to the left, and in thename of God and all that is right, to war boys: kill, kill, kill! Yours not to reason why, but damn it hurts when a land mine blows off your leg.
    ‘So, Murad, old chum, people kill people all the time, and usually with the barest minimum of fuss. You really must keep a sense of humor about it all. There is no moral issue here. Better to laugh at what you do not understand than to take it seriously and end up giggling hysterically in a padded cell off Jail Road.’
    Now, I concede that the murderers do have a point. But I was brought up by my mother to have a strong sense of wrong and right, and in the end I can only say, quite feebly I admit: Placing so little value on human life is wrong.
    As for myself, I had no choice. The first and only time I killed a man, it was either him or me, and even so the memory of it saddens me immensely.
    Let me elaborate.
    I was (why deny it?) something of a celebrity in the transportation industry in those days. The wave of yellow-cab robberies by rickshaw drivers had crested, and the sense of empowerment which coursed through my fellow drivers of three-wheeled vehicles was electric. It was widely and correctly believed that I was the originator of the idea that the rickshaw’s salvation lay in erecting a little barrier to the entry of the yellow cab in our market. Entry barriers are common to all industries, and the spree of robberiesof drivers of four-wheeled entrants by drivers of the established three-wheeled holders of market share was simply an example of laissez-faire market economics, as I am sure the good Dr Superb would tell you.
    Naturally, the yellow-cab drivers had a different point of view. I was an infamous figure of almost mythical proportions to them, a Redbeard or Red Baron (indeed, my rickshaw sported a little red pennant from her rear mast, a radio antenna), and every second robbery was linked to me in some way. A bounty of ten thousand rupees was placed on my head, soon upped to fifty thousand, and from there to two lakhs. At least three men were killed by bounty hunters and irate yellow-cab drivers in cases of mistaken identity. And I wasn’t always so lucky: two bullets found me out in my hiding places, as I mentioned earlier, and I submit that I shed more than my share of blood.
    Eventually, after heavy casualties on both sides, a truce was agreed to, and rickshaw drivers and yellow-cab drivers joined one another in putting an end to the cycle of robbery and reprisal. By this point, most of the robbing was being done by professional thugs who had nothing to do with either side but simply saw a good opportunity and did not discriminate between the types of vehicles they robbed. So both three- and four-wheeled transporters banded together against this common