The Middleman

The gods gave Guddu the most unremarkable face in the world. He looked like everyone else in Maharashtra, in Bihar, in practically every state in India. He was certain that this was what made him well suited to be a dalal, a middleman for the madams in Mumbai. He supplied girls to the Kamathipura brothels. Kamathipura like Kamasutra, the book of love. Something of a misnomer for a neighborhood of whores, but that was neither here nor there. Every month, he picked a dusty village in the neighboring state, chatted up the local moneylender, slipped him a bribe to find out the names of poor families with young daughters and large debts. He knocked on their doors, stepped into their sooty little huts, offered them fifteen thousand rupees in exchange for a daughter. He never told them that he would sell the girls, though he suspected that some of the more desperate parents would not object if they found out. Your girls will be dishwashers, servants, shopgirls in the city, he assured them. They will send money back to the village every month.

The village he chose that day had seen several farmer suicides in the past few months. The drought dried up the land and the crops never came, only dust. Guddu was a farmer's son, but he had no sympathy for men who strung themselves up on trees like that. His own father sold his land for pennies and moved to Mumbai to work as a laborer when things got hard. He did not fold into himself and die. The dying happened several years later, when he was sleeping on the pavement one summer night. He had his head bludgeoned in by a hammer that night as he slept, the fiftieth victim of a madman from Hubli who did those sorts of things in the dark. Some people liked to argue that that was a much worse fate than hanging oneself off a skinny old tree in the comfort of your own farmland. But those people did not understand what it meant to fight the gods.

The moneylender he met that day in the village looked like the money-lender in every other village: black blazer, white tunic and dhoti, an unctuous air of servility. Guddu sat across from the man in his matchbox-sized shop, watching him lick his index finger as he sifted through his ledger without pausing at a single name. "Come, brother, I don't have all day," said Guddu, sighing. He pushed a wad of rupees across the table. "A little gift to speed up your hand."

The moneylender took the wad and slipped it into a drawer without looking up. Within minutes he had several names for Guddu: a Muslim family with three daughters, a lower-caste farming family with two, and a cow skinner family with four. Guddu chose the farmers. No more cow skinners for him. He had stolen a girl from a cow skinner family once. She was the most pliant girl he had ever seen, uncomplaining, unquestioning, completely resigned to her fate. After he had sold her in Kamathipura he did penance by giving his entire commission to the first temple that allowed him to step inside its gates.

The moneylender coughed until Guddu gave him a few more bank-notes in exchange for directions. He left the shop and walked out, squinting in the sun. There were no roads in this village, only dusty packed earth, dry and cracked and hardened by sun. He walked along the path, passing by one, two, three men squatting on their haunches who stopped doing nothing to stare at him as he went past. Guddu made no attempt to be inconspicuous. Tomorrow the men would be unable to recall the contours of his face.

The farmer opened the door and stood blinking at him. His skin stretched taut and shiny over his broad cheekbones. He had on no shirt, only a blue lungi. Guddu could count all his ribs.

"You look a little like my father," he said, to which the farmer did not reply.

"Why have you come?" asked the farmer...