A Little Something

On the sixth careful reading of the tape measure, whose end lay at the bottom of the dark borehole I was peering into, it read eighteen feet and four inches to the surface. The reading was exactly the same as the previous five I had taken in the last hour, but perhaps another verification couldn’t hurt. But it did. As I wound up the tape, my fingers were so numb that icy morning that I didn’t feel the sharp edge of the metal tape slicing through my thumb. And knowing that my fate would be measured out by Mr. Fletcher’s tape cut somewhere the metal hadn’t reached.

When Mr. Fletcher, the building inspector, had visited the previous Monday, his tape couldn’t muster over seventeen and eleven and a half. To be fair to him, he jiggled and wiggled the tape, but whatever was obstructing it didn’t budge, and the reading held. And the blueprints stipulated eighteen feet, and that was that.

So that inspection did not pass. The concrete pour had to be rescheduled; a crane had to be rented again to pull the rebar cages out of the pier, and the drilling contractor had to be called again to have the holes re-drilled. A half-inch clod of dirt pushed, perhaps by an errant gopher, into one borehole among twenty-four, had set me back by a few thousand dollars. At the very foundational stage of our American Dream building, we were thwarted.

What fault could he find this time? I sucked on my bleeding thumb.

My wife had chosen to wait in the car with the heater on, preferring to avoid any interaction with Mr. Fletcher. “What the hell!” she screamed when I returned to the car, still sucking my bleeding thumb. “I thought you made sure this time that all pier hole depths matched the blueprints.”

“Yes, I did!” I whined. “Exceeded, not just matched. But the inspector found a small root poking into one hole, at a depth of five feet from the ground. It must have grown over the weekend. He said we did not have the required three-inch clearance between the rebars and the sides of the hole all around. One root! One wisp of a root!”

Leaving my distraught wife to continue her passionate, expletive-laden analytical reasoning on the passenger side, including commentaries on the othering of immigrants and inter-ethnic jealousies, I started driving toward the nearby Home Depot, hoping to find pruning shears with extra long handles.

She suddenly turned to me and yelled, “You never notice anything!”

“Wait a minute!” I remonstrated, “How the hell was I supposed to know about tree roots?”

“That’s not what I am talking about,” she said, slapping her forehead in exasperation. “Did you see how long he was waiting next to his car, pretending to write notes? Perhaps he was open to negotiations.”

“Huh?”

“You know, maybe he was expecting what we used to call a little something back home in India?”

I was quiet for a while.

“But this is America! Such things don’t happen here.”

She didn’t reply.

She worked in the government herself. I was used to hearing her frustrated litanies across the dinner table about big corporations, in cahoots with the folks in Sacramento, having their ways to subvert the system she worked hard to uphold.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But Mr. Fletcher does not seem to be that kind of person.”

Was she right? Perhaps I could have offered to take him out for lunch to discuss the matter further, and he would have tipped his hat and stepped out of the way as I pursued my American Dream.

But the real question was whether I was that kind of person?

Even though I grew up in India, where corruption is a celebrated cultural artifact and the shadow economy is as real as any illumined economy, I had deep difficulties with these practices.

While it was true that recalcitrant building inspectors would merely have been a minor nuisance in India, one that would dissolve as quickly as you could open your wallet, I was not sure I had it in me what it took to avail myself of that easy lifestyle.

Through constant, well-intentioned education and example-setting, my father had enticed me into a moral cage. Had I not moved to America for graduate school, I could envision myself, constrained by this cage, incapable of flowing with the ways of that world. The cage was my father’s gift to me.

My father worked in the government, too. Perhaps the only government servant of his stature with modest means. He tried to stay honest in a place that paid better for the opposite. If he had not reached the place in life where he deserved to be, he had often explained; it was because he had refused every shortcut presented to him on his journey. For a government servant, that was a remarkable claim.

I had subconsciously bought into his paradigm and sought its mold, wherein I poured my still-gelling soul. But I was a kid then and did not have to face moral quandaries. It was not as if I had anything in my pockets to tempt me into unsavory quid pro quos.

Strangely enough, the quandaries appeared just shortly before I left India for good.

It was my last semester in college, and I was expecting to be in America in a few months. India, it seemed, was unwilling to let me leave without a few tests, catching me right at its threshold before I could put the whole unpleasant bribing business behind me for good.

All my American graduate school applications were in. It was only January, too early to get anxious about the outcome. The one distraction in those meaningless winter days was feeling my bile rise as I watched a wretched postman walk along the hallways of the dorms where I lived.

Just a small, dark, beedi-smoking, emaciated old man, dressed in unwashed khakis, shuffling listlessly as he walked from door to door. He held my fate in his hands.

He was the gatekeeper to my dreams and aspirations. He could crumple and destroy them with his wizened knuckles, if he so chose. The common wisdom was that if the postman’s palms were not adequately greased with Little Somethings, he would choose to deliver the valuable epistles that determined one’s future and fortunes into the tinder pile for his wife’s kitchen stove.

And I was loath to leave my moral cage. Other scholarship aspirants would regularly ask warmly about his family, make sympathetic noises when he related his tales of woe, and on occasion, stuff a little bill or two into his hands. However, when he dilly-dallied outside my door after a delivery, scratching his nether parts, I feigned ignorance and stared at the numerous crude mends in his ancient sandals, silently savoring my bile.

I looked up from The Guardian crossword when I heard a muffled cough. It was the postman again. He handed me an envelope, one that had obviously traversed the oceans. My breath stopped.

When I regained my senses, I realized he had left without his usual antics. I inhaled deeply. The paper smelled nice, like only a piece of American paper could. It was whiter than any Indian paper could dare to be white. The printing was impeccable; it had the name of a reputed American university in the corner, and my name on the front. Neat little black letters that had just found their place on a clean, new, white envelope. They were typed using an electric typewriter, a device whose existence I had only discovered through such correspondence. That day being in January, I knew this could not be a rejection letter.

The significance of being the first student from the graduating class (across the whole university) to get a scholarship to an American graduate school cannot be overstated. Even before I got comfortable with the pleasure of feeling the smoothness and thickness of American letter paper in my fingers, a crowd of fifty, a hundred, or more, had gathered around my room to celebrate. The letter was flitting from one ogling pair of eyes to another.

In that commotion about the letter, the kids had forgotten me completely. That gave me a chance to escape from the dorm to address another issue that was eating me from inside, the exhilarating circumstances notwithstanding. I ran out to the front gate of my dorm, trying to see if I could intercept the postman before he left. Unfortunately, he was just a khaki blob in the distance, wobbling on his pedals, too separated from me to receive my gratitude.

Guilt rose and drowned what little euphoria had found its way into my heart. Oh, why had I distrusted this poor honest soul?

A while ago, when my friends had berated me for not doing the “right thing” by the postman, I had an excuse. “To be trusting and then be deceived is more tolerable than being deceived by mistrust in every thought,” I had said. Perhaps I was deceiving myself; it was just me being a tightwad, fearing opening the doors of my cage?

I was expecting more letters, with better scholarships. Expectations like that could nudge those creaky doors.

The next day, at a calculated time, I was waiting for him at a spot a little distance from my dorm. I had an image to maintain, even though nobody cared about or even knew what my image was. I couldn’t be seen conducting an unlawful transaction with a public servant, no? So, no cash! But inside my jacket, I had a small bottle of good whiskey. Someone had given it to me for my birthday, and I didn’t drink.

Various theories from my sophomore year economics class raced through my mind. The bottle was a gift, and it had no utility for me and therefore, perhaps, no real value. If it did not carry a value, what would be the impropriety in transacting with it? The answer was not clear to me, but the act of shame seemed necessary, and I wanted to execute it quickly. Fortunately, his bicycle appeared on schedule. I sidled into his path.

I tried to improvise some words, but not finding them forced me to scramble to my meager plan. I pushed the little bottle awkwardly into his hands and said, “A little something for you.”

With those words expectorated, I felt much relief. It was good to give a gift to myself.

There was no joy in his eyes, only a puzzled exasperation.

“How much would this bottle cost?” he asked.

I didn’t know; I hazarded a high number.

“You could have given me that sum, sir. I can’t feed this to my kids,” he said, returning the bottle to me.

I didn’t have any cash in my hand that day. Only a bottle of dubious value.

“Another time,” I mumbled.

And that time never came. And I continued to receive all my mail, unintercepted.

The trials didn’t end there.

My passport application was stuck, with the travel date a few months away. I visited various government offices in Calcutta, and tried to sweet-talk hardened bureaucrats into condescending to share even a snippet of information, but it was all in vain. This was new territory for me; when my brother left for America the previous year, he hadn’t gone through this ordeal. He had just paid what we call a “tout,” an unofficial broker who hangs outside government offices, a nice packet of money and he brought the passport home a few weeks later with no fuss.

It took a while, but I found the choke point in one particular office housed in a crumbling building, which allegedly in its eighteenth-century heyday used to function as a residence for the local nawab’s concubines. A government clerk (babu), seated at one of the many desks scattered in the remains of an ostentatious ballroom, glared at me from behind a stack of file folders. He pointed vaguely at a folder at the bottom of a pile and told me that one could be mine.

He slowly waved his hands and explained its intended trajectory: “See, it has to arrive at the top of this pile. If the paperwork is in order, it can then move to this other pile here. Then that one. Then it goes to the desk of that other clerk over there. As you can see, he has four stacks of his own. When all three of us approve this file, we send it to the Police Headquarters in Lal Bazar for address verification, and when that gets done, they send it to the main passport office in Brabourne Street.”

I stared back at him, dumbfounded.

“Files don’t move on their own, you know,” he spat out, annoyed. He went back to reading the newspaper. Something caught his eye and his eyebrows went up. He called out to the clerk at the next desk and said, “Hey, it says here our strike is scheduled to start next week. What’s the Union saying?”

I ran out in distress. I found a stack of bricks in the shade of a big banyan tree outside the office where a few handcart pullers were taking siestas and sat down on it, not knowing what my next move could be. My father was traveling on government business, so he was not available. What would he advise?

The babu from the third desk came out for a break. He settled himself comfortably under the same tree and started rolling a cigarette. For a while, he watched me with disdain as he lazily blew smoke rings. That was the point when I broke down. A couple of teardrops teetered at the bottom of my eyes for a second, and then a whole stream ran down my cheeks.

Those tears from the eyes of a twenty-one-year-old must have melted even such a hardened heart.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

I told him I was from an impecunious family, couldn’t afford to present “gifts” to the hard-working people who rightfully deserved them, and might have to forsake my last opportunity to study abroad and improve our circumstance.

Even in my grief, I could imagine the desperation of a man having to sit in that dingy office all day long with no escape while he signed off passport applications for a pittance just so that his rich brethren could fly off to golden lands. So I tried to work some pitiful elements into my story.

It worked. To a large extent. I could see him struggling with his principles, too.

“Listen,” he said, finally. “Can you buy us a round of tea and cigarettes? I’ll see what we can do.”

I walked with him to the tea and smoke shack. I counted my bills, setting aside what I needed for the bus fare home. We ran some numbers. The kid noted in his ledger that the next four days’ refreshment expenses for the babus were prepaid.

There, I admit it! I did it. Not a bad deal for the price of two modest meals.

On the bus home, I am not sure what felt worse. The bribing or cheating the babus of their bribes with a fabricated sob story.

A few weeks later, as I was turning the corner into my dorm hallway, I saw a uniformed policeman leaning against my door, lazy curls of smoke rising from his dark lips.

Address verification = bribe. I fled to the library.

My friends later told me the low-level police constable had patiently waited for a couple of hours at my door, even after they had vouched for my address. He was probably expecting to make at least a hundred bucks that day, which would be a week’s worth of his official wages. And I had denied him that opportunity. Nice!

My father handed me a letter saying my passport was ready to be picked up.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” I said. “I managed to get an Indian passport, and I didn’t pay a single rupee in bribes. All done by the book!” It wasn’t necessary to update him regarding the tea and cigarette expenses.

My father’s face seemed to quiz me, ostensibly searching for extra-planetary origins for my stupidity.

“By the book? What about the hawaldar who knocked on my door last month? He said he couldn’t find you at your dorm address, so he wandered in here instead. Going by the neighborhood we live in, he reckoned he shouldn’t leave without at least Rs. 1000 in his pockets. Things just don’t work out by themselves, you know!”

“But, but …” I said, “what about not taking shortcuts in life and all that?”

“It’s better that you get yourself to a place where you don’t have to ponder those questions. Go get your passport.”

Fortunately, Mr. Fletcher was transferred to rental inspections. I could race along the rest of the way to The Dream. The new inspector, who stayed with the project through its completion, treated even getting out of his car as a chore. One could guess how seriously he would execute the task of walking the steep hillside lot and peering into two-dozen boreholes on a winter morning.

Months rolled by. A gleaming new house stood on the side of the hill.

A man does not build an edifice without leaving some debris behind. It behooves him to look back and clear it out, especially when a suitable opportunity presents itself.

There was this issue of long forgotten moral cages and delicate options.

At the very end of our building project, I was doing a dump run. This last one was a light one, just a lot of paint cans, perhaps fifty of them. I had with me Luis, one of the regular laborers who I used to pick up from the parking lot of The Home Depot. He used to be a professor of Animal Husbandry in El Salvador in the past, but he had fled government corruption and other such things and was trying to make a living as a day laborer in California. In those days, he was digging ditches or mixing grout and thin-set mortar for me for twelve dollars an hour.

I drove into the city’s hazardous materials processing facility, where they would accept unused paint for free. At the receiving station, I showed my ID to prove city residency and opened the trunk of the van.

The clerk, who looked like a character from Duck Dynasty, stared at me with a crooked smile.

“Sir,” he said, “do you realize I could summon an officer of the law and have you cited for this?”

“Huh? What? These are just half-empty paint cans!”

“Sir, do you know that under California law, you may not carry over eight cans of paint in your personal, non-commercial vehicle?”

“Really? No.”

“It would be illegal and inappropriate for me to accept this consignment of hazardous materials, sir.”

“I am so sorry. I did not know. What should I do?”

“Please exit the premises that way, and if you choose to use this facility in the future, please arrive with eight cans or fewer.”

“Okay, I will do that. I appreciate your help!”

As I turned the bend and was about to exit the yard, I saw a second bearded clerk in an orange vest waving at me, asking me to stop.

He spoke sweetly, addressing me as “dude,” and said I looked sincere and so they would like to help me out. He said there was another “commercial process” through which they could accept a larger consignment of paint, which as a residential and not commercial customer, I couldn’t avail myself of. But as a one-time exception, they could be flexible, but there would be a processing fee of $120. That looked like a deal, considering the alternative was that I would have to make seven more trips to this place. I thought I should tell my wife about these guys. She was not the only one in the government who interpreted regulations in a way that it helped the people.

I was back at the unloading station, sitting in my driver’s seat. The trunk was open.

The first clerk shoved a clipboard through the window. I expected to see some forms. Instead, it only had blank sheets of printer paper. I pulled out a credit card from my wallet, wondering where the commercial paperwork was.

I turned to him in confusion; his beard was quivering from side to side ever so subtly.

What an idiot I was! I should have understood, having grown up in India and all. Fortunately, Luis was there to guide me. He pushed my Visa aside and told me, “Cash only, patron.” To be trusting and then be deceived, indeed!

Like before, I had no cash in my hand.

Luis whisked out the wages I had paid him earlier that afternoon and neatly slid the ‘Little Something’ between the sheets of blank paper, deep inside the car and outside the prying line of vision of security cameras. He knew the drill.

The clipboard went back to the clerk. The trunk was cleared, and we were waved out.

My thoughts went back to the day my wife had suggested that Mr. Fletcher might have been expecting a little something, and I had wondered whether I was that kind of man.

The question felt misplaced now. I had never really been outside the system—I was a shielded subsystem within it, for which I was allowed to get creative with pretty names.

“You have been a great help, Luis. I will pay you double for your work today,” I said. “Just for today. okay?”

If I paid him double and he used his money to suborn a civic official, it wasn’t such a stain on my soul, was it?

“What a country!” Luis shrugged.

I nodded. My father should be satisfied.

Editor's Note:

Fundamentally, this story is about moral rot. The narrator spends the entire story telling himself he's different from the corrupt systems he's navigated, only to arrive at the ending and discover he's been inside them all along. "My father should be satisfied" stands out in particular for its irony. The father who modeled integrity is invoked to bless a rationalization. The narrator has become exactly what he feared, and he's made peace with it by outsourcing the dirty work to Luis.

For these reasons and more, we consider this story to be a truly accomplished piece of literary fiction for its thematic coherence, structural patience, and a voice that the reader wants to spend their hard-earned time with.—Jon Negroni

Vaidhy Mahalingam came to the USA from India for graduate school, completed his PhD in Naval Architecture, and had a 29-year career in the tech industry. In retirement, he spends his time cherishing moments with his family and putting into words the stories that have lived in his thoughts for years. His short stories have been featured in Arkana, Pembroke Magazine, Solstice, MudRoom, The Temz Review, and The Write Launch.

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