Between the Assassinations (21 page)

“We don’t have money, uncle.”

He gave them a rupee coin and asked, “Where are your parents?”

They got onto a bus and paid the conductor. “Where are you getting off?” he shouted.

“The port.”

“This bus doesn’t go to the port. You need the number three-forty-three. This is the number…”

They got out and walked.

They were near the Cool Water Well Junction now. They found the one-armed, one-legged boy working there, as he always did; he went hopping about from car to car, begging before she could get to them. Someone had given him a radish today, so he went about begging with a large white radish in his hand, tapping it on the windshields to get the attention of the passengers.

“Don’t you dare bring your begging here, you sons of bitches!” he shouted at them, waving the radish threateningly.

The two of them stuck their tongues out at him and shouted, “Freak! Disgusting freak!”

Raju began crying after an hour and refused to walk anymore, so she picked in a rubbish can for some food. There was a carton with two biscuits, and they had one each.

They walked some more. After a while, Raju’s nostrils began bubbling.

“I can smell the sea from here.”

She could too.

They walked faster. They saw a man painting a sign in English by the side of the road; two cats fighting on the roof of a white Fiat; a horse cart, loaded with chopped wood; an elephant, walking down the road with a mound of neem leaves; a car that had been smashed up in an accident; and a dead crow with its claws drawn in stiffly to its chest, its belly open and swarming with black ants.

Then they were at the Bunder.

The sun was setting over the sea, and they went past the packed markets, looking for a garden.

“There are no gardens here in the Bunder. That’s why the air is so bad here,” an old Muslim peanut seller told them. “You’ve got the wrong directions.”

Looking at their crestfallen faces, he offered them a handful of peanuts to munch on.

Raju whined. He was hungry…to hell with the peanuts! He thrust them back at the Muslim man, who called him a devil.

That made Raju so angry he left his sister and ran, and she ran after him until Raju came to a stop.

“Look!” he shrieked, pointing at a row of mutilated men with bandaged limbs, sitting in front of a building with a white dome.

Gingerly they walked around the lepers. And then she saw a man lying down on a bench, his palms crossed over his face, breathing heavily. She came near the bench, and saw, right at the water’s edge, fenced off by a small stone wall, a little green park.

Raju was quiet now.

When they got to the park, there was shouting. A policeman was slapping a very dark man. “Did you steal the shoes? Did you?”

The very dark man shook his head. The policeman hit him harder. “Son of a bald woman, you take these drugs, and then you steal things, and you—son of a bald woman, you—!”

Three white-haired men, hiding in a bush near her, gestured to Soumya to come and hide with them. She took Raju into the bush, and they waited there for the policeman to leave.

She whispered to the three white-haired men, “I’m the daughter of Ramachandran, the man who smashes rich people’s houses in Rose Lane.”

None of the three knew her father.

“What do you want, little girl?”

She said the word, as well as she could remember, “…
ack.
”

One of the men, who appeared to be their leader, frowned. “Say it again.”

He nodded when she said the strange word the second time. Taking a pouch made of newspaper out of his pocket, he tapped it: white powder, like crushed chalk, poured out. He took out a cigarette from another pocket, sliced it open, tapped out the tobacco, filled the paper with the white powder, and rolled it tight. He held the cigarette up in the air and gestured with his other hand to Soumya.

“Twelve rupees.”

“I’ve got only nine,” she said. “You’ll have to take nine.”

“Ten.”

She gave them the money; she took the cigarette. A horrible doubt seized her.

“If you’re robbing me, if you’re cheating me…Raju and I’ll come back with Daddy—and beat you all.” The three men crouched together. They began shaking, and then they were laughing together. Something was wrong with them. She grabbed Raju by the wrist and she and her brother ran.

Glimpses of the scene to come flashed through her mind. She would show Daddy what she had brought for him from so far away. “Sweetie,” he would say—the way he used to say it—and hold her in a frenzy of affection, and the two would go mad with love for each other.

Her left foot began to burn after a while, and she flexed her toes and stared at them. Raju insisted on being carried; but fair enough, she thought—the little fellow had done well today.

It began raining again. Raju cried. She had to threaten to leave him behind three times; once she actually left him and walked a whole block before he came running after her, telling her of a giant dragon that was chasing him.

They got onto a bus.

“Tickets,” the driver shouted, but she winked at him and said, “Big brother, let us on for free, please…”

His face softened, and he let them stay near the back.

It was pitch-black when they got back to Rose Lane. They saw the lamps lit up in all the mansions. The foreman was sitting under his gas lamp, talking to one of the workers. The house looked smaller: all the crossbeams had been sawn off.

“Did you go begging in this neighborhood?” the foreman shouted when he saw the two of them.

“No, we didn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me! You were gone all day—and doing what? Begging on Rose Lane!”

She raised her upper lip in contempt. “Why don’t you ask if we begged here before accusing us?”

The foreman glared at them, but kept quiet, defeated by the girl’s logic.

Raju ran ahead, screaming for his mother. They found her asleep, alone, in her rain-dampened sari. Raju ran up to her, butted his head into her side, and began rubbing against her body for warmth like a kitten; the sleeping woman groaned and turned over to the other side. One of her arms began swatting Raju away.

“Amma,” he said, shaking her. “Amma! I’m hungry! Soumya gave me nothing to eat all day! She made me walk and walk and take this bus and that, and no food! A white man gave her a hundred rupees but she never gave me anything to eat or drink.”

“Don’t lie!” Soumya hissed. “What about the biscuits?”

But he kept shaking her: “Amma! Soumya gave me nothing to eat or drink all day!”

The two children began wrestling each other. Then a hand lightly tapped Soumya’s shoulder.

“Sweetie.”

When he saw their father, Raju began to simper; he turned and ran to his mother. Soumya and her father walked to one side.

“Do you have it, sweetie? Do you have the thing?”

She drew a breath. “Here,” she said, and put the packet into his hands. He lifted it up to his nose, sniffed, and then put it under his shirt: she saw his hands reach through his sarong into his groin. He took his hand out. She knew it was coming now: his caress.

He caught her wrist; his fingers cut into her flesh.

“What about the hundred rupees that the white man gave you? I heard Raju.”

“No one gave me a hundred rupees, Daddy. I swear. Raju is lying, I swear.”

“Don’t lie. Where is the hundred rupees?”

He raised his arm. She began screaming.

When she came to lie down next to her mother, Raju was still complaining that he had not eaten all day long, and had been forced to walk from here to there and then from there to another place and then back to here. Then he saw the red marks on his sister’s face and neck, and went silent. She fell to the ground, and went to sleep.

KITTUR: BASIC FACTS

TOTAL POPULATION (1981 CENSUS): 193,432 residents

CASTE AND RELIGIOUS BREAKDOWN (as percentage of total population):

Valencia, the Catholic neighborhood, begins with Father Stein’s Homeopathic Hospital, which is named after a German Jesuit missionary who began a hospice here. Valencia is the largest neighborhood of Kittur; most of its inhabitants are educated, employed, and owners of their homes. The handful of Hindus and Muslims who have bought land in Valencia have never encountered any trouble, but Protestants looking to live here have sometimes been attacked with stones and slogans. Every Sunday morning, men and women in their best clothes pour into the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia for Mass. On Christmas Eve, virtually the entire population crams into the cathedral for midnight Mass; the singing of carols and hymns continues well into the early hours.

W
HEN IT CAME
to troubles seen and horrors experienced, Jayamma, the advocate’s cook, wanted it known that her life had been second to none. In the space of twelve years her dear mother had given birth to eleven children. Nine of them had been girls. Yes, nine! Now,
that’s
trouble. By the time Jayamma was born, number eight, there was no milk in her mother’s breasts—they had to feed her an ass’s milk in a plastic bottle. An ass’s milk, yes! Now,
that’s
trouble. Her father had saved enough gold only for six daughters to be married off; the last three had to remain barren virgins for life. Yes, for life. For forty years she had been put on one bus or the other and sent from one town to the next to cook and clean in someone else’s house. To feed and fatten someone else’s children. She wasn’t even told where she would be going next; it would be night, she’d be playing with her nephew—that roly-poly little fellow Brijju—and what would she hear in the living room but her sister-in-law telling some stranger or the other, “It’s a deal, then. If she stays here, she eats food for nothing; so you’re doing us a favor, believe me.” The next day Jayamma would be put on the bus again. Months would pass before she saw Brijju again. This was Jayamma’s life, an installment plan of troubles and horrors. Who had more to complain about on this earth?

But at least one horror was coming to an end. Jayamma was about to leave the advocate’s house.

She was a short, stooped woman in her late fifties, with a glossy silver head of hair that seemed to give off light. A large black wart over her left eyebrow was the kind that is taken for an auspicious sign in an infant. There were always pouches of dark skin shaped like garlic cloves under her eyes, and her eyeballs were rheumy from chronic sleeplessness and worry.

She had packed up her things: one big brown suitcase, the same one she had arrived with. Nothing more. Not a paisa had been stolen from the advocate, although the house was sometimes in a mess, and there surely had been the opportunity. But she had been honest. She brought the suitcase to the front porch and waited for the advocate’s green Ambassador. He had promised to drop her off at the bus station.

“Good-bye, Jayamma. Are you leaving us for real?”

Shaila, the little lower-caste servant girl at the advocate’s house—and Jayamma’s principal tormentor of the past eight months—grinned. Although she was twelve, and would be ready for marriage the following year, she looked only seven or eight. Her dark face was caked with Johnson’s Baby Powder, and she batted her eyelids mockingly.

“You lower-caste demon!” Jayamma hissed. “Mind your manners!”

An hour late, the advocate’s car pulled into the garage.

“Haven’t you heard yet?” he said, when Jayamma came toward him with her bag. “I told your sister-in-law we could use you a bit longer, and she agreed. I thought someone would have informed you.”

He slammed his car door shut. Then he went to take his bath, and Jayamma took her old brown suitcase back into the kitchen and began preparing dinner.

“I’m never going to leave the advocate’s house, am I, Lord Krishna?”

The next morning, the old woman was standing over the gas burner in the kitchen, stirring a lentil stew. As she worked, she sucked in air with a hiss, as if her tongue were on fire.

“For forty years I’ve lived among good Brahmins, Lord Krishna: homes in which even the lizards and the toads had been Brahmins in a previous birth. Now you see my fate, stuck among Christians and meat eaters in this strange town, and each time I think I’m leaving, my sister-in-law tells me to stay on some more…”

She wiped her forehead, and went on to ask what had she done in a previous life—had she been a murderess, an adulteress, a child devourer, a person who was rude to holy men and sages—to have been fated to come here, to the advocate’s house, and live next to a lower-caste?

She sizzled onions, chopped coriander, and threw them in, then stirred in red curry powder and monosodium glutamate from little plastic packets.

“Hai! Hai!”

Jayamma started, and dropped her ladle into the broth. She went to the grille that ran along the rear end of the advocate’s house and peered.

Shaila was at the outer wall of the compound, clapping her hands, while next door, in the Christian neighbor’s backyard, thick-lipped Rosie, a cleaving knife in her hand, was running after a rooster. Slowly unbolting the door, Jayamma crept out into the backyard to take a better look. “Hai! Hai! Hai!” Shaila was shouting in glee as the rooster clicked and clucked and jumped on the green net over the well, where Rosie finally caught the poor thing and began cutting its neck. The rooster’s tongue stuck out, and its eyes almost popped out. “Hai! Hai! Hai!”

Jayamma ran through the kitchen, straight into the dark prayer room, and bolted the door behind her. “Krishna…My Lord Krishna…”

The prayer room doubled as a storage room for rice, and also as Jayamma’s private quarters. The room was seven feet by seven feet; the little space in between the shrine and the rice bags, just enough to curl up in and go to sleep at night, was all Jayamma had asked from the advocate. (She had refused point-blank to take up the advocate’s initial suggestion that she share a room with the lower-caste in the servants’ quarters.)

She reached into the prayer shrine and took out a black box, which she opened slowly. Inside was a silver idol of a child god—crawling, naked, with shiny buttocks—the god Krishna, Jayamma’s only friend and protector.

“Krishna, Krishna,” she chanted softly, holding the baby god in her hands, and rubbing its silver buttocks with her fingers. “You see what goes on around me—me, a highborn Brahmin woman!”

She sat down on one of three rice bags lined up against the wall of the prayer room, and surrounded by yellow moats of DDT. Folding her legs up on the rice bag and leaning her head against the wall, she took in deep breaths of the DDT—a strange, relaxing, curiously addictive aroma. She sighed; she wiped her forehead with the edge of her vermilion sari. Spots of sunlight, filtering through the plantain trees outside, played along the ceiling of the little room.

Jayamma closed her eyes. The fragrance of DDT made her drowsy; her body uncoiled, her limbs loosened, and she was asleep in seconds.

When she woke up, fat little Karthik, the advocate’s son, was shining a flashlight on her face. This was his way of rousing her from a nap.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “Is anything ready?”

“Brother!” The old woman sprang to her feet. “There’s black magic in the backyard! Shaila and Rosie have killed a chicken—and they’re doing black magic.”

The boy switched off the flashlight. He looked at her skeptically.

“What are you talking about, you old hag?”

“Come.” The old cook’s eyes were large with excitement. “Come!”

She coaxed the little master down the long hallway into the servants’ quarters.

They stopped by the metal grille that gave them a view of the backyard. There were short coconut trees, and a clothesline, and a black wall beyond which began the compound of their Christian neighbor. There was no one around. A strong wind shook the trees, and a loose sheet of paper was swirling around the backyard like a dervish. The boy saw the white bedsheets on the clothesline swaying eerily. They too seemed to suspect what the cook suspected.

Jayamma motioned to Karthik:
Be very, very quiet.
She pushed the door to the servants’ quarters. It was locked shut.

When the old woman unlocked it, a stench of hair oil and baby powder wafted out, and the boy clamped his nostrils.

Jayamma pointed to the floor of the room.

A triangle in white chalk had been marked inside a square in red chalk; dried coconut flesh crowned the points of the triangle. Withered, blackening flowers were strewn about inside a circle. A blue marble gleamed from its center.

“It’s for black magic,” she said, and the boy nodded.

“Spies! Spies!”

Shaila stood athwart the door of the servants’ room. She made a finger at Jayamma.

“You—you old hag! Didn’t I tell you never to snoop around my room again?”

The old lady’s face twitched. “Brother!” she shouted. “Did you see how this lower-caste speaks to us Brahmins?”

Karthik made a fist at the girl. “Hey! This is my house, and I’ll go wherever I want to, you hear?”

Shaila glared at him. “Don’t think you can treat me like an animal, okay?”

Three loud honks ended the fighting. Shaila flew out to open the gate; the boy ran into his room and opened a textbook; Jayamma raced around the dining room in a panic, laying the table with stainless-steel plates.

The master of the house removed his shoes in the entrance hall and threw them in the direction of the shoe rack. Shaila would have to rearrange them later. A quick wash in his private bathroom, and he emerged into the dining room, a tall, mustachioed man who cultivated flowing sideburns in the style of an earlier decade. At dinner he was always bare chested, except for the Brahmin caste string winding around his flabby torso. He ate quickly and in silence, pausing only once to gaze into a corner of the ceiling. The house was put in order by the motions of the master’s jaws. Jayamma served. Karthik ate with his father. In the car shed, Shaila hosed down the master’s green Ambassador and wiped it clean.

The advocate read the paper in the television room for an hour, and then the boy strolled in and began searching for the black remote control in the mess of papers and books on the sandalwood table in the center of the room. Jayamma and Shaila scrambled into the room and squatted in a corner, waiting for the television to come on.

At ten o’clock, all the lights in the house went out. The master and Karthik slept in their rooms.

In the darkness, a vicious hissing continued in the servants’ quarters:

“Witch! Witch! Black-magic-making lower-caste witch!”

“Brahmin hag! Crazy old Brahmin hag!”

A week of nonstop conflict followed. Each time Shaila passed by the kitchen, the old Brahmin cook showered vengeful deities by the thousands down on that oily lower-caste head.

“What kind of era is this when Brahmins bring lower-caste girls into their household?” she grumbled as she stirred the lentils in the morning. “Where have the rules of caste and religion fallen today, O Krishna?”

“Talking to yourself again, old virgin?” The girl had popped her head into the kitchen; Jayamma threw an unpeeled onion at her.

Lunch. Truce. The girl put out her stainless steel plate outside the servants’ quarters and squatted on the floor, while Jayamma served a generous portion of the lentil soup over the mounds of white rice on the girl’s plate. She wouldn’t starve anyone, she grumbled as she served, not even a sworn enemy. That’s right: not even a sworn enemy. It wasn’t the Brahmin way of doing things.

After lunch, putting on her glasses, she spread a copy of the newspaper just outside the servants’ quarters. Sucking air in constantly, she read loudly and slowly, piecing letters into words and words into sentences. When Shaila passed by, she thrust the paper at her face.

“Here—you can read and write, can’t you? Here, read the paper!”

The girl fumed; she went back into the servants’ quarters and slammed the door.

“Do you think I’ve forgotten the trick you played on the advocate, you little Hoyka? He’s a kindhearted man, so that’s why that evening you went up to him with your simpering lower-caste face and said, ‘Master, I can’t read. I can’t write. I want to read. I want to write.’ Didn’t he, immediately, drive out to Shenoy’s Bookstore on Umbrella Street and buy you expensive reading-and-writing books? And all for what? Were the lower-castes meant to read and write?” Jayamma demanded of the closed door. “Wasn’t that all just a trap for the advocate?”

Sure enough, the girl had lost all interest in her books. They lay in a heap in the back of her room, and one day, when Shaila was chatting up the thick-lipped Christian next door, Jayamma sold them all to the scrap-paper Muslim. Ha! Showed her!

As Jayamma narrated the story of the infamous reading-and-writing scam, the door to the servants’ quarters opened; Shaila’s face popped out, and she screamed at Jayamma at the top of her voice.

That evening the advocate spoke during dinner:

“I hear there’s been some disturbance or other in the house every day this week…It’s important to keep things quiet. Karthik has to prepare for his exams.”

Jayamma, who had been carrying away the lentil stew using the edge of her sari against the heat, put the stew down on the table.

“It’s not me making the noise, master—it’s that Hoyka girl! She doesn’t know our Brahmin ways.”

“She may be a Hoyka”—the advocate licked the rice grains clinging to his fingers—“but she is clean, and works well.”

As she cleared the table after dinner, Jayamma trembled at the reproach.

Only once the lights were off in the house, and she lay in the prayer room with the familiar fumes of DDT about her and opened the little black box, did she calm down. The baby god was smiling at her.

O, when it came to troubles and horrors, Krishna, who had seen what Jayamma had seen? She told the patient deity the story of how she first came to Kittur; how her sister-in-law had commanded her, “Jayamma, you have to leave us and go, the advocate’s wife is in a hospital in Bangalore, someone has to take care of little Karthik”—that was supposed to be just a month or two. Now it had been eight months since she had seen her little nephew Brijju, or held him in her arms, or played cricket with him. Oh, yes,
these
were troubles, Baby Krishna.