Between the Assassinations (23 page)

“I’m going,
Jayamma.
”

The old lady was brushing her silver hair on the threshold. She felt that Shaila was pronouncing the name with deliberate tartness. “I’m going to get married.” The old lady kept brushing her hair. “Write to me sometime, won’t you, Jayamma? You Brahmins are such fine letter writers, the best of the best…”

Jayamma tossed the plastic comb into a corner of the storage room. “To hell with you, you little lower-caste vermin!”

The weeks passed. Now she had to do the girl’s work too. By the time dinner was served and the dishes cleaned, she was spent. The advocate made no mention of hiring a new servant. She understood that from now on it was up to her to perform the lower-caste’s work too.

In the evenings, she took to wandering in the backyard with her long silver hair down at the sides. One evening, Rosie, the thick-lipped Christian, waved at her.

“What happened to Shaila? Did she get married?”

Thrown into confusion, Jayamma grinned.

She started to watch Rosie. How carefree those Christians were—eating whatever they wanted, marrying and divorcing whenever they felt like it.

One night the two demons came back. She lay paralyzed for many minutes, listening to the screeching of the spirits, which had disguised themselves as cats once again. She clutched the idol of Baby Krishna, rubbing its silver buttocks while sitting on a bag of rice surrounded by the moat of DDT; she began to sing:

That next evening, the advocate spoke to her at dinner. He had received a letter from Shaila’s mother.

“They said they were not happy with the size of the gold necklace. After I spent two thousand rupees on it, can you believe it?”

“Some people are never satisfied, master…what can be done?”

He scratched at his bare chest with his left hand and belched. “In this life, a man is always the servant of his servants.”

That night she could not go to sleep from anxiety. What if the advocate cheated her out of her pay too?

“For you!” One morning, Karthik tossed a letter onto the rice winnower. Jayamma shook the grains of rice off it and tore it open with trembling fingers. Only one person in the world ever wrote her letters—her sister-in-law in Salt Market Village. Spreading it out on the ground, she put together the words one by one.

“The advocate has let it be known that he intends to move to Bangalore. You, of course, will be returned to us. Do not expect to stay here long; we are already looking for another house to dispatch you to.”

She folded the letter slowly, and tucked it into the midriff of her sari. It felt like a slap to her face: the advocate had not bothered to tell her the news. “Well, let it be, who am I to him, just another servant woman.”

A week later, he came into the storage room and stood at the threshold, as Jayamma got up hurriedly, trying to put her hair in order. “Your money has been sent already to your sister-in-law in Salt Market Village,” he said.

This was the usual agreement anywhere Jayamma worked; the wages never came to her directly.

The advocate paused.

“The boy needs someone to take care of him…I have relatives in Bangalore…”

“I only hope for the best for you and for Master Karthik,” she said, bowing before him with slow dignity.

That Sunday, she collected all her belongings over the past year into the same suitcase with which she had come to the house. The only sad part was saying good-bye to the Baby Krishna.

The advocate was not going to drop her off; she would walk to the bus stand herself. The bus was not due till four o’clock, and she walked about the backyard, amid the swaying garments on the clothesline. She thought of Shaila—that girl had been running around this backyard, her hair loose, like an irresponsible brat; and now she was a married woman, the mistress of a household.
Everyone changed and moved up in life,
she thought.
Only I remain the same: a virgin.
She turned to the house with a somber thought:
This is the last time I will see this house, where I have spent more than a year of my life.
She remembered all the houses where she had been sent these past forty years, so that she could fatten other people’s children. She had taken back nothing from her time at all those houses; she was still unmarried, childless, and penniless. Like a glass from which clean water had been drunk, her life showed no trace of the years that had passed—except that her body had grown old, her eyes were weak, and her knee joints ached.
Nothing will ever change for me till I die,
thought old Jayamma.

All at once, her gloom was gone. She had seen a blue rubber ball, half hidden by a hibiscus plant in the backyard. It looked like one of the balls Karthik played cricket with; had it been left out here because it was punctured? Jayamma brought it right up to her nose for a good examination. Although she could not see a hole anywhere, when she squeezed it next to her cheek, she felt a tickling hiss of air on her skin.

With a servant’s instinct for caution, the old cook glanced around the garden. Breathing in deep, she tossed the blue ball to the side of the house; it smacked against the wall and came back to her with a single bounce.

Good enough!

Jayamma turned the ball over and examined its skin, faded but still with a nice blue sheen. She sniffed at it. It would do very nicely.

She came to Karthik, who was in his room, on the bed:
Bip! Bip! Bip!
She thought how much he resembled the image of his mother in photographs when he beetled his brow to concentrate on the game; the furrow in his brow was like a bookmark left there by the dead woman.

“Brother…”

“Hm?”

“I’m leaving for my brother’s home today…I’m going back to my village. I’m not coming back.”

“Hm.”

“May the blessings of your dear mother shine on you always.”

“Hm.”

“Brother…”

“What is it?” His voice crackled with irritation. “Why are you always pestering me?”

“Brother…that blue ball out in the garden, the one that’s punctured, you don’t use it, do you?”

“Which ball?”

“Can I take that with me for my little Brijju? He loves playing cricket, but sometimes there’s no money to buy a ball…”

“No.”

The boy did not look up. He punched at the buttons on his game.

Bip!

Bip!

Bip!

“Brother…you gave the lower-caste girl a gold necklace…Can’t you give me just a blue ball for Brijju?”

Bip!

Bip!

Bip!

Jayamma thought with horror of all the food she had fed this fat creature, how it was the sweat of her brow, dripping into the lentil broth in the heat of that little kitchen, that had nourished him until here he was, round and plump, like an animal bred in the backyard of a Christian’s house. She had a vision of chasing this fat little boy with a meat cleaver; she saw herself catch him by the hair and raise the cleaver over his pleading head.
Bang!
She brought it down—his tongue spread out, his features bulged out, and he was…

The old lady shuddered.

“You are a motherless child, and a Brahmin. I don’t want to think badly of you…Farewell, brother…”

She went out into the garden with her suitcase, shooting a final glance at the ball. She went to the gate, and stopped. Her eyes were full of the tears of the righteous. The sun mocked her from between the trees.

Just then, Rosie came out of the Christian’s house. She stopped and looked at the suitcase in Jayamma’s hand. She spoke. For a moment Jayamma couldn’t understand a word, then the Christian’s message sounded loud and clear in her mind:

Take the ball, you Brahmin fool!

Swaying coconut palms rushed past. Jayamma was on the bus back to Salt Market Village, sitting next to a woman who was returning from the sacred city of Varanasi. Jayamma could pay no attention to the holy lady’s stories about the great temples she had seen…her thoughts were all on the thing she was concealing in her sari, tucked against her tummy…the blue ball with the small hole…the one she had just stolen…She could not believe that she, Jayamma, the daughter of good Brahmins of Salt Market Village, had done such a thing!

Eventually the holy woman next to her fell asleep. The snoring filled Jayamma with fear for her soul. What would the gods do to her, she wondered, as the bus rattled over the dirt road; what would she be in the next life? A cockroach, a silverfish that lived in old books, an earthworm, a maggot in a pile of cow shit, or something even filthier.

Then a strange thought came to her: maybe, if she sinned enough in this life, she would be sent back as a Christian in the next one…

The thought made her feel light-headed with joy; and she dozed off almost at once.

It cannot be easily explained why the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia still remains incomplete, despite so many attempts to finish the work in recent years and so much money sent by expatriates working in Kuwait. The original Baroque structure dating to 1691 was entirely rebuilt in 1890. Only one bell tower was left incomplete, and it remains incomplete to the present day. Scaffolding has covered the north tower almost continuously since 1981; work resumes fitfully, and stops again, either because of a lack of funds or because of the death of a significant priest. Even in its incomplete state, the cathedral is considered Kittur’s most important tourist attraction. Of particular interest are the frescoes of the miraculously preserved corpse of St. Francis Xavier painted on the ceiling of the chapel, and the colossal mural entitled
Allegory of Europe Bringing Science and Enlightenment into the East Indies
behind the altar.

G
EORGE
D’S
OUZA,
the mosquito man, had caught himself a princess. Evidence for this claim would be produced at sunset, when work ended on the cathedral. Until then George was only going to suck on his watermelon, drop hints to his friends, and grin.

He was sitting on a pyramid-shaped mound of granite stones in the compound in front of the cathedral, with his metal backpack and his spray gun to one side.

Cement mixers were growling on both sides of the cathedral building, crushing granite stones and mud, and disgorging mounds of black mortar. On a scaffolding, bricks and cement were being hoisted up to the top of the northern bell tower. George’s friends Guru and Michael poured water from plastic one-liter bottles into the cement mixer. As water from the machines dripped into the red soil of the compound, blood-red rivulets cascaded down from the cathedral, as if it were a heart left on a piece of newspaper to drain.

When he was done with his melon, George smoked beedi after beedi. He closed his eyes, and at once the construction workers’ children began to spray each other with pesticide. He chased them for a while, then returned to the pyramid of stones and sat on it.

He was a small, lithe, dark fellow who seemed to be in his early forties—but since physical labor accelerates aging, he might have been younger, perhaps even in his late twenties. He had a long scar under his left eye, and a pockmarked face that suggested a recent bout of chicken pox. His biceps were long and slender: not the glossy rippling kind bulked up in expensive gyms, but the hewed-from-necessity sinews of the working poor, stone hard and deeply etched from a lifetime of having to lift things for other people.

At sunset, firewood was piled up in front of George’s stone pyramid, a flame lit, and rice and fish curry cooked in a black pot. A transistor radio was turned on. Mosquitoes buzzed. Four men sat around the flickering fire, their faces burnished, smoking beedis. Around George were his old colleagues—Guru, James, and Vinay; they had worked with him on the construction site before his dismissal.

Taking his green notebook from his pocket, he opened it to the middle page, where he had kept something pink, like the tongue of an animal he had caught and skinned.

It was a twenty-rupee note. Vinay fingered the thing in wonder; even after it was gently prized away from him by Guru, he could not take his eyes off it.

“You got this for spraying pesticide in her house?”

“No, no, no. She saw me do the spraying, and I guess she was impressed, because she asked me to do some gardening work.”

“If she’s rich, doesn’t she have a gardener?”

“She does—but the fellow is always drunk. So I did his work.”

George described it—removing the dead log from the path of the gutter in the backyard and carrying it a few yards away, removing the muck that had sedimented in the gutter, which had allowed the mosquitoes to breed. Then trimming the hedges in the front yard with a giant clipper.

“That’s all?” Vinay’s jaw dropped. “Twenty rupees for
that
?”

George blew smoke into the air with a luxuriant wickedness. He put the twenty-rupee note back in the notebook, and the notebook in his pocket.

“That’s why I say she’s my princess.”

“The rich own the whole world,” said Vinay, with a sigh that was half in rebellion and half in acceptance of this fact. “What is twenty rupees to them?”

Guru, who was a Hindu, generally spoke little, and was considered “deep” by his friends. He had been as far as Bombay, and could read signs in English.

“Let me tell you about the rich—let me tell you about the rich.”

“All right: tell us.”

“I’m telling you about the rich. In Bombay, at the Oberoi Hotel in Nariman Point, there is a dish called Beef Vindaloo that costs five hundred rupees.”

“No way!”

“Yes, five hundred! It was in the English newspaper on Sunday. Now you know about the rich.”

“What if you order the dish, and then you realize you made a mistake and you don’t like it? Do you get your money back?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter to you if you’re rich. You know what the biggest difference is between being rich and being like us? The rich can make mistakes again and again. We make only one mistake, and that’s it for us.”

After dinner, George took everyone out to drinks at the arrack shop. He had drunk and eaten off their generosity since being fired from the construction site: the mosquito spraying, which Guru had arranged for him through a connection in the City Corporation, was only a once-a-week job.

“Next Sunday,” Vinay said, as they headed out of the arrack shop at midnight, dead drunk, “I’m coming to see your fucking princess.”

“I’m not telling you where she lives,” George cried. “She’s my secret.” The others were annoyed, but didn’t press the issue. They were happy enough to see George in a good mood, which was a rare thing, since he was a bitter man.

They went to sleep in tents at the back of the cathedral construction site. Since it was September, there was still the danger of rain, but George slept out in the open, looking at the stars, and thinking of the generous woman who had made this day a happy one for him.

The following Sunday, George strapped on his metal backpack, connected the spray gun to one of its nozzles, and walked out into Valencia. He stopped at every house along his route, and wherever he saw a gutter or puddle, and at every sewage hole he found, he fired his gun:
tzzzk…tzzzk…

He walked a half kilometer from the cathedral and then turned left into one of the alleys that slide downhill from Valencia. He took the route down, firing his gun into the gutters by the side of the road:
tzzk…tzzk…tzzk…

The rain had ended, and muddy raucous torrents no longer gushed downhill, but the twinkling branches of roadside trees and the sloping tiled roofs of the houses still dripped into the road, where the loose stones braided the water into shining rivulets that flowed into the gutters with a soft music. Thick green moss coated the gutters like a sediment of bile, and reeds sprouted up from the bedrock, and small swampy patches of stale water gleamed out of nooks and crannies like liquid emeralds.

A dozen women in colorful saris, each with a green or mauve bandanna around her head, were cutting the grass at the sides of the road. Swaying in concert as they sang strange Tamil songs, the migrant workers were down in the gutters, where they scraped the moss and pulled the weeds out from between the stones with violent tugs, as if they were taking them back from children, while others scooped out handfuls of black gunk from the bottom of the gutters and heaped it up in dripping mounds.

He looked at them with contempt, and he thought,
But I have fallen to the level of these people myself!

He grew moody; he began to spray carelessly; he even avoided spraying a few puddles deliberately.

By and by, he got to 10A, and realized that he was outside his princess’s house. He unlatched the red gate and went in.

The windows were closed; but close to the house he could hear the sound of water hissing inside.
She is taking a shower in the middle of the day,
he thought.
Rich women can do things like this.

He had immediately guessed, when he saw the woman the previous week, that her husband was away. You could tell, after a while, with these women whose husbands work in the Gulf: they have an air of not having been around a man for a long time. Her husband had left her well compensated for his absence: the only chauffeur-driven car in all of Valencia, a white Ambassador, in the driveway, and the only air conditioner in the lane, which jutted out of her bedroom and over the jasmine plants in her garden, whirring and dripping water.

The driver of the white Ambassador was nowhere around.

He must be off drinking somewhere again,
George thought. He had seen an old cook somewhere in the back the previous time. An old lady and a derelict driver—that was all this lady had in the house with her.

A gutter led from the garden into the backyard, and he followed its path, spraying into it:
tzzzk…tzzzk…
The gutter was blocked again. He got down into the filth and muck of the blocked gutters, carefully applying his gun at different angles, pausing periodically to examine his work. He pressed the mouth of the spray gun against the side of the gutter. The spraying sound stopped. A white froth, like the one that is produced when a snake is made to bite on a glass to release its venom, spread over the mosquito larvae. Then he tightened a knob on his spray gun, clicked it into a groove on his backpack canister, and went to find her once again with the book she had to sign.

“Hey!” A woman peeped out a window. “Who are you?”

“I’m the mosquito man. I was here last week!”

The window closed. Sounds came from various parts of the house, things were unbolted, slammed, and shut, and then she was before him again—his princess. Mrs. Gomes, the woman of house 10A, was a tall woman, approaching her forties now, who wore bright red lipstick and a Western-style gown that exposed her arms nine-tenths of the way up her shoulder. Of the three kinds of women in the world—traditional, modern, and working—Mrs. Gomes was an obvious member of the modern tribe.

“You didn’t do a good job last time,” she said, and showed him red welts on her hands, then stepped back and lifted up the edge of her long green gown to expose her ravished ankles. “Your spraying didn’t do any good.”

He felt hot with embarrassment, but he also did not dare take his eyes off what he was being shown.

“The problem is not my spraying, but your backyard,” he retorted. “Another twig has blocked the gutters, and I think there’s a dead animal of some kind, a mongoose maybe, blocking the flow of water. That’s why the mosquitoes keep breeding. Come and see if you don’t believe me,” he suggested.

She shook her head. “The backyard is filthy. I never go there.”

“I’ll clean it up again,” he said. “That will get rid of the mosquitoes better than my spray gun.”

She frowned. “How much do you want for doing this?”

Her tone annoyed him, so he said, “Nothing.”

He went around to the backyard, got into the gutter, and began attacking the gunk.
How these people think they can buy us like cattle! How much do you want to do this? How much for that?

Half an hour later, he rang the bell with blackened hands; after a few seconds he heard her shout, “Come over here.”

He followed the voice to a closed window.

“Open it!”

He put his blackened hands to a small crack between the two wooden shutters of the window and pulled them apart. Mrs. Gomes was reading in her bed.

He stuck his pencil into the book and held it out.

“What should I do with the book?” she asked, bringing the smell of freshly washed hair with her to the window.

He held his dirty thumb on one line that read, “House 10A: Mr. Roger Gomes.”

“Do you want some tea?” she asked, as she forged her husband’s signature on his book.

He was dumbfounded; he had never been offered tea before on his job. Mostly out of fear of what this rich lady might do if he refused, he said yes.

An old servant, perhaps the cook, came to the back door, and regarded him with suspicion as Mrs. Gomes asked her to get some tea.

The old cook came back a few minutes later, a glass of tea in her hand; she looked at the mosquito man with scorn, and put the glass down on the threshold for him to pick up.

He came up the three steps, took the cup, and then went back down, and took another three steps farther back, before he began to sip.

“How long have you been doing this job?”

“Six months.”

He sipped the tea. Seized by a sudden inspiration, he said:

“I have a sister in my village whom I have to support. Maria. She is a good girl, madam. She can cook well. Do you need a cook, madam?”

The princess shook her head. “I’ve got a very good cook. Sorry.”

George finished his tea, and put the glass down at the foot of the steps, holding it an extra second to make sure it didn’t fall over.

“Will the problem in my backyard start again?”

“For sure. A mosquito is an evil thing, madam. It causes malaria and filaria,” he said, telling her of Sister Lucy in his village, who got malaria of the brain. “She said she was going to flap-flap-flap her wasted arms like a hummingbird until she got to Holy Jerusalem”; using his arms, and gyrating around the parked car, he showed her how.

She let out a sudden wild laugh. He seemed a grave and serious man, so she had not expected this burst of levity from him; she had never heard a person of the lower classes be so funny before. She looked him over from head to toe, feeling that she was seeing him for the first time.

He noticed that she laughed heartily, and snorted, like a peasant woman. He had not expected this; women of good breeding were not meant to laugh so crudely and openly, and her behavior confused him.