Between the Assassinations

DAY FIVE: VALENCIA (TO THE FIRST CROSSROADS)

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.

WHEN 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.

The next morning, she dropped her ladle in the lentils again. Karthik had poked her midriff from behind.

She followed him out of the kitchen and into the servants’ room. She watched the boy as he looked at the diagram on the floor and the blue marble at the center of it.

In his eyes the old servant saw the gleam-the master’s possessive gleam that she had seen so many times in forty years.

“Look at that,” Karthik said. “The nerve of that girl, drawing this thing in my own house…”

The crouching pair sat down by the yellow grille and watched Shaila move along the far wall of the compound toward the Christian’s house. A wide well, covered with green netting, made a bump in the back of the house. Hens and roosters, hidden by the wall, ran around the well and clucked incessantly. Rosie was standing at the wall. Shaila and the Christian talked for a while. It was a brilliant, flickering afternoon. As the light emerged and retreated at rapid intervals, the glossy green canopies of the coconut trees blazed and dimmed like bursts of fireworks.

The girl wandered aimlessly after Rosie left. They saw her bending by the jasmine plants to tear off a few flowers and put them in her hair. A little later, Jayamma saw Karthik begin to scratch his leg in long, shearing strokes, like a bear scratching the sides of a tree. From his thighs, his rasping fingers moved upward toward his groin. Jayamma watched with a sense of disgust. What would the boy’s mother say, if she could see what he was doing right now?

The girl was walking by the clothesline. The thin cotton sheets hung out to dry turned incandescent, like cinema screens, when the light emerged from the clouds. Inside one of the glowing sheets, the girl made a round, dark bulge, like a thing inside a womb. A keening noise rose from the white sheet. She had begun singing:

A star is whispering

Of my heart’s deep longing

To see you once more,

My baby-child, my darling, my king.

“I know that nursery rhyme…My brother’s wife sings it to Brijju…my little nephew…”

“Quiet. She’ll hear you.”

Shaila had reemerged from the hanging sheets. She drifted toward the far end of the backyard, where neem trees mingled with coconut palms.

“Does she think about her mother and sisters often, I wonder?” Jayamma whispered. “What kind of a life is this for a girl, away from her family?”

“I’m tired of this waiting!” Karthik grumbled.

“Brother, wait!”

But he was already in the servants’ room. A triumphant shriek: Karthik came out with the blue marble.

In the evening, Jayamma was on the threshold of the kitchen, winnowing rice. Her glasses had slid halfway down her nose, and her brow was furrowed. She turned toward the servants’ room, which was bolted from the inside, and from which came the sound of sobbing, and shouted:

“Stop crying. You’ve got to get tough. Servants like us, who work for others, have to learn to be tough.”

Swallowing her tears audibly, Shaila shouted back through the bolted door:

“Shut up, you self-pitying Brahmin hag! You told Karthik I had black magic!”

“Don’t accuse me of things like that! I never told him you did black magic!”

“Liar! Liar!”

“Don’t call me a liar, you Hoyka! Why do you draw triangles on the ground, if not to practice black magic? You don’t fool me for a minute!”

“Can’t you see those triangles were just part of a game? Are you losing your mind, you old hag?”

Jayamma slammed down the winnow; the rice grains were splattered about the threshold. She went into the prayer room and closed the door.

She woke up and overheard a sob-drenched monologue: it was coming from the servants’ quarters, and was so loud that it had penetrated the wall of the prayer room.

“I don’t want to be here…I didn’t want to leave my friends, and our fields, and our cows, and come here. But my mother said, ‘You have to go to the city and work for the Advocate Panchinalli, otherwise where will you get the gold necklace? And who will marry you without a gold necklace?’ But ever since I came, I’ve seen no gold necklace-just trouble, trouble, trouble!”

Jayamma shouted into the wall at once, “Trouble, trouble, trouble-see how she talks like an old woman! This is nothing, your misfortune. I’ve seen real trouble!”

The sobbing stopped. Jayamma told the lower-caste a few of her own troubles. At dinner, Jayamma came with the trough of rice to the servants’ living room. She banged on the door, but Shaila would not open.

“Oh, what a haughty little miss she is!”

She kept banging on the door until it opened. Then she served the girl rice and lentil stew, and watched to make sure that it was eaten.

The next morning, the two servants were sitting at the threshold together.

“Say, Jayamma, what’s the news of the world?”

Shaila was beaming. Flowers in her hair, and Johnson’s Baby Powder on her face again. Jayamma looked up from the paper with a scornful expression.

“Oh, why do you ask me? You can read and write, can’t you?”

“C’mon, Jayamma, you know we lower-castes aren’t meant to do things like that…” The little girl smiled ingratiatingly.

“If you Brahmins don’t read for us, where will we learn anything?”

“Sit down,” the old woman said haughtily. She turned the pages slowly, and read out from the news items that interested her.

“They say that in Tumkur District, a holy man has mastered the art of flying through willpower, and can go seventeen feet up in the air and bring himself down too.”

“Really?” The girl was skeptical. “Has anyone actually seen him do this, or are they simply believing him?”

“Of course they saw him do it!” Jayamma retorted, tapping on the news item as proof. “Haven’t you ever seen magic?”

Shaila giggled hysterically; then she ran into the backyard and dashed into the coconut trees; and then Jayamma heard the song again.

She waited till Shaila came back to the house, and said, “What will your husband think, if he sees you looking like a savage? Your hair is a mess.”

So the girl sat down on the threshold, and Jayamma oiled her hair, and combed it into gleaming black tresses that would set any man’s heart on fire.

At eight o’clock the old lady and the girl went together to watch TV. They watched till ten, then returned to their rooms when Karthik switched it off.

Halfway through the night, Shaila woke up to see the door to her room pushed open.

“Sister…”

Through the darkness Shaila saw a silver-haired head peering in.

“Sister…let me spend the night here…There are ghosts outside the storage room, yes…”

Almost crawling into the servants’ quarters, Jayamma, breathing hard and sweating profusely, propped herself against a wall of the room and sank her head between her knees. The girl went out to see what was happening in the storage room; she came back giggling.

“Jayamma…those aren’t ghosts, those are just two cats, fighting at the Christian’s house…that’s all…”

But the old lady was already asleep, her silver hair spread out on the floor.

From then on, Jayamma began to come to sleep in Shaila’s room whenever she heard the two screeching cat-demons outside her room.

It was the day before the Navarathri Festival. Still no word from home, nor from the advocate, about when she might be going home. The price of jaggery had gone up again. So had kerosene. Jayamma read in the papers that a holy man had learned to fly from tree to tree in a grove in Kerala-but only if the trees were betel-nut trees. There was going to be a partial solar eclipse the following year, and that might signal the end of the earth. V. P. Singh, a member of the Union Cabinet, had accused the prime minister of corruption. The government could fall any day, and there was going to be chaos in Delhi.

That night, after dinner, Jayamma proposed to the advocate that on the holy day she take Karthik to the Kittamma Devi Temple near the train station.

“He should not fall out of the habit of prayer now that his mother is no more, should he?” she said meekly.

“That’s a good idea…” The advocate picked up his newspaper.

Jayamma breathed in for courage.

“If you could give me a few rupees towards the rickshaw…”

She knocked on the little girl’s room. She opened her fist triumphantly.

“Five rupees! The advocate gave me five rupees!”

Jayamma took a bath in the servants’ toilet, lathering herself thoroughly in sandalwood soap. Changing from her vermilion sari to her purple one, she walked up to the boy’s room, relishing the fragrance of her own skin, feeling like someone important.

“Get dressed, brother-we’ll miss the five o’clock pooja.”

The boy was on his bed, punching at the buttons of a small handheld electronic game: Bip! Bip! Bip!

“I’m not coming.”

“Brother-it’s a temple. We should go!”

“No.”

“Brother…what would your mother say if she were…”

The boy put his game down for a second. He walked up to the door of his room, and slammed it in Jayamma’s face.

She lay in the storage room, seeking comfort in the fumes of the DDT and the sight of the Baby Krishna’s silver buttocks. The door creaked open. A small black face, coated in Johnson’s Baby Powder, smiled at her.

“Jayamma-Jayamma-take me to the temple instead…”

The two of them sat quietly in the autorickshaw.

“Wait here,” Jayamma said at the entrance to the temple. She bought a packet of flowers with fifty paise of her own money.

“Here.” She guided the girl to place the basket in the hands of the priest when they were in the temple.

A throng of devotees had gathered around the silver lingam. Little boys jumped high to strike the temple bells around the deity. They struggled in vain, and then their fathers hoisted them up. Jayamma caught Shaila leaping high at a bell.

“Shall I lift you up?”

At five, the pooja got under way. In a bronze plate, flames rose from camphor cubes. Two women blew giant conches; a brass gong was struck, faster and faster. Then one of the Brahmins rushed out with a copper plate that burned at one end, and Jayamma dropped a coin into it, while the girl reached forward with her palms for the holy fire.

The two of them sat out on the veranda of the temple, on whose walls hung the giant drums that were played at weddings. Jayamma remarked on the scandal of a woman decked in a sleeveless blouse heading toward the temple gate. Shaila thought the sleeveless style was quite “sporty.” A screaming child was being pulled along by her father to the temple door. She quieted down when Jayamma and Shaila both began to pet her.

The two servants left the temple reluctantly. Birds rose up from the trees as they waited for a rickshaw. Bands of incandescent clouds piled up one above the other like military decorations as the sun set. Jayamma began fighting with the rickshaw driver over the price to go home, and Shaila giggled the whole time, infuriating the old woman and the driver alike.

“Jayamma-have you heard the big news?”

The old lady looked up from the newspaper spread out on the threshold. She removed her glasses and blinked at the girl.

“About the price of jaggery?”

“No, not that.”

“About the man in Kasargod who gave birth?”

“No, not that either.” The girl grinned shyly. “I’m getting married.”

Jayamma’s lips parted. She turned her head down, took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes.

“When?”

“Next month. The marriage has been fixed. The advocate told me this yesterday. He will send my gold necklace directly to my village.”

“So you think you’re a queen now, huh?” Jayamma snapped. “Because you’re getting hitched to some village bumpkin!”

She saw Shaila run to the compound wall to spread the tidings to the thick-lipped Christian. “I’m getting married, I’m getting married,” the girl sang sweetly all day long.

Jayamma cautioned her from the kitchen, “You think it’s any big deal being married? Don’t you know what happened to my sister Ambika?”

But the girl was too full of herself to listen. She just sang all day:

“I’m getting married, I’m getting married!”

So at night, it was the Baby Krishna who got to hear the story of the luckless Ambika, punished for her sins in a previous life:

Ambika, the sixth daughter and the last to be married, was the family beauty. A rich doctor wanted her for his son. Excellent news! When the groom came to see Ambika, he left for the bathroom repeatedly. “See how shy he is,” the women all said, giggling. On the wedding night, he lay with his back turned to Ambika’s face. He coughed all night. In the morning, she saw blood on the sheets. He notified her that she had married a man with advanced tuberculosis. He had wanted to be honest, but his mother would not let him. “Someone has put black magic on your family, you wretched girl,” he said, as his body was racked by fits of coughing. A month later, he was dead on a hospital bed. His mother told the village that the girl, and all her sisters, were cursed, and no one would agree to marry any of the other children.

“And that’s the true story of why I’m a virgin,” Jayamma wanted the infant Krishna to know. “In fact, I had such thick hair, such golden skin, I was considered a beauty, you know that?” She raised her eyebrows archly, like a film actress, suspecting that the little god did not entirely believe her. “Sometimes I thank my stars I never married. What if I too had been deceived, like Ambika? Better a spinster than a widow, any day…And yet that little lower-caste can’t stop singing about it every minute of the morning…” Lying in the dark, Jayamma mimicked the little lower-caste’s voice for the baby god’s benefit:

“‘I’m getting married, I’m getting married…’”

The day came for Shaila’s departure. The advocate said he would himself drive the girl home in his green Ambassador.

“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:

A star is whispering

Of my heart’s deep longing

To see you once more,

My baby-child, my darling, my king.

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.