Between the Assassinations

DAY FIVE (EVENING): THE CATHEDRAL OF OUR LADY OF VALENCIA

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.

GEORGE D’SOUZA, 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.

In a weary voice, she added:

“Matthew is supposed to clean the backyard. But he’s not even here often enough to do the driving, forget about the backyard. Always out drinking.”

Then her face lit up with an idea:

“You do it,” she said. “You can be a part-time gardener for me. I’ll pay you.”

George was about to say yes, but something within him resisted, disliking the casual way the job had been offered.

“That’s not my kind of work. Taking shit out of backyards. But I will do it for you, madam. I will do anything for you, because you are a good person. I can see into your soul.”

She laughed again.

“Start next week,” she said, vestiges of the laugh still rippling on her face, and she closed the door.

When he was gone, she opened the door to her backyard. She rarely went out there: it was strong with the smell of fecund black soil, overgrown with weeds, the air tinged with sewage. She smelled the pesticide; it drew her out of the house. She heard a sound, and recognized that the mosquito man was still somewhere in her neighborhood.

Tzzk…tzzzk; in her mind she followed it as it sounded from around the neighborhood-first at the Monteiros’ house; then to Dr. Karkada’s compound; then at the Valencia Jesuit Teachers’ College and Seminary: tzzzk…tzzzk…tzzzk-before she lost track of it.

George was on the pile of stones, waiting for other men who felt about their work as he did, and then they would move together to an arrack shop close by, to start drinking.

“What’s got into you?” the other guys asked him later that evening. “Hardly a word out of you.”

After an initial hour of raucousness, he had become sullen. He was thinking of the man and the woman-the ones he had seen on the cover of his princess’s novel. They were in a car; the wind was blowing through the woman’s hair, and the man was smiling. In the background, there was an airplane. Words in English, the title of the novel, in silver letters, hov ered over the scene, like a benediction from the God of Good Living.

He thought of the woman who could afford to spend her days reading such books, in the comfort of her home, with the air conditioner on at all times.

“The rich abuse us, man. It’s always, here, take twenty rupees, kiss my feet. Get into the gutter. Clean my shit. It’s always like that.”

“There he goes again.” Guru chuckled. “It was this talk that got him fired in the first place, but he hasn’t changed at all. Still so bitter.”

“Why should I change? Am I lying?” George shouted back. “The rich lie in bed reading books, and live alone without families, and eat five-hundred-rupee dishes called…what was that thing called? Vindoo? Vindiloo?”

That night he could not sleep. He left the tent and went to the construction site, gazing at the unfinished cathedral for hours, and thinking about that woman at 10A.

The next week it was clear to him she had been waiting for him. When he came to her house, she stuck her arm out, rotating it from side to side until he had seen the flesh from 360 degrees.

“No bites,” she said. “Last week was much better. Your spray is finally working.”

He took charge of her backyard. First, walking with his spray gun out and his left hand adjusting a knob on his backpack canister, he went down on his knees and drizzled pesticide over her gutters. Then, as she watched, he put some order into her long-neglected yard: he dug, and sprayed, and cut, and cleaned for an hour.

That evening, the guys at the construction site could not believe the news.

“It’s a full-time job now,” George said. “The princess thinks I’m such a good worker she wants me to stay there and sleep in a shed in the backyard. She’s paying me double what I get now. And I don’t have to be a mosquito man anymore. It’s perfect.”

“We’ll never see you again, I bet,” Guru said, flicking his beedi to the ground.

“That’s not true,” George protested. “I’ll come down to drink every evening.”

Guru snorted. “Sure you will.”

And he was right: they did not see much of George after that.

Every Monday, a white woman dressed in North Indian salwar kameez arrived at the gate and asked him, in English, “Madam is in?”

He opened the gate, bowed, and said, “Yes. She is in.”

She was from England; she had come to teach yoga and breathing to Madam. The air conditioner was turned off, and George heard the sound of deep breathing from the bedroom. Half an hour later, the white woman emerged and said:

“It’s amazing, isn’t it? Me having to teach you yoga.”

“Yes, it’s sad. We Indians have forgotten everything about our own civilization.”

Then the white woman and Madam walked around the garden for a while. On Tuesday mornings, Matthew, his eyes red and his breath reeking of arrack, drove Madam to the Lions Ladies’ meeting at the club on Rose Lane. That seemed to be the extent of Mrs. Gomes’s social life. When they drove out, George held the gate open: as the car passed him, he saw Matthew turn and glare.

He’s frightened of me, George thought, as he went back to trimming the plants in the garden. Does he think I will try to take over from him as driver one day?

It was not a thought he had entertained until then.

When the car came back, he looked at it with disapproval: its sides were filthy. He hosed it down, and then wiped the outside with a dirty rag, and the inside with a clean rag. The thought came to him as he worked that cleaning the car was not his job, as gardener-he was doing something extra-but of course Madam wouldn’t notice. They never have any gratitude, the rich, do they?

“You’ve done a very good job with the car,” Mrs. Gomes said in the evening. “I am grateful.”

George was ashamed of himself. He thought, This rich woman really is different from other rich people.

“I’ll do anything for you, madam,” he said.

He kept a distance of about five or six feet between them whenever they talked; sometimes, in the course of conversation, the distance contracted, perfume made his nostrils expand, and he would automatically, with little backward steps, reestablish the proper radius between mistress and servant.

The cook brought him tea in the evenings, and chatted with him for hours. He had not yet gone inside the house, but from the old woman he came to realize that its share of wonders went far beyond an air conditioner. That enormous white box he saw whenever the back door opened was a machine that did washing-and drying-automatically, the old cook said.

“Her husband wanted her to use it, and she didn’t. They never agreed on anything. Plus,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “no children. That always causes problems.”

“What drove them apart?”

“That way she laughs,” the old woman said. “He said she laughed like a devil.”

He had noticed it too: high pitched, savage, like the laugh of a child or an animal, gloating and wanton. He always stopped work to listen when it ricocheted from her room; and he often heard it elsewhere even in the creak made by the opening of a door, or the particular cadence of an unusual bird cry. He understood what her husband had meant.

“Are you educated, George?” Mrs. Gomes asked one day, in a surprised tone. She had found him reading the newspaper.

“Yes and no, madam. I studied till the tenth standard, madam, but I failed the SSLC.”

“Failed?” she asked with a smile. “How can anyone fail the SSLC? It is such a simple exam…”

“I could do all the sums, madam. I passed mathematics with sixty marks out of a hundred. I only failed social studies, because I could not mark Madras and Bombay on the map of India that they gave me. What could I do, madam? We had not studied those things in class. I got thirty-four in social studies-one mark fail!”

“Why didn’t you take the exam again?” she asked.

“Take it again?” He uttered the words as if he did not understand them. “I began working,” he said, because he did not know how to answer her. “I worked for six years, madam. The rains were bad last year, and there was no agriculture. We heard there were jobs for Christians at the construction site-the cathedral, I mean-and a bunch of us from the village came up here. I was working as a carpenter there, madam. Where was the time to study?”

“Why did you leave the construction site?”

“I have a bad back,” he said.

“Should you be doing this kind of work, then?” she asked. “Won’t it hurt your back? And then you’ll say that I broke your back and make a fuss about it!”

“My back is fine, madam. My back is fine. Don’t you see me bent over and working every day?”

“So why did you say your back was bad?” she demanded. He said nothing, and she shook her head and said, “Oh, you villagers are impossible to understand!”

The next day he was waiting for her. When she came out into the garden after her bath, wiping her wet hair dry with a towel, George approached her and said:

“He slapped me, madam. I slapped him back.”

“What are you talking about, George? Who slapped you?”

He explained: he had gotten into a fight with his foreman. George pantomimed the exchange of palms, hoping to impress upon her how fast it had been, how reflexive.

“He said I was making eyes at his wife, madam. But that was untrue. We are honest people in my family, madam. We used to plow in the village, madam,” he said. “And we would find copper coins. These are from the time of Tippu Sultan. They are over a hundred years old. And those coins were taken from me, and melted down for copper. I wanted so much to keep them, but I handed them over to Mr. Coelho, the landlord. I am not dishonest. I do not steal, or look at another man’s woman. This is the truth. Go to the village and ask Mr. Coelho. He’ll tell you.”

She smiled at this; like all villagers, he had a manner of defending his character that was naïve, circuitous, and endearing.

“I trust you,” she said, and went in, without closing the door. He peered into the house, and saw clocks, red carpets, wooden medallions on the walls, potted plants, things of bronze and silver. Then the door closed again.

She brought tea out herself that day. She put the glass down on the threshold, and he scampered up the steps with a bowed head, picked it up, and scampered back down.

“Ah, madam, but you people have it all, and we people have nothing. It’s just not fair,” he said, sucking on the tea.

She let out a little laugh. She did not expect such directness from the poor; it was charming.

“It’s just not fair, madam,” he said again. “You even have a washing machine that you never use. That’s how much you have.”

“Are you asking me for more money?” She arched her eyebrows.

“No, madam, why should I? You pay very well. I don’t do things in a roundabout way,” he said. “If I want it, I’ll ask for money.”

“I have problems you don’t know about, George. I have problems too.” She smiled and went in. He stood outside, hoping vainly for an explanation.

A little later it began to rain. The foreign yoga teacher came, with an umbrella, through the heavy rain; he ran up to the gate to let her in, and then sat in the garage by the car, eavesdropping on the sound of deep breathing from Madam’s bedroom. By the time the yoga session was over, the rain had ended and the garden was sparkling in the sun. The two women seemed excited by the sun-and the garden’s carefully tended condition. Mrs. Gomes talked to her foreign friend with an arm on her hip; George noticed that unlike the European woman, his employer had retained her maidenly figure. He supposed it was because she did not have any children.

The lights came on in her bedroom at around six-thirty, and then the noise of water flowing. She was taking a bath; she took a bath every night. It was not necessary, since she bathed again in the morning, and anyway she smelled of won derful perfume, yet she bathed twice-in hot water, he was sure, coating herself in lather and relaxing her body. She was a woman who did things just for her pleasure.

On Sunday, George walked uphill to attend Mass at the cathedral; when he came back, the conditioner was still purring. So she does not go to church, he thought.

Every other Wednesday afternoon, the Ideal Mobile Circulating Library came to the house on a Yamaha motorbike; the librarian-cum-driver of the bike, after pressing the bell, would untie a metal box of books strapped to the back of his motorbike, and place it on the back of the car for her to inspect. Mrs. Gomes peered at the books and picked out a couple. When she had made her selection, and paid, and gone back inside, George went up to the librarian-cum-driver, who was retying the box to the back of his Yamaha, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“What sort of books does Madam take?”

“Novels.”

The librarian-cum-driver stopped and winked at him. “Dirty novels. I see dozens like her every day: women with their husbands abroad.”

He bent his finger and wiggled it.

“It still itches, you know. So they have to read English novels to get rid of it.”

George grinned. But when the Yamaha, kicking up a cloud of dust, turned in a circle and left the garden, he ran to the gate and shouted:

“Don’t talk of Madam like that, you bastard!”

At night he lay awake; then he wandered about the backyard quietly, making no noise. He was thinking. It seemed to him, when he looked back on it, that his life consisted of things that had not said yes to him, and things that he could not say no to. The SSLC had not said yes to him, and his sister he could not say no to. He could not imagine, for instance, abandoning his sister to her own fate and trying to go back and complete his SSLC examination.

He left the compound and walked up the lane and along the main road. The unfinished cathedral was a dark shape against the blue coastal night sky. Lighting a beedi, he walked in circles around the mess of the construction site, looking at familiar things in an unfamiliar way.

The next day, he was waiting for her with an announcement:

“I’ve stopped drinking, madam,” he told her. “I made the decision last night-never another bottle of arrack.”

He wanted her to know; he had the power now to live any way he wanted. That evening, as George was out in the garden trimming the leaves on the rosebush, Matthew unlatched the gate and came in. He glared at George, then he walked away into the backyard, to his quarters.

Half an hour later, when Mrs. Gomes needed to be driven to the Lions Ladies’ meeting, Matthew was nowhere to be seen, even after she yelled into the backyard six times.

“Let me drive, Madam,” he said.

She looked at him skeptically. “Do you know how to drive?”

“Madam, when you grow up poor, you have to learn to do everything, from farming to driving. Why don’t you get in and see for yourself how well I drive?”

“Do you have a license? Will you kill me?”

“Madam,” he said, “I would never do anything to put you in the slightest danger.” A moment later he added, “I would even give my life for you.”

She smiled at that; then she saw that he was saying it in earnest, and she stopped smiling. She got into the car, and he started the engine, and he became her driver.

“You drive well, George. Why don’t you work full-time as my driver?” she asked him at the end.

“I’ll do anything for you, madam.”

Matthew was dismissed that evening. The cook came to George and said, “I never liked him. I’m glad you’re staying, though.”

George bowed to her. “You’re like my elder sister,” he said, and watched her beam happily.

In the mornings he cleaned and washed the car, and sat on Matthew’s stool, his legs crossed, humming merrily, and waiting for the moment when Madam would command him to take her out. When he drove her to the Lions Ladies’ meetings, he wandered about the flagpole in front of the club, watching the buses go by around the municipal library. He looked at the buses and the library differently: not as wanderer, a manual worker who got down into gutters and scooped out earth-but like someone with a stake in things. He drove her down to the sea once. She walked toward the water and sat by the rocks, watching the silver waves, while he waited by the car, watching her.

As she approached the car, he coughed.

“What is it, George?”

“My sister, Maria.”

She looked at him with a smile, encouraging him.

“She can cook, madam. She is clean, and hardworking, and a good Christian girl.”

“I have a cook, George.”

“She’s not good, madam. And she’s old. Why don’t you get rid of her, and have my sister over from the village?”

Her face darkened. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? Trying to take over my household! First you get rid of my driver, and now my cook!”

She got in and slammed the door. He smiled; he was not worried. He had planted the seed in her mind; it would germinate in a little time. He knew now how this woman’s mind worked.

That summer, during the water shortage, George showed Mrs. Gomes that he was indispensable. He was up at the top of the hill waiting for the water tanker to come along; he brought the buckets down himself, filling up her flush and commodes so she did not have to go through the humiliation of rationing her flushes, like everyone else in the neighborhood. As soon as he heard a rumor that the corporation was going to release water through the taps for a limited time (they sometimes gave half an hour of water every two or three days), he would come rushing into the house shouting, “Madam! Madam!”

She gave him a set of the keys to the back door, so that he could come into the house anytime he heard that the water was going to be on, and fill up the buckets.

Thanks to his hard work, at a time when most people couldn’t bathe even once every other day, Madam was still taking her twice-a-day pleasure baths.

“How absurd,” she said one evening, coming to the back door with her hair wet and falling down her shoulders, rubbing it vigorously with a white towel, “that in this country with so much rain, we still have water shortages. When will India ever change?”

He smiled, averting his eyes from her figure and her wet hair.

“George, your pay will be increased,” she said, and went back inside, closing the door firmly.

There was more good news for him too, a few evenings later. He saw the old cook leaving, a bag under her arm. She looked at him with baleful eyes as their paths crossed, and hissed:

“I know what you’re trying to do to her! I told her you’ll destroy her name and reputation! But she’s fallen under your spell.”

A week after Maria joined the household of 10A, Mrs. Gomes came to George as he was tinkering with the engine of the car.

“Your sister’s shrimp curry is excellent.”

“Everyone in our family is hardworking, madam,” he said, and got so excited he jerked up his head, whacking it against the hood. It stung, but Mrs. Gomes had begun to laugh-that sharp, high-pitched animal laugh of hers-and he tried to laugh along with her while rubbing the red bump on his skull.

Maria was a small, frightened girl who came with two bags, no English, and no knowledge of life beyond her village. Mrs. Gomes had taken a liking to her, and allowed her to sleep in the kitchen.

“What do they talk about, inside the house, Madam and that foreign woman?” George asked her, when Maria came to his one-room quarters with his evening meal.

“I don’t know,” she said, ladling out his fish curry.

“Why don’t you know?”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” she said, her voice small, scared, as always, of her brother.

“Well, pay attention! Don’t just sit there like a doll, saying ‘Yes, madam’ and ‘No, madam’! Take some initiative! Keep your eyes open!”

On Sundays, he took Maria along to Mass at the cathedral; construction stopped in the morning, to let people in, but as they emerged, they could see the contractors getting ready to resume work in the evening.

“Why doesn’t Madam come to Mass? Isn’t she a Christian too?” Maria asked as they were leaving church.

He took a deep breath. “The rich do as they want. It’s not for us to question them.”

He noticed Mrs. Gomes talking to Maria; with her open, generous nature, which did not distinguish between rich and poor, she was becoming more than just a mistress to Maria, but a good friend. It was exactly as he had hoped.

In the evenings he missed his drink, but he filled the time by walking about, or by listening to a radio and letting his mind drift. He thought, Maria can get married next year. She had a status now as a cook in a rich woman’s house. Boys would line up for her back home in the village.

After that, he figured, it would be time for his own marriage, which he had put off so long, out of a combination of bitterness, poverty, and shame. Yes, time for marriage, and children. Yet regret still gnawed at him, created by his contact with this rich woman, that he could have done so much more with his life.

“You’re a lucky man, George,” Mrs. Gomes said one evening, watching him rub the car with a wet cloth. “You have a wonderful sister.”

“Thank you, madam.”

“Why don’t you take Maria around the city? She hasn’t seen anything in Kittur, has she?”

He decided that this was a clear opportunity to show some initiative. “Why don’t we all three go together, madam?”

The three of them drove down for a drive to the beach. Mrs. Gomes and Maria went for a walk along the sand. He watched from a distance. When they returned, he was waiting with a paper cone filled with roasted groundnuts for Maria.

“Don’t I get some too?” Mrs. Gomes demanded, and he hurried to pour some nuts out, and she took them from his hands, and that was how he touched her for the first time.

It was raining again in Valencia, and he knew he had been at the house almost a year. One day, the new mosquito man came to the backyard. Mrs. Gomes watched as George directed the fellow around the gutters and canals in the back, to make sure not a spot was missed.

That evening, she called him to the house and said, “George, you should do it yourself. Please spray the gutter yourself, like last year.”

Her voice became sweet, and though it was the same voice she used to make him move mountains for her, this time he stiffened. He was offended that she would still ask him to perform such a task.

“Why not?” She raised her voice angrily. She shrieked, “You work for me! You do what I say!”

The two of them stared at each other, and then, grumbling and cursing her, he left the house. He wandered aimlessly for some time, then decided to visit the cathedral again, to see how the old fellows were doing.

Nothing much had changed in the field by the cathedral. The construction had been held up, he was told, because of the rector’s death. It would start again soon.

His other friends were missing-they had left the work and returned to the village-but Guru was there.

“Now that you’re here, why don’t we…” Guru made the gesture of a bottle being emptied down a throat.

They went to an arrack shop, and there was some fine drinking, just like in old times.

“So how are things with you and your princess?” Guru asked.

“Oh, these rich people are all the same,” George said bitterly. “We’re just trash to them. A rich woman can never see a poor man as a man. Just as a servant.”

He remembered his carefree days, before he was tied down to a house and to Madam-and he became resentful at having lost his freedom. He left early, shortly before midnight, saying that he had something to take care of at the house. On the way back, he staggered drunkenly, singing a Konkani song; but another pulse had started to throb beneath the lighthearted film number.

As he drew near the gate, his voice dropped down and died out, and he realized he was walking with exaggerated stealth. He wondered why, and felt frightened of himself.

He opened the latch of the gate soundlessly, and walked toward the back door of the house. He had been holding the key in his hand for some time; bending down to the lock and squinting at the keyhole, he inserted it. Opening the door carefully and quietly, he walked into the house. The heavy washing machine lay in the dark, like a night watchman. In the distance wisps of cool air escaped from a crack in the closed door of her bedroom.

George breathed slowly. His one thought, as he staggered forward, was that he must avoid walking into the washing machine.

“Oh, God,” he said suddenly. He realized that he had banged his knee into the washing machine and the damn machine was reverberating.

“Oh, God,” he said again, with the dim, desperate consciousness that he had spoken too loudly.

There was a movement; her door opened, and a woman with long loose hair emerged.

A cool air-conditioned breeze thrilled his entire body. The woman pulled the edge of a sari over her shoulder.

“George?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want?”

He said nothing. The answer to the question was at once vague and full of substance, half obscure but all too present, just as she herself was. He almost knew what he wanted to say; she said nothing. She had not screamed or raised the alarm. Perhaps she wanted it too. He felt that it was now only a matter of saying it, or even of moving. Just do something. It will happen.

“Get out,” she said.

He had waited too long.

“Madam, I-”

“Get out.”

It was too late now; he turned around and walked quickly.

The moment the back door closed on him, he felt foolish. He thumped it with his fist so hard that it hurt. “Madam, let me explain!” He pounded the door harder and harder. She had misunderstood him-completely misunderstood!

“Stop it,” came a voice. It was Maria, looking at him fearfully through the window. “Please stop it at once.”

At that moment, the immensity of what he had done struck George. He was conscious the neighbors might be watching. Madam’s reputation was at stake.

He dragged himself up to the construction site, and fell down there to sleep. The next morning, he discovered he had been lying, just as he had done months before, on top of a pyramid of crushed granite.

He came back, slowly. Maria was waiting for him by the gate.

“Madam,” she called as she went into the house. Mrs. Gomes came out, her finger deep into her latest novel.

“Maria, go to the kitchen,” Mrs. Gomes ordered, as he walked into the garden. He was glad of that; so she wanted to protect Maria from what was coming. He felt gratitude for her delicacy. She was different from other rich people; she was special. She would spare him.

He put the key to the back door on the ground.

“It’s okay,” she said. Her manner was cool. He understood now that the radius had increased; it was pushing him back every second he stood. He did not know how far back to go; it seemed to him he was already as far back as he could be and hear what she was saying. Her voice was distant and small and cold. For some reason, he could not take his eyes off the cover of her novel: a man was driving a red car, and two white women in bikinis were sitting inside.

“It’s not anger,” she said. “I should have taken greater precautions. I made a mistake.”

“I’ve left the key down here, madam,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The lock is being changed this evening.”

“Can I stay until you find someone else?” he blurted out. “How will you manage with the garden? And what will you do for a driver?”

“I’ll manage,” she said.

Until then, all his thoughts had been for her-her reputation in the neighborhood, her peace of mind, the sense of betrayal she must feel-but now he understood: she was not the one who needed taking care of.

He wanted to speak his heart out to her and tell her all this, but she spoke first.

“Maria will have to leave as well.”

He stared at her, his mouth open.

“Where will she sleep tonight?” His voice was thin and desperate. “Madam, she left everything she had in our village and came here to live with you.”

“She can sleep in the church, I suppose,” Mrs. Gomes said calmly. “They let people in all night, I’ve heard.”

“Madam.” He folded his palms. “Madam, you’re Christian like us, and I’m begging you in the name of Christian charity, please leave Maria out of-”

She closed the door; then he heard the sound of it being locked, and then double-locked.

He waited for his sister at the top of the road, and looked in the direction of the unfinished cathedral.