Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

“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.