Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

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.