Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

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.