Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

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.”