Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

“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.