Aravind Adiga - Between the Assassinations

She brought tea out herself that day. She put the glass down on the threshold, and he scampered up the steps with a bowed head, picked it up, and scampered back down.

“Ah, madam, but you people have it all, and we people have nothing. It’s just not fair,” he said, sucking on the tea.

She let out a little laugh. She did not expect such directness from the poor; it was charming.

“It’s just not fair, madam,” he said again. “You even have a washing machine that you never use. That’s how much you have.”

“Are you asking me for more money?” She arched her eyebrows.

“No, madam, why should I? You pay very well. I don’t do things in a roundabout way,” he said. “If I want it, I’ll ask for money.”

“I have problems you don’t know about, George. I have problems too.” She smiled and went in. He stood outside, hoping vainly for an explanation.

A little later it began to rain. The foreign yoga teacher came, with an umbrella, through the heavy rain; he ran up to the gate to let her in, and then sat in the garage by the car, eavesdropping on the sound of deep breathing from Madam’s bedroom. By the time the yoga session was over, the rain had ended and the garden was sparkling in the sun. The two women seemed excited by the sun-and the garden’s carefully tended condition. Mrs. Gomes talked to her foreign friend with an arm on her hip; George noticed that unlike the European woman, his employer had retained her maidenly figure. He supposed it was because she did not have any children.

The lights came on in her bedroom at around six-thirty, and then the noise of water flowing. She was taking a bath; she took a bath every night. It was not necessary, since she bathed again in the morning, and anyway she smelled of won derful perfume, yet she bathed twice-in hot water, he was sure, coating herself in lather and relaxing her body. She was a woman who did things just for her pleasure.

On Sunday, George walked uphill to attend Mass at the cathedral; when he came back, the conditioner was still purring. So she does not go to church, he thought.

Every other Wednesday afternoon, the Ideal Mobile Circulating Library came to the house on a Yamaha motorbike; the librarian-cum-driver of the bike, after pressing the bell, would untie a metal box of books strapped to the back of his motorbike, and place it on the back of the car for her to inspect. Mrs. Gomes peered at the books and picked out a couple. When she had made her selection, and paid, and gone back inside, George went up to the librarian-cum-driver, who was retying the box to the back of his Yamaha, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“What sort of books does Madam take?”

“Novels.”

The librarian-cum-driver stopped and winked at him. “Dirty novels. I see dozens like her every day: women with their husbands abroad.”

He bent his finger and wiggled it.

“It still itches, you know. So they have to read English novels to get rid of it.”

George grinned. But when the Yamaha, kicking up a cloud of dust, turned in a circle and left the garden, he ran to the gate and shouted:

“Don’t talk of Madam like that, you bastard!”

At night he lay awake; then he wandered about the backyard quietly, making no noise. He was thinking. It seemed to him, when he looked back on it, that his life consisted of things that had not said yes to him, and things that he could not say no to. The SSLC had not said yes to him, and his sister he could not say no to. He could not imagine, for instance, abandoning his sister to her own fate and trying to go back and complete his SSLC examination.

He left the compound and walked up the lane and along the main road. The unfinished cathedral was a dark shape against the blue coastal night sky. Lighting a beedi, he walked in circles around the mess of the construction site, looking at familiar things in an unfamiliar way.

The next day, he was waiting for her with an announcement:

“I’ve stopped drinking, madam,” he told her. “I made the decision last night-never another bottle of arrack.”

He wanted her to know; he had the power now to live any way he wanted. That evening, as George was out in the garden trimming the leaves on the rosebush, Matthew unlatched the gate and came in. He glared at George, then he walked away into the backyard, to his quarters.

Half an hour later, when Mrs. Gomes needed to be driven to the Lions Ladies’ meeting, Matthew was nowhere to be seen, even after she yelled into the backyard six times.

“Let me drive, Madam,” he said.

She looked at him skeptically. “Do you know how to drive?”

“Madam, when you grow up poor, you have to learn to do everything, from farming to driving. Why don’t you get in and see for yourself how well I drive?”

“Do you have a license? Will you kill me?”

“Madam,” he said, “I would never do anything to put you in the slightest danger.” A moment later he added, “I would even give my life for you.”

She smiled at that; then she saw that he was saying it in earnest, and she stopped smiling. She got into the car, and he started the engine, and he became her driver.

“You drive well, George. Why don’t you work full-time as my driver?” she asked him at the end.

“I’ll do anything for you, madam.”

Matthew was dismissed that evening. The cook came to George and said, “I never liked him. I’m glad you’re staying, though.”

George bowed to her. “You’re like my elder sister,” he said, and watched her beam happily.

In the mornings he cleaned and washed the car, and sat on Matthew’s stool, his legs crossed, humming merrily, and waiting for the moment when Madam would command him to take her out. When he drove her to the Lions Ladies’ meetings, he wandered about the flagpole in front of the club, watching the buses go by around the municipal library. He looked at the buses and the library differently: not as wanderer, a manual worker who got down into gutters and scooped out earth-but like someone with a stake in things. He drove her down to the sea once. She walked toward the water and sat by the rocks, watching the silver waves, while he waited by the car, watching her.

As she approached the car, he coughed.

“What is it, George?”

“My sister, Maria.”

She looked at him with a smile, encouraging him.

“She can cook, madam. She is clean, and hardworking, and a good Christian girl.”

“I have a cook, George.”

“She’s not good, madam. And she’s old. Why don’t you get rid of her, and have my sister over from the village?”

Her face darkened. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? Trying to take over my household! First you get rid of my driver, and now my cook!”

She got in and slammed the door. He smiled; he was not worried. He had planted the seed in her mind; it would germinate in a little time. He knew now how this woman’s mind worked.

That summer, during the water shortage, George showed Mrs. Gomes that he was indispensable. He was up at the top of the hill waiting for the water tanker to come along; he brought the buckets down himself, filling up her flush and commodes so she did not have to go through the humiliation of rationing her flushes, like everyone else in the neighborhood. As soon as he heard a rumor that the corporation was going to release water through the taps for a limited time (they sometimes gave half an hour of water every two or three days), he would come rushing into the house shouting, “Madam! Madam!”

She gave him a set of the keys to the back door, so that he could come into the house anytime he heard that the water was going to be on, and fill up the buckets.

Thanks to his hard work, at a time when most people couldn’t bathe even once every other day, Madam was still taking her twice-a-day pleasure baths.