“No one gave me a hundred rupees, Daddy. I swear. Raju is lying, I swear.”
“Don’t lie. Where is the hundred rupees?”
He raised his arm. She began screaming.
When she came to lie down next to her mother, Raju was still complaining that he had not eaten all day long, and had been forced to walk from here to there and then from there to another place and then back to here. Then he saw the red marks on his sister’s face and neck, and went silent. She fell to the ground, and went to sleep.
KITTUR: BASIC FACTS
TOTAL POPULATION (1981 CENSUS): 193,432 residents
CASTE AND RELIGIOUS BREAKDOWN (as percentage of total population):
HINDUS:
UPPER CASTES:
Brahmins:
Kannada-speaking: 4 percent
Konkani-speaking: 3 percent
Tulu-speaking: less than 1 percent
Bunts: 16 percent
Other upper castes: 1 percent
BACKWARD CASTES:
Hoykas: 24 percent
Miscellaneous backward castes and tribals: 4 percent
DALITS (formerly known as untouchables): 9 percent
MINORITIES:
Muslims:
Sunni: 14 percent
Shia: 1 percent
Ahmadiyya, Bohra, Ismaili: less than 1 percent
Catholics: 14 percent
Protestants (Anglican, Pentecostal, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon): 3 percent
Jains: 1 percent
Other religions (including Parsi, Jewish, Buddhist, Brahmo Samaj, and Bahá’í): less than 1 percent
89 residents declare themselves to be without religion or caste
DAY FIVE: VALENCIA (TO THE FIRST CROSSROADS)
Valencia, the Catholic neighborhood, begins with Father Stein’s Homeopathic Hospital, which is named after a German Jesuit missionary who began a hospice here. Valencia is the largest neighborhood of Kittur; most of its inhabitants are educated, employed, and owners of their homes. The handful of Hindus and Muslims who have bought land in Valencia have never encountered any trouble, but Protestants looking to live here have sometimes been attacked with stones and slogans. Every Sunday morning, men and women in their best clothes pour into the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia for Mass. On Christmas Eve, virtually the entire population crams into the cathedral for midnight Mass; the singing of carols and hymns continues well into the early hours.
WHEN IT CAME to troubles seen and horrors experienced, Jayamma, the advocate’s cook, wanted it known that her life had been second to none. In the space of twelve years her dear mother had given birth to eleven children. Nine of them had been girls. Yes, nine! Now, that’s trouble. By the time Jayamma was born, number eight, there was no milk in her mother’s breasts-they had to feed her an ass’s milk in a plastic bottle. An ass’s milk, yes! Now, that’s trouble. Her father had saved enough gold only for six daughters to be married off; the last three had to remain barren virgins for life. Yes, for life. For forty years she had been put on one bus or the other and sent from one town to the next to cook and clean in someone else’s house. To feed and fatten someone else’s children. She wasn’t even told where she would be going next; it would be night, she’d be playing with her nephew-that roly-poly little fellow Brijju-and what would she hear in the living room but her sister-in-law telling some stranger or the other, “It’s a deal, then. If she stays here, she eats food for nothing; so you’re doing us a favor, believe me.” The next day Jayamma would be put on the bus again. Months would pass before she saw Brijju again. This was Jayamma’s life, an installment plan of troubles and horrors. Who had more to complain about on this earth?
But at least one horror was coming to an end. Jayamma was about to leave the advocate’s house.
She was a short, stooped woman in her late fifties, with a glossy silver head of hair that seemed to give off light. A large black wart over her left eyebrow was the kind that is taken for an auspicious sign in an infant. There were always pouches of dark skin shaped like garlic cloves under her eyes, and her eyeballs were rheumy from chronic sleeplessness and worry.
She had packed up her things: one big brown suitcase, the same one she had arrived with. Nothing more. Not a paisa had been stolen from the advocate, although the house was sometimes in a mess, and there surely had been the opportunity. But she had been honest. She brought the suitcase to the front porch and waited for the advocate’s green Ambassador. He had promised to drop her off at the bus station.
“Good-bye, Jayamma. Are you leaving us for real?”
Shaila, the little lower-caste servant girl at the advocate’s house-and Jayamma’s principal tormentor of the past eight months-grinned. Although she was twelve, and would be ready for marriage the following year, she looked only seven or eight. Her dark face was caked with Johnson’s Baby Powder, and she batted her eyelids mockingly.
“You lower-caste demon!” Jayamma hissed. “Mind your manners!”
An hour late, the advocate’s car pulled into the garage.
“Haven’t you heard yet?” he said, when Jayamma came toward him with her bag. “I told your sister-in-law we could use you a bit longer, and she agreed. I thought someone would have informed you.”
He slammed his car door shut. Then he went to take his bath, and Jayamma took her old brown suitcase back into the kitchen and began preparing dinner.
“I’m never going to leave the advocate’s house, am I, Lord Krishna?”
The next morning, the old woman was standing over the gas burner in the kitchen, stirring a lentil stew. As she worked, she sucked in air with a hiss, as if her tongue were on fire.
“For forty years I’ve lived among good Brahmins, Lord Krishna: homes in which even the lizards and the toads had been Brahmins in a previous birth. Now you see my fate, stuck among Christians and meat eaters in this strange town, and each time I think I’m leaving, my sister-in-law tells me to stay on some more…”
She wiped her forehead, and went on to ask what had she done in a previous life-had she been a murderess, an adulteress, a child devourer, a person who was rude to holy men and sages-to have been fated to come here, to the advocate’s house, and live next to a lower-caste?
She sizzled onions, chopped coriander, and threw them in, then stirred in red curry powder and monosodium glutamate from little plastic packets.
“Hai! Hai!”
Jayamma started, and dropped her ladle into the broth. She went to the grille that ran along the rear end of the advocate’s house and peered.
Shaila was at the outer wall of the compound, clapping her hands, while next door, in the Christian neighbor’s backyard, thick-lipped Rosie, a cleaving knife in her hand, was running after a rooster. Slowly unbolting the door, Jayamma crept out into the backyard to take a better look. “Hai! Hai! Hai!” Shaila was shouting in glee as the rooster clicked and clucked and jumped on the green net over the well, where Rosie finally caught the poor thing and began cutting its neck. The rooster’s tongue stuck out, and its eyes almost popped out. “Hai! Hai! Hai!”
Jayamma ran through the kitchen, straight into the dark prayer room, and bolted the door behind her. “ Krishna…My Lord Krishna…”
The prayer room doubled as a storage room for rice, and also as Jayamma’s private quarters. The room was seven feet by seven feet; the little space in between the shrine and the rice bags, just enough to curl up in and go to sleep at night, was all Jayamma had asked from the advocate. (She had refused point-blank to take up the advocate’s initial suggestion that she share a room with the lower-caste in the servants’ quarters.)
She reached into the prayer shrine and took out a black box, which she opened slowly. Inside was a silver idol of a child god-crawling, naked, with shiny buttocks-the god Krishna, Jayamma’s only friend and protector.
“Krishna, Krishna,” she chanted softly, holding the baby god in her hands, and rubbing its silver buttocks with her fingers. “You see what goes on around me-me, a highborn Brahmin woman
!”
She sat down on one of three rice bags lined up against the wall of the prayer room, and surrounded by yellow moats of DDT. Folding her legs up on the rice bag and leaning her head against the wall, she took in deep breaths of the DDT-a strange, relaxing, curiously addictive aroma. She sighed; she wiped her forehead with the edge of her vermilion sari. Spots of sunlight, filtering through the plantain trees outside, played along the ceiling of the little room.
Jayamma closed her eyes. The fragrance of DDT made her drowsy; her body uncoiled, her limbs loosened, and she was asleep in seconds.
When she woke up, fat little Karthik, the advocate’s son, was shining a flashlight on her face. This was his way of rousing her from a nap.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “Is anything ready?”
“Brother!” The old woman sprang to her feet. “There’s black magic in the backyard! Shaila and Rosie have killed a chicken-and they’re doing black magic.”
The boy switched off the flashlight. He looked at her skeptically.
“What are you talking about, you old hag?”
“Come.” The old cook’s eyes were large with excitement. “Come!”
She coaxed the little master down the long hallway into the servants’ quarters.
They stopped by the metal grille that gave them a view of the backyard. There were short coconut trees, and a clothesline, and a black wall beyond which began the compound of their Christian neighbor. There was no one around. A strong wind shook the trees, and a loose sheet of paper was swirling around the backyard like a dervish. The boy saw the white bedsheets on the clothesline swaying eerily. They too seemed to suspect what the cook suspected.
Jayamma motioned to Karthik: Be very, very quiet. She pushed the door to the servants’ quarters. It was locked shut.
When the old woman unlocked it, a stench of hair oil and baby powder wafted out, and the boy clamped his nostrils.
Jayamma pointed to the floor of the room.
A triangle in white chalk had been marked inside a square in red chalk; dried coconut flesh crowned the points of the triangle. Withered, blackening flowers were strewn about inside a circle. A blue marble gleamed from its center.
“It’s for black magic,” she said, and the boy nodded.
“Spies! Spies!”
Shaila stood athwart the door of the servants’ room. She made a finger at Jayamma.
“You-you old hag! Didn’t I tell you never to snoop around my room again?”
The old lady’s face twitched. “Brother!” she shouted. “Did you see how this lower-caste speaks to us Brahmins?”
Karthik made a fist at the girl. “Hey! This is my house, and I’ll go wherever I want to, you hear?”
Shaila glared at him. “Don’t think you can treat me like an animal, okay?”
Three loud honks ended the fighting. Shaila flew out to open the gate; the boy ran into his room and opened a textbook; Jayamma raced around the dining room in a panic, laying the table with stainless-steel plates.
The master of the house removed his shoes in the entrance hall and threw them in the direction of the shoe rack. Shaila would have to rearrange them later. A quick wash in his private bathroom, and he emerged into the dining room, a tall, mustachioed man who cultivated flowing sideburns in the style of an earlier decade. At dinner he was always bare chested, except for the Brahmin caste string winding around his flabby torso. He ate quickly and in silence, pausing only once to gaze into a corner of the ceiling. The house was put in order by the motions of the master’s jaws. Jayamma served. Karthik ate with his father. In the car shed, Shaila hosed down the master’s green Ambassador and wiped it clean.
The advocate read the paper in the television room for an hour, and then the boy strolled in and began searching for the black remote control in the mess of papers and books on the sandalwood table in the center of the room. Jayamma and Shaila scrambled into the room and squatted in a corner, waiting for the television to come on.
At ten o’clock, all the lights in the house went out. The master and Karthik slept in their rooms.
In the darkness, a vicious hissing continued in the servants’ quarters:
“Witch! Witch! Black-magic-making lower-caste witch!”
“Brahmin hag! Crazy old Brahmin hag!”
A week of nonstop conflict followed. Each time Shaila passed by the kitchen, the old Brahmin cook showered vengeful deities by the thousands down on that oily lower-caste head.
“What kind of era is this when Brahmins bring lower-caste girls into their household?” she grumbled as she stirred the lentils in the morning. “Where have the rules of caste and religion fallen today, O Krishna?”
“Talking to yourself again, old virgin?” The girl had popped her head into the kitchen; Jayamma threw an unpeeled onion at her.
Lunch. Truce. The girl put out her stainless steel plate outside the servants’ quarters and squatted on the floor, while Jayamma served a generous portion of the lentil soup over the mounds of white rice on the girl’s plate. She wouldn’t starve anyone, she grumbled as she served, not even a sworn enemy. That’s right: not even a sworn enemy. It wasn’t the Brahmin way of doing things.
After lunch, putting on her glasses, she spread a copy of the newspaper just outside the servants’ quarters. Sucking air in constantly, she read loudly and slowly, piecing letters into words and words into sentences. When Shaila passed by, she thrust the paper at her face.
“Here-you can read and write, can’t you? Here, read the paper!”
The girl fumed; she went back into the servants’ quarters and slammed the door.
“Do you think I’ve forgotten the trick you played on the advocate, you little Hoyka? He’s a kindhearted man, so that’s why that evening you went up to him with your simpering lower-caste face and said, ‘Master, I can’t read. I can’t write. I want to read. I want to write.’ Didn’t he, immediately, drive out to Shenoy’s Bookstore on Umbrella Street and buy you expensive reading-and-writing books? And all for what? Were the lower-castes meant to read and write?” Jayamma demanded of the closed door. “Wasn’t that all just a trap for the advocate?”
Sure enough, the girl had lost all interest in her books. They lay in a heap in the back of her room, and one day, when Shaila was chatting up the thick-lipped Christian next door, Jayamma sold them all to the scrap-paper Muslim. Ha! Showed her!
As Jayamma narrated the story of the infamous reading- and-writing scam, the door to the servants’ quarters opened; Shaila’s face popped out, and she screamed at Jayamma at the top of her voice.
That evening the advocate spoke during dinner:
“I hear there’s been some disturbance or other in the house every day this week…It’s important to keep things quiet. Karthik has to prepare for his exams.”
Jayamma, who had been carrying away the lentil stew using the edge of her sari against the heat, put the stew down on the table.
“It’s not me making the noise, master-it’s that Hoyka girl! She doesn’t know our Brahmin ways.”
“She may be a Hoyka”-the advocate licked the rice grains clinging to his fingers-“but she is clean, and works well.”
As she cleared the table after dinner, Jayamma trembled at the reproach.
Only once the lights were off in the house, and she lay in the prayer room with the familiar fumes of DDT about her and opened the little black box, did she calm down. The baby god was smiling at her.
O, when it came to troubles and horrors, Krishna, who had seen what Jayamma had seen? She told the patient deity the story of how she first came to Kittur; how her sister-in-law had commanded her, “Jayamma, you have to leave us and go, the advocate’s wife is in a hospital in Bangalore, someone has to take care of little Karthik”-that was supposed to be just a month or two. Now it had been eight months since she had seen her little nephew Brijju, or held him in her arms, or played cricket with him. Oh, yes, these were troubles, Baby Krishna.
The next morning, she dropped her ladle in th
e 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.”
Between the Assassinations Page 19
