Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

Shaila had reemerged from the hanging sheets. She drifted toward the far end of the backyard, where neem trees mingled with coconut palms.

  “Does she think about her mother and sisters often, I wonder?” Jayamma whispered. “What kind of a life is this for a girl, away from her family?”

  “I’m tired of this waiting!” Karthik grumbled.

  “Brother, wait!”

  But he was already in the servants’ room. A triumphant shriek: Karthik came out with the blue marble.

  In the evening, Jayamma was on the threshold of the kitchen, winnowing rice. Her glasses had slid halfway down her nose, and her brow was furrowed. She turned toward the servants’ room, which was bolted from the inside, and from which came the sound of sobbing, and shouted:

  “Stop crying. You’ve got to get tough. Servants like us, who work for others, have to learn to be tough.”

  Swallowing her tears audibly, Shaila shouted back through the bolted door:

  “Shut up, you self-pitying Brahmin hag! You told Karthik I had black magic!”

  “Don’t accuse me of things like that! I never told him you did black magic!”

  “Liar! Liar!”

  “Don’t call me a liar, you Hoyka! Why do you draw triangles on the ground, if not to practice black magic? You don’t fool me for a minute!”

  “Can’t you see those triangles were just part of a game? Are you losing your mind, you old hag?”

  Jayamma slammed down the winnow; the rice grains were splattered about the threshold. She went into the prayer room and closed the door.

  She woke up and overheard a sob-drenched monologue: it was coming from the servants’ quarters, and was so loud that it had penetrated the wall of the prayer room.

  “I don’t want to be here…I didn’t want to leave my friends, and our fields, and our cows, and come here. But my mother said, ‘You have to go to the city and work for the Advocate Panchinalli, otherwise where will you get the gold necklace? And who will marry you without a gold necklace?’ But ever since I came, I’ve seen no gold necklace-just trouble, trouble, trouble!”

  Jayamma shouted into the wall at once, “Trouble, trouble, trouble-see how she talks like an old woman! This is nothing, your misfortune. I’ve seen real trouble!”

  The sobbing stopped. Jayamma told the lower-caste a few of her own troubles. At dinner, Jayamma came with the trough of rice to the servants’ living room. She banged on the door, but Shaila would not open.

  “Oh, what a haughty little miss she is!”

  She kept banging on the door until it opened. Then she served the girl rice and lentil stew, and watched to make sure that it was eaten.

  The next morning, the two servants were sitting at the threshold together.

  “Say, Jayamma, what’s the news of the world?”

  Shaila was beaming. Flowers in her hair, and Johnson’s Baby Powder on her face again. Jayamma looked up from the paper with a scornful expression.

  “Oh, why do you ask me? You can read and write, can’t you?”

  “C’mon, Jayamma, you know we lower-castes aren’t meant to do things like that…” The little girl smiled ingratiatingly.

  “If you Brahmins don’t read for us, where will we learn anything?”

  “Sit down,” the old woman said haughtily. She turned the pages slowly, and read out from the news items that interested her.

  “They say that in Tumkur District, a holy man has mastered the art of flying through willpower, and can go seventeen feet up in the air and bring himself down too.”

  “Really?” The girl was skeptical. “Has anyone actually seen him do this, or are they simply believing him?”

  “Of course they saw him do it!” Jayamma retorted, tapping on the news item as proof. “Haven’t you ever seen magic?”

  Shaila giggled hysterically; then she ran into the backyard and dashed into the coconut trees; and then Jayamma heard the song again.

  She waited till Shaila came back to the house, and said, “What will your husband think, if he sees you looking like a savage? Your hair is a mess.”

  So the girl sat down on the threshold, and Jayamma oiled her hair, and combed it into gleaming black tresses that would set any man’s heart on fire.

  At eight o’clock the old lady and the girl went together to watch TV. They watched till ten, then returned to their rooms when Karthik switched it off.

  Halfway through the night, Shaila woke up to see the door to her room pushed open.

  “Sister…”

  Through the darkness Shaila saw a silver-haired head peering in.

  “Sister…let me spend the night here…There are ghosts outside the storage room, yes…”

  Almost crawling into the servants’ quarters, Jayamma, breathing hard and sweating profusely, propped herself against a wall of the room and sank her head between her knees. The girl went out to see what was happening in the storage room; she came back giggling.

  “Jayamma…those aren’t ghosts, those are just two cats, fighting at the Christian’s house…that’s all…”

  But the old lady was already asleep, her silver hair spread out on the floor.

  From then on, Jayamma began to come to sleep in Shaila’s room whenever she heard the two screeching cat-demons outside her room.

  It was the day before the Navarathri Festival. Still no word from home, nor from the advocate, about when she might be going home. The price of jaggery had gone up again. So had kerosene. Jayamma read in the papers that a holy man had learned to fly from tree to tree in a grove in Kerala-but only if the trees were betel-nut trees. There was going to be a partial solar eclipse the following year, and that might signal the end of the earth. V. P. Singh, a member of the Union Cabinet, had accused the prime minister of corruption. The government could fall any day, and there was going to be chaos in Delhi.

  That night, after dinner, Jayamma proposed to the advocate that on the holy day she take Karthik to the Kittamma Devi Temple near the train station.

  “He should not fall out of the habit of prayer now that his mother is no more, should he?” she said meekly.

  “That’s a good idea…” The advocate picked up his newspaper.

  Jayamma breathed in for courage.

  “If you could give me a few rupees towards the rickshaw…”

  She knocked on the little girl’s room. She opened her fist triumphantly.

  “Five rupees! The advocate gave me five rupees!”

  Jayamma took a bath in the servants’ toilet, lathering herself thoroughly in sandalwood soap. Changing from her vermilion sari to her purple one, she walked up to the boy’s room, relishing the fragrance of her own skin, feeling like someone important.

  “Get dressed, brother-we’ll miss the five o’clock pooja.”

  The boy was on his bed, punching at the buttons of a small handheld electronic game: Bip! Bip! Bip!

  “I’m not coming.”

  “Brother-it’s a temple. We should go!”

  “No.”

  “Brother…what would your mother say if she were…”

  The boy put his game down for a second. He walked up to the door of his room, and slammed it in Jayamma’s face.

  She lay in the storage room, seeking comfort in the fumes of the DDT and the sight of the Baby Krishna’s silver buttocks. The door creaked open. A small black face, coated in Johnson’s Baby Powder, smiled at her.

  “Jayamma-Jayamma-take me to the temple instead…”

  The two of them sat quietly in the autorickshaw.

  “Wait here,” Jayamma said at the entrance to the temple. She bought a packet of flowers with fifty paise of her own money.

  “Here.” She guided the girl to place the basket in the hands of the priest when they were in the temple.

  A throng of devotees had gathered around the silver lingam. Little boys jumped high to strike the temple bells around the deity. They struggled in vain, and then their fathers hoisted them up. Jayamma caught Shaila leaping high at a bell.

  “Shall I
lift you up?”

  At five, the pooja got under way. In a bronze plate, flames rose from camphor cubes. Two women blew giant conches; a brass gong was struck, faster and faster. Then one of the Brahmins rushed out with a copper plate that burned at one end, and Jayamma dropped a coin into it, while the girl reached forward with her palms for the holy fire.

  The two of them sat out on the veranda of the temple, on whose walls hung the giant drums that were played at weddings. Jayamma remarked on the scandal of a woman decked in a sleeveless blouse heading toward the temple gate. Shaila thought the sleeveless style was quite “sporty.” A screaming child was being pulled along by her father to the temple door. She quieted down when Jayamma and Shaila both began to pet her.

  The two servants left the temple reluctantly. Birds rose up from the trees as they waited for a rickshaw. Bands of incandescent clouds piled up one above the other like military decorations as the sun set. Jayamma began fighting with the rickshaw driver over the price to go home, and Shaila giggled the whole time, infuriating the old woman and the driver alike.

  “Jayamma-have you heard the big news?”

  The old lady looked up from the newspaper spread out on the threshold. She removed her glasses and blinked at the girl.

  “About the price of jaggery?”

  “No, not that.”

  “About the man in Kasargod who gave birth?”

  “No, not that either.” The girl grinned shyly. “I’m getting married.”

  Jayamma’s lips parted. She turned her head down, took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes.

  “When?”

  “Next month. The marriage has been fixed. The advocate told me this yesterday. He will send my gold necklace directly to my village.”

  “So you think you’re a queen now, huh?” Jayamma snapped. “Because you’re getting hitched to some village bumpkin!”

  She saw Shaila run to the compound wall to spread the tidings to the thick-lipped Christian. “I’m getting married, I’m getting married,” the girl sang sweetly all day long.

  Jayamma cautioned her from the kitchen, “You think it’s any big deal being married? Don’t you know what happened to my sister Ambika?”

  But the girl was too full of herself to listen. She just sang all day:

  “I’m getting married, I’m getting married!”

  So at night, it was the Baby Krishna who got to hear the story of the luckless Ambika, punished for her sins in a previous life:

  Ambika, the sixth daughter and the last to be married, was the family beauty. A rich doctor wanted her for his son. Excellent news! When the groom came to see Ambika, he left for the bathroom repeatedly. “See how shy he is,” the women all said, giggling. On the wedding night, he lay with his back turned to Ambika’s face. He coughed all night. In the morning, she saw blood on the sheets. He notified her that she had married a man with advanced tuberculosis. He had wanted to be honest, but his mother would not let him. “Someone has put black magic on your family, you wretched girl,” he said, as his body was racked by fits of coughing. A month later, he was dead on a hospital bed. His mother told the village that the girl, and all her sisters, were cursed, and no one would agree to marry any of the other children.

  “And that’s the true story of why I’m a virgin,” Jayamma wanted the infant Krishna to know. “In fact, I had such thick hair, such golden skin, I was considered a beauty, you know that?” She raised her eyebrows archly, like a film actress, suspecting that the little god did not entirely believe her. “Sometimes I thank my stars I never married. What if I too had been deceived, like Ambika? Better a spinster than a widow, any day…And yet that little lower-caste can’t stop singing about it every minute of the morning…” Lying in the dark, Jayamma mimicked the little lower-caste’s voice for the baby god’s benefit:

  “‘I’m getting married, I’m getting married…’”

  The day came for Shaila’s departure. The advocate said he would himself drive the girl home in his green Ambassador.

  “I’m going, Jayamma.”

  The old lady was brushing her silver hair on the threshold. She felt that Shaila was pronouncing the name with deliberate tartness. “I’m going to get married.” The old lady kept brushing her hair. “Write to me sometime, won’t you, Jayamma? You Brahmins are such fine letter writers, the best of the best…”

  Jayamma tossed the plastic comb into a corner of the storage room. “To hell with you, you little lower-caste vermin!”

  The weeks passed. Now she had to do the girl’s work too. By the time dinner was served and the dishes cleaned, she was spent. The advocate made no mention of hiring a new servant. She understood that from now on it was up to her to perform the lower-caste’s work too.

  In the evenings, she took to wandering in the backyard with her long silver hair down at the sides. One evening, Rosie, the thick-lipped Christian, waved at her.

  “What happened to Shaila? Did she get married?”

  Thrown into confusion, Jayamma grinned.

  She started to watch Rosie. How carefree those Christians were-eating whatever they wanted, marrying and divorcing whenever they felt like it.

  One night the two demons came back. She lay paralyzed for many minutes, listening to the screeching of the spirits, which had disguised themselves as cats once again. She clutched the idol of Baby Krishna, rubbing its silver buttocks while sitting on a bag of rice surrounded by the moat of DDT; she began to sing:

  A star is whispering

  Of my heart’s deep longing

  To see you once more,

  My baby-child, my darling, my king.

  That next evening, the advocate spoke to her at dinner. He had received a letter from Shaila’s mother.

  “They said they were not happy with the size of the gold necklace. After I spent two thousand rupees on it, can you believe it?”

  “Some people are never satisfied, master…what can be done?”

  He scratched at his bare chest with his left hand and belched. “In this life, a man is always the servant of his servants.”

  That night she could not go to sleep from anxiety. What if the advocate cheated her out of her pay too?

  “For you!” One morning, Karthik tossed a letter onto the rice winnower. Jayamma shook the grains of rice off it and tore it open with trembling fingers. Only one person in the world ever wrote her letters-her sister-in-law in Salt Market Village. Spreading it out on the ground, she put together the words one by one.

  “The advocate has let it be known that he intends to move to Bangalore. You, of course, will be returned to us. Do not expect to stay here long; we are already looking for another house to dispatch you to.”

  She folded the letter slowly, and tucked it into the midriff of her sari. It felt like a slap to her face: the advocate had not bothered to tell her the news. “Well, let it be, who am I to him, just another servant woman.”

  A week later, he came into the storage room and stood at the threshold, as Jayamma got up hurriedly, trying to put her hair in order. “Your money has been sent already to your sister-in-law in Salt Market Village,” he said.

  This was the usual agreement anywhere Jayamma worked; the wages never came to her directly.

  The advocate paused.

  “The boy needs someone to take care of him…I have relatives in Bangalore…”

  “I only hope for the best for you and for Master Karthik,” she said, bowing before him with slow dignity.

  That Sunday, she collected all her belongings over the past year into the same suitcase with which she had come to the house. The only sad part was saying good-bye to the Baby Krishna.

  The advocate was not going to drop her off; she would walk to the bus stand herself. The bus was not due till four o’clock, and she walked about the backyard, amid the swaying garments on the clothesline. She thought of Shaila-that girl had been running around this backyard, her hair loose, like an irresponsible brat; and now she was a married woman, the mistress of a household. Ev
eryone changed and moved up in life, she thought. Only I remain the same: a virgin. She turned to the house with a somber thought: This is the last time I will see this house, where I have spent more than a year of my life. She remembered all the houses where she had been sent these past forty years, so that she could fatten other people’s children. She had taken back nothing from her time at all those houses; she was still unmarried, childless, and penniless. Like a glass from which clean water had been drunk, her life showed no trace of the years that had passed-except that her body had grown old, her eyes were weak, and her knee joints ached. Nothing will ever change for me till I die, thought old Jayamma.

  All at once, her gloom was gone. She had seen a blue rubber ball, half hidden by a hibiscus plant in the backyard. It looked like one of the balls Karthik played cricket with; had it been left out here because it was punctured? Jayamma brought it right up to her nose for a good examination. Although she could not see a hole anywhere, when she squeezed it next to her cheek, she felt a tickling hiss of air on her skin.

  With a servant’s instinct for caution, the old cook glanced around the garden. Breathing in deep, she tossed the blue ball to the side of the house; it smacked against the wall and came back to her with a single bounce.

  Good enough!

  Jayamma turned the ball over and examined its skin, faded but still with a nice blue sheen. She sniffed at it. It would do very nicely.

  She came to Karthik, who was in his room, on the bed: Bip! Bip! Bip! She thought how much he resembled the image of his mother in photographs when he beetled his brow to concentrate on the game; the furrow in his brow was like a bookmark left there by the dead woman.

  “Brother…”

  “Hm?”

  “I’m leaving for my brother’s home today…I’m going back to my village. I’m not coming back.”

  “Hm.”

  “May the blessings of your dear mother shine on you always.”

  “Hm.”

  “Brother…”

  “What is it?” His voice crackled with irritation. “Why are you always pestering me?”

  “Brother…that blue ball out in the garden, the one that’s punctured, you don’t use it, do you?”