Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

  “Which ball?”

  “Can I take that with me for my little Brijju? He loves playing cricket, but sometimes there’s no money to buy a ball…”

  “No.”

  The boy did not look up. He punched at the buttons on his game.

  Bip!

  Bip!

  Bip!

  “Brother…you gave the lower-caste girl a gold necklace…Can’t you give me just a blue ball for Brijju?”

  Bip!

  Bip!

  Bip!

  Jayamma thought with horror of all the food she had fed this fat creature, how it was the sweat of her brow, dripping into the lentil broth in the heat of that little kitchen, that had nourished him until here he was, round and plump, like an animal bred in the backyard of a Christian’s house. She had a vision of chasing this fat little boy with a meat cleaver; she saw herself catch him by the hair and raise the cleaver over his pleading head. Bang! She brought it down-his tongue spread out, his features bulged out, and he was…

  The old lady shuddered.

  “You are a motherless child, and a Brahmin. I don’t want to think badly of you…Farewell, brother…”

  She went out into the garden with her suitcase, shooting a final glance at the ball. She went to the gate, and stopped. Her eyes were full of the tears of the righteous. The sun mocked her from between the trees.

  Just then, Rosie came out of the Christian’s house. She stopped and looked at the suitcase in Jayamma’s hand. She spoke. For a moment Jayamma couldn’t understand a word, then the Christian’s message sounded loud and clear in her mind:

  Take the ball, you Brahmin fool!

  Swaying coconut palms rushed past. Jayamma was on the bus back to Salt Market Village, sitting next to a woman who was returning from the sacred city of Varanasi. Jayamma could pay no attention to the holy lady’s stories about the great temples she had seen…her thoughts were all on the thing she was concealing in her sari, tucked against her tummy…the blue ball with the small hole…the one she had just stolen…She could not believe that she, Jayamma, the daughter of good Brahmins of Salt Market Village, had done such a thing!

  Eventually the holy woman next to her fell asleep. The snoring filled Jayamma with fear for her soul. What would the gods do to her, she wondered, as the bus rattled over the dirt road; what would she be in the next life? A cockroach, a silverfish that lived in old books, an earthworm, a maggot in a pile of cow shit, or something even filthier.

  Then a strange thought came to her: maybe, if she sinned enough in this life, she would be sent back as a Christian in the next one…

  The thought made her feel light-headed with joy; and she dozed off almost at once.

  DAY FIVE (EVENING): THE CATHEDRAL OF OUR LADY OF VALENCIA

  It cannot be easily explained why the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia still remains incomplete, despite so many attempts to finish the work in recent years and so much money sent by expatriates working in Kuwait. The original Baroque structure dating to 1691 was entirely rebuilt in 1890. Only one bell tower was left incomplete, and it remains incomplete to the present day. Scaffolding has covered the north tower almost continuously since 1981; work resumes fitfully, and stops again, either because of a lack of funds or because of the death of a significant priest. Even in its incomplete state, the cathedral is considered Kittur’s most important tourist attraction. Of particular interest are the frescoes of the miraculously preserved corpse of St. Francis Xavier painted on the ceiling of the chapel, and the colossal mural entitled Allegory of Europe Bringing Science and Enlightenment into the East Indies behind the altar.

  GEORGE D’SOUZA, the mosquito man, had caught himself a princess. Evidence for this claim would be produced at sunset, when work ended on the cathedral. Until then George was only going to suck on his watermelon, drop hints to his friends, and grin.

  He was sitting on a pyramid-shaped mound of granite stones in the compound in front of the cathedral, with his metal backpack and his spray gun to one side.

  Cement mixers were growling on both sides of the cathedral building, crushing granite stones and mud, and disgorging mounds of black mortar. On a scaffolding, bricks and cement were being hoisted up to the top of the northern bell tower. George’s friends Guru and Michael poured water from plastic one-liter bottles into the cement mixer. As water from the machines dripped into the red soil of the compound, blood-red rivulets cascaded down from the cathedral, as if it were a heart left on a piece of newspaper to drain.

  When he was done with his melon, George smoked beedi after beedi. He closed his eyes, and at once the construction workers’ children began to spray each other with pesticide. He chased them for a while, then returned to the pyramid of stones and sat on it.

  He was a small, lithe, dark fellow who seemed to be in his early forties-but since physical labor accelerates aging, he might have been younger, perhaps even in his late twenties. He had a long scar under his left eye, and a pockmarked face that suggested a recent bout of chicken pox. His biceps were long and slender: not the glossy rippling kind bulked up in expensive gyms, but the hewed-from-necessity sinews of the working poor, stone hard and deeply etched from a lifetime of having to lift things for other people.

  At sunset, firewood was piled up in front of George’s stone pyramid, a flame lit, and rice and fish curry cooked in a black pot. A transistor radio was turned on. Mosquitoes buzzed. Four men sat around the flickering fire, their faces burnished, smoking beedis. Around George were his old colleagues-Guru, James, and Vinay; they had worked with him on the construction site before his dismissal.

  Taking his green notebook from his pocket, he opened it to the middle page, where he had kept something pink, like the tongue of an animal he had caught and skinned.

  It was a twenty-rupee note. Vinay fingered the thing in wonder; even after it was gently prized away from him by Guru, he could not take his eyes off it.

  “You got this for spraying pesticide in her house?”

  “No, no, no. She saw me do the spraying, and I guess she was impressed, because she asked me to do some gardening work.”

  “If she’s rich, doesn’t she have a gardener?”

  “She does-but the fellow is always drunk. So I did his work.”

  George described it-removing the dead log from the path of the gutter in the backyard and carrying it a few yards away, removing the muck that had sedimented in the gutter, which had allowed the mosquitoes to breed. Then trimming the hedges in the front yard with a giant clipper.

  “That’s all?” Vinay’s jaw dropped. “Twenty rupees for that?”

  George blew smoke into the air with a luxuriant wickedness. He put the twenty-rupee note back in the notebook, and the notebook in his pocket.

  “That’s why I say she’s my princess.”

  “The rich own the whole world,” said Vinay, with a sigh that was half in rebellion and half in acceptance of this fact. “What is twenty rupees to them?”

  Guru, who was a Hindu, generally spoke little, and was considered “deep” by his friends. He had been as far as Bombay, and could read signs in English.

  “Let me tell you about the rich-let me tell you about the rich.”

  “All right: tell us.”

  “I’m telling you about the rich. In Bombay, at the Oberoi Hotel in Nariman Point, there is a dish called Beef Vindaloo that costs five hundred rupees.”

  “No way!”

  “Yes, five hundred! It was in the English newspaper on Sunday. Now you know about the rich.”

  “What if you order the dish, and then you realize you made a mistake and you don’t like it? Do you get your money back?”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter to you if you’re rich. You know what the biggest difference is between being rich and being like us? The rich can make mistakes again and again. We make only one mistake, and that’s it for us.”

  After dinner, George took everyone out to drinks at the arrack shop. He had drunk and eaten off their generosity since being fi
red from the construction site: the mosquito spraying, which Guru had arranged for him through a connection in the City Corporation, was only a once-a-week job.

  “Next Sunday,” Vinay said, as they headed out of the arrack shop at midnight, dead drunk, “I’m coming to see your fucking princess.”

  “I’m not telling you where she lives,” George cried. “She’s my secret.” The others were annoyed, but didn’t press the issue. They were happy enough to see George in a good mood, which was a rare thing, since he was a bitter man.

  They went to sleep in tents at the back of the cathedral construction site. Since it was September, there was still the danger of rain, but George slept out in the open, looking at the stars, and thinking of the generous woman who had made this day a happy one for him.

  The following Sunday, George strapped on his metal backpack, connected the spray gun to one of its nozzles, and walked out into Valencia. He stopped at every house along his route, and wherever he saw a gutter or puddle, and at every sewage hole he found, he fired his gun: tzzzk…tzzzk…

  He walked a half kilometer from the cathedral and then turned left into one of the alleys that slide downhill from Valencia. He took the route down, firing his gun into the gutters by the side of the road: tzzk…tzzk…tzzk…

  The rain had ended, and muddy raucous torrents no longer gushed downhill, but the twinkling branches of roadside trees and the sloping tiled roofs of the houses still dripped into the road, where the loose stones braided the water into shining rivulets that flowed into the gutters with a soft music. Thick green moss coated the gutters like a sediment of bile, and reeds sprouted up from the bedrock, and small swampy patches of stale water gleamed out of nooks and crannies like liquid emeralds.

  A dozen women in colorful saris, each with a green or mauve bandanna around her head, were cutting the grass at the sides of the road. Swaying in concert as they sang strange Tamil songs, the migrant workers were down in the gutters, where they scraped the moss and pulled the weeds out from between the stones with violent tugs, as if they were taking them back from children, while others scooped out handfuls of black gunk from the bottom of the gutters and heaped it up in dripping mounds.

  He looked at them with contempt, and he thought, But I have fallen to the level of these people myself!

  He grew moody; he began to spray carelessly; he even avoided spraying a few puddles deliberately.

  By and by, he got to 10A, and realized that he was outside his princess’s house. He unlatched the red gate and went in.

  The windows were closed; but close to the house he could hear the sound of water hissing inside. She is taking a shower in the middle of the day, he thought. Rich women can do things like this.

  He had immediately guessed, when he saw the woman the previous week, that her husband was away. You could tell, after a while, with these women whose husbands work in the Gulf: they have an air of not having been around a man for a long time. Her husband had left her well compensated for his absence: the only chauffeur-driven car in all of Valencia, a white Ambassador, in the driveway, and the only air conditioner in the lane, which jutted out of her bedroom and over the jasmine plants in her garden, whirring and dripping water.

  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 ca
r, 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.”