After an initial hour of raucousness, he had become sullen. He was thinking of the man and the woman-the ones he had seen on the cover of his princess’s novel. They were in a car; the wind was blowing through the woman’s hair, and the man was smiling. In the background, there was an airplane. Words in English, the title of the novel, in silver letters, hov ered over the scene, like a benediction from the God of Good Living.
He thought of the woman who could afford to spend her days reading such books, in the comfort of her home, with the air conditioner on at all times.
“The rich abuse us, man. It’s always, here, take twenty rupees, kiss my feet. Get into the gutter. Clean my shit. It’s always like that.”
“There he goes again.” Guru chuckled. “It was this talk that got him fired in the first place, but he hasn’t changed at all. Still so bitter.”
“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.
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.
“How absurd,” she said one evening, coming to the back door with her hair wet and falling down her shoulders, rubbing it vigorously with a white towel, “that in this country with so much rain, we still have water shortages. When will India ever change?”
He smiled, averting his eyes from her figure and her wet hair.
“George, your pay will be increased,” she said, and went back inside, closing the door firmly.
There was more good news for him too, a few evenings later. He saw the old cook leaving, a bag under her arm. She looked at him with baleful eyes as their paths crossed, and hissed:
“I know what you’re trying to do to her! I told her you’ll destroy her name and reputation! But she’s fallen under your spell.”
A week after Maria joined the household of 10A, Mrs. Gomes came to George as he was tinkering with the engine of the car.
“Your sister’s shrimp curry is excellent.”
“Everyone in our family is hardworking, madam,” he said, and got so excited he jerked up his head, whacking it against the hood. It stung, but Mrs. Gomes had begun to laugh-that sharp, high-pitched animal laugh of hers-and he tried to laugh along with her while rubbing the red bump on his skull.
Maria was a small, frightened girl who came with two bags, no English, and no knowledge of life beyond her village. Mrs. Gomes had taken a liking to her, and allowed her to sleep in the kitchen.
“What do they talk about, inside the house, Madam and that foreign woman?” George asked her, when Maria came to his one-room quarters with his evening meal.
“I don’t know,” she said, ladling out his fish curry.
“Why don’t you know?”
“I wasn’t paying attention,” she said, her voice small, scared, as always, of her brother.
“Well, pay attention! Don’t just sit there like a doll, saying ‘Yes, madam’ and ‘No, madam’! Take some initiative! Keep your eyes open!”
Between the Assassinations Page 22
