‘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 the 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 centre 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 towards 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 after -noon. 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 towards 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.’
Shaila had re-emerged from the hanging clothes. She drifted towards the far end of the back yard, 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 towards 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 practise 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 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 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 any -thing…’
‘Sit down,’ the old woman said haughtily. She turned the pages over 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 sceptical. ‘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 back yard 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
in the Christian’s house…that’s all…’
But the old lady was already asleep, her silver hair spread out on the ground.
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 Navaratri 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 arecanut 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 at 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 hand-held 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 DDT and the sight of the baby Krishna’s silver buttocks. The door creaked open. A small black face, coated in Johnson and 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 linga. Little boys jumped high to strike the temple bells around the deity. They struggled in vain and then their fathers hoicked them up. Jayamma caught Shaila leaping high at a bell.
‘Shall I lift you up?’
At five, the pooja got under way. 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 verandah of the temple, on whose walls hung the giant drums that were played at wed -dings. Jayamma remarked on the scandal of a woman decked in a sleeveless blouse heading towards 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 quietened 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 cloud 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 sung 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 giggled. 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 back yard 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. r />
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 paralysed 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.