Between the Assassinations

  He came up the three steps, took the cup, and then went back down and took another three steps further 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 as he left it.

  ‘Will the problem in my back yard 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 car, 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 behaviour confused him.

  In a weary voice, she added: ‘Matthew is supposed to clean the back yard. But he’s not even here often enough to do the driving, forget about the back yard. 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 back yards. 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 closed the door.

  When he was gone, she opened the door to her back yard. 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 neighbourhood.

  Tzzzk…tzzzk; in her mind she followed it as it sounded from round the neighbourhood – 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.’

  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 aeroplane. Words in English, the title of the novel, in silver letters, hovered 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 in 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 back yard. 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 germicide 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 back yard. She’s paying me double what I get now. And I don’t have to be a mosquito-man any more. 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, and 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 Lion 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 outsides with a dirty rag, and the insides 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 was 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, re-establish the proper radius between mistress and servant.

  The cook brought him tea in the evenings and chatted to 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. r />
  ‘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 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 got 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 plough 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, his manner of defending his character was naïve, circuitous, and endearing.

  ‘I trust you,’ she said and went in, without locking 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, eaves -dropping 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 wonderful 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 over 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 scratches, 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; he wandered about the back yard 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 went out, he 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 he was out in the garden, trimming the leaves on the rose plant, Matthew unlatched the gate and came in. He glared at George, then he walked away into the back yard, to his quarters.

  Half an hour later, when Mrs Gomes needed to be driven to the Lion Ladies’ meeting, Matthew was nowhere to be seen, even after she yelled into the back yard six times.

  ‘Let me drive, Madam,’
he said.

  She looked at him sceptically: ‘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 licence? 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 new 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 Madam would command him to take her out. When he drove her to the Lion 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 towards the water and sat by the rocks, watching the silver waves, while he waited by the car, watching her.

  As she got out of 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 hard-working, 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.