Between the Assassinations

CASTE AND RELIGIOUS BREAKDOWN (as percentage of total population):

HINDUS:

UPPER CASTES:

Brahmins:

Kannada-speaking: 4 percent

Konkani-speaking: 3 percent

Tulu-speaking: less than 1 percent

Bunts: 16 percent

Other upper castes: 1 percent

BACKWARD CASTES:

Hoykas: 24 percent

Miscellaneous backward castes and tribals: 4 percent

DALITS (formerly known as untouchables): 9 percent

MINORITIES:

Muslims:

Sunni: 14 percent

Shia: 1 percent

Ahmadiyya, Bohra, Ismaili: less than 1 percent

Catholics: 14 percent

Protestants (Anglican, Pentecostal, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon): 3 percent

Jains: 1 percent

Other religions (including Parsi, Jewish, Buddhist, Brahmo Samaj, and Baha’i): less than 1 percent

89 residents declare themselves to be without religion or caste

DAY FIVE: VALENCIA (TO THE FIRST CROSSROADS)

Valencia, the Catholic neighborhood, begins with Father Stein’s Homeopathic Hospital, which is named after a German Jesuit missionary who began a hospice here. Valencia is the largest neighborhood of Kittur; most of its inhabitants are educated, employed, and owners of their homes. The handful of Hindus and Muslims who have bought land in Valencia have never encountered any trouble, but Protestants looking to live here have sometimes been attacked with stones and slogans. Every Sunday morning, men and women in their best clothes pour into the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia for Mass. On Christmas Eve, virtually the entire population crams into the cathedral for midnight Mass; the singing of carols and hymns continues well into the early hours.

WHEN IT CAME to troubles seen and horrors experienced, Jayamma, the advocate’s cook, wanted it known that her life had been second to none. In the space of twelve years her dear mother had given birth to eleven children. Nine of them had been girls. Yes, nine! Now, that’s trouble. By the time Jayamma was born, number eight, there was no milk in her mother’s breasts-they had to feed her an ass’s milk in a plastic bottle. An ass’s milk, yes! Now, that’s trouble. Her father had saved enough gold only for six daughters to be married off; the last three had to remain barren virgins for life. Yes, for life. For forty years she had been put on one bus or the other and sent from one town to the next to cook and clean in someone else’s house. To feed and fatten someone else’s children. She wasn’t even told where she would be going next; it would be night, she’d be playing with her nephew-that roly-poly little fellow Brijju-and what would she hear in the living room but her sister-in-law telling some stranger or the other, “It’s a deal, then. If she stays here, she eats food for nothing; so you’re doing us a favor, believe me.” The next day Jayamma would be put on the bus again. Months would pass before she saw Brijju again. This was Jayamma’s life, an installment plan of troubles and horrors. Who had more to complain about on this earth?

But at least one horror was coming to an end. Jayamma was about to leave the advocate’s house.

She was a short, stooped woman in her late fifties, with a glossy silver head of hair that seemed to give off light. A large black wart over her left eyebrow was the kind that is taken for an auspicious sign in an infant. There were always pouches of dark skin shaped like garlic cloves under her eyes, and her eyeballs were rheumy from chronic sleeplessness and worry.

She had packed up her things: one big brown suitcase, the same one she had arrived with. Nothing more. Not a paisa had been stolen from the advocate, although the house was sometimes in a mess, and there surely had been the opportunity. But she had been honest. She brought the suitcase to the front porch and waited for the advocate’s green Ambassador. He had promised to drop her off at the bus station.

“Good-bye, Jayamma. Are you leaving us for real?”

Shaila, the little lower-caste servant girl at the advocate’s house-and Jayamma’s principal tormentor of the past eight months-grinned. Although she was twelve, and would be ready for marriage the following year, she looked only seven or eight. Her dark face was caked with Johnson’s Baby Powder, and she batted her eyelids mockingly.

“You lower-caste demon!” Jayamma hissed. “Mind your manners!”

An hour late, the advocate’s car pulled into the garage.

“Haven’t you heard yet?” he said, when Jayamma came toward him with her bag. “I told your sister-in-law we could use you a bit longer, and she agreed. I thought someone would have informed you.”

He slammed his car door shut. Then he went to take his bath, and Jayamma took her old brown suitcase back into the kitchen and began preparing dinner.

“I’m never going to leave the advocate’s house, am I, Lord Krishna?”

The next morning, the old woman was standing over the gas burner in the kitchen, stirring a lentil stew. As she worked, she sucked in air with a hiss, as if her tongue were on fire.

“For forty years I’ve lived among good Brahmins, Lord Krishna: homes in which even the lizards and the toads had been Brahmins in a previous birth. Now you see my fate, stuck among Christians and meat eaters in this strange town, and each time I think I’m leaving, my sister-in-law tells me to stay on some more…”

She wiped her forehead, and went on to ask what had she done in a previous life-had she been a murderess, an adulteress, a child devourer, a person who was rude to holy men and sages-to have been fated to come here, to the advocate’s house, and live next to a lower-caste?

She sizzled onions, chopped coriander, and threw them in, then stirred in red curry powder and monosodium glutamate from little plastic packets.

“Hai! Hai!”

Jayamma started, and dropped her ladle into the broth. She went to the grille that ran along the rear end of the advocate’s house and peered.

Shaila was at the outer wall of the compound, clapping her hands, while next door, in the Christian neighbor’s backyard, thick-lipped Rosie, a cleaving knife in her hand, was running after a rooster. Slowly unbolting the door, Jayamma crept out into the backyard to take a better look. “Hai! Hai! Hai!” Shaila was shouting in glee as the rooster clicked and clucked and jumped on the green net over the well, where Rosie finally caught the poor thing and began cutting its neck. The rooster’s tongue stuck out, and its eyes almost popped out. “Hai! Hai! Hai!”

Jayamma ran through the kitchen, straight into the dark prayer room, and bolted the door behind her. “ Krishna…My Lord Krishna…”

The prayer room doubled as a storage room for rice, and also as Jayamma’s private quarters. The room was seven feet by seven feet; the little space in between the shrine and the rice bags, just enough to curl up in and go to sleep at night, was all Jayamma had asked from the advocate. (She had refused point-blank to take up the advocate’s initial suggestion that she share a room with the lower-caste in the servants’ quarters.)

She reached into the prayer shrine and took out a black box, which she opened slowly. Inside was a silver idol of a child god-crawling, naked, with shiny buttocks-the god Krishna, Jayamma’s only friend and protector.

“Krishna, Krishna,” she chanted softly, holding the baby god in her hands, and rubbing its silver buttocks with her fingers. “You see what goes on around me-me, a highborn Brahmin woman!”

She sat down on one of three rice bags lined up against the wall of the prayer room, and surrounded by yellow moats of DDT. Folding her legs up on the rice bag and leaning her head against the wall, she took in deep breaths of the DDT-a strange, relaxing, curiously addictive aroma. She sighed; she wiped her forehead with the edge of her vermilion sari. Spots of sunlight, filtering through the plantain trees outside, played along the ceiling of the little room.

Jayamma closed her eyes. The fragrance of DDT made her drowsy; her body uncoiled, her limbs loosened, and she was asleep in seconds.

When she woke up, fat little Karthik, the advocate’s son, was shining a flashlight on her face. This was his way of rousing her from a nap.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “Is anything ready?”

“Brother!” The old woman sprang to her feet. “There’s black magic in the backyard! Shaila and Rosie have killed a chicken-and they’re doing black magic.”

The boy switched off the flashlight. He looked at her skeptically.

“What are you talking about, you old hag?”

“Come.” The old cook’s eyes were large with excitement. “Come!”

She coaxed the little master down the long hallway into the servants’ quarters.

They stopped by the metal grille that gave them a view of the backyard. There were short coconut trees, and a clothesline, and a black wall beyond which began the compound of their Christian neighbor. There was no one around. A strong wind shook the trees, and a loose sheet of paper was swirling around the backyard like a dervish. The boy saw the white bedsheets on the clothesline swaying eerily. They too seemed to suspect what the cook suspected.

Jayamma motioned to Karthik: Be very, very quiet. She pushed the door to the servants’ quarters. It was locked shut.