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.
The advocate paused.
“The boy needs someone to take care of him…I have relatives in Bangalore…”
“I only hope for the best for you and for Master Karthik,” she said, bowing before him with slow dignity.
That Sunday, she collected all her belongings over the past year into the same suitcase with which she had come to the house. The only sad part was saying good-bye to the Baby Krishna.
The advocate was not going to drop her off; she would walk to the bus stand herself. The bus was not due till four o’clock, and she walked about the backyard, amid the swaying garments on the clothesline. She thought of Shaila-that girl had been running around this backyard, her hair loose, like an irresponsible brat; and now she was a married woman, the mistress of a household.
All at once, her gloom was gone. She had seen a blue rubber ball, half hidden by a hibiscus plant in the backyard. It looked like one of the balls Karthik played cricket with; had it been left out here because it was punctured? Jayamma brought it right up to her nose for a good examination. Although she could not see a hole anywhere, when she squeezed it next to her cheek, she felt a tickling hiss of air on her skin.
With a servant’s instinct for caution, the old cook glanced around the garden. Breathing in deep, she tossed the blue ball to the side of the house; it smacked against the wall and came back to her with a single bounce.
Good enough!
Jayamma turned the ball over and examined its skin, faded but still with a nice blue sheen. She sniffed at it. It would do very nicely.
She came to Karthik, who was in his room, on the bed:
“Brother…”
“Hm?”
“I’m leaving for my brother’s home today…I’m going back to my village. I’m not coming back.”
“Hm.”
“May the blessings of your dear mother shine on you always.”
“Hm.”
“Brother…”
“What is it?” His voice crackled with irritation. “Why are you always pestering me?”
“Brother…that blue ball out in the garden, the one that’s punctured, you don’t use it, do you?”
“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.
“Brother…you gave the lower-caste girl a gold necklace…Can’t you give me just a blue ball for Brijju?”
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.
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:
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
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.
