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.

When the old woman unlocked it, a stench of hair oil and baby powder wafted out, and the boy clamped his nostrils.

Jayamma pointed to the floor of the room.

A triangle in white chalk had been marked inside a square in red chalk; dried coconut flesh crowned the points of the triangle. Withered, blackening flowers were strewn about inside a circle. A blue marble gleamed from its center.

“It’s for black magic,” she said, and the boy nodded.

“Spies! Spies!”

Shaila stood athwart the door of the servants’ room. She made a finger at Jayamma.

“You-you old hag! Didn’t I tell you never to snoop around my room again?”

The old lady’s face twitched. “Brother!” she shouted. “Did you see how this lower-caste speaks to us Brahmins?”

Karthik made a fist at the girl. “Hey! This is my house, and I’ll go wherever I want to, you hear?”

Shaila glared at him. “Don’t think you can treat me like an animal, okay?”

Three loud honks ended the fighting. Shaila flew out to open the gate; the boy ran into his room and opened a textbook; Jayamma raced around the dining room in a panic, laying the table with stainless-steel plates.

The master of the house removed his shoes in the entrance hall and threw them in the direction of the shoe rack. Shaila would have to rearrange them later. A quick wash in his private bathroom, and he emerged into the dining room, a tall, mustachioed man who cultivated flowing sideburns in the style of an earlier decade. At dinner he was always bare chested, except for the Brahmin caste string winding around his flabby torso. He ate quickly and in silence, pausing only once to gaze into a corner of the ceiling. The house was put in order by the motions of the master’s jaws. Jayamma served. Karthik ate with his father. In the car shed, Shaila hosed down the master’s green Ambassador and wiped it clean.

The advocate read the paper in the television room for an hour, and then the boy strolled in and began searching for the black remote control in the mess of papers and books on the sandalwood table in the center of the room. Jayamma and Shaila scrambled into the room and squatted in a corner, waiting for the television to come on.