At ten o’clock, all the lights in the house went out. The master and Karthik slept in their rooms.

In the darkness, a vicious hissing continued in the servants’ quarters:

“Witch! Witch! Black-magic-making lower-caste witch!”

“Brahmin hag! Crazy old Brahmin hag!”

A week of nonstop conflict followed. Each time Shaila passed by the kitchen, the old Brahmin cook showered vengeful deities by the thousands down on that oily lower-caste head.

“What kind of era is this when Brahmins bring lower-caste girls into their household?” she grumbled as she stirred the lentils in the morning. “Where have the rules of caste and religion fallen today, O Krishna?”

“Talking to yourself again, old virgin?” The girl had popped her head into the kitchen; Jayamma threw an unpeeled onion at her.

Lunch. Truce. The girl put out her stainless steel plate outside the servants’ quarters and squatted on the floor, while Jayamma served a generous portion of the lentil soup over the mounds of white rice on the girl’s plate. She wouldn’t starve anyone, she grumbled as she served, not even a sworn enemy. That’s right: not even a sworn enemy. It wasn’t the Brahmin way of doing things.

After lunch, putting on her glasses, she spread a copy of the newspaper just outside the servants’ quarters. Sucking air in constantly, she read loudly and slowly, piecing letters into words and words into sentences. When Shaila passed by, she thrust the paper at her face.

“Here-you can read and write, can’t you? Here, read the paper!”

The girl fumed; she went back into the servants’ quarters and slammed the door.

“Do you think I’ve forgotten the trick you played on the advocate, you little Hoyka? He’s a kindhearted man, so that’s why that evening you went up to him with your simpering lower-caste face and said, ‘Master, I can’t read. I can’t write. I want to read. I want to write.’ Didn’t he, immediately, drive out to Shenoy’s Bookstore on Umbrella Street and buy you expensive reading-and-writing books? And all for what? Were the lower-castes meant to read and write?” Jayamma demanded of the closed door. “Wasn’t that all just a trap for the advocate?”

Sure enough, the girl had lost all interest in her books. They lay in a heap in the back of her room, and one day, when Shaila was chatting up the thick-lipped Christian next door, Jayamma sold them all to the scrap-paper Muslim. Ha! Showed her!

As Jayamma narrated the story of the infamous reading- and-writing scam, the door to the servants’ quarters opened; Shaila’s face popped out, and she screamed at Jayamma at the top of her voice.

That evening the advocate spoke during dinner:

“I hear there’s been some disturbance or other in the house every day this week…It’s important to keep things quiet. Karthik has to prepare for his exams.”

Jayamma, who had been carrying away the lentil stew using the edge of her sari against the heat, put the stew down on the table.

“It’s not me making the noise, master-it’s that Hoyka girl! She doesn’t know our Brahmin ways.”

“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 center 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 toward 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 afternoon. 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 toward 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 reemerged from the hanging sheets. She drifted toward the far end of the backyard, 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 toward 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 practice 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 was 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!”