“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.

Bip!

Bip!

Bip!

“Brother…you gave the lower-caste girl a gold necklace…Can’t you give me just a blue ball for Brijju?”

Bip!

Bip!

Bip!

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. Bang! She brought it down-his tongue spread out, his features bulged out, and he was…

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:

Take the ball, you Brahmin fool!

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

It cannot be easily explained why the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia still remains incomplete, despite so many attempts to finish the work in recent years and so much money sent by expatriates working in Kuwait. The original Baroque structure dating to 1691 was entirely rebuilt in 1890. Only one bell tower was left incomplete, and it remains incomplete to the present day. Scaffolding has covered the north tower almost continuously since 1981; work resumes fitfully, and stops again, either because of a lack of funds or because of the death of a significant priest. Even in its incomplete state, the cathedral is considered Kittur’s most important tourist attraction. Of particular interest are the frescoes of the miraculously preserved corpse of St. Francis Xavier painted on the ceiling of the chapel, and the colossal mural entitled Allegory of Europe Bringing Science and Enlightenment into the East Indies behind the altar.

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.

“You got this for spraying pesticide in her house?”

“No, no, no. She saw me do the spraying, and I guess she was impressed, because she asked me to do some gardening work.”

“If she’s rich, doesn’t she have a gardener?”

“She does-but the fellow is always drunk. So I did his work.”

George described it-removing the dead log from the path of the gutter in the backyard and carrying it a few yards away, removing the muck that had sedimented in the gutter, which had allowed the mosquitoes to breed. Then trimming the hedges in the front yard with a giant clipper.

“That’s all?” Vinay’s jaw dropped. “Twenty rupees for that?”

George blew smoke into the air with a luxuriant wickedness. He put the twenty-rupee note back in the notebook, and the notebook in his pocket.

“That’s why I say she’s my princess.”

“The rich own the whole world,” said Vinay, with a sigh that was half in rebellion and half in acceptance of this fact. “What is twenty rupees to them?”

Guru, who was a Hindu, generally spoke little, and was considered “deep” by his friends. He had been as far as Bombay, and could read signs in English.

“Let me tell you about the rich-let me tell you about the rich.”

“All right: tell us.”

“I’m telling you about the rich. In Bombay, at the Oberoi Hotel in Nariman Point, there is a dish called Beef Vindaloo that costs five hundred rupees.”