“No way!”

“Yes, five hundred! It was in the English newspaper on Sunday. Now you know about the rich.”

“What if you order the dish, and then you realize you made a mistake and you don’t like it? Do you get your money back?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter to you if you’re rich. You know what the biggest difference is between being rich and being like us? The rich can make mistakes again and again. We make only one mistake, and that’s it for us.”

After dinner, George took everyone out to drinks at the arrack shop. He had drunk and eaten off their generosity since being fired from the construction site: the mosquito spraying, which Guru had arranged for him through a connection in the City Corporation, was only a once-a-week job.

“Next Sunday,” Vinay said, as they headed out of the arrack shop at midnight, dead drunk, “I’m coming to see your fucking princess.”

“I’m not telling you where she lives,” George cried. “She’s my secret.” The others were annoyed, but didn’t press the issue. They were happy enough to see George in a good mood, which was a rare thing, since he was a bitter man.

They went to sleep in tents at the back of the cathedral construction site. Since it was September, there was still the danger of rain, but George slept out in the open, looking at the stars, and thinking of the generous woman who had made this day a happy one for him.

The following Sunday, George strapped on his metal backpack, connected the spray gun to one of its nozzles, and walked out into Valencia. He stopped at every house along his route, and wherever he saw a gutter or puddle, and at every sewage hole he found, he fired his gun: tzzzk…tzzzk…

He walked a half kilometer from the cathedral and then turned left into one of the alleys that slide downhill from Valencia. He took the route down, firing his gun into the gutters by the side of the road: tzzk…tzzk…tzzk…

The rain had ended, and muddy raucous torrents no longer gushed downhill, but the twinkling branches of roadside trees and the sloping tiled roofs of the houses still dripped into the road, where the loose stones braided the water into shining rivulets that flowed into the gutters with a soft music. Thick green moss coated the gutters like a sediment of bile, and reeds sprouted up from the bedrock, and small swampy patches of stale water gleamed out of nooks and crannies like liquid emeralds.

A dozen women in colorful saris, each with a green or mauve bandanna around her head, were cutting the grass at the sides of the road. Swaying in concert as they sang strange Tamil songs, the migrant workers were down in the gutters, where they scraped the moss and pulled the weeds out from between the stones with violent tugs, as if they were taking them back from children, while others scooped out handfuls of black gunk from the bottom of the gutters and heaped it up in dripping mounds.

He looked at them with contempt, and he thought, But I have fallen to the level of these people myself!

He grew moody; he began to spray carelessly; he even avoided spraying a few puddles deliberately.

By and by, he got to 10A, and realized that he was outside his princess’s house. He unlatched the red gate and went in.

The windows were closed; but close to the house he could hear the sound of water hissing inside. She is taking a shower in the middle of the day, he thought. Rich women can do things like this.

He had immediately guessed, when he saw the woman the previous week, that her husband was away. You could tell, after a while, with these women whose husbands work in the Gulf: they have an air of not having been around a man for a long time. Her husband had left her well compensated for his absence: the only chauffeur-driven car in all of Valencia, a white Ambassador, in the driveway, and the only air conditioner in the lane, which jutted out of her bedroom and over the jasmine plants in her garden, whirring and dripping water.

The driver of the white Ambassador was nowhere around.

He must be off drinking somewhere again, George thought. He had seen an old cook somewhere in the back the previous time. An old lady and a derelict driver-that was all this lady had in the house with her.

A gutter led from the garden into the backyard, and he followed its path, spraying into it: tzzzk…tzzzk… The gutter was blocked again. He got down into the filth and muck of the blocked gutters, carefully applying his gun at different angles, pausing periodically to examine his work. He pressed the mouth of the spray gun against the side of the gutter. The spraying sound stopped. A white froth, like the one that is produced when a snake is made to bite on a glass to release its venom, spread over the mosquito larvae. Then he tightened a knob on his spray gun, clicked it into a groove on his backpack canister, and went to find her once again with the book she had to sign.

“Hey!” A woman peeped out a window. “Who are you?”

“I’m the mosquito man. I was here last week!”

The window closed. Sounds came from various parts of the house, things were unbolted, slammed, and shut, and then she was before him again-his princess. Mrs. Gomes, the woman of house 10A, was a tall woman, approaching her forties now, who wore bright red lipstick and a Western-style gown that exposed her arms nine-tenths of the way up her shoulder. Of the three kinds of women in the world-traditional, modern, and working-Mrs. Gomes was an obvious member of the modern tribe.

“You didn’t do a good job last time,” she said, and showed him red welts on her hands, then stepped back and lifted up the edge of her long green gown to expose her ravished ankles. “Your spraying didn’t do any good.”

He felt hot with embarrassment, but he also did not dare take his eyes off what he was being shown.

“The problem is not my spraying, but your backyard,” he retorted. “Another twig has blocked the gutters, and I think there’s a dead animal of some kind, a mongoose maybe, blocking the flow of water. That’s why the mosquitoes keep breeding. Come and see if you don’t believe me,” he suggested.

She shook her head. “The backyard is filthy. I never go there.”

“I’ll clean it up again,” he said. “That will get rid of the mosquitoes better than my spray gun.”

She frowned. “How much do you want for doing this?”

Her tone annoyed him, so he said, “Nothing.”

He went around to the backyard, got into the gutter, and began attacking the gunk. How these people think they can buy us like cattle! How much do you want to do this? How much for that?

Half an hour later, he rang the bell with blackened hands; after a few seconds he heard her shout, “Come over here.”

He followed the voice to a closed window.

“Open it!”

He put his blackened hands to a small crack between the two wooden shutters of the window and pulled them apart. Mrs. Gomes was reading in her bed.

He stuck his pencil into the book and held it out.

“What should I do with the book?” she asked, bringing the smell of freshly washed hair with her to the window.

He held his dirty thumb on one line that read, “House 10A: Mr. Roger Gomes.”

“Do you want some tea?” she asked, as she forged her husband’s signature on his book.

He was dumbfounded; he had never been offered tea before on his job. Mostly out of fear of what this rich lady might do if he refused, he said yes.

An old servant, perhaps the cook, came to the back door, and regarded him with suspicion as Mrs. Gomes asked her to get some tea.

The old cook came back a few minutes later, a glass of tea in her hand; she looked at the mosquito man with scorn, and put the glass down on the threshold for him to pick up.

He came up the three steps, took the cup, and then went back down, and took another three steps farther back, before he began to sip.