“How long have you been doing this job?”

“Six months.”

He sipped the tea. Seized by a sudden inspiration, he said:

“I have a sister in my village whom I have to support. Maria. She is a good girl, madam. She can cook well. Do you need a cook, madam?”

The princess shook her head. “I’ve got a very good cook. Sorry.”

George finished his tea, and put the glass down at the foot of the steps, holding it an extra second to make sure it didn’t fall over.

“Will the problem in my backyard start again?”

“For sure. A mosquito is an evil thing, madam. It causes malaria and filaria,” he said, telling her of Sister Lucy in his village, who got malaria of the brain. “She said she was going to flap-flap-flap her wasted arms like a hummingbird until she got to Holy Jerusalem”; using his arms, and gyrating around the parked car, he showed her how.

She let out a sudden wild laugh. He seemed a grave and serious man, so she had not expected this burst of levity from him; she had never heard a person of the lower classes be so funny before. She looked him over from head to toe, feeling that she was seeing him for the first time.

He noticed that she laughed heartily, and snorted, like a peasant woman. He had not expected this; women of good breeding were not meant to laugh so crudely and openly, and her behavior confused him.

In a weary voice, she added:

“Matthew is supposed to clean the backyard. But he’s not even here often enough to do the driving, forget about the backyard. Always out drinking.”

Then her face lit up with an idea:

“You do it,” she said. “You can be a part-time gardener for me. I’ll pay you.”

George was about to say yes, but something within him resisted, disliking the casual way the job had been offered.

“That’s not my kind of work. Taking shit out of backyards. But I will do it for you, madam. I will do anything for you, because you are a good person. I can see into your soul.”

She laughed again.

“Start next week,” she said, vestiges of the laugh still rippling on her face, and she closed the door.

When he was gone, she opened the door to her backyard. She rarely went out there: it was strong with the smell of fecund black soil, overgrown with weeds, the air tinged with sewage. She smelled the pesticide; it drew her out of the house. She heard a sound, and recognized that the mosquito man was still somewhere in her neighborhood.

Tzzk…tzzzk; in her mind she followed it as it sounded from around the neighborhood-first at the Monteiros’ house; then to Dr. Karkada’s compound; then at the Valencia Jesuit Teachers’ College and Seminary: tzzzk…tzzzk…tzzzk-before she lost track of it.

George was on the pile of stones, waiting for other men who felt about their work as he did, and then they would move together to an arrack shop close by, to start drinking.

“What’s got into you?” the other guys asked him later that evening. “Hardly a word out of you.”

After an initial hour of raucousness, he had become sullen. He was thinking of the man and the woman-the ones he had seen on the cover of his princess’s novel. They were in a car; the wind was blowing through the woman’s hair, and the man was smiling. In the background, there was an airplane. Words in English, the title of the novel, in silver letters, hov ered over the scene, like a benediction from the God of Good Living.

He thought of the woman who could afford to spend her days reading such books, in the comfort of her home, with the air conditioner on at all times.

“The rich abuse us, man. It’s always, here, take twenty rupees, kiss my feet. Get into the gutter. Clean my shit. It’s always like that.”

“There he goes again.” Guru chuckled. “It was this talk that got him fired in the first place, but he hasn’t changed at all. Still so bitter.”

“Why should I change? Am I lying?” George shouted back. “The rich lie in bed reading books, and live alone without families, and eat five-hundred-rupee dishes called…what was that thing called? Vindoo? Vindiloo?”

That night he could not sleep. He left the tent and went to the construction site, gazing at the unfinished cathedral for hours, and thinking about that woman at 10A.

The next week it was clear to him she had been waiting for him. When he came to her house, she stuck her arm out, rotating it from side to side until he had seen the flesh from 360 degrees.

“No bites,” she said. “Last week was much better. Your spray is finally working.”

He took charge of her backyard. First, walking with his spray gun out and his left hand adjusting a knob on his backpack canister, he went down on his knees and drizzled pesticide over her gutters. Then, as she watched, he put some order into her long-neglected yard: he dug, and sprayed, and cut, and cleaned for an hour.

That evening, the guys at the construction site could not believe the news.

“It’s a full-time job now,” George said. “The princess thinks I’m such a good worker she wants me to stay there and sleep in a shed in the backyard. She’s paying me double what I get now. And I don’t have to be a mosquito man anymore. It’s perfect.”

“We’ll never see you again, I bet,” Guru said, flicking his beedi to the ground.

“That’s not true,” George protested. “I’ll come down to drink every evening.”

Guru snorted. “Sure you will.”

And he was right: they did not see much of George after that.

Every Monday, a white woman dressed in North Indian salwar kameez arrived at the gate and asked him, in English, “Madam is in?”

He opened the gate, bowed, and said, “Yes. She is in.”

She was from England; she had come to teach yoga and breathing to Madam. The air conditioner was turned off, and George heard the sound of deep breathing from the bedroom. Half an hour later, the white woman emerged and said:

“It’s amazing, isn’t it? Me having to teach you yoga.”

“Yes, it’s sad. We Indians have forgotten everything about our own civilization.”

Then the white woman and Madam walked around the garden for a while. On Tuesday mornings, Matthew, his eyes red and his breath reeking of arrack, drove Madam to the Lions Ladies’ meeting at the club on Rose Lane. That seemed to be the extent of Mrs. Gomes’s social life. When they drove out, George held the gate open: as the car passed him, he saw Matthew turn and glare.

He’s frightened of me, George thought, as he went back to trimming the plants in the garden. Does he think I will try to take over from him as driver one day?

It was not a thought he had entertained until then.

When the car came back, he looked at it with disapproval: its sides were filthy. He hosed it down, and then wiped the outside with a dirty rag, and the inside with a clean rag. The thought came to him as he worked that cleaning the car was not his job, as gardener-he was doing something extra-but of course Madam wouldn’t notice. They never have any gratitude, the rich, do they?

“You’ve done a very good job with the car,” Mrs. Gomes said in the evening. “I am grateful.”

George was ashamed of himself. He thought, This rich woman really is different from other rich people.

“I’ll do anything for you, madam,” he said.

He kept a distance of about five or six feet between them whenever they talked; sometimes, in the course of conversation, the distance contracted, perfume made his nostrils expand, and he would automatically, with little backward steps, reestablish the proper radius between mistress and servant.

The cook brought him tea in the evenings, and chatted with him for hours. He had not yet gone inside the house, but from the old woman he came to realize that its share of wonders went far beyond an air conditioner. That enormous white box he saw whenever the back door opened was a machine that did washing-and drying-automatically, the old cook said.