“Her husband wanted her to use it, and she didn’t. They never agreed on anything. Plus,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “no children. That always causes problems.”

“What drove them apart?”

“That way she laughs,” the old woman said. “He said she laughed like a devil.”

He had noticed it too: high pitched, savage, like the laugh of a child or an animal, gloating and wanton. He always stopped work to listen when it ricocheted from her room; and he often heard it elsewhere even in the creak made by the opening of a door, or the particular cadence of an unusual bird cry. He understood what her husband had meant.

“Are you educated, George?” Mrs. Gomes asked one day, in a surprised tone. She had found him reading the newspaper.

“Yes and no, madam. I studied till the tenth standard, madam, but I failed the SSLC.”

“Failed?” she asked with a smile. “How can anyone fail the SSLC? It is such a simple exam…”

“I could do all the sums, madam. I passed mathematics with sixty marks out of a hundred. I only failed social studies, because I could not mark Madras and Bombay on the map of India that they gave me. What could I do, madam? We had not studied those things in class. I got thirty-four in social studies-one mark fail!”

“Why didn’t you take the exam again?” she asked.

“Take it again?” He uttered the words as if he did not understand them. “I began working,” he said, because he did not know how to answer her. “I worked for six years, madam. The rains were bad last year, and there was no agriculture. We heard there were jobs for Christians at the construction site-the cathedral, I mean-and a bunch of us from the village came up here. I was working as a carpenter there, madam. Where was the time to study?”

“Why did you leave the construction site?”

“I have a bad back,” he said.

“Should you be doing this kind of work, then?” she asked. “Won’t it hurt your back? And then you’ll say that I broke your back and make a fuss about it!”

“My back is fine, madam. My back is fine. Don’t you see me bent over and working every day?”

“So why did you say your back was bad?” she demanded. He said nothing, and she shook her head and said, “Oh, you villagers are impossible to understand!”

The next day he was waiting for her. When she came out into the garden after her bath, wiping her wet hair dry with a towel, George approached her and said:

“He slapped me, madam. I slapped him back.”

“What are you talking about, George? Who slapped you?”

He explained: he had gotten into a fight with his foreman. George pantomimed the exchange of palms, hoping to impress upon her how fast it had been, how reflexive.

“He said I was making eyes at his wife, madam. But that was untrue. We are honest people in my family, madam. We used to plow in the village, madam,” he said. “And we would find copper coins. These are from the time of Tippu Sultan. They are over a hundred years old. And those coins were taken from me, and melted down for copper. I wanted so much to keep them, but I handed them over to Mr. Coelho, the landlord. I am not dishonest. I do not steal, or look at another man’s woman. This is the truth. Go to the village and ask Mr. Coelho. He’ll tell you.”

She smiled at this; like all villagers, he had a manner of defending his character that was naïve, circuitous, and endearing.

“I trust you,” she said, and went in, without closing the door. He peered into the house, and saw clocks, red carpets, wooden medallions on the walls, potted plants, things of bronze and silver. Then the door closed again.

She brought tea out herself that day. She put the glass down on the threshold, and he scampered up the steps with a bowed head, picked it up, and scampered back down.

“Ah, madam, but you people have it all, and we people have nothing. It’s just not fair,” he said, sucking on the tea.

She let out a little laugh. She did not expect such directness from the poor; it was charming.

“It’s just not fair, madam,” he said again. “You even have a washing machine that you never use. That’s how much you have.”

“Are you asking me for more money?” She arched her eyebrows.

“No, madam, why should I? You pay very well. I don’t do things in a roundabout way,” he said. “If I want it, I’ll ask for money.”

“I have problems you don’t know about, George. I have problems too.” She smiled and went in. He stood outside, hoping vainly for an explanation.

A little later it began to rain. The foreign yoga teacher came, with an umbrella, through the heavy rain; he ran up to the gate to let her in, and then sat in the garage by the car, eavesdropping on the sound of deep breathing from Madam’s bedroom. By the time the yoga session was over, the rain had ended and the garden was sparkling in the sun. The two women seemed excited by the sun-and the garden’s carefully tended condition. Mrs. Gomes talked to her foreign friend with an arm on her hip; George noticed that unlike the European woman, his employer had retained her maidenly figure. He supposed it was because she did not have any children.

The lights came on in her bedroom at around six-thirty, and then the noise of water flowing. She was taking a bath; she took a bath every night. It was not necessary, since she bathed again in the morning, and anyway she smelled of won derful perfume, yet she bathed twice-in hot water, he was sure, coating herself in lather and relaxing her body. She was a woman who did things just for her pleasure.

On Sunday, George walked uphill to attend Mass at the cathedral; when he came back, the conditioner was still purring. So she does not go to church, he thought.

Every other Wednesday afternoon, the Ideal Mobile Circulating Library came to the house on a Yamaha motorbike; the librarian-cum-driver of the bike, after pressing the bell, would untie a metal box of books strapped to the back of his motorbike, and place it on the back of the car for her to inspect. Mrs. Gomes peered at the books and picked out a couple. When she had made her selection, and paid, and gone back inside, George went up to the librarian-cum-driver, who was retying the box to the back of his Yamaha, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“What sort of books does Madam take?”

“Novels.”

The librarian-cum-driver stopped and winked at him. “Dirty novels. I see dozens like her every day: women with their husbands abroad.”

He bent his finger and wiggled it.

“It still itches, you know. So they have to read English novels to get rid of it.”

George grinned. But when the Yamaha, kicking up a cloud of dust, turned in a circle and left the garden, he ran to the gate and shouted:

“Don’t talk of Madam like that, you bastard!”

At night he lay awake; then he wandered about the backyard quietly, making no noise. He was thinking. It seemed to him, when he looked back on it, that his life consisted of things that had not said yes to him, and things that he could not say no to. The SSLC had not said yes to him, and his sister he could not say no to. He could not imagine, for instance, abandoning his sister to her own fate and trying to go back and complete his SSLC examination.

He left the compound and walked up the lane and along the main road. The unfinished cathedral was a dark shape against the blue coastal night sky. Lighting a beedi, he walked in circles around the mess of the construction site, looking at familiar things in an unfamiliar way.

The next day, he was waiting for her with an announcement:

“I’ve stopped drinking, madam,” he told her. “I made the decision last night-never another bottle of arrack.”

He wanted her to know; he had the power now to live any way he wanted. That evening, as George was out in the garden trimming the leaves on the rosebush, Matthew unlatched the gate and came in. He glared at George, then he walked away into the backyard, to his quarters.