I asked Mallika to hire some villagers to do the weeding. For a week, three women and two men ambled up the driveway with their shoddy equipment – a couple of shovels and a prehistoric pan-shaped thing that I’d seen women use on building sites to carry gravel on their heads. They started at nine and were gone by five. Between twelve-thirty and two, the hottest hours of the day, they rested for lunch in the shade of Mallika’s small house. The remainder of the time they sat on their haunches in the dirt, yanking things from the ground with their bare hands.

‘I want to pay the women the same rate,’ I told Mallika. ‘They’re doing the same work, after all.’

‘No, no,’ Mallika said. ‘The men do all the hard work, they clear all the thorny parts. If we don’t give them more it will create tensions.’

At four I brewed a big vessel of tea. I made it milky and sweet. I called to Mallika, who had wrapped a towel around her head and squatted with the other women in the garden. ‘Come and get the tea,’ I shouted. She walked up the path, her skin polished with sweat.

Later, I called Praveen and told him I felt like a plantation owner.

‘Why’s it like this here?’ I asked. ‘In America, every job is a service. You do the job, you get paid, you fuck off. It’s transactional. But even when I was babysitting and cleaning people’s houses, there was still some interaction. They asked me to sit with them for dinner. They dropped me home because I didn’t have a car. I don’t want to use the word dignity, but it’s what I’m reaching for. How am I supposed to treat these people breaking their backs in my garden for less than five hundred bucks a day? Why is it making me so angry to look at them? Why don’t they fucking run into the house and smash the shit out of everything?’

‘It’s the biggest mindfuck of this country. Only way to keep sane is to get the hell out once in a while. And so,’ he pressed. ‘It’s really over with your man, is it? I saw him the other day, Ms G. He’s feeling it.’

Chapter 21

21

This is a scene from a long time ago. How many evenings have I spent on this railway platform, sitting on an overstuffed suitcase, slapping mosquitoes from my ankles?

Vendors are pacing the platforms with carts of badam milk and bananas, bottled water and magazines. It’s as if they’ve been shouting forever, their voices billowing out from somewhere deep in their bodies. I keep craning my neck towards the direction of the train, but it does not come. The air is still and I am fatigued by the pointlessness of all the moving around. All the dirty, ravaged stray dogs.