Jacintha was angry with the world for making her what she had become. In particular, it was a few individuals she held responsible. Sons of whores, daughters of bitches, may they sizzle in the hottest pit of hell. Tears stabbed and streamed from her eyes as she chopped a heap of deep purple onions.

She tried to silence the thoughts that were rushing to her brain, engorging it with a bitter rage. But they kept swirling back, dancing naked before her helpless distraction. Mocking her; not unlike the position of the hands in the timepiece on the wall which swam into vision every time she wiped her watering eyes. Already a quarter to one. A family of six would soon be hungry for chicken curry. Not counting the old woman in her backroom who would call for her soup and toast anytime now. Jacintha sliced faster.

By the time they finished with their meal and she could start on hers it would be at least a half past two, and all the best pieces consumed. Never mind, just so long as she could reach home safely. On days when lunch was ready early, they didn’t mind if she ate first and came back in the evening to scrub the dishes. But today everything had got late. Perhaps it was best not to wait for them to finish licking their plates. Just go home to a fried egg instead. As she plunged the ground spices into hot oil, their aroma rose to her nostrils and her quandary became especially painful. She was very hungry herself.

She glanced at the clock again. Once it struck three, the street leading to the cluster of little cottages and shanties where she lived would be deserted. Shops downed their shutters in the afternoon. Apart from the stray autorickshaa hurtling past, everything was still as death. Two days ago, the same thing had happened. She was late. When she stepped out of Domasso Villa onto the hot tar of the street, there wasn’t a stray dog, not even a crow in sight.

Then a white Fiat had pulled up at the pavement just a few feet away from her with four men inside. They looked this way and that, as if searching for somebody or something, but she could tell it was her they were really watching. She felt dizzy with fear. The men in the car were staring. She could feel their collective gaze boring a hole in the nape of her neck as she walked past. If one of them had opened a door and stepped out, she was prepared to make a run for it. But then, thank God, she heard the engine start up and the white Fiat rolled away. She sighed with relief, wiped the perspiration off her face and walked on.

She knew it was not her imagination. There were signs everywhere. Her movements were being observed. This was a new job, barely five months old. How had they found out where she was working? She’d avoided telling anyone about it, even her closest friend. But they were clever. Each time it was a different bunch of people, faces she had never seen before. So she wouldn’t get suspicious. But she was no fool either. Once in a while, they slipped up, and she recognized among her watchers one of Cyril’s boys from Fernandes Lane. It infuriated her that they could have the gall to subject her to such harassment. Sometimes at the paan shop she passed on her way home, a lone stranger would be hanging about ogling her shamelessly. She felt like stepping up and giving him two tight slaps across his face. But, she thought, better to pretend I don’t see anything. Just keep walking on. Those bastards are capable of anything. If they could finish off a boy not yet twenty-three and dump his body in the pond, would they stop at harming a defenceless woman? Just because I know their secret, they’re after me now.

Dolsy, the landlord’s sister entered the kitchen.

‘Muttering, muttering, what Jessie?’ she observed kindly.

‘What,’ repeated Jacintha dully. ‘Food is nearly ready.’

‘Don’t squeeze too much tamarind in the curry, baba,’ purred Dolsy, her tone cautious and fawning. ‘Poor Domasso’s joints are aching so, dear.’

She knew she had to be careful how she put it. Jacintha didn’t like her cooking criticized. There had been occasions in the past when she had absented herself for days over a slight rebuke about excess salt in the food or the pungency of a curry.

And she wouldn’t return until a peace effort was initiated—usually by Dolsy herself, much irritated but meek, dropping by to politely enquire after her health. Then Jacintha would come back to work, complaining of dizziness or her tortured varicose veins.

‘I never put too much tamarind,’ declared Jacintha, and Dolsy decided this was not the best moment to debate the issue. A little later, in a conciliatory tone, Jacintha added,

‘I know. Sour things very bad for joints. My fingers ache every morning in water. But I eat. Raw mangoes ‘pecially, can’t resist. With little salt and chilli . . .’

Dolsy was all right. Not half so abrasive as Sylvie, Domasso’s wife, who was alive when Jacintha had first started working here, eight years ago. Jacintha felt a guarded affection for Dolsy, who was unmarried, like herself. She didn’t make it a point to stand by while Jacintha helped herself to her meals.

Sylvie had watched like a hawk. But there were other things about Dolsy which irritated her. Why did she have to potter about the kitchen and pretend to help, sticking her nose into curries even before the aroma could come to a head? Only once, Dolsy had dared to remark, ‘That nice juicy breast I was saving for Domasso? Where it’s gone?’

‘What breast you’re talking about?’ she had replied in a hurtfilled voice. ‘I took the neck. All bones.’ Jacintha knew that she had told a lie, but her sense of outrage at the suggestion that she was not entitled to the best pieces convinced her that she was right to defend herself. She felt unlimited scorn for people who were miserly about food.

Food was all-important to Jacintha—and that it should be deliciously cooked. Before she had started doing it for a wage, cooking had given her more pleasure than any other activity in the lustreless routine of her life. A perfectly browned kabab or a hotly spiced curry that hit the palate at exactly the right pitch gave her a unique sense of contentment and equilibrium. She had seen better times when she could afford a leg of mutton at least once a week, and often enough other delicacies like tongue, or oxtail, or trotters. But her enemies could not stomach her happiness; those vicious people had destroyed it all in one fell swoop.

It had happened one night, more than ten years ago. The last of her customers had just left. She had turned off the light on the verandah and changed into her night-gown when the police raided her home. Hysterical, angry, confused, Jacintha had tried to physically restrain them as they carried away from her backyard her large canisters, her drum and the copper pots and pipe of her distilling machinery and loaded it into their jeep. She had lost control and scratched one of the policemen on his arm with her nails. He responded by lecherously squeezing her large breasts, and whispering something lewd to her. The memory of that touch still smarted and filled her with shame.

It was all part of a plan to humiliate her, deprive her of her livelihood. Didn’t every other shack in her colony do a little side-business selling hooch? Then why had she been singled out? Why, if not out of malice on a tip-off by those scum who had her own blood in their veins? They had stood by and gloated as those rascals carried off her things . . . She had never been able to put together enough money to start her liquor business again. Instead, she began to cook for a living.

Jacintha was a gifted cook. Over the years, she had mastered traditional recipes, and even ferreted out those little secret touches which expert cooks are wont not to mention while describing the alchemy of their ingredients. She disliked the drudgery of cooking for others, and such large quantities at that, but she took pains over her job nevertheless. After all, she took her meals there as well.

But then, good as she was at her work, she was also unpredictable. There were days when her mood was so spoilt, and that howling harpy she was forced to live with made it her mission to do just that, when she could come up with an angry concoction that tasted of nothing but red chilli, or some slop as bland as boiled cabbage. On such days she would not eat there herself. She would fast and spend the day remembering St. Andrew, her patron saint; or if she was too hungry, she would go home and beat up an omelette.

Every morning, the bitch would try and provoke her. Don’t hang your smelly clothes to dry on my line. What an unbearable stink from the lavatory after you fart up the place. Your intestines must be rotting, m’n. What do you eat, men’s balls . . .?

What goes of yours what I do with my men, bitch? Why, you’re burning with envy? It’s my home, too, isn’t it? You got married and came here. My father built it . . .

Usually, such ripostes ran on endlessly in Jacintha’s mind the whole day long, but she managed to keep her mouth shut. Should she lose her reticence for even a minute, the harangue would quickly deteriorate into a slanging match that ended in fisticuffs and scratch-wounds. One morning, when Jacintha came to work, she displayed deep teeth-marks in a patch of blue flesh on her forearm. Her spectacles, which she held in her hand, had been snapped at the nose-bridge. Poor Dolsy was quite shocked.

‘Now you know what kind of animals live in this village,’ said Jacintha with a kind of gloating disgust, ‘and what-all filth they’re spreading about me.’

In fact, there were no men in Jacintha’s life. There hadn’t been for a long, long time. She slept on the mezzanine, where she kept a Primus stove and her few belongings in an iron trunk. Her brother Robert, his wife Bettina—the harpy—and their two grown children used the hall and bedroom and kitchen downstairs, and she did her best to keep out of their way. But there was only one toilet. And many unfortunate squabbles surrounded the use of this tiny cubicle, with its half-filled pail of water and the black orifice that ingested and evacuated the congealed poisons of a family’s bodily refuse. Sometimes, when Robert was sober, he would take up for his sister.

‘Got a bamboo up your arse or what?’ he’d expostulate with his wife, spraying with his insults a lot of spittle as well. ‘Every morning you talk some idiotic rubbish.’

But those were rare occasions. Most mornings Robert was already quite drunk. If he was awake, he skulked in a corner of the hall beside the silent television set or under the altar next to it. Or, he would lie supine, muttering in a half-sleep endless imprecations directed against no one in particular. He was her blood brother. But did he care what became of her? They were all in it together. Part of a conspiracy hatched by Bettina, the whore, and that fiendish cousin of hers, Cyril.

Cyril was known as Elvis the Pelvis on Fernandes Lane. Swanky, debonair, profligate, he was either tinkering with his bike or revving up and down the cross-lanes of the settlement on it, when he wasn’t flying. He was a purser with an airline. His lifestyle indicated, and popular opinion confirmed, that he had done well for himself bringing in gold biscuits from Dubai.

There was another boy called Esveraldo, younger than Cyril, who had worked for the same airline. He had been found face down in the pond outside the village, dead. People said he had belonged to the same gang of smugglers. Esveraldo was the son of Jorem. Jorem had been engaged to Jacintha for eleven years before he decided to marry someone else.

She still saw Jorem sometimes, at funerals and weddings. Jacintha had accepted it as her destiny that she would remain a spinster. But spiteful tongues decreed that the reason why Jacintha never missed a funeral was because she was always hoping to glimpse her ex-boyfriend, or stand close behind him at the wake. This was sheer calumny. The truth was Jacintha was very particular, almost devout about observing her neighbourly duties. Her neighbours could depend on her in times of trouble, they were important to her. Of friends, she had very few.

There was one, Rosabel. But she had married and moved to Poisar. Years ago they had worked together in a biscuit factory. They had fallen in love, so close was their friendship. Rosabel’s marriage and displacement had created a rift. But much tenderness remained and had reasserted itself once Rosabel discovered that the man she had married was selfish and violent. Still, sheer distance compelled their separation, and they hardly ever saw each other.

‘If I told you all I know about the people of this village,’ Jacintha always called the settlement where she lived a village, and that was what it was for her and many of its residents (she hardly ever crossed the railway tracks, let alone caught a train), ‘your ears will burn with shame. And because I know so much they are after me now . . . I keep my mouth shut. Why to talk? Still they are not leaving me alone . . . my own family, they are the worst bastards . . . Won’t stop to kill anyone.’

Because she spoke in riddles, Dolsy never quite knew what to make of Jacintha’s outbursts, or what exactly it was she feared. She was eager to pick up the village gossip but wasn’t sure how much of what she heard was Jacintha’s own concoction. She felt sorry for this woman in her early fifties, still comely, though on the large side, who had to work so hard for a living, who was so alone and had so many tormentors. But she also wondered at times if everything was quite right in Jacintha’s upper storey.

A few days later, something strange happened. Jacintha came to work dressed in the most unusual fashion. She was wearing a salwaar-kameez that was probably twenty years old, judging by the way it clung to her body. Instead of a dupatta, she had thrown a thin printed bedsheet over her shoulders and most of her face. Later on, Dolsy remarked on her behaviour to Domasso: ‘What does she think, people are going to shoot her down in broad daylight? Four men got out of a jeep and one was carrying a gun, she says. She would not have been alive if the watchman of Hari Niwas hadn’t stepped out just then. I told her, if you feel like that, just make a police complaint. Then let’s see what anybody can do to you …’

Domasso disagreed. He scratched his white stubble and spoke dismissively in a nasal whine, ‘I’m warning you, don’t get involved. Tomorrow she’ll go around telling everyone Dolsy told her to make a police complaint.’ Domasso wasn’t interested in Jacintha’s problems. He had enough of his own just trying to collect rent from the likes of her brother and their neighbours who occupied his land. But Dolsy was concerned. Jacintha’s anxieties had created some of her own—the thought of the domestic chaos that would ensue should her cook suddenly collapse.

Sure enough, Jacintha’s work was affected. She began to absent herself more frequently and now her excuse was not her poor health.

‘I felt too frightened to come, baba,’ she said. ‘Someone is always watching me. How to come? My last job also I had to leave because such kind of things started happening. Now they won’t leave me alone…’

Her curries still turned out all right, but became more eccentric in taste. She rushed through her work, taking shortcuts she herself would have found appalling earlier. Dolsy  overlooked a lot. She tried to dispel her cook’s fears by logical argument. But Jacintha was convinced someone was trying to kill her. Where she had once displayed placid control as she contrived her culinary mixes, there was now a strange edge to her movements in the kitchen, the frenzy of a trapped creature. She’d even lost interest in eating heartily, which Dolsy saw as the worst sign of all.

For Jacintha there were signs of the danger that awaited her everywhere. The most innocuous of them (or at least what seemed innocuous to Dolsy) filled her with terror.

‘When I go to sleep, every night I always leave my slippers carefully at the foot of my bed. Today I woke up, and they were gone. Then I found them at the other end of the room, soles upward . . . and my cupboard, I am sure I locked it last night, and put the key under my pillow. When I woke up it was open. And the key was in my handbag, which was in the cupboard. Are they opening my bags and cupboards also now?’

Then one day, on her day off, Jacintha decided to bake a cake for her young nieces, her brother’s children. Perhaps instinctively she knew that this was an activity that would soothe her. When they were children they had been very close to her. Now they were at college and didn’t have much time for their aunt. She carefully mixed the batter for a Madeira cake and left it in her old tin oven on the Primus.

When she returned from the market with fruit peel to decorate the cake, she was shocked to see it had turned black. No, it wasn’t exactly charred, just coated with grime and sagging in places. The sight of the cake chilled Jacintha to the bone. She didn’t dare to touch it. She let it lie in the oven all night. Something horrible had been done to that cake, she was sure. That night, lying in bed under the corrugated roof of her mezzanine, there were tears in her eyes as she watched the candle she had lit for St. Andrew sputter and burn itself out.

Her own life was a bit like the cake, she thought. She wondered why it had not turned out golden brown instead of bitterly black. She thought of Jorem who had kept her waiting for eleven years and destroyed her youth. She could still forgive him, but it was no use. He had four grown sons, one of them now dead, and an obese wife.

Jacintha hadn’t exactly witnessed the murder of Esvaraldo Gomes. But she had been able to imagine it exactly like it must have happened. When she heard that his body had been found in the pond, she knew who had done it. And they knew that she knew. These things are difficult to conceal . . . In a moment of sudden clarity, Jacintha thought, all this for property? They won’t let me have a roof over my head in my own father’s house? My room is what they are after, then let them take it. If I get a few thousands out of them, I’ll go away. Maybe I can find a job somewhere with living quarters. A nice home, husband-wife both working, children to look after . . . But it has to be far away from here. Or they’ll find me out again . . . They won’t let me live. I know too many of their terrible secrets. The next morning, Jacintha decided it wouldn’t be right to let even the pi-dogs consume the poison cake, let alone her nieces. So instead of throwing it on the garbage heap, she stuffed it down the toilet. For some reason, the aborted cake blocked the gully trap and a number of buckets of water were required to flush it clean. There was a terrific row. Of course, Jacintha’s intestines were blamed for the catastrophe, since nobody knew about the cake.

She didn’t go to work the next day as well. When it was evening she decided to fry a mackerel for her dinner. On the way back from the fish bazaar, she nearly got run over by a speeding car. Jacintha thought she recognized the face of the driver. Her large body wouldn’t stop trembling. It was some time before she could steady herself and walk home.

After that day of the near-accident, Jacintha disappeared.  Nobody knew where she had gone. On the third day of her absence, Dolsy went to her place but her family claimed ignorance of her whereabouts. Bettina began to say something mean about her loafing habits, but Dolsy silenced her with a sharp look. Then Bettina said yes, they were all worried.

‘They don’t give a damn,’ said Dolsy to Domasso, ‘I could see that they were wishing she’d be found dead in a gutter somewhere.’

Dolsy wanted to inform the police that Jacintha was missing and tell them what she knew about her cook’s fears—that someone was trying to harm her. But Domassso put his foot down most vehemently.

‘Who do you think you are to poke your nose into other people’s affairs? Mother Teresa? You want a cook, I’ll get you a cook. I’ll get you ten cooks. But we are not going to get involved with the police.’

Kind-hearted Dolsy began to wonder if she had not misjudged Jacintha. Perhaps her fears were not all imaginary. She might have come to a dreadful end after all.

~

Unable to bear the turbulence in her life anymore, Jacintha packed a small bag and left her house while it was still dark and caught the Virar fast to Poisar. She found the company of her friend Rosabel calming. The husband left them alone. In her small garden, Rosabel grew vegetables. She was especially proud of her lettuce and dill patches, which were of prize quality. Every night, she would cook Jacintha a hot lettuce soup, with a little finely chopped dill thrown in. It was an old remedy for nerves and insomnia. Here in Poisar, Jacintha could have slept as late as she liked but she would get up early out of habit, and listen to the birds. It was very quiet and lovely. She imagined that the birds were speaking to her, reminding her of long ago when she was a child, knocking down raw mangoes from a tree in her neighbour’s garden. Her mother, too, used to grow dill in their backyard, she recalled. In fact, it was the taste of Rosabel’s soup which took her back many years to the time when her mother was still alive.

Perhaps even more than the lettuce soup what really helped Jacintha was her meeting with Dr Rahim Ali Khan, a tantric medicine man and clairvoyant whom Rosabel consulted for all her emotional and physical problems. Dr Rahim received his patients in the small room of a seedy hotel in Poisar. The room was painted a garish green and decorated with tantric mandalas, and photographs of Dr Rahim’s gurus. It was filled with the fumes of strong incense. When it was her turn, the fiercelooking, bearded doctor listened to Jacintha’s troubles patiently.

He counted her pulse, stared hard at her fingernails and asked her if she had been experiencing shooting pains in the left side of her body, to which Jacintha answered that she had. Then, taking out an amber stone as large as an egg from a drawer, he proceeded to gaze at it, and fell into a trance. After what might have been five minutes, he shook his head, rubbed his eyes and frowned.

Then he said to Jacintha, ‘Yes, you were right. They have been trying to kill you. And you have had a narrow escape. But do not worry. They cannot harm you now that you have come to me. I will pray for your well-being day and night. You must wear this talisman always, which I am preparing for you. It will protect you.’

The talisman was going to cost more money than Jacintha had on her, and certainly more than she could afford, but Rosabel insisted on chipping in. The doctor turned away for a few minutes to prepare the little tin box which had a black string running through it. When it was ready, he tied it to her arm himself. Then Dr Rahim put his palm on Jacintha’s forehead.

It felt very warm. It slid slowly over her crinkled hair and came to rest on the nape of her neck, where its heat seemed particularly intense. He squeezed her neck and shook her gently. Then he murmured, ‘Why you’re worrying? I’m there . . .’

For the first time, Jacintha dared to look deep into his eyes.  They were gleeful, laughing, a child’s eyes. Her years of torment and suffering seemed to drop away, and Jacintha felt young again.

Whether it was the dill and lettuce soup or Dr Rahim Khan’s talisman that proved efficacious, ten days later Jacintha reported back to work at Domasso Villa. She was peculiarly serene and composed. Dolsy scolded her for having disappeared, making everyone worry, but Jacintha only smiled with girlish shyness. In her heart Dolsy rejoiced at her recovery, and at the prospect of good meals once again. Then Jacintha went into the kitchen and prepared a gorgeously spicy beef chilli fry. It smelt so good, Domasso’s mother wanted to try some, instead of the clear soup which was all she could generally stomach. Jacintha was in her room feeding the bed-ridden woman for well over an hour. The greedy old woman wiped out a good portion of the dish. Then Jacintha went into the kitchen to eat herself.

Dolsy couldn’t resist going into the old woman’s room and asking her, ‘What were you two talking about for so long?’

‘Talking?’

Her mother-in-law couldn’t remember. Then she said, ‘Oh yes, Jessie was telling me about the birds. Every morning before dawn she would wake up and hear a koel singing . . . She was telling me how sweetly he sang, so sweetly . . . Ooeeeooo, ooeeeooo . . . That means the rains will be here soon.’

‘Yes,’ whispered Dolsy. ‘And now that you’ve eaten so well, you’d better sleep, too.’

‘Yes,’ said the old woman, ‘I think I will.’

It was only one o’clock by the time Jacintha had finished with her meal and scrubbed the dishes. Then she sauntered out of Domasso Villa perspiring profusely, visibly satiated by the mound of rice and hot chilli fry she had just consumed. She walked with light, dainty steps, her large fleshy body quivering, floating almost, on the wings of a mysterious fledgling peace.

***

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