To ward off any ill feeling, every so often Geeta brought home a trinket for the girl, who was a chatty, dimpled creature from Jharkhand. The cook was old and beyond the nip of jealousy, and Geeta barely saw the drivers, but it was possible that the maidservant resented her for her relative freedom. Besides Geeta, they employed a maidservant, a cook, and two drivers.
The children went to an international school, and as long as she was at the gate by one-fifteen the Bakers didn’t care what she did. She had her own bathroom, and a cell phone, whose bill, for the past eighteen months, the Bakers had paid. So Geeta had sheets and pillows from England and a cupboard that was much too large for her few clothes. The Bakers had told her that they were aware of how domestic help was treated in India, and that they would sooner drown themselves than treat another human being that way. Her own bedroom was small but well appointed. Then she felt the children tugging at her hands, and she marched them back to their bedroom, where she locked the windows, turned down their beds, pushed their dolls to the side, switched on the frog-shaped night-light, and stroked their foreheads before leaving them to sleep. She glanced away immediately but retained the impression of a puffy face, tired eyes behind glasses. He had his forearms on his knees and was watching her. There wasn’t supposed to be a chair in that corner. Most of the Bakers’ guests were British expatriates like them, but there were a few Indians, one of whom was sitting in a chair at her elbow, away from the rest. As the children were walking toward her, Geeta glanced around. The girls’ mother gave them one last squeeze and then stood, looking wistful. “We’ll try to be quiet, but if we disturb you-” But when she spoke it was a plaintive whisper. Emma giggled and said, “G’night.” Sally stared at the lounging figures, something imperious in her expression. “All right, little misses, say good night to this debauched lot,” Mrs. Baker, either, because in matters of child rearing, as in most others, he deferred to his wife.
She was drunk, but Geeta knew that those gray-green eyes could snap to attention at any moment.
Baker was crouching between her daughters, arms around their shoulders. Laughter dribbled its way across the room. “Just don’t steal ours, because you’ll have to fight us to the bloody death.” Get an au pair.” Now she could see him, one elbow on the bar’s burnished surface. Don’t try to go it alone in this country. Baker’s voice from over by the bar, “Geeta has saved our lives, ladies and gentlemen. Two small hands left Geeta’s, and then the girls were in their mother’s arms. Tall and thin, she wore her yellow hair in a plumb-line ponytail down her black turtleneck sweater.
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