Chapter Thirty-Eight Rulers of the Slums
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Rulers of the Slums
Harithi lined up at the checkpoint to enter the Welkish sector.
The midafternoon sun bore down on her, but since the freak storm that had interrupted Poppy Sutherland’s wedding a few days ago, the heat had lost its brutal strength.
Hasan and Harithi had both known the storm was no act of nature.
No matter what the papers said about the summer’s peak or humidity or ocean currents, they knew the truth: Poppy Sutherland had summoned that storm, washing half the city with her wrath.
They’d watched it from the window of Hasan’s apartment, black clouds flocking to the Welkish quarter, the rain falling so thick and heavy that the cathedral was obscured from view.
“How is that possible?” Hasan had asked. “The amount of daivyakhi that would require . . .”
“I guess you weren’t as poor a teacher as you thought,” she quipped.
“You!” an officer shouted at Harithi. Her focus snapped back. “You’re next.”
She picked up her bucket of cleaning supplies, readjusting the cotton dupatta over her shoulders where it had slipped, and made a show of hurrying forward, showing the man her stolen identification card.
For the last week, she’d observed the checkpoint at Morning Bridge.
Only servants who worked in the Welkish quarters were being permitted through.
Each of them had to present a card, which was cross-referenced against a directory by a police officer.
Harithi had sent one of her vasudhakt runners to pickpocket one of the maids.
He’d brought back the woman’s purse, where she found the identification card she needed, as well as a paycheck written from the Wainwrights.
She’d taken the identification card, considering herself lucky that the Welks had been too cheap to invest in adding photographs of servants to their cards.
The officer squinted at the card. “Nandini?”
She hid her wince at the way he butchered it—nan DEE knee—and smiled, bobbing her head. “That’s me.”
“What business do you have today?”
“I clean houses.” Harithi lifted the bucket of supplies she’d pillaged from Hasan’s bathroom.
“Who’s your employer?” the officer asked, eyeing her up and down. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around.”
Of course, she’d ended up with the one chatty checkpoint officer. She scowled. “Do you think I’m new? I’ve been mopping floors and scrubbing toilets for years! I was here just two days ago, cleaning for the Wainwrights.”
The officer hesitated, skimming the list of names under Wainwright until he found her name—well, Nandini’s name. “Oh, that was you.” The officer nodded. “I remember now. Yes, it’s all clear. Go ahead.”
“Thank you, Officer,” Harithi simpered, her tone so sweet it was almost putrid.
She sauntered through with her bogus bucket of cleaning supplies, heading to Montrose Manor on foot.
When she got there, she peered through the gatehouse window.
The man inside was probably in his sixties, close to retirement, and deeply engrossed in a novel.
She sauntered up to the glass, knocking twice before he opened his window.
“Excuse me,” she said, “is this the Montrose residence? I’m here to clean.” She held her bucket up so he could see it.
The gatekeeper scowled. “You’re late. The other cleaners were all here before lunch.”
Harithi cursed internally, but she improvised, forcing her bottom lip to wobble.
“Do you think they’ve noticed I’m late? I didn’t mean to be tardy.
It’s my first day, but it took so long to get through the checkpoint, and then after that, I couldn’t find the house, and then I ran out of money to pay the rickshaw driver, so he made me get out and walk on foot, and I can’t lose this job because my mother has—”
“Just go,” the gatekeeper said, lifting his novel and smoothing out the dog-eared corner. “And don’t be late again, girl!”
“I won’t,” Harithi said breathlessly, clutching her bucket as she hurried past him. “Thank you so much, sir.”
She made her way around the back of the house, looking for the discreet door that marked the servants’ entrance.
It took her a moment, but she located it eventually, half-hidden behind a wall of ivy.
Making sure her dupatta was still up around her face, she tried the handle—and found it locked.
Cursing, she tried again, pushing, then pulling, but the door didn’t budge.
She should have seen it coming. Montrose might have been an ass, but he wasn’t an idiot.
Still, neither was she. She reached under her dupatta and withdrew one of the bobby pins that held her bun in place.
Harithi had just finished bending it into the shape of a lock pick when the door flew open on its own.
She dropped the hairpin immediately, covering it with her foot.
“Who are you?” A matronly woman glared at her. Wisps of gray hair had escaped her servant’s cap only to get trapped against her forehead by a thin layer of sweat.
“I’m here to clean,” Harithi stammered, gesturing to her bucket.
“I know every maid who’s ever been hired here,” the matron scoffed. “You’re no cleaner.” As if to prove her point, she added, “I would ask you how you made it across the checkpoint, but I suspect it has to do with the reason Nandini didn’t come to work today, hm?”
Harithi sized up the woman again and came to the conclusion that there was no bullshitting her. “I’m here looking for information,” she said, keeping her voice brisk and urgent. “Let me in.”
The matron didn’t move. “What information?”
Harithi narrowed her eyes. She wasn’t used to being questioned by anyone other than the Devars, and definitely not by a woman who was almost certainly vasudhakt.
“Captain Montrose has been arresting daivyakt people around the city,” she said. “The Jackal wants to know why.”
The matron’s eyes widened at Hasan’s name, much to Harithi’s satisfaction. Then, to her surprise, the matron’s expression stretched into a smug grin of her own.
“The Jackal won’t be running free for much longer. If I were you, I’d drop the attitude, girl.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Captain Montrose has been pushing the House to introduce a bill to control your kind for a long time, but he’s never been able to prove what a threat you are until your Jackal took the viceroy’s daughter and burned down the museum.
The marquess himself has introduced the bill to register and track every single daivyakt.
The House is voting on it in a week’s time. ”
Harithi’s mind raced. Her little brothers were daivyakt. The thought of them tagged like cattle sent a spike of rage and nausea rolling through her, sharpening her tone. “If this is true, then we have to stop it. I need more information. Let me in.”
She tried to take another step forward, but the matron shifted, blocking her path. “Why should I?”
“It’s for the greater good.” Harithi stared down at her. “Will you really side with your white employer over your own people?”
The matron laughed derisively. “Oh, so now we’re the same people, hm?
Were we the same people when we were dying of thirst, but you refused to give us a drop of water without a tithe?
Were we the same people when you barred us from mixing with daivyakt in public spaces such as schools and temples under the pretense of purity?
The Welkish treat us badly, but so did the daivyakt. ”
“These are grievances from centuries ago,” Harithi said. “Will you really deny me aid because of the actions of ancient kings?”
“Very well, let’s look at your actions today.
” The matron put one hand on her hip and the other against her jaw as she pretended to think deeply.
“Daivyakt today interact with vasudhakt only because they are forced to. But several of them still uphold the old ways as much as possible, refusing to serve vasudhakt at their businesses or permit intercaste marriages in their own families. Daivyakhi is forbidden now, so instead of divine or royal power, the daivyakt hoard wealth and gatekeep the best jobs, leaving vasudhakt to fight over coins in backbreaking, dangerous careers. We’ve had activists protesting for better working conditions for decades.
Not a single daivyakt has joined that cause, because none of you care about vasudhakt oppression.
You’d rather be rulers of the slums than equals in battle with us.
You can’t claim we’re all one race when you’ve spent the last five centuries keeping us at arm’s length. ”
Harithi tried to come up with a rebuttal, but nothing the other woman had said was false.
Though the Welks loved to pretend that they had “fixed” the caste divisions, the truth was that they had taken a new skin.
The prejudices of ancient daivyakt had been passed down generation to generation, just as much an inheritance as the power that ran in their veins.
If anything, the Welks had complicated it even further, bringing racism to the island.
By allowing the Welks to divide them, Virians had made it easy for them to pick them off, one by one.
Harithi only wished it hadn’t taken her this long to realize it. “You make a good point. But things are different now.”
The matron laughed. “They sure are.” With that, she closed the door in Harithi’s face.
· · ·
Hasan listened as Harithi caught him up to speed on what she had learned at Montrose Manor. When she finished, he rose to his feet, pacing back and forth as he processed the information.
“So you’re telling me that in a week, the House of Representatives is going to vote on some sort of law that forces daivyakt people to be registered and tracked?”
“Exactly,” Harithi said. “I don’t know how that ties into the arrests, though it does explain why they’re only taking daivyakt. Maybe they’re registering them early?”
“Still doesn’t explain why they haven’t come home,” Hasan pointed out. “Never mind. We have to stop this bill. If we’re on a registry, we’ll be consigned to a life of police surveillance. And that’s just the beginning.”
“You don’t have to persuade me. I’m with you. But how do we stop it?”
“We can’t let this go past the vote in the House,” he said.
“It could potentially die if it doesn’t get two signatures from the Council of Lords, or if the viceroy refuses to provide assent.
But if Lord Montrose proposed it, then he knows he has the support of at least one other lord, and Sutherland too.
So we have to kill it,” Hasan concluded.
He stopped pacing, running one hand through his hair.
“But how? It’s not like we can petition all the representatives.
And we don’t have connections with any of them, either.
They hold all the power in this situation. ”
He winced as the words left his mouth, a burning echo of those that Zeyar had flung at him in the kitchen with Paranjay, in a different lifetime, after he’d brought Daria home: Our business will never have as much power as the legitimate hierarchy.
“You sound like Zeyar,” Harithi said, her criticism disturbingly close to the turn that his thoughts had taken.
He spun on her. “Don’t make this about him.”
“Well, it’s true! He was always going on about joining the legitimate power structure,” she scoffed.
“Because he was right!” Hasan shouted. He dropped onto the couch beside her.
He hung his head over his knees and laced his fingers at the nape of his neck.
At a normal volume, he said, “He was right, okay? All Devar Brothers got us was control over other Virians. Tell me, Harithi, how is taking advantage of vasudhakt going to help us now? We deal in extortion and violence, not petitions and constituency meetings. Do you want me to kidnap the Council of Lords? Should we just burn down the House of Representatives, while we’re at it? ”
“Well,” she said, “we could.”
“Zeyar was right. We should have spent more time trying to—” He straightened up. “Wait . . . what?”
Harithi looked him right in the eye. “We could burn down the House of Representatives,” she said. “Seriously. Think about it. If they show up to a pile of ashes, it would buy us more time to find a permanent solution while they regroup.”
“No.” Hasan’s mind raced. “The House shouldn’t be burned before they arrive. That’ll only buy us a week, maximum.”
“Then what?” she asked. “What would get us more time?”
He looked at her, measuring his words before he said, “If we burned it after they arrived. When they’re all inside.”
For a moment, Harithi was rendered speechless. Then, she demanded, “Have you lost your mind? You’re talking about mass murder.”
“Like we’ve never killed before,” Hasan scoffed. “I’ve burned men inside their homes for less,” he added, thinking of Darsh.
“Not rich white men.” Harithi shook her head vehemently. “Hasan, the consequences for burning the nobility . . . they’ll slaughter us.”
“They’re already slaughtering us!” Hasan seized her by the shoulders, forcing her to meet his eyes again.
“Don’t you see, Harithi? They starve us, brutalize us, force us to labor in their prison camps.
If they tag us like livestock, it’s only a matter of time before they round us up and put us in a pen like cattle.
We are all going to die. Will you die on your feet, with a gun in your hands?
Or behind an electric fence, shackles around your ankles? ”
Harithi closed her eyes, silent. When she opened them, the fire in her eyes matched the heat in her tone: “Let’s cook some representatives.”