beds or coax a baby from their wombs. Because of this, I could name a price ten times higher than the Shudra women. And receive it.
Even Parvati credited her younger son’s birth to my henna skills. She had been my first client in Jaipur. When she conceived, I saw the pages of my appointment book fill up with the ladies of her acquaintance—the elite of Jaipur.
Now, as the henna on her hands was drying and I began drawing on her feet, Parvati bent forward to observe until our heads were almost touching, her breath sweet with the scent of betel nut. Her warm sigh grazed my cheek. “You tell me you’ve never been outside India, but I’ve only seen this fig leaf in Istanbul.”
My breath caught and, for an instant, the old fear came over me. On Parvati’s feet, I had drawn the leaves of the Turkish fig tree—so different from its Rajasthani cousin, the banyan, the miserly fruit of which was fit only for birds. On her soles, intended for a husband’s eyes alone, I was painting a large fig, plump and sensual, split in half.
I smiled as I met her eyes and pressed her shoulder back, gently, onto the cushions of the divan. Arching a brow, I said, “Is that what your husband will notice? That the figs are Turkish?”
I pulled a mirror from my satchel, and held it to the arch of her right foot so she could see the tiny wasp I’d painted next to the fig. “Your husband surely knows that every fig requires a special wasp to fertilize the flower deep inside.”
Her brows rose in surprise. Her lips, stained a deep plum, parted. She laughed, a lusty roar that shook the divan. Parvati was a handsome woman with shapely eyes and a generous mouth, the top lip plumper than the bottom. Her jewel-colored saris, like the fuchsia silk she wore today, brightened her complexion.
She wiped the corners of her eyes with the end of her sari. “Shabash, Lakshmi!” she said. “Always on the days you’ve done my henna, Samir can’t stay away from my bed.” Her voice carried the hint of an afternoon spent on cool cotton sheets, her husband’s thighs warm against hers.
With an effort, I banished the image from my mind. “As it should be,” I murmured before resuming my work on her arch, a sensitive spot on most women. But she was used to my ministrations and managed never to shake my reed.
She chuckled. “So the Turkish fig leaves remain a mystery, as do your blue eyes and fair skin.”
In the ten years I’d been serving her, Parvati had not let this matter rest. India was a land of coal-black irises. Blue eyes demanded an explanation. Did I have a sordid past? A European father? Or, even worse, an Anglo-Indian mother? I was thirty years old, born during British rule and used to aspersions being cast on my parentage. I never let Parvati’s comments provoke me.
I draped a wet cloth over the henna paste and poured some clove oil from a bottle onto my palm. I rubbed my palms together to warm the oil, then reached for her hands to rub off the dried henna paste. “Consider, Ji, that an ancestor of mine might have been seduced by Marco Polo. Or Alexander the Great.” As I massaged her fingers, flakes of dried henna paste fell onto the towel below. The design I’d painted on her hands began to emerge. “Like you, I may have warrior blood running through my veins.”
“Oh, Lakshmi, be serious!” Her bell-shaped gold-and-pearl earrings danced merrily as she let out another laugh. Parvati and I were both born to the two highest Hindu castes, she a Kshatriya and me a Brahmin. But she could never bring herself to treat me as an equal because I touched the feet of ladies as I painted their henna. Feet were considered unclean, only to be handled by the low-caste Shudras. So even though her caste had relied on mine for centuries to educate their children and perform spiritual rites, in the eyes of Jaipur’s elite, I was now a fallen Brahmin.
But women like Parvati paid well. I gave no attention to her needling as I removed the last of the paste from her hands. Over time, I had saved a great deal and was so close to getting what I wanted—a house of my own. It would have marble floors to cool my feet after a day of crisscrossing the city