Girls Burn Brighter

by Shobha Rao

  “Bhima took it.”

  “He took it?”

  “We still owe him thirty.”

  Savitha sighed, and though the sigh was slow and diffuse, her mind was alert and racing. She thought of her three younger sisters, who also scoured the garbage heaps; her mother, who cleaned houses; and her father, who, after years of drinking, had finally given it up when his rheumatoid arthritis had gotten so bad that he could no longer hold a glass in his hand. He might get a handout from the priests at the temple, where he begged most days, but it would hardly be enough for him, let alone his wife and four daughters. She also had two older brothers, both of whom had gone to Hyderabad looking for work, with promises of sending money home, but there had not even been a letter from either in the two years since they’d gone.

  She stood in the middle of their meager hut and tallied all the ways in which she could make money: she could collect garbage, which clearly wasn’t bringing in enough; she could cook and clean, as her mother did, though there were hardly any families rich enough in Indravalli to keep even her mother employed; she could work the charkha and the loom—she did belong to the caste of weavers, after all—but money from making cotton saris was dwindling each year, and given how little each sari brought in, if a family owned a charkha or a loom, they kept the work within the family, to keep the money there as well. Savitha looked at their charkha, broken, draped with cobwebs, slumped in the corner of their hut like a heap of firewood waiting for a match. For five years now, they hadn’t had the money to get it fixed. If only it were fixed, she thought, I could make us more money. She was, of course, aware of the absurdity of the thought: she needed money to make money.

  But thread! To hold it again between her fingers.

  She still remembered clutching a boll of cotton in her tiny hands when she’d been a little girl and being amazed that such a bit of silly fluff, filled with dark and stubborn seeds, could become something as lovely and smooth and flat and soft as a sari.

  From boll to loom to cloth to sari, she thought.

  She left the dark hut, the broken charkha, and her mother, staring listlessly at the empty pots and pans, and wandered into the village. She walked past the huts of the laundresses and past the train station and past the tobacco shop and the dry goods shop and the sari shop and the tailoring shop and past even the Hanuman temple, in the middle of Indravalli, and found herself in front of the small gated opening to the weaving collective. She heard voices and the whirring of a fan. And just there, if she put her face to the gate, she could smell the faint aroma of new cloth, a mingling of freshly cooked rice and spring rain and teakwood and something of those hard seeds, so unwilling to let go. More captivating to her—this slight scent, lost so soon in the wind—than the most fragrant flower.

  With hardly a thought, she opened the creaking gate with a firm grip and went inside.

  * * *

  Poornima’s father owned two looms. One was where he worked, and the other was where her mother had worked. They’d each taken two or three days to complete a sari, but now, with only one person at the loom, there were only half the number of saris. That meant half the money. Poornima was too busy with her charkha and the household chores to take over the second loom, her brothers and sister too small to reach the treadles, so her father began looking for help. He asked everyone he knew, he inquired at the tea shop he frequented in the evenings, he went to the weaving collective and announced he was willing to offer a quarter of the proceeds of every sari that was made, along with meals. There were no takers. Indravalli was a village composed mainly of sari makers, and most of the young men were busy helping their own families. The village was purportedly founded in the time of the Ikshvakus, and ever since, had been weaving cloth—in ancient times, clothing for the royal courts, but now simply the cotton saris worn by the peasantry and, occasionally, the intellectual elite. The Quit India Movement, along with the image of Gandhi sitting at his charkha, spinning, and his inception of the homespun ideal, had improved Indravalli’s prospects considerably, especially in the years leading up to independence. But now it was 2001, a new century, and the young men of Indravalli, those who were born into the caste of weavers, to which Poornima and her family also belonged, were struggling to feed their own families. In fact, many had abandoned weaving and taken up other occupations.

  “Weaving is dying. It’s death,” her father said. “I heard they have fancy machines now.” Poornima knew that was why her father was looking to marry her off to the farmer. He laughed bitterly and said, “They may have invented a machine to make cloth, but let’s see them invent a machine to grow food.”

  Poornima laughed, too. But she was hardly listening to him. She was thinking that if she could get her father to buy more kerosene, she could weave at night, by lantern light, and then he wouldn’t have to hire someone.

  But the following week, a girl leaned into the doorway of the hut. Poornima looked up from her cooking. She couldn’t see the girl’s face—the sun was behind her—but by the curve of her body, by the way it bent into the low doorway with the grace of a strong and swaying palm, she knew she was young. Her voice confirmed it, though it was more gentle, and older, than she expected. “Your father?”

  She could obviously see Poornima. “Come back in the evening,” she said, squinting. “He’ll be home before dark.” She turned away and reached to take the lid off the pot of rice; as she did, the edge of it burned her finger. She snatched the hand away—the finger was already turning red—and put it in her mouth. When she looked up again, the girl was still there. She hesitated, and the image of the palm came back: but now it seemed like a young palm tree, just a sapling, one that wasn’t quite sure which way to bend, which way the sun would rise and set, which way it was expected to grow. “Yes?” Poornima said, taken aback that she was still there.

  The girl shook her head, or seemed to, and then she left. Poornima stared at the place she had just been. Where did she go? Poornima nearly jumped up and followed her. Her leaving seemed to empty them in some way—the entrance to the hut, and the hut itself. But how? Who was she? Poornima didn’t know; she didn’t recognize her from the well where she went to draw water, or as one of the girls in the neighborhood. She guessed she was from the temple, come to ask for donations, or maybe just a peddler, come to sell vegetables. Then she smelled the rice burning, and forgot all about her.

  * * *

  A week later the girl was seated at her mother’s loom. Poornima knew it was her because the room filled again. She’d forgotten it was even empty. Filled, not with a body or a scent or a presence: that was her father, seated at the other loom. No, she filled it with a sudden awareness, a feeling of waking, though it had been light for hours. Poornima set a cup of tea down next to her father’s loom. He glanced at her and said, “Set another plate for lunch.”

  Poornima turned to go. She was now standing behind her. The girl was wearing a cheap cotton sari; her blouse was threadbare, though still a vivid blue, the color of the Krishna at the hour of twilight. There was a large round birthmark on her right forearm, on the inside of her wrist. Striking because it was at the exact point where her veins seemed to meet, before they spilled into her hand. The birthmark seemed to actually gather them up—the veins—as if it were ribbon that tied together a bouquet. A bouquet? A birthmark? Poornima looked away, embarrassed. As she hurried past, the strange girl pulled the picking stick of the loom out toward her, and in that moment, Poornima couldn’t help it: she saw her hand. Much too big for her thin body, more like a man’s, but gentle, just as her voice had been gentle; though what truly struck Poornima was that her hand gripped the picking stick with such force, such solidity, that it seemed she might never let go. The pivot of her entire body seemed to be pulling the picking stick. To hold it tight. Poornima was astonished. She’d never known a hand could do that: contain so much purpose.

  That night, after dinner, was when her father first mentioned her. The deepa on Indravalli Konda was dark, an
d Poornima was putting her siblings to bed. Her youngest brother was only seven years old, her sister was eleven, and she had a set of twin brothers, twelve. They were relatively good children, but sometimes Poornima thought her mother might’ve died from tiredness. She was unrolling their sleeping mats and telling one of the twins to stop pulling his sister’s hair, when her father, rolling tobacco, said, “You eat with her. Make sure she doesn’t take more than her share.”

  Poornima turned. “Who?”

  “Savitha.”

  So that was her name.

  Poornima stood still, a mat half unrolled. “She’s all I could find,” her father said, lying back on his hemp-rope bed, smoking. “The weaving collective said I should be happy. As if my wages are low. Besides, she should be grateful. That father of hers, old Subbudu, can hardly feed himself, let alone that miserable wife and those four daughters.” He yawned. “I hope she’s not as weak as she looks.”

  But Poornima, smiling into the dark, knew she wasn’t.

  * * *

  Savitha was quiet around Poornima at first. She was a year or two older, Poornima guessed, though neither truly knew their exact ages. Only the birthdates of the boys were recorded in the village. Still, when Poornima asked, over lunch one day, Savitha told her just what her mother had told her: that she was born on the day of a solar eclipse. Her mother had said that while in labor with her, she’d looked out the window and seen the sky darken in midday, and was paralyzed by it. She was convinced she was about to give birth to a rakshasa. She’d told Savitha that in that moment, all her labor pains had subsided and were replaced by fear. What if she was giving birth to a demon? Her mother began to pray and pray, and then she began to tremble, wishing her new baby dead. Wondering if she should kill it herself. That was better, she’d told Savitha, than unleashing evil into the world. Anyone would do the same, she’d told Savitha. But then the eclipse had ended, and her baby was born, and it was just a regular, cooing little baby.

  “Your mother must’ve been relieved,” Poornima said.

  “Not really. I was still a girl.”

  Poornima nodded. She watched her while she ate. Savitha had a healthy appetite, but no more than anyone else who sat at the loom for twelve hours a day.

  “That’s why she named me Savitha.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “What do you think? She thought that if she named me after the sun, it wouldn’t go away again.”

  She licked her fingers of rasam, the birthmark on her wrist swaying between her mouth and the plate like a hammock, and then she asked for another helping of rice to eat with yogurt.

  “Do you want salt?” Poornima asked.

  “I like it sweet. To tell you the truth, what I love with yogurt rice is a banana. I squish it up and mix it in with the rice. Don’t make that face. Not until you try it. It tastes like the sweetest, loveliest sunrise. And I’m not just saying that because of my name. It just does; you should try it.”

  “But bananas,” Poornima said, thinking now of her own mother and the two bananas she’d bought for her every day, and how, in the end, they hadn’t made a bit of difference.

  “I know. Expensive. But that’s the thing, Poori—do you mind if I call you that?—you shouldn’t eat it at every meal. It’s too good. Too perfect. Would you want to see the sun rise every morning? You’d get used to it; the colors, I mean. You’d get so you’d just turn away.”

  “And that’s the same with too much yogurt rice and bananas? I’d just turn away?”

  “No. You’d still eat it. You just wouldn’t think of it.”

  Think of it?

  No, she wasn’t quiet anymore, Poornima thought. Not at all. And she was strangely obsessed with food: the thing with the bananas and yogurt rice, calling her Poori, the way she licked her fingers, as if she would never eat another meal. Poornima’s father had said her family was poor, poorer even than they were, which was hard to imagine. Six children in all, her father had told her, old Subbudu so frail that he’d long ago given up sitting at the loom, her mother cleaning, cooking for other families, no better than a common servant, he’d said derisively, and her older brothers moved to Hyderabad, promising to send money home, though the family hadn’t yet received a single paisa. And with four daughters unmarried. “Four,” her father had exclaimed, shaking his head. “The old man’s done for,” he’d said. “He might be better off finding four big rocks and a rope and leading them to the nearest well.”

  “Which one is Savitha?”

  “Oldest. Of the girls. Not even enough for her dowry.” So her marriage was delayed, too, just like Poornima’s. Her father narrowed his eyes then and looked at her. “Not eating too much, is she? Tucking a little away for her sisters?”

  “No,” Poornima said. “Hardly anything.”

  * * *

  What Poornima liked most about Savitha—in addition to her hands—was her clarity. She had never known anyone—not her father, not a teacher, not the temple priest—to be as certain as Savitha was. But certain about what? she asked herself. About bananas in yogurt rice? About sunrises? Yes, but about more than that. About her grip on the picking stick, about her stride, about the way her sari was knotted around her waist. About everything, Poornima realized, that she herself was unsure about. As the weeks went by, Savitha began to linger a little longer over her lunch; she came earlier to help with the morning chores, though she must’ve had chores to do at her own house beforehand. She and Poornima also began to go to the well together for water.

  On one of these trips, as they were walking back together, the clay pots of water balanced on their hips, they came across a crowd of young men about their age. There were four of them, clustered around the beedie shop, smoking, when one of them, a boy of about twenty or twenty-two, thin as a reed but with a thick shock of hair, noticed Poornima and Savitha and pointed.

  “Look over there,” he called to the other men. “Look at those hips. Those curves. Such fine examples of the Indian landscape.”

  Then another of the men whistled, and another, or maybe the same, said, “Not even Gandhiji could’ve resisted.” They all laughed. “Which one do you want, boys,” he continued, “the yellow or the blue?”

  Poornima discovered he was talking about the color of their saris.

  “The blue!”

  “The yellow,” another yelled.

  “I want to be the clay pot,” another said, and they all laughed again.

  There was no way to get around them, they realized. The men came closer and surrounded them. The circle they formed was porous but menacing. Poornima looked at Savitha, but she was looking straight past them, as if the men weren’t even there. “What do we do?” Poornima whispered.

  “Walk,” she said, her voice firm, steady and as solid as the temple on Indravalli Konda, the one on which Savitha’s gaze seemed to be fixed.

  Poornima glanced at her and then she glanced at her feet.

  “Don’t look down,” Savitha said. “Look up.”

  She lifted her gaze slowly and saw that the men were now in a tight huddle. They were jumping up and down like crickets; one grabbed Savitha’s pallu and yanked it. She slapped his hand away. This brought out a long howl from them, and more dancing and laughter, as if the slap had been an invitation. Poornima was mildly aware of other women, standing at the entrance to their huts. Boys, they would be thinking, shaking their heads. Poornima felt a rising panic; this was a common occurrence in the village, but the men usually left them alone after a little teasing, a few winks. These men were following them. And there were four of them. She looked at Savitha. Her face was as determined as before, staring ahead of her, straight at the temple and Indravalli Konda as if she could bore a hole through both. The men seemed to sense something in her, something like defiance—and this defiance, its audacity seemed to enliven them even more. “Darling baby,” they said in English, and then in Telugu, “why don’t you choose.” They were talking to Savitha.

  And this. This was t
he signal she was waiting for.

  She set down her pot of water, straightened her back, and stood still. Absolutely still. And with her stillness came an even greater stillness. The people standing at the entrances to their huts, the bend of the street leading to Indravalli Konda, the fields of rice all around, and even the clacking of the looms, ubiquitous in the village at all hours, were strangely quieted. They could almost hear the Krishna, a few kilometers away—the lapping of its waters, the flapping of the wings of water birds.

  “I know who I want,” Savitha said.

  The first man, the thin one with the abundant hair, whooped and hollered and skipped around the circle like a child. “She knows. She knows. Sorry, boys, better luck next time.”

  “Which one? Which one?” they chirped.

  Savitha looked at each of them in turn, met their eyes, and then she walked a step or two in each of their directions, as if taunting them with her choice, and then she smiled—her flash of teeth as gleaming and virtuous as the white of the distant temple—stepped toward Poornima, took her hand, and said, “I choose her.” With these words, she picked up her pot of water, tugged at Poornima’s arm, and pulled her out of the circle. The men let them go but hissed and growled. “Her?” they groaned. “She’s uglier than you are.”

  When they got home, Poornima was trembling.

  “Don’t,” Savitha told her. “It’s no good.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Don’t you see? I could’ve chosen a tree. A dog.”

  “Yeah, but they could’ve hurt us.”

  “I wouldn’t have let them,” she said.

  * * *

  And so, there they were: those five words. They were a song, an incantation. Poornima felt a weight, an awful and terrifying weight, erode. Had the weight been borne from her mother’s death? Or from being an ox? Or was it from something less obvious, like the passage of time, or the endless spinning of her charkha? Though, when she thought about it, they were the same thing, weren’t they? It hardly mattered. She and Savitha became such close friends that neither could eat a single meal without wondering if the other would’ve preferred more salt, or if she liked brinjal with potatoes. Breakfast was suddenly their least favorite meal, and Sunday their least favorite day. Poornima even saved a paisa here and there and began to buy bananas whenever she could. The first time she did, she presented one to Savitha at lunch, when she served her the buttermilk. There had not been enough money for yogurt that morning. Savitha didn’t seem to mind. She mixed her watery buttermilk and rice with as much relish as if it were the thickest, creamiest yogurt she’d ever eaten. Poornima watched her, and then she held out the banana.