by Shobha Rao
Savitha gasped. “Are you sure?”
“Of course. I bought it especially for you.”
She was so delighted that she became curiously shy. “My mother says if I’d eaten fewer bananas in my life, they would have had the money for my dowry.”
Poornima smiled and looked down.
Savitha stopped eating. “When did she die?”
“Four months ago.”
Savitha mixed the banana into her rice. First she took off the entire peel then mushed it with her thumb and fingers into the rice. The banana ended up in unsightly lumps, strewn across the carpet of rice like wading bandicoots. It was all a gloppy, unappetizing mess.
“You like that?”
“Try some.” She raised a handful toward Poornima. Poornima shook her head vigorously. Savitha shrugged and ate the rice-and-banana concoction with great relish, closing her eyes as she chewed.
“You know what’s even better than this?”
Poornima wrinkled her nose. “Most things, I would imagine.”
Savitha ignored her. She leaned toward Poornima, as if revealing a secret. “I don’t know for sure, I’ve only heard, but there’s supposed to be this rare fruit. Unbearable, Poori. Pink inside, almost buttery, but with the sweetness of candy. Sweeter. Better even than bananas, better even than sapota. I know, I know, you wouldn’t think it possible, but I heard an old woman talking about it in the marketplace. Years ago. She said it only grew on some island. On the Brahmaputra. Even the way she described the island was lovely. She looked at me, right at me, and she said, ‘You know how Krishna plays the flute for his Radha, wooing her at twilight, just as the cows are coming home? It is that sound. That is the sound of the island. Flute song. Everywhere you go there are the fruit, and there is flute song. Following you like a lover.”
“That’s what she said?”
“Yes.”
“Like flute song?”
“Yes.”
Poornima was silent. “What’s the name of the island?”
“Majuli.”
“Majuli,” Poornima said out loud, slowly, as if tasting the word on her tongue. “And you believed her?”
“Of course I believed her,” Savitha said. “Some of the crowd didn’t, but I did. They said she was senile and had never been north of the abandoned train depot, let alone to the Brahmaputra. But you should’ve seen her face, Poori. How could you not believe her? Lit up like a star.”
Poornima thought for a moment, perplexed. “But how can an island be like flute song? Did she mean she loved the island? Like Krishna loves Radha?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“What then? It’s a song of love, after all.”
“Yes,” Savitha said, “but it’s also a song of hunger.”
Now Poornima was even more confused. “Hunger?”
“Maybe what she meant was that the island was the end of hunger. Or the beginning of it. Or maybe that hunger has no beginning. Or end. Like the sound of Krishna’s flute.”
“But what about love?”
“What is love, Poori?” Savitha said. “What is love if not a hunger?”
3
The following week, Savitha invited Poornima to her house. It was a Sunday. Her father didn’t mind as long as she first cooked and fed her brothers and sister and laid his tobacco and mat out for his afternoon nap. The day was hot; it was March, though already they had to keep to the shade—Savitha ahead, Poornima following close behind her—skidding along under the trees and the overhanging thatched roofs of the huts to keep out of the sun. Savitha lived on the other side of the village, farther from Indravalli Konda but closer to the Krishna. Many of those belonging to the caste of laundresses lived on that side of town, because of its proximity to the water. There were also—discovered on that side of the village—inscriptions dating back to the time of the Cholas, though, being close to the railroad tracks, it was also the village’s primary bathroom, and the inscriptions mostly ignored. Still, the majority who lived there belonged to the caste of weavers, Savitha’s family among them.
Their hut was on a small ridge. The road—more a dirt path—leading to it was lined with scrubs, their leaves and branches already withered and gray from the heat. When Poornima reached down and touched one, a silky film of gray came off the leaf, and she realized it was ash, from the wood fires that were built outside the huts along the path—they being too poor to have even a cooking area inside their huts. Piles of trash also lined the huts, sniffed occasionally by a stray dog or a pig hungry enough to withstand the heat. It was almost time for tiffin, four in the afternoon, but no one seemed to be home. By now, the sky was white, glowing like a brass pot lit from within. Beads of sweat dripped down Poornima’s back. Clung like mist to her scalp.
When they reached the hut, Poornima realized her family was wealthy compared to Savitha’s. They couldn’t even afford palm fronds for the roof of their hut; it was a discarded sheet of corrugated tin. The outside walls of the hut were plastered with cow dung, and a small area of dirt was cleared in front of the scrubs, though it was still scattered with trash—bits of old yellowed newspaper, disintegrating, blackened rags, vegetable skins too rotted even for the tiny piglets that roamed freely from hut to hut. Poornima stepped over these, and when she followed Savitha into the hut, the first thing that overcame her was the smell. It smelled like old, unwashed clothes and sweat and pickled food. It smelled like manure, woodsmoke, dirt. It smelled like poverty. And despair. It smelled like her mother dying.
“We don’t have any milk for tea,” Savitha said. “Do you want one of these?” She held out a tin of biscuits that were clearly meant only for company. Poornima bit into one; it was stale and crumbled into a soft yellow paste in her mouth. “Where is your mother? Your sisters?”
“My mother cooks today. For the family that owns that big house, the one near the market. My sisters go collecting in the afternoons,” Savitha said.
“Collecting what?”
She shrugged. “I usually go with them.”
“Where?”
“Edge of town. By the Christian cemetery.”
Poornima knew that was where the garbage dumps were. Not the small heaps that dotted the village, practically on every doorstep, but the massive ones, three or four in all, where the small heaps were eventually deposited. Poornima had seen them only from a distance—a far mountain range on the southern horizon that only the poorest climbed. Seeking discarded cloth or paper or scraps of metal, food, plastic. Usually children, she knew, but sometimes adults. But always the poorest. She remembered her mother saying once, as they passed them, “Don’t look,” and Poornima had not known whether she meant at the cemetery or at the children scrambling up the heaps. But now, standing in Savitha’s impoverished hut, and with her mother long dead, she thought she understood. Her mother had said don’t look and she’d meant don’t look at either the cemetery or the garbage heaps. She’d meant, don’t look at death, don’t look at poverty, don’t look at how they crawl through life, how they wait for you, stalk you, before they end you.
“You go?”
“Not anymore. Not since I started working for your father.”
Poornima looked out the one window of the hut. It looked out onto Indravalli Konda, and she looked at the temple and felt pride for the first time toward her father; he’d given Savitha a livelihood and led her away from the garbage heaps. She had never thought of him as generous, but she realized generosity could be a quality that was hidden, obscured, veiled as if by ash, like the true color of the leaves on the scrubs outside Savitha’s hut. “But how did you learn to weave?” she asked.
“My parents used to. My mother still has her old charkha,” she said, pointing to a pile of wood in a corner. Pinned above it was a calendar with Shiva and Parvati, with Ganesha and Kartikeya seated on their laps. Next to the broken charkha was a large bundle wrapped in an old sheet, maybe a shawl. A few dented aluminum pots and pans lay in another corner, below a hanging vegetable basket t
hat contained a stray piece of garlic, a distended onion, and a round orange squash. Poornima saw a leftover clump of rice swarming with flies. A frayed bamboo mat leaned next to them. “We used to have a loom. But my father drank it away. A small beedie shop. Not here. In the center of town. He drank that away, too.”
Poornima had never heard of such a thing. The word for alcohol in Telugu was mondhoo, which could mean medicine, or poison. It was considered taboo to even mention the word, and never around women and children. Drinkers were spoken of in hushed voices and considered leprous, or worse. To be standing in the home of a drinker—Poornima shuddered. “Where is he now?”
Her eyes turned to the window. “Up there, probably.”
Poornima followed her gaze. There was Indravalli Konda, the temple, sky. “The temple?”
“He goes and begs for handouts. Usually the priests feel sorry for him and give him half a coconut, a laddoo if he’s lucky.” She said it so offhandedly that Poornima was amazed. “It’s enough to keep him.”
They both stood, looking out at the temple. The story—not a myth; it couldn’t be a myth because it actually happened, Poornima had seen it—was that once a year, inexplicably, nectar would run from the mouth of the deity. A sweet, thick nectar flowing freely. No one knew where it came from, why it started, or why it stopped, but Poornima looked around at Savitha’s hut, at the one clove of garlic and the rotting onion and the squash that she knew was the entirety of their provisions, maybe for the week, and thought, It should run all the time. If we are truly God’s children, like the priests say, then why doesn’t it run all the time?
“I won’t give him my earnings. He thinks I’m saving for my own dowry. But I’m not. I’m saving it for my sisters’ dowries.” Savitha looked at Poornima. “I’m not getting married, not until they are.”
“No?”
Savitha looked past her, as if into a cave, and said, “No.”
* * *
The farmer was no longer interested. He sent word to Poornima’s father. He said he couldn’t wait the remaining eight months, and besides, he said, he had heard his daughter was as dark as a tamarind. Poornima’s father was crestfallen. He prodded Ramayya, who’d brought the news, with question after question. “What else did he say? Any chance he’ll change his mind? A tamarind? Really? She’s hardly as dark as a tamarind. Do you think she is? It’s a curse: daughters, darkness. What if I buy him another goat? A few chickens?”
Ramayya swung his head and said it was hopeless. He took a sip of his tea and said, “We’ll find her another. I already have a lead.”
Poornima’s father’s eyes lit up. “Who?”
It was a young man who lived in Repalle. He had passed his tenth-class exams and was now apprenticed at a sari shop. His parents were both weavers, but with their son working, and in anticipation of a daughter-in-law who would bring in a dowry and hopefully extra income with a charkha, they were slowing down and focusing on getting him married. “There’s a younger daughter, too, so it’s unclear,” Ramayya said. He was referring, of course, to the fact that the young man couldn’t get married until his sister was married and settled. But, according to Ramayya, the younger daughter’s marriage was already fixed. Only the muhurthum—the most auspicious date and time of the wedding—remained to be arranged. Poornima’s father was delighted. “Plenty of time, then,” he said, smiling. “And what about the dowry?”
Ramayya finished his tea. “Within our range. He’s still an apprentice, after all. But one thing at a time.”
The next afternoon, Poornima told Savitha what she’d overheard. She’d come in for lunch. They always ate after Poornima’s father, and he’d asked for a second helping of capsicum curry, leaving Poornima and Savitha with only a small spoonful to share. They ate their rice mainly with pickle. “Where did you say?”
“Repalle.”
Savitha was silent for a moment. “That’s too far.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s past Tenali. It’s by the ocean.”
“The ocean?” Poornima had never seen the ocean, and she imagined it to be just like a field—a field of rice, she thought—with ships in the distance instead of mountains, blue instead of green, and as for waves, she’d discussed them with a classmate once, when she was in the third class. “But what are they? What do they look like?” The other girl—who’d also never seen the ocean—said they were the water burping, and they looked like a cat when it’s stretching. A cat? Stretching? Poornima was skeptical. “Will you visit me?”
“I told you. It’s too far.”
“But, a train.”
Savitha laughed out loud. She held up a bit of capsicum. “You see this? You see this?” she said, indicating her full plate of rice and a fingertip’s worth of last year’s tomato pickle. “This is a feast. How do you think I will ever afford a train ticket?”
That night, Poornima lay on her mat and thought about Savitha. It was vaguely unsettling, but it seemed to her that she couldn’t possibly marry a man who lived too far away for Savitha to visit. So that, essentially, Savitha was more important than the man she would marry. Could that be true? How had this happened? Poornima couldn’t say. She thought about the fierceness that sometimes flooded Savitha’s eyes. She thought about the view of the temple from the window of her hut. She thought about her mixing rice and buttermilk with banana, and how, when she’d finally asked her for a bite, Savitha, with a wide grin, had rolled a bit of dripping rice into a ball between her fingers, and instead of handing it to her, she’d fed her. Raised the bite to Poornima’s mouth, so that she’d touched the very tip of her fingers with her tongue. As if she were a child. As Amma might’ve done. But with Savitha, there was no illness to mar the gesture, no dying; she was alive, more alive than anyone she’d ever known. She made even the smallest of life seem grand, and for Poornima, who had always ached for something more than the memory of a comb in her hair, more than the chiming of a blue clock, or a voice that she tried so often to conjure, watching Savitha, watching her delight, was like cultivating her own. And even in her daily duties—cooking, going to the well for water, washing dishes, scrubbing clothes, sitting for endless hours at the charkha—she found a sudden and glimmering satisfaction. Perhaps even joy. Though what surprised her most was that she could no longer imagine her life without her. Who had she talked to at meals before Savitha? What had she done on Sundays? Who had she cooked for? Her father, who was slow to notice most things, had said the previous evening, “That Savitha seems like a good girl. She’s a hard worker, that’s for sure.” Then he’d turned back to his tobacco and said, “Shouldn’t let a girl like that run around. Should get her married. How old is she? Too old to run around, I’d say. No telling.”
No telling, Poornima repeated to herself. No telling what?
Her father looked at her. “They’ll be here tomorrow. Probably in the afternoon.”
“Who?”
“The boy from Repalle. His family.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Here.” Her father handed her a few rupees. “Send your brother out for snacks in the morning. Pakoras, maybe.” Poornima stared at him. “Don’t just stand there. Take it.”
In the morning, when Poornima told her, Savitha only smiled. “It’ll come to nothing,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Because these things always do.”
“What things?”
Savitha pointed at the sky. “Things that are not ordained. That are broken before they ever begin.”
“But—they’re on their way. Gopi is out buying pakoras.”
She smiled again. “A few mornings ago, I was on my way to your house. I was crossing Old Tenali Road, you know, where all the lorries pass on their way to the highway. As I was crossing by the paan shop, I heard a thump. More like a quick thud. I didn’t think much of it. But I did turn around to look, and when I did, I saw an owl on the road. It had obviously been hit. One of its wings looked wrong, just wrong. Do you know what I
mean? It looked dead. Or sleeping. But no, it was awake, Poori. Awake. More awake than anything I’ve ever seen. It was not making a sound. No calling, no whimpering. Do birds whimper? Anyway, none of that. It was just sitting there, fallen there, in the middle of the road. With all the bicycles and people and lorries whisking by it. One lorry even went right over it. But the owl just sat there. Its eye—the one facing me—like a marble. A perfect black-and-gold marble. Reflecting everything. I was now close, you see, bending over it, wondering what I could do to help it. But what could I do? Its shattered wing was awful. Like a lonesome day. Like hunger. But as I looked at it, I realized it was saying something to me. It was trying to tell me something. I swear. And you know what it was? What it was trying to say?”
Poornima said nothing.
“Owl things. Things I couldn’t possibly understand. They were dying words, the words of the dying, but spoken in an another language. A silent one. But it was also saying something else, something to me. It was saying, The man from Repalle doesn’t matter. You’ll be together. (He was talking about you and me, of course.) That’s the way it is: If two people want to be together, they’ll find a way. They’ll forge a way. It may seem ludicrous, even stupid, to work so hard at something that is, truly, a matter of chance, completely arbitrary, such as staying with someone—as if ‘with’ and ‘apart’ have meaning in and of themselves—but, the owl said (and by now, Savitha added, the owl was sighing, maybe wheezing, nearing death), But that’s the thing with you humans. You think too much, don’t you?”