by Shobha Rao
“Wait,” Poornima said. “The owl said all this to you?”
“Yes.”
“So, it knows me? It knows you? It knows the man from Repalle?”
“Knew. It’s probably dead by now.”
“Okay. Knew.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
Savitha returned her gaze, unblinking, and said, “Yes.”
* * *
The marriage viewing took place that evening. They arrived a little after six o’clock. There was the groom, who was apprenticed in the sari shop, along with his mother, father, Ramayya, and an uncle and aunt. Though the uncle and aunt could have been an older cousin and his wife. It was hard to tell, and Poornima never found out for sure. She was in the weaving hut, where the looms were located, when they arrived. Her father’s sister was helping her with her sari—cream-colored cotton with a green border, which had belonged to her mother—and tying a garland of jasmine to her hair. Poornima had oiled it that morning, the coconut still scenting her fingertips, and the kumkum leaving a thin film of powder on them as if she’d caught a red butterfly. Her aunt yanked at her hair as she braided it, pulling the strands with such force that Poornima squealed in pain.
“Shush,” her aunt scolded. “One boy already fallen through. The shame. How do you think it looks for a girl? Huh? Thank the Lord Vishnu he never laid eyes on you. That would’ve been the end. Your poor father. First he loses a wife, five kids on his own, and now this. Working his fingers to the bone. But this one will work out. You’ll see.” She lathered Poornima’s face with a thick coating of talcum powder. She reapplied the kumkum and kajal. And then she took the gold bangles off her own wrists and squeezed them onto Poornima’s. “There,” her aunt said, taking a step or two back. “Now, keep your eyes down, and only speak when spoken to. Don’t get frisky. Just answer their questions. And try to sing. If they ask you, sing something. A devotional ballad is good. Simple, so you don’t mess it up.”
Poornima nodded.
Her aunt then led her out of the weaving hut, around the back of the main hut, and into the front, where they were all seated. She nudged Poornima onto the straw mat, on which were also seated the groom’s mother and aunt or cousin. The groom’s father was seated in the chair, while all the other men were seated on the edge of the hemp-rope bed. Pleasantries were exchanged with Poornima’s aunt, whom the aunt or cousin seemed to be acquainted with. Then the groom’s mother reached over and touched the gold bangles. “Not very thick,” she said.
“Yes, well,” Ramayya said lightheartedly, “all that can be discussed later.”
The woman smiled, let go of the bangles reluctantly, and said, “What’s your name, dear?”
Poornima lifted her gaze to the woman she assumed would be her future mother-in-law. She was fat, well-fed, her stomach above the waistline of her sari rested as round and moist as a clay pot. Her nails and teeth were yellow. “Poornima,” she replied. She liked that she’d called her dear. But she disliked the timbre in her voice, was suspicious of it; it’d gone too easily between the thickness of the gold bangles and her name, as if they were one and the same, as if they were part of the same inquiry, the same pursuit.
“Ask her, Ravi,” the groom’s aunt or cousin said. “Ask her something.”
The groom was sitting on the edge of the bed; Poornima saw only his shoes (brown sandals) and the cuff of his pants (gray, with pinstripes). His ankles—the only part of his body that was in her view—were dark, the hair on them wiry and thick. “Can you sing?” he said.
She cleared her throat. A devotional song, she told herself. Think of a devotional song. But then her mind drew a blank. Not a blank, not exactly. What she thought of was the owl. The dying owl that had spoken to Savitha. What had it said? Something about finding a way, forging it. What would she do in Repalle, alone, without Savitha? That question seemed greater than any other question she’d ever been asked. Greater than all other questions put together. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t sing.”
Her aunt gasped. “Of course you can,” she said, laughing nervously. “Remember that one. That one we sing at the temple. About Rama and Sita and—”
“I remember it. I remember it perfectly. I just can’t sing it. Like I said, I can’t sing.”
Ramayya rose a little, his eyes wide. “Shy. That’s all. Such a shy girl.”
The groom cleared his throat. The aunt or the cousin said, “Well, that’s all right. Singing’s not all that important. She can cook, right? How many canisters can you spin on the charkha per day?”
“Four, five.”
“Now, see,” the woman said, “that’s not bad.”
“Swapna can spin eight,” the groom’s mother said. “And that’s with the baby.”
The conversation went on like that. They finished their tea, all the pakoras, and most of the jilebi, leaving only bits of sugar syrup on the plate. They talked about the lack of rain, and about how the trains from Repalle were always late, they talked about the price of peanuts and mangoes and rice, and then they talked about the new government, and how prices had been cheaper, and the quality of the produce better, when the Congress party had been in power. Her aunt then led Poornima out of the room. She was scolded, as she knew she would be. “You fool,” her aunt said. “Who’ll marry someone like you? Who’ll marry someone so wicked? Thank the Lord Vishnu your mother wasn’t here. It would’ve killed her. A daughter so terrible. Don’t you see? It has nothing to do with whether you can sing, you fool. They just want to make certain that you will listen. That you’ll be obedient. And now they know. They know you’re wicked.”
When Poornima told Savitha the next day, she laughed. “That’s it! That’s how we do it.” Then she pushed a strand of hair that had fallen across Poornima’s face and said, “That’s it. We’re safe.”
4
A heat wave settled into Indravalli in the days after the marriage viewing. Poornima began getting up in the dark to do the morning chores. Getting water at the well, cooking for the day, sweeping and washing—all of it had to be done before the sun came up. Once the sun touched the horizon, licked even the mere tip of it, the earth burned as if lit on fire. The air, through the mornings and afternoons, was still and hot, searing; a thin breeze drifted along in the evenings, but that too was hardly a whimper. Poornima sat at the charkha in the afternoons, spinning listlessly, and waited for dinnertime. She couldn’t visit Savitha during the day, while she was at the loom: her father was in the weaving hut, too, watching them from his own loom. In the afternoons, she took their tea to them, but she and Savitha hardly exchanged a glance. Besides, Poornima’s father was furious. The Repalle family was now demanding an even larger dowry, double what had previously been discussed. “Double,” her father hissed, “for your insolence.” They’d also asked for a set of gold bangles for their daughter, the groom’s younger sister. “Gold,” her father repeated, “gold, gold, gold. Do you understand? Gold. How do you suppose I get the money to buy gold?” His eyes, already bloodshot and inflamed from the heat, gaped at his daughter. “And I’ve got another one after you. In what? Two or three years? And that friend of yours. Savitha. What do you think she asked me the other day? She asked me if she could use the loom, after work. Come in early, leave later. My loom. And she asked, just like that, as if I owed it to her.” He shook his head, swiping at a mosquito on his arm. “It’s your audacity,” he said. “It’s the audacity of you girls, you modern girls, that will be your ruin. That will be my ruin.”
“Why?” Poornima asked.
“Why what?”
“Why does she want to come in extra?”
“How should I know?” her father said. “Why don’t you ask her?” Poornima stood looking at him. He slapped at another mosquito. “Well, don’t just stand there. Get me the swatter.”
She asked Savitha the next day at lunch. The air in the hut was liquid; it throbbed white and raw with heat. Flies buzzed listlessly, lifting a little off the ground and then se
ttling back, as if exhausted from the effort. Savitha was sweating from sitting at the loom. Beads of perspiration stood at her hairline, studded her collarbone. Poornima could smell the scent of her body: jungled, musky. Not the slightest whiff of laundry cake or a bit of sandalwood soap or even talcum powder. Animal: that was her scent.
Savitha stopped eating and listened as Poornima told her about the Repalle people, and how they were asking for more dowry. “Can your father give it to them?”
“I don’t think so. He can barely afford the dowry he’s offering now.”
“So it’s done.”
Poornima shrugged. “Maybe. Everyone is furious, though.”
“Because you wouldn’t sing? What are we? Trained monkeys?”
Poornima didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “Why do you want to work longer at the loom? Why did you ask my father if you could?”
Savitha took a bite of her rice and sambar. Her eyes twinkled. “I’m making you something. I’m making you a sari. That’s why I asked your father if I could use the loom. Do you think he’ll let me?”
“A sari? But how? Where will you get the thread? How will you make two saris at once? You can’t.”
“That’s why I wanted to come in extra. I’ll finish the sari for your father by working after hours. And then, when that’s done, I can start yours on a Saturday night, work all day Sunday, and have it done by Monday morning. And the threads? I got those from the collective. They had extra. Apparently somebody dyed them the wrong color. Indigo. They can’t dye over it, or they don’t want to. Either way, they gave it to me for cheap.”
“A sari in one day?”
“Two, if I work day and night.”
“That’s ridiculous. You can’t work without sleeping for two days. Besides, why? Why do you want to make me a sari?”
“It’ll be my wedding present to you. You will eventually get married, you know. Not to this guy in Repalle, I hope. I hope it’s somebody in Indravalli. But when you do, I can’t afford to give you anything else. Besides, look at this,” she said, holding up a handful of rice. “No one has ever cooked for me. My mother must’ve, but I don’t remember it. As long as I can remember, I’ve cooked for myself, and for my parents and brothers and sisters. And the bananas. I know you save your money to buy them for me. But it’s not just the cooking. It’s everything. Everything. From the way you sit and spin the charkha, as if you weren’t spinning thread at all, but as if you were spinning the strangest stories, the loveliest dreams. And the way you set the tea down next to me when I’m at the loom. And the way you hold the pot of water when we’re walking back from the well, as if nothing, nothing in the world, could match the finery, the fineness, of that pot of water. Don’t you see, Poori? Everything else is so bland, so colorless, except you. But that indigo.” She smiled. “The least I can do is make you a sari. I know how to do that. And a few sleepless nights won’t matter. Imagine when I see it on you.”
Poornima wanted to get up, pull Savitha up from her plate, and embrace her. No one—not ever—had thought to make something for her. Her mother, of course, but she was dead. And the weight of her mother’s hand, holding the comb in her hair, was all she had left of her. At times, many times, she gripped that memory, that weight, as if it alone could guide her through dark and savage forest paths, and eventually, she hoped, into a clearing, but it wasn’t true. It couldn’t. All that memory could do was give small solace. One drop after another after another, like the glucose drip that had punctured and bled her mother’s arm when she’d been in the hospital. It had been nothing. Not really. Sugar. They had dripped sugar into her. “To keep her strength up,” the doctors had said. As if sugar were a stand against cancer. But Savitha, Savitha wanted to make her a sari. A sari she could wind around her body and hold to her face. Not a memory, not a scent, not a thing that drifts away. But a sari. She could take that sari and weep into it, she could stretch it across a rooftop, a hot sand, wear it to the Krishna and wade into its waters, she could wrap herself in its folds, cocoon herself against the night, she could sleep, she could dream.
5
The owl was right: negotiations with the family from Repalle fell apart. They refused to budge from their dowry demands, though Ramayya did get them to agree to accept one gold bangle for the sister instead of two. “One, two. What does it matter? I can’t afford half a gold bangle. Let alone the dowry,” her father said.
“They’ve seen her. That’s the thing,” Ramayya said. When Poornima brought Ramayya his tea, he looked at her with such distaste that she thought he might fling the tea back in her face. She moved away. “Shy,” he said with disgust. “You’re not shy. You’re rude. You and your father are lucky I’m still willing to help. Word’s gotten around, you know. Everyone between here and the Godavari knows about you. Who would want you now?”
When Ramayya left, Poornima’s father slapped her, hard. Then he grabbed her by the hair. He said, “You see this? You see what you’ve done?” His grip on her hair tightened and he said, “The next time somebody asks you to sing, what’re you going to do?”
Poornima blinked. She held back tears. Her scalp burned, hairs snapped like electric wires. Her brothers and sister crowded around the door of the hut to see. “What?” he growled. “What will you do? Say it. Say it.”
“Sing,” she whispered, wincing in pain. “I’m going to sing.”
He let go with a shove, and Poornima fell forward. She knocked against the steel cups in which she’d served the tea, and her hand split open. One of her brothers ran to get a rag, and she tied it around her hand. The blood soaked through, and there was still dinner to prepare. She sent them out to play and leaned against the wall of the hut. It was the eastern wall. Across from her was a high window. Through it, beyond Indravalli Konda, she could see the setting sun. Not the sun itself, but pink and yellow and orange clouds, thin, their ends sharp as knives, rushing toward the mountain as if they meant to bring it to its knees. How delusional, she thought: as if those useless bits of fluff could maim a mountain.
She closed her eyes. The pain in her hand, her scalp, her face where he’d slapped her, none of them she even noticed. They were still there, but she could no longer feel them. Her body swam, slowly, as if through a thick and sedimental sea. It’s the heat, she thought, but the heat wave had passed. It was April, and though the temperatures had lessened some—although stepping outside in the afternoons was still unwise—the heat would not completely abate, not until July when the monsoons arrived. Until then, the air was stifling. The hut was stifling. Poornima could hardly breathe. She wanted to cry, but her body felt as dry as a coconut husk. The heat having sapped everything, even tears.
And it was only April.
Savitha saw the cut on her hand, the bruise on her face when she came in for lunch the next afternoon, and was livid. “Don’t you worry,” she said, fuming.
“Worry about what?” Poornima asked.
“Nothing. Don’t you worry about a thing.” Then she laid Poornima’s head in her lap, she brushed the hair from her face, and she said, “Do you want to hear a story?”
Poornima nodded.
“What kind of story?”
“You’re the one who asked.”
“All right, but an old story or a new one?”
“A new one.”
“Why?”
Poornima thought for a moment. Savitha’s lap was warm, though a little uneven, like sleeping on a lumpy bed. “Because I’m sick of old things. Like Ramayya. And this hut.” She raised her hand to her face, the cut still open on her palm. Curved, like a clay pot. “I want something new.”
“In that case, once upon a time,” Savitha began, “though not very long ago, since you want a new story—once upon a time, an elephant and the rain had an argument. The elephant was proud. It walked proudly around the forest. It ate whatever it wanted, reaching high into the trees, scaring away all the other animals. It was so proud that one day the elephant looked up, saw the rain, and declared,
‘I don’t need you. You don’t nourish me. I don’t need you at all.’ The rain, after hearing this, looked sadly back at the elephant and said, ‘I will go away, and then you will see.’ So the rain went away. The elephant watched it go and had an idea. He saw a nearby lagoon filled with water and he knew that without rain, it would soon dry up.” Here, Savitha stopped. Poornima lifted her head from her lap and sat up.
“So what was it? What was his idea?” Poornima asked.
Savitha turned to face her. She smiled. “The elephant, you see, saw a poor old crow walking along the forest path, looking for grubs, and ordered him to guard the lagoon. ‘Only I may drink from the lagoon,’ he told the crow. So the old crow sat and sat and guarded the lagoon. Eventually there came a monkey and said, ‘Give me water!’ and the crow answered, ‘The water belongs to elephant.’ The monkey shook its head and went away.
“Then came a hyena and said, ‘Give me water!’ and the crow answered, ‘The water belongs to elephant.’
“Along came a cobra and said, ‘Give me water!’ and the crow answered, ‘The water belongs to elephant.’
“Then came a jungle cat and said, ‘Give me water!’ and the crow answered, ‘The water belongs to elephant.’
“Then came a bear and a crocodile and a deer. They all asked for water and the old crow always gave the same answer. Finally, there came a lion. The lion said, ‘Give me water!’ and the crow answered, ‘The water belongs to elephant.’ When the lion heard this he roared; he grabbed the poor crow by the neck and beat him. Then he took a long, refreshing drink from the lagoon and walked away into the forest.