by Shobha Rao
Next to the television was the desk, and on the desk were Kishore’s papers. These papers were different than the papers in the armoire, he’d told her. These papers were just his work papers, he’d said, while the ones in the armoire were government papers and bankbooks. Poornima looked at them, and seeing that they were in disarray, she got up from the bed and went to the desk to straighten them. As she did, she saw that they were filled with columns—six of them, with many, many rows underneath filled with lots of numbers and scribbles that she couldn’t possibly understand, so she laid them back down on the desk. But something caught her eye: she saw that the first row on the topmost page did make sense. It was simply the numbers in the second, third, fourth, and fifth columns added up, and listed in the sixth column. The first column was just a date. That was easy enough; she’d learned addition well before the fifth class, which was the last year she’d attended school. Then she checked the remaining rows, and they, too, were the same: simple addition, that was it.
Was this what Kishore did at work all day? She nearly laughed out loud. Asking for foot massages, demanding that she press his shirts every morning, yelling for a glass of water as soon as he walked in the door: as if he’d crossed a desert, as if his labors had utterly parched him, when all he was really doing was adding up numbers! But then she checked the other sheets of paper, and it wasn’t true. Those columns weren’t added up; something different was happening in those columns.
Poornima sighed and went back downstairs. There were the lunch dishes to wash and dinner to prepare. Her mother-in-law and Aruna liked their tea at four o’clock, and it was already ten past. Poornima hurried to the kitchen. But as she boiled the water and milk, and raced to add the tea powder, and brought down the sugar things, she wondered about those other pages. What were those columns doing? Maybe Savitha had been right, she thought. Maybe, in the end, accounting was not much more complicated than when her father gave her money to go to the market, hardly any money at all, and she’d still had to buy enough vegetables and rice for all of them, and even so, he’d demanded that she bring back change, along with a full rendition of all she’d spent and where. If she’d bought a kilo of potatoes for five rupees, he’d say, “I could’ve gotten them for four,” and if she did get them for four, he’d say, “They’re small. Pockmarked. No wonder.”
Still, as she was scooping the sugar into the cups, Poornima suddenly put down the spoon. She put it down and looked up. She was amazed. She’d just thought of Savitha, and yet she had felt none of the usual blunt, dreary pain or confusion or longing that she always felt, nor even the gleaming, sharp hatred toward her father. None of it. She’d simply, and without suffering, thought of Savitha. It was the first time she’d done so, and the feeling was like being handed a kite in a strong wind. Poornima smiled. But then the smile immediately fell. Because in the moment right afterward, it all rose up again: the desperate sorrow, the disorder, the mystery of her whereabouts that drove her, on some nights, to huddle in a corner of the terrace and weep under the waning or waxing moon, the watching stars.
But she’d been free for a moment, and besides, those columns couldn’t possibly be all that difficult: those two things she knew. Those two things she was certain she knew.
5
The first time Poornima talked back to her mother-in-law was on the morning of a marriage viewing for Aruna. She was six months older than Poornima and yet still not married. The problem, according to Aruna and her mother, was the boys. They were never good enough. One had a good job, high-paying, in Hyderabad, but he was balding. Another, tall and handsome, had a father who was keeping a woman even though his wife was still alive—and who knew if bigamy had a genetic component? Yet another was perfect in every way—job, hairline, family reputation—but he was the exact same height as Aruna, and she liked to wear a little heel whenever she went to the cinema or out to eat. “What am I supposed to do,” she said, pouting, “wear chapals everywhere? Like a common villager?”
The boy coming today was from Guntur; he worked for Tata Consulting and had been to America on a project, and might even have the chance to go again. He was an only son, so the entirety of his family’s inheritance would go only to him, and he looked like a film hero. At least, that’s what one of his neighbors told the matchmaker, when he went around to inquire. “Which hero?” Poornima asked. “Is it the one in the film we saw?” Aruna scowled and shook her head. “No. Not that one, you pakshi. A hero in a good film.”
It didn’t matter which film. The house in Namburu had been aflutter since four in the morning. The stone floors in every room were washed and mopped. All the furniture was dusted, the cushions on the sofa and chairs aired out. A small puja was conducted—as soon as Aruna had washed her hair and dressed, she made an offering to Lakshmi Devi and lit incense. They were arriving at three in the afternoon but had said nothing about staying for dinner—which meant that Poornima had to make enough sambar and curries in case they did, along with pulao rice and bhajis. She was cutting strips of eggplant for the bhajis, the oil already heating on the stove, when her mother-in-law came in, yelling for her to hurry up, the milkman had arrived, and there was the milk to boil and the yogurt to set. Poornima turned down the oil and got up to get the milk pan, when her mother-in-law looked at her, up and down, and said, “When they arrive, don’t show your face. Stay upstairs. We’ll make up something. We’ll tell them you had to go back to Indravalli for the day. Something. Just don’t make a sound.”
Poornima turned from the stove. “Why? Why would I stay upstairs?”
Her mother-in-law sighed loudly. “You’re not—well, we don’t want to bring Aruna’s status down, do we? Besides, six months, seven months, and you’re still not pregnant? I don’t want you to rub off on my Aruna. On her chances. Barren women are a bad omen, and I don’t want you down here.”
There was silence. Poornima listened. She strained her ears and found that there was only the small, quiet sound of the oil beginning to boil, though this, too, magnified the other silence, the greater one. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know your son isn’t the one who’s barren?”
The slap that followed was so powerful that it knocked Poornima backward, reeling, crashing into the stove. The milk wasn’t on the burner yet, but the oil was. It splattered across the wall, dripped off the granite counter, and landed in thick, hot drops on the floor. A few drops flew onto Poornima’s arm, and she could feel their sizzle, spreading like papad, hissing like snakes.
Her mother-in-law eyed her with real hatred, and then she said, “Keep acting up. Go ahead. There’ll be worse. Just keep it up.”
Worse? There would be worse? Kishore had said the same thing: Was it a coincidence? Or wasn’t it?
That afternoon, when the boy’s family arrived, Poornima was relegated to the upstairs and told not to come down until they called for her. She didn’t mind. She sat in the middle of the terrace for a few minutes, away from the edge so no one would see her. It was after four o’clock when the boy’s family arrived, the hour when flower vendors walked through the village, shouting and singing out the kinds of flowers they had for sale. Poornima could hear the song of the old man who sold the garlands of jasmine, plump as pillows, and just beginning to open, releasing a fragrance so intoxicating that she was certain she caught their scent on the terrace, two, maybe three streets away.
Her mother-in-law sometimes bought a long strand, cutting off the longest lengths—as long as her forearm—for Aruna and Divya (who didn’t even like wearing jasmine in her hair and took it off as soon as her mother turned her head); she took a short one for her own, puny bun and gave the remainder to Poornima. Poornima, whose father, after her mother had died, had never once given her money for flowers, would rush to oil and braid her hair, wash her face, then reapply talcum powder to her face and neck, draw kajal around her eyes, and paint on a fresh bottu. And only then, only after she’d made herself worthy of the flowers, their sweetness, their beauty, would she final
ly put them in her hair. On those nights, after Kishore took her—not once commenting on the flowers in her hair; did he even notice them? Poornima wondered—she’d lie back on her pillow, and their scent would drift up toward her like mist, like drizzle, like the unbearable sadness of that upstairs room, her husband turned away from her, the shutters closed against burglars, but still a mild breeze sneaking in, rustling the edges of the sheet, and Poornima, lying there in the dark, her eyes open, warm, inundated by the fragrance of flowers.
The voice of the old man selling the garlands of jasmine faded, and Poornima got up and walked across the terrace. She went into the upstairs room and closed the door. The papers were still on the desk. They were the same stack, sitting in the same place, and had been for the past two weeks. She moved aside the top page, the one with simple addition, and looked at the next one. This one had more numbers, but it also had a heading at the top of the page. The heading was in English, which Poornima couldn’t read, but there were other details in Telugu. For instance, the first column had a listing of various machines, such as cars (6), lorries (3), tractors (2), combines (2), and so forth. Each machine had an amount next to it. Judging by how high the numbers were, and how all the numbers in a group—such as the group of cars—were approximately the same, Poornima guessed each number corresponded to the value of the listed machine. Next to one car, she saw it read “Dented,” and was valued less than the others. The lorries, on the other hand, were all valued far more than the cars. Poornima shuffled to the next page. She was doing this out of boredom, she realized, but it was also fun, in a way. She couldn’t say why, only that figuring out what the numbers meant, what the columns stood for, gave her a sense of accomplishment, of gain. The feeling itself was unfamiliar, and she wondered at it: Why hadn’t she felt it when she’d worked at her charkha, or when she made a particularly tasty sambar, or even when she’d bought the two bananas, an apple, and the handful of cashews for her mother? Well, one reason was obvious: her mother died, the sambar got eaten, and the charkha, well, the charkha spun and it spun and it never stopped spinning. But this? This stack of papers? It was leading to something; she could sense it. She left that page and turned to the next.
* * *
The nagging from Poornima’s mother-in-law and Kishore escalated. Aruna’s marriage to the boy from Guntur was nearly fixed; it was just a matter of a little more haggling over the dowry and the amount of jewelry (measured in ounces of gold) each side would give the bride. Aruna’s family had the dowry money, though they had to sell a small farm they owned outside Kaza for the gold. But the farm didn’t bring in enough, and so every time Poornima entered a room, or left one, her mother-in law yelled after her, “That no-good father of yours said within the year. All five thousand. Well, the year’s come and gone. And here we are, feeding you three times a day, without even a grandchild to show for it. No-good fathers beget no-good daughters, that’s what I say. And here’s my poor son, a prince, stuck with you. We should’ve never married into such a family.” Poornima snuck a look at Kishore’s mangled fingers and wondered, Who is stuck with whom?
Kishore’s mode of escalation was more subtle, though also more painful: the sex became rougher. Violent. He’d grab her hair, yank her around the bed by it, slam into her with such force that her head would hit the wall behind the bed. The next day, bruises bloomed across her body, green and blue and gray and black, growing like nests, as if tiny birds were coming in the night to build them, one feather and branch and twig at a time. At the end of two weeks, Poornima could no longer see the true color of the skin on her legs and arms, and she wondered—bracing every evening for Kishore’s return from work, serving dinner with as much care and slowness as she could manage without being told to hurry up, washing the dishes even more deliberately, and then climbing the stairs one by one, knowing he was upstairs, knowing what the night would hold, and even, once or twice, closing her eyes when she reached the top step, praying, hoping, that when she opened them, Savitha would be there, standing on the terrace, laughing, saying, Let’s go—but wondering, wondering, she couldn’t help wondering if this is what they meant by worse.
* * *
Kishore’s work pages took on a kind of poetry for Poornima. She could’ve gazed at them for hours, days, were it not for chores, and for the simple fact that she didn’t know what they actually meant. Individually, she knew what they meant, but not together: the first page was simply various payments made to Kishore’s company over the past three months, added up. The second page—the one with the listing of cars and lorries—was a listing of the company’s assets. The third page, Poornima realized without much trouble—based on the columns of other company names and an amount beside each name, some getting smaller, some getting higher—were the company’s debts. But what did they mean, when taken together? Why was Kishore always shuffling them around, punching numbers into some small machine, grumbling about this or that outstanding payment? Loans. Debts. It didn’t make sense. Poornima wandered through her chores in a daze for a full week, until one afternoon, while she was hanging up the laundry to dry, one of Aruna’s shalwar tops was whipped to the ground by the wind, and Aruna ran up behind her, caught Poornima’s arm in a grip, and swung her around to face her. “Do you know whose this is? Do you know what it’s worth?” Poornima looked at her, and then she couldn’t help smiling. It was so simple. Of course. That must be it. All those papers, stacked on the desk: they added up to something. They added up to what the company was worth.
* * *
And so as the stacks kept changing—with Kishore taking stacks back to work, bringing new ones, all the while completely unaware that Poornima was studying them, that she was learning from them—she began to see the world differently; she began to see it with a kind of clarity: there was what you owed, and there was what you could sell to pay off what you owed, and whatever was left (if there was anything left) was all that you could say was truly yours, all that you could truly love.
6
By the middle of the second year of Poornima’s marriage, the nagging grew into outright hostility. She couldn’t recall a single day when she hadn’t been slapped or screamed at or forced to ask for forgiveness (for the smallest things, like when she dripped a few drops of tea onto the stone floor). The five thousand rupees was still outstanding, and her mother-in-law and Kishore reminded her of it every time she put a bite of food in her mouth, or drank a glass of water. “You think it’s free?” her mother-in-law hissed. “You think that water’s free? That pump we installed cost three thousand rupees. So you wouldn’t have to go to the well. And where do you think we got that three thousand rupees? Where? Not from your father, not from him. That’s for sure, the thief. Both of you. Thieves.” But the water pump was installed the year before I came to Namburu, Poornima wanted to say, but didn’t. Not because she was afraid; fear began to lose meaning in her life—fear was a thing she’d felt for so long, first with her father and then with her mother-in-law and Aruna and Kishore, that it took on a monotony, an everydayness that struck Poornima as being just as boring as washing dishes, or ironing clothes. Why should she be afraid? She’d left her father’s house and nothing had changed. Maybe nothing ever did. She understood now that Savitha had been right to run away. She’d been right to leave. Fear was no good, but neither was the monotony of fear.
But then, all of a sudden, everything changed. It simply stopped.
There was no more yelling, no more demands, no more violence. Poornima went about her chores and they simply ignored her. Sometimes, she’d catch one or another watching her, waiting, it seemed. But for what? She didn’t know, but she did know one thing: she had to get pregnant soon. She’d heard of barren women being replaced by second wives. She wouldn’t mind that much—she might actually prefer it—but she thought they might send her back to Indravalli once the second wife arrived. She sometimes dreamed that they had, and when she walked into the weaving hut, Savitha was seated at the loom, waiting for her. But that w
asn’t true; only her father was there, and Poornima refused to see him. Even during festival days, when daughters were expected to return home, Poornima wouldn’t go. Why should she? “No,” she said with finality, “I won’t go,” and her mother-in-law cursed her under her breath, mumbling, “No. No, you wouldn’t. That would save us a week’s food, so why would you?”
Aruna’s marriage was finally fixed—with the man from Guntur—for the end of August. The family was overjoyed. It was now July, and preparations began in earnest. There was shopping to do, invitations to send out, the marriage hall to book. Aruna was beside herself. She grabbed Divya by the arms and spun in circles, laughing. “He’s so handsome, Divi, and so rich, and we’ll have to live in America. That’s what his father told Nanna, that he would have to go back soon on another project. Oh, Divi! Can you imagine? Me, in America. I need clothes. Amma, I need clothes. Not these ugly shalwars, but modern clothes. Amma, did you hear me?” She went on and on in this way, and Poornima was glad she would soon be out of the house.
Preparations intensified in the middle of July, but on a windless day, late in the afternoon, during tea, the matchmaker, whose name was Balaji, arrived at their door. He was invited in with great aplomb, but Poornima’s mother-in-law took one look at his face and put down her teacup. “What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”