by Shobha Rao
The matchmaker looked at the nearly empty teacups, and then at Poornima. “Don’t just stand there. Tea. Bring us some tea.”
By the time Poornima returned, Aruna was crying.
“Off? But why?” her mother-in-law wailed.
Balaji wouldn’t say. Only that they’d had a change of heart.
“Change of heart? But why? Why? We gave them everything they asked for.”
He sipped his tea and looked at Aruna sadly. “She’s a fine girl. We’ll find another match.”
“Another match? You fool. What happened to this one? How does it look? Practically on the altar, and then they cancel. Why?”
She got no more out of him, only that it was better to leave it all behind. Move forward, he told Poornima’s mother-in-law. The way forward is the only way, he said.
But rumors trickled down.
The main one was that somebody had told the Guntur family that Kishore’s mangled hand was a genetic condition, and any children Aruna would have might also be disfigured.
“That’s ridiculous,” Kishore said, infuriated. “They’re idiots. Dongalu.”
Poornima was serving him dinner. She scooped some rice onto his plate, and then she said, “Is it?”
“Is it what?”
“Is it a genetic condition?”
Kishore blanched; he got up from the table and left the room without a word.
“Get out!” her mother-in-law screamed. “Get out of this house. It’s you. It’s because of you they canceled the wedding. You’re a curse on this family. It’s all because of you.”
Am I a curse? Poornima wondered vaguely, climbing the stairs to the second floor. She didn’t go into the bedroom, where she knew Kishore would be. Instead, she stood on the terrace and looked out at the palm trees swaying in the distance, and the thatched-roof huts huddled beneath them, and then she turned to the west and watched the last rays of the sun leave the sky, as if they had no use for it anymore, and Poornima wanted to follow it, follow the sun, and she thought, What has my life added up to? What’s been taken, what’s been left? What’s it worth? Then she heard footsteps. She thought it must be Kishore, and braced for what would come, but it was Divya, holding out a plate of rice. “You didn’t get to eat,” she said.
Poornima nearly cried out with gratitude.
Divya turned and went back down the steps.
Poornima idled on the terrace well into the night, and then snuck noiselessly into the bedroom. Kishore was turned toward the wall, and she thought he must be sleeping, but no, his breathing was ragged, uneven. He was awake, and he was angry. She could feel his fury. She edged to the opposite end of the bed and waited, expecting the worst, but he seemed to eventually fall asleep. Or maybe she did.
The next morning, too, was strangely quiet. Divya went to school; nowadays, Aruna nearly always stayed in the bedroom she and Divya shared. Kishore stayed home from work. He said he was feeling ill, but instead of resting, he and his mother locked themselves away in the upstairs bedroom. Midafternoon, Poornima’s mother-in-law came downstairs. She looked at Poornima sweetly and said, “My dear, how about some bhajis for tea today? I feel like eating bhajis. Would you mind?”
Poornima stared at her. She’d never once heard this voice before.
There was only one potato in the house, and some onions, so she cut those up and put the oil on to heat. Her mother-in-law lingered in the kitchen and even offered to help with the chopping, but Poornima said it was all right; she would make them. The oil began to pop, and then to slightly smoke. Poornima dipped an onion into the batter. Just then, Kishore walked into the kitchen. Poornima was startled—never once, not once, had Kishore come into the kitchen.
He, too, smiled sweetly.
No, she thought in that instant. No.
None of it made sense, and yet it did.
She dropped the onion back into the batter and stepped away from them, and away from the stove. In that instant, both of them lurched: one body toward her, and the other toward the stove.
Poornima’s vision blurred. She didn’t know who it was that grabbed her, but she pushed them away so hard that she fell backward. She was on the floor, and they were both now by the stove.
Why are they standing there? She had just enough time to think, Why are they standing by the stove? before an arm swept something off it, and Kishore and her mother-in-law sprang away and raced to the other end of the kitchen.
She turned her head to follow them, and that was why, when the oil landed, it splattered across the left side of her face, down her neck, and caught her upper arm and shoulder. Poornima felt a fire, and then the fire, and everything with it, went out.
7
Kishore and her mother-in-law refused to pay the hospital bills, so Poornima was discharged on her second day. Only her father-in-law and Divya came to get her; when she sat down in the autorickshaw, the bandages still on her face and neck and arm and shoulder, she felt so small, so placental, that she shivered in the midday heat. Her father-in-law said, “You can stay for a day or two, but then you have to leave. It’s no good for you in Namburu. It’s no good. I’ll go tonight and buy you a ticket to Indravalli.”
Poornima nodded imperceptibly, and that slight nod sent a shattering pain up the left side of her face.
When they reached the house, her mother-in-law and Kishore were in the sitting room, and they watched her with contempt. Divya led her up the stairs, and when they reached the terrace, Poornima had her go in first and cover the mirror on the armoire. Only then did she enter. She lay down on the bed. Divya left, and then she came back that evening with a plate of food. Poornima looked at the plate of food and started to cry. Divya left again and came back with a glass of milk, and this she forced Poornima to drink.
The next day was the same. Only Divya came and went. But this time, she brought her books with her, and opened one of them, and began to study. Poornima made a sound, a squeak. Divya looked up from her book. “It’s my Telugu primer,” she said.
The primer was from the British era, she told Poornima; the small village school in Namburu never having had the money to buy new ones. Poornima opened her mouth slightly, the slightest amount, in an attempt to speak, but the pain shot through her like a cannon.
“Do you want me to read aloud to you?”
Poornima blinked.
The story Divya read was told from the perspective of a man on a ship in the early 1900s. The man’s name was Kirby. Divya paused and said, “It doesn’t say if it’s his family name or his given name.” Then she continued reading.
In the story, this man Kirby was traveling on a ship from Pondicherry to Africa. While traveling, he met another man, also on the ship, who was a Portuguese army colonel. The colonel, according to Kirby, was traveling to his family’s estate in Mozambique. They grew sisal, the colonel told Kirby, and went on endlessly about how sisal looked (like a Mexican agave, Kirby wrote, though neither Poornima nor Divya, even with a footnoted explanation, had any idea what that was either), how it was grown and then harvested. He said the blades of the sisal plant could cut deeper than a sword. Kirby then asked the colonel, But how do you handle it?
Oh, we don’t, the colonel said. The Negroes do all that.
On his last night on the ship, before he was due to disembark the next morning at Lourenço Marques, the old colonel told Kirby this story:
It happened one winter, the colonel began, when I was stationed at Wellington, near Madras. Years ago. Our cantonment, quite suddenly, was overrun with rats. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They got into the food, the beds, the artillery. And not just any kind of rat, he said, and here he cupped his hands so that they were as big around as a dinner plate. They were enormous. Well, no one knew how to get rid of them. We tried poison and traps and we even had this tribal shaman come down from the mountains, some sort of expert on rodents and scorpions and such. None of it did any good, you see. The rats went right on eating and shitting everywhere. (Here there was inserted another foot
note indicating that the colonel had meant to say defecating.)
After about a month of this, the colonel continued, one of the young soldiers noticed that after he’d spit on the ground, a rat came around, sniffed his sputum, and looked up at him with the kindest, most concerned eyes the man had ever seen. The soldier told us about it at dinner that evening, almost joking, you see. But I could tell the young man was a bit shaken. The camp doctor heard this, and that very night he diagnosed him with early-stage tuberculosis.
Kirby noted that here, the colonel took a sip of his champagne (again, Poornima and Divya shrugged, not knowing what that was). Rats, you see, he said, putting down his glass of champagne, can detect tuberculosis well before modern medicine can. That damn rat very nearly saved the camp from an epidemic. Amazing, isn’t it?
Kirby, apparently, then asked the colonel, What about the rats? What happened to them?
That’s the thing. One day they all just left. Picked up and disappeared. It was as if their sole purpose was to warn us. To save the thing that was trying to destroy them.
At this point, Kirby, writing this account, said he laughed out loud but that the colonel only closed his eyes. At the end of the story in the Telugu primer, Kirby wrote that early the next morning, when the ship had docked in Lourenço Marques, they went to wake the colonel, but he was dead. Kirby wrote that laying on his narrow ship’s bed, the colonel was pallid, his skin nearly translucent, and that he could almost see the blood drifting away from the colonel’s heart.
That was the end of the story, and when Divya stopped reading, Poornima looked at her. A young girl, the same age she and Savitha had been when they’d first met. She then looked down at Divya’s neck—brown like bark, a vein throbbing, pulsing steadily, a lighthouse beneath her skin—and then Poornima thought about the poor colonel, and the rats, and Mozambique, wherever that was, and she didn’t have to wonder what it looked like, blood drifting away from the heart.
* * *
The next day was a Sunday. Everyone was at home. Poornima could hear them moving downstairs, talking, laughing, and the vendors, mostly vegetable sellers, stopping at various doors, yelling out their wares, eggplant and beans and peppers plucked just that morning. The dew still clinging to their skins. The Krishna didn’t flow past Namburu, but Poornima thought she caught its scent on the wind, could see the fishing nets flung into its waters, twirling like langas. When she closed her eyes, there were the saris drying on the opposite shore. Every color, fluttering in the river breeze, fields of wildflowers.
Her eyes, now, were often closed. She stayed in the room all day, only going downstairs to use the latrine. She hadn’t bathed since the spill, and her musk and animal smell, mingled with the smell of her sweat, of rotting bandages, of copper (Had she gotten her period? Maybe. She didn’t care to look.), and burned flesh, always the smell of burned flesh, assaulted her as she tried to sleep. She didn’t mean to sleep. She meant to stay awake, all night, if needed. Her father-in-law had come upstairs the previous night and handed her a train ticket to Indravalli. Second class, instead of third, so she could travel in relative comfort. He hadn’t looked her in the eye, but she knew he was sorry. She knew so little about him, but she knew suddenly that his life was lived in regret. He stood at the door for a moment, before leaving, and she was lying on the bed, and she thought they must look like two wounded animals, circling in a dark cave.
After he left, Poornima stared at the ticket, and then she put it under her pillow. It was the twice-daily passenger train, leaving Namburu at 2:30 P.M. and arriving in Indravalli at 2:55 P.M. Twenty-five minutes. That’s all there had ever been.
She thought Kishore might come upstairs, if only to ensure that she was leaving, but only Divya came in the evening, bringing Poornima’s dinner of rice and pappu, the rice cooked soft so that she wouldn’t have to chew very much. After she left, Poornima closed her eyes again. It was dark when she opened them. There was a gibbous moon, so when she studied the shadowed room, she saw the shapes of the furniture, the gleam of the stone floor, the pattern of flowers on the sheet that covered her. She looked at the desk; she saw, even in the moonlight, the stack of papers, the accounting papers that had given her such pleasure to decipher, such a sense of accomplishment and purpose. It was nothing, she realized, her heart breaking. All of it was nothing. It was nothing in the face of something as simple as hot oil, and the slightest evil.
She then rose heavily, into the silver moonlight, and stepped onto the terrace. She would miss the terrace; she realized it was the only thing, along with Divya, that she would miss from her two years in Namburu. She walked to the edge of the terrace and looked at the first stars, and she thought of the many years she had left to live. Or maybe she had none at all. It was impossible to know. But if she didn’t die tonight, if she didn’t die within the amount of time a human being can readily foresee, can honestly imagine (a day? a week?), What, she wondered, will I do with all those years? All those many years? To look forward, Poornima realized, was to also look back. And so she saw her mother, as she had once been: young and alive. Sitting at the loom by lantern light, or bending over a steaming pot, or tending to one of Poornima’s brothers or her sister, wiping their faces or bathing them or pushing the hair from their eyes. That’s all she could recall her mother ever doing: something for someone else. Even Poornima’s most tender memories—of being fed by her mother’s hand on the bus trip to see her grandparents, or the weight of it against her hair while she’d been combing it—had all of them to do with her mother doing something for her child, never for herself. Is that how she’d meant to spend her life? Is that how lives were meant to be spent?
Now, Poornima looked to the future. She saw herself going back to Indravalli. At 2:55 P.M. the next day, she would step off the passenger train, walk to her father’s house, and enter it. She could see him clearly, sitting on the veranda, on the hemp-rope bed, smoking his tobacco and watching her. Just as she was watching him. Perhaps her siblings would be there, perhaps they wouldn’t. But what the future held most clearly—more clearly even than the image of her father—was the image of a battlefield. And no battlefield, in all the histories of man, could compare with the one Poornima now saw: blood-soaked, and littered—littered with what? She moved closer, she knelt to see, her eyes widened: it was herself. It was littered with her limbs, her organs, her feet, her hands, her scalped hair, and even her skin, shredded, mangled as if by dogs.
Poornima blinked, but it wasn’t tears she blinked back. What was it? She didn’t know, but she could see it—floating in the air around her, suffocating, spinning like ash.
She walked back into the upstairs room, took out the train ticket from under her pillow, and ripped it in half, then quarters, then eighths, and then she let the tiny pieces fall to the floor like confetti. She watched them fall with a certain delight, and then she turned to the armoire, opened it, and took out the locked box. There was no key that she could see; probably her mother-in-law had the key on the key ring she always kept tucked into the waistband of her sari. Calmly, Poornima gripped the statuette—the one that had been presented to Kishore for being first in his college—and slammed it against the lock. The lock broke, but so did the statuette, at the point where the figurine (of a bird taking flight from a branch) was cauterized to the engraved base. She threw both pieces of the statuette back into the armoire. The papers in the box were of no interest to Poornima, but the jewelry—only a thin gold chain and two bangles; the rest Kishore kept in a safe-deposit box at the bank—she tied into a pouch at the end of her pallu and slipped it into the waistband of her own sari; the cash (a little over five hundred rupees) she placed into her blouse, next to her left breast. Then the box, too, she tossed back into the armoire, closed the door, and stood in front of it.
The mirror was still covered with a sheet, and Poornima stood looking at the sheet, as if it held an answer. A sign. But it held nothing; it was just a sheet. She ripped it off the mirror with such force that the win
d in the room shifted; her hair flew up and around her face as if she were staring out to sea. But Poornima felt none of it, none of the wind and none of the sea. She stood perfectly still in front of the mirror—it was the most she’d ever seen of herself. The mirror in Indravalli had only been a hand mirror, and while in Namburu, though she’d been living here for almost two years, she’d never really stood in front of this mirror. Or any other. But now, she stood. She saw that she was no longer a girl. And if she had ever been pretty, she certainly wasn’t anymore. She stepped closer, and then she raised her hands to her face and removed the bandages, one by one. The left side of her face and neck were just as she imagined them, or worse: flaming red, blistered, gray and black on the edges of the wide burn, the left cheek hollow, pink, silvery, and wet, as if it’d been turned inside out. Her left arm and shoulder, though, were not as bad as she’d thought. They had only been splattered by droplets of oil, rather than splashed, and the splatters already seemed to be healing. But the face and neck she knew she had to keep from getting infected, which meant she needed clean bandages and iodine. With the bandages off, she looked even more grotesque than she did with them on. She recalled the doctor saying, while she was in a morphine haze, “You’re lucky it didn’t get you below the neck.”
She’d turned her sleepy gaze to him.
“Your husband won’t leave you. As long as you have proper breasts, a man won’t leave you.”
She’d wanted to say—had she not been in an opiate haze, had she not been content to simply close her eyes—Then I wish it’d gotten the breasts, too.
Poornima lay back on the bed and waited. She waited until the darkest part of the night, then changed into a fresh sari, drank the glass of water that Divya had left for her, and snuck downstairs, out of the house, and out of Namburu, and all of this she did with a shocking stealth and precision and cold-bloodedness, because of course she knew exactly what she was going to do, no matter how long it took her, no matter how difficult the journey, and she knew exactly where all of this had always been leading, always.