Girls Burn Brighter

by Shobha Rao

  “You do?”

  “Yes, it must’ve been two years ago. Now I remember. And she was from Indravalli. Are you from there, too?”

  “What did she say? Where did she go?”

  “Not north. Where did you get the idea she would go north? She’s right here. In Vijayawada. I got her a job.”

  “Here? In Vijayawada?”

  “Yes. Right here. Come on, I’ll take you to her.” He smiled again, and this time Poornima noticed that one of his teeth was discolored: one of the lower ones, in the front. She looked at it and wondered if he was lying.

  9

  They left the station by the same way Poornima had come in, nearly two weeks earlier. They walked for what seemed like hours, through the Green Park Colony and Chittinagar, and then they entered an area with run-down homes and shacks. The tea stalls seemed dirtier, and the eyes of the men followed them, rimmed with red. They saw Poornima’s bandages and turned quickly away.

  “Do you have to have those?” he said.

  “Have what?”

  “Those bandages.”

  Poornima felt the need to scratch again, the moment she thought about them. “Well, yes, of course I do.”

  “Savitha might mind them.”

  “Why would she?”

  They walked on. By now, there were no more run-down houses, but only empty lots. Poornima could tell they were getting farther away from the Krishna. The wide-open lots were inhabited only by pigs and feral dogs and heaps of trash. At the edge of one of these garbage-strewn fields was a massive house, much bigger than anything else in the area, and much better maintained, too. They turned into the drive. “Savitha is here? She works here?”

  “Sort of,” he said enigmatically.

  Rishi didn’t ring the bell; they walked right in. As soon as they did, Poornima heard shuffling coming from the second floor. She looked up into the open balcony and saw maybe five or six girls, her age and even younger, milling for a moment, and then turning and walking away. She didn’t see Savitha, though. Rishi said, “Come on,” and led her deeper down the first-floor hallway. At its end was a door, and when they entered it—knocking this time—a thin man with large spectacles was sitting behind a desk. He had skin the texture of jackfruit, maybe from a childhood disease, Poornima thought. He looked up and eyed her, and his expression of boredom turned to distaste. But the edge of his gaze held more than distaste, and Poornima nearly stepped back and fled, to see such bold and ready ruthlessness.

  “What is that?” he said, not looking at Rishi but clearly addressing him.

  “Train station, Guru.”

  “Are you stupid?”

  “You said we were short, Guru. So I thought maybe—”

  “Is that right? Is that what you thought?”

  Rishi lowered his head and nodded.

  “Well, take it back,” the man growled. “She’s ugly. And those bandages. Who’d pay for that? Don’t you have any sense? No one does. That’s the problem. And guess what that Samuel did? Left without a word. Took one of the girls with him. Now what am I supposed to do? Nobody to do the books and one less girl. And you. Bringing that around. Get rid of it.”

  Poornima looked from Rishi to the man behind the desk. She thought of her money, and her jewelry, and she thought she might never have another chance. “Do you know my friend? From my village. Rishi said—” she began.

  The man was scribbling in a book, a logbook of some sort, and when Poornima spoke, he looked up at her as if he was amazed, perplexed that she had a voice. He made a slow fist. “I said, get her out of here.”

  “He said you did.”

  He put down his pen, and she could see the anger rising. Constricting his mouth, his nose, and finally his eyes into pinpoints of rage. “You know, I’ve seen monkeys more attractive than you.”

  Rishi grabbed her arm, as if to pull her out of the room. Poornima shook him off. She thought of the weaving hut, the morning after Savitha left, and she thought of how she must’ve walked out, all alone, into the night. She wondered whether she had turned around, just before leaving, and stood at the door, searching for a reason to stay, and yet hadn’t found one. Nothing, not ever, would be emptier for Poornima than that thought. “I can do books,” she said.

  The man looked at her.

  “I can do books. Accounting. I’ve learned.”

  The man laughed. He said, “Since when do village girls learn accounting? Where did you say you were from?”

  “I can. I’ll show you.”

  The man looked at Rishi and Rishi looked back at him. Then they both looked at Poornima. The man then turned the logbook around to face Poornima and said, “Go ahead.”

  Poornima studied it. They just seemed a jumble of numbers at first, with letters heading most of the columns, with what had to be dates on the left-most column. But the longer she looked at them, the more she realized there was a pattern: the numbers under some of the letters were always bigger. And the dates, she saw, were the previous month’s dates. Then she realized what the letters were; they were initials. Three of them were S, followed by a number. Cold dripped down her spine. “Wouldn’t it be better if you knew more? Like, if it was the same man, over and over again? And what days he was coming. And whether for the same girl. If you tracked that, you could charge more.”

  There was silence. A dog barked. “So you can,” the man said. He looked at her, as if for the first time. “What else can you do?”

  “I can cook, and I can clean, and I can work on the charkha.”

  Guru signaled with a wave of his hand for Rishi to leave the room. Once he’d gone, he looked at her with sudden interest, but interest laced with cruelty, with calculation.

  “Guru,” he said. “That’s my name. We have more of these. Six others. You have to do all of them. Where are you staying?”

  “At the train station.”

  “There’s a room in back. You can stay there. Nothing in the room will belong to you, but we can try it for a few days. Are you willing to try it for a few days?” His tone sharpened, pointed at her like a dagger, and Poornima realized he was no longer talking about the books, or account keeping. She nodded.

  Then he said, “What happened to your face?”

  “Nothing,” Poornima said. “I had an accident.”

  Guru smiled, horribly. Then he sat back in his chair and said, “Oil? Or acid?”

  * * *

  She was given a windowless room in the back, on the first floor. There was a cot on the floor, a framed picture of Ganesha over the door, and a small refrigerator in one corner. There was an attached bathroom with a latrine and a sink with running water and a high strip of window, which Poornima couldn’t reach. She stood and stared at the unreachable rectangle of light. Then she examined the bathroom; she’d never been in a room with an attached latrine or running water. She hid the money and jewelry under the cot and then went to take a bucket bath.

  When she came out and tried to open the outer door, she found that it was locked. She pushed on it, banged and yelled, but there was no sound on the other side. She stepped back and stared at the door. Maybe it had locked by accident? But it couldn’t have; she’d seen the metal rod on the door handle, and how it had to be pushed into a set of grooves to lock. What did that mean? Were they imprisoning her? Were they? The thought pushed a scream out of her throat so loud that the frame of Ganesha fell off the wall. She flung herself at the door. She grew hoarse from yelling and crying; her hands stung from pounding on the door. Nothing. Not a sound from outside. She slumped against it and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw the refrigerator on the other side of the room. She rose unsteadily and looked inside. There were two bottles of water and a bowl of glistening fruit: guavas and apples and sapota and grapes. She closed the refrigerator and banged on the door again. Still, nothing. When she’d exhausted herself, she went and lay down on the cot and forced herself to sleep.

  She had no idea how much time had passed when she woke up. For a moment
, she was afraid. Afraid of what? she asked herself. Being locked in a room? The door never opening again? The door opening? Suddenly, none of it felt much different from the years she’d spent in Namburu, so she went to the refrigerator again and took a hesitant sip from one of the bottles of water. Then she took another, longer sip. She was hungry, so she reached for one of the fruits, but then her hand, of its own accord, simply stopped. Paused. Just as she reached for an apple. She held it there, motionless, wondering why, and that’s when they came back to her, Guru’s words: Nothing in the room will belong to you. Why had he said that? It seemed—with her hand still hovering near the fruit—a strange thing to say. But was it? Maybe this is a test, she thought, with sudden clarity. Maybe he wants to test whether I’ll take any of the fruit. It seemed a perfectly reasonable test for an accountant: to see if they would steal from their employer. Take what had been clearly stated didn’t belong to them. But she was hungry, and she thought for a moment she would take the fruit anyway, but then she thought, If Savitha is here, eating an apple—an apple—might spoil my one chance of finding her.

  She closed the refrigerator door.

  She sat in the room for three days without eating. At first, she felt a slow, growing hunger that soon gnawed at her stomach. Doubled her over in pain. And then weakness. The hunger was a beast, and she willed it to be still, restricting herself to the cot as if chained, drinking great gulps of water. She slept fitfully but stayed in bed well into late morning. By the middle of the second day, her skin was hot and feverish. The water did no good. She wondered if she was ill. She seriously considered eating the fruit—what if they never opened the door?—but then she thought of Savitha. She was here. Poornima only needed to pass this test; she was here. She settled back on the cot and thought about food. That did no good. So then she thought about hunger. In Indravalli, there had been plenty of days when she’d gone hungry, giving her share to her brothers and sister, but there had always been a little for her, even if it was only a handful of rice and pickle. But this hunger: this hunger was a ravaged land.

  The weakness spread. She was tired from the exertion of going to the bathroom, of lifting the water bottle. On the third day, her skin ceased to function. A drop of water landed on her arm, and her entire body convulsed from the impact. It was as if she no longer had skin, and the water had landed on raw, exposed tissue. She didn’t take a bucket bath on the third day. She could hardly stand. But her body began to emit an odor. She thought her burns might be infected, or the bandages were rotting, but it was neither: it was her pores. It was not her usual sweat; that smell she knew. This was more piquant, intense, and absinthal. The sheet on the cot was sticky with it, and yet the peculiar scent of her famished body, every one of her limbs afire, felt to Poornima as if hunger were the most natural state, the truest one. She hardly even wanted food; food became an abstract thing, a memory for which she felt mostly apathy, and sometimes hatred.

  On the morning of the fourth day, the door opened.

  Still on the cot, Poornima opened her eyes and didn’t bother to get up. It was Guru. He looked at her, visibly disgusted, and said, “What is that smell?”

  She continued looking at him, and then she closed her eyes. She said, “I didn’t eat them.”

  He went to the refrigerator, looked inside, and said, “So you didn’t,” and then he turned to her. “I wouldn’t have cared if you had.”

  She opened her eyes again.

  “Is that what you thought I was after? To see if you’d eat the fruits?” He laughed. “You village girls are all so amusingly stupid. They wouldn’t have lasted past the first day, anyway. No,” he said. “No, what I wanted to show you, what I wanted you to appreciate is what I own.” Poornima began to sit up, confused, but he said, “No, no, don’t sit up on my account. In fact, lie back down, and turn over.” She lay down again, but remained on her back, watching him. “If you’re going to work for me then I need you to understand what I own. I own you,” he began. “I own the food you eat. I own your sweat, your stink. I own your weakness. But most of all, I own your hunger.” He was standing above her, looking down. “Do you understand? I own your hunger. Now,” he said, unbuckling his belt, “turn over. I don’t like faces. Especially not yours.”

  * * *

  She began working for him the following day. Her desk was next to his, but smaller, so he could watch over her. But he was rarely there. She was usually alone, and she left the door open, looking up at every girl who passed by it.

  None of them was Savitha. At least, none at this location. Poornima wasn’t allowed to talk to them—Guru watched her keenly when he was there, and when he wasn’t, the cook, named Raju, watched her—but every time one of the girls came downstairs, Poornima nodded or smiled. They mostly ignored her. Some of the younger ones, or newer ones, would look back at her sadly, or bravely, and then they would go back upstairs. There were thirteen girls. But were they girls? Poornima wondered. Of course they were. None of them was probably older than sixteen. But there was something missing in them; some essence of girlhood had left them. What was it? Poornima thought about it every day during her first few weeks at the brothel. Innocence, certainly. That was obvious. And they were damaged. That, too, was obvious. But there was something else. Something finer.

  And then she had it. It came to her while she was watching one of the girls trudge through the house midafternoon, just after she’d woken up, on her way to the latrines. She was rubbing her eyes, and her face was swollen with sleep, or maybe fatigue. Her gaze was even, and indifferent, as she stood at the back door, looking out. And it was when Poornima saw this gaze, this indifference, that she understood: the girl had lost her sense of light. It was all the same to her, to all the girls, really: light and dark, morning and night. But it wasn’t an outside light they’d lost a sense of, Poornima realized. It was an interior one. And so that was the aspect of girlhood they’d lost: a sense of their own light.

  Poornima thought of light, and then she thought of Savitha. There were six books she had to track and balance and audit against the money that was coming in. They’d even given her one of those little adding machines Kishore had used. The machine made everything much, much quicker. Even so, she worked diligently, all the while trying to figure out a way to go to the other brothels, to see the other girls. By now, she knew Rishi had been lying, back at the train station when he’d said he knew Savitha, but Guru ran nearly all the brothels in Vijayawada, and Poornima decided she couldn’t make her way north until she knew for sure. And so she stayed, and she waited.

  By her ninth month working at the brothel, Poornima had only managed to visit two of the other locations, asking to go along with Guru when he collected. “I’m not one of the girls,” she said. “I want to drive around a little.” He agreed reluctantly, though she sensed that he’d come to trust her. She never stole money, she never asked for money, and she never made a mistake in the books. He came to confide in her at times and even began giving her a small salary. She realized it was because of her scar that he trusted her, in the small way that he did. It was odd, but it was true. She was no longer wearing bandages, but the burn had healed and left scar tissue that was shiny and wide and blisteringly pink. It made her look damaged, harmless, and, most important, pathetic.

  One day, Guru came in complaining of the cost of buying food and clothing and sundries for the nearly hundred women and girls in the brothels. “Thousands of rupees I spend per month. Thousands. All they do is eat.”

  Poornima didn’t say anything. She knew for a fact that he made over one hundred thousand rupees a month off the girls. In some months, he made two lakhs.

  “For instance, just the other day, a girl tells me it’s her birthday, and could I buy her a sweet. Her birthday! I said, You’ll get a sweet when you do ten men in one night. That’s when you’ll get a sweet.”

  Poornima nodded.

  “Every day. Every day they eat and eat.”

  She went back to her work; it was com
mon for Guru to complain, and she’d grown used to it.

  “And the audacity. One time, this one girl says to me, I want a banana. So I say, I buy you rice. Go eat that. And you know what she says?”

  “No. What?” Poornima hardly looked up.

  “She says, But I like to eat bananas with my rice. With my yogurt rice. Can you believe that? A banana! The audacity.”

  Poornima’s head shot up. She stilled her thoughts, she evened her voice. “Oh,” she said. Then she said, “What happened to that girl? The one who asked for the banana?”

  Guru shrugged. “We sold her.”

  “Sold her? To whom?”

  Guru looked up. His eyes narrowed. He said, “You think all we have are these shitty brothels? You think you’re doing all the books? Our main income is from selling girls. To rich men. To men in Saudi. Dubai.”

  Poornima took a breath. She told herself, Don’t let him see. He won’t tell you if you let him see. “But that one,” she said lightly, “the one who wanted the banana. Where did she go?”

  “I think she was part of that big shipment we made. A year ago? Some rich man in America. Get this: he wanted girls to clean apartments. Apparently, over there it costs serious money to hire people to clean. To clean. Common Dalits. It was cheaper for him to buy them. He owned hundreds of them. Apartments, I mean. Some place called Seetle, Sattle. I don’t know. But he paid good money for them.”

  Poornima could feel the air around her cooling. She could feel a great wooden door creaking open. “How do you get there?”

  Guru started to laugh. He started to howl with laughter. “It’s far. It’s far, far away. You’ll never get there.”

  Poornima laughed with him, but she knew she would.

  Savitha

  1

  Savitha knew she wouldn’t get the banana, not at first, at least. But what would it take to get something as simple, as small, as a banana?