by Shobha Rao
She’d find out.
Savitha also knew she had to deal with the leader of the ring, named Guru. No one else. He came around occasionally to check on his goods, as he called the girls. The first time was within a few weeks of her arrival. She’d left Indravalli in the early hours of the morning, on the same day she was to marry Poornima’s father. Her body hurt. She’d been crouched in the corner of the weaving hut for three days. She hadn’t wept, she hadn’t blinked (not that she was aware of), she hadn’t hoped or prayed or felt pain, nor had she had a single thought. Not one. Well, maybe one. Her only thought had been, Which is better? This? Or being dead? Or are they one and the same? Before leaving the weaving hut, and the sleeping Poornima, she’d untied all the tiny knots of the sari she’d been making for her, not yet even half completed, stretched out on the loom like a shroud, and folded it into eighths, and then tucked the cloth into the inside of her blouse, against her flat chest.
Then she left Indravalli, knowing it was forever.
When she got to the bus stop—out on the highway, not the one in town—the first bus that pulled up was the one to Vijayawada. It was empty, except for the conductor. Not even the farmers were headed to market yet. Savitha didn’t have any money, not a single paisa, so when the door of the bus opened, she looked up at the driver, not at all pleading, but with a look that was stern, deliberate, and she said, “No one will possibly find out if you give me a ride.”
The bus driver looked at her, up and down, and then he laughed and closed the door and drove away. A lorry was her only chance. She waited a few more minutes until one came into view. It drove off, not even slowing, as did four others, ignoring her utterly, until the sixth one. The sixth one was painted intricately, a Ganesha on top of the windshield, in the middle, with a scene of a tranquil lake with a hut and cows on one side and a bouquet of roses on the other. Two fresh limes dangled from its front bumper, for good fortune. Along the inside top of the windshield was draped a length of red streamers, sparkling even without the sun. Savitha hailed the driver, stepping onto the edge of the road, and when he slowed, she saw that he was young, hardly older than her. Closer up, once she’d climbed into the cabin, she saw that his teeth were the most brilliant white she had ever seen, whiter even than the temple on Indravalli Konda, though his eyes were bleary, red, maybe from the lack of sleep or dust or drink.
“Where are you headed?”
“Depends,” she said. “How far are you going?”
“To Pune.”
“Then that’s where I’m going.”
He smiled, and this time, Savitha wasn’t so sure of the brilliance of his teeth. Their whiteness, yes, but not their brilliance.
It took less than ten minutes, bumping along on the Trunk Road, past the shuttered roadside tea shops, and the dark huts, and the dewy fields of rice, and the sleeping dogs, for the driver’s hand to leave the steering wheel. It didn’t inch along the seat, as Savitha might’ve expected, but simply took flight and landed on her thigh. “I’m in no hurry,” he said. “Are you?”
Savitha took a breath.
She understood, in that very instant, that a door had been opened. Not today, but three days ago. What was this door? she wondered. Why hadn’t she ever known it was there? She had no answer. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to know the answer. Regardless, it was now open, and she was through it. Poornima’s father, of course, had been the one to open it, the one to push her through, and she felt rage, an intense and terrible rage toward him—for no other reason than that he hadn’t asked her what she wanted. He hadn’t said, There is a door. Do you see it? Do you want me to open it? Do you want to see what’s on the other side? But now it was done. And now, she realized, that’s all she’d ever be in the eyes of men: a thing to enter, to inhabit for a time, and then to leave.
They drove on. The lorry driver’s hand inched up her thigh. They drove across the Krishna and turned onto the national highway.
Well, if that were true, then something else also had to be true. She didn’t have to think long on it to figure out what it was; it was like it had been waiting there all along, alongside the road. And it was this: there was yet another door. A smaller door, a more formidable one. A hidden one. But through this other door, she knew, lay the real treasures: her love for Poornima, her love for her parents and her sisters. These treasures gleamed: the feel of cloth, the one against her chest, yes, but really, all cloth. How it lay like a hand (not the lorry driver’s, but a tender one, wanting nothing) against your skin, protecting you, softening with time. They shone through the night, these treasures: the memory (already a memory) of her father’s hands, the way they reached with such fear, such longing, the taste of yogurt rice with banana, the way it was creamy and sweet, both at once, the fill of her heart, the way it swelled but never broke.
“Stop here,” she said.
The lorry driver’s hand paused, nearly at her crotch.
“Here?”
“Right here.”
“But we’re hardly past Vijayawada. You said Pune.”
She looked at him, at his dark lips, the top one nearly completely curtained by his mustache. Then he smiled, as if she might smile back. But she only looked some more, at the red of his eyes and the white of his teeth. He slowed the lorry but didn’t stop. Savitha looked out the window. A mangy dog lay next to a garbage heap; farther down, a chicken scratched at the dirt. He’d swerve to avoid them, she thought. Anybody would. And then she thought, I hold the key.
She lifted his hand from her thigh and wrenched it, hard, at the wrist. He gasped, slammed on the brakes. The lorry tilted and then screeched to a halt.
“You bitch. Pakshi. Get out.”
When she did, the lorry pulled away with a loud squeal and a cloud of dust. Savitha stood on the national highway and looked to the east and to the west. Toward the east were the outskirts of Vijayawada. They’d mostly skirted the city, but it would be easy enough to go back. Back. That didn’t seem very smart. To the west were Hyderabad and then Karnataka and then Maharashtra and then the Arabian Sea. Not that Savitha knew any of this; she knew only that Pune was to the west, and beyond was a sea. She sat right down, on the dirt, on the edge of the highway, and wondered what to do. There were more vehicles now, mostly lorries. She could hail another one, hope for a better man. Most any one of them would take her to Pune, if Pune was where she wanted to go. What did they speak there? Marathi, of course. Which, of course, she had no idea how to speak. What if she asked them to take her to Bangalore? They spoke Kannada there. Close to Telugu, but not quite. She turned her head and looked toward Vijayawada again. It was wiser to go back, she decided. It was better to first make some money, and to make money it was best to stay where she knew the language. And really, if anyone in Indravalli went looking for her, which she doubted they would, somewhere as obvious as Vijayawada would be the last place they’d look. Or so she guessed. But this she knew: it was better to be wise than to be smart.
* * *
Everyone called him Boss, or Guru, but his real name was probably something different. He was thin, with huge spectacles, and wiry, and seemed weak, but his physical aspect was a foil. This Savitha could see plainly in his eyes. His eyes: boring through her as if through rock, through mountain, through the Himalayas, looking not for metals or minerals or gems, but for girls, poor but pretty girls, which she came to understand was just another word for profit.
The first time he came around Savitha was still drugged. She’d made it so simple for them; it was almost laughable. She’d walked back into Vijayawada. For three weeks she’d gone to various tailoring shops and seamstresses, looking for work, and in the nights, she’d slept next to a gutter in the goldsmiths district, scented by the coal braziers used to filigree the shining yellow metal during the day, teeming with rats and pigs at night. One rat had tried to nibble on her ear as she slept. She’d eaten whatever she could find: the insides of discarded banana peels, a half-gnawed roti, a slice of coconut from the Kanaka Durga Te
mple. Toward the end of her first month, she’d gone to a tea stall, on a narrow alley off Annie Besant Road, and stood on the edge of a group of men, looking up at the soot-grimed walls of the close buildings, the narrow strip of sky, glowing with sunrise, and the clotheslines, crisscrossing between the buildings, slicing open the morning sky. She wondered what to do. A man came up behind her, one she hadn’t even noticed in the huddled group of men, and he offered her a cup of tea. Savitha looked from the steaming, sugary cup of tea to his face. He was middle-aged, well dressed in clean pants and a shirt; his hair was neatly oiled and combed.
“Go on. Take it.”
She hesitated.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“Yes. My husband.”
“Where’s your mangalsutra?”
She shrugged, and he laughed. And it was then that she realized her mistake: her hands should’ve instinctively gone to her neck. But he only laughed some more, good-naturedly, and said, “Go on. This stall serves the best tea in the city.”
She took a sip, and then another, and then another. Then she drained the glass. She felt light-headed at first, which she took to be from the lack of food, but then when she opened her eyes, she was tied to a hemp-rope bed in a damp-smelling concrete room with no windows. She was tied at the wrists and the ankles. And no matter how much she strained and screamed, no one came; the rope didn’t give. After what seemed like days, someone entered the room, a boy, she thought, but couldn’t be sure because it was dark inside the room and dark outside the room. He ran his hand over the bed, then over her face. When he found it, he pinched her nose shut until she opened her mouth, then he threw another bitter liquid into it, this time without the benefit of tea.
She dropped again into a deep sleep.
Three or four or five days later, or maybe a month later, the door opened for a second time. This time, a thin yellow light seeped in from outside the door, and Savitha saw that it was a little girl. She was lugging a bucket, far too heavy for her, splashing water on the floor and over the front of her torn frock. Savitha was still hazy in her thoughts, her body still limp, but she told herself, Talk to her. Talk to this girl. Tell her you’ll do anything, anything. Her mouth opened, or so she assumed, but nothing came out. Savitha willed harder, she closed her eyes, she focused on the fog, the heaviness, she told herself, Speak. “Untie me,” she finally managed to whisper. “Please.”
The girl seemed not to hear. She went about raising a wet cloth to Savitha’s legs, her crotch, her underarms, her chest. My chest, Savitha thought. Was the strip of Poornima’s sari still there? Was it? “The cloth,” she croaked. “Is it?” By now the girl had found it. She raised it to her face, seemed to sniff it once, then threw it into the corner. Savitha let out a long wail. Animal. Wounded. The girl still paid her no attention. She went about her work, the damp cloth now wiping down Savitha’s neck, her arms. When she reached for her hands, Savitha grabbed the girl’s forearm. She yanked her closer, so she could see the child’s face in the dim light of the half-open door. She looked into the girl’s eyes; they returned her gaze, but they were unmoved, blank, gray, as if the concrete of the room had blown like sediment and settled into them. Savitha’s alarm pushed through layers of confusion, rage, incoherence, and flame, and she said, “Can’t you hear me?”
The girl let out her own wail, though hers was even more animal, more wounded. And it was then, at that sound, when Savitha truly began to understand her bondage, her imprisonment, the totality of its vision, the completeness of her fate. And that she’d been neither smart nor wise: the girl was a deaf-mute, and the boy had been blind.
* * *
She flailed. She strained at her wrists and ankles, managing only to tighten their grip. She beat her head against the hemp, she screamed, she wept. She bit and snapped against the rope with her teeth. Too far away for her to cut through, but the ends she caught and gnawed until her gums bled. She tasted copper and thought, Good. And then she thought, How long will it take to bleed to death? Out of my gums? The drugs she spit out, gagged on, retched every time the boy poured them in. That’s when he started injecting it—mostly by plunging the needle into her stomach, but if she squirmed too much, straight into the side of her buttocks. But even in her haze, her bafflement, Savitha could see clearly the edges of the bed, the dark corners of the room, and in the dank of the windowless walls, the beauty she’d lost: sunlight, wind, water.
In between bouts of sleeping, sweating, waking, and vomiting, there were other memories, floating in and out, above and beyond, like breath. There was the shimmer of the temple on Indravalli Konda, the perfume of freshly cooked rice, the shouts of flower vendors, spilling petals on the streets, there were the words of an owl, there was the feel of the loom, the feel of thread, the feel of form, taking shape, becoming something. She could’ve woven a river; she could’ve woven a sea. Why was she lying here? Why?
The door opened, soon after the girl had cleaned her again. This time it was a man she’d not seen before. Although, in truth, she was bleary-eyed, weak, sodden, and high, her limbs long ago gone numb, so really, it could’ve been her father.
But it wasn’t her father.
This man—who she learned in time was the one called Guru—let the light spill in. Savitha squinted. He approached the bed with a small smile. Then he laid a knife at the edge of the bed, just beyond her reach. Despite her frailness, a sliver of something feral, a shard of some lucidity, sliced through her consciousness. Savitha lurched for it, nearly tipping the bed over. She rocked violently from side to side, side to side, until the knife fell to the floor with a clang. Guru ignored her. He walked to the corner of the room, where Poornima’s half-made sari still lay, and nudged it with the tip of his shoe. He bent a little, taking a closer look. He held his face away from the cloth, as if it were rotting meat, and then he smiled and said, “I know this weave. So distinctive. You’re from Indravalli, aren’t you?” Savitha said nothing. He walked back to the bed. His smile widened. She looked up at him, called him names, she begged; she sensed what was to come. “You stink,” he said placidly. Then he said, “There’s nothing worse than a woman who stinks.” He picked up the knife. He studied the blade intently. After a long moment, he said, “Maybe there is one thing. Just one. And that’s a woman who won’t listen.” He lowered the blade and ran the tip of it along her cheek, her neck. He yanked back the folds of her sari; her blouse fell away in tatters. He traced the edge of the knife against her breasts, under them, between. “Not much to them, is there,” he said, looking down, and then he said, “You’ll listen, won’t you? Won’t you, my dear?” He looked into her eyes, almost kindly, and then he spit in her face. The spit, in the midst of her grogginess, her fear, just as she turned her head to avoid it, landed at the edge of her mouth and on her cheek. Guru rubbed it over more of her face. “A smudge, you see,” he said lightly, and then got up and left.
The thick glob of spit dried and puckered on Savitha’s cheek. He’d been chewing betelnut; she could smell it for hours.
* * *
They untied the rope but kept her locked in the room. They made sure she was hooked—if the boy with the needle was even a few minutes late, she pounded on the door, shivering and beseeching and mad, skin alight, on fire—and then, when she was good and hooked, they made her go through withdrawal. When they finally let her out (a month later, two?), Savitha had lost nearly ten kilograms, and her face was gaunt and gray. Large clumps of hair had fallen out. She was bruised, her ankles and wrists inflamed and red, not having yet healed. The madam took one look at her and clucked with disapproval, as if Savitha were a child being naughty, misbehaving, come home late for supper.
Savitha bent her head, believing she was that child.
Her first customer was a middle-aged man, maybe forty or forty-five. He worked in an office; Savitha could tell just by looking at him, slacks and a neat shirt, a gold watch, clean toes. There was a faded strip of ash across his forehead—had he conducted the puja th
at morning, or had it been his wife?
The man was furtive at first, but then he sat down next to her, on the edge of the bed, and said, “Will you give me a kiss?”
Savitha looked up at him. “I don’t know how,” she said. The statement so guileless that the man seemed to almost wilt when he heard it. “Here,” he said finally, “let me show you.”
After that, the mechanics of it all became routine: the five to six customers she had per day, the constant clucking and recriminations from the madam, the talking and laughing and teasing and silence of the other girls, whose names Savitha tried to remember but couldn’t, as if her mind had jellied, relented, forfeited. Relinquished something essential—kingdom, subjects, throne—while even the blood in her veins collapsed, not wanting, any longer, to carry the enormity of memory, the sorrow of new names.
But something remained, a constant, a comfort, and it was this: the cloth on which she lay. While the men pushed into her, pressed her face into the sheet—rough, cheap, bought at one of the tawdry stalls on Governorpet—Savitha closed her eyes and pressed her face, her back, her knees, her palms, deeper and deeper and deeper. The scent of woven cloth, threadbare with use, with semen, filled her nostrils. She held back tears. She held back thoughts of Poornima. She held back her girlhood, squandered on heaps of garbage. She held back her father, her mother, her sisters, her lost brothers. She held back the loamy scent of the Krishna, the laundresses laughing, the temple deepa quivering, the dark of the weaving hut, forever mourning. Though what she did let loose, let soar like a bird out of a cage, was the flight of her hands, weaving.
She allowed herself to recall that one thing.
Once, while still a small child, she’d gone to the cotton fields outside Indravalli, on the way to Guntur. Her mother had worked for a summer in the fields, and Savitha had trotted behind her, jumping for the bolls, wanting to help. She’d been far too short, but one had floated down from her mother’s hands and Savitha had caught it and squealed with delight, as if she’d caught a piece of a crumbling cloud. When she’d yanked her mother’s pallu and held it up like a prize, her mother had barely looked at her; instead she’d said, “Keep it. It’s what your frock is made from.” At those words, Savitha had stood still in the middle of the cotton field, hot under the summer sun, and had looked down at the boll in her hand, soft, full of seeds, and then she’d gazed up at the rows and rows of them, round white moons held aloft to the sky, so exquisite, so out of reach. Then she’d looked down at her frock, a faded pink, frayed at the hem, dirty, but still a frock. But how? she’d wondered. How could this little piece of fluff with the little brown seeds become my frock? She’d thought it was a secret, a secret kept by the adults. Or magic, more likely. But a mystery. Always a mystery, even after she grew up and began sitting at the charkha and then sitting at the loom and then sitting next to Poornima, eating dinner together, which, by her weaving, at least in some part, the purchase of food, food, had been made possible. So, an even greater mystery: from boll to cloth to food to friend.