by Shobha Rao
By his eleventh or twelfth year, he said, he was no longer human. He said, “I’d catch an animal, in a trap or with a crude bow and arrow, and kill it without a thought. Strangle it, snap its neck, while I looked into its eyes, and not feel the slightest thing. Not even victory. I would bash its head in with my bare hand, and it felt like I was cracking a nut.” As he neared the twentieth year, he said, he could recall no other life than that of a fugitive. He had memories, he told her, of the time before he was a fugitive. Vague memories of being in jail, even vaguer of being a son, a brother. “It was as if,” he said, “it was what I was born to be: a fugitive. Not just that. But that I was born a fugitive. Do you understand?”
This time, Savitha did, a little.
“Every so often, I met other fugitives. Sometimes tribals. But they generally left me alone. They asked no questions. Questions are for the living, and they could very clearly see that I was dead. At the start of my twenty-fourth year,” he said, “I began talking to the universe. Not just talking to it, but commanding it. I could make clouds part. I could make fish swim to me, swim into my hand with nothing in the hand besides desire. I could make wind stop blowing. I remember one night, deep in the forest—I couldn’t ever be near a ranger station, or a village, even the smallest—I was asleep, and was awoken by a strange rustling. When I sat up and looked around me, there was a cobra, staring straight back. I’d fashioned a kind of hatchet, so I reached for it. But the cobra was faster. It caught my hand just as I touched the hatchet, and it said, ‘You can’t kill me twice,’ which is when I knew it was my brother. And then the cobra said, ‘Find out something for me.’ I waited. I thought he, it, would ask me to find out whether our parents were all right, or whether fate and chance were in battle or in collusion, or whether our cycle of suffering would ever truly end, but instead, the cobra said, ‘Find out for me the depth of the forest floor.’
“‘The depth?’ I said.
“‘Yes. I’ve tried, you see. I’ve tried to snake my way all the way down; that’s what we do, after all, we snakes. But I can’t seem to find its floor. It’s as if I could keep going and going and going. That maybe there is no end. But there has to be. Maybe it goes to the core of the earth, or maybe somewhere even darker. Or hotter. Don’t you think?’
“‘No, I don’t,’ I said.
“‘Neither do I,’ the cobra said, and slithered away into the forest.”
Here, the man—who was clearly no longer a fugitive, as he was sitting in Savitha’s room—looked at her, maybe for the first time, and said, “That’s when I walked out of the forest. The very next morning. Because you see, the cobra didn’t want an answer; it didn’t want anything, certainly not to know the depth of the forest floor. What it wanted was to reveal to me that there is no end to guilt, no end to the prices we pay, that we are the forest, and our conscience, our hell, is the forest floor.”
He looked at her. She thought he might be waiting for her to say something, but no, he was just looking at her.
“I went to the nearest ranger station that morning. That very morning. Walked right through the doors and told them who I was and what I’d done. At first they didn’t believe me. Some guy who was saying he’d lived in the forest for twenty-five years—why would they? They didn’t even think it was possible. But after some discussion among them, they drove me to the police station in Shillong. And there, they had to call it in. So they called the police station in Guntur, but they said that the old courthouse, where all the criminal case files would have been kept, had burned down long ago, years ago, and that their own files from that time, kept in boxes in a musty back room, had been chewed through by rats, so really, there was no record of me at all. Anywhere. The constable put down the receiver, looked at me, and explained everything the Guntur police had told him, almost apologetically. And then he said I was free to go.”
“What did you do then?” she asked.
“I came home,” he said. “But by then, both my parents had died. From heartache, some said. But that’s what people want to believe. It’s more romantic that way. If I had to guess, I’d say my father died from rage and my mother from boredom. They were childless at the end of their lives, it’s true, even after having had two sons. I wish I could’ve apologized to them for that. I wish for many things. But they must’ve searched, too, for the forest floor.”
And with that, the former fugitive, who was now a customer, and yet had not once touched Savitha, his face as placid as the surface of a still lake, said, “So how did you lose your hand?”
4
The ticket for Saudi never arrived. Guru called her into his office three months after her operation and said the prince had found somebody more suitable. More suitable? Savitha asked. What’s more suitable?
“Apparently, a missing leg.”
“He told you that?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. His people did.”
Her left hand—the phantom one she’d been feeling over the past few weeks—clenched. It drew phantom blood. “What about the money?”
“Forget about that measly one lakh. I have a better deal.”
Savitha was seated in front of his desk, but she still slumped. She was tired. She was tired of deals. Every moment in a woman’s life was a deal, a deal for her body: first for its blooming and then for its wilting; first for her bleeding and then for her virginity and then for her bearing (counting only the sons) and then for her widowing.
“Farther away, though,” he said, twirling a pen in his hand.
She waited for her exhaustion, her despair, to pass. Then she said, “Farther is better.”
“A temporary visa first. Then they’ll figure out a way for you to stay. Or you can come back, if you want.”
“What do they want me for?” she asked, afraid of the answer.
“To clean houses. Flats. Apparently, they have to pay maids so much over there, it’s cheaper to buy them from here.”
“But how will I—” she began, but Guru, before she could finish, said, “I told them you’d work twice as fast.”
“Where?”
“America. Someplace called Sattle. Good money, too.”
Unlike Saudi, America she knew. Everyone knew America. And it was indeed far away. Far, far away. On the other side of the earth, she’d once heard someone say.
“How much?” she asked.
“Twenty thousand. Ten for you, ten for me.”
“That’s hardly anything! You said yourself I was worth more than that.”
Guru put down the pen. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Dollars, my dear. Dollars.”
* * *
But why would Guru split the money with me? Why would he ever have? That was the first thing that passed through Savitha’s mind, sitting across from him, watching the avarice glow in his eyes. The second was, He won’t, of course. Still, what bothered her was not that he was lying, which didn’t really matter, nor that she had been so slow to see it, but that she, she, had said the word worth.
* * *
It was a Telugu man who’d bought her, Savitha learned. In this town in America, she was told, he owned hundreds of apartments and a handful of restaurants and even a cinema hall. Maybe I’ll finally get to see a cinema, she thought, not with excitement or bitterness, but with a kind of shame. She’d always have to sit to Poornima’s left, she realized, so that they could hold hands during the scary parts. The man in America had two sons and a daughter. The daughter was married to a doctor, a famous doctor, the kind who made women’s breasts bigger or their noses smaller. Savitha had never heard of such a thing, had never known there were doctors who did such things, but wondered whether the extra nose bits went to the same place her hand had gone, and whether the extra breast bits came from that same place. The two sons helped the father run his many businesses, and Savitha didn’t know whether they were married. The man in America had a wife who was from Vijayawada, which is how they’d come to know of Guru, and she was exceedingly devout. She
was involved in good works all over the city, giving money to the poor and the sick, and every year, she donated ten lakh rupees to the Kanaka Durga Temple, along with a new set of gold ornaments for the deity.
Then she learned of a thing called the exchange rate.
Guru, out of this deal, would make over thirteen lakh rupees. That was a sum Savitha couldn’t even imagine, and she smiled with him when he said, “We could buy Indravalli, you and I.” After a moment, she asked him why her, why someone with only one hand, why not one of the other girls, one of the ones with both hands; they would certainly agree to go to America, and they would also clearly make better maids. Guru’s eyes sparkled. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Only you can go.” Apparently, this all had to do with something Guru had mentioned earlier, something called a visa. There were visas to do different types of things, such as one to visit a place, and another to work in a place, and another to study in that place. And then there was one to get treatment.
“What kind of treatment?” Savitha asked.
“The kind you’re going to get,” Guru said. “At least, that’s what they’ll tell him. To whatever official.” Then he nodded at the stub of her left arm, resting on her lap. “They’ll say you need to enter America for a special operation, one only they can perform. One doctor here, a doctor there—their son-in-law, maybe—will vouch for your need for American medical treatment. And once you’re there, well, the rest is easy.”
“But will I get the operation? Will they give me a new hand?”
He looked at her with something like incomprehension, maybe even a trace of contempt. “Of course not, you fool. There is no operation. You’re going to clean houses.”
* * *
So she was going to clean houses. That was fine. That was better than sleeping with men. But something Guru had said kept echoing inside of her. No, echo would indicate it was his voice she heard. It was not. It was her own, and it repeated, over and over and over again: Only you can go.
Only you can go. What did those words mean? They meant that of all the girls in all of Guru’s houses, only she could go. And why was that? Because she was the only one with a hand missing—the others might be prettier or stronger or sweeter; they might be lighter skinned or bigger breasted or have longer and thicker hair, plumper and rounder hips; but only she could go.
But what did that mean?
Savitha smiled.
It meant that she had leverage. It meant that she had power.
* * *
“I won’t go,” she said to Guru a week later.
His eyes widened in alarm. He laughed nervously. “What do you mean, you won’t go? Think of all the money.”
“I am.”
He was an animal in the dark, she thought. His eyes scanned the night forest for movement, sound. “You’re afraid I won’t give it to you? How could you? It’s just that I won’t get the money until after you’re there. Upon receipt. It’s like goods, you see.”
It wasn’t like goods, she thought.
“I’ll go on one condition,” she said.
He relaxed into his chair. He lifted his arm in munificence.
“My little sisters. I want you to give my parents enough money for their dowries. I want you to give them enough money for a new house. I want you to give them enough money to last the rest of their lives.”
He roared with laughter. She sat very still. He looked at her face, then at the strength of the one hand resting on her lap, and he stopped. “All right.”
“I want you to do it before I leave. And I don’t want them to know it had anything to do with me.”
He nodded.
“And one other thing,” she said. “I want you to loan me a car.”
“Why?”
“Because once you say it’s done, I want to make sure it is.”
* * *
She went in the middle of the night. She asked the driver to go up Old Tenali Road, and then told him to stop a few hundred yards from her parents’ hut. How will I know? she wondered. How will I know if he gave them the money? I’ll know, she thought, just from looking at the hanging vegetable basket. She walked up the stinking hill, keeping off the main path, so she wouldn’t be seen, and along the backs of the huts.
Indravalli Konda loomed in the distance. The temple floated at its center, a lone and beating heart. Its colors changing in the moonlight, according to her glimpses of it: buttermilk and pumice, then mother-of-pearl, then the froth of the sea. The deepa wasn’t lit, and so the rest of the mountain, its contours, was lost to the sky. When she passed by one hut, a sleeping dog woke at the sound of her footsteps and barked into the night. An emaciated goat, tethered to an emaciated tree, stiffened with fear.
The moon was high, and when she finally came upon her parents’ hut—the one she’d been born in, and all her brothers and sisters—she crept along the back of it quietly, meaning only to peek inside, but there was no need: it was empty. Only a dried gourd and a rat-chewed blanket in one corner.
She, too, stiffened and ran. Down the hill, her breath a fist through her body. All manner of thoughts, as she ran, all of them culminating in the one: they’re dead, he’s killed them to get out of paying.
She slammed into the side of the car. The driver jerked awake. “Ask. Go ask,” she hissed. “Ask them what happened.”
He cursed his luck for being on duty tonight, and then drove around until they reached the highway. There, a tea stall was still open. Inside, behind a false door, was whiskey and moonshine. “Crazy bitch,” he muttered, and partook, asked a few questions, and then came back outside.
She was slouched in the backseat so no one would see, but sprang to attention like a coil. “What did they say? What?”
“They’ve moved,” he said, the scent of whiskey filling the front seat and then the back. He started the car. They drove again, this time away from Old Tenali Road, to the other side of the village. Hardly five minutes away, but the houses richer, bigger, no longer thatch but concrete. He stopped at the end of a road Savitha had only walked by, not ever having known anyone wealthy enough to live in one of the dhaba houses. “That one,” said the driver, pointing to the third house on the left, painted pink and green and yellow, with still-green mango leaves stretched across the front door. There was a gate, locked, and she stood outside of it and saw a figure sleeping on the veranda, on a hemp-rope cot, a thin blanket over them. Through an open door, three more figures slept on beds. Beds!
When she came back to the car, she said, “It isn’t them. There are only four people in that house.”
“One of your sisters is already married. Last week.”
“She is?”
She told him to wait a moment more and went back and stood at the gate. She studied the dim interior of the veranda, the rich moonlit marble floor, the sleeping bodies—still skeptical. A breeze swept past her and into the house, and with a rustle, the figure on the veranda threw off the sheet. And in that moment, she saw the fingers, gnarled and noble and lovely, more beautiful than broken. And then she knew.
The driver turned toward Vijayawada, but she said no, there was one more place she needed to go. He sighed loudly and turned the car around again.
Poornima was married by now, of that Savitha was certain. She thought vaguely of asking the driver to take her to Namburu, but where in Namburu, and was that even the boy she married?
That hut was the same. The same thatched roof, the same dirt floor, the same dusty and stunted trees. Four small figures were asleep on the ground, on the same mats, under the same thin sheets, with forlorn faces peeking above them, impoverished even in the moonlight. Another, larger figure was asleep on the hemp-rope bed, and from him, Savitha averted her eyes, allowing them to rest, just for a moment, on the nearer structure, the weaving hut. She gazed at it with sudden emotion, maybe even longing, for what she had left inside, for what she had been, and then she turned to the driver and said, “Let’s go.”
5
She left
for America two months later. All of the necessary documents had been witnessed, notarized, fingerprinted, and all manner of other words Savitha had never heard before. Guru took her to Chennai on the train, and from there, she was to be accompanied by an older woman who was to pretend to be Savitha’s mother. The older woman was indeed probably her mother’s age, maybe a little older. Savitha never quite understood who she was, how she was related to the people in America, or why she’d agreed to accompany her, but she was, in her way, the perfect choice: she was grave, her sari was simple yet impressively well woven, humble to look at, and she wore round spectacles, which gave her an air of seriousness, and more important, gave her an air of concern—which was exactly what she should feel for a beloved daughter about to travel halfway around the world for hand surgery.
In Chennai, Savitha put on a cast, so no one could see that her stub had completely healed, and then they boarded a plane. Guru had explained it to Savitha—that she would travel to America on a long bus that could fly through the air. She had been confused, and still was, even as the plane taxied down the runway. And then: it lifted into the air. The old woman—the one who was supposed to be her mother—sat beside her. She had hardly spoken to Savitha, merely nodded when they met, and now, once they were on the plane, she’d inserted what looked like tiny cotton balls into her ears, with wires coming out of them, and seemed completely absorbed or asleep or maybe just unwell; her eyes closed the moment they sat down. Savitha thought that she might have an ear infection. One of her little sisters, who was prone to ear infections as a baby, had always needed to have cotton balls, dipped in coconut oil, stuffed in her ears to ease the ache and her crying. But now, as the plane lifted off the ground, Savitha grabbed the woman’s hand and stared frantically from her to the window and then back again. The plane climbed higher and higher; Savitha swallowed back her racing heart. The woman opened her eyes, looked down at her hand, took out one of the cotton balls with the other hand, and shook Savitha off as if she were a fly. Then she said, speaking Telugu with a Tamilian accent, and without a trace of a smile, “This is the best part. Enjoy it.”