by Shobha Rao
What did she mean by that? Did she mean that this was the best part of the plane ride, or that this was the best part of all that was to come? Maybe she meant this was the best part of all of it: the plane ride, what was to come, and all that had come before.
Regardless, after an hour or so, after Savitha had stared, unblinking, at every cloud that floated by her oval window, she leaned back in her seat and fell into a deep sleep.
* * *
When they landed at Heathrow, the first thing Savitha noticed was that it smelled like nothing, absolutely nothing—as if not a single animal had passed through here, nor a single flower bloomed—and then she noticed that it was cold. So cold that it seemed to be spilling out of the walls, climbing out of the floor. She asked the woman if they were in America. The woman said, No, we’re in England. Why did we stop here? she asked. Because it’s halfway between India and America, the woman said. They sat in the transfer lounge, which Savitha only registered as a long, crowded room with row after row of orange chairs. There were also a few shops, which were so brightly lit that they scared her away. She sat in one of the orange chairs and looked at the other people in the lounge. They, too, scared her. She noticed a few Indians, but mostly, the people around her—sleeping or eating or reading or talking—seemed to her like giants. Tall and unwieldy and oily. Some of them pale giants, some of them burnt, crisp giants, but all of them towering over her, even over the woman who was supposed to be her mother. Where had they all come from? Where were they all going? It felt to Savitha as if the world was full of them, these giants, suddenly, and that she and the old woman and Indravalli and Vijayawada were all merely their playthings, kept locked in a box in a hotter part of the world.
After that, after boarding another plane and after more hours upon hours had passed, during which, whenever Savitha woke and blinked into the dark of the plane and into the dark of the world beyond, she thought that maybe she was dead, and that this was the afterlife: all of them headed in a long bus to whatever was next, and around and beyond them was only stillness, and stars, and below, far, far below, only some gigantic moving mass, by turns white and then gray and then only black, reflecting the stars but darker, angrier than any night sky, and when she pointed to it and asked the woman, in alarm, What is that? the woman hardly even glanced at it, never even took out her cotton balls, and as she closed her eyes again, she said, “Water.”
* * *
The next morning, or what Savitha presumed was morning because the woman said, “Go brush your teeth,” they landed again. This time, when Savitha said, Is this America? the woman said, Yes.
They were at JFK.
They stood in one long line and then another. Then they sat down in another transit lounge. This one had blue chairs. Otherwise, it was just the same: the same lack of scent, the same cold, the same giants. “What city are we in?” Savitha asked. “Are we in Sattle?” No, the woman said, New York. And then she told her to sit right there, don’t move, and went off to make a telephone call. Savitha could see her in the distance, standing at a pole with a telephone attached to it. The woman put something into the telephone and pressed some buttons and started talking.
Savitha was nauseated, or maybe just lonely, so she closed her eyes and tried to think of Poornima, of her sisters, of her father, of anything that had perfume that she could inhale. Her mind swirled, but she was so tired, so depleted of memory, that nothing came to her. Not one thing. So she leaned down and opened the suitcase that Guru had given her to pack her few things, and she took out Poornima’s half-made sari and held it to her nose. She breathed. And there, even after coming all this way, to the other side of the earth, there was the scent of the loom. The scent of its picking stick. The scent of the rice starch used to dampen the thread and the scent of the charkha and the scent of the fingers that had wound it on the charkha, perfumed with turmeric and salt and mustard seed, and there, just there, was the scent of Indravalli Konda, and the deepa, the oil burning low, drenching the cotton wick as if with rain, with typhoon; she buried her face deeper and out rose the scent of the Krishna, winding its way through the mountains and valleys and into the sea.
When she raised her head, the woman seated across from her was watching her.
Savitha averted her eyes, but the woman kept looking.
The woman who was supposed to be her mother seemed to be saying her good-byes. Savitha wished she would come back quickly, but then the conversation seemed to take another turn, and the old woman began talking animatedly again. Savitha looked over, and when she did, the strange woman across from her, one of the giants, her hair the color of jilebi, and with round spots on her face like a ripe banana, leaned across toward Savitha, gazed at the cast on her arm and then into her eyes, and said, “Are you okay? Do you need help?” Savitha had no idea what she’d said, so she only shook her head, and then nodded, and then waited, hoping the jilebi-haired woman was satisfied and would leave her alone. She considered getting up and going to the woman who was supposed to be her mother, but she’d specifically told Savitha to stay put and watch their bags.
“Do you understand English?”
Savitha smiled and nodded again.
The woman smiled back. And it was then—when the woman smiled, when she revealed her tiny teeth, not at all giant, but dazzling, pearls, the most luminescent pearls, as if the oyster who’d made them had been in love during their making—that Savitha saw how gentle the jilebi-haired lady was, how concerned. Gentler and more concerned than anyone she’d met in a long, long time. Maybe ever. And Savitha thought, Maybe I’ve come far enough away. Maybe I’m in a good country. Maybe I’m in a kind one. Just then, a loud announcement came over the PA system and Savitha jumped, but the woman seemed unafraid; she reached inside her purse and took out a small white rectangle of paper and held it out to Savitha. Savitha took it, not knowing what else to do, and then the woman picked up her purse and her bag and walked into the mass of people that had gathered when they’d heard the announcement. Savitha watched the woman, inexplicably sad at her departure, and then she looked at the card. It had letters, maybe her name, and then more letters. She stared at it and stared at it, and when she looked up, the woman who was supposed to be her mother was walking toward her. Savitha had no idea what the letters spelled, but she knew enough to slip the card into the inside of her cast.
6
When they landed in Seattle, a man came to collect them. On the plane from New York, Savitha had looked out the window and seen the sky in front of her brushed with strokes of deep orange and rose and rust, but when she turned around, so was the other side. Though ahead of her it was brighter, the reds fiercer. West. They were heading west.
Savitha stepped through the sliding doors into the open air (after what felt like a lifetime) and saw that it was midday. The sun was high and warm. Lines of cars, shiny and silent, drifted by her; a few were stopped and had one or two people standing next to them, loading luggage or embracing or standing expectantly. One couple even kissed, and Savitha looked away in embarrassment. A few were standing at a far end, smoking. Otherwise, it was empty. There was no noise or clamor or porters or horns. There was not one policeman blowing his whistle, shouting for people to keep moving, nor a single person haggling with a taxi driver or laughing or eating from a cone of peanuts, dropping their shells on the ground, birds pecking among them for food, dogs sniffing at blowing wrappers and the discarded rinds of an orange or a mango, not even idle young men, standing in groups and watching the women and smoking beedies and spitting betelnut. Waiting for life. Here, there was nothing but a silent, ordered sleekness.
She looked up at the sun again.
It, too, was quiet. Not blazing and insolent and angry and rowdy, like it was in Indravalli, but tempered, emasculated. She didn’t know if she liked this sun. She doubted it was even the same one.
It was then that a black car, the windows so spotless they shone like a mirror, pulled next to her and the woman who was supposed to be her
mother. The man who’d come to collect them, named Mohan, stepped out. He was older than Savitha, maybe thirty, though she couldn’t be sure, because he, too, was a giant. The first Indian giant she’d ever met. He was not exactly fat or puffy, though certainly there was something cherubic about his face. He was muscular, though, like the images of the cinema heroes Savitha had seen on posters, when she’d passed a handful of times along the Apsara or the Alankar. She saw them again now, those heroic muscles, curved, firm, rising from Mohan’s arms, his chest, while his neck and his hands held taut with their power, their magnificence, nearly discomfited by their rising and falling. Savitha found it disconcerting: this well-fed, well-tended extravagance, this health.
Nevertheless, what struck her most about Mohan was his melancholy. Eyes and lips turned by some sorrow, some blunder, the sad slope of his stride as he came around the car, reached for their few bags. His gaze paused at Savitha’s cast and then continued up her stomach and breasts to her face.
“Is that all?” he asked in Telugu. The old woman nodded, and they climbed into the car.
It smelled like a lemon.
Below the scent of lemon was the smell of coffee. Both thick and bitter, Savitha thought, and then she searched the car and saw a white cup with a white lid. Mohan’s hand hovered near it even as he drove: first on a curved road out of the airport and then down a wide road that was the blackest one Savitha had ever seen, with more cars than she had ever seen. They drove in silence—with the old woman sitting next to Mohan and Savitha behind her. After a few minutes, Mohan turned on the radio. It was a kind of music Savitha had never heard before; it had no words. At times, the music soared to a lofty peak, like being on the top of Indravalli Konda, and at other times it was gentle, yet controlled, like lapping water. She wanted to ask what it was, but the silence in the car, too, seemed controlled and inflexible.
After twenty minutes or so, Mohan pulled off the many-laned road to a smaller one. On this road, Savitha noticed low, flat buildings; there were cars parked along this street, and the storefronts (or so she guessed by the genteel window displays) were not at all like the storefronts in India. In India, they were choked with colorful streamers and the windows piled high with merchandise and the whole crowded with people yelling and pushing and shoving. Here, they seemed hardly occupied. Only their lighted interiors revealed a few customers, any sign of life. Halfway down the street, Mohan stopped the car in front of a long building, lined with doors, and he and the old woman got out. She leaned into the car—as Mohan was getting her bags—and said, “Stay here,” and then she seemed to waver, or sway with a kind of discomfort, or guilt, and added, “Be careful.”
Be careful of what? Savitha wondered.
She watched them. What is this place, she puzzled, with its series of doors, though the old lady and Mohan ignored these and instead entered the only glass door, more prominent than the others. They were inside for maybe ten minutes, and then Mohan walked the old lady to one of the regular doors and said, “See you tomorrow.” When he returned to the car he looked at Savitha shyly and said, “Come to the front if you’d like.” She got into the front passenger seat, and now, now she felt the true enormity of this new country. It could only be felt from the front seat, she realized, only from the wide window and the unobstructed light.
The music came on again.
They drove over a bridge, though from Savitha’s seat, it looked to her more like a bolt of unfurled silk over a layer of mist. Above Savitha, from the little mirror Mohan had looked into earlier to take fleeting glances at her, dangled a thin yellow tree-shaped decoration. Lemon! So that’s where it was coming from. Then the road curved, and suddenly, before Savitha, were the tallest and shiniest buildings she’d ever seen and the bluest stretch of water and the greenest mountains. “Is this Sattle?” she asked.
“See-attle,” he corrected her.
They neared the buildings, rising out of the earth like blazing rectangles, reflecting the sun, and then cut along their right-hand flank and went down another black road with many lanes, for quiet mile after quiet mile, until Mohan said, “Are you hungry? We can stop.”
“Yes.”
“Not for long. There’s a McDonald’s, Taco Bell up there.”
Savitha looked where he was pointing. He saw the expression on her face, and he said, “No, not Indian food, but it’s not bad.”
She turned to him and said, “Do you have bananas here?”
He was startled by the question, she thought, because he slowed the car, and then he met her gaze. He was unused to looking at women. Maybe not all women, she thought after a moment, maybe just women with a certain openness, a kind of curiosity, perhaps even that radiance she had glimpsed long ago, bearing itself up behind her eyes like a crumbling fort, an embattled army. They stopped at a massive building with many parked cars, and he went inside, and when he came out again, he handed her a bag.
Inside the bag were bananas.
* * *
There were six of them. The biggest bananas she’d ever seen, worthy of giants. She took one and tried to give the remaining five back to him. “They’re yours,” he said.
In all her life, Savitha had never possessed this many bananas at once.
That first one she ate in the car. With only one hand, she’d learned to use her teeth to rip open the end of the banana, opposite the stem, and as she did, she felt Mohan watching her. She offered him one, but he said no. She was about to eat a second one, with a vague sense of bafflement, awe, repletion at the thought that she even could, when Mohan stopped the car. He parked in front of a building that was four stories tall, cream-colored with chipped brown windowsills and a brown roof. Many of the windows were open, and from them fluttered all colors of curtains. Some seemed to be sheets, torn in places, tie-dyed, others were flags; a few had broken blinds. A small tattered awning over a sagging door in the center of the building indicated the entrance. Next to the front door were three rows of cubbyholes, some with bent or rusted metal flaps. “What are these?” Savitha asked.
He looked at her curiously. “Mailboxes,” he said in English.
“What are they for?”
“Letters.”
She studied them, many bursting with browned envelopes that seemed to have been set out in the sun and rain for weeks, months. “But why don’t they take their letters? Don’t they want to read them?”
“No. Not these kind of letters.”
What kind were they? she wondered. Savitha had not once gotten a letter (From whom would she get one, and why? She could hardly read.), but she thought if she did, she wouldn’t leave it out in the sun and rain, she would tear it open and stare at it, relish the slant of the letters, the way they’d written her name (that she’d known how to read and write since she was three years old), the feel of the paper, which she knew would be very different from the paper scraps she’d collected from the garbage heap, and the color and the beauty of ink. But when they went inside, Savitha’s reverie ended. They climbed a musty stair and then walked down a musty hallway. Mohan carried her one suitcase—though it was practically empty; what was there to put in it?—and Savitha carried the bag of bananas. At the end of the hallway, Mohan opened a door, with the assurance of knowing it would be open, as if he lived there, and inside the small room was another man, also Indian but older. He was watching something on television, holding a glass—the chair on which he was sitting, the glass, a small table to hold the glass, and the television being the only four things in the room. He looked up when they entered, at Savitha with barely concealed contempt, and then he said, in Telugu (was everyone in this country Telugu?), “A stub to clean houses. I suppose next he’ll buy a one-legged man to ride a bicycle.”
Mohan stammered something in embarrassment and glanced at her once, for a moment that felt to Savitha as if he were at war, or had just returned, and then he left. She didn’t see him again for three months.
7
The older man took her up another flight
of stairs. He’d taken one look at her suitcase and her bag of bananas, and then had looked away without a word. Savitha carried the suitcase in her right hand and the bananas in the crook of her left arm. At the top of the stairs, the man opened a door that led into a room smaller than his own. On the floor of this room, laid out on the mildewed and stale-smelling beige carpet, were three cots. He pointed to the farthest one, on the side of the room opposite from the door, and said, “That’s yours,” and then he said, “That’s all that’s yours.” He closed the door behind her.
Savitha took two steps into the center of the room—still holding her suitcase and her bag of five bananas (and the peel of the one she’d eaten)—and saw that there was a tiny kitchenette in one corner of the room and a door to the bathroom in the other. She looked at the cots. They were positioned in the shape of a U, with the one in the middle beneath the only window in the room, one behind her, against the wall with the front door, and hers, next to the bathroom door. The cot by the front door was neatly made, with the pillow fluffed and centered and a small, cheap suitcase like her own resting at the foot. The sheets of the one in the middle were in complete disarray, the pillow half flung, and there was no suitcase in sight, only clothes and toiletries and hair things tossed in every which direction as if it were the wreckage of a ship, and the beige carpet a sea.
The first thing she did was to take out Poornima’s half-made sari from her suitcase and look at it. From boll to thread to loom to this, she thought. And then she thought, I made you. She tucked the cloth into the inside of her pillowcase. Then she slid off her cast and placed the little white rectangular card back inside its hollow. She placed them against the wall. After a time—during which Savitha tried to take a bucket bath, but there was no bucket in sight, only a long white rectangular hole (was everything in this country white and rectangular?)—she washed her face and drank a glass of water and ate another banana. She lay down on her cot, but as soon as she did, there was a sound at the door. A girl entered, and she said, “Who are you?”