Girls Burn Brighter

by Shobha Rao

  The girl’s name was Geeta, short for Geetanjali, and she was talkative.

  “I’m named after the film,” she began, in Telugu. “Did you see it?”

  Savitha shook her head.

  “My amma saw it a few months before I was born. It was the first movie she’d ever seen. She said she didn’t really follow the story, not really—she was only thirteen or fourteen—but she said that when she came out of the cinema theater, back into the world, it felt new. Polished. Like it was a different world, and that anything could happen. She said she practically skipped home. Back to the little hut she lived in with my nanna, on the edge of a jute field, neither of which they owned. She said she felt the same way when I was born, that the world was somehow new. That I’d made it new. So she named me Geetanjali. Isn’t that nice?”

  Savitha had to agree.

  Then Geeta laughed. A tinkling laugh that cut through Savitha’s fatigue, the fog of the long plane ride. “It’s funny, though, isn’t it? It’s still the same old world. They’re still in that same hut, leasing that same farm. And here I am, just a housecleaner and a whore.”

  Savitha blinked. She got up from her cot, her legs unsteady.

  A whore?

  “Didn’t they tell you? Maybe they didn’t. Anyway, it rains a lot here. Rain is the only sound in this country. If you make any others, if you talk to anyone, if you even open your mouth to speak, they’ll come for you.”

  “Who’ll come for me?”

  “Who brought you here?”

  “Mohan.”

  “No wonder,” Geeta said knowingly, laughing again. “You’re lucky. He’s the nice one.”

  Geeta told her that Mohan was the younger of the two sons. The older one was named Suresh, and he was more like his father, cruel, slapping them around to show them who was boss, as if they didn’t know; he worked them long hours, sometimes through the night if an apartment or office building needed to be cleaned by morning, so they wouldn’t have to go even one day without collecting rent on it, as if they didn’t have tens of thousands, maybe even lakhs of dollars in the bank, Geeta said; Suresh came around whenever he wanted, he had his favorites, of course, she added, but he’ll come around at least once, try you out. She glanced at the stub and then the cast, and said, Well, maybe not you.

  Then she told her a story. The story was about Mohan and Padma.

  “Who’s Padma?” Savitha said.

  Geeta nodded toward the third cot, the unkempt one. “She says they make her clean other people’s toilets, but they can’t make her clean her own. But she’s the prettiest. She could’ve been a film star.” This Padma, as it turned out, was in love with Mohan. “Stupid. Idiotic. What chance does she have with him? With the son of the man who owns us.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Whose?”

  “The father’s.”

  “Gopalraju. Are you going to let me finish?”

  It was about six months ago. Geeta had just arrived. From where? Savitha wanted to ask, but thought she would wait. Padma had already been here for more than a year and had already fallen completely and utterly in love with Mohan. The problem (other than the obvious ones of caste, class, ownership, enslavement, and opportunity) was this: Mohan refused to sleep with her. The father and the older son had already been by, but the younger wouldn’t even look at her. But why? But why, Padma kept lamenting. Geeta said Padma tried everything: she borrowed Geeta’s new hair clips, the ones her mother had given her before she’d left for America; she tore the sleeves off her blouses and sewed up the ends, to show off her pretty arms; she tried to wear her hair down like the American girls they saw on the streets as they were being driven to and from the cleaning jobs, but they had no shampoo, and they were forbidden to go to the store, or anywhere for that matter, so her hair hung like the greasy ends of a scruffy broom, and no one noticed, least of all Mohan, but she kept it that way, hoping, until Vasu (the man from downstairs, who managed the building, but mostly managed the girls) said, Unless you’re going to mop with it, put it up. It went on like this, with Padma trying to lure him more and more desperately, dropping things on the floor and bending to pick them up slowly, ridiculously slowly, in low-cut blouses, or wearing a horrid bright orange lipstick that they’d found left behind in one of the apartments. It made her look like an orangutan, Geeta said, laughing. None of it worked, you see, she said, until one day, he came by the apartment drunk. He was only there to pick us up and take us to a cleaning job. Usually he waited for us in the car, but that night, he came to the apartment, he took one long look at us, from one to the other, and then he stumbled to my cot, lay down, and began to cry.

  “Cry?” Savitha asked.

  “Cry. Actually cry, more like sobbing,” Geeta said.

  When he’d finished sobbing—during which time Geeta and Padma began to panic, wondering if they’d been at fault, and if so, if Gopalraju would go and demand the money their parents had been paid for them, money, as they both knew, which was long gone by now, used already to pay off debts, or to pay the dowries of their other daughters—he sat up and asked them for a glass of water. Padma ran to get it. He drank it down, and then he said, Do you have any vodka?

  What’s that? they asked, and he said, Never mind.

  Here, Geeta paused.

  “So what happened?” Savitha asked.

  “Nothing,” Geeta said. “Nothing, until we got to the building we were supposed to clean. It was the middle of the night, you see. And he gave me the key, and he said, Go on up. So I did. But I watched for Padma, wondering what was happening, but also knowing, and when she finally came up, disheveled, maybe twenty minutes later, I said, What happened? And she said, He took me. In the back of the car. But she didn’t look altogether happy when she said it.

  “I mean,” Geeta said, “I know he forced her, I know he didn’t make love to her, but I thought she’d be happier. So I asked her. I said, I thought you wanted him to. Yes, but it was cramped, she said, and his breath was awful. He reeked. And then she said, And here’s the other thing: When he was done, he dragged me out of the car; I’d barely had a chance to put my clothes on again. He dragged me out, and he pushed me to the ground, and he stood staring down at me. I thought he would kick me, but instead he dropped to his knees, right next to where I was sprawled, but he wouldn’t look at me, he wouldn’t, he looked only at the ground next to me, and then somewhere into the dark, and then he reached up to where I was lying on the grass, and he took each of the buttons of my shirt, open, because I hadn’t had time to do more than pull up my pants, and he buttoned them. One by one. Gently, like they weren’t buttons at all, but beads of rain. Not even my mother, she said, was ever that gentle.”

  And then what happened? Savitha asked.

  Nothing, Geeta said. Then we went back to cleaning.

  What about Padma? Savitha said. Does she still love him?

  Geeta laughed, and then she said, She loves him even more.

  * * *

  When Padma came in late that night, dropped off after a cleaning job in Redmond, she looked over at Savitha and said, “New girl?” Savitha nodded. She was indeed pretty. But she knew it, and she said, “Oh,” and then went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  * * *

  The next morning, just as Geeta had said, it was raining. Savitha was picked up with the others. When she’d come out of the bathroom (Geeta had showed her how to work the shower and explained that there was so much water in this country that no one took a bucket bath) wearing one of the two saris she’d brought along, Padma had laughed, and Geeta had said, “They don’t want us wearing those. We stick out too much,” and lent her a pair of black polyester pants and a gray-and-pink checkered shirt. The shirt, Savitha noticed, was cotton and felt good against her skin. She checked the threading, even though it was clearly machine made. When they handed her a pair of old sneakers to wear, Savitha looked at them and then at Geeta and Padma. They stared back. “She can’t tie them,” Padma announce
d gleefully, as if she’d solved a riddle. Geeta tied them for her and told her she’d find her Velcro ones. “What’s that?” Savitha asked. “You’ll see. You’ll be able to tie your shoes with your teeth,” Geeta said, laughing. My teeth, Savitha thought, and wondered how tying a shoe could be like peeling a banana.

  They were dropped off, and each of them went to clean different apartments. Padma and Geeta first showed her how to use the various mops and brooms and brushes, the sprays, the vacuum cleaner. None of it was difficult—running the vacuum cleaner was even fun—but it was hard to do with just one hand. She was slow. When Padma and Geeta came for her an hour later, she’d hardly even started. But within a week, she was almost as fast as they were. At the end of two weeks, recalling what Guru had said, that all she had to do was work twice as fast, Savitha sometimes finished before them.

  The apartments were always empty. That made it easier. The tenant who’d moved out, usually a student at the university, would’ve been gone for only a day, sometimes only a matter of hours, and Savitha always, upon entering, stopped at the threshold of the apartment. She stood still and smelled the room. The houses in Indravalli never had a smell, because the windows and doors and verandas were open to the world, and every scent in the world was a scent of theirs, and the small windowless huts always smelled of the same thing, poverty. But here, the smells were subtler. Was it a boy or a girl who’d lived here? That was easy enough to tell. But underneath. Underneath, there was so much more. What did they eat, how often were they home, how often did they bathe, did they like flowers, did they like rain. She could sometimes even tell what they had been studying. She thought one boy might’ve been studying the stars, because they were drawn in great detail on his walls, at the height he must’ve been. He liked milk, cheese, dairy, she guessed, and he didn’t bathe very often. Another girl was probably studying the arts, she thought, by the scent of paints and oils, and she must’ve liked rain and sun, because every window had been thrown open.

  All this within minutes of entering the apartments.

  By the end of the month, she was cleaning almost a dozen of them a day, but she no longer took any great pleasure from guessing at the previous occupants. There was always another to clean, and then home to a plate of rice and pickle, maybe pappu if one of them had the energy to make it, her only hand trembling from exhaustion, unable to lift even a bite of rice to her mouth, and then to sleep. Walking now into the empty apartments, she scanned them quickly, assessing in the first sweep how much work needed to be done. She saw—on the carpets and the walls, sometimes on a shelf—the places where furniture or picture frames or potted plants or books had once been, and once removed, had left the square or the circle or rectangle brighter, untouched by feet and dirt and damage, more luminous than the space around it. Savitha stared at the spot of brightness in the middle of a dull, gray room and wished she were that space, the protected one. Instead, at the end of a few weeks, at the end of many apartments, she understood she was the pallid part, the discolored one. She was what absorbed the dirt and the distress. What was fatigued by sun. What lay, like a hand, over brightness.

  8

  She’d been in Seattle for two months, but she’d never before seen the man who came to pick her up—in a bright red car—one Saturday night in December. Only Vasu had ever driven them, picked them up. And with each passing day, the walls of the apartments closed in; the air grew thinner. She ran to open windows, and stuck her head out, starved for cold, for feeling, for the fall of rain.

  Unlike Vasu, the man in the bright red car was tall, a few silver hairs at his temples. He had the beginnings of a belly, and though not nearly as muscular, he was clearly Mohan’s brother. He said, “Get in,” in Telugu, and then drove her to a low building on a side street. Savitha had been trying to learn her letters, studying street names and signs, but she couldn’t see any, it being too dark or the area too industrial. A flickering white light seeped from a distant streetlight. The area was deserted, and when Suresh turned off the headlights, they were plunged into a deep darkness. Her eyes adjusted and she saw that the building he’d parked in front of had a thin line of light at the seam of the door and the sidewalk. It glistened in the dark like a knife.

  Inside, they passed through an area lined with boxes to a door at the back and to the left. Suresh knocked, and a voice said to come in, and even before she saw him, Savitha knew it was the father, Gopalraju, the one who’d bought her. He was not as old as she’d expected him to be, his hair unnaturally blue-black, clearly colored, but his face wide and alert, flushed with the same peculiar raw, cold light that came with success, wealth, that she’d seen in Guru, except Gopalraju’s face was even sharper, more calculating. He looked at her for a long moment, and then, with false tenderness, he said, “Getting along all right?” She nodded, though she knew it wasn’t truly a question. Not really, not in a concerned sense. More precisely, she knew it was a statement, followed by a different question entirely. The statement was this: You will get along all right. And beneath that statement, just as Geeta had said, was this: If, perchance, you don’t get along all right, if, perchance, you feel like talking, like telling, like running, like shouting, if, perchance, you feel coming upon you any kind of despair, distaste, if you feel the need to find a phone, to stop a person on the street, to scan the sidewalks for a policeman, and if, perchance, you feel descending upon you breathlessness, madness, a desire for revelation, then you will no longer be all right. And so this, in turn, was the true question: Do you understand? he was asking. Do you?

  Then he saw her stub.

  His lips curled up, ever so slightly, in what she knew was disgust, and he closed his eyes, just for a moment, and in that moment, he looked almost ecclesiastic, almost beatific, and Savitha thought they would simply let her go, back to her empty cot, her pillowcase tucked with a half-made sari, a small rectangle of paper, back to the apartment where Padma and Geeta were sleeping, dreaming.

  “Be careful. Might poke your eye out,” he finally said, still looking at Savitha, but clearly talking to Suresh. She turned to him, and he was laughing, and it was then that she saw she wouldn’t be led back, that what lay ahead was another door, behind Gopalraju, and it was through this door that Suresh pushed her. It was dark inside, and when he turned on the light, there was only a roughly made bed, a squat fridge, and some bottles strewn on a corner table. There was a small bathroom on one side. The smell of stale beer, which Savitha didn’t recognize, hung in the windowless room, though the other smells she did recognize: unwashed sheets, shit, semen, salt, sweat, cigarettes, a kind of anguish, a kind of listlessness, a kind of gloom, all of which had a scent, all of which had a shape, all of which sat hunched in the corners of the little room.

  He told her to get on the bed. And then he did, too. When she lay on her back, he said, No, you’ll do the other thing. And so she turned, but he said, No, no, that’s not what I mean. Savitha looked at him, confused, and then he showed her what to do. He had a bottle of something clear that he smeared over her stub, and then he showed her. He said, Like this, and then he got on the bed. On all fours. He told her to go in and out, and when she did, he said, Oh, yeah, like that, like that. A pain hit somewhere behind her eyes, and she turned away. But the pain was thunder, it broke and it broke. And he said, Yeah, oh yeah, yes, just like that. And she began to cry, willing it to end. Praying that it would. But he said, Keep going. And so she did, and so it broke.

  * * *

  She closed the door of the small bathroom. The light made her dizzy so she turned it off. She felt her way to the sink and washed up, scrubbed and scrubbed with a little cake of soap, her brown skin reddening all the way up to her shoulder. Then she turned off the water and was about to leave, when she heard something. What was that? She listened. It was coming from the toilet; it seemed to be humming. She leaned closer and listened, and it was. The toilet was humming! Just for her. It was humming a simple song, a child’s song, but it was humming it for her. Savitha
smiled into the dark, and then she knelt next to the toilet and she gave it a hug. She hummed along. Such a simple song, such simple notes, and yet so exquisite. She knelt and she hummed. The cool of the porcelain and its song; the cool of a river and its gurgle.

  * * *

  He was lying on the bed and smoking. Her legs were weak, and maybe he could see that, because he said, in Telugu, “Come here. Sit down.” So she walked to the end of the bed and sat at its edge. He looked at her for a long while, and then he said, in English, as if she could understand, “I wasn’t raised here, you know. I was raised in Ohio. You know where that is? I was on the track team. You know what they called me? Curry in a Hurry. Mohan was on the wrestling team, and they called him Curry Up. They didn’t think anything of it, the kids. And I would laugh along. There was so much to laugh about back then. But I wanted to punch them. Every time someone said it, and they laughed, I’d laugh, too, and stare at their mouth, and I’d imagine grabbing its edges and ripping it open. Nice and wide.”

  He took a sip from a bottle that had been resting on the corner table. He sank deeper into the bed with a contented sigh, and he said, again in English, “How’d you lose that hand, anyway?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he sat bolt upright. His eyes widened, and he said in Telugu, “Hey. Hey, watch this.”

  There was a fly on the table. It jerked here and there. He was watching it intently. Savitha too. He took the cigarette out of his mouth. He held it poised above the table, not near the fly, but a little away, as if he knew where the fly would veer. And it did. It inched right toward his hand, which was still as a statue. Savitha had never known a man to be so still. To wait so patiently. For what? She didn’t know, but his stillness seemed to her a state of fallen grace. A form of dark worship. Then, in a flash, his hand swept down and he caught it: he trapped the fly under the burning cigarette. Savitha blinked. He couldn’t have. She looked again, and sure enough: there was the fly, a slight sizzle, a flailing of this or that limb, and then it was still. As still as Suresh’s hand had been.