by Shobha Rao
The next time she saw Mohan was two weeks later. He came to an apartment she was cleaning, a studio like hers but much prettier, with fine wood floors and shining white cabinets. He made her coffee. She took a sip, waited, took another sip, and said, “Did you pick them up?”
“Pick who up?” He was distracted, fiddling with a loose faucet in the kitchen. She couldn’t see his face, but she could see his hands, and she focused on them. “The girl. The one with the cleft lip.”
“Not yet. Postponed. Some issue with the visa.”
She watched his hands, and then she looked around the apartment. “This place is nice, isn’t it? I wish I could live here.”
Mohan turned to face her. He said, “I could try to get you in here. I could talk to Nanna.”
Savitha nearly went to him. She nearly cried out. It is love, she thought, it is love.
* * *
Only a few days later, after she’d gotten home and was heating up rice, there was a knock on the door. She put the rice back in the pot, washed her hand, and went to answer it. Suresh. A pain stabbed her middle. When they got to the warehouse, Savitha looked again at the desk where Gopalraju had been sitting the first time she’d been here. This time the chair was empty, pushed in, and all the papers were piled neatly next to a big computer. The desk, she saw, had three drawers down one side of it. None of them had a lock.
When they entered the room, he kissed her roughly and then handed her the bottle of clear liquid. She rubbed it over her stub, and then she closed her eyes. She’d done this so many times that she could do it by feel. But behind her closed eyelids, there was a different vision. And in this vision, she saw a collapsed building. She couldn’t see what had made it collapse, but she saw that not only that building, but all the surrounding buildings, and all the houses around the surrounding buildings, they were also collapsed. And it went on: beyond the houses, there were slums, and these, too, were rubble. And then followed the factories and the garbage dumps and the fields: flattened. She didn’t know what had caused this collapse, all the way to the horizon; she didn’t need to. She only needed to see the ruin, know the ruin, know it would never end.
When Suresh went to the bathroom, she slipped out of the room and rifled through the first drawer of the desk. And then the second. And then the third. Nothing. No little blue books. Where could they be? Anyplace. A million other places. Probably not even in the warehouse. She ran back inside, and when she did, Suresh was coming out of the bathroom. He looked at her, and then at the open door. “Where’d you go?” he said, his voice even.
“I heard a sound.”
He raced past her and checked the warehouse and then outside. He came back and said, “Nothing.” He eyed her suspiciously, sternly, and then he took two steps, to where she was standing, and slapped her, hard, and said, “Next time there’s a sound, I’ll check.”
* * *
When she got back to the apartment, she sat on her cot for a long while. She listened to the night sounds: Padma’s and Geeta’s breathing, the swoosh of cars, the rustle of leaves, the burning of stars. Then she took out the remaining strip of Poornima’s half-made sari and brought it to her face. She cried out.
Geeta sat straight up. “What? What is it?”
Savitha whisked it behind her. “Nothing. A bad dream.” Padma didn’t wake. She looked from her to Geeta, who’d fallen back on her pillow, and then brought it out again: even in the dark it was plain to see: Another piece. Gone. Now it was hardly the size of a towel. Now she understood. Now she knew. The pieces were a warning. They were a message. The pieces said: Stop. But how? How did they know? And how many pieces were left? How many till the last?
She looked at the cloth, as if for an answer. “From boll to thread to loom to now,” she whispered into it. And then, “We’re leaving, you and I.”
* * *
She waited. She wondered about the blue book.
* * *
She asked Geeta in a whisper one morning, after Padma had left, “You need it to go places? What places?”
“How should I know?”
“You mean if Vasu can’t pick me up. If I take the bus.”
“No, not like that. You need it to get on a plane. To go to another country.”
Savitha was astonished. Relieved. She looked at Geeta. “How long have you been here?”
“Five years.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen,” she said.
Savitha nodded. Around the same age I was when I met Poornima, she thought. And then she thought, But where will I go? Certainly not back to India; she didn’t have the money. Or the blue book. But she didn’t know anyone here. No one. Except—there was that one lady, the jilebi-haired lady, the one with the teeth of pearls. It was something, at least; someone. When Geeta went to take a shower, Savitha took out the white rectangle of paper and looked at it. Her name was Katie, Katie something. And under her name was a string of letters. No phone number, but there was an address: New York, New York. Twice. And to the east.
A few days later, she saw a young woman, with a kind face, coming out of one of the apartments, and she pointed to the string of letters. “What, please,” she said.
The young woman looked at her, perplexed. “Excuse me?”
“What this?”
The young woman looked at it. “That’s an e-mail address.”
It was Savitha’s turn to look perplexed.
“Do you have a computer?”
Ah. Savitha nodded, and thanked her.
A computer.
Well, she didn’t have a computer, and she couldn’t head west; Mohan said there was only the ocean to the west. And north, south? What was there to the north and south? She had no idea. But east. It would have to be east.
* * *
She began carrying Poornima’s half-made sari with her. Every day. Mohan noticed it once, on a clear, cold day in mid-September. “What is that?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, stuffing it back into her pocket. “Just something someone left in one of the apartments.”
He looked at her, hurried into his clothes, and said, “I have to go. Pick them up.”
“Who?”
“The girl with the cleft lip.”
Savitha nodded. After he left for the airport, she took out the half-made sari, folded and refolded it, smoothed it with her one hand. She was now even more careful. Clutching it in her hand as she slept, never letting it leave her sight, even while she was in the shower. Still: nothing. Nothing. But she knew it would have to be soon.
* * *
On a Thursday evening, by now late in September, Mohan came for her again. He took her back to the park, the one overlooking the lights, the beads, and the band of water, and then he asked her what apartments she’d cleaned that day and took her to the one on Phinney Ridge. By now, she’d taught herself some of the street names and had learned to read a few signs, like Stop and Exit and Merge. Merge—she liked the sound of that one best. She’d also learned her numbers and how to write her name in English letters, and she’d asked Mohan how to spell his, and then she’d asked him how to spell Seattle. They hadn’t gotten much farther than that.
She watched him now, in the kitchen, making coffee. She remembered the first time she’d seen him, and how he’d gazed at her cast, knowing it was false, but still with genuine concern and curiosity. And how he’d bought her her first American bananas. And how he’d wooed her, in his fashion, in this place. In the intervening years, though there was so little she knew about him—since most of his stories were told to her in English—she’d come to sense that there fluttered in him some fragile being, some lone and broken creature, beating its wings against some lone and broken heart. And if she had to guess, she would say he had no idea what to do with her either, with this. But that, too, was as it should be. There was no answer. He was raised for different things. Different ends. Things maybe even he didn’t understand. But she? She knew what she was raised for, even with o
ne hand, she knew: she was raised for the loom, the cloth, the magic of thread, the magnificence of making a thing, of wrapping it, like a lover, around your body.
And so it was—with hardly any hesitation—that she reached over and took out his wallet from the pocket of his pants. Why wait any longer? There was a little more than a hundred dollars, $112. Over six thousand rupees! It would certainly get her to New York. It would have to.
Just as she tucked the stack of bills into her pocket, she noticed lodged between them the photograph he’d shown her, the one of Spearfish Canyon. She considered it for only an instant before ripping it in two and stuffing the half with Suresh back into his pocket. And the half with Mohan, along with the money, into her own.
* * *
He dropped her off. Not this time, and never before, did they kiss good-bye.
* * *
She had to leave that night, that very night, before Mohan opened his wallet, before her love for him stopped her.
And so she did. She crept out of the apartment—after she was sure Geeta and Padma were asleep—and eased down the stairs. Nearing Vasu’s apartment, she saw the crack under his door was dark. Still, she trembled as she passed it; her left foot landed. Her right. A creak.
The lights came on.
Savitha stopped; she held her breath. Footsteps. Go—go now. She bolted down the remaining stairs. She opened the front door with a crash.
She knew east. East, she knew. She ran.
Poornima
1
It wasn’t easy for Poornima to get to shepherd the cleft-lipped girl to Seattle. That was what the Telugu word for it meant, shepherd. No, it was extraordinarily difficult. And required such meticulous planning, persuasion, and sheer ingenuity that she’d laugh to herself at times; with the effort I put into it, she’d think, I could’ve laid railroad tracks across a mountainous country, or built bridges across a watery one.
Most of the two years it took felt to Poornima like she was wasting time, precious time, time she counted out in minutes, seconds, but she knew she had to be still. It was stillness, she learned, that at times was the greatest movement. She would find Savitha, she knew that much, but she also knew that it would take enormous amounts of patience to understand what she didn’t know. For instance, all she really knew was that Savitha had been sold to some rich man in America, in a city called Seattle. She didn’t know where Seattle was, or how she would get there, or even what was required to travel to a place like America.
How did one cross the borders of a country?
Once Guru had revealed to her Savitha’s whereabouts, Poornima did nothing. She waited. She knew that if she raised any suspicion in Guru’s cruel mind—that she knew Savitha, or was looking for her—Poornima was certain he would sabotage every link to her and would turn Poornima out of the brothel immediately. So she waited a good three months—long, frustrating months—and then, very casually, on a hot, languid yellow morning, when even the fan seemed to stumble with fatigue, she looked up from her accounting books and her calculator, and she said, “A new cinema came out at the Alankar. I saw it last night. The crowd was a hundred thick. I saw one woman get pushed to the ground.”
Guru barely nodded. He was chewing betelnut and reading a newspaper. “Another woman had her blouse torn off. The animals.”
Guru looked up from his paper. He cringed, subtly, as he did every time he saw Poornima’s face. No one ever got used to it, she noticed, not even she. It had healed completely, but the half that had been splashed by the oil was still bright pink, and against her brown skin, her face looked like a rotting flower. The entire left side was misshapen, hollowed out like a mine, revealing something too raw, too naked. But it wasn’t just the pink, edged with an island border of white, the center cratered, dark, as if small animals lived inside; there was another aspect that was far uncannier. Poornima thought it might be her smile, and how it twisted her face grotesquely—children paused in their play and looked at her in fright—and so she stopped smiling altogether, but it wasn’t that.
It was something else entirely: it was something beneath the face. Or rather, it was something raging beneath the face. It was a light, a fire. And it burned. Even as the hot oil on the surface of her skin cooled, capitulated, the fire within grew brighter. And that was what was truly uncanny, untoward. It was tragic to be a burn victim—oil, acid, dowry disputes, cruel in-laws, all that—though what was expected next was a humble, pained exit, feminine in its sorrow, in its sense of proportion. In other words, what was expected was invisibility. For the woman to disappear. But Poornima refused, or rather, she never even considered it. She walked down the street, she held her head high, she wore no mangalsutra, she had no male escort, she was iron in her purpose, imperial in her poise. And what was more, and what was uncanniest of all, was that all this, all this fire, began raging after she was attacked with hot oil.
Of course, Guru saw none of this. He saw only the burn, and the deformed face, and squirmed with discomfort.
“They filmed the songs in Switzerland,” Poornima continued. “Switzerland! In the snow. That poor heroine, dressed in that tiny bit of cloth, having to dance and sing in the snow and cold.”
“What did you say the name of the movie was?” he asked.
“I’d like to go there one day,” Poornima said, sighing. “Wouldn’t you?”
“To Switzerland? Why? Plenty of mountains here. I’ve heard there’s some mountains two hours north of Delhi.”
“I know. I know. But the mountains in Switzerland are different. Don’t you think?”
“No.”
She paused. “How would I get there, anyway?”
He turned back to his paper. “Switzerland? I guess you’d get a visa and a plane ticket, like everywhere else.”
“A visa?”
“It lets you travel out of the country.”
“How do you get one?”
“Well, you’d have to start with a passport first.”
“A passport? What’s that?”
Guru crumpled the paper down so that she could see his eyes, and he said, “Like anyone would let you into their country with a face like that.”
“Just to visit. Just to see the mountains.”
He groaned loudly, and then he explained to her what a passport was, and about the Indian government, and then about the visa, and about the Swiss consulate (“Wherever that is,” he said. “Good luck finding it.”), and then about how all this took inordinate amounts of time and documentation and photo-taking and fingerprinting and “Money! Most of all money. And that’s before you buy the plane ticket, before you even get there. And from what I hear, Switzerland isn’t exactly cheap,” he added.
Well, Poornima thought, I’m not going to Switzerland.
Still, she was undeterred. And as Guru had said, she started by applying for a passport.
* * *
The months wore on. Poornima paid them no mind. She did her work and by then had rented a room a little away from the brothel, but on the bus route. Sometimes, she walked the five kilometers to work, and on the hottest days, or the wettest, she treated herself to an autorickshaw. She ate simple meals that she cooked on a small gas stove, shopping for the evening’s vegetables on the way home and buying packets of milk, which she stored in her landlady’s refrigerator. She used just enough oil to fry up the vegetables, never more. On Sundays, she walked around Vijayawada, looking into shop windows or drifting toward the Prakasam Barrage, or climbing up to the Kanaka Durga Temple. She never went inside. She once splurged and agreed to twenty rupees to take a boat ride on the Krishna. The boatswain was a lithe young man, not yet twenty, with coppery-bronze skin and the blackest and thickest head of hair she’d ever seen. He ran up to her as she walked along the shore, and said, “Look at her. Just look at her. Don’t you want to sail on her? Doesn’t she look like what life should’ve been?” He was pointing to the river, and with its sparkling waters, the sparkle even mightier because there were clouds darkening th
e waters downriver, the Krishna did indeed glitter like a gem, like a promise.
She talked him down from thirty rupees to twenty and climbed onto his rickety boat. “Did you build this yourself?” she said.
He laughed. She liked his smile. She liked that he looked right into her face and didn’t once flinch.
He navigated to the middle of the river, and here the water suddenly turned choppy. She held on to the sides of the boat, while the boy pushed back toward shore with his long pole for an oar. The clouds were now racing upriver, and she watched as the billowing gray masses crowded above them, colliding and roaring like lions, and she said, “Hurry,” and the boy only laughed, and said, “Are you scared?”
Yes, she thought, yes, I am scared.
The water now tossed them like a coin, and they landed with a thud, and then the first raindrop landed. On her arm, and as big as an apple. There was nothing else for a moment, the briefest pause, and then, as if the heavens had tired of playing, of flirting, they opened with a vengeance so sudden and so powerful that Poornima was thrown against the lee of the boat. She caught the sides, scraping her hands. The boy was now struggling against the pitch of the waters. His pole so curved against the current that Poornima thought it might snap in two. She saw his muscles, wet and taut. She saw his hair, dripping like a forest around his face. And both of their clothes, soaked through. She thought of her father in that moment, and she nearly laughed: I might drown in the Krishna after all, Nanna, she said to him. Just twenty years too late for you.
The boy finally heaved them out of the middle of the river and then pushed them toward shore. The rain seemed to abate, just a little, though there was no longer any distinction: her skin was as wet as the river that was as wet as the storm that was as wet as the sky. When they reached water shallow enough to see sand, she jumped out. She waited for the boy to drag his boat to higher ground and found that her fear had left an exhilaration, a lightness of body she had never before felt, and she tilted her face to the sky. The rain, the rest of her years.
She paid the boy twenty-five rupees, and his smile grew even wider, impossibly alluring, and she walked back through the wet streets, jubilant, though she never again took another boat ride.