Girls Burn Brighter

by Shobha Rao

  * * *

  Her passport arrived. She’d taken the blank forms to a local scribe, near the courts, and he’d filled them out for her. He’d then told her she needed to get photos taken and instructed her on where to submit the forms and the photos. She went back to the courts, months later, passport in hand, and searched the crowd of scribes for the same one who’d helped her before. “Now,” she said to him, “how do I go to America?”

  * * *

  A visa, then. That’s what she needed. The scribe had explained it to her, much more clearly than Guru had, and so she went back to her flat, deep in thought. She cooked herself some rice and plain pappu and had it with a bit of tomato pickle, then she had yogurt rice, washed up the few dishes, and sat down by the window. Her second-floor flat looked out onto a peepal tree, and beyond that, a man had set up an ironing stall. He was there on most days—thin, with a tired face, graying hair, his iron steaming with red coals, his long fingers dipping into a bowl of water, sprinkling it on the creases of shirts and trousers to crisp them, the edges of saris to smooth them. Poornima had watched him on occasion, but today was the first time she noticed him, how rapt he was, how completely consumed he was by the ironing—of what? What was that? A child’s frock. It was a child’s frock, and it utterly engrossed him. She watched him a little longer, watched him fold the frock, ever so gently, and then place it on a pile of already ironed clothes. He took up the next item. A man’s shirt. Poornima then looked up and down the street. There was a cow at one end and a stray dog picking at some greasy newspaper thrown on the ground on the other; a rickshaw wallah was taking a nap on the opposite side of the street. A cool evening wind was rustling the leaves of the peepal tree, and there was the scent of something frying, maybe pakora, from one of the nearby houses. The sky was yellow, thick like ghee, as it cooled into evening, into night’s blue mood, and Poornima came finally to see the unavoidable: that she didn’t have the money for a visa. She’d used all the money and jewelry she’d stolen from the armoire to pay for the passport. She didn’t even have enough for a tourist visa, and she knew no one in America who could sponsor her. That left Guru. And though she was infuriated, she saw no other option: she was far more dependent on Guru than she had imagined, than she would’ve liked, but she needed him now more than she ever had before.

  * * *

  She obviously couldn’t tell him she needed his help; he would never give it to her. She had to appeal to the only thing he loved, and she lacked: money. Her opportunity came a few weeks later. She was checking a list of expenses for the previous month—routine odds and ends, like a new hot-water geyser for one of the brothels, the cost of repairing a gate that had rusted, and official payments like the one for a new phone line, and unofficial ones, like the bribe that had been paid to the telephone company administrator to nudge their application for the new telephone line—when she came across an expense that was huge, eight lakh rupees to be exact, but had nothing listed beside it. No name or company or even the initials of a name or a company. Poornima guessed it was a bribe to a politician; only that would explain the extraordinary amount and the fact that it was left blank and untraceable. When next she saw Guru, she asked, “That eight lakh rupees. From last month. Do you know who it was paid out to?”

  He had come to check up on a new girl who’d just arrived. A farmer’s daughter. The farmer had committed suicide, and the mother had sold the daughter to pay off debts. Poornima saw her only in passing, sitting alone in a room, hardly more than twelve or thirteen. Her face was round, and she wore a glittering nose ring. Poornima imagined that the mother had given her that small piece of jewelry, and that she’d said, Remember me by this, remember your father. But probably it was only a cheap ornament, a tawdry carnival item that had been bought for a few rupees. Though the glitter was real, and it made her face, in the dark room, glow like banked embers.

  Guru was on his way to see her when Poornima asked him. He stood at her door, his teeth and lips orange from the betelnet, and said, “Oh, that money? Fucking Kuwaitis. They wouldn’t pay a single paisa for the shepherd. Made me pay, the rich bastards.”

  “A shepherd? A shepherd for what?”

  “For the girl.”

  Poornima looked at him. “What girl?”

  “Look, can’t sit here talking to you all day. You don’t need to know.”

  “But I need to balance the books. Know expenses.”

  He glanced in the direction of the farmer’s daughter’s room and said, “On my way out.” When he came back, twenty minutes later, his face was calm, and he smiled and said, “Usually, we split the cost with the buyer, but they wouldn’t split.”

  By now, Poornima had figured out most of it: a young village girl, bought by some foreigner, certainly couldn’t travel alone. She would clearly need a shepherd, someone to deliver her. But who were these shepherds? “Middlemen find them for us,” Guru said. “Someone who knows English, obviously. Airports and all that.”

  “That’s it? Someone who knows English, and they get eight lakh rupees for two days’ work?”

  Guru shook his head in disgust. “It’s thievery, plain and simple. But you’re not just buying two days’ work, or English, what you’re buying for eight lakhs is discretion. Or, shall we say, a bad memory.”

  Poornima shook her head right along with him. But her thoughts were elsewhere. English, she was thinking. English.

  * * *

  That very night, she rode the bus to Governorpet and asked around. There was a good English school on Eluru Road, the college kids told her, and so she got on another bus to Divine Nagar. She enrolled in a conversational English class starting the following week.

  She thought about all the English words she knew, which were the same ones everyone knew: hello, good-bye, serial, and cinema. She knew the words battery and blue and paste and auto and bus and train. She also knew the word radio. Those wouldn’t help her much. She knew the words penal code section, also from the movies, the ones with courtroom scenes. Those certainly wouldn’t help her. She knew the words please and thank you. They might.

  The class met three times a week, from seven to nine P.M. During the first class, they covered most of the words Poornima already knew, and some she didn’t, and they learned simple sentences, like “My name is” and “How are you?” and “I live in Vijayawada.” Those were all fine and good, but by the end of the week, they hadn’t learned a single thing that would help her while traveling, in airports, or to function, even for one or two days, in a new country. When she asked the teacher about this, about when they would learn things like asking directions or reading signs in an airport or interacting with the officials at passport control (which the scribe had also explained to her), the teacher—a young woman who was a newlywed; Poornima could tell this because she wore a fresh, fragrant garland of jasmine in her hair every evening, and she looked at her watch constantly, and as it neared nine P.M., she would be flush with what could be only expectation, joy, newness—looked at Poornima curiously, averting her eyes from the scar, and said, “This is a conversational English class. You want the one for businesspeople.”

  “Businesspeople? Why?”

  “Because they’re the ones who travel,” she said.

  So Poornima transferred into the class for businesspeople. This class had five men in it, and Poornima. The teacher was a middle-aged man, maybe forty, with a prominent nose and an excitable manner. He would leap around the class like a grasshopper, explaining various words and their meanings and engaging them in conversation. By the end of the fourth week, Poornima was elated. She was able to have this conversation:

  “What is your name, madam?”

  “Poornima.”

  “What is your business?”

  “I am accountant.”

  “I am an accountant,” the teacher corrected her.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “I am an accountant.”

  “How was your flight, madam?”

  “Very good, sir.” />
  “Did you fly from Delhi or Mumbai?”

  “I fly from Delhi.”

  “I flew,” he said.

  “Yes, yes. I flew from Delhi,” she said smiling, resplendent, unaware of the five other men in the class, staring at her face in horror.

  * * *

  The course was four months long. At the end of the four months, Poornima knew the names of major airports (Heathrow, Frankfurt, JFK), and she knew the words gate, transit, business, pleasure, no, nothing to declare, and lots of other business phrases she hadn’t even imagined, like “In for a penny, in for a pound” and “Let’s seal the deal” and “Bon voyage” (which wasn’t even English!). She would walk home after class, or ride the bus, and speak to the passing scenes. She’d say, “Bird. Hello. I am learning English.” Or she’d say, “Tree. Do you know English?” Once she saw a cat prowling around an alley near her flat, and she said, “Cat. You are looking thin. Drink milk.” On the last day, the teacher gave Poornima a pocket-size Telugu-English dictionary for being the best student in the class. She received it in front of the other students—all of them still unused to the burn scars on her face—folded her hands, and said, “Thank you, sir. With me, I will take it America.”

  * * *

  Once the class was finished, there was nothing more to be done. Poornima considered taking another class, an advanced class for businesspeople, but she didn’t have the money to enroll, so she waited, saved most of her salary each month, and carried the Telugu-English dictionary with her everywhere, as if it were an amulet, a charm that would take her to Savitha faster. It did nothing of the sort. In fact, she had to wait half a year before she saw another large payout. This one was for five lakh rupees. No name, no notations. She seized the opportunity. She said to Guru, “Another shepherd?”

  He groaned. “They’ll finish me, with their prices.”

  “How much do you make on the girls?”

  “None of your business,” he said, looking her squarely in the eyes, as warning, as admonishment. The funds were kept separately, Poornima had noticed, off the books.

  “I was just thinking,” she said, ignoring his look, “that I could go. Take the girls. You’d only have to pay for the ticket.”

  “You,” he said, and laughed, “with that face? And not a lick of English?”

  “But I do know English.”

  “What?”

  “I learned in school. In diploma college. When I learned accounting.”

  “Where are you from again?”

  “Ask me. Ask me anything.”

  Guru didn’t know enough English to ask her anything beyond “What is your name?” and “What is your caste?” but the next day, he brought in an English-language newspaper, The Times of India, and said, Read that. She did, and explained that it was about two tribals in Jharkhand who’d been beaten to death for being Christian. He looked at her, amazed. Apparently, he’d already had someone, an acquaintance or a man at the newsstand, read the article and tell him what it was about. “Diploma college, you say?”

  Poornima nodded.

  He was still skeptical, until Poornima started speaking to him exclusively in English, convincingly enough for Guru, who hardly knew it, until he finally said, “There is this one girl. Going to Dubai. But you’ll have to get a passport.”

  Poornima jumped at the chance, hiding from him the fact that she already had one.

  He warned her: This is unorthodox, he said. And then he corrected himself: Actually, he said, it’s not done. He took a deep breath. “We’re supposed to keep everything separate. So no one knows anything, all the way up the line. But do this one, let’s see.” He chewed his betelnut. “Don’t talk to her. Don’t answer her. Don’t have a conversation with her, you understand? You don’t know her. And you especially don’t know me. Who am I?”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly.” And then he said, “I’m a stranger. The girl’s a stranger.”

  “Okay, but who is she?”

  “The farmer’s daughter,” he said.

  2

  They left the following month. The girl’s name was Kumari and she was wearing a new sari, a fancy one that was yellow with a green border. Poornima noticed that she’d washed and oiled her hair that morning, powdered her face with talcum, and still wore the nose ring, still glittering against the russet of her skin. She looked like a doll, one that Poornima would see in the shop windows during her walks.

  The story was that they were sisters, going to visit relatives, though with her scarred face, it was nearly impossible to tell Poornima’s age. “I never even thought of it before now,” Guru exclaimed, joyous at the prospect of saving the five or six lakhs he would’ve had to pay another shepherd. “You’re perfect. Perfect. And you’re so ugly, they might not be able to look at you long enough to ask all those questions.”

  Poornima hoped so.

  Then he said, “You mention me, you utter the first syllable of my name, and I will kill you myself.”

  She nodded.

  Guru even saved money on the train trip to Chennai, as he simply had his driver take Kumari and Poornima to the train station in Vijayawada and drop them off. Naturally, Poornima knew everything there was to know about the Vijayawada station. She bought the girl a chocolate bar at the Higginbotham’s, glanced at the niche behind the magazine rack, and then boarded an overnight train to Hyderabad. From there, they took an airplane to Mumbai, barely a two-hour flight. Even so, it was the first time on a plane for both of them, and when they hit turbulence midway, Kumari looked over at Poornima, stricken, green like the green ends of her sari, and said, “Will we fall out of the sky?” Poornima looked back at her, thought of Guru’s orders not to speak, and thought, What could it hurt? And though she, too, was terrified, she said, “Of course not. Planes are like birds. They never fall out of the sky.”

  In Mumbai, they boarded another two-hour flight to Dubai. When they passed through customs and immigration, their passports stamped with barely a glance, barely any questions, there was a man waiting for them in the arrivals meeting area—he was Indian, and humorless. He said there was a car waiting and led Kumari away. But just as the girl turned, the sun struck her face, shone against the nose ring, setting it ablaze. And it was then, with the small jewel spinning like a sun, that she turned to Poornima, and said, “Birds do. Sometimes.”

  “What?”

  “Fall out of the sky.”

  Poornima watched her go, her eyes warming with tears. So that’s how it can hurt, she thought.

  * * *

  She spent a few days in Dubai, at a cheap hostel, so that passport control in India wouldn’t start asking questions. What questions, she didn’t know, but Guru had given her dirhams and said, “Stay there. And don’t talk to anyone.” No one talked to her, so it was easy, and three months after she returned to Vijayawada, she took another girl to Dubai. Two months after that, she took a girl to Singapore. She also finally saved up enough money to register for the advanced English class for businesspeople. It was taught by a different teacher, another middle-aged man she didn’t like as much, but she liked that there was another woman in the class this time, a stylish woman who wore skirts and jeans and who’d already been to many places, like England and America, on business. “What kind of business?” Poornima asked. “Computers,” the woman said. Poornima had never seen a computer, or heard the word, but she was too embarrassed to ask any more questions.

  Finally, toward the middle of the year, it happened.

  Poornima, when Guru told her, sat speechless. She sat without blinking. She stared at him, her body suddenly weightless, exhilarated, and she thought of the night after the boat ride.

  “Did you hear me? I know it’s not Switzerland,” he said, laughing. “But you might like it. Everyone else does.”

  America. Seattle.

  They needed another girl. The girl they’d bought last time, Guru told her, was the hardest worker they’d ever seen. “And get this: the hardest worker, and she onl
y has one hand,” he exclaimed. Poornima nodded, hardly listening. She was going to America. She was going to Seattle.

  “Savitha,” she said that night, into the dark of her room, “Savitha, I’m coming.”

  3

  The preparations for this trip were far more complicated than for the other trips. Much stronger rules, Guru told her. The girl Poornima would shepherd, Madhavi, had a cleft lip. Another medical visa, he added. Then he laughed and said, You two might as well be on a billboard for medical visas. Still, it took months to gather all the documentation, witness them, and submit them, and then to travel back and forth from the American consulate in Chennai. Even so, they rejected Poornima’s visa initially, and she had to reapply for a tourist visa, which they delayed again, at the last minute, after they’d bought their plane tickets, so that now Guru had to pay change fees and a bribe to a consulate official, and he grumbled incessantly, but she knew it was still lucrative for him, even after all these expenses.

  While they waited for the visas, Poornima slowly began selling away her things. She didn’t have much, only a cot and the stove, some dishes, and a small suitcase she’d bought to store her clothes. She sold the cot for a hundred rupees and slept on the mat that had been underneath. She kept the stove for the time being but promised it to her landlady when she left. The suitcase, made of a flimsy, dented plastic, which she’d bought for sixty rupees at Maidan Bazaar, she threw out, and bought herself a new one. “Made for foreign,” the man at the shop said, slapping the side of the suitcase. She carried it home, filled it with her few clothes, took out all the money she had in the bank—everything she’d saved since paying for the passport—hardly adding up to a thousand dollars, once converted, and put that, too, into a secret side pocket of her new suitcase, and then she waited.

  On the morning of their flight, there was one final delay: Madhavi. She refused to come out of her room. There was no lock on the inside, but she had shoved a broom or a stick into the handle of the door, and rebuffed all their pleas to come out, or to let them in. Guru waited, cursing her mother and father, all the way to her great-great-grandparents, and when Poornima asked to talk to her, he said, “No. No, you don’t talk to her. Your only job is to deliver her.” But when, after five minutes, she still hadn’t opened the door, he relented. “Fine. Talk to her. Tell her another five minutes before we break it open.” As it was, Madhavi hadn’t offered a word of explanation to the madam or the other girls, but when Poornima leaned into the door and said, “Madhavi, open the door. Open it. Don’t you want to go to America? Everybody wants to go to America.”