by Shobha Rao
Savitha followed his finger. There! One of the birds, drying in the middle of the grid of birds, did have a wing that had broken off. She jumped up, alarmed. “What will we do, Nanna? Will they make us pay for that bird?”
Her father shook his head solemnly. “No, I don’t think so. But we’d better eat it, just to be sure.”
Savitha thought about that statement, and then she smiled. Laughed. “I’ll get it, Nanna. I’ll get the bird.” She ran to the edge of its row and leaned over, carefully, carefully, but she lost her footing and fell, crushing all but one or two of the birds beneath her. Savitha lay for a moment on the broken birds. Her eyes flooded with tears. She knew she was in for a scolding, maybe even a beating, and what was more: her father would have to make all those birds all over again. She finally got up, gingerly, her arms and legs and frock and even her face studded with splintered pieces of sugar. Her cheeks hot with tears. She was afraid to look at her father, afraid to raise her gaze, but when she did, to her surprise, he was laughing. His eyes were shining. She couldn’t understand it. “But Nanna, you’ll have to make them all over again.” Her father still laughed. Now he pointed at her. “And I thought you were sweet before,” he said.
It took her a moment to understand, and when she did, she flew into his arms; he laughed some more and hugged her close and lifted her off the ground. “Forget those birds,” he said. “You, you, girl of mine, you’re the one with wings.”
Sitting at the loom now, on a hot June night, she considered those two wonders: a girl bejeweled with sugar and the words you’re the one with wings.
A darkness fell over the lantern light.
Savitha turned and saw Poornima’s father. He smiled, and she thought, But he’s never smiled. And then he said, “Come with me.”
8
Poornima was asleep. A sound reached her. Cut through her dreams. She thought the sound might be an animal, a stray dog or a pig. Poornima listened. Then it came again. A cry.
From where? From where?
The weaving hut.
Poornima jumped up. She ran.
The weaving hut, she saw, was dimmed by shadows. A lantern burned. “Savitha?” she whispered.
At first only silence, except heavy, as if it had grown viscous in the heat, the dark. And then a low moan.
“Savitha?” She walked toward the sound. From the corner of the hut. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw a bundle, a shadow deeper than the surrounding shadows. She passed both looms. They looked massive, sinister in the dark, as if they were giants, hunched and full of hunger. But the bundle—she could see now that it was weeping, this bundle, sobbing so quietly, so achingly, that Poornima wondered if it was human, if the creature before her was born with anything besides this weeping.
She stumbled. She bent down.
Then she stilled. For a single moment, fleeting, she thought, Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe my eyes will open. But when she reached out her hand, she touched bare skin. Hot, heat like sunburned earth. Like desert sand. It was then that she saw Savitha’s clothes, ripped. Some on, some off. Lying around her like torn sails. “Savitha. What is it? What’s happened?”
The sobbing stopped.
Poornima knelt and took her shoulders. She felt the bones, the sharpness of them. The bones of a small animal. The hull of a tiny ship. Savitha shrank away. As she did, Poornima saw the part in her hair. The lantern lighting a river. Her braid undone, her long hair in disarray, but her part untouched. Silver. Waters pulsing through a mountain pass.
It was then that her grip on Savitha’s shoulders loosened. “Who?”
Savitha—whose head was bent over her knees, let out a wail. Low and tender and broken.
“Who?”
Her eyes filled with tears.
Savitha shook so violently that Poornima held her body against her own. She clasped her head to her chest and they rocked like that. Poornima thought she should get help, rouse her father, the neighbors. But when she made a move, the slightest stirring, Savitha gripped her hand. Gripped it so tightly that Poornima looked at her in astonishment.
“Who?”
Their eyes met.
“Poori,” she murmured.
And it was then that she understood. It was then that Poornima knew.
* * *
She let out a scream so loud that no less than ten people came running. By now, Savitha had shrunk. Retreated like a wounded animal. Scraps of her blouse fell from her shoulders. Her shoulders brown and denuded like distant hills. They stood around them; the questions and gasps and exclamations singing past Poornima like arrows. She dropped to her knees. A neighbor stood over her and said, “What is it? What? What’s wrong with you girls?”
“Bring a sheet,” someone yelled, trying to lift her up, but Poornima refused, covering Savitha’s body with her own. What other use could it have, she thought, this body of mine? What other use?
* * *
The sky the next morning was white with fever. The air so thick and hot it tasted of smoke. Poornima blinked awake, her eyelids wretched and unbelieving. Savitha was seated just as she had been, the sheet thrown over her, and Poornima eyed her desperately, thinking, No, this is no dream. Why couldn’t it be a dream? A moment later, Poornima’s brother sidled past the door, averted his eyes, and said, “Nanna wants his tea.”
Poornima looked at her brother, and then, when he’d gone, she looked at the empty doorway.
“Nanna wants his tea,” she parroted in a whisper, as if not only those words but all of language were a stranger to her.
She sat with those words, thinking through each one, and then slowly rose to her feet. Savitha didn’t move. She didn’t even seem to be awake, though her eyes were open.
Poornima moved through the heat, dazzled by the light, dizzied, from the weaving hut into the main hut, and set the water to boil. She added the milk, the sugar, the tea powder. She watched the blaze. It didn’t seem possible: it didn’t seem possible that she could make tea, make something as ordinary as tea. The world had reordered itself in the night, and to make tea, tea, for her father, seemed, in some way, a more fundamental offense than the one he had committed. She watched it with disgust, first simmering, then boiling, and then held the cup away from her, as though the wound he had opened, induced, was already festering, maggoted; as though she held that wound in her hand.
He was seated on the hemp-rope bed, just outside the hut. The elders were some distance away, and she could see that he was straining to hear them. When he saw her, he straightened his back and held out his hand, callous in its reach. A hot venom shot through her; she recoiled. She took steps toward him but her feet didn’t seem to be striking anything solid, anything sturdy. The ground is so soft, she thought, so like cotton. But then the venom turned to nausea, the heat, the glare of morning made her sway, her vision suddenly swam with iridescent dots, flashes of lurid light.
She was only a step or two away from him when her body gave out, gave in to the vertigo, the pull of the earth. She stumbled, a drop or two of tea splattered, her other arm reached to break her fall, and it was this arm that her father caught. It was this arm—the one he had never before touched, never in her memory—that he touched now. She felt the sizzle of his skin. The serpent curl of its claws, tongues, fingers. Scales like burning coals. She pulled away with a kind of violence, horror, and fled back to the weaving hut.
Back to Savitha.
She huddled against her, burrowed against her body, as if she had been the one who had been wronged. Wronged? It was a father, steadying his daughter. And yet, to steady her in this way, at this time, with its sickening glint of kindness, seemed to Poornima a greater affront than if he’d simply let her float away on the Krishna, all those years ago. Why, she wanted to ask, Why didn’t you?
* * *
It was then that Savitha’s father arrived. His hands—those gnarled fingers, bent and misshapen—no longer hidden. But held out in front of him, as if beseeching. Begging. Waving before him like wild branches
. Twisted by lightning strikes, bugs, disease. But his face, his face, Poornima saw, was frozen. Such despair as she had never seen.
“My girl,” he said simply, his eyes red, shattered. His voice in ruins.
He tried to lift Savitha—to take her with him—but she gripped Poornima’s arm. “Leave her,” someone yelled through the door. He tried lifting her once more, but Savitha gripped harder, and finally, watching his struggle, Poornima looked at him as she would at an empty field, and said, “She wants to be left.”
* * *
The afternoon brought swirls of chaos and maddening commotion. Neighbors, elders, onlookers, children hushed and sent away, men, everywhere men. But Savitha—Savitha remained still. Not since she’d gripped Poornima’s arm had she so much as turned her head. She’d simply pulled the sheet up to her neck, blinked once, and then stayed sitting, stonelike, exactly as she was. Poornima sat beside her and at one point, panicked and unnerved by her stillness, held her fingers under her nose for a moment to make sure she was still breathing. The dewy warmth of her exhalation, its delicacy, countered all the voices, the noise, the endless people.
Hands, sometime in the afternoon, tried to pull Poornima away. Tried to pry her away from Savitha. But this time, Poornima clung to her with a kind of madness, frenzy. She heard someone say, not even in a whisper, “It’ll taint her. These things always do. And so close to her marriage being settled.” Another said, “A dung heap is a dung heap. If you step in it—”
Poornima, though, felt like a blade of grass bent viciously by wind. She spoke to the wind. Please, she said to it softly, please stop. But when it did, just for a moment, she was stunned by the silence. Afraid. Afraid it would reach through the smoke, the heat, the numbness, and swallow them, she and Savitha, piece by piece.
* * *
The day wore on. The heat still savage. Clawing. Invading everything. Even Poornima’s tongue and her ears and her scalp were coated in a layer of dust. She paid it no attention; evening drew to a close. She listened. She heard everything. The village elders were still gathered outside the hut, debating what to do. Late in the evening, Savitha’s father joined them, and every now and then, Poornima heard shouting, and they seemed to her the shrieks of strange and startled birds, caught in nets.
“You,” a voice said.
Poornima looked up. Standing in the doorway of the weaving hut was a woman she didn’t recognize. But she seemed to know her.
“You,” she seethed. “It’s your fault.”
Poornima shrunk farther into her corner. The wall behind her hard and rough and unforgiving. She knew now: Savitha’s mother.
“Your fault. Your fault.”
“I—”
“If it wasn’t for you, if it wasn’t for your friendship, my Savitha would’ve never come here. She would’ve never stayed here. In this house of demons. In this house. Never. You’re a demon. Your house is demonic. And that sari.” The tears began; her voice failed. She slid to the ground. She clutched at the doorpost. She crawled toward Poornima like an animal. “That sari. That sari. That she was making for you. This would’ve never happened otherwise.” Now she had crept so close that Poornima felt her breath against her face. Hot, rancid, poisoned. “My child. My child, you understand? No. No, you don’t. You couldn’t, you demon.”
Someone came in. They saw her. They pulled her away. She screamed—wretchedly, without form, as if a stake were being driven into her heart. She kicked as she was dragged away. Dust flew into Poornima’s eyes. She blinked. In the quiet that followed, a pall descended over the hut. Over Savitha and Poornima. A great and unendurable silence. As if Savitha’s mother had opened a portal, and air had rushed in. It was then that the tears started. And once they started, Poornima saw, they had no end. They came in great and uncontrollable sobs. If her mother’s death had brought a storm, this could drown the earth and everyone with it.
No one paid her any attention. They went in and out of the weaving hut. All manner of people. Late in the evening, a child—a little boy—peeped through the doorway, and one of the village elders grabbed his arm and pulled him away. He admonished him. “What is there to see?” Poornima heard him say. “Spoiled fruit is spoiled fruit.”
The tears kept coming.
At one point Poornima choked with her weeping, and when she did, she realized she’d forgotten to breathe. Forgotten that there was such a thing as air. That there was anything other than pain.
She took Savitha’s limp hand and held it in hers—and youth and middle age and senescence passed before her like the cinema she had never seen, like the cinema Savitha had delighted in one day seeing.
“Savitha?”
Nothing.
“Savitha?”
Not the slightest movement. Not a twitch or a breath or a blink.
“Say something.”
Deep into that night, the village elders came to a decision: Poornima’s father was to marry Savitha. They all agreed: it was to be his punishment, and it was just.
No one bothered to tell Savitha the decision. Poornima only heard of it when Ramayya walked by the door of the hut and hissed, “She’ll get married before you. The trash picker. And without even having to give your father a dowry.”
Poornima stared at him. She turned from the doorway only when she felt movement; Savitha had blinked. For the duration of the second night, Savitha sat again, motionless. “Savitha,” Poornima tried one more time, shaking her, pleading once more for so much as a word, a gesture, before falling finally into a disturbed and plagued sleep. Mostly by dreams, nightmares, visions, and premonitions, but once by Savitha’s voice.
“Do you remember?” her voice said.
Poornima rolled her head in her sleep; she mumbled, “What?”
“About Majuli. About flute song. And that perfect fruit. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
There was silence. Poornima shifted again in her sleep, felt for Savitha’s hunched body but found only air.
“I’ll be many things, Poori, but I won’t be your stepmother.”
“Okay.”
A shuffling.
“Poornima?”
“Yes?”
“I’m the one with wings.”
In the morning, Poornima woke to screams and clamoring and calls for a search party; she looked around the weaving hut and found it empty. Savitha was gone.
Poornima
1
Poornima’s wedding was postponed indefinitely. The groom’s side wouldn’t budge from their demand for twenty thousand more rupees. Especially now with rumors swirling as to the fouled runaway girl, her friendship with Poornima, and suggestions—by people whom Poornima had never even met, by people not even from Indravalli—that Poornima had helped her to run away. And what could be said about a girl like that? they said. What good would she be as a wife?
Not only that, but every day, more details dribbled in from Namburu confirming their hesitation. The father sent word that his son—in addition to the twenty thousand—would need a watch and a motorcycle. The older of the groom’s sisters, whose name was Aruna, wondered aloud, in the company of some of the other village women in Namburu, whether it wouldn’t be difficult for her to have a sister-in-law so clearly beneath her. Beneath you? one of them had asked. Beneath you how? Supposedly, the sister had looked at her gravely and said, “Beneath me in the way a monkey is beneath me.”
Still, it was the mother’s comment that most agitated Poornima. She’d told one of Poornima’s distant cousins, while bemoaning her college-educated son’s marriage to a village girl, “What can one do? That’s the thing with a successful son: you either have to get him married to a modern college girl who’ll ruin him with her excesses and demands, demands of makeup and fashionable saris and jewelry every time she so much as passes gas, or the village bumpkin who is as dark as a mustard seed, with the social graces of a mama pig in mud.” But hadn’t she said Poornima was not as dark as she’d thought? Hadn’t she taken Poornima’s chin i
n her hand?
She wished Savitha were here, so she could talk to her about it. Savitha? Her heart blazed with pain. And then gave out like a candle.
She had been gone for a month now. Thirty-three days. The search party that had gone to look for her—made up of a group of young men from Indravalli (there had also been a local police constable in the beginning, but he’d returned within two hours of starting the search and declared, wiping his brow in the heat, “The last time I spent more than an hour looking for a girl was the daughter of an MLA. We ended up finding her at the bottom of a well, not two hundred yards from the MLA’s house. It’s always the same; take my word for it. In this heat, I give it a day or two. Maybe three. And there she’ll be, floating, puffed up like a puri.”)—had gone as far as Amravati to the west, Gudivada to the east, Guntur to the south, and Nuzividu to the north. Nothing. They’d come back without so much as a rumor as to her whereabouts. Where could she have gone? the women in Indravalli wondered. Where is there to disappear to?
Poornima looked in the direction of the Krishna, east, and wondered the same thing.
After two months of back and forth, Ramayya and Poornima’s father finally reached a compromise with the Namburu family. Poornima’s father would add an extra ten thousand to the dowry, paying out five thousand now and five thousand within a year of the marriage, along with a scooter instead of a motorcycle—Ramayya suggesting to them that a scooter would be more convenient as Poornima began having children (sons, he was careful to add). The Namburu family, after a tense week of silence, finally agreed, grumblingly, bemoaning the generosity of their discount. Ramayya was overjoyed that the match had finally been settled, but Poornima’s father was miserable. “But you won’t have to sell the looms,” Ramayya said, trying to cheer him. “And just think, you only have one more to go.” Poornima’s father raised his dark gaze to her, when she handed him his tea, and eyed her with contempt. And Poornima, surprising even herself, eyed him right back.
