by Shobha Rao
And this mystery remained with her. All through the years. From then until now. She held it close while at the brothel, tucked away inside her pillow. Along with Poornima’s half-made sari (she’d screamed for it in one of her drug-fueled rages, and someone had—not out of kindness but to shut her up—found it lodged in a corner of the concrete room, lifted it with their toes, and flung it at her face).
There, then: the mystery of cloth, and the cloth itself. She felt both, burning—as mysteries do—inside her pillow.
2
The second time she saw Guru was a few months later. One of the girls was sick from an infection. A customer had given it to her, and she lay in bed with a scalding fever, a wide, blistering rash on her thighs and crotch, unable to swallow even a single sip of buttermilk. The girls crowded around her. A doctor, one of them yelled. There was a scampering. The madam pushed her way to the front. “It’s a Sunday,” she said, without much regret. “There’ll be a surcharge.”
A Sunday.
There is such a thing as days, Savitha suddenly realized. There is such a thing as time.
Her mind pricked. Something small, behind the eyes, grew rigid.
Guru arrived later that afternoon. The madam had phoned him and asked him to come. The girls gathered around again. This time, Savitha noticed that his shoes had a slight heel, and that the betelnut had colored his teeth orange. “You call me for this,” he said.
The madam kneaded her hands. “It’s the worst I’ve seen.”
He studied the girl’s wan face, her lips split and bleeding from fever. “Was she one of the popular ones?”
“She is,” the madam said.
Guru then studied her some more, turned on his elevated heels, walked to the door, and said, “Let her die.”
Savitha watched him leave the room. The girl whimpered in her sleep, as if she’d heard the words. Though she couldn’t possibly have. Not through all those layers of heat and withering and waste. Let her die. The words hung in the air for a moment, and then they began another journey, this time snaking through Savitha’s own layers of heat and wither and waste. Her eyes grew wide; they ached with new light. There was a door, she remembered, a hidden one. Where all her treasures lay. And it remained closed, through the tea stall and the concrete room and the drugs, through the men and the men and the men. And it was through this door that the words found their way.
She looked around the room.
It seemed to her, looking now, that they were all simply children, waiting to die. And in the next instant, she thought, No. No, we’re all old. Old, old women, ravaged by time, and waiting to die.
And it was this thought that brought the others. An avalanche of others—not in their number, but in their precision.
The first one was this: she couldn’t stay here. It wasn’t an obvious thought, not to her. Since Poornima’s father had raped her, she’d floundered in something like life, but not life itself. A veil had fallen when he’d held his hand over her mouth. A fadedness, too, had fallen, when he’d pried her legs open. A branch had snapped—a branch from which all things grew, from which every banana, every hope, every laugh sprouted—when she’d looked into his face, and, in a small way, seen her friend’s. After that, what did it matter where she lived, or ate, or breathed her lesser breaths? What difference would it ever make? So that now, when the thought came to her that she needed to leave, that she must leave, she realized, with surprise, that she was beginning to live again. That it did matter. That this again was life.
Her second thought: in order to leave, she had to get past Guru. She recalled, a few months ago, that one of the customers had wanted to use a wooden pestle, and when Savitha had run out of the room, horrified, the madam had yanked her back inside and said, “It would be a shame if someone snapped your father’s fingers off, wouldn’t it? Or if your sisters ended up where you are?” The madam hadn’t gathered those things on her own. Guru had. That much she knew. And yes, she’d been barely conscious for the past few months, but she’d been conscious enough to notice that this was no singular house or madam or undertaking. Not at all. It had its leader—Guru—and it had its lieutenants, like the madam, and it had its foot soldiers, like the man who’d offered her the tea, and the boy who’d injected her, and the girl who’d cleaned her, and the one who’d gone to Indravalli, asked around, and had made sure that no one would come looking for her, or at least that no one had the money or the power or the pull (all three, one and the same) to look for her.
Her third and final thought was this: she needed an advantage. There were only a few clear advantages in the world. She obviously had no money, her only skill was weaving, and she could barely read or write. That left only one thing: her body. My body, my body, she thought, looking down at the now used-up husk of the girl she’d once been, the chest still flat, the hands still big, the skin still dark. She moved then to the mirror—a small round mirror, framed by green plastic, hanging by a nail on a wall opposite the bed. She’d not once looked into it, not once, but now she took it down and studied her face. Her eyes, her lips, her nose. The curve of her cheeks, the sweep of her lashes. She moved the mirror closer, then farther. She tilted it; she straightened it. She looked. And there, just there. What was that? “Stop,” she said out loud, into the emptiness of the room. “Hold it there.” And so she held it there. And that was when she saw it. Had it always been there? That lamp glowing from within. How had it survived all these previous months? How had it held on? No matter, it was greater than her body, it was greater than all else. She laughed, for perhaps the first time since the night in the weaving hut, to see it there. To know it was hers.
Over the next few days, she watched the other girls in the brothel; she stared into their faces, their eyes, five who’d been there longer than Savitha, one who had arrived only the previous month. And none of them had it. Not one. Theirs had been extinguished. But hers, hers.
So now she had two advantages: she had her body, and she had her light.
She bided her time. On every full moon night, she looked up at the sky.
* * *
It took the better part of a year, but one winter evening, when Guru came to check the account books, she waited outside the madam’s door. He was saying something about having hired a new accountant, someone trustworthy, he thought, and then he laughed, and then the rest of the conversation was muffled. When he came out, Savitha stepped in front of him. Guru was taken aback, or so she guessed by the slight quiver she saw at the edge of his lips, though he said and did nothing more to indicate his surprise.
“Do I know you?”
So that’s how many girls he had: more than he could remember.
“Savitha.”
“Savitha?”
“I’m the one you spit on.”
He seemed to consider the statement, the words themselves, and the fact that they’d been spoken. To him.
“I’d like a banana,” she said.
By now, the madam had come to the door. Her eyes blazed. She laughed nervously. “A joker. It’s nice when one of the girls is funny.”
Savitha braced her feet to the floor. She willed her body taut. Her eyes blazed back. Guru seemed amused. He rocked on his elevated shoes, eye to eye with Savitha, and said, “You get enough rice.”
“I do. But I’d like a banana to eat with my rice. My yogurt rice.”
He laughed out loud, for a long while. And when he finished, his voice dropped; it settled like stone. “Come with me,” he said. “Let me show you how you can get that banana.”
She followed him inside. He sent the madam down the hall and closed the door behind her. Then he walked to the desk in the center of the room and opened one of the large books stacked in a far corner. Savitha had never seen a book that big, the pages filled with lines and columns and numbers and all manner of scribbles. “You see this,” he said, pointing to a row in the middle of a page. She leaned over. No, she didn’t see. It looked to her like random markings. “This is how muc
h you make in a month. And you see these? These numbers here are what you cost me. The difference is my profit. You see?”
Savitha nodded.
“Very good. Then you must also see that for every banana you want, all you have to do is take on one more customer. One banana, one customer. You see?” He looked at her.
Savitha looked back. “I see. I’d also like to know how to leave here,” she said.
He sat down on the chair behind the desk. He folded his hands. His look was one of sorrow, or maybe sweetness. “Forget what I said about a woman who won’t listen. The worst thing is a woman who knows what she wants.” He rose slowly and came around the desk. His heels clicked on the stone floor. “Let’s start here,” he said, and led her to a cot in the corner of the room. Savitha lay down on her back, but he turned her over and took her that way. “I don’t like faces,” he said.
* * *
Over the next months, Guru sought her out whenever he came to the brothel. It wasn’t very often; usually he had the books delivered to the main house, where the accounts were kept. Somewhere outside of town, Savitha was told.
He’d asked for her by name.
Each time, he’d ask her how many bananas she’d earned that month. Six, she’d say, or five. You like them that much? he’d ask. They keep me from forgetting, she’d say. Forgetting what? Savitha would only smile and burn brighter.
In the spring of that year, Guru summoned Savitha into his office. It had been nearly two years since she’d left Indravalli. This time, as she looked around the room, she saw that the books were gone; there was only him, behind the desk, waiting. “Sit down,” he said. And when she did, he said, “There’s a Saudi prince.”
“Saudi?”
“It’s a country.”
“Is this a story?”
“Sort of. Yes, yes, it is. He wants to buy a girl. Young, not too young. You might be just right.”
Savitha listened.
“A lakh rupees. We’ll split it two ways. A year or two over there, and you’ll be free.”
Savitha’s eyes widened. Fifty thousand rupees! She could get all her sisters married; she could buy her parents a house, a castle! But wait. Why would he share the money with her? Why would he give her a single paisa?
“The thing is…” Guru continued, hesitating, though Savitha had never before seen him hesitate. “The thing is, he has interesting tastes.”
“What kind of tastes?”
“He likes amputees.”
“What’s an amputee?”
“Someone who’s missing a limb.”
Savitha shook her head, confused. “But I’m not missing a limb.”
He looked at her. A long, cruel look.
“No.” She laughed, chilled by the realization of what Guru was suggesting. “Never.”
But he continued looking. He waited. She jumped up, breathed with effort. “You’re worth about a quarter of that to me,” he said. “Twenty-five, let’s say. Do you know how long it will take you to buy your way out of here?”
Savitha thought of the book, the markings, the figures. She thought about what a banana cost. “I don’t care. I’m not—”
“So the question is,” Guru said, interrupting her, “do you want to be worth what you are, or do you want to be worth more?”
There seemed no greater question in the world.
Savitha looked down at her hands, and as if prophetic in her gaze, when she asked, “Which limb?” he said, “Any limb. A hand, let’s say. Either one. You choose.”
* * *
The operation was scheduled to take place two days later, but was then moved up to the next day. Less time to change my mind, Savitha thought. Regardless, she lay in bed all the night before, cradling her left hand, letting it wander over the ridges of her body. How can they take a hand? How can a hand be taken? she wondered. The palm, the fingers, the crescent moons at their tips. The warmth of blood beneath the skin, already curtailed, lost. The ends of a body as beautiful as its beating center. She decided in that moment, resolutely, lying in bed, No, I won’t do this, I won’t let them. But then she gazed into the dark of the room, into the dark oblivion of her waiting sisters, their waiting dowries, and knew she would. Knew she had to. She would let them buy it—her hand; she had nothing left to sell.
3
It was called a general anesthetic, but it felt to Savitha as if a light had been turned off, as if night had crashed through her like an anvil. When she woke up, the stub of her left arm was bandaged. The doctor beamed with pride and said, “Cleanest one ever. It looks almost pretty.” When the bandage came off, Savitha sat in her room and stared at it. What did they do with my hand? she wondered. Where did they take it? If someone paid for a stub, then maybe someone else paid for a hand?
Regardless, in the end, she realized, it had come down to the body.
She held back tears. She could never again sit at the loom, or the charkha, but why would she need to? With fifty thousand rupees she could buy all the cloth in the world. Silks and chiffons and gold-bordered pottu saris. Saris she could’ve never before imagined, but now could buy as gifts for her sisters on their wedding days. With that thought, she searched in her pillow and took out Poornima’s half-made one. She held it to her chest; she buried her head in its folds. What reason was there to be sad? It was just a hand. Imagine Nanna’s surprise, she thought. Imagine his delight. All that money. And yet, and yet the scrap of a sari she held now, she knew—the knowledge grottoed in her heart, hidden in a cove, reached only by the darker waters, the quieter ones—was the truest offering. What did they matter, the ones to come? What did they matter to her? What mattered was that once, long ago, a line of indigo thread had met a line of red, and out had poured a thing of beauty. A thing of bravery.
She lifted her head and noticed a dampness. She was crying. And the cotton, as cotton will, had soaked up the tears.
* * *
Savitha waited for her ticket to Saudi to arrive. She tried to find a map, but she couldn’t. When she asked the madam where it was, she said, “In the desert.” So it was near Rajasthan. That wasn’t so far. Though it did occur to her that far might be the best place to be. She had been wrong to turn back, to come to Vijayawada, where she could still, in a certain wind, scent the waters of the Krishna. And that scent would then plunge her into a terrifying and quarried understanding of how little she’d managed, how corrupt her fate: she’d come all of twenty kilometers from Indravalli. What would’ve happened if I had gone to Pune? she wondered. She looked at the space at the end of her left arm and thought, Would I still have you? But now she was going even farther, and to go far, and then to return, with money, was, she decided, what the crow had told her that long-ago day: Let them eat you, let them, but be sure to eat them back.
Money. Money let you eat them back.
She was no longer considered one of the regular prostitutes, but one of the special ones. What did that mean? Savitha wasn’t quite sure. She didn’t have to take as many customers, that was one thing, because mostly, as it turned out, the fetish for an amputee wasn’t all that common; most of the men preferred one of the girls with both hands intact. Though the customers she did have paid more, and were much more talkative than they had been, as if her missing hand were an expensive conversation piece, as if it lent her an added ability to understand their deepest selves, their darkest fears. Savitha was happy to listen. In fact, she became such a good listener that she could sense a man’s sorrow—the source of it—the minute he entered the room. It was easy. A man with a nagging wife held his head unnaturally high when he entered. A man who’d been unloved as a child waited for her to speak first. A man who had no money—who was perhaps spending the last of it on her—held on to the doorknob for longer than he should.
She once had a customer who confessed to having been in jail. For killing my brother, he said, though he said nothing more about it. But he went on to tell her that after his third year in jail, he’d escaped and lived as a fugitive for
more than twenty years. In Meghalaya, he said, in the forests. He said he’d been the pampered eldest son of a wealthy family. Wheat merchants. I had no idea how to cook even rice, he said, let alone live in the wilderness. But he learned to make his way in the forests, he told her, and he began to realize certain things.
“What things?” Savitha asked.
But at that point in the story, he stopped. Savitha waited. She watched him. He didn’t look like a fugitive, though she had no idea what one would look like. She’d expect them to at least be wild-looking, haunted in some way, but this man looked quite serene, contented even, as if he’d just had a refreshing bath and a nice breakfast.
At last, after almost ten minutes of sitting in silence, the man, with graying hair and dark eyes, by turn tunnels and then becoming the smooth faces of cliffs, said, “By my fifth year in the forest, I realized I could no longer feel. Not just that I couldn’t feel pain or loneliness or lust. Not just those things, but that I could no longer even feel my own heart. Do you understand? It was beating, but it might as well have been a stone, beating against another stone.”
