Girls Burn Brighter

by Shobha Rao

  He laughed out loud. “No one else can do that. No one. I’ve been able to do it since I was five.” He looked at her. “The key is: your hand has to move before your mind even tells it to move. That’s the only way to kill a fly.”

  He lifted the cigarette, the fly still caught on its end, its body no longer distinguishable from it, and dropped the butt into the ashtray. His smile, too, dropped, and he said, “Let’s go.” When he pulled up to her building, he said, “I’ll be back in a week or two.”

  When she got back to the apartment, she stood for a moment and looked at Padma’s and Geeta’s sleeping faces.

  We were once children, she thought; we were once little girls. We once played in the dirt under the shade of a tree.

  Then she turned away, the nausea rising in her throat. She showered. She smelled burning flesh, though was there enough to a fly to be called flesh? She didn’t know, and she stopped wondering. After her shower, she drank a glass of water, went to her cot, and took out Poornima’s half-made sari. She looked at it, she looked at it hard, and she thought, In a week or two. He’ll be back in a week or two. And then she thought, but of course there was enough to it. There had to be. There was enough to everything to be called flesh. Even the smallest creature. The poorest. The most alone. And yet. And yet, he’d be back in a week or two. She looked at the fragment of sari in her hand, and she thought, I am not that girl in that room. I am not. I am this; I am indigo and red. And to be here in a week or two, and a week or two after that, and a week or two after that, was to surrender to what the crow had warned against, had always been warning against, it was to surrender to being eaten piece by piece.

  * * *

  She didn’t sleep that night, thinking. And she stayed thinking all the next day: while she cleaned apartments and one floor of an office building and a few rooms of a residential hotel. When she got back to the apartment, late that night, she ate, thinking. Padma came home after her. Still pretty after a day of cleaning, Savitha thought, but all that prettiness came to nothing. Just a made-up girl wearing orange lipstick, heavy kajal, cleaning the houses of strangers, and waiting for a man who would never come.

  Savitha was quiet, and Padma must’ve noticed, because she said, “What’s with you?”

  Savitha looked at her as if she’d never seen her before. “What keeps you from leaving?”

  “Where would I go?”

  “Back to India.”

  “Where would I get the money? Besides, India’s no prize. Nothing there. My father used the money he got for me to buy a motorcycle.”

  Savitha was silent.

  “Why? Are you thinking about it?”

  “No, but you. You’re just so pretty.”

  That made her smile, touch her fingers to her hair, and Savitha smiled back, imagining Padma believed her.

  She was wrong.

  The next time she took out Poornima’s half-made sari, a few days later, she gasped: a long swath was ripped from it. Torn, the weaving mutilated, the tear uneven. Who’d done such a thing? She looked inside her pillowcase and then in her cot. She looked at the remaining piece, a third of it missing. Gone. She sat for a moment, and then she jumped up and scoured the entire apartment: the kitchen cabinets, the bathroom, the hall closet, Geeta’s and Padma’s things. Padma! She must’ve told someone Savitha had been asking about India, about leaving. And they’d … they’d what? She slumped again on her cot. They’d taken a piece of the only thing that meant anything to her. And why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they take the whole thing? “Why,” she said to the walls. But the walls said nothing back.

  * * *

  I have to be more careful, she decided. Much more careful. The sky seemed to agree: the rain came harder; the air grew heavier.

  9

  Over the next weeks, she lay in bed every night and thought about the journey from India to Seattle. She dissected every moment, every document. When she and the woman who was supposed to be her mother had first arrived at the airport, in Chennai, the old woman had taken out two strips of paper and two small blue books and handed them to the lady at the counter. The strips must’ve been their tickets, because the lady at the counter had stamped them and handed them back. The blue books she’d only glanced at before handing them back. Then what? Then nothing, until they’d arrived in New York. Here, the whole process had been reversed. Here, Savitha recalled, they’d stood in a long line, and this time, the old woman had shown the tickets and the two small blue books to a man. The man had stamped the blue books but not the tickets. What were those books? Savitha had no idea, but she knew she needed one: the blue book. She also knew she needed a ticket. And for both of those? She knew she needed money.

  Her heart sank.

  Because she realized that even with money and a ticket and the blue book, she obviously still couldn’t leave. Not at all. They knew her family, they knew they were in Indravalli, and if she left, well, anything could happen to them. Gopalraju had paid a lot of money for her, more than she could imagine—she was an investment, something Savitha knew only in terms of cows and goats and chickens. And why would anyone let their cow or goat or chicken simply walk away? They wouldn’t. Never. And as for her family: they could be killed. She knew that, she knew that as she knew her love for them: in her gut. So she would stay.

  * * *

  Toward the end of her three months in Seattle, there was a knock on the door. Savitha panicked. Vasu usually barged right in, using his key, so it wasn’t him. It was a Wednesday night, and Padma and Geeta weren’t home yet. What if it was Suresh? But he usually picked her up at one of the buildings, and took her to the room, and handed her the tube with the clear liquid. Those were the nights she came home well after Padma and Geeta were asleep. A few times, afterward, she’d vomited on the sidewalk when he’d pulled his car away; one time she’d held her stub over a flame.

  Another knock. Who could it be?

  She stood by the door and listened. Nothing. Then a shuffling of feet. Not going away, not yet. She waited. There was no peephole, though in some of the apartments she’d cleaned, she’d noticed the hole in the door. Now she wished she had one.

  On the third knock, she turned the knob silently, as quietly as possible, and peeked through the crack.

  It was Mohan.

  She opened it wide, and he stood there sheepishly, not moving. She waited at the open door, wondering if he, too, had come to take her to the room.

  He smiled shyly, maybe even sadly, and then he handed her a brown paper bag. When she opened it, there were six bananas inside. The bananas, the sight of them—their smooth yellow skins, their defiant firmness, their subtle beauty—made her laugh with pleasure. She looked at them and she looked at them, and when she finally looked up, Mohan was looking back at her.

  “In America, they cut them lengthwise and put ice cream in the middle,” he said.

  She tried to imagine that and couldn’t. “I like them with yogurt rice,” she said.

  They stood for a moment, and she invited him inside (though she felt funny about the invitation; it was his father’s building, after all). He said, No, maybe another time. Maybe next week, he said, and then he left.

  That night, Savitha had two helpings of rice and yogurt and banana. The first helping so sweet and creamy and divine that tears streamed down her face. Geeta laughed, and let her have a little of her portion of rice. The second helping—Geeta’s kindness, Mohan’s kindness—made her think of Poornima, and more tears came to her eyes, though these, she knew, were for different reasons.

  * * *

  “Let’s go,” Mohan said.

  He’d come to an apartment she was cleaning, and he stood by the door, as if the carpet were wet, which it wasn’t, or as if there were other people inside, which there weren’t.

  “But I’m not done,” Savitha said.

  He looked around the lit room once, let his gaze pass perfunctorily from one end of the room to the other, and then he said, “It’s fine.”


  She climbed into the same car in which he’d picked up her and the old woman from the airport. It was still flooded with the scent of lemon. She didn’t know where he was taking her, but he’d turned away from the direction of her apartment. He was quiet, almost morose, but she hardly noticed. She was looking out the window, at the nighttime streets. She’d only ever been driven from cleaning jobs to her apartment and back again, ten, twenty minutes at a time, but now, she sensed, they were drifting, a word she’d never associated with her life, never associated with life, life being only a constant doing; doing so that there could be eating and sleeping and surviving. But now, now, on a wide street, and on a wide and drizzly night, to glide under the traffic lights and to watch people sitting in brightly lit rooms and to imagine the smell of those rooms, the warmth, the chatter of the people inside or of the television or of nothing at all, just the silence, but to imagine it, sitting in a fancy, lemon-scented car, and with nothing ahead, and nothing, not really, behind, it was enough to make Savitha’s heart swell, enough to make it ache with something like happiness.

  They eventually turned off the wide main street and started to go up a hill. They wound through dark streets. The wind picked up, and she asked if she could open the window, and when Mohan didn’t respond, or maybe didn’t hear, she fidgeted with some buttons on her door until the window rolled down, with a smooth, thrilling ease, and the breeze lifted her loose hair (with only one hand, she could no longer wear her hair in a braid), and the drizzle sprayed her face, set her shivering with delight, and the shadowed leaves swayed above her and beside her as they drove past, moving as if wedded to the night, as if dancing with the wind.

  No, she couldn’t remember a night so wondrous, here or anywhere, and when she turned to Mohan, nearly laughing, she saw that he was unscrewing the cap of a small bottle, lifting it to his mouth, and it was then, when she saw the gold liquid in the bottle, tipping, when she saw his face wince with the first sip, it was then that she knew she was mistaken. None of this was true. Not in the least. This night, this drizzle, this uphill climb. None of it was her own. It was his. He owned her, and that was the only true thing.

  She rolled her window back up; the walls closed in again; she closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, the streets were even darker, and they were still climbing. Eventually he pulled the car onto a small embankment, off the side of the road, and he turned the engine off. He took a long pull from the bottle, and when he saw her watching, he held it out to her. Savitha thought about her father, then she thought about Poornima’s father, and then she took the bottle. It went down like fire—her first taste of whiskey—and she coughed and sputtered until Mohan laughed and took the bottle back. She thought then that he must be unused to laughter, or at least unused to laughter not tinged with sorrow. The whiskey reached her stomach, and then her eyes floated and bobbed along on a warm sea. When they focused she saw that they were on a high ridge, and below them and beyond them, all the way to the dark horizon, was a field of lights. The lights spilled like beads on black velvet. “Which way are we facing?” she asked.

  “West.”

  West, west.

  She studied the lights, and she thought that somewhere below, just below, must be her apartment. Beyond the lights, in the distance, was a strip of solid black. “What is that band without lights?”

  He looked up, clearly drunk by the way his head wobbled, and he said, Where? She pointed into the distance. He followed her arm and said, “Water. That’s water.” She remembered the bridge they’d gone over and yet, in her three months in Seattle, had forgotten they were so close to water. All she knew were walls. Even on sunny days, the light was gray, slanting dolorously into dirty apartments. The dust motes spun in place, having nowhere to go. She stared into the black mass before her, that strip of dark, and though she knew all about washing machines now, she wondered if that black mass had ever had laundresses on its shores, if saris had ever fluttered there like flags.

  “You know when I had my first drink?” he asked into the dark, in Telugu.

  She took another drink from the bottle.

  “I was eleven. Almost twelve. Behind the carousel at the state fair.” Now he was switching between Telugu and English, and Savitha struggled to understand. “Went with my friend Robbie and his dad. His dad thought it was time, so he bought us beers.” Then he was silent for a long moment. “We moved the next year. Nanna sold the motel, bought another two. I’ll build us an empire, he said. An empire!” He looked at Savitha, and he said, “I guess you’re it. I guess you’re the empire.”

  The whiskey was gone. Mohan flung the bottle into the backseat and leaned his seat back. How did he do that? Savitha wondered, pushing against her seat to get it to lean.

  “Open that,” he said, pointing to the glove box.

  She fiddled with it, and when it popped open, there was another bottle inside. She handed it to him, and he held it close, without opening it, as if it were a talisman, an object of great beauty.

  Into the silence of the car, he said, “I stopped wrestling at sixteen. Just stopped. Suresh must’ve asked me a million times. Still does. Why, he’ll say. Why’d you stop? You were good, Mo, really good. You could’ve made it to the state finals. The nationals.” He stopped and looked at Savitha. He asked in Telugu, “Do you understand any English?”

  She shook her head no.

  He continued, this time only in English. “He picked me up after school one time. Just that once. There was a girl sitting in the backseat, about my age. I looked at her, and then I asked, ‘Who is she?’ He didn’t even turn his head. Said, ‘Just go in there, Mo. Just go with her, wait for her to be done, and come back out. Nothing fancy.’ By then, he’d pulled the car up to a clinic, and we just sat there in the parking lot. The three of us. By then I understood. I said, ‘Why can’t you go?’ He waited. I didn’t think he’d answer, but then he said, ‘They might recognize me.’ So I took the girl in there and talked to the nurse. I knew what she was thinking, the way she looked at me. She gave me pamphlets on contraception and abstinence and all that. I must’ve turned beet red.

  “When the girl came back out, she was carrying the same pamphlets. Couldn’t speak a word of English, but she clutched those pamphlets as if they were a hand. Wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t raise her head. I didn’t know what to say. I was a kid. We both were. I finally stammered something about getting her some water, and she said, ‘No, thank you, sir.’ Can you imagine that? Sixteen, and she calls me sir.”

  He laughed.

  “After we dropped her off, I said, ‘Who the fuck is she? What’s she doing in our building? What’d you do to her?’ He looked at me, long and hard, and he said, ‘What do you think she’s doing in our building? Huh? What do you think we do, Mo? How do you think we make it in this country? Make it big. You think Dad got us where we are without girls like her?’”

  The drizzle turned to rain.

  “Girls like her,” he repeated, and then he grew quiet. In Telugu he asked, “What did you understand?”

  Savitha said, truthfully, “I understood the word girls.”

  He looked at her with what she thought was real longing, or real loneliness, and then he ran his fingers slowly down the side of her face, and he said, in English, “You are an empire. You’re more than an empire.”

  Savitha looked at him and she wanted in that moment to tell him everything, absolutely everything, but instead she took the bottle from his hands, saw the liquid tilt against the raindrops, the distant lights, drank as her father would’ve drunk, and then she smiled.

  * * *

  It was the following week. He came to another apartment, on Brooklyn Avenue, and without a word he lay her down on the carpet. He kissed her arm and then her throat and then her mouth, and even though she had been kissed many times before, she thought, So this is what it’s like to be kissed. The give of the carpet was on her back, and he pushed the hair from her face, and then he unfastened her blouse. It didn�
�t fall completely open, only to one side, and on this side he took her breast into his mouth. She cradled his head in her hand, and Savitha saw, in the quiet black of his hair, his first coarse gray. A window swayed above their heads and then a thick cloud shifted and light flooded in, fell onto her face. He took off her pants, her underwear, both a size too big because they had to share clothes and Geeta was bigger than her, but he seemed not to notice, nor to care, because he was kissing her stomach. He laid his head against it, as if listening for voices, and she cradled his head again, keening to him, wanting him to continue, but no, he wouldn’t. Not yet, he said. She felt first impatience and then despair. Please, she almost said, in English, in Telugu: please. But he waited, held himself above her, looking down. No, he said again, no, I want to look at you first. The full fiery brown gleam of you. She rolled her head back, and he held her away like that, poised above her, poised perfectly, heartlessly, and the light beyond her shivered, nectared and alive.

  * * *

  They sat together afterward in the fading light. Under the window, on the floor, their legs outstretched and touching. Neither spoke. Savitha wanted to take his hand, but he was sitting to her left. She looked at her stump, resting on her thigh, though Mohan hardly ever seemed to notice it. Instead, he reached for his pants, took out his wallet, and said, “Here. I want to show you something.”

  It was a small photograph, and though it was creased and yellowed, she saw immediately that it was Mohan and Suresh, as boys. “How old were you?”