Girls Burn Brighter

by Shobha Rao

  “Eight and fourteen.”

  She studied them: the too-long hair, the round eyes, the expression of irrepressible wonder on Mohan’s face, tilted half toward his older brother, half toward the camera, his smile unabashed and absolute, and Suresh not smiling at all, but with an adolescent seriousness, or maybe an adolescent stubbornness, but still with his arm around his little brother, holding him close, though not too close. “Where’s your sister?”

  “She took it. We were on vacation. The only vacation we ever took. My dad wanted to show us Mount Rushmore. This was back when we lived in Ohio. ‘That is greatness, kids,’ he said, ‘when your face is chiseled onto the side of a mountain.’ I don’t much remember it. Mount Rushmore, I mean. But what I do remember is that place,” he said, nodding at the photograph.

  Savitha looked deeper into it, past Mohan and Suresh, and at the stand of trees behind them, and maybe a river or a lake in the near distance. “What is it?”

  “Spearfish Canyon. We just drove through, but I remember it was perfect. It was the most perfect place I have ever been.”

  She stared some more. It didn’t look like much; it didn’t look half as awe-inspiring as Indravalli Konda. “Perfect how?”

  He was silent. And then he shifted his arm and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around her stump, as completely and as naturally as if she, too, had a hand. “There is no way,” he said. “There is no way to explain a thing that is perfect.”

  Savitha considered the photograph. “Was it like flute song?”

  “What?”

  “This place. Was it like flute song?”

  A small smile played at the edge of his lips. “Yes. In a way, it was.” Then he said, “I never thought of it that way. But yes, it was flute song.”

  “What is it called again?”

  “Spearfish Canyon.”

  She broke the words down into parts and said them to herself. Spear. Fish. Can. Yon. Then she said them out loud. “How do you spell it?”

  “Other side,” he said. And when she turned the photograph over, there it was: written in blue ink: S-P-E-A-R-F-I-S-H C-A-N-Y-O-N. When she handed it back to him, he said, “Maybe we can go one day,” and she nearly laughed. Why, she didn’t know, couldn’t say; only that she felt no joy.

  10

  She had been in Seattle for over a year. Sometimes, when Vasu drove her from apartment to apartment, they would pass the university, and Savitha would look out the window of his old beige car, at the waiting or the walking or the laughing students, and she would look especially at the girls. They were her age, sometimes older, and she looked at their skin, the fall of their hair, the slope of their shoulders, both of their hands, and she would think, What is your name? Where do you live? Do you live in an apartment I’ve cleaned?

  * * *

  If Mohan knew about Suresh and the room and the bottle of clear liquid, he didn’t let on. He was usually silent, or he would tell her stories in English, or he would make love to her and then he would make her coffee. Even if they were in an empty apartment, with not a pot or pan in sight, he would run down to the corner store, buy instant coffee, boil water in the microwave, and then settle on the floor with her, drinking weak coffee out of a Styrofoam cup he’d found in his car.

  Once, he had neither a pot nor cups, but the previous tenant had left a small plastic flowerpot on one of the windowsills. Savitha saw Mohan looking at it, and she said, No, that’s disgusting. But he cleaned it out in the sink, and boiled water, and they passed it back and forth, the slight scent of dirt mixing with the strong scent of coffee.

  * * *

  Of course, she didn’t tell Geeta or Padma about either Mohan or Suresh. None of them talked much about the brothers. But one night, after they’d found a bag of half-rotting capsicum at their door, probably left by Vasu, Geeta cut out the inedible bits and made a curry of capsicum and potato. They had it with rice, and then they had yogurt with rice, and as Savitha was peeling her banana, Padma said, “Where did you get that?”

  She couldn’t tell her the truth, and so she said, “Outside the door. Just like the capsicum.”

  They ate in silence, and after they’d washed up, they lay on their cots and Savitha heard a distant bellowing, and she said, “What is that?”

  “It’s for the fog. It’s to warn the ships.”

  “Fog?”

  A thick mist, they told her. Ships can lose their way. Savitha remembered the early-morning mist over the Krishna; she could’ve ladled it out like sambar. And then she thought about ships. There must be a port nearby, she guessed, and there must be sailors and captains and passengers and wonderful things from all over the world coming to that port. Like spices, maybe, or gold.

  “Mohan came by earlier,” Geeta said to Savitha. “He said he needed to take you to a job in Ravenna. I told him I could go, but he said no, it could wait.”

  Savitha was quiet, but Padma sighed into the dark.

  “You should tell him,” Geeta said, giggling as if she were a schoolgirl.

  Padma turned in her cot, sighing again, humorless.

  Their breaths deepened, and into the dark, Geeta said, her voice now serious, “What are you afraid of? I mean, hasn’t the worst thing already happened?”

  There was silence. Savitha felt for Poornima’s half-made sari, wondering over and over whether she should hide it before she left in the mornings. Wondering why.

  Padma and Geeta finally seemed collapsed into a restive sleep. But Savitha lay awake. Geeta’s words broke through her thoughts; they held like a weight over the room. The night, too, was a weight. She wondered for a time whether she felt jealous, not of Padma, obviously, but of what was to come. Suresh, she’d learned, was married, but Mohan wasn’t. She knew he would be, one day soon, to some appropriate girl from some appropriately wealthy family. She would be Telugu, and she would be charming. That, too, she knew. But she wasn’t jealous. She’d known the conditions of their affection all along. Affection? No, not affection; but was it love? Maybe it was love, and that thought, as she lay on her cot on the floor of a run-down studio, was the one that saddened her. She turned away then, physically turned away from the thought, and faced the wall.

  She thought of a story her father had told her, long ago. She’d been just a girl, and all day she’d played among the stunted trees near their hut, watched as the laundresses passed by, bundles of folded clothes balanced on their heads. It had been evening, and the chores had been done, and even her amma had come and sat on the ground, at the foot of her husband’s bed, oiling Savitha’s hair (there weren’t any other daughters yet). In the story, Nanna had been Savitha’s age, maybe even younger, and being the youngest and too small to start on the loom or the charkha, he was instead sent every morning to the milkman’s house. Now, the milkman’s house, her father told her, was almost four kilometers away, and there was no money for a rickshaw or a bus, so he had to walk.

  “I was sleepy, always sleepy and stumbling along,” he said, “but my favorite part was to greet the cows. They always stood waiting for me, their wet noses against their pens, and just then, just then the sun would come up and the tops of their fuzzy, funny ears would be all aglow, as if they were little hills, lit from behind. During the day,” he continued, “it was a pleasant walk. Through the fields and toward the river. But in the morning, early morning, while it was still dark, maybe three in the morning, maybe four—so he could get the choicest curds, discounted for him because the milkman felt sorry for him, felt sorry that so little a boy had to come so far—the fields were awful. They were awful and frightening.”

  “But why?” Savitha asked, the scent of coconut oil mingling with the night air.

  “Because I was just a boy,” her father said, “and because it was dark, and because that’s when all the fears come out: when you’re a boy—or a girl,” he said, patting her head, “and when it’s dark. So anyway,” he went on, “one morning I was on my way to the milkman’s house when I stopped in my tracks. Just stopp
ed, right in the middle of the path. You know why I stopped?” he asked Savitha.

  She shook her head, her eyes wide.

  “Because I saw a bear. Or a tiger. I couldn’t tell, you see. It was dark, as I said, and even though I could almost reach out and touch it, even with my child’s arm, I didn’t dare. Who would? But it held me, it held me in its gaze. Its eyes were yellow, I could see them, and they didn’t blink, or they blinked in the exact same moments that I blinked. At any rate, in that gaze, I was frozen. Absolutely terrified. And as I stood there, not moving, it stood there, too, not moving. Just stood there, gazing at me. Waiting to eat me.”

  Savitha gasped. “What happened, Nanna?”

  “Well,” her father said, “we stood looking at each other, breathing, unmoving, its yellow eyes slowly turning red. Orange and then red. And then more and more red. By this point, I’d found a small hollow near me, just a few steps away, and so I backed away from the bear or the tiger, ever so quietly, and I settled into this hollow. I would wait till sunrise, I decided, and then make a run for it. Or more likely, I hoped, it would leave and go back to the forest or the jungle or wherever it had come from. Besides, by then, I figured, the farmers would start coming out to their fields, and maybe one of them would have a stick to scare it away. Well, these were the thoughts going through my head, but mostly, there were no thoughts, just fear.”

  And then, much to Savitha’s surprise, her father laughed out loud. “And you know what happened next?”

  Savitha stared up at him.

  “The sun came up. That’s what happened. And then you know what happened after that? I saw that that big bear or tiger or whatever other monster I’d imagined was nothing but a tree. A tree! It was just a tree. A dead tree.” He laughed some more. “It was the dark, you see. It was my imagination.”

  “So there was no bear? There was no tiger?” Savitha asked, a little disappointed.

  “No, my ladoo,” he said. “It was just a tree. Like most fears, it was nothing. Nothing.”

  Savitha lay in the dark and thought about that story. She hadn’t thought about it in many years, but she thought about it now and realized: But my fears aren’t nothing. My fears for my family, for their well-being, are real. They are a bear. A tiger. And if I were to leave—well, she couldn’t even finish that thought. But why did I think of the story about fear on the very heels of thinking about love? she wondered. Was it obvious? Of course it was. She’d never known one without the other: she’d always feared for her father’s health, his drinking, her sisters’ marriages, her mother’s endless days. And with Mohan. Well, with Mohan, it was even clearer—there could be no love without fear. The two had always been bound for her, she realized, fear and love, always, but just there, floating on the edge of wake and sleep, another thought drifted up, as if from the cloth that was tucked into her pillow: the thought that maybe there had been one exception. Maybe once, just for a short time, in her girlhood, they had been separate. For a short time (she was already snoring, beginning to dream), she had loved Poornima, and in that love, she had felt no fear.

  * * *

  Suresh came and took her to the room and then Mohan came and then Suresh came. Then Mohan came and they had sex in an empty apartment, and once in an office building. This pattern followed her around like a lost dog. Months went by. She once sat on the edge of the bed and watched Suresh open a bottle of beer, and she said, “Can I have one?” He looked at her, astonished—perhaps that she had spoken at all, something she avoided, broken as she still was by him and the room and the bottle of clear liquid and the act—and handed her one. And so, yet another pattern: beer with Suresh, coffee or whiskey with Mohan. She found herself alone one night, in the studio, and could hardly sit still. She went from the window to the kitchen to the bathroom and back, and realized that what she really wanted was a drink. The thought stopped her cold. She stood at the window and thought about her father, about his destruction, and then she thought about the blind boy, and how she’d lain in her cot and stared at the locked door, waiting for him to arrive with the needle. She swore it off in that moment. All of it. And never again touched the beer or whiskey she was offered.

  At the end of July, on a warm and cloudy afternoon, Mohan came to pick her up and said, “I have a surprise.” They drove on a wide road again, this one next to the water, and then he parked on a busy street, between a blue car and a red car. She would always remember that: that he’d parked his black car between a blue car and a red car. The restaurant he took her to was the most colorful room Savitha had ever seen. The booths were bright red, cinema posters lined the walls, and the counter was blue. Blue and red again, she thought. When they sat down—Savitha still bewildered because he had never brought her to a public place before, and what was more, she’d never actually been in a restaurant before, ever, with or without Mohan—she looked around her at the other patrons, laughing and chatting, utterly at ease, and slid into the corner of her seat. She surreptitiously tucked in her blouse so no one would see how loose it was and concealed her stub under the table, and then she watched the happenings in the restaurant, the clatter and the conversation and the steaming plates of food going past their table, all with a kind of reverence, a wide-eyed wonder.

  When the waitress came to take their order, she looked at Savitha with what seemed to her like ridicule, or maybe pity, and then she turned to Mohan. He ordered something Savitha couldn’t understand, and when it arrived, the waitress set the shallow oval bowl down in the center of the table, between them.

  Savitha looked at it. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you remember? I told you about it. It’s called a banana split.”

  She looked at it, and there it was! A banana! “But what is that?”

  “Ice cream.”

  “No, on top.”

  “Chocolate. And that’s whipped cream.”

  “And that?”

  “Strawberry sauce.”

  “Those look like bits of peanut.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the thing on the very top?”

  “It’s a cherry. Have you ever eaten a cherry?”

  Savitha shook her head, and so he insisted that she eat that first, and when she did, she decided it was the strangest thing she’d ever tasted. The texture like a lychee, but the taste more a sweet, syrupy alcohol. Then she took a bite of the banana with a bit of ice cream and chocolate and dipped the tip of her spoon into the strawberry sauce so she could taste all of them together. She also got a bit of the white, fluffy weightless substance, and it all took a moment, but then she closed her eyes. It was the best thing she’d ever tasted. Was it better than banana with yogurt rice? No, but it was more extravagant. It was hard to even think about both of them together. Yogurt rice with a banana was like life, simple, straightforward, with a beginning and an end, while the other—the banana split—was like death, complex, infused with a kind of mystery that was beyond Savitha’s comprehension, and every bite, like every death, dumbfounding.

  Mohan watched her intently, taking only a bite or two, and then he said, “It’s hard to leave you, at times like this.”

  “Times like what?”

  He didn’t respond. He instead reached over and wiped a bit of chocolate from her cheek, and he said, “I have to go to the airport soon.”

  “Oh,” Savitha said, hardly listening, focused on the banana split.

  “Another girl.”

  Savitha looked up. She was listening now.

  “A cleft lip, I think.”

  So another medical visa.

  “Where is she from?”

  “How should I know?”

  “I mean, is she Telugu?”

  “Probably. But we make a point not to know.”

  Savitha felt a rush of cold air. She held the spoon steady. “I don’t understand. You make a point not to know?”

  He lowered his voice to a whisper, though Savitha saw that there was no one seated near them. Besides, they were speaking i
n Telugu. Who could possibly understand them? “Otherwise,” he said, “well, otherwise, in case of trouble—” He stopped, and then he said, “Not here.”

  So she finished the banana split and he paid the bill, and when they got back to the car, she said, “Are you saying—”

  “Just that, in case of trouble, no one knows any of the other parties. No one can rat anyone out.”

  “So you don’t know where—where this girl is coming from? Her village?”

  “No.”

  “Her family?”

  “No.”

  “How did your father get her, then?”

  “There are middlemen. The world is full of middlemen.”

  “What about that old lady? The one who pretended to be my mother?”

  “Not even her,” he said. “Least of all her.”

  Savitha sat back in her seat.

  * * *

  Her thoughts whirled: I’ll need money; where do I get money; and how, how will I leave; the little blue book; the little blue book; medical visas; stupid, stupid, why didn’t I pay more attention to signs, to roads, to English; a girl with a cleft lip; Nanna, you’re safe; Nanna, you were right, it wasn’t a bear, it wasn’t a tiger, it was all in my head; should I tell Padma and Geeta, I can’t, I can’t; cleft lip; I remember someone with a cleft lip, that girl, the daughter of one of the laundresses, she crawled and fell down the well by accident, or did she; airport, should I go to the airport; banana split; death, being here will be death; the little blue book; idiot, why didn’t you plan better; but Nanna, I didn’t know, I didn’t know it wasn’t a bear, a tiger, not until now, not until sunrise, not until this moment, I didn’t know.

  Her thoughts whirled and whirled, spun in great gusts, and at their center, in their precise and perfect center, there was absolute quiet, and in that quiet, there was only one thought: I can leave.

  11

  She waited. She stilled her mind, and she waited.

  * * *