Poornima rolled off their mat. She folded the blankets, placed them on top of her pillow, and stacked them in the corner of the hut. Her father and brothers and sister were asleep.
“So early,” she said, yawning, gathering her hair into a knot. “Why are you up so early?”
“That sari isn’t going to make itself. Besides, your father said I could make extra if I finished six by your wedding day.”
“Six? That’s one sari every three days.”
“Seven. I still have to make yours.”
Poornima shook her head. She cut a branch off the neem tree and chewed on it. By the time Savitha was settled at her loom, Poornima brought in the tea. Savitha took a sip. She took another. “No sugar?”
“My father’s saving everything for the wedding.”
“Has he even seen you yet?”
Poornima shrugged. “I told you. He has exams.”
“Exams, Poori? How can he dream of you if he hasn’t seen you?”
Poornima blushed. And then she was confused. Her mother’s one-year death ceremony had kept her occupied, for a time, but now she was back to wondering. It was not uncommon to marry someone without first seeing them, or hearing their voice, but it struck her as strange that Kishore, her groom, showed no interest in meeting her. His parents had already come twice to handle the dowry negotiations, the Indravalli cousin had stopped by last week for evening tea, and her father and Ramayya were going to Guntur in a few days to shop for the wedding, and yet he had never arrived, not even on his way home to Namburu from college. Not once. He actually had to pass through Indravalli to get there! She shook her head. It would be nice, she thought, to see him, but she couldn’t insist. Insist to whom? Besides, it was a good match, as everyone said. A college-educated match; Poornima couldn’t hope for more. And that idiosyncrasy that Ramayya had alluded to: no one had mentioned it again. It was probably nothing.
Poornima looked around her. Savitha had finished her tea; the empty cup rested on the dirt floor of the hut. She was working away at her loom. Sunlight flooded in, through the open eastern end of the hut, and Poornima wondered what he was doing this very instant, her groom. Was he watching the sun rise? Was he thinking of her?
She also wondered, at times, whether her father would miss her when she married and moved to Namburu, or wherever her new husband would find a job. Because it occurred to her, despite what Savitha said, that she could possibly move farther away than Namburu. Maybe to Guntur. Maybe as far away as Vizag. Regardless, she would no longer be here. Would her brothers and sister miss her? Her sister was now old enough to cook and clean; she was twelve, and she could perhaps, after a time, begin working on the charkha. At least for two or three years, until she, too, got married. Family—the thing that she and her father and her siblings were bound by—suddenly seemed strange to her. What had collected them like seashells on a beach? And placed them together, on a windowsill?
She thought, in the weeks leading to her wedding, that she would ask her father. Not whether he would miss her—that she obviously couldn’t ask—but whether he would miss her mango pickle, say, or the stuffed eggplant she made, his favorite. But then, Poornima thought, she didn’t have to; she already knew the answer. It had come to her when she’d overheard him and Ramayya talking, and her father had told him a story Poornima had never heard before.
The story was about when she was little, just over a year old, and she and her parents had gone to the temple in Vijayawada. It had been raining all morning. It had been the day of her mundan, the offering of a baby’s hair to the gods, and afterward, they’d found a covered spot, a fisherman’s palm-frond shelter, on the shores of the Krishna. Poornima’s mother had laid out the food for their lunch. By this time, the rain had slowed, he told Ramayya, but it was still gray, the mist still hovering over the river, which was only a few yards away. According to her father, while they had been busy laying out the lunch, Poornima had squirmed away. “Straight into the water,” her father said. “Probably she followed a boat or some other kid into the water. She did that a lot. Followed whatever caught her eye.” Within seconds, he continued, she was up to her neck. “Her mother panicked. I jumped up and ran as fast as I could. It was only a few steps, but it seemed to take ages. Ages. I held her in my sight, I willed her to stay right there. If I even said, if I even whispered, ‘Don’t move!’ I was afraid she would move. Fall. Be taken by the river. So I didn’t say anything. I just looked at her and willed her to be still.” And she was, he told Ramayya, she was as still as a statue. Her newly shorn head gleaming under a break in the clouds.
When I got near the waterline though, he said, I stopped. I know I should’ve plucked her up and given her a slap, but I couldn’t. You see, he said, she looked like she was nothing. Just a piece of debris. In that mist, in that gray, in that vast, slippery rush of water, she looked like nothing. Maybe the head of a fish tossed back in the water. Or a piece of driftwood, not even very big. I looked at her, he said, I looked and I looked, and I could hear her mother shouting, running toward me, but I couldn’t move. I was standing there, and I was thinking. I was thinking: She’s just a girl. Let her go. By then, her mother had come up from behind me, and she’d snatched her out. Poornima was crying, he said, her mother was crying, too. Maybe they both knew what I had thought. Maybe it was written on my face, he told Ramayya. And then her father had let out a little laugh. “That’s the thing with girls, isn’t it?” he’d said. “Whenever they stand on the edge of something, you can’t help it, you can’t. You think, Push. That’s all it would take. Just one little push.”
*
A week before the wedding, Ramayya brought an urgent message from Namburu. “What is it? What is it?” Poornima’s father asked him, sitting on the edge of the hemp bed, holding a cup of weak, unsweetened tea, his eyebrows raised.
“It’s the dowry,” Ramayya said, shaking his head. “They want twenty thousand more.” Ramayya’s tea was sweetened, but he still looked up at Poornima as if she were the reason for this sudden demand.
“Twenty thousand! But why?”
“They must’ve heard. Something. Maybe from the Repalle people. Who knows what they’ve heard. But they know it’s too late. You’ve committed, and you’ll have to pay up.”
Her father gave Poornima a look of such loathing that she backed into the hut. She thought of the mother from Namburu, and how her kind words had turned so quickly to dust; she thought of the resignation in the father’s eyes, the sister’s laugh. But where was he? she wondered. Where was the groom? And what had he to say about this sudden, inexplicable demand?
The next morning, Savitha announced with a smile, “I’m starting it this afternoon.”
“Don’t bother,” Poornima said gloomily. Then she told her about the increased dowry demand, and how her father had said that even if he sold both of his looms, he’d still barely have enough.
“What will he do?”
Poornima shrugged and looked out at the blazing light of late morning.