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.