At one point Poornima choked with her weeping, and when she did, she realized she’d forgotten to breathe. Forgotten that there was such a thing as air. That there was anything other than pain.
She took Savitha’s limp hand and held it in hers—and youth and middle age and senescence passed before her like the cinema she had never seen, like the cinema Savitha had delighted in one day seeing.
“Savitha?”
Nothing.
“Savitha?”
Not the slightest movement. Not a twitch or a breath or a blink.
“Say something.”
Deep into that night, the village elders came to a decision: Poornima’s father was to marry Savitha. They all agreed: it was to be his punishment, and it was just.
No one bothered to tell Savitha the decision. Poornima only heard of it when Ramayya walked by the door of the hut and hissed, “She’ll get married before you. The trash picker. And without even having to give your father a dowry.”
Poornima stared at him. She turned from the doorway only when she felt movement; Savitha had blinked. For the duration of the second night, Savitha sat again, motionless. “Savitha,” Poornima tried one more time, shaking her, pleading once more for so much as a word, a gesture, before falling finally into a disturbed and plagued sleep. Mostly by dreams, nightmares, visions, and premonitions, but once by Savitha’s voice.
“Do you remember?” her voice said.
Poornima rolled her head in her sleep; she mumbled, “What?”
“About Majuli. About flute song. And that perfect fruit. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
There was silence. Poornima shifted again in her sleep, felt for Savitha’s hunched body but found only air.
“I’ll be many things, Poori, but I won’t be your stepmother.”
“Okay.”
A shuffling.
“Poornima?”
“Yes?”
“I’m the one with wings.”
In the morning, Poornima woke to screams and clamoring and calls for a search party; she looked around the weaving hut and found it empty. Savitha was gone.
Poornima
1
Poornima’s wedding was postponed indefinitely. The groom’s side wouldn’t budge from their demand for twenty thousand more rupees. Especially now with rumors swirling as to the fouled runaway girl, her friendship with Poornima, and suggestions—by people whom Poornima had never even met, by people not even from Indravalli—that Poornima had helped her to run away. And what could be said about a girl like that? they said. What good would she be as a wife?
Not only that, but every day, more details dribbled in from Namburu confirming their hesitation. The father sent word that his son—in addition to the twenty thousand—would need a watch and a motorcycle. The older of the groom’s sisters, whose name was Aruna, wondered aloud, in the company of some of the other village women in Namburu, whether it wouldn’t be difficult for her to have a sister-in-law so clearly beneath her. Beneath you? one of them had asked. Beneath you how? Supposedly, the sister had looked at her gravely and said, “Beneath me in the way a monkey is beneath me.”
Still, it was the mother’s comment that most agitated Poornima. She’d told one of Poornima’s distant cousins, while bemoaning her college-educated son’s marriage to a village girl, “What can one do? That’s the thing with a successful son: you either have to get him married to a modern college girl who’ll ruin him with her excesses and demands, demands of makeup and fashionable saris and jewelry every time she so much as passes gas, or the village bumpkin who is as dark as a mustard seed, with the social graces of a mama pig in mud.” But hadn’t she said Poornima was not as dark as she’d thought? Hadn’t she taken Poornima’s chin in her hand?
She wished Savitha were here, so she could talk to her about it. Savitha? Her heart blazed with pain. And then gave out like a candle.
She had been gone for a month now. Thirty-three days. The search party that had gone to look for her—made up of a group of young men from Indravalli (there had also been a local police constable in the beginning, but he’d returned within two hours of starting the search and declared, wiping his brow in the heat, “The last time I spent more than an hour looking for a girl was the daughter of an MLA. We ended up finding her at the bottom of a well, not two hundred yards from the MLA’s house. It’s always the same; take my word for it. In this heat, I give it a day or two. Maybe three. And there she’ll be, floating, puffed up like a puri.”)—had gone as far as Amravati to the west, Gudivada to the east, Guntur to the south, and Nuzividu to the north. Nothing. They’d come back without so much as a rumor as to her whereabouts. Where could she have gone? the women in Indravalli wondered. Where is there to disappear to?
Poornima looked in the direction of the Krishna, east, and wondered the same thing.
After two months of back and forth, Ramayya and Poornima’s father finally reached a compromise with the Namburu family. Poornima’s father would add an extra ten thousand to the dowry, paying out five thousand now and five thousand within a year of the marriage, along with a scooter instead of a motorcycle—Ramayya suggesting to them that a scooter would be more convenient as Poornima began having children (sons, he was careful to add). The Namburu family, after a tense week of silence, finally agreed, grumblingly, bemoaning the generosity of their discount. Ramayya was overjoyed that the match had finally been settled, but Poornima’s father was miserable. “But you won’t have to sell the looms,” Ramayya said, trying to cheer him. “And just think, you only have one more to go.” Poornima’s father raised his dark gaze to her, when she handed him his tea, and eyed her with contempt. And Poornima, surprising even herself, eyed him right back.
*
The wedding was set for the following month. Poornima spent most of that month inside the hut. It was considered gauche for a girl to be seen out and about in the village after her betrothal, and there was also the matter of the evil gaze of the other villagers, putting a hex on Poornima, envious of her good fortune in marrying a college-educated boy. “Besides,” her aunt said, staying with them for the month to help with the preparations, “we don’t need you getting any darker.” It didn’t matter either way to Poornima: light and dark, inside and outside, hope and hopelessness slowly started to lose meaning for her.