But sunlight and moonlight weren’t Poornima’s only considerations. The other one, the main one, was that her mother was ill. Cancer, as far as the doctor at the American hospital in Tenali could tell. Medicine was expensive, and the doctor put her on a diet of fruits and nuts—also expensive. Her father, who made the homespun cotton saris that their region of Guntur district was famous for, could barely keep his wife and five children fed on government-rationed rice and lentils, let alone the luxury of fruits and nuts. But Poornima didn’t mind. She relished—no, not just relished, but delighted, actually savored—the food she was able to buy for her mother every day: two bananas, a tiny apple, and a handful of cashews. By savoring, it was not that she actually ate any of the fruit or nuts. Never did she take even a single bite, though her mother did, once, coax her into accepting a cashew, which, when her mother turned away for an instant, Poornima placed back on the pile. No, by savoring, what Poornima did was watch her mother slowly eating the banana, even chewing such a soft thing exhausting her, but Poornima watched her with such conviction, such hope, that she thought she could actually see her mother getting stronger. As if strength were a seed. And all she had to do was add her two rupees’ worth of food and watch it grow.
It got so that Poornima almost made as much as her father. Here is what she did: she’d get loops of raw thread, undivided and in thick bundles, and by using the charkha, her job was to spin the thread so that it separated, and as it did, wound around a metal canister. She once looked at the thread wound around the canister and thought it looked just like a tiny wooden barrel, nearly the size of her littlest brother’s head. This thread would then eventually end up on the loom where her father made the saris. It was treated further before it got to the loom, but Poornima always thought she could spot the lengths of thread that she had spun. The canisters that she had wound it around. Anyone would’ve laughed if she’d told them this—they all look the same, they’d have said—but that wasn’t true. Her hands had felt the canister, known the places it was dented, the contours of its body, the patterns of its rust. She had held them, and it seemed to her that anything a person has held is a thing they never really let go. Like the small wind-up clock her teacher had given her when she’d left school. It had a round blue face, four little legs, and two bells that chimed every hour. When her teacher, an old and embittered Catholic nun, had given it to her, she’d said, “I suppose they’ll get you married now. With a child a year for the next ten. Hold this. Hold on to this. You won’t know what I mean now, but you might one day.” Then she’d wound up the clock and let it chime. “That sound,” she’d said. “Remember: that sound is yours. No one else’s but yours.” Poornima had no idea what the old nun was talking about, but she thought the chiming of the clock was the most exquisite sound she’d ever heard.
She began carrying the clock everywhere. She put it next to her charkha while she worked. She placed it beside her plate when she ate. She put it by her mat when she slept. Until one day, just like that, the clock stopped chiming, and her father exclaimed, “Finally. I thought that thing would never stop.”
A few months after the clock stopped chiming Poornima’s mother died. Poornima had just turned sixteen—she was the eldest of the five children—and watching her mother die was like watching a fine blue morning turn to gray. What she missed most about her mother was her voice. It was soft and mellifluous and warm against the rat-chewed walls of the small hut. It pleased Poornima that such a lovely voice should reach for her, that it should cut through the long hours, when all those hours really amounted to were two bananas, an apple, and a handful of cashews. Her mother’s was a voice that could make even those few things seem like the ransom of kings. And now Poornima had lost both her mother and the clock.
With her mother dead, Poornima slowed her charkha; she put it away sometimes even in the middle of the day, and she would stare at the walls of the hut and think, I’ll forget her voice. Maybe that’s what that old nun had meant, that you forget a sound you don’t hear every day. I don’t think I will now, but I will. And then I’ll have lost everything. Once she thought this, she knew she had to remember more than a voice, she had to remember a moment, and this is the one that came to her: In the course of her mother’s illness, she had been well enough one morning to comb Poornima’s hair. It had been bright and sunny outside and the brush strokes had been so gentle and light that Poornima had felt as if the person holding the comb were not a person at all but a small bird perched on its handle. After three or four strokes her mother had stopped suddenly. She’d rested her hand on her daughter’s head for a moment, and Poornima turned to find her mother’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother had looked back at her and with a sadness that had seemed old and endless, she’d said, “Poornima, I’m too tired. I’m so tired.”
How long after that had she died?
Three, maybe four months later, Poornima guessed. They’d woken up one morning and her eyes had been open and empty and lifeless. Poornima hadn’t been able to cry, though. Not when she’d helped bathe and dress her mother’s body. Not when her father and brothers had carried her, jasmine-laden, through the streets of the village. Not even as the funeral pyre had burned down to a cold ash. Nor when she’d strung the last chrysanthemum on the garland that hung from the framed portrait of her mother. Only later, when she’d walked out into the season’s first cool autumn morning, had she cried. Or tried to cry. The tears, she recalled, had been paltry. At the time, she’d felt like a bad daughter for not crying, for not weeping, but no matter how sad she’d felt, how profound her sorrow, she’d only managed to squeeze out one or two tears. A vague reddening of the eyes. “Amma,” she’d said, looking up at the sky, “forgive me. It’s not that I don’t love you. Or miss you. I don’t understand; everyone else is crying. Buckets. But tears aren’t the only measure, are they?”
Still, what she had imagined came true: as the months wore on she forgot her mother’s voice. But what she did remember, the only thing that truly stayed with her, was that for a short time—while combing her hair—her mother had rested her hand on her. It was the slightest of gestures, and yet Poornima felt it, always: the weight of her mother’s hand. A weight so delicate and fine, it was like the spatter of raindrops after a hot summer’s day. A weight so small and tired, but with strength enough to muscle through her veins like blood.
In the end, she decided, it was the most beautiful weight.
*
Once a month, Poornima went to the temple on Indravalli Konda to offer prayers for her mother. She stood in the incense-choked anteroom and watched the priest, hoping the gods would speak to her, would tell her amma was with them, though what she truly yearned to reach was the deepa, more a small lantern, that was perched at the very summit of the mountain. Sometimes she’d stand outside their hut and look up, on a Sunday or a festival day, and it would glow, distant and yellow and blinking, like a star. “Who lights it?” she once asked her father.
“Lights what?”
“The deepa, on the summit.”
Her father, sitting outside the hut after dinner, his arms fatigued, his body hunched, glanced at Indravalli Konda and said, “Some priest, probably. Some kid.”
Poornima was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “I think Amma lights it.”
Her father looked at her. His look was dark, ravaged, as if he’d just walked out of a burning building. Then he asked for his tea. When she handed it to him, he said, “Another ten months.”
“Ten months?”
“Till her one-year ceremony.”
Now Poornima understood what he was saying. After a family death, it was inauspicious to have a celebration of any sort, let alone a wedding, for a full year. It had been two months since her mother’s death. In another ten—her father was saying—she would be married.