After six months of marriage, the days took an even darker turn. Poornima’s father had been able to give them the first five thousand rupees at the wedding. He’d taken a loan from the weaving collective, at an exorbitant interest rate, but had been able to keep both of his looms, and even hired a boy—young, hardly able to reach the treadles—to work the second loom. But he still hadn’t managed to buy Kishore a scooter, nor had he any way to pay the remaining five thousand. Poornima would’ve known nothing about this, since she hardly had any contact with her father, had it not been for the fact that her in-laws began to mention it more and more. Mention? That wasn’t quite the right word. Hound was a better word. They began to hound her about it.
At first, Poornima didn’t even know they were talking about the five thousand. They were circumspect, and they would say things like, Some people. Some people are just too lazy to pay their debts, or, You can’t trust anyone, especially not the poor, the ones with daughters. Why should their bad luck cost us money? or, Liars—if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a liar. But after a few weeks, the grumbling became more pointed. While Poornima was eating dinner one night, after all the others had finished—first Kishore and her father-in-law, and then her mother-in-law and Aruna and Divya had to be served—her mother-in-law walked into the kitchen, where Poornima was sitting on the floor and eating, and said, “Did you get enough to eat, my dear?”
Poornima looked up at her in astonishment. My dear?
“It’s just as well,” she continued. “Eat your fill. You can live off of us. But who are we going to live off of?”
Poornima tried to talk to Kishore about it. She brought it up one night, after they’d climbed to their upstairs room. The nights were cooler now. It was January, and they’d had to switch out the thin sheets for the woolen blanket. The sky was a deep and distant blue; winter stars pierced it with cold indifference. Poornima stood on the terrace for a moment, looking out at the other houses in Namburu, most of them only thatched-roof huts like the one she’d grown up in. Golden lantern light spilled onto the dirt passageways between the huts, and there was the smell of woodsmoke, cooking fires setting rice to boil, round wheat pulkas browning directly over the flames. Poornima looked in the direction of Indravalli and knew this same cold night air must hang over Indravalli, too, this exact night air, probably, and yet she felt no kinship with it. No affection. It was as if the winter had turned the season of her heart, too, and left it filled only with smoke and distant, frozen stars.
Kishore asked her to come to the bed when she entered. He was lying on top of the covers. “Take off your blouse,” he said. Poornima took off her blouse and wrapped her pallu around her shoulders, though the shadowed curves of her breasts, her thin arms, could still be guessed through the fabric of her sari. “No,” he said, “take that off, too.” She did so reluctantly, shy, unaware, even after six months of marriage, and even with Kishore on top of her practically every night, of her adolescent body, and of the crude brutality it could inspire. “Massage my feet,” he said. She moved to the end of the bed. Her fingers, though they’d already been rough in Indravalli from the charkha and the housework, were now calloused and cracking from the constant work, her hands the only part of her that seemed to absorb the daily disgraces, the accusations, the domesticity of everyday cruelty. When she lifted her eyes, she saw that Kishore’s were closed, and though her bare chest was cold, she didn’t dare to cover it again. She thought he might’ve fallen asleep, but when she slowed the massage a bit, he called out, “Keep going. Who told you to stop?” She heard him snore lightly, or maybe he grunted, and then, after a moment, he said, “Come here.” He took her while she was on her back first, and then he turned her over onto her stomach and took her again. When he finally came, he collapsed on top of her and lay there for so long that Poornima watched as three different mosquitoes bit her and flew away, drugged, heavy and bloated with her blood.
She waited a moment, once he rolled off, and then she took a deep breath. She said, “I can’t help it. I can’t help it if my father doesn’t have the money.”
Silence. She slapped away another mosquito, the room now thick with them, attracted by the heat of their bodies.
“Yes, you can,” he said.
Poornima stopped. She stared at him in the dark. “I can?”
His voice grew cold. The room, too, grew suddenly cold. All the mosquitoes wandered off. “Tell him there’s worse to come,” he said, “unless he pays up.”
“Worse? Worse how?”
But Kishore didn’t say anything, and after a moment, he was snoring. Fast asleep. Poornima lay awake, the returning mosquitoes now a welcome distraction, the loss of blood an offering.
*
It wasn’t that conversation. Or maybe it was. Regardless, Poornima, a few weeks after that night, began to sneak upstairs between her chores, or race to finish them, or find any excuse to leave the main part of the house and climb to the second floor, close the door to their room, and sit on the edge of the bed. She never lay down; lying down reminded her of Kishore, and she didn’t want to be reminded of him. She didn’t want to be reminded of Savitha, either, so she didn’t close her eyes.
Instead, she studied the room. The walls were painted a pale green. There were watermarks on two of the walls, but none on the third and fourth. Two windows on either side of the door looked out onto the terrace, and these had bars and shutters across them, to keep out thieves. There was a lot to steal, Poornima thought: the wooden armoire was handsome; nothing in their hut in Indravalli was as handsome as the armoire. Inside it were mostly Kishore’s work clothes, along with her wedding sari, some papers and jewelry and cash that Kishore kept in a locked metal box, and a doll that was wrapped in crinkly plastic, which a distant relative had brought back from America. There was also, in the armoire, a bronze statuette Kishore had gotten for being the best student at his college each of his four years there, and this he kept especially protected, in a designated place nestled between some clothes. Tucked in between everything were mothballs. Against the other wall were the television and the desk. The television still didn’t work—Poornima wondered whether it ever had—but the room felt rich for having it there, a piece of muslin cloth covering it to keep out the dust.
Next to the television was the desk, and on the desk were Kishore’s papers. These papers were different than the papers in the armoire, he’d told her. These papers were just his work papers, he’d said, while the ones in the armoire were government papers and bankbooks. Poornima looked at them, and seeing that they were in disarray, she got up from the bed and went to the desk to straighten them. As she did, she saw that they were filled with columns—six of them, with many, many rows underneath filled with lots of numbers and scribbles that she couldn’t possibly understand, so she laid them back down on the desk. But something caught her eye: she saw that the first row on the topmost page did make sense. It was simply the numbers in the second, third, fourth, and fifth columns added up, and listed in the sixth column. The first column was just a date. That was easy enough; she’d learned addition well before the fifth class, which was the last year she’d attended school. Then she checked the remaining rows, and they, too, were the same: simple addition, that was it.