Her mother-in-law sometimes bought a long strand, cutting off the longest lengths—as long as her forearm—for Aruna and Divya (who didn’t even like wearing jasmine in her hair and took it off as soon as her mother turned her head); she took a short one for her own, puny bun and gave the remainder to Poornima. Poornima, whose father, after her mother had died, had never once given her money for flowers, would rush to oil and braid her hair, wash her face, then reapply talcum powder to her face and neck, draw kajal around her eyes, and paint on a fresh bottu. And only then, only after she’d made herself worthy of the flowers, their sweetness, their beauty, would she finally put them in her hair. On those nights, after Kishore took her—not once commenting on the flowers in her hair; did he even notice them? Poornima wondered—she’d lie back on her pillow, and their scent would drift up toward her like mist, like drizzle, like the unbearable sadness of that upstairs room, her husband turned away from her, the shutters closed against burglars, but still a mild breeze sneaking in, rustling the edges of the sheet, and Poornima, lying there in the dark, her eyes open, warm, inundated by the fragrance of flowers.
The voice of the old man selling the garlands of jasmine faded, and Poornima got up and walked across the terrace. She went into the upstairs room and closed the door. The papers were still on the desk. They were the same stack, sitting in the same place, and had been for the past two weeks. She moved aside the top page, the one with simple addition, and looked at the next one. This one had more numbers, but it also had a heading at the top of the page. The heading was in English, which Poornima couldn’t read, but there were other details in Telugu. For instance, the first column had a listing of various machines, such as cars (6), lorries (3), tractors (2), combines (2), and so forth. Each machine had an amount next to it. Judging by how high the numbers were, and how all the numbers in a group—such as the group of cars—were approximately the same, Poornima guessed each number corresponded to the value of the listed machine. Next to one car, she saw it read “Dented,” and was valued less than the others. The lorries, on the other hand, were all valued far more than the cars. Poornima shuffled to the next page. She was doing this out of boredom, she realized, but it was also fun, in a way. She couldn’t say why, only that figuring out what the numbers meant, what the columns stood for, gave her a sense of accomplishment, of gain. The feeling itself was unfamiliar, and she wondered at it: Why hadn’t she felt it when she’d worked at her charkha, or when she made a particularly tasty sambar, or even when she’d bought the two bananas, an apple, and the handful of cashews for her mother? Well, one reason was obvious: her mother died, the sambar got eaten, and the charkha, well, the charkha spun and it spun and it never stopped spinning. But this? This stack of papers? It was leading to something; she could sense it. She left that page and turned to the next.
*
The nagging from Poornima’s mother-in-law and Kishore escalated. Aruna’s marriage to the boy from Guntur was nearly fixed; it was just a matter of a little more haggling over the dowry and the amount of jewelry (measured in ounces of gold) each side would give the bride. Aruna’s family had the dowry money, though they had to sell a small farm they owned outside Kaza for the gold. But the farm didn’t bring in enough, and so every time Poornima entered a room, or left one, her mother-in law yelled after her, “That no-good father of yours said within the year. All five thousand. Well, the year’s come and gone. And here we are, feeding you three times a day, without even a grandchild to show for it. No-good fathers beget no-good daughters, that’s what I say. And here’s my poor son, a prince, stuck with you. We should’ve never married into such a family.” Poornima snuck a look at Kishore’s mangled fingers and wondered, Who is stuck with whom?
Kishore’s mode of escalation was more subtle, though also more painful: the sex became rougher. Violent. He’d grab her hair, yank her around the bed by it, slam into her with such force that her head would hit the wall behind the bed. The next day, bruises bloomed across her body, green and blue and gray and black, growing like nests, as if tiny birds were coming in the night to build them, one feather and branch and twig at a time. At the end of two weeks, Poornima could no longer see the true color of the skin on her legs and arms, and she wondered—bracing every evening for Kishore’s return from work, serving dinner with as much care and slowness as she could manage without being told to hurry up, washing the dishes even more deliberately, and then climbing the stairs one by one, knowing he was upstairs, knowing what the night would hold, and even, once or twice, closing her eyes when she reached the top step, praying, hoping, that when she opened them, Savitha would be there, standing on the terrace, laughing, saying, Let’s go—but wondering, wondering, she couldn’t help wondering if this is what they meant by worse.
*
Kishore’s work pages took on a kind of poetry for Poornima. She could’ve gazed at them for hours, days, were it not for chores, and for the simple fact that she didn’t know what they actually meant. Individually, she knew what they meant, but not together: the first page was simply various payments made to Kishore’s company over the past three months, added up. The second page—the one with the listing of cars and lorries—was a listing of the company’s assets. The third page, Poornima realized without much trouble—based on the columns of other company names and an amount beside each name, some getting smaller, some getting higher—were the company’s debts. But what did they mean, when taken together? Why was Kishore always shuffling them around, punching numbers into some small machine, grumbling about this or that outstanding payment? Loans. Debts. It didn’t make sense. Poornima wandered through her chores in a daze for a full week, until one afternoon, while she was hanging up the laundry to dry, one of Aruna’s shalwar tops was whipped to the ground by the wind, and Aruna ran up behind her, caught Poornima’s arm in a grip, and swung her around to face her. “Do you know whose this is? Do you know what it’s worth?” Poornima looked at her, and then she couldn’t help smiling. It was so simple. Of course. That must be it. All those papers, stacked on the desk: they added up to something. They added up to what the company was worth.
*
And so as the stacks kept changing—with Kishore taking stacks back to work, bringing new ones, all the while completely unaware that Poornima was studying them, that she was learning from them—she began to see the world differently; she began to see it with a kind of clarity: there was what you owed, and there was what you could sell to pay off what you owed, and whatever was left (if there was anything left) was all that you could say was truly yours, all that you could truly love.
6
By the middle of the second year of Poornima’s marriage, the nagging grew into outright hostility. She couldn’t recall a single day when she hadn’t been slapped or screamed at or forced to ask for forgiveness (for the smallest things, like when she dripped a few drops of tea onto the stone floor). The five thousand rupees was still outstanding, and her mother-in-law and Kishore reminded her of it every time she put a bite of food in her mouth, or drank a glass of water. “You think it’s free?” her mother-in-law hissed. “You think that water’s free? That pump we installed cost three thousand rupees. So you wouldn’t have to go to the well. And where do you think we got that three thousand rupees? Where? Not from your father, not from him. That’s for sure, the thief. Both of you. Thieves.” But the water pump was installed the year before I came to Namburu, Poornima wanted to say, but didn’t. Not because she was afraid; fear began to lose meaning in her life—fear was a thing she’d felt for so long, first with her father and then with her mother-in-law and Aruna and Kishore, that it took on a monotony, an everydayness that struck Poornima as being just as boring as washing dishes, or ironing clothes. Why should she be afraid? She’d left her father’s house and nothing had changed. Maybe nothing ever did. She understood now that Savitha had been right to run away. She’d been right to leave. Fear was no good, but neither was the monotony of fear.