When they reached the house, her mother-in-law and Kishore were in the sitting room, and they watched her with contempt. Divya led her up the stairs, and when they reached the terrace, Poornima had her go in first and cover the mirror on the armoire. Only then did she enter. She lay down on the bed. Divya left, and then she came back that evening with a plate of food. Poornima looked at the plate of food and started to cry. Divya left again and came back with a glass of milk, and this she forced Poornima to drink.
The next day was the same. Only Divya came and went. But this time, she brought her books with her, and opened one of them, and began to study. Poornima made a sound, a squeak. Divya looked up from her book. “It’s my Telugu primer,” she said.
The primer was from the British era, she told Poornima; the small village school in Namburu never having had the money to buy new ones. Poornima opened her mouth slightly, the slightest amount, in an attempt to speak, but the pain shot through her like a cannon.
“Do you want me to read aloud to you?”
Poornima blinked.
The story Divya read was told from the perspective of a man on a ship in the early 1900s. The man’s name was Kirby. Divya paused and said, “It doesn’t say if it’s his family name or his given name.” Then she continued reading.
In the story, this man Kirby was traveling on a ship from Pondicherry to Africa. While traveling, he met another man, also on the ship, who was a Portuguese army colonel. The colonel, according to Kirby, was traveling to his family’s estate in Mozambique. They grew sisal, the colonel told Kirby, and went on endlessly about how sisal looked (like a Mexican agave, Kirby wrote, though neither Poornima nor Divya, even with a footnoted explanation, had any idea what that was either), how it was grown and then harvested. He said the blades of the sisal plant could cut deeper than a sword. Kirby then asked the colonel, But how do you handle it?
Oh, we don’t, the colonel said. The Negroes do all that.
On his last night on the ship, before he was due to disembark the next morning at Louren?o Marques, the old colonel told Kirby this story:
It happened one winter, the colonel began, when I was stationed at Wellington, near Madras. Years ago. Our cantonment, quite suddenly, was overrun with rats. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They got into the food, the beds, the artillery. And not just any kind of rat, he said, and here he cupped his hands so that they were as big around as a dinner plate. They were enormous. Well, no one knew how to get rid of them. We tried poison and traps and we even had this tribal shaman come down from the mountains, some sort of expert on rodents and scorpions and such. None of it did any good, you see. The rats went right on eating and shitting everywhere. (Here there was inserted another footnote indicating that the colonel had meant to say defecating.)
After about a month of this, the colonel continued, one of the young soldiers noticed that after he’d spit on the ground, a rat came around, sniffed his sputum, and looked up at him with the kindest, most concerned eyes the man had ever seen. The soldier told us about it at dinner that evening, almost joking, you see. But I could tell the young man was a bit shaken. The camp doctor heard this, and that very night he diagnosed him with early-stage tuberculosis.
Kirby noted that here, the colonel took a sip of his champagne (again, Poornima and Divya shrugged, not knowing what that was). Rats, you see, he said, putting down his glass of champagne, can detect tuberculosis well before modern medicine can. That damn rat very nearly saved the camp from an epidemic. Amazing, isn’t it?
Kirby, apparently, then asked the colonel, What about the rats? What happened to them?
That’s the thing. One day they all just left. Picked up and disappeared. It was as if their sole purpose was to warn us. To save the thing that was trying to destroy them.
At this point, Kirby, writing this account, said he laughed out loud but that the colonel only closed his eyes. At the end of the story in the Telugu primer, Kirby wrote that early the next morning, when the ship had docked in Louren?o Marques, they went to wake the colonel, but he was dead. Kirby wrote that laying on his narrow ship’s bed, the colonel was pallid, his skin nearly translucent, and that he could almost see the blood drifting away from the colonel’s heart.
That was the end of the story, and when Divya stopped reading, Poornima looked at her. A young girl, the same age she and Savitha had been when they’d first met. She then looked down at Divya’s neck—brown like bark, a vein throbbing, pulsing steadily, a lighthouse beneath her skin—and then Poornima thought about the poor colonel, and the rats, and Mozambique, wherever that was, and she didn’t have to wonder what it looked like, blood drifting away from the heart.
*
The next day was a Sunday. Everyone was at home. Poornima could hear them moving downstairs, talking, laughing, and the vendors, mostly vegetable sellers, stopping at various doors, yelling out their wares, eggplant and beans and peppers plucked just that morning. The dew still clinging to their skins. The Krishna didn’t flow past Namburu, but Poornima thought she caught its scent on the wind, could see the fishing nets flung into its waters, twirling like langas. When she closed her eyes, there were the saris drying on the opposite shore. Every color, fluttering in the river breeze, fields of wildflowers.
Her eyes, now, were often closed. She stayed in the room all day, only going downstairs to use the latrine. She hadn’t bathed since the spill, and her musk and animal smell, mingled with the smell of her sweat, of rotting bandages, of copper (Had she gotten her period? Maybe. She didn’t care to look.), and burned flesh, always the smell of burned flesh, assaulted her as she tried to sleep. She didn’t mean to sleep. She meant to stay awake, all night, if needed. Her father-in-law had come upstairs the previous night and handed her a train ticket to Indravalli. Second class, instead of third, so she could travel in relative comfort. He hadn’t looked her in the eye, but she knew he was sorry. She knew so little about him, but she knew suddenly that his life was lived in regret. He stood at the door for a moment, before leaving, and she was lying on the bed, and she thought they must look like two wounded animals, circling in a dark cave.
After he left, Poornima stared at the ticket, and then she put it under her pillow. It was the twice-daily passenger train, leaving Namburu at 2:30 P.M. and arriving in Indravalli at 2:55 P.M. Twenty-five minutes. That’s all there had ever been.