She thought Kishore might come upstairs, if only to ensure that she was leaving, but only Divya came in the evening, bringing Poornima’s dinner of rice and pappu, the rice cooked soft so that she wouldn’t have to chew very much. After she left, Poornima closed her eyes again. It was dark when she opened them. There was a gibbous moon, so when she studied the shadowed room, she saw the shapes of the furniture, the gleam of the stone floor, the pattern of flowers on the sheet that covered her. She looked at the desk; she saw, even in the moonlight, the stack of papers, the accounting papers that had given her such pleasure to decipher, such a sense of accomplishment and purpose. It was nothing, she realized, her heart breaking. All of it was nothing. It was nothing in the face of something as simple as hot oil, and the slightest evil.
She then rose heavily, into the silver moonlight, and stepped onto the terrace. She would miss the terrace; she realized it was the only thing, along with Divya, that she would miss from her two years in Namburu. She walked to the edge of the terrace and looked at the first stars, and she thought of the many years she had left to live. Or maybe she had none at all. It was impossible to know. But if she didn’t die tonight, if she didn’t die within the amount of time a human being can readily foresee, can honestly imagine (a day? a week?), What, she wondered, will I do with all those years? All those many years? To look forward, Poornima realized, was to also look back. And so she saw her mother, as she had once been: young and alive. Sitting at the loom by lantern light, or bending over a steaming pot, or tending to one of Poornima’s brothers or her sister, wiping their faces or bathing them or pushing the hair from their eyes. That’s all she could recall her mother ever doing: something for someone else. Even Poornima’s most tender memories—of being fed by her mother’s hand on the bus trip to see her grandparents, or the weight of it against her hair while she’d been combing it—had all of them to do with her mother doing something for her child, never for herself. Is that how she’d meant to spend her life? Is that how lives were meant to be spent?
Now, Poornima looked to the future. She saw herself going back to Indravalli. At 2:55 P.M. the next day, she would step off the passenger train, walk to her father’s house, and enter it. She could see him clearly, sitting on the veranda, on the hemp-rope bed, smoking his tobacco and watching her. Just as she was watching him. Perhaps her siblings would be there, perhaps they wouldn’t. But what the future held most clearly—more clearly even than the image of her father—was the image of a battlefield. And no battlefield, in all the histories of man, could compare with the one Poornima now saw: blood-soaked, and littered—littered with what? She moved closer, she knelt to see, her eyes widened: it was herself. It was littered with her limbs, her organs, her feet, her hands, her scalped hair, and even her skin, shredded, mangled as if by dogs.
Poornima blinked, but it wasn’t tears she blinked back. What was it? She didn’t know, but she could see it—floating in the air around her, suffocating, spinning like ash.
She walked back into the upstairs room, took out the train ticket from under her pillow, and ripped it in half, then quarters, then eighths, and then she let the tiny pieces fall to the floor like confetti. She watched them fall with a certain delight, and then she turned to the armoire, opened it, and took out the locked box. There was no key that she could see; probably her mother-in-law had the key on the key ring she always kept tucked into the waistband of her sari. Calmly, Poornima gripped the statuette—the one that had been presented to Kishore for being first in his college—and slammed it against the lock. The lock broke, but so did the statuette, at the point where the figurine (of a bird taking flight from a branch) was cauterized to the engraved base. She threw both pieces of the statuette back into the armoire. The papers in the box were of no interest to Poornima, but the jewelry—only a thin gold chain and two bangles; the rest Kishore kept in a safe-deposit box at the bank—she tied into a pouch at the end of her pallu and slipped it into the waistband of her own sari; the cash (a little over five hundred rupees) she placed into her blouse, next to her left breast. Then the box, too, she tossed back into the armoire, closed the door, and stood in front of it.
The mirror was still covered with a sheet, and Poornima stood looking at the sheet, as if it held an answer. A sign. But it held nothing; it was just a sheet. She ripped it off the mirror with such force that the wind in the room shifted; her hair flew up and around her face as if she were staring out to sea. But Poornima felt none of it, none of the wind and none of the sea. She stood perfectly still in front of the mirror—it was the most she’d ever seen of herself. The mirror in Indravalli had only been a hand mirror, and while in Namburu, though she’d been living here for almost two years, she’d never really stood in front of this mirror. Or any other. But now, she stood. She saw that she was no longer a girl. And if she had ever been pretty, she certainly wasn’t anymore. She stepped closer, and then she raised her hands to her face and removed the bandages, one by one. The left side of her face and neck were just as she imagined them, or worse: flaming red, blistered, gray and black on the edges of the wide burn, the left cheek hollow, pink, silvery, and wet, as if it’d been turned inside out. Her left arm and shoulder, though, were not as bad as she’d thought. They had only been splattered by droplets of oil, rather than splashed, and the splatters already seemed to be healing. But the face and neck she knew she had to keep from getting infected, which meant she needed clean bandages and iodine. With the bandages off, she looked even more grotesque than she did with them on. She recalled the doctor saying, while she was in a morphine haze, “You’re lucky it didn’t get you below the neck.”
She’d turned her sleepy gaze to him.
“Your husband won’t leave you. As long as you have proper breasts, a man won’t leave you.”
She’d wanted to say—had she not been in an opiate haze, had she not been content to simply close her eyes—Then I wish it’d gotten the breasts, too.
Poornima lay back on the bed and waited. She waited until the darkest part of the night, then changed into a fresh sari, drank the glass of water that Divya had left for her, and snuck downstairs, out of the house, and out of Namburu, and all of this she did with a shocking stealth and precision and cold-bloodedness, because of course she knew exactly what she was going to do, no matter how long it took her, no matter how difficult the journey, and she knew exactly where all of this had always been leading, always.
She was going to find Savitha.
8
Poornima made a rough calculation and decided that Savitha had left at around four in the morning. She guessed this because, as she recalled, on that last night, she’d gone to sleep with her arm around her, and when she’d woken up, with the sun, Savitha was gone. When did the sun rise? Maybe six thirty or seven? If that was the case, then Savitha had to have left much earlier, to avoid detection, so probably she left at four or five in the morning. Closer to four, Poornima guessed. But why not earlier? Say at two or three in the morning? It was possible, Poornima thought, but where would she go? None of the buses or trains ran at that hour, and trying to catch a ride on a lorry on the highway would’ve been too risky. Besides, if she’d done that, if she’d gotten into a random lorry on the Tenali Road, then she could be anywhere by now. She could be in Assam or Kerala or Rajasthan or Kashmir. Or anywhere in between. Anywhere at all. And that, Poornima refused to consider.
She also refused to consider the nearly two years that had passed since Savitha had left, and that that amount of time, too, could have taken her anywhere. But this Poornima chose to ignore. After all, she told herself, time was simple. Time was no kind of mystery. It was naked and unblinking; it was like the buffalo she saw plowing the fields. All it did was plod along, never wavering and without a thought in its head. Time was all her days in Namburu, and all the days before that. But geography? Now, geography Poornima considered a mystery. Its mountains, its rivers, its vast and endless plains, its seas that she had never seen. Geography was the unknown.