“I’ve already talked to Ramayya. There’s a farmer near here. A few acres of his own, and a good worker. Two buffalo, a cow, some goats. He doesn’t want to wait, though. He needs the money right now. And he’s worried you won’t take to being a farmer’s wife. I told Ramayya, I told him, Look at her. Just look at her. Strong as an ox, she is an ox. Forget the oxen, she could plow the fields.”
Poornima nodded and went back inside the hut. The only mirror they owned was a handheld mirror; she couldn’t even see her entire face unless she held it at arm’s length, but she held it up to her face, saw an eye, a nose, and then she moved it down to her neck and breasts and hips. An ox? She was overcome with a sudden sadness. Why, she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter why. It was childish to be sad for no reason at all. She only knew that had her mother been alive, she would’ve probably already been married. Maybe even pregnant, or with a baby. That was no cause for sadness either. She was concerned about this farmer, though. What if he did make her pull the plow? What if her mother-in-law was cruel? What if all she had were girls? Then she heard her amma speak. None of those things has even happened yet, she heard her say. And then she said, Everything is already written in the stars, Poornima. By the gods. We can’t alter a thing. So what does it matter? Why worry?
She was right, of course. But when she lay on her mat that night, Poornima thought about the farmer, she thought about the deepa on top of Indravalli Konda, she thought about beauty. If her skin had been lighter, her hair thicker, or if her eyes had been bigger, her father might’ve found a better match for her: someone who wanted a wife, not an ox. She’d once heard Ramayya saying, when he’d come to see her father, “Your Poornima’s a good worker, but you know these boys today, they want a modern girl. They want fashion.” Fashion? Then she thought about her mother; she thought about her last days, spent writhing in pain; she thought about the weight of her mother’s hand on her head; and then she thought about the two bananas, the apple, and the handful of cashews, and as if this were the moment her heart had been waiting for, it broke, and out poured so many tears that she thought they would never stop. She cried silently, hoping her sleeping father and brothers and sister wouldn’t hear, the mat she lay on soaked so thoroughly that she smelled the wet earth underneath, as if after a rainfall, and at the end of it, her body was so wracked with sobs, so drained of feeling, so exquisitely empty, that she actually smiled, and then fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
2
It was around this time, around the time of the death of Poornima’s mother, when Savitha’s mother—much older than Poornima’s mother would’ve been, far poorer, and yet who hadn’t been ill a single day of her life—came to Savitha, her eldest daughter, of seventeen or so, and confessed that they had no food for that night’s dinner. “No food?” Savitha said, surprised. “What about the twenty rupees I got for the bundles yesterday?” By bundles, she meant the bundles of discarded paper and plastic she’d collected at the garbage heaps outside of town, next to the Christian cemetery. It had taken her three days of crawling over stinking and rotting and putrid scraps, fighting off the other garbage pickers, along with the pigs and the dogs, to make the twenty rupees.
“Bhima took it.”
“He took it?”
“We still owe him thirty.”
Savitha sighed, and though the sigh was slow and diffuse, her mind was alert and racing. She thought of her three younger sisters, who also scoured the garbage heaps; her mother, who cleaned houses; and her father, who, after years of drinking, had finally given it up when his rheumatoid arthritis had gotten so bad that he could no longer hold a glass in his hand. He might get a handout from the priests at the temple, where he begged most days, but it would hardly be enough for him, let alone his wife and four daughters. She also had two older brothers, both of whom had gone to Hyderabad looking for work, with promises of sending money home, but there had not even been a letter from either in the two years since they’d gone.
She stood in the middle of their meager hut and tallied all the ways in which she could make money: she could collect garbage, which clearly wasn’t bringing in enough; she could cook and clean, as her mother did, though there were hardly any families rich enough in Indravalli to keep even her mother employed; she could work the charkha and the loom—she did belong to the caste of weavers, after all—but money from making cotton saris was dwindling each year, and given how little each sari brought in, if a family owned a charkha or a loom, they kept the work within the family, to keep the money there as well. Savitha looked at their charkha, broken, draped with cobwebs, slumped in the corner of their hut like a heap of firewood waiting for a match. For five years now, they hadn’t had the money to get it fixed. If only it were fixed, she thought, I could make us more money. She was, of course, aware of the absurdity of the thought: she needed money to make money.
But thread! To hold it again between her fingers.
She still remembered clutching a boll of cotton in her tiny hands when she’d been a little girl and being amazed that such a bit of silly fluff, filled with dark and stubborn seeds, could become something as lovely and smooth and flat and soft as a sari.
From boll to loom to cloth to sari, she thought.
She left the dark hut, the broken charkha, and her mother, staring listlessly at the empty pots and pans, and wandered into the village. She walked past the huts of the laundresses and past the train station and past the tobacco shop and the dry goods shop and the sari shop and the tailoring shop and past even the Hanuman temple, in the middle of Indravalli, and found herself in front of the small gated opening to the weaving collective. She heard voices and the whirring of a fan. And just there, if she put her face to the gate, she could smell the faint aroma of new cloth, a mingling of freshly cooked rice and spring rain and teakwood and something of those hard seeds, so unwilling to let go. More captivating to her—this slight scent, lost so soon in the wind—than the most fragrant flower.
With hardly a thought, she opened the creaking gate with a firm grip and went inside.
*
Poornima’s father owned two looms. One was where he worked, and the other was where her mother had worked. They’d each taken two or three days to complete a sari, but now, with only one person at the loom, there were only half the number of saris. That meant half the money. Poornima was too busy with her charkha and the household chores to take over the second loom, her brothers and sister too small to reach the treadles, so her father began looking for help. He asked everyone he knew, he inquired at the tea shop he frequented in the evenings, he went to the weaving collective and announced he was willing to offer a quarter of the proceeds of every sari that was made, along with meals. There were no takers. Indravalli was a village composed mainly of sari makers, and most of the young men were busy helping their own families. The village was purportedly founded in the time of the Ikshvakus, and ever since, had been weaving cloth—in ancient times, clothing for the royal courts, but now simply the cotton saris worn by the peasantry and, occasionally, the intellectual elite. The Quit India Movement, along with the image of Gandhi sitting at his charkha, spinning, and his inception of the homespun ideal, had improved Indravalli’s prospects considerably, especially in the years leading up to independence. But now it was 2001, a new century, and the young men of Indravalli, those who were born into the caste of weavers, to which Poornima and her family also belonged, were struggling to feed their own families. In fact, many had abandoned weaving and taken up other occupations.