And then she had it. It came to her while she was watching one of the girls trudge through the house midafternoon, just after she’d woken up, on her way to the latrines. She was rubbing her eyes, and her face was swollen with sleep, or maybe fatigue. Her gaze was even, and indifferent, as she stood at the back door, looking out. And it was when Poornima saw this gaze, this indifference, that she understood: the girl had lost her sense of light. It was all the same to her, to all the girls, really: light and dark, morning and night. But it wasn’t an outside light they’d lost a sense of, Poornima realized. It was an interior one. And so that was the aspect of girlhood they’d lost: a sense of their own light.
Poornima thought of light, and then she thought of Savitha. There were six books she had to track and balance and audit against the money that was coming in. They’d even given her one of those little adding machines Kishore had used. The machine made everything much, much quicker. Even so, she worked diligently, all the while trying to figure out a way to go to the other brothels, to see the other girls. By now, she knew Rishi had been lying, back at the train station when he’d said he knew Savitha, but Guru ran nearly all the brothels in Vijayawada, and Poornima decided she couldn’t make her way north until she knew for sure. And so she stayed, and she waited.
By her ninth month working at the brothel, Poornima had only managed to visit two of the other locations, asking to go along with Guru when he collected. “I’m not one of the girls,” she said. “I want to drive around a little.” He agreed reluctantly, though she sensed that he’d come to trust her. She never stole money, she never asked for money, and she never made a mistake in the books. He came to confide in her at times and even began giving her a small salary. She realized it was because of her scar that he trusted her, in the small way that he did. It was odd, but it was true. She was no longer wearing bandages, but the burn had healed and left scar tissue that was shiny and wide and blisteringly pink. It made her look damaged, harmless, and, most important, pathetic.
One day, Guru came in complaining of the cost of buying food and clothing and sundries for the nearly hundred women and girls in the brothels. “Thousands of rupees I spend per month. Thousands. All they do is eat.”
Poornima didn’t say anything. She knew for a fact that he made over one hundred thousand rupees a month off the girls. In some months, he made two lakhs.
“For instance, just the other day, a girl tells me it’s her birthday, and could I buy her a sweet. Her birthday! I said, You’ll get a sweet when you do ten men in one night. That’s when you’ll get a sweet.”
Poornima nodded.
“Every day. Every day they eat and eat.”
She went back to her work; it was common for Guru to complain, and she’d grown used to it.
“And the audacity. One time, this one girl says to me, I want a banana. So I say, I buy you rice. Go eat that. And you know what she says?”
“No. What?” Poornima hardly looked up.
“She says, But I like to eat bananas with my rice. With my yogurt rice. Can you believe that? A banana! The audacity.”
Poornima’s head shot up. She stilled her thoughts, she evened her voice. “Oh,” she said. Then she said, “What happened to that girl? The one who asked for the banana?”
Guru shrugged. “We sold her.”
“Sold her? To whom?”
Guru looked up. His eyes narrowed. He said, “You think all we have are these shitty brothels? You think you’re doing all the books? Our main income is from selling girls. To rich men. To men in Saudi. Dubai.”
Poornima took a breath. She told herself, Don’t let him see. He won’t tell you if you let him see. “But that one,” she said lightly, “the one who wanted the banana. Where did she go?”
“I think she was part of that big shipment we made. A year ago? Some rich man in America. Get this: he wanted girls to clean apartments. Apparently, over there it costs serious money to hire people to clean. To clean. Common Dalits. It was cheaper for him to buy them. He owned hundreds of them. Apartments, I mean. Some place called Seetle, Sattle. I don’t know. But he paid good money for them.”
Poornima could feel the air around her cooling. She could feel a great wooden door creaking open. “How do you get there?”
Guru started to laugh. He started to howl with laughter. “It’s far. It’s far, far away. You’ll never get there.”
Poornima laughed with him, but she knew she would.
Savitha
1
Savitha knew she wouldn’t get the banana, not at first, at least. But what would it take to get something as simple, as small, as a banana?
She’d find out.
Savitha also knew she had to deal with the leader of the ring, named Guru. No one else. He came around occasionally to check on his goods, as he called the girls. The first time was within a few weeks of her arrival. She’d left Indravalli in the early hours of the morning, on the same day she was to marry Poornima’s father. Her body hurt. She’d been crouched in the corner of the weaving hut for three days. She hadn’t wept, she hadn’t blinked (not that she was aware of), she hadn’t hoped or prayed or felt pain, nor had she had a single thought. Not one. Well, maybe one. Her only thought had been, Which is better? This? Or being dead? Or are they one and the same? Before leaving the weaving hut, and the sleeping Poornima, she’d untied all the tiny knots of the sari she’d been making for her, not yet even half completed, stretched out on the loom like a shroud, and folded it into eighths, and then tucked the cloth into the inside of her blouse, against her flat chest.
Then she left Indravalli, knowing it was forever.
When she got to the bus stop—out on the highway, not the one in town—the first bus that pulled up was the one to Vijayawada. It was empty, except for the conductor. Not even the farmers were headed to market yet. Savitha didn’t have any money, not a single paisa, so when the door of the bus opened, she looked up at the driver, not at all pleading, but with a look that was stern, deliberate, and she said, “No one will possibly find out if you give me a ride.”
The bus driver looked at her, up and down, and then he laughed and closed the door and drove away. A lorry was her only chance. She waited a few more minutes until one came into view. It drove off, not even slowing, as did four others, ignoring her utterly, until the sixth one. The sixth one was painted intricately, a Ganesha on top of the windshield, in the middle, with a scene of a tranquil lake with a hut and cows on one side and a bouquet of roses on the other. Two fresh limes dangled from its front bumper, for good fortune. Along the inside top of the windshield was draped a length of red streamers, sparkling even without the sun. Savitha hailed the driver, stepping onto the edge of the road, and when he slowed, she saw that he was young, hardly older than her. Closer up, once she’d climbed into the cabin, she saw that his teeth were the most brilliant white she had ever seen, whiter even than the temple on Indravalli Konda, though his eyes were bleary, red, maybe from the lack of sleep or dust or drink.
“Where are you headed?”
“Depends,” she said. “How far are you going?”
“To Pune.”
“Then that’s where I’m going.”
He smiled, and this time, Savitha wasn’t so sure of the brilliance of his teeth. Their whiteness, yes, but not their brilliance.
It took less than ten minutes, bumping along on the Trunk Road, past the shuttered roadside tea shops, and the dark huts, and the dewy fields of rice, and the sleeping dogs, for the driver’s hand to leave the steering wheel. It didn’t inch along the seat, as Savitha might’ve expected, but simply took flight and landed on her thigh. “I’m in no hurry,” he said. “Are you?”
Savitha took a breath.