She understood, in that very instant, that a door had been opened. Not today, but three days ago. What was this door? she wondered. Why hadn’t she ever known it was there? She had no answer. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to know the answer. Regardless, it was now open, and she was through it. Poornima’s father, of course, had been the one to open it, the one to push her through, and she felt rage, an intense and terrible rage toward him—for no other reason than that he hadn’t asked her what she wanted. He hadn’t said, There is a door. Do you see it? Do you want me to open it? Do you want to see what’s on the other side? But now it was done. And now, she realized, that’s all she’d ever be in the eyes of men: a thing to enter, to inhabit for a time, and then to leave.
They drove on. The lorry driver’s hand inched up her thigh. They drove across the Krishna and turned onto the national highway.
Well, if that were true, then something else also had to be true. She didn’t have to think long on it to figure out what it was; it was like it had been waiting there all along, alongside the road. And it was this: there was yet another door. A smaller door, a more formidable one. A hidden one. But through this other door, she knew, lay the real treasures: her love for Poornima, her love for her parents and her sisters. These treasures gleamed: the feel of cloth, the one against her chest, yes, but really, all cloth. How it lay like a hand (not the lorry driver’s, but a tender one, wanting nothing) against your skin, protecting you, softening with time. They shone through the night, these treasures: the memory (already a memory) of her father’s hands, the way they reached with such fear, such longing, the taste of yogurt rice with banana, the way it was creamy and sweet, both at once, the fill of her heart, the way it swelled but never broke.
“Stop here,” she said.
The lorry driver’s hand paused, nearly at her crotch.
“Here?”
“Right here.”
“But we’re hardly past Vijayawada. You said Pune.”
She looked at him, at his dark lips, the top one nearly completely curtained by his mustache. Then he smiled, as if she might smile back. But she only looked some more, at the red of his eyes and the white of his teeth. He slowed the lorry but didn’t stop. Savitha looked out the window. A mangy dog lay next to a garbage heap; farther down, a chicken scratched at the dirt. He’d swerve to avoid them, she thought. Anybody would. And then she thought, I hold the key.
She lifted his hand from her thigh and wrenched it, hard, at the wrist. He gasped, slammed on the brakes. The lorry tilted and then screeched to a halt.
“You bitch. Pakshi. Get out.”
When she did, the lorry pulled away with a loud squeal and a cloud of dust. Savitha stood on the national highway and looked to the east and to the west. Toward the east were the outskirts of Vijayawada. They’d mostly skirted the city, but it would be easy enough to go back. Back. That didn’t seem very smart. To the west were Hyderabad and then Karnataka and then Maharashtra and then the Arabian Sea. Not that Savitha knew any of this; she knew only that Pune was to the west, and beyond was a sea. She sat right down, on the dirt, on the edge of the highway, and wondered what to do. There were more vehicles now, mostly lorries. She could hail another one, hope for a better man. Most any one of them would take her to Pune, if Pune was where she wanted to go. What did they speak there? Marathi, of course. Which, of course, she had no idea how to speak. What if she asked them to take her to Bangalore? They spoke Kannada there. Close to Telugu, but not quite. She turned her head and looked toward Vijayawada again. It was wiser to go back, she decided. It was better to first make some money, and to make money it was best to stay where she knew the language. And really, if anyone in Indravalli went looking for her, which she doubted they would, somewhere as obvious as Vijayawada would be the last place they’d look. Or so she guessed. But this she knew: it was better to be wise than to be smart.
*
Everyone called him Boss, or Guru, but his real name was probably something different. He was thin, with huge spectacles, and wiry, and seemed weak, but his physical aspect was a foil. This Savitha could see plainly in his eyes. His eyes: boring through her as if through rock, through mountain, through the Himalayas, looking not for metals or minerals or gems, but for girls, poor but pretty girls, which she came to understand was just another word for profit.
The first time he came around Savitha was still drugged. She’d made it so simple for them; it was almost laughable. She’d walked back into Vijayawada. For three weeks she’d gone to various tailoring shops and seamstresses, looking for work, and in the nights, she’d slept next to a gutter in the goldsmiths district, scented by the coal braziers used to filigree the shining yellow metal during the day, teeming with rats and pigs at night. One rat had tried to nibble on her ear as she slept. She’d eaten whatever she could find: the insides of discarded banana peels, a half-gnawed roti, a slice of coconut from the Kanaka Durga Temple. Toward the end of her first month, she’d gone to a tea stall, on a narrow alley off Annie Besant Road, and stood on the edge of a group of men, looking up at the soot-grimed walls of the close buildings, the narrow strip of sky, glowing with sunrise, and the clotheslines, crisscrossing between the buildings, slicing open the morning sky. She wondered what to do. A man came up behind her, one she hadn’t even noticed in the huddled group of men, and he offered her a cup of tea. Savitha looked from the steaming, sugary cup of tea to his face. He was middle-aged, well dressed in clean pants and a shirt; his hair was neatly oiled and combed.
“Go on. Take it.”
She hesitated.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“Yes. My husband.”
“Where’s your mangalsutra?”
She shrugged, and he laughed. And it was then that she realized her mistake: her hands should’ve instinctively gone to her neck. But he only laughed some more, good-naturedly, and said, “Go on. This stall serves the best tea in the city.”
She took a sip, and then another, and then another. Then she drained the glass. She felt light-headed at first, which she took to be from the lack of food, but then when she opened her eyes, she was tied to a hemp-rope bed in a damp-smelling concrete room with no windows. She was tied at the wrists and the ankles. And no matter how much she strained and screamed, no one came; the rope didn’t give. After what seemed like days, someone entered the room, a boy, she thought, but couldn’t be sure because it was dark inside the room and dark outside the room. He ran his hand over the bed, then over her face. When he found it, he pinched her nose shut until she opened her mouth, then he threw another bitter liquid into it, this time without the benefit of tea.
She dropped again into a deep sleep.
Three or four or five days later, or maybe a month later, the door opened for a second time. This time, a thin yellow light seeped in from outside the door, and Savitha saw that it was a little girl. She was lugging a bucket, far too heavy for her, splashing water on the floor and over the front of her torn frock. Savitha was still hazy in her thoughts, her body still limp, but she told herself, Talk to her. Talk to this girl. Tell her you’ll do anything, anything. Her mouth opened, or so she assumed, but nothing came out. Savitha willed harder, she closed her eyes, she focused on the fog, the heaviness, she told herself, Speak. “Untie me,” she finally managed to whisper. “Please.”