The girl seemed not to hear. She went about raising a wet cloth to Savitha’s legs, her crotch, her underarms, her chest. My chest, Savitha thought. Was the strip of Poornima’s sari still there? Was it? “The cloth,” she croaked. “Is it?” By now the girl had found it. She raised it to her face, seemed to sniff it once, then threw it into the corner. Savitha let out a long wail. Animal. Wounded. The girl still paid her no attention. She went about her work, the damp cloth now wiping down Savitha’s neck, her arms. When she reached for her hands, Savitha grabbed the girl’s forearm. She yanked her closer, so she could see the child’s face in the dim light of the half-open door. She looked into the girl’s eyes; they returned her gaze, but they were unmoved, blank, gray, as if the concrete of the room had blown like sediment and settled into them. Savitha’s alarm pushed through layers of confusion, rage, incoherence, and flame, and she said, “Can’t you hear me?”
The girl let out her own wail, though hers was even more animal, more wounded. And it was then, at that sound, when Savitha truly began to understand her bondage, her imprisonment, the totality of its vision, the completeness of her fate. And that she’d been neither smart nor wise: the girl was a deaf-mute, and the boy had been blind.
*
She flailed. She strained at her wrists and ankles, managing only to tighten their grip. She beat her head against the hemp, she screamed, she wept. She bit and snapped against the rope with her teeth. Too far away for her to cut through, but the ends she caught and gnawed until her gums bled. She tasted copper and thought, Good. And then she thought, How long will it take to bleed to death? Out of my gums? The drugs she spit out, gagged on, retched every time the boy poured them in. That’s when he started injecting it—mostly by plunging the needle into her stomach, but if she squirmed too much, straight into the side of her buttocks. But even in her haze, her bafflement, Savitha could see clearly the edges of the bed, the dark corners of the room, and in the dank of the windowless walls, the beauty she’d lost: sunlight, wind, water.
In between bouts of sleeping, sweating, waking, and vomiting, there were other memories, floating in and out, above and beyond, like breath. There was the shimmer of the temple on Indravalli Konda, the perfume of freshly cooked rice, the shouts of flower vendors, spilling petals on the streets, there were the words of an owl, there was the feel of the loom, the feel of thread, the feel of form, taking shape, becoming something. She could’ve woven a river; she could’ve woven a sea. Why was she lying here? Why?
The door opened, soon after the girl had cleaned her again. This time it was a man she’d not seen before. Although, in truth, she was bleary-eyed, weak, sodden, and high, her limbs long ago gone numb, so really, it could’ve been her father.
But it wasn’t her father.
This man—who she learned in time was the one called Guru—let the light spill in. Savitha squinted. He approached the bed with a small smile. Then he laid a knife at the edge of the bed, just beyond her reach. Despite her frailness, a sliver of something feral, a shard of some lucidity, sliced through her consciousness. Savitha lurched for it, nearly tipping the bed over. She rocked violently from side to side, side to side, until the knife fell to the floor with a clang. Guru ignored her. He walked to the corner of the room, where Poornima’s half-made sari still lay, and nudged it with the tip of his shoe. He bent a little, taking a closer look. He held his face away from the cloth, as if it were rotting meat, and then he smiled and said, “I know this weave. So distinctive. You’re from Indravalli, aren’t you?” Savitha said nothing. He walked back to the bed. His smile widened. She looked up at him, called him names, she begged; she sensed what was to come. “You stink,” he said placidly. Then he said, “There’s nothing worse than a woman who stinks.” He picked up the knife. He studied the blade intently. After a long moment, he said, “Maybe there is one thing. Just one. And that’s a woman who won’t listen.” He lowered the blade and ran the tip of it along her cheek, her neck. He yanked back the folds of her sari; her blouse fell away in tatters. He traced the edge of the knife against her breasts, under them, between. “Not much to them, is there,” he said, looking down, and then he said, “You’ll listen, won’t you? Won’t you, my dear?” He looked into her eyes, almost kindly, and then he spit in her face. The spit, in the midst of her grogginess, her fear, just as she turned her head to avoid it, landed at the edge of her mouth and on her cheek. Guru rubbed it over more of her face. “A smudge, you see,” he said lightly, and then got up and left.
The thick glob of spit dried and puckered on Savitha’s cheek. He’d been chewing betelnut; she could smell it for hours.
*
They untied the rope but kept her locked in the room. They made sure she was hooked—if the boy with the needle was even a few minutes late, she pounded on the door, shivering and beseeching and mad, skin alight, on fire—and then, when she was good and hooked, they made her go through withdrawal. When they finally let her out (a month later, two?), Savitha had lost nearly ten kilograms, and her face was gaunt and gray. Large clumps of hair had fallen out. She was bruised, her ankles and wrists inflamed and red, not having yet healed. The madam took one look at her and clucked with disapproval, as if Savitha were a child being naughty, misbehaving, come home late for supper.
Savitha bent her head, believing she was that child.
Her first customer was a middle-aged man, maybe forty or forty-five. He worked in an office; Savitha could tell just by looking at him, slacks and a neat shirt, a gold watch, clean toes. There was a faded strip of ash across his forehead—had he conducted the puja that morning, or had it been his wife?
The man was furtive at first, but then he sat down next to her, on the edge of the bed, and said, “Will you give me a kiss?”
Savitha looked up at him. “I don’t know how,” she said. The statement so guileless that the man seemed to almost wilt when he heard it. “Here,” he said finally, “let me show you.”
After that, the mechanics of it all became routine: the five to six customers she had per day, the constant clucking and recriminations from the madam, the talking and laughing and teasing and silence of the other girls, whose names Savitha tried to remember but couldn’t, as if her mind had jellied, relented, forfeited. Relinquished something essential—kingdom, subjects, throne—while even the blood in her veins collapsed, not wanting, any longer, to carry the enormity of memory, the sorrow of new names.
But something remained, a constant, a comfort, and it was this: the cloth on which she lay. While the men pushed into her, pressed her face into the sheet—rough, cheap, bought at one of the tawdry stalls on Governorpet—Savitha closed her eyes and pressed her face, her back, her knees, her palms, deeper and deeper and deeper. The scent of woven cloth, threadbare with use, with semen, filled her nostrils. She held back tears. She held back thoughts of Poornima. She held back her girlhood, squandered on heaps of garbage. She held back her father, her mother, her sisters, her lost brothers. She held back the loamy scent of the Krishna, the laundresses laughing, the temple deepa quivering, the dark of the weaving hut, forever mourning. Though what she did let loose, let soar like a bird out of a cage, was the flight of her hands, weaving.