She allowed herself to recall that one thing.
Once, while still a small child, she’d gone to the cotton fields outside Indravalli, on the way to Guntur. Her mother had worked for a summer in the fields, and Savitha had trotted behind her, jumping for the bolls, wanting to help. She’d been far too short, but one had floated down from her mother’s hands and Savitha had caught it and squealed with delight, as if she’d caught a piece of a crumbling cloud. When she’d yanked her mother’s pallu and held it up like a prize, her mother had barely looked at her; instead she’d said, “Keep it. It’s what your frock is made from.” At those words, Savitha had stood still in the middle of the cotton field, hot under the summer sun, and had looked down at the boll in her hand, soft, full of seeds, and then she’d gazed up at the rows and rows of them, round white moons held aloft to the sky, so exquisite, so out of reach. Then she’d looked down at her frock, a faded pink, frayed at the hem, dirty, but still a frock. But how? she’d wondered. How could this little piece of fluff with the little brown seeds become my frock? She’d thought it was a secret, a secret kept by the adults. Or magic, more likely. But a mystery. Always a mystery, even after she grew up and began sitting at the charkha and then sitting at the loom and then sitting next to Poornima, eating dinner together, which, by her weaving, at least in some part, the purchase of food, food, had been made possible. So, an even greater mystery: from boll to cloth to food to friend.
And this mystery remained with her. All through the years. From then until now. She held it close while at the brothel, tucked away inside her pillow. Along with Poornima’s half-made sari (she’d screamed for it in one of her drug-fueled rages, and someone had—not out of kindness but to shut her up—found it lodged in a corner of the concrete room, lifted it with their toes, and flung it at her face).
There, then: the mystery of cloth, and the cloth itself. She felt both, burning—as mysteries do—inside her pillow.
2
The second time she saw Guru was a few months later. One of the girls was sick from an infection. A customer had given it to her, and she lay in bed with a scalding fever, a wide, blistering rash on her thighs and crotch, unable to swallow even a single sip of buttermilk. The girls crowded around her. A doctor, one of them yelled. There was a scampering. The madam pushed her way to the front. “It’s a Sunday,” she said, without much regret. “There’ll be a surcharge.”
A Sunday.
There is such a thing as days, Savitha suddenly realized. There is such a thing as time.
Her mind pricked. Something small, behind the eyes, grew rigid.
Guru arrived later that afternoon. The madam had phoned him and asked him to come. The girls gathered around again. This time, Savitha noticed that his shoes had a slight heel, and that the betelnut had colored his teeth orange. “You call me for this,” he said.
The madam kneaded her hands. “It’s the worst I’ve seen.”
He studied the girl’s wan face, her lips split and bleeding from fever. “Was she one of the popular ones?”
“She is,” the madam said.
Guru then studied her some more, turned on his elevated heels, walked to the door, and said, “Let her die.”
Savitha watched him leave the room. The girl whimpered in her sleep, as if she’d heard the words. Though she couldn’t possibly have. Not through all those layers of heat and withering and waste. Let her die. The words hung in the air for a moment, and then they began another journey, this time snaking through Savitha’s own layers of heat and wither and waste. Her eyes grew wide; they ached with new light. There was a door, she remembered, a hidden one. Where all her treasures lay. And it remained closed, through the tea stall and the concrete room and the drugs, through the men and the men and the men. And it was through this door that the words found their way.
She looked around the room.
It seemed to her, looking now, that they were all simply children, waiting to die. And in the next instant, she thought, No. No, we’re all old. Old, old women, ravaged by time, and waiting to die.
And it was this thought that brought the others. An avalanche of others—not in their number, but in their precision.
The first one was this: she couldn’t stay here. It wasn’t an obvious thought, not to her. Since Poornima’s father had raped her, she’d floundered in something like life, but not life itself. A veil had fallen when he’d held his hand over her mouth. A fadedness, too, had fallen, when he’d pried her legs open. A branch had snapped—a branch from which all things grew, from which every banana, every hope, every laugh sprouted—when she’d looked into his face, and, in a small way, seen her friend’s. After that, what did it matter where she lived, or ate, or breathed her lesser breaths? What difference would it ever make? So that now, when the thought came to her that she needed to leave, that she must leave, she realized, with surprise, that she was beginning to live again. That it did matter. That this again was life.
Her second thought: in order to leave, she had to get past Guru. She recalled, a few months ago, that one of the customers had wanted to use a wooden pestle, and when Savitha had run out of the room, horrified, the madam had yanked her back inside and said, “It would be a shame if someone snapped your father’s fingers off, wouldn’t it? Or if your sisters ended up where you are?” The madam hadn’t gathered those things on her own. Guru had. That much she knew. And yes, she’d been barely conscious for the past few months, but she’d been conscious enough to notice that this was no singular house or madam or undertaking. Not at all. It had its leader—Guru—and it had its lieutenants, like the madam, and it had its foot soldiers, like the man who’d offered her the tea, and the boy who’d injected her, and the girl who’d cleaned her, and the one who’d gone to Indravalli, asked around, and had made sure that no one would come looking for her, or at least that no one had the money or the power or the pull (all three, one and the same) to look for her.
Her third and final thought was this: she needed an advantage. There were only a few clear advantages in the world. She obviously had no money, her only skill was weaving, and she could barely read or write. That left only one thing: her body. My body, my body, she thought, looking down at the now used-up husk of the girl she’d once been, the chest still flat, the hands still big, the skin still dark. She moved then to the mirror—a small round mirror, framed by green plastic, hanging by a nail on a wall opposite the bed. She’d not once looked into it, not once, but now she took it down and studied her face. Her eyes, her lips, her nose. The curve of her cheeks, the sweep of her lashes. She moved the mirror closer, then farther. She tilted it; she straightened it. She looked. And there, just there. What was that? “Stop,” she said out loud, into the emptiness of the room. “Hold it there.” And so she held it there. And that was when she saw it. Had it always been there? That lamp glowing from within. How had it survived all these previous months? How had it held on? No matter, it was greater than her body, it was greater than all else. She laughed, for perhaps the first time since the night in the weaving hut, to see it there. To know it was hers.
Over the next few days, she watched the other girls in the brothel; she stared into their faces, their eyes, five who’d been there longer than Savitha, one who had arrived only the previous month. And none of them had it. Not one. Theirs had been extinguished. But hers, hers.
So now she had two advantages: she had her body, and she had her light.
She bided her time. On every full moon night, she looked up at the sky.