*
Savitha waited for her ticket to Saudi to arrive. She tried to find a map, but she couldn’t. When she asked the madam where it was, she said, “In the desert.” So it was near Rajasthan. That wasn’t so far. Though it did occur to her that far might be the best place to be. She had been wrong to turn back, to come to Vijayawada, where she could still, in a certain wind, scent the waters of the Krishna. And that scent would then plunge her into a terrifying and quarried understanding of how little she’d managed, how corrupt her fate: she’d come all of twenty kilometers from Indravalli. What would’ve happened if I had gone to Pune? she wondered. She looked at the space at the end of her left arm and thought, Would I still have you? But now she was going even farther, and to go far, and then to return, with money, was, she decided, what the crow had told her that long-ago day: Let them eat you, let them, but be sure to eat them back.
Money. Money let you eat them back.
She was no longer considered one of the regular prostitutes, but one of the special ones. What did that mean? Savitha wasn’t quite sure. She didn’t have to take as many customers, that was one thing, because mostly, as it turned out, the fetish for an amputee wasn’t all that common; most of the men preferred one of the girls with both hands intact. Though the customers she did have paid more, and were much more talkative than they had been, as if her missing hand were an expensive conversation piece, as if it lent her an added ability to understand their deepest selves, their darkest fears. Savitha was happy to listen. In fact, she became such a good listener that she could sense a man’s sorrow—the source of it—the minute he entered the room. It was easy. A man with a nagging wife held his head unnaturally high when he entered. A man who’d been unloved as a child waited for her to speak first. A man who had no money—who was perhaps spending the last of it on her—held on to the doorknob for longer than he should.
She once had a customer who confessed to having been in jail. For killing my brother, he said, though he said nothing more about it. But he went on to tell her that after his third year in jail, he’d escaped and lived as a fugitive for more than twenty years. In Meghalaya, he said, in the forests. He said he’d been the pampered eldest son of a wealthy family. Wheat merchants. I had no idea how to cook even rice, he said, let alone live in the wilderness. But he learned to make his way in the forests, he told her, and he began to realize certain things.
“What things?” Savitha asked.
But at that point in the story, he stopped. Savitha waited. She watched him. He didn’t look like a fugitive, though she had no idea what one would look like. She’d expect them to at least be wild-looking, haunted in some way, but this man looked quite serene, contented even, as if he’d just had a refreshing bath and a nice breakfast.
At last, after almost ten minutes of sitting in silence, the man, with graying hair and dark eyes, by turn tunnels and then becoming the smooth faces of cliffs, said, “By my fifth year in the forest, I realized I could no longer feel. Not just that I couldn’t feel pain or loneliness or lust. Not just those things, but that I could no longer even feel my own heart. Do you understand? It was beating, but it might as well have been a stone, beating against another stone.”
By his eleventh or twelfth year, he said, he was no longer human. He said, “I’d catch an animal, in a trap or with a crude bow and arrow, and kill it without a thought. Strangle it, snap its neck, while I looked into its eyes, and not feel the slightest thing. Not even victory. I would bash its head in with my bare hand, and it felt like I was cracking a nut.” As he neared the twentieth year, he said, he could recall no other life than that of a fugitive. He had memories, he told her, of the time before he was a fugitive. Vague memories of being in jail, even vaguer of being a son, a brother. “It was as if,” he said, “it was what I was born to be: a fugitive. Not just that. But that I was born a fugitive. Do you understand?”
This time, Savitha did, a little.
“Every so often, I met other fugitives. Sometimes tribals. But they generally left me alone. They asked no questions. Questions are for the living, and they could very clearly see that I was dead. At the start of my twenty-fourth year,” he said, “I began talking to the universe. Not just talking to it, but commanding it. I could make clouds part. I could make fish swim to me, swim into my hand with nothing in the hand besides desire. I could make wind stop blowing. I remember one night, deep in the forest—I couldn’t ever be near a ranger station, or a village, even the smallest—I was asleep, and was awoken by a strange rustling. When I sat up and looked around me, there was a cobra, staring straight back. I’d fashioned a kind of hatchet, so I reached for it. But the cobra was faster. It caught my hand just as I touched the hatchet, and it said, ‘You can’t kill me twice,’ which is when I knew it was my brother. And then the cobra said, ‘Find out something for me.’ I waited. I thought he, it, would ask me to find out whether our parents were all right, or whether fate and chance were in battle or in collusion, or whether our cycle of suffering would ever truly end, but instead, the cobra said, ‘Find out for me the depth of the forest floor.’
“‘The depth?’ I said.
“‘Yes. I’ve tried, you see. I’ve tried to snake my way all the way down; that’s what we do, after all, we snakes. But I can’t seem to find its floor. It’s as if I could keep going and going and going. That maybe there is no end. But there has to be. Maybe it goes to the core of the earth, or maybe somewhere even darker. Or hotter. Don’t you think?’
“‘No, I don’t,’ I said.
“‘Neither do I,’ the cobra said, and slithered away into the forest.”
Here, the man—who was clearly no longer a fugitive, as he was sitting in Savitha’s room—looked at her, maybe for the first time, and said, “That’s when I walked out of the forest. The very next morning. Because you see, the cobra didn’t want an answer; it didn’t want anything, certainly not to know the depth of the forest floor. What it wanted was to reveal to me that there is no end to guilt, no end to the prices we pay, that we are the forest, and our conscience, our hell, is the forest floor.”
He looked at her. She thought he might be waiting for her to say something, but no, he was just looking at her.
“I went to the nearest ranger station that morning. That very morning. Walked right through the doors and told them who I was and what I’d done. At first they didn’t believe me. Some guy who was saying he’d lived in the forest for twenty-five years—why would they? They didn’t even think it was possible. But after some discussion among them, they drove me to the police station in Shillong. And there, they had to call it in. So they called the police station in Guntur, but they said that the old courthouse, where all the criminal case files would have been kept, had burned down long ago, years ago, and that their own files from that time, kept in boxes in a musty back room, had been chewed through by rats, so really, there was no record of me at all. Anywhere. The constable put down the receiver, looked at me, and explained everything the Guntur police had told him, almost apologetically. And then he said I was free to go.”
“What did you do then?” she asked.