She went in the middle of the night. She asked the driver to go up Old Tenali Road, and then told him to stop a few hundred yards from her parents’ hut. How will I know? she wondered. How will I know if he gave them the money? I’ll know, she thought, just from looking at the hanging vegetable basket. She walked up the stinking hill, keeping off the main path, so she wouldn’t be seen, and along the backs of the huts.
Indravalli Konda loomed in the distance. The temple floated at its center, a lone and beating heart. Its colors changing in the moonlight, according to her glimpses of it: buttermilk and pumice, then mother-of-pearl, then the froth of the sea. The deepa wasn’t lit, and so the rest of the mountain, its contours, was lost to the sky. When she passed by one hut, a sleeping dog woke at the sound of her footsteps and barked into the night. An emaciated goat, tethered to an emaciated tree, stiffened with fear.
The moon was high, and when she finally came upon her parents’ hut—the one she’d been born in, and all her brothers and sisters—she crept along the back of it quietly, meaning only to peek inside, but there was no need: it was empty. Only a dried gourd and a rat-chewed blanket in one corner.
She, too, stiffened and ran. Down the hill, her breath a fist through her body. All manner of thoughts, as she ran, all of them culminating in the one: they’re dead, he’s killed them to get out of paying.
She slammed into the side of the car. The driver jerked awake. “Ask. Go ask,” she hissed. “Ask them what happened.”
He cursed his luck for being on duty tonight, and then drove around until they reached the highway. There, a tea stall was still open. Inside, behind a false door, was whiskey and moonshine. “Crazy bitch,” he muttered, and partook, asked a few questions, and then came back outside.
She was slouched in the backseat so no one would see, but sprang to attention like a coil. “What did they say? What?”
“They’ve moved,” he said, the scent of whiskey filling the front seat and then the back. He started the car. They drove again, this time away from Old Tenali Road, to the other side of the village. Hardly five minutes away, but the houses richer, bigger, no longer thatch but concrete. He stopped at the end of a road Savitha had only walked by, not ever having known anyone wealthy enough to live in one of the dhaba houses. “That one,” said the driver, pointing to the third house on the left, painted pink and green and yellow, with still-green mango leaves stretched across the front door. There was a gate, locked, and she stood outside of it and saw a figure sleeping on the veranda, on a hemp-rope cot, a thin blanket over them. Through an open door, three more figures slept on beds. Beds!
When she came back to the car, she said, “It isn’t them. There are only four people in that house.”
“One of your sisters is already married. Last week.”
“She is?”
She told him to wait a moment more and went back and stood at the gate. She studied the dim interior of the veranda, the rich moonlit marble floor, the sleeping bodies—still skeptical. A breeze swept past her and into the house, and with a rustle, the figure on the veranda threw off the sheet. And in that moment, she saw the fingers, gnarled and noble and lovely, more beautiful than broken. And then she knew.
The driver turned toward Vijayawada, but she said no, there was one more place she needed to go. He sighed loudly and turned the car around again.
Poornima was married by now, of that Savitha was certain. She thought vaguely of asking the driver to take her to Namburu, but where in Namburu, and was that even the boy she married?
That hut was the same. The same thatched roof, the same dirt floor, the same dusty and stunted trees. Four small figures were asleep on the ground, on the same mats, under the same thin sheets, with forlorn faces peeking above them, impoverished even in the moonlight. Another, larger figure was asleep on the hemp-rope bed, and from him, Savitha averted her eyes, allowing them to rest, just for a moment, on the nearer structure, the weaving hut. She gazed at it with sudden emotion, maybe even longing, for what she had left inside, for what she had been, and then she turned to the driver and said, “Let’s go.”
5
She left for America two months later. All of the necessary documents had been witnessed, notarized, fingerprinted, and all manner of other words Savitha had never heard before. Guru took her to Chennai on the train, and from there, she was to be accompanied by an older woman who was to pretend to be Savitha’s mother. The older woman was indeed probably her mother’s age, maybe a little older. Savitha never quite understood who she was, how she was related to the people in America, or why she’d agreed to accompany her, but she was, in her way, the perfect choice: she was grave, her sari was simple yet impressively well woven, humble to look at, and she wore round spectacles, which gave her an air of seriousness, and more important, gave her an air of concern—which was exactly what she should feel for a beloved daughter about to travel halfway around the world for hand surgery.
In Chennai, Savitha put on a cast, so no one could see that her stub had completely healed, and then they boarded a plane. Guru had explained it to Savitha—that she would travel to America on a long bus that could fly through the air. She had been confused, and still was, even as the plane taxied down the runway. And then: it lifted into the air. The old woman—the one who was supposed to be her mother—sat beside her. She had hardly spoken to Savitha, merely nodded when they met, and now, once they were on the plane, she’d inserted what looked like tiny cotton balls into her ears, with wires coming out of them, and seemed completely absorbed or asleep or maybe just unwell; her eyes closed the moment they sat down. Savitha thought that she might have an ear infection. One of her little sisters, who was prone to ear infections as a baby, had always needed to have cotton balls, dipped in coconut oil, stuffed in her ears to ease the ache and her crying. But now, as the plane lifted off the ground, Savitha grabbed the woman’s hand and stared frantically from her to the window and then back again. The plane climbed higher and higher; Savitha swallowed back her racing heart. The woman opened her eyes, looked down at her hand, took out one of the cotton balls with the other hand, and shook Savitha off as if she were a fly. Then she said, speaking Telugu with a Tamilian accent, and without a trace of a smile, “This is the best part. Enjoy it.”
What did she mean by that? Did she mean that this was the best part of the plane ride, or that this was the best part of all that was to come? Maybe she meant this was the best part of all of it: the plane ride, what was to come, and all that had come before.
Regardless, after an hour or so, after Savitha had stared, unblinking, at every cloud that floated by her oval window, she leaned back in her seat and fell into a deep sleep.
*