It smelled like a lemon.
Below the scent of lemon was the smell of coffee. Both thick and bitter, Savitha thought, and then she searched the car and saw a white cup with a white lid. Mohan’s hand hovered near it even as he drove: first on a curved road out of the airport and then down a wide road that was the blackest one Savitha had ever seen, with more cars than she had ever seen. They drove in silence—with the old woman sitting next to Mohan and Savitha behind her. After a few minutes, Mohan turned on the radio. It was a kind of music Savitha had never heard before; it had no words. At times, the music soared to a lofty peak, like being on the top of Indravalli Konda, and at other times it was gentle, yet controlled, like lapping water. She wanted to ask what it was, but the silence in the car, too, seemed controlled and inflexible.
After twenty minutes or so, Mohan pulled off the many-laned road to a smaller one. On this road, Savitha noticed low, flat buildings; there were cars parked along this street, and the storefronts (or so she guessed by the genteel window displays) were not at all like the storefronts in India. In India, they were choked with colorful streamers and the windows piled high with merchandise and the whole crowded with people yelling and pushing and shoving. Here, they seemed hardly occupied. Only their lighted interiors revealed a few customers, any sign of life. Halfway down the street, Mohan stopped the car in front of a long building, lined with doors, and he and the old woman got out. She leaned into the car—as Mohan was getting her bags—and said, “Stay here,” and then she seemed to waver, or sway with a kind of discomfort, or guilt, and added, “Be careful.”
Be careful of what? Savitha wondered.
She watched them. What is this place, she puzzled, with its series of doors, though the old lady and Mohan ignored these and instead entered the only glass door, more prominent than the others. They were inside for maybe ten minutes, and then Mohan walked the old lady to one of the regular doors and said, “See you tomorrow.” When he returned to the car he looked at Savitha shyly and said, “Come to the front if you’d like.” She got into the front passenger seat, and now, now she felt the true enormity of this new country. It could only be felt from the front seat, she realized, only from the wide window and the unobstructed light.
The music came on again.
They drove over a bridge, though from Savitha’s seat, it looked to her more like a bolt of unfurled silk over a layer of mist. Above Savitha, from the little mirror Mohan had looked into earlier to take fleeting glances at her, dangled a thin yellow tree-shaped decoration. Lemon! So that’s where it was coming from. Then the road curved, and suddenly, before Savitha, were the tallest and shiniest buildings she’d ever seen and the bluest stretch of water and the greenest mountains. “Is this Sattle?” she asked.
“See-attle,” he corrected her.
They neared the buildings, rising out of the earth like blazing rectangles, reflecting the sun, and then cut along their right-hand flank and went down another black road with many lanes, for quiet mile after quiet mile, until Mohan said, “Are you hungry? We can stop.”
“Yes.”
“Not for long. There’s a McDonald’s, Taco Bell up there.”
Savitha looked where he was pointing. He saw the expression on her face, and he said, “No, not Indian food, but it’s not bad.”
She turned to him and said, “Do you have bananas here?”
He was startled by the question, she thought, because he slowed the car, and then he met her gaze. He was unused to looking at women. Maybe not all women, she thought after a moment, maybe just women with a certain openness, a kind of curiosity, perhaps even that radiance she had glimpsed long ago, bearing itself up behind her eyes like a crumbling fort, an embattled army. They stopped at a massive building with many parked cars, and he went inside, and when he came out again, he handed her a bag.
Inside the bag were bananas.
*
There were six of them. The biggest bananas she’d ever seen, worthy of giants. She took one and tried to give the remaining five back to him. “They’re yours,” he said.
In all her life, Savitha had never possessed this many bananas at once.
That first one she ate in the car. With only one hand, she’d learned to use her teeth to rip open the end of the banana, opposite the stem, and as she did, she felt Mohan watching her. She offered him one, but he said no. She was about to eat a second one, with a vague sense of bafflement, awe, repletion at the thought that she even could, when Mohan stopped the car. He parked in front of a building that was four stories tall, cream-colored with chipped brown windowsills and a brown roof. Many of the windows were open, and from them fluttered all colors of curtains. Some seemed to be sheets, torn in places, tie-dyed, others were flags; a few had broken blinds. A small tattered awning over a sagging door in the center of the building indicated the entrance. Next to the front door were three rows of cubbyholes, some with bent or rusted metal flaps. “What are these?” Savitha asked.
He looked at her curiously. “Mailboxes,” he said in English.
“What are they for?”
“Letters.”
She studied them, many bursting with browned envelopes that seemed to have been set out in the sun and rain for weeks, months. “But why don’t they take their letters? Don’t they want to read them?”
“No. Not these kind of letters.”
What kind were they? she wondered. Savitha had not once gotten a letter (From whom would she get one, and why? She could hardly read.), but she thought if she did, she wouldn’t leave it out in the sun and rain, she would tear it open and stare at it, relish the slant of the letters, the way they’d written her name (that she’d known how to read and write since she was three years old), the feel of the paper, which she knew would be very different from the paper scraps she’d collected from the garbage heap, and the color and the beauty of ink. But when they went inside, Savitha’s reverie ended. They climbed a musty stair and then walked down a musty hallway. Mohan carried her one suitcase—though it was practically empty; what was there to put in it?—and Savitha carried the bag of bananas. At the end of the hallway, Mohan opened a door, with the assurance of knowing it would be open, as if he lived there, and inside the small room was another man, also Indian but older. He was watching something on television, holding a glass—the chair on which he was sitting, the glass, a small table to hold the glass, and the television being the only four things in the room. He looked up when they entered, at Savitha with barely concealed contempt, and then he said, in Telugu (was everyone in this country Telugu?), “A stub to clean houses. I suppose next he’ll buy a one-legged man to ride a bicycle.”
Mohan stammered something in embarrassment and glanced at her once, for a moment that felt to Savitha as if he were at war, or had just returned, and then he left. She didn’t see him again for three months.
7