The older man took her up another flight of stairs. He’d taken one look at her suitcase and her bag of bananas, and then had looked away without a word. Savitha carried the suitcase in her right hand and the bananas in the crook of her left arm. At the top of the stairs, the man opened a door that led into a room smaller than his own. On the floor of this room, laid out on the mildewed and stale-smelling beige carpet, were three cots. He pointed to the farthest one, on the side of the room opposite from the door, and said, “That’s yours,” and then he said, “That’s all that’s yours.” He closed the door behind her.
Savitha took two steps into the center of the room—still holding her suitcase and her bag of five bananas (and the peel of the one she’d eaten)—and saw that there was a tiny kitchenette in one corner of the room and a door to the bathroom in the other. She looked at the cots. They were positioned in the shape of a U, with the one in the middle beneath the only window in the room, one behind her, against the wall with the front door, and hers, next to the bathroom door. The cot by the front door was neatly made, with the pillow fluffed and centered and a small, cheap suitcase like her own resting at the foot. The sheets of the one in the middle were in complete disarray, the pillow half flung, and there was no suitcase in sight, only clothes and toiletries and hair things tossed in every which direction as if it were the wreckage of a ship, and the beige carpet a sea.
The first thing she did was to take out Poornima’s half-made sari from her suitcase and look at it. From boll to thread to loom to this, she thought. And then she thought, I made you. She tucked the cloth into the inside of her pillowcase. Then she slid off her cast and placed the little white rectangular card back inside its hollow. She placed them against the wall. After a time—during which Savitha tried to take a bucket bath, but there was no bucket in sight, only a long white rectangular hole (was everything in this country white and rectangular?)—she washed her face and drank a glass of water and ate another banana. She lay down on her cot, but as soon as she did, there was a sound at the door. A girl entered, and she said, “Who are you?”
The girl’s name was Geeta, short for Geetanjali, and she was talkative.
“I’m named after the film,” she began, in Telugu. “Did you see it?”
Savitha shook her head.
“My amma saw it a few months before I was born. It was the first movie she’d ever seen. She said she didn’t really follow the story, not really—she was only thirteen or fourteen—but she said that when she came out of the cinema theater, back into the world, it felt new. Polished. Like it was a different world, and that anything could happen. She said she practically skipped home. Back to the little hut she lived in with my nanna, on the edge of a jute field, neither of which they owned. She said she felt the same way when I was born, that the world was somehow new. That I’d made it new. So she named me Geetanjali. Isn’t that nice?”
Savitha had to agree.
Then Geeta laughed. A tinkling laugh that cut through Savitha’s fatigue, the fog of the long plane ride. “It’s funny, though, isn’t it? It’s still the same old world. They’re still in that same hut, leasing that same farm. And here I am, just a housecleaner and a whore.”
Savitha blinked. She got up from her cot, her legs unsteady.
A whore?
“Didn’t they tell you? Maybe they didn’t. Anyway, it rains a lot here. Rain is the only sound in this country. If you make any others, if you talk to anyone, if you even open your mouth to speak, they’ll come for you.”
“Who’ll come for me?”
“Who brought you here?”
“Mohan.”
“No wonder,” Geeta said knowingly, laughing again. “You’re lucky. He’s the nice one.”
Geeta told her that Mohan was the younger of the two sons. The older one was named Suresh, and he was more like his father, cruel, slapping them around to show them who was boss, as if they didn’t know; he worked them long hours, sometimes through the night if an apartment or office building needed to be cleaned by morning, so they wouldn’t have to go even one day without collecting rent on it, as if they didn’t have tens of thousands, maybe even lakhs of dollars in the bank, Geeta said; Suresh came around whenever he wanted, he had his favorites, of course, she added, but he’ll come around at least once, try you out. She glanced at the stub and then the cast, and said, Well, maybe not you.
Then she told her a story. The story was about Mohan and Padma.
“Who’s Padma?” Savitha said.
Geeta nodded toward the third cot, the unkempt one. “She says they make her clean other people’s toilets, but they can’t make her clean her own. But she’s the prettiest. She could’ve been a film star.” This Padma, as it turned out, was in love with Mohan. “Stupid. Idiotic. What chance does she have with him? With the son of the man who owns us.”
“What’s his name?”
“Whose?”
“The father’s.”
“Gopalraju. Are you going to let me finish?”
It was about six months ago. Geeta had just arrived. From where? Savitha wanted to ask, but thought she would wait. Padma had already been here for more than a year and had already fallen completely and utterly in love with Mohan. The problem (other than the obvious ones of caste, class, ownership, enslavement, and opportunity) was this: Mohan refused to sleep with her. The father and the older son had already been by, but the younger wouldn’t even look at her. But why? But why, Padma kept lamenting. Geeta said Padma tried everything: she borrowed Geeta’s new hair clips, the ones her mother had given her before she’d left for America; she tore the sleeves off her blouses and sewed up the ends, to show off her pretty arms; she tried to wear her hair down like the American girls they saw on the streets as they were being driven to and from the cleaning jobs, but they had no shampoo, and they were forbidden to go to the store, or anywhere for that matter, so her hair hung like the greasy ends of a scruffy broom, and no one noticed, least of all Mohan, but she kept it that way, hoping, until Vasu (the man from downstairs, who managed the building, but mostly managed the girls) said, Unless you’re going to mop with it, put it up. It went on like this, with Padma trying to lure him more and more desperately, dropping things on the floor and bending to pick them up slowly, ridiculously slowly, in low-cut blouses, or wearing a horrid bright orange lipstick that they’d found left behind in one of the apartments. It made her look like an orangutan, Geeta said, laughing. None of it worked, you see, she said, until one day, he came by the apartment drunk. He was only there to pick us up and take us to a cleaning job. Usually he waited for us in the car, but that night, he came to the apartment, he took one long look at us, from one to the other, and then he stumbled to my cot, lay down, and began to cry.
“Cry?” Savitha asked.
“Cry. Actually cry, more like sobbing,” Geeta said.
When he’d finished sobbing—during which time Geeta and Padma began to panic, wondering if they’d been at fault, and if so, if Gopalraju would go and demand the money their parents had been paid for them, money, as they both knew, which was long gone by now, used already to pay off debts, or to pay the dowries of their other daughters—he sat up and asked them for a glass of water. Padma ran to get it. He drank it down, and then he said, Do you have any vodka?
What’s that? they asked, and he said, Never mind.
Here, Geeta paused.
“So what happened?” Savitha asked.