“Nothing,” Geeta said. “Nothing, until we got to the building we were supposed to clean. It was the middle of the night, you see. And he gave me the key, and he said, Go on up. So I did. But I watched for Padma, wondering what was happening, but also knowing, and when she finally came up, disheveled, maybe twenty minutes later, I said, What happened? And she said, He took me. In the back of the car. But she didn’t look altogether happy when she said it.
“I mean,” Geeta said, “I know he forced her, I know he didn’t make love to her, but I thought she’d be happier. So I asked her. I said, I thought you wanted him to. Yes, but it was cramped, she said, and his breath was awful. He reeked. And then she said, And here’s the other thing: When he was done, he dragged me out of the car; I’d barely had a chance to put my clothes on again. He dragged me out, and he pushed me to the ground, and he stood staring down at me. I thought he would kick me, but instead he dropped to his knees, right next to where I was sprawled, but he wouldn’t look at me, he wouldn’t, he looked only at the ground next to me, and then somewhere into the dark, and then he reached up to where I was lying on the grass, and he took each of the buttons of my shirt, open, because I hadn’t had time to do more than pull up my pants, and he buttoned them. One by one. Gently, like they weren’t buttons at all, but beads of rain. Not even my mother, she said, was ever that gentle.”
And then what happened? Savitha asked.
Nothing, Geeta said. Then we went back to cleaning.
What about Padma? Savitha said. Does she still love him?
Geeta laughed, and then she said, She loves him even more.
*
When Padma came in late that night, dropped off after a cleaning job in Redmond, she looked over at Savitha and said, “New girl?” Savitha nodded. She was indeed pretty. But she knew it, and she said, “Oh,” and then went into the bathroom and closed the door.
*
The next morning, just as Geeta had said, it was raining. Savitha was picked up with the others. When she’d come out of the bathroom (Geeta had showed her how to work the shower and explained that there was so much water in this country that no one took a bucket bath) wearing one of the two saris she’d brought along, Padma had laughed, and Geeta had said, “They don’t want us wearing those. We stick out too much,” and lent her a pair of black polyester pants and a gray-and-pink checkered shirt. The shirt, Savitha noticed, was cotton and felt good against her skin. She checked the threading, even though it was clearly machine made. When they handed her a pair of old sneakers to wear, Savitha looked at them and then at Geeta and Padma. They stared back. “She can’t tie them,” Padma announced gleefully, as if she’d solved a riddle. Geeta tied them for her and told her she’d find her Velcro ones. “What’s that?” Savitha asked. “You’ll see. You’ll be able to tie your shoes with your teeth,” Geeta said, laughing. My teeth, Savitha thought, and wondered how tying a shoe could be like peeling a banana.
They were dropped off, and each of them went to clean different apartments. Padma and Geeta first showed her how to use the various mops and brooms and brushes, the sprays, the vacuum cleaner. None of it was difficult—running the vacuum cleaner was even fun—but it was hard to do with just one hand. She was slow. When Padma and Geeta came for her an hour later, she’d hardly even started. But within a week, she was almost as fast as they were. At the end of two weeks, recalling what Guru had said, that all she had to do was work twice as fast, Savitha sometimes finished before them.
The apartments were always empty. That made it easier. The tenant who’d moved out, usually a student at the university, would’ve been gone for only a day, sometimes only a matter of hours, and Savitha always, upon entering, stopped at the threshold of the apartment. She stood still and smelled the room. The houses in Indravalli never had a smell, because the windows and doors and verandas were open to the world, and every scent in the world was a scent of theirs, and the small windowless huts always smelled of the same thing, poverty. But here, the smells were subtler. Was it a boy or a girl who’d lived here? That was easy enough to tell. But underneath. Underneath, there was so much more. What did they eat, how often were they home, how often did they bathe, did they like flowers, did they like rain. She could sometimes even tell what they had been studying. She thought one boy might’ve been studying the stars, because they were drawn in great detail on his walls, at the height he must’ve been. He liked milk, cheese, dairy, she guessed, and he didn’t bathe very often. Another girl was probably studying the arts, she thought, by the scent of paints and oils, and she must’ve liked rain and sun, because every window had been thrown open.
All this within minutes of entering the apartments.
By the end of the month, she was cleaning almost a dozen of them a day, but she no longer took any great pleasure from guessing at the previous occupants. There was always another to clean, and then home to a plate of rice and pickle, maybe pappu if one of them had the energy to make it, her only hand trembling from exhaustion, unable to lift even a bite of rice to her mouth, and then to sleep. Walking now into the empty apartments, she scanned them quickly, assessing in the first sweep how much work needed to be done. She saw—on the carpets and the walls, sometimes on a shelf—the places where furniture or picture frames or potted plants or books had once been, and once removed, had left the square or the circle or rectangle brighter, untouched by feet and dirt and damage, more luminous than the space around it. Savitha stared at the spot of brightness in the middle of a dull, gray room and wished she were that space, the protected one. Instead, at the end of a few weeks, at the end of many apartments, she understood she was the pallid part, the discolored one. She was what absorbed the dirt and the distress. What was fatigued by sun. What lay, like a hand, over brightness.
8
She’d been in Seattle for two months, but she’d never before seen the man who came to pick her up—in a bright red car—one Saturday night in December. Only Vasu had ever driven them, picked them up. And with each passing day, the walls of the apartments closed in; the air grew thinner. She ran to open windows, and stuck her head out, starved for cold, for feeling, for the fall of rain.