Unlike Vasu, the man in the bright red car was tall, a few silver hairs at his temples. He had the beginnings of a belly, and though not nearly as muscular, he was clearly Mohan’s brother. He said, “Get in,” in Telugu, and then drove her to a low building on a side street. Savitha had been trying to learn her letters, studying street names and signs, but she couldn’t see any, it being too dark or the area too industrial. A flickering white light seeped from a distant streetlight. The area was deserted, and when Suresh turned off the headlights, they were plunged into a deep darkness. Her eyes adjusted and she saw that the building he’d parked in front of had a thin line of light at the seam of the door and the sidewalk. It glistened in the dark like a knife.
Inside, they passed through an area lined with boxes to a door at the back and to the left. Suresh knocked, and a voice said to come in, and even before she saw him, Savitha knew it was the father, Gopalraju, the one who’d bought her. He was not as old as she’d expected him to be, his hair unnaturally blue-black, clearly colored, but his face wide and alert, flushed with the same peculiar raw, cold light that came with success, wealth, that she’d seen in Guru, except Gopalraju’s face was even sharper, more calculating. He looked at her for a long moment, and then, with false tenderness, he said, “Getting along all right?” She nodded, though she knew it wasn’t truly a question. Not really, not in a concerned sense. More precisely, she knew it was a statement, followed by a different question entirely. The statement was this: You will get along all right. And beneath that statement, just as Geeta had said, was this: If, perchance, you don’t get along all right, if, perchance, you feel like talking, like telling, like running, like shouting, if, perchance, you feel coming upon you any kind of despair, distaste, if you feel the need to find a phone, to stop a person on the street, to scan the sidewalks for a policeman, and if, perchance, you feel descending upon you breathlessness, madness, a desire for revelation, then you will no longer be all right. And so this, in turn, was the true question: Do you understand? he was asking. Do you?
Then he saw her stub.
His lips curled up, ever so slightly, in what she knew was disgust, and he closed his eyes, just for a moment, and in that moment, he looked almost ecclesiastic, almost beatific, and Savitha thought they would simply let her go, back to her empty cot, her pillowcase tucked with a half-made sari, a small rectangle of paper, back to the apartment where Padma and Geeta were sleeping, dreaming.
“Be careful. Might poke your eye out,” he finally said, still looking at Savitha, but clearly talking to Suresh. She turned to him, and he was laughing, and it was then that she saw she wouldn’t be led back, that what lay ahead was another door, behind Gopalraju, and it was through this door that Suresh pushed her. It was dark inside, and when he turned on the light, there was only a roughly made bed, a squat fridge, and some bottles strewn on a corner table. There was a small bathroom on one side. The smell of stale beer, which Savitha didn’t recognize, hung in the windowless room, though the other smells she did recognize: unwashed sheets, shit, semen, salt, sweat, cigarettes, a kind of anguish, a kind of listlessness, a kind of gloom, all of which had a scent, all of which had a shape, all of which sat hunched in the corners of the little room.
He told her to get on the bed. And then he did, too. When she lay on her back, he said, No, you’ll do the other thing. And so she turned, but he said, No, no, that’s not what I mean. Savitha looked at him, confused, and then he showed her what to do. He had a bottle of something clear that he smeared over her stub, and then he showed her. He said, Like this, and then he got on the bed. On all fours. He told her to go in and out, and when she did, he said, Oh, yeah, like that, like that. A pain hit somewhere behind her eyes, and she turned away. But the pain was thunder, it broke and it broke. And he said, Yeah, oh yeah, yes, just like that. And she began to cry, willing it to end. Praying that it would. But he said, Keep going. And so she did, and so it broke.
*
She closed the door of the small bathroom. The light made her dizzy so she turned it off. She felt her way to the sink and washed up, scrubbed and scrubbed with a little cake of soap, her brown skin reddening all the way up to her shoulder. Then she turned off the water and was about to leave, when she heard something. What was that? She listened. It was coming from the toilet; it seemed to be humming. She leaned closer and listened, and it was. The toilet was humming! Just for her. It was humming a simple song, a child’s song, but it was humming it for her. Savitha smiled into the dark, and then she knelt next to the toilet and she gave it a hug. She hummed along. Such a simple song, such simple notes, and yet so exquisite. She knelt and she hummed. The cool of the porcelain and its song; the cool of a river and its gurgle.
*
He was lying on the bed and smoking. Her legs were weak, and maybe he could see that, because he said, in Telugu, “Come here. Sit down.” So she walked to the end of the bed and sat at its edge. He looked at her for a long while, and then he said, in English, as if she could understand, “I wasn’t raised here, you know. I was raised in Ohio. You know where that is? I was on the track team. You know what they called me? Curry in a Hurry. Mohan was on the wrestling team, and they called him Curry Up. They didn’t think anything of it, the kids. And I would laugh along. There was so much to laugh about back then. But I wanted to punch them. Every time someone said it, and they laughed, I’d laugh, too, and stare at their mouth, and I’d imagine grabbing its edges and ripping it open. Nice and wide.”
He took a sip from a bottle that had been resting on the corner table. He sank deeper into the bed with a contented sigh, and he said, again in English, “How’d you lose that hand, anyway?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he sat bolt upright. His eyes widened, and he said in Telugu, “Hey. Hey, watch this.”
There was a fly on the table. It jerked here and there. He was watching it intently. Savitha too. He took the cigarette out of his mouth. He held it poised above the table, not near the fly, but a little away, as if he knew where the fly would veer. And it did. It inched right toward his hand, which was still as a statue. Savitha had never known a man to be so still. To wait so patiently. For what? She didn’t know, but his stillness seemed to her a state of fallen grace. A form of dark worship. Then, in a flash, his hand swept down and he caught it: he trapped the fly under the burning cigarette. Savitha blinked. He couldn’t have. She looked again, and sure enough: there was the fly, a slight sizzle, a flailing of this or that limb, and then it was still. As still as Suresh’s hand had been.
He laughed out loud. “No one else can do that. No one. I’ve been able to do it since I was five.” He looked at her. “The key is: your hand has to move before your mind even tells it to move. That’s the only way to kill a fly.”
He lifted the cigarette, the fly still caught on its end, its body no longer distinguishable from it, and dropped the butt into the ashtray. His smile, too, dropped, and he said, “Let’s go.” When he pulled up to her building, he said, “I’ll be back in a week or two.”
When she got back to the apartment, she stood for a moment and looked at Padma’s and Geeta’s sleeping faces.
We were once children, she thought; we were once little girls. We once played in the dirt under the shade of a tree.
Then she turned away, the nausea rising in her throat. She showered. She smelled burning flesh, though was there enough to a fly to be called flesh? She didn’t know, and she stopped wondering. After her shower, she drank a glass of water, went to her cot, and took out Poornima’s half-made sari. She looked at it, she looked at it hard, and she thought, In a week or two. He’ll be back in a week or two. And then she thought, but of course there was enough to it. There had to be. There was enough to everything to be called flesh. Even the smallest creature. The poorest. The most alone. And yet. And yet, he’d be back in a week or two. She looked at the fragment of sari in her hand, and she thought, I am not that girl in that room. I am not. I am this; I am indigo and red. And to be here in a week or two, and a week or two after that, and a week or two after that, was to surrender to what the crow had warned against, had always been warning against, it was to surrender to being eaten piece by piece.