*
She didn’t sleep that night, thinking. And she stayed thinking all the next day: while she cleaned apartments and one floor of an office building and a few rooms of a residential hotel. When she got back to the apartment, late that night, she ate, thinking. Padma came home after her. Still pretty after a day of cleaning, Savitha thought, but all that prettiness came to nothing. Just a made-up girl wearing orange lipstick, heavy kajal, cleaning the houses of strangers, and waiting for a man who would never come.
Savitha was quiet, and Padma must’ve noticed, because she said, “What’s with you?”
Savitha looked at her as if she’d never seen her before. “What keeps you from leaving?”
“Where would I go?”
“Back to India.”
“Where would I get the money? Besides, India’s no prize. Nothing there. My father used the money he got for me to buy a motorcycle.”
Savitha was silent.
“Why? Are you thinking about it?”
“No, but you. You’re just so pretty.”
That made her smile, touch her fingers to her hair, and Savitha smiled back, imagining Padma believed her.
She was wrong.
The next time she took out Poornima’s half-made sari, a few days later, she gasped: a long swath was ripped from it. Torn, the weaving mutilated, the tear uneven. Who’d done such a thing? She looked inside her pillowcase and then in her cot. She looked at the remaining piece, a third of it missing. Gone. She sat for a moment, and then she jumped up and scoured the entire apartment: the kitchen cabinets, the bathroom, the hall closet, Geeta’s and Padma’s things. Padma! She must’ve told someone Savitha had been asking about India, about leaving. And they’d … they’d what? She slumped again on her cot. They’d taken a piece of the only thing that meant anything to her. And why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they take the whole thing? “Why,” she said to the walls. But the walls said nothing back.
*
I have to be more careful, she decided. Much more careful. The sky seemed to agree: the rain came harder; the air grew heavier.
9
Over the next weeks, she lay in bed every night and thought about the journey from India to Seattle. She dissected every moment, every document. When she and the woman who was supposed to be her mother had first arrived at the airport, in Chennai, the old woman had taken out two strips of paper and two small blue books and handed them to the lady at the counter. The strips must’ve been their tickets, because the lady at the counter had stamped them and handed them back. The blue books she’d only glanced at before handing them back. Then what? Then nothing, until they’d arrived in New York. Here, the whole process had been reversed. Here, Savitha recalled, they’d stood in a long line, and this time, the old woman had shown the tickets and the two small blue books to a man. The man had stamped the blue books but not the tickets. What were those books? Savitha had no idea, but she knew she needed one: the blue book. She also knew she needed a ticket. And for both of those? She knew she needed money.
Her heart sank.
Because she realized that even with money and a ticket and the blue book, she obviously still couldn’t leave. Not at all. They knew her family, they knew they were in Indravalli, and if she left, well, anything could happen to them. Gopalraju had paid a lot of money for her, more than she could imagine—she was an investment, something Savitha knew only in terms of cows and goats and chickens. And why would anyone let their cow or goat or chicken simply walk away? They wouldn’t. Never. And as for her family: they could be killed. She knew that, she knew that as she knew her love for them: in her gut. So she would stay.
*
Toward the end of her three months in Seattle, there was a knock on the door. Savitha panicked. Vasu usually barged right in, using his key, so it wasn’t him. It was a Wednesday night, and Padma and Geeta weren’t home yet. What if it was Suresh? But he usually picked her up at one of the buildings, and took her to the room, and handed her the tube with the clear liquid. Those were the nights she came home well after Padma and Geeta were asleep. A few times, afterward, she’d vomited on the sidewalk when he’d pulled his car away; one time she’d held her stub over a flame.
Another knock. Who could it be?
She stood by the door and listened. Nothing. Then a shuffling of feet. Not going away, not yet. She waited. There was no peephole, though in some of the apartments she’d cleaned, she’d noticed the hole in the door. Now she wished she had one.
On the third knock, she turned the knob silently, as quietly as possible, and peeked through the crack.
It was Mohan.
She opened it wide, and he stood there sheepishly, not moving. She waited at the open door, wondering if he, too, had come to take her to the room.
He smiled shyly, maybe even sadly, and then he handed her a brown paper bag. When she opened it, there were six bananas inside. The bananas, the sight of them—their smooth yellow skins, their defiant firmness, their subtle beauty—made her laugh with pleasure. She looked at them and she looked at them, and when she finally looked up, Mohan was looking back at her.
“In America, they cut them lengthwise and put ice cream in the middle,” he said.
She tried to imagine that and couldn’t. “I like them with yogurt rice,” she said.
They stood for a moment, and she invited him inside (though she felt funny about the invitation; it was his father’s building, after all). He said, No, maybe another time. Maybe next week, he said, and then he left.
That night, Savitha had two helpings of rice and yogurt and banana. The first helping so sweet and creamy and divine that tears streamed down her face. Geeta laughed, and let her have a little of her portion of rice. The second helping—Geeta’s kindness, Mohan’s kindness—made her think of Poornima, and more tears came to her eyes, though these, she knew, were for different reasons.
*
“Let’s go,” Mohan said.
He’d come to an apartment she was cleaning, and he stood by the door, as if the carpet were wet, which it wasn’t, or as if there were other people inside, which there weren’t.
“But I’m not done,” Savitha said.
He looked around the lit room once, let his gaze pass perfunctorily from one end of the room to the other, and then he said, “It’s fine.”