She climbed into the same car in which he’d picked up her and the old woman from the airport. It was still flooded with the scent of lemon. She didn’t know where he was taking her, but he’d turned away from the direction of her apartment. He was quiet, almost morose, but she hardly noticed. She was looking out the window, at the nighttime streets. She’d only ever been driven from cleaning jobs to her apartment and back again, ten, twenty minutes at a time, but now, she sensed, they were drifting, a word she’d never associated with her life, never associated with life, life being only a constant doing; doing so that there could be eating and sleeping and surviving. But now, now, on a wide street, and on a wide and drizzly night, to glide under the traffic lights and to watch people sitting in brightly lit rooms and to imagine the smell of those rooms, the warmth, the chatter of the people inside or of the television or of nothing at all, just the silence, but to imagine it, sitting in a fancy, lemon-scented car, and with nothing ahead, and nothing, not really, behind, it was enough to make Savitha’s heart swell, enough to make it ache with something like happiness.
They eventually turned off the wide main street and started to go up a hill. They wound through dark streets. The wind picked up, and she asked if she could open the window, and when Mohan didn’t respond, or maybe didn’t hear, she fidgeted with some buttons on her door until the window rolled down, with a smooth, thrilling ease, and the breeze lifted her loose hair (with only one hand, she could no longer wear her hair in a braid), and the drizzle sprayed her face, set her shivering with delight, and the shadowed leaves swayed above her and beside her as they drove past, moving as if wedded to the night, as if dancing with the wind.
No, she couldn’t remember a night so wondrous, here or anywhere, and when she turned to Mohan, nearly laughing, she saw that he was unscrewing the cap of a small bottle, lifting it to his mouth, and it was then, when she saw the gold liquid in the bottle, tipping, when she saw his face wince with the first sip, it was then that she knew she was mistaken. None of this was true. Not in the least. This night, this drizzle, this uphill climb. None of it was her own. It was his. He owned her, and that was the only true thing.
She rolled her window back up; the walls closed in again; she closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the streets were even darker, and they were still climbing. Eventually he pulled the car onto a small embankment, off the side of the road, and he turned the engine off. He took a long pull from the bottle, and when he saw her watching, he held it out to her. Savitha thought about her father, then she thought about Poornima’s father, and then she took the bottle. It went down like fire—her first taste of whiskey—and she coughed and sputtered until Mohan laughed and took the bottle back. She thought then that he must be unused to laughter, or at least unused to laughter not tinged with sorrow. The whiskey reached her stomach, and then her eyes floated and bobbed along on a warm sea. When they focused she saw that they were on a high ridge, and below them and beyond them, all the way to the dark horizon, was a field of lights. The lights spilled like beads on black velvet. “Which way are we facing?” she asked.
“West.”
West, west.
She studied the lights, and she thought that somewhere below, just below, must be her apartment. Beyond the lights, in the distance, was a strip of solid black. “What is that band without lights?”
He looked up, clearly drunk by the way his head wobbled, and he said, Where? She pointed into the distance. He followed her arm and said, “Water. That’s water.” She remembered the bridge they’d gone over and yet, in her three months in Seattle, had forgotten they were so close to water. All she knew were walls. Even on sunny days, the light was gray, slanting dolorously into dirty apartments. The dust motes spun in place, having nowhere to go. She stared into the black mass before her, that strip of dark, and though she knew all about washing machines now, she wondered if that black mass had ever had laundresses on its shores, if saris had ever fluttered there like flags.
“You know when I had my first drink?” he asked into the dark, in Telugu.
She took another drink from the bottle.
“I was eleven. Almost twelve. Behind the carousel at the state fair.” Now he was switching between Telugu and English, and Savitha struggled to understand. “Went with my friend Robbie and his dad. His dad thought it was time, so he bought us beers.” Then he was silent for a long moment. “We moved the next year. Nanna sold the motel, bought another two. I’ll build us an empire, he said. An empire!” He looked at Savitha, and he said, “I guess you’re it. I guess you’re the empire.”
The whiskey was gone. Mohan flung the bottle into the backseat and leaned his seat back. How did he do that? Savitha wondered, pushing against her seat to get it to lean.
“Open that,” he said, pointing to the glove box.
She fiddled with it, and when it popped open, there was another bottle inside. She handed it to him, and he held it close, without opening it, as if it were a talisman, an object of great beauty.
Into the silence of the car, he said, “I stopped wrestling at sixteen. Just stopped. Suresh must’ve asked me a million times. Still does. Why, he’ll say. Why’d you stop? You were good, Mo, really good. You could’ve made it to the state finals. The nationals.” He stopped and looked at Savitha. He asked in Telugu, “Do you understand any English?”
She shook her head no.
He continued, this time only in English. “He picked me up after school one time. Just that once. There was a girl sitting in the backseat, about my age. I looked at her, and then I asked, ‘Who is she?’ He didn’t even turn his head. Said, ‘Just go in there, Mo. Just go with her, wait for her to be done, and come back out. Nothing fancy.’ By then, he’d pulled the car up to a clinic, and we just sat there in the parking lot. The three of us. By then I understood. I said, ‘Why can’t you go?’ He waited. I didn’t think he’d answer, but then he said, ‘They might recognize me.’ So I took the girl in there and talked to the nurse. I knew what she was thinking, the way she looked at me. She gave me pamphlets on contraception and abstinence and all that. I must’ve turned beet red.
“When the girl came back out, she was carrying the same pamphlets. Couldn’t speak a word of English, but she clutched those pamphlets as if they were a hand. Wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t raise her head. I didn’t know what to say. I was a kid. We both were. I finally stammered something about getting her some water, and she said, ‘No, thank you, sir.’ Can you imagine that? Sixteen, and she calls me sir.”
He laughed.
“After we dropped her off, I said, ‘Who the fuck is she? What’s she doing in our building? What’d you do to her?’ He looked at me, long and hard, and he said, ‘What do you think she’s doing in our building? Huh? What do you think we do, Mo? How do you think we make it in this country? Make it big. You think Dad got us where we are without girls like her?’”
The drizzle turned to rain.
“Girls like her,” he repeated, and then he grew quiet. In Telugu he asked, “What did you understand?”
Savitha said, truthfully, “I understood the word girls.”
He looked at her with what she thought was real longing, or real loneliness, and then he ran his fingers slowly down the side of her face, and he said, in English, “You are an empire. You’re more than an empire.”
Savitha looked at him and she wanted in that moment to tell him everything, absolutely everything, but instead she took the bottle from his hands, saw the liquid tilt against the raindrops, the distant lights, drank as her father would’ve drunk, and then she smiled.