*
It was the following week. He came to another apartment, on Brooklyn Avenue, and without a word he lay her down on the carpet. He kissed her arm and then her throat and then her mouth, and even though she had been kissed many times before, she thought, So this is what it’s like to be kissed. The give of the carpet was on her back, and he pushed the hair from her face, and then he unfastened her blouse. It didn’t fall completely open, only to one side, and on this side he took her breast into his mouth. She cradled his head in her hand, and Savitha saw, in the quiet black of his hair, his first coarse gray. A window swayed above their heads and then a thick cloud shifted and light flooded in, fell onto her face. He took off her pants, her underwear, both a size too big because they had to share clothes and Geeta was bigger than her, but he seemed not to notice, nor to care, because he was kissing her stomach. He laid his head against it, as if listening for voices, and she cradled his head again, keening to him, wanting him to continue, but no, he wouldn’t. Not yet, he said. She felt first impatience and then despair. Please, she almost said, in English, in Telugu: please. But he waited, held himself above her, looking down. No, he said again, no, I want to look at you first. The full fiery brown gleam of you. She rolled her head back, and he held her away like that, poised above her, poised perfectly, heartlessly, and the light beyond her shivered, nectared and alive.
*
They sat together afterward in the fading light. Under the window, on the floor, their legs outstretched and touching. Neither spoke. Savitha wanted to take his hand, but he was sitting to her left. She looked at her stump, resting on her thigh, though Mohan hardly ever seemed to notice it. Instead, he reached for his pants, took out his wallet, and said, “Here. I want to show you something.”
It was a small photograph, and though it was creased and yellowed, she saw immediately that it was Mohan and Suresh, as boys. “How old were you?”
“Eight and fourteen.”
She studied them: the too-long hair, the round eyes, the expression of irrepressible wonder on Mohan’s face, tilted half toward his older brother, half toward the camera, his smile unabashed and absolute, and Suresh not smiling at all, but with an adolescent seriousness, or maybe an adolescent stubbornness, but still with his arm around his little brother, holding him close, though not too close. “Where’s your sister?”
“She took it. We were on vacation. The only vacation we ever took. My dad wanted to show us Mount Rushmore. This was back when we lived in Ohio. ‘That is greatness, kids,’ he said, ‘when your face is chiseled onto the side of a mountain.’ I don’t much remember it. Mount Rushmore, I mean. But what I do remember is that place,” he said, nodding at the photograph.
Savitha looked deeper into it, past Mohan and Suresh, and at the stand of trees behind them, and maybe a river or a lake in the near distance. “What is it?”
“Spearfish Canyon. We just drove through, but I remember it was perfect. It was the most perfect place I have ever been.”
She stared some more. It didn’t look like much; it didn’t look half as awe-inspiring as Indravalli Konda. “Perfect how?”
He was silent. And then he shifted his arm and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around her stump, as completely and as naturally as if she, too, had a hand. “There is no way,” he said. “There is no way to explain a thing that is perfect.”
Savitha considered the photograph. “Was it like flute song?”
“What?”
“This place. Was it like flute song?”
A small smile played at the edge of his lips. “Yes. In a way, it was.” Then he said, “I never thought of it that way. But yes, it was flute song.”
“What is it called again?”
“Spearfish Canyon.”
She broke the words down into parts and said them to herself. Spear. Fish. Can. Yon. Then she said them out loud. “How do you spell it?”
“Other side,” he said. And when she turned the photograph over, there it was: written in blue ink: S-P-E-A-R-F-I-S-H C-A-N-Y-O-N. When she handed it back to him, he said, “Maybe we can go one day,” and she nearly laughed. Why, she didn’t know, couldn’t say; only that she felt no joy.
10
She had been in Seattle for over a year. Sometimes, when Vasu drove her from apartment to apartment, they would pass the university, and Savitha would look out the window of his old beige car, at the waiting or the walking or the laughing students, and she would look especially at the girls. They were her age, sometimes older, and she looked at their skin, the fall of their hair, the slope of their shoulders, both of their hands, and she would think, What is your name? Where do you live? Do you live in an apartment I’ve cleaned?
*
If Mohan knew about Suresh and the room and the bottle of clear liquid, he didn’t let on. He was usually silent, or he would tell her stories in English, or he would make love to her and then he would make her coffee. Even if they were in an empty apartment, with not a pot or pan in sight, he would run down to the corner store, buy instant coffee, boil water in the microwave, and then settle on the floor with her, drinking weak coffee out of a Styrofoam cup he’d found in his car.
Once, he had neither a pot nor cups, but the previous tenant had left a small plastic flowerpot on one of the windowsills. Savitha saw Mohan looking at it, and she said, No, that’s disgusting. But he cleaned it out in the sink, and boiled water, and they passed it back and forth, the slight scent of dirt mixing with the strong scent of coffee.
*
Of course, she didn’t tell Geeta or Padma about either Mohan or Suresh. None of them talked much about the brothers. But one night, after they’d found a bag of half-rotting capsicum at their door, probably left by Vasu, Geeta cut out the inedible bits and made a curry of capsicum and potato. They had it with rice, and then they had yogurt with rice, and as Savitha was peeling her banana, Padma said, “Where did you get that?”
She couldn’t tell her the truth, and so she said, “Outside the door. Just like the capsicum.”
They ate in silence, and after they’d washed up, they lay on their cots and Savitha heard a distant bellowing, and she said, “What is that?”
“It’s for the fog. It’s to warn the ships.”
“Fog?”
A thick mist, they told her. Ships can lose their way. Savitha remembered the early-morning mist over the Krishna; she could’ve ladled it out like sambar. And then she thought about ships. There must be a port nearby, she guessed, and there must be sailors and captains and passengers and wonderful things from all over the world coming to that port. Like spices, maybe, or gold.
“Mohan came by earlier,” Geeta said to Savitha. “He said he needed to take you to a job in Ravenna. I told him I could go, but he said no, it could wait.”
Savitha was quiet, but Padma sighed into the dark.
“You should tell him,” Geeta said, giggling as if she were a schoolgirl.
Padma turned in her cot, sighing again, humorless.
Their breaths deepened, and into the dark, Geeta said, her voice now serious, “What are you afraid of? I mean, hasn’t the worst thing already happened?”