There was silence. Savitha felt for Poornima’s half-made sari, wondering over and over whether she should hide it before she left in the mornings. Wondering why.
Padma and Geeta finally seemed collapsed into a restive sleep. But Savitha lay awake. Geeta’s words broke through her thoughts; they held like a weight over the room. The night, too, was a weight. She wondered for a time whether she felt jealous, not of Padma, obviously, but of what was to come. Suresh, she’d learned, was married, but Mohan wasn’t. She knew he would be, one day soon, to some appropriate girl from some appropriately wealthy family. She would be Telugu, and she would be charming. That, too, she knew. But she wasn’t jealous. She’d known the conditions of their affection all along. Affection? No, not affection; but was it love? Maybe it was love, and that thought, as she lay on her cot on the floor of a run-down studio, was the one that saddened her. She turned away then, physically turned away from the thought, and faced the wall.
She thought of a story her father had told her, long ago. She’d been just a girl, and all day she’d played among the stunted trees near their hut, watched as the laundresses passed by, bundles of folded clothes balanced on their heads. It had been evening, and the chores had been done, and even her amma had come and sat on the ground, at the foot of her husband’s bed, oiling Savitha’s hair (there weren’t any other daughters yet). In the story, Nanna had been Savitha’s age, maybe even younger, and being the youngest and too small to start on the loom or the charkha, he was instead sent every morning to the milkman’s house. Now, the milkman’s house, her father told her, was almost four kilometers away, and there was no money for a rickshaw or a bus, so he had to walk.
“I was sleepy, always sleepy and stumbling along,” he said, “but my favorite part was to greet the cows. They always stood waiting for me, their wet noses against their pens, and just then, just then the sun would come up and the tops of their fuzzy, funny ears would be all aglow, as if they were little hills, lit from behind. During the day,” he continued, “it was a pleasant walk. Through the fields and toward the river. But in the morning, early morning, while it was still dark, maybe three in the morning, maybe four—so he could get the choicest curds, discounted for him because the milkman felt sorry for him, felt sorry that so little a boy had to come so far—the fields were awful. They were awful and frightening.”
“But why?” Savitha asked, the scent of coconut oil mingling with the night air.
“Because I was just a boy,” her father said, “and because it was dark, and because that’s when all the fears come out: when you’re a boy—or a girl,” he said, patting her head, “and when it’s dark. So anyway,” he went on, “one morning I was on my way to the milkman’s house when I stopped in my tracks. Just stopped, right in the middle of the path. You know why I stopped?” he asked Savitha.
She shook her head, her eyes wide.
“Because I saw a bear. Or a tiger. I couldn’t tell, you see. It was dark, as I said, and even though I could almost reach out and touch it, even with my child’s arm, I didn’t dare. Who would? But it held me, it held me in its gaze. Its eyes were yellow, I could see them, and they didn’t blink, or they blinked in the exact same moments that I blinked. At any rate, in that gaze, I was frozen. Absolutely terrified. And as I stood there, not moving, it stood there, too, not moving. Just stood there, gazing at me. Waiting to eat me.”
Savitha gasped. “What happened, Nanna?”
“Well,” her father said, “we stood looking at each other, breathing, unmoving, its yellow eyes slowly turning red. Orange and then red. And then more and more red. By this point, I’d found a small hollow near me, just a few steps away, and so I backed away from the bear or the tiger, ever so quietly, and I settled into this hollow. I would wait till sunrise, I decided, and then make a run for it. Or more likely, I hoped, it would leave and go back to the forest or the jungle or wherever it had come from. Besides, by then, I figured, the farmers would start coming out to their fields, and maybe one of them would have a stick to scare it away. Well, these were the thoughts going through my head, but mostly, there were no thoughts, just fear.”
And then, much to Savitha’s surprise, her father laughed out loud. “And you know what happened next?”
Savitha stared up at him.
“The sun came up. That’s what happened. And then you know what happened after that? I saw that that big bear or tiger or whatever other monster I’d imagined was nothing but a tree. A tree! It was just a tree. A dead tree.” He laughed some more. “It was the dark, you see. It was my imagination.”
“So there was no bear? There was no tiger?” Savitha asked, a little disappointed.
“No, my ladoo,” he said. “It was just a tree. Like most fears, it was nothing. Nothing.”
Savitha lay in the dark and thought about that story. She hadn’t thought about it in many years, but she thought about it now and realized: But my fears aren’t nothing. My fears for my family, for their well-being, are real. They are a bear. A tiger. And if I were to leave—well, she couldn’t even finish that thought. But why did I think of the story about fear on the very heels of thinking about love? she wondered. Was it obvious? Of course it was. She’d never known one without the other: she’d always feared for her father’s health, his drinking, her sisters’ marriages, her mother’s endless days. And with Mohan. Well, with Mohan, it was even clearer—there could be no love without fear. The two had always been bound for her, she realized, fear and love, always, but just there, floating on the edge of wake and sleep, another thought drifted up, as if from the cloth that was tucked into her pillow: the thought that maybe there had been one exception. Maybe once, just for a short time, in her girlhood, they had been separate. For a short time (she was already snoring, beginning to dream), she had loved Poornima, and in that love, she had felt no fear.
*