Suresh came and took her to the room and then Mohan came and then Suresh came. Then Mohan came and they had sex in an empty apartment, and once in an office building. This pattern followed her around like a lost dog. Months went by. She once sat on the edge of the bed and watched Suresh open a bottle of beer, and she said, “Can I have one?” He looked at her, astonished—perhaps that she had spoken at all, something she avoided, broken as she still was by him and the room and the bottle of clear liquid and the act—and handed her one. And so, yet another pattern: beer with Suresh, coffee or whiskey with Mohan. She found herself alone one night, in the studio, and could hardly sit still. She went from the window to the kitchen to the bathroom and back, and realized that what she really wanted was a drink. The thought stopped her cold. She stood at the window and thought about her father, about his destruction, and then she thought about the blind boy, and how she’d lain in her cot and stared at the locked door, waiting for him to arrive with the needle. She swore it off in that moment. All of it. And never again touched the beer or whiskey she was offered.
At the end of July, on a warm and cloudy afternoon, Mohan came to pick her up and said, “I have a surprise.” They drove on a wide road again, this one next to the water, and then he parked on a busy street, between a blue car and a red car. She would always remember that: that he’d parked his black car between a blue car and a red car. The restaurant he took her to was the most colorful room Savitha had ever seen. The booths were bright red, cinema posters lined the walls, and the counter was blue. Blue and red again, she thought. When they sat down—Savitha still bewildered because he had never brought her to a public place before, and what was more, she’d never actually been in a restaurant before, ever, with or without Mohan—she looked around her at the other patrons, laughing and chatting, utterly at ease, and slid into the corner of her seat. She surreptitiously tucked in her blouse so no one would see how loose it was and concealed her stub under the table, and then she watched the happenings in the restaurant, the clatter and the conversation and the steaming plates of food going past their table, all with a kind of reverence, a wide-eyed wonder.
When the waitress came to take their order, she looked at Savitha with what seemed to her like ridicule, or maybe pity, and then she turned to Mohan. He ordered something Savitha couldn’t understand, and when it arrived, the waitress set the shallow oval bowl down in the center of the table, between them.
Savitha looked at it. “What is it?”
“Don’t you remember? I told you about it. It’s called a banana split.”
She looked at it, and there it was! A banana! “But what is that?”
“Ice cream.”
“No, on top.”
“Chocolate. And that’s whipped cream.”
“And that?”
“Strawberry sauce.”
“Those look like bits of peanut.”
“Yes.”
“What about the thing on the very top?”
“It’s a cherry. Have you ever eaten a cherry?”
Savitha shook her head, and so he insisted that she eat that first, and when she did, she decided it was the strangest thing she’d ever tasted. The texture like a lychee, but the taste more a sweet, syrupy alcohol. Then she took a bite of the banana with a bit of ice cream and chocolate and dipped the tip of her spoon into the strawberry sauce so she could taste all of them together. She also got a bit of the white, fluffy weightless substance, and it all took a moment, but then she closed her eyes. It was the best thing she’d ever tasted. Was it better than banana with yogurt rice? No, but it was more extravagant. It was hard to even think about both of them together. Yogurt rice with a banana was like life, simple, straightforward, with a beginning and an end, while the other—the banana split—was like death, complex, infused with a kind of mystery that was beyond Savitha’s comprehension, and every bite, like every death, dumbfounding.
Mohan watched her intently, taking only a bite or two, and then he said, “It’s hard to leave you, at times like this.”
“Times like what?”
He didn’t respond. He instead reached over and wiped a bit of chocolate from her cheek, and he said, “I have to go to the airport soon.”
“Oh,” Savitha said, hardly listening, focused on the banana split.
“Another girl.”
Savitha looked up. She was listening now.
“A cleft lip, I think.”
So another medical visa.
“Where is she from?”
“How should I know?”
“I mean, is she Telugu?”
“Probably. But we make a point not to know.”
Savitha felt a rush of cold air. She held the spoon steady. “I don’t understand. You make a point not to know?”
He lowered his voice to a whisper, though Savitha saw that there was no one seated near them. Besides, they were speaking in Telugu. Who could possibly understand them? “Otherwise,” he said, “well, otherwise, in case of trouble—” He stopped, and then he said, “Not here.”
So she finished the banana split and he paid the bill, and when they got back to the car, she said, “Are you saying—”
“Just that, in case of trouble, no one knows any of the other parties. No one can rat anyone out.”
“So you don’t know where—where this girl is coming from? Her village?”
“No.”
“Her family?”
“No.”
“How did your father get her, then?”
“There are middlemen. The world is full of middlemen.”
“What about that old lady? The one who pretended to be my mother?”
“Not even her,” he said. “Least of all her.”
Savitha sat back in her seat.
*
Her thoughts whirled: I’ll need money; where do I get money; and how, how will I leave; the little blue book; the little blue book; medical visas; stupid, stupid, why didn’t I pay more attention to signs, to roads, to English; a girl with a cleft lip; Nanna, you’re safe; Nanna, you were right, it wasn’t a bear, it wasn’t a tiger, it was all in my head; should I tell Padma and Geeta, I can’t, I can’t; cleft lip; I remember someone with a cleft lip, that girl, the daughter of one of the laundresses, she crawled and fell down the well by accident, or did she; airport, should I go to the airport; banana split; death, being here will be death; the little blue book; idiot, why didn’t you plan better; but Nanna, I didn’t know, I didn’t know it wasn’t a bear, a tiger, not until now, not until sunrise, not until this moment, I didn’t know.
Her thoughts whirled and whirled, spun in great gusts, and at their center, in their precise and perfect center, there was absolute quiet, and in that quiet, there was only one thought: I can leave.
11
She waited. She stilled her mind, and she waited.
*
The next time she saw Mohan was two weeks later. He came to an apartment she was cleaning, a studio like hers but much prettier, with fine wood floors and shining white cabinets. He made her coffee. She took a sip, waited, took another sip, and said, “Did you pick them up?”
“Pick who up?” He was distracted, fiddling with a loose faucet in the kitchen. She couldn’t see his face, but she could see his hands, and she focused on them. “The girl. The one with the cleft lip.”
“Not yet. Postponed. Some issue with the visa.”
She watched his hands, and then she looked around the apartment. “This place is nice, isn’t it? I wish I could live here.”
Mohan turned to face her. He said, “I could try to get you in here. I could talk to Nanna.”
Savitha nearly went to him. She nearly cried out. It is love, she thought, it is love.
*
Only a few days later, after she’d gotten home and was heating up rice, there was a knock on the door. She put the rice back in the pot, washed her hand, and went to answer it. Suresh. A pain stabbed her middle. When they got to the warehouse, Savitha looked again at the desk where Gopalraju had been sitting the first time she’d been here. This time the chair was empty, pushed in, and all the papers were piled neatly next to a big computer. The desk, she saw, had three drawers down one side of it. None of them had a lock.