It wasn’t easy for Poornima to get to shepherd the cleft-lipped girl to Seattle. That was what the Telugu word for it meant, shepherd. No, it was extraordinarily difficult. And required such meticulous planning, persuasion, and sheer ingenuity that she’d laugh to herself at times; with the effort I put into it, she’d think, I could’ve laid railroad tracks across a mountainous country, or built bridges across a watery one.
Most of the two years it took felt to Poornima like she was wasting time, precious time, time she counted out in minutes, seconds, but she knew she had to be still. It was stillness, she learned, that at times was the greatest movement. She would find Savitha, she knew that much, but she also knew that it would take enormous amounts of patience to understand what she didn’t know. For instance, all she really knew was that Savitha had been sold to some rich man in America, in a city called Seattle. She didn’t know where Seattle was, or how she would get there, or even what was required to travel to a place like America.
How did one cross the borders of a country?
Once Guru had revealed to her Savitha’s whereabouts, Poornima did nothing. She waited. She knew that if she raised any suspicion in Guru’s cruel mind—that she knew Savitha, or was looking for her—Poornima was certain he would sabotage every link to her and would turn Poornima out of the brothel immediately. So she waited a good three months—long, frustrating months—and then, very casually, on a hot, languid yellow morning, when even the fan seemed to stumble with fatigue, she looked up from her accounting books and her calculator, and she said, “A new cinema came out at the Alankar. I saw it last night. The crowd was a hundred thick. I saw one woman get pushed to the ground.”
Guru barely nodded. He was chewing betelnut and reading a newspaper. “Another woman had her blouse torn off. The animals.”
Guru looked up from his paper. He cringed, subtly, as he did every time he saw Poornima’s face. No one ever got used to it, she noticed, not even she. It had healed completely, but the half that had been splashed by the oil was still bright pink, and against her brown skin, her face looked like a rotting flower. The entire left side was misshapen, hollowed out like a mine, revealing something too raw, too naked. But it wasn’t just the pink, edged with an island border of white, the center cratered, dark, as if small animals lived inside; there was another aspect that was far uncannier. Poornima thought it might be her smile, and how it twisted her face grotesquely—children paused in their play and looked at her in fright—and so she stopped smiling altogether, but it wasn’t that.
It was something else entirely: it was something beneath the face. Or rather, it was something raging beneath the face. It was a light, a fire. And it burned. Even as the hot oil on the surface of her skin cooled, capitulated, the fire within grew brighter. And that was what was truly uncanny, untoward. It was tragic to be a burn victim—oil, acid, dowry disputes, cruel in-laws, all that—though what was expected next was a humble, pained exit, feminine in its sorrow, in its sense of proportion. In other words, what was expected was invisibility. For the woman to disappear. But Poornima refused, or rather, she never even considered it. She walked down the street, she held her head high, she wore no mangalsutra, she had no male escort, she was iron in her purpose, imperial in her poise. And what was more, and what was uncanniest of all, was that all this, all this fire, began raging after she was attacked with hot oil.
Of course, Guru saw none of this. He saw only the burn, and the deformed face, and squirmed with discomfort.
“They filmed the songs in Switzerland,” Poornima continued. “Switzerland! In the snow. That poor heroine, dressed in that tiny bit of cloth, having to dance and sing in the snow and cold.”
“What did you say the name of the movie was?” he asked.
“I’d like to go there one day,” Poornima said, sighing. “Wouldn’t you?”
“To Switzerland? Why? Plenty of mountains here. I’ve heard there’s some mountains two hours north of Delhi.”
“I know. I know. But the mountains in Switzerland are different. Don’t you think?”
“No.”
She paused. “How would I get there, anyway?”
He turned back to his paper. “Switzerland? I guess you’d get a visa and a plane ticket, like everywhere else.”
“A visa?”
“It lets you travel out of the country.”
“How do you get one?”
“Well, you’d have to start with a passport first.”
“A passport? What’s that?”
Guru crumpled the paper down so that she could see his eyes, and he said, “Like anyone would let you into their country with a face like that.”
“Just to visit. Just to see the mountains.”
He groaned loudly, and then he explained to her what a passport was, and about the Indian government, and then about the visa, and about the Swiss consulate (“Wherever that is,” he said. “Good luck finding it.”), and then about how all this took inordinate amounts of time and documentation and photo-taking and fingerprinting and “Money! Most of all money. And that’s before you buy the plane ticket, before you even get there. And from what I hear, Switzerland isn’t exactly cheap,” he added.
Well, Poornima thought, I’m not going to Switzerland.
Still, she was undeterred. And as Guru had said, she started by applying for a passport.
*
The months wore on. Poornima paid them no mind. She did her work and by then had rented a room a little away from the brothel, but on the bus route. Sometimes, she walked the five kilometers to work, and on the hottest days, or the wettest, she treated herself to an autorickshaw. She ate simple meals that she cooked on a small gas stove, shopping for the evening’s vegetables on the way home and buying packets of milk, which she stored in her landlady’s refrigerator. She used just enough oil to fry up the vegetables, never more. On Sundays, she walked around Vijayawada, looking into shop windows or drifting toward the Prakasam Barrage, or climbing up to the Kanaka Durga Temple. She never went inside. She once splurged and agreed to twenty rupees to take a boat ride on the Krishna. The boatswain was a lithe young man, not yet twenty, with coppery-bronze skin and the blackest and thickest head of hair she’d ever seen. He ran up to her as she walked along the shore, and said, “Look at her. Just look at her. Don’t you want to sail on her? Doesn’t she look like what life should’ve been?” He was pointing to the river, and with its sparkling waters, the sparkle even mightier because there were clouds darkening the waters downriver, the Krishna did indeed glitter like a gem, like a promise.
She talked him down from thirty rupees to twenty and climbed onto his rickety boat. “Did you build this yourself?” she said.
He laughed. She liked his smile. She liked that he looked right into her face and didn’t once flinch.
He navigated to the middle of the river, and here the water suddenly turned choppy. She held on to the sides of the boat, while the boy pushed back toward shore with his long pole for an oar. The clouds were now racing upriver, and she watched as the billowing gray masses crowded above them, colliding and roaring like lions, and she said, “Hurry,” and the boy only laughed, and said, “Are you scared?”
Yes, she thought, yes, I am scared.