The water now tossed them like a coin, and they landed with a thud, and then the first raindrop landed. On her arm, and as big as an apple. There was nothing else for a moment, the briefest pause, and then, as if the heavens had tired of playing, of flirting, they opened with a vengeance so sudden and so powerful that Poornima was thrown against the lee of the boat. She caught the sides, scraping her hands. The boy was now struggling against the pitch of the waters. His pole so curved against the current that Poornima thought it might snap in two. She saw his muscles, wet and taut. She saw his hair, dripping like a forest around his face. And both of their clothes, soaked through. She thought of her father in that moment, and she nearly laughed: I might drown in the Krishna after all, Nanna, she said to him. Just twenty years too late for you.
The boy finally heaved them out of the middle of the river and then pushed them toward shore. The rain seemed to abate, just a little, though there was no longer any distinction: her skin was as wet as the river that was as wet as the storm that was as wet as the sky. When they reached water shallow enough to see sand, she jumped out. She waited for the boy to drag his boat to higher ground and found that her fear had left an exhilaration, a lightness of body she had never before felt, and she tilted her face to the sky. The rain, the rest of her years.
She paid the boy twenty-five rupees, and his smile grew even wider, impossibly alluring, and she walked back through the wet streets, jubilant, though she never again took another boat ride.
*
Her passport arrived. She’d taken the blank forms to a local scribe, near the courts, and he’d filled them out for her. He’d then told her she needed to get photos taken and instructed her on where to submit the forms and the photos. She went back to the courts, months later, passport in hand, and searched the crowd of scribes for the same one who’d helped her before. “Now,” she said to him, “how do I go to America?”
*
A visa, then. That’s what she needed. The scribe had explained it to her, much more clearly than Guru had, and so she went back to her flat, deep in thought. She cooked herself some rice and plain pappu and had it with a bit of tomato pickle, then she had yogurt rice, washed up the few dishes, and sat down by the window. Her second-floor flat looked out onto a peepal tree, and beyond that, a man had set up an ironing stall. He was there on most days—thin, with a tired face, graying hair, his iron steaming with red coals, his long fingers dipping into a bowl of water, sprinkling it on the creases of shirts and trousers to crisp them, the edges of saris to smooth them. Poornima had watched him on occasion, but today was the first time she noticed him, how rapt he was, how completely consumed he was by the ironing—of what? What was that? A child’s frock. It was a child’s frock, and it utterly engrossed him. She watched him a little longer, watched him fold the frock, ever so gently, and then place it on a pile of already ironed clothes. He took up the next item. A man’s shirt. Poornima then looked up and down the street. There was a cow at one end and a stray dog picking at some greasy newspaper thrown on the ground on the other; a rickshaw wallah was taking a nap on the opposite side of the street. A cool evening wind was rustling the leaves of the peepal tree, and there was the scent of something frying, maybe pakora, from one of the nearby houses. The sky was yellow, thick like ghee, as it cooled into evening, into night’s blue mood, and Poornima came finally to see the unavoidable: that she didn’t have the money for a visa. She’d used all the money and jewelry she’d stolen from the armoire to pay for the passport. She didn’t even have enough for a tourist visa, and she knew no one in America who could sponsor her. That left Guru. And though she was infuriated, she saw no other option: she was far more dependent on Guru than she had imagined, than she would’ve liked, but she needed him now more than she ever had before.
*
She obviously couldn’t tell him she needed his help; he would never give it to her. She had to appeal to the only thing he loved, and she lacked: money. Her opportunity came a few weeks later. She was checking a list of expenses for the previous month—routine odds and ends, like a new hot-water geyser for one of the brothels, the cost of repairing a gate that had rusted, and official payments like the one for a new phone line, and unofficial ones, like the bribe that had been paid to the telephone company administrator to nudge their application for the new telephone line—when she came across an expense that was huge, eight lakh rupees to be exact, but had nothing listed beside it. No name or company or even the initials of a name or a company. Poornima guessed it was a bribe to a politician; only that would explain the extraordinary amount and the fact that it was left blank and untraceable. When next she saw Guru, she asked, “That eight lakh rupees. From last month. Do you know who it was paid out to?”
He had come to check up on a new girl who’d just arrived. A farmer’s daughter. The farmer had committed suicide, and the mother had sold the daughter to pay off debts. Poornima saw her only in passing, sitting alone in a room, hardly more than twelve or thirteen. Her face was round, and she wore a glittering nose ring. Poornima imagined that the mother had given her that small piece of jewelry, and that she’d said, Remember me by this, remember your father. But probably it was only a cheap ornament, a tawdry carnival item that had been bought for a few rupees. Though the glitter was real, and it made her face, in the dark room, glow like banked embers.
Guru was on his way to see her when Poornima asked him. He stood at her door, his teeth and lips orange from the betelnet, and said, “Oh, that money? Fucking Kuwaitis. They wouldn’t pay a single paisa for the shepherd. Made me pay, the rich bastards.”
“A shepherd? A shepherd for what?”
“For the girl.”
Poornima looked at him. “What girl?”
“Look, can’t sit here talking to you all day. You don’t need to know.”
“But I need to balance the books. Know expenses.”
He glanced in the direction of the farmer’s daughter’s room and said, “On my way out.” When he came back, twenty minutes later, his face was calm, and he smiled and said, “Usually, we split the cost with the buyer, but they wouldn’t split.”
By now, Poornima had figured out most of it: a young village girl, bought by some foreigner, certainly couldn’t travel alone. She would clearly need a shepherd, someone to deliver her. But who were these shepherds? “Middlemen find them for us,” Guru said. “Someone who knows English, obviously. Airports and all that.”
“That’s it? Someone who knows English, and they get eight lakh rupees for two days’ work?”
Guru shook his head in disgust. “It’s thievery, plain and simple. But you’re not just buying two days’ work, or English, what you’re buying for eight lakhs is discretion. Or, shall we say, a bad memory.”
Poornima shook her head right along with him. But her thoughts were elsewhere. English, she was thinking. English.
*
That very night, she rode the bus to Governorpet and asked around. There was a good English school on Eluru Road, the college kids told her, and so she got on another bus to Divine Nagar. She enrolled in a conversational English class starting the following week.