Guru even saved money on the train trip to Chennai, as he simply had his driver take Kumari and Poornima to the train station in Vijayawada and drop them off. Naturally, Poornima knew everything there was to know about the Vijayawada station. She bought the girl a chocolate bar at the Higginbotham’s, glanced at the niche behind the magazine rack, and then boarded an overnight train to Hyderabad. From there, they took an airplane to Mumbai, barely a two-hour flight. Even so, it was the first time on a plane for both of them, and when they hit turbulence midway, Kumari looked over at Poornima, stricken, green like the green ends of her sari, and said, “Will we fall out of the sky?” Poornima looked back at her, thought of Guru’s orders not to speak, and thought, What could it hurt? And though she, too, was terrified, she said, “Of course not. Planes are like birds. They never fall out of the sky.”
In Mumbai, they boarded another two-hour flight to Dubai. When they passed through customs and immigration, their passports stamped with barely a glance, barely any questions, there was a man waiting for them in the arrivals meeting area—he was Indian, and humorless. He said there was a car waiting and led Kumari away. But just as the girl turned, the sun struck her face, shone against the nose ring, setting it ablaze. And it was then, with the small jewel spinning like a sun, that she turned to Poornima, and said, “Birds do. Sometimes.”
“What?”
“Fall out of the sky.”
Poornima watched her go, her eyes warming with tears. So that’s how it can hurt, she thought.
*
She spent a few days in Dubai, at a cheap hostel, so that passport control in India wouldn’t start asking questions. What questions, she didn’t know, but Guru had given her dirhams and said, “Stay there. And don’t talk to anyone.” No one talked to her, so it was easy, and three months after she returned to Vijayawada, she took another girl to Dubai. Two months after that, she took a girl to Singapore. She also finally saved up enough money to register for the advanced English class for businesspeople. It was taught by a different teacher, another middle-aged man she didn’t like as much, but she liked that there was another woman in the class this time, a stylish woman who wore skirts and jeans and who’d already been to many places, like England and America, on business. “What kind of business?” Poornima asked. “Computers,” the woman said. Poornima had never seen a computer, or heard the word, but she was too embarrassed to ask any more questions.
Finally, toward the middle of the year, it happened.
Poornima, when Guru told her, sat speechless. She sat without blinking. She stared at him, her body suddenly weightless, exhilarated, and she thought of the night after the boat ride.
“Did you hear me? I know it’s not Switzerland,” he said, laughing. “But you might like it. Everyone else does.”
America. Seattle.
They needed another girl. The girl they’d bought last time, Guru told her, was the hardest worker they’d ever seen. “And get this: the hardest worker, and she only has one hand,” he exclaimed. Poornima nodded, hardly listening. She was going to America. She was going to Seattle.
“Savitha,” she said that night, into the dark of her room, “Savitha, I’m coming.”
3
The preparations for this trip were far more complicated than for the other trips. Much stronger rules, Guru told her. The girl Poornima would shepherd, Madhavi, had a cleft lip. Another medical visa, he added. Then he laughed and said, You two might as well be on a billboard for medical visas. Still, it took months to gather all the documentation, witness them, and submit them, and then to travel back and forth from the American consulate in Chennai. Even so, they rejected Poornima’s visa initially, and she had to reapply for a tourist visa, which they delayed again, at the last minute, after they’d bought their plane tickets, so that now Guru had to pay change fees and a bribe to a consulate official, and he grumbled incessantly, but she knew it was still lucrative for him, even after all these expenses.
While they waited for the visas, Poornima slowly began selling away her things. She didn’t have much, only a cot and the stove, some dishes, and a small suitcase she’d bought to store her clothes. She sold the cot for a hundred rupees and slept on the mat that had been underneath. She kept the stove for the time being but promised it to her landlady when she left. The suitcase, made of a flimsy, dented plastic, which she’d bought for sixty rupees at Maidan Bazaar, she threw out, and bought herself a new one. “Made for foreign,” the man at the shop said, slapping the side of the suitcase. She carried it home, filled it with her few clothes, took out all the money she had in the bank—everything she’d saved since paying for the passport—hardly adding up to a thousand dollars, once converted, and put that, too, into a secret side pocket of her new suitcase, and then she waited.
On the morning of their flight, there was one final delay: Madhavi. She refused to come out of her room. There was no lock on the inside, but she had shoved a broom or a stick into the handle of the door, and rebuffed all their pleas to come out, or to let them in. Guru waited, cursing her mother and father, all the way to her great-great-grandparents, and when Poornima asked to talk to her, he said, “No. No, you don’t talk to her. Your only job is to deliver her.” But when, after five minutes, she still hadn’t opened the door, he relented. “Fine. Talk to her. Tell her another five minutes before we break it open.” As it was, Madhavi hadn’t offered a word of explanation to the madam or the other girls, but when Poornima leaned into the door and said, “Madhavi, open the door. Open it. Don’t you want to go to America? Everybody wants to go to America.”
There was a slight shuffling, and then a whimper. And then a thin voice said, “I do.”
“Then what is it? Come out.”
“I’m afraid.”
Poornima stepped back. Of course she was. She had no idea what awaited her in America. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll be there with you.”
“But that’s what I’m afraid of,” she said.
“What?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Your face. It scares me. I had a dream, when I was little, and I saw a face just like yours.”
Poornima laughed out loud. And then she grew silent. She said, “Madhavi,” and then she stopped. She felt something rise inside of her, something bitter, something angry, and she spit out, “You fool.” She heard the girl back away from the door. “You fool,” she cried again, and heard the girl whimper. What a fool you are, she thought, fuming. What fools we all are. We girls. Afraid of the wrong things, at the wrong times. Afraid of a burned face, when outside, outside waiting for you are fires you cannot imagine. Men, holding matches up to your gasoline eyes. Flames, flames all around you, licking at your just-born breasts, your just-bled body. And infernos. Infernos as wide as the world. Waiting to impoverish you, make you ash, and even the wind, even the wind. Even the wind, my dear, she thought, watching you burn, willing it, passing over you, and through you. Scattering you, because you are a girl, and because you are ash.
And you’re afraid of me?
She went to where Guru was waiting and said, “Break it down.” When he looked at her uncomprehendingly, she said, “The door. Break it down.”
*
They left in the afternoon, in mid-September. Chennai to Mumbai to Doha to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, they waited five hours in a busy transit lounge. So far, Madhavi had avoided her entirely, wedged into the corner of her window seat and hardly speaking. She hadn’t eaten on the plane, only picked at the food. When Poornima told her to eat, she said, “I don’t like it.” In Frankfurt, Poornima watched people coming and going. Travelers from all different places, hurrying home or away from home. The transit lounge had no windows, but Poornima raised her face to the ceiling and thought she could scent the mountains of Switzerland, she was so close. She then looked over and saw that Madhavi was staring at a display of pastries at the coffee shop near where they were sitting. She said, “Wait here,” and went and bought one for her.
She watched the girl eat.