That night Poornima tried to sleep. She said to herself, You can’t go out in the dark, in a strange town, in a country not even your own, in which you arrived all of ten hours ago, looking for one particular building and for one particular person in that building. So she tried to sleep. But she couldn’t. She was jet-lagged, and the time difference between India and Seattle was twelve and a half hours, so basically, night was day and day was night, though Poornima didn’t know any of this. She only tossed and turned in the sleeping bag, rolling some along the smooth wooden floor. Around three or four A.M., she began to doze, but she was jolted awake. She felt a sudden chill. What if Savitha had already been sold to another ring? In another city? What if the trail was dead? What if this was the end, and she’d lost her scent forever?
Her breathing became ragged; she got up and drank a glass of water. She went to the window. It was raining; streaks of water maundered down the glass. She remembered then, looking into the dark, the rain, something that had happened long ago, a few months after she and Savitha had met.
It had been the monsoon season. She and Savitha had gone to the market. It had been a Sunday, and most of the shops were closed, but the tobacco shop was open. Poornima’s father had rolled the last of his leaves the previous evening, and so, before lying down for his nap, he’d told her to go to the market and fetch him two rupees’ worth of tobacco. Savitha had arrived just as Poornima had been getting ready to leave, though both of them, of course, had been barefoot—Savitha because she had no shoes, and Poornima because her flimsy sandals (passed down from her mother) would’ve been useless if it started to rain, getting caught, or ripped, in the muddy sludge. Still, they had taken their time walking through the market—the sky overhead had been overcast, but there was no rain. Not yet.
Poornima remembered that they had stopped and peered into the window of the bangle shop, with its row after row of colorful glass bangles, a color to match every shade of sari. “Can you imagine,” Poornima had said, breathless, “having ones to go with every sari?” Savitha had only laughed, and had led her past the paan shop and the dry goods store and the grain mill, all of them closed.
They’d entered the produce market, and the vendors had eyed them sleepily. They squatted on the ground, bits of dirty plastic tarp held at the ready, for the coming rain, to cover their heads and their capsicums and their squashes and their cilantro. They’d been able to tell that Poornima and Savitha had no money to spend—vendors always could. At one turning—as they’d followed behind a bullock cart hauling unsold produce back to the farm—a tiny round eggplant had fallen out of the cart. Savitha had squealed with delight and run and picked it up. “Look, Poori! What luck.”
Yes, Poornima had thought, what luck.
They’d been nearly home when the rain had started. Poornima had thought they should run for it, but Savitha had pointed to a nearby sandalwood tree. She’d said, “No, let’s wait under there.” And so they’d huddled together under the tree’s branches and watched the downpour. It had been a squall, and Poornima had known it would soon pass, but she’d hoped—in the way she’d once hoped that a handful of fruits and cashews would save her mother from cancer, from death—that the rain would last the rest of the days of her life. Why? She couldn’t say. It hadn’t made sense. But it was true: Even as they’d both shivered with cold. Even as their hair and their clothes had dripped with rain. Even as her father had waited, and she’d known he’d be furious when he saw the damp tobacco.
There had been a gust of wind then, and the leaves of the sandalwood tree had shuddered, and cold, fat raindrops had splashed down their necks and backs. Tickled their scalps. They’d laughed and laughed and laughed.
The rain had poured harder. Come down in relentless sheets. Savitha had put out her arm and drawn Poornima deeper under the tree. To protect her from the rain. At the time, Poornima had shivered and felt it to be true: she did feel protected, she felt safe.
But now, standing at the window of an empty apartment, in Seattle, holding an empty glass, Poornima laughed, half mocking, her lips trembling, her eyes growing hot, and she thought, How foolish. How foolish we were, how foolish you were, she bristled, to think you could protect me from rain. Against such a thing as rain. As if rain were a knife, as if it were a battle. And you, my shield. How foolish you were, how stupid you are, Poornima thought, nearly weeping with rage. With anger at Savitha’s ignorance, her infuriating innocence. To find herself in this place, passed like a beedie between the hands of men. Don’t you see, we were never safe. Not against rain, not against anything. And you, she railed, all you thought to do was huddle under that indifferent tree. As if, against rain, against my father, against what remained, all we had to do was stand closer. Stand together. As if, against rain, against fate, against war, two bodies—the bodies of two girls—were greater than one.
“You fool,” she cried into the dark, and bolted out of the apartment into the night.
5
It took her more than five hours to find the building Mohan had showed her. She was soaked. She’d left her apartment a little before a muddled sunrise, and now it was nearly eleven o’clock. It had stopped raining, but she and her clothes were still damp, cold; she settled on the stoop of the building and waited. Of course, she knew Mohan would come to check on her, but her only strategy was to blink her eyes and proclaim innocence. “Oh,” she planned to say coyly, “I didn’t know I had to be here. It’s my first time shepherding, after all.”
In the first hour, only two people came out of the building, neither of them Indian. After the first person came out, she slipped in through the swinging door and considered knocking on every apartment, but when she snuck up to the top of the first flight of stairs, she peeked around the corner and saw an old Indian man sitting in a drab room, his chair tilted toward the half-open door. He was seemingly absorbed in the television show, but Poornima knew better—he was policing the stairwell. She abandoned her plan and went outside again. In the second hour, a man parked a small lorry in front of the building and came to the door holding a box in his hands. He pushed one of the buttons and said, “Package,” into the wall, and the door began to buzz. He went inside.
Poornima tried the same. She avoided the button that read 1B, as that was what the door of the Indian man’s apartment had read, but she pressed the buttons to the other apartments. Most of them didn’t answer or weren’t home. One did answer, and Poornima, in her accented English, said, “Are you Indian, please?” The other end was silent for a moment, and then a woman’s voice said, “What is this about? I just got a package.”
Poornima sat back down on the stoop.
She waited until five o’clock in the evening and then started on the hour’s walk home, made even longer because she got lost twice. She showered when she got back to the apartment and made rice, and when she heard the knock on the door, she knew it was Mohan, come to check on her. He hardly stayed five minutes; he scanned the room, and then her face, and then he left.
The next day, she was smarter: she took a packet of rice for lunch and got to the building at seven in the morning. She did this for three days, and finally, on the fourth, she realized she must be there during the wrong times, and so on the fourth day, she got there midafternoon and stayed late into the night. This time, she knew for certain that she would miss Mohan, and that simply pleading ignorance might not be enough; she decided she’d buy something on her way home, something she’d desperately needed, to show for her absence. She hoped it would be enough.
A car slowed in front of the building. Poornima crept into the shadows, away from the streetlights and the ones spilling from windows, and waited. She couldn’t see the driver, but someone got out of the car, and as they approached the building, Poornima saw that it was Madhavi. She walked slowly up the drive, bent somehow from the last time she’d seen her. Poornima waited until the car pulled away, and when she revealed herself, feigning concern and delight, she saw that Madhavi’s expression was grayer, more tired under the sallow bulb hanging over the entranceway, or maybe from the long day of cleaning. When she noticed Poornima, Madhavi’s eyes widened. “Akka! What are you doing here?”
Big sister. She’d never called her big sister before. “How are you? Are they treating you well? Are you getting enough to eat?”