“Try some.” She raised a handful toward Poornima. Poornima shook her head vigorously. Savitha shrugged and ate the rice-and-banana concoction with great relish, closing her eyes as she chewed.
“You know what’s even better than this?”
Poornima wrinkled her nose. “Most things, I would imagine.”
Savitha ignored her. She leaned toward Poornima, as if revealing a secret. “I don’t know for sure, I’ve only heard, but there’s supposed to be this rare fruit. Unbearable, Poori. Pink inside, almost buttery, but with the sweetness of candy. Sweeter. Better even than bananas, better even than sapota. I know, I know, you wouldn’t think it possible, but I heard an old woman talking about it in the marketplace. Years ago. She said it only grew on some island. On the Brahmaputra. Even the way she described the island was lovely. She looked at me, right at me, and she said, ‘You know how Krishna plays the flute for his Radha, wooing her at twilight, just as the cows are coming home? It is that sound. That is the sound of the island. Flute song. Everywhere you go there are the fruit, and there is flute song. Following you like a lover.”
“That’s what she said?”
“Yes.”
“Like flute song?”
“Yes.”
Poornima was silent. “What’s the name of the island?”
“Majuli.”
“Majuli,” Poornima said out loud, slowly, as if tasting the word on her tongue. “And you believed her?”
“Of course I believed her,” Savitha said. “Some of the crowd didn’t, but I did. They said she was senile and had never been north of the abandoned train depot, let alone to the Brahmaputra. But you should’ve seen her face, Poori. How could you not believe her? Lit up like a star.”
Poornima thought for a moment, perplexed. “But how can an island be like flute song? Did she mean she loved the island? Like Krishna loves Radha?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“What then? It’s a song of love, after all.”
“Yes,” Savitha said, “but it’s also a song of hunger.”
Now Poornima was even more confused. “Hunger?”
“Maybe what she meant was that the island was the end of hunger. Or the beginning of it. Or maybe that hunger has no beginning. Or end. Like the sound of Krishna’s flute.”
“But what about love?”
“What is love, Poori?” Savitha said. “What is love if not a hunger?”
3
The following week, Savitha invited Poornima to her house. It was a Sunday. Her father didn’t mind as long as she first cooked and fed her brothers and sister and laid his tobacco and mat out for his afternoon nap. The day was hot; it was March, though already they had to keep to the shade—Savitha ahead, Poornima following close behind her—skidding along under the trees and the overhanging thatched roofs of the huts to keep out of the sun. Savitha lived on the other side of the village, farther from Indravalli Konda but closer to the Krishna. Many of those belonging to the caste of laundresses lived on that side of town, because of its proximity to the water. There were also—discovered on that side of the village—inscriptions dating back to the time of the Cholas, though, being close to the railroad tracks, it was also the village’s primary bathroom, and the inscriptions mostly ignored. Still, the majority who lived there belonged to the caste of weavers, Savitha’s family among them.
Their hut was on a small ridge. The road—more a dirt path—leading to it was lined with scrubs, their leaves and branches already withered and gray from the heat. When Poornima reached down and touched one, a silky film of gray came off the leaf, and she realized it was ash, from the wood fires that were built outside the huts along the path—they being too poor to have even a cooking area inside their huts. Piles of trash also lined the huts, sniffed occasionally by a stray dog or a pig hungry enough to withstand the heat. It was almost time for tiffin, four in the afternoon, but no one seemed to be home. By now, the sky was white, glowing like a brass pot lit from within. Beads of sweat dripped down Poornima’s back. Clung like mist to her scalp.
When they reached the hut, Poornima realized her family was wealthy compared to Savitha’s. They couldn’t even afford palm fronds for the roof of their hut; it was a discarded sheet of corrugated tin. The outside walls of the hut were plastered with cow dung, and a small area of dirt was cleared in front of the scrubs, though it was still scattered with trash—bits of old yellowed newspaper, disintegrating, blackened rags, vegetable skins too rotted even for the tiny piglets that roamed freely from hut to hut. Poornima stepped over these, and when she followed Savitha into the hut, the first thing that overcame her was the smell. It smelled like old, unwashed clothes and sweat and pickled food. It smelled like manure, woodsmoke, dirt. It smelled like poverty. And despair. It smelled like her mother dying.
“We don’t have any milk for tea,” Savitha said. “Do you want one of these?” She held out a tin of biscuits that were clearly meant only for company. Poornima bit into one; it was stale and crumbled into a soft yellow paste in her mouth. “Where is your mother? Your sisters?”
“My mother cooks today. For the family that owns that big house, the one near the market. My sisters go collecting in the afternoons,” Savitha said.
“Collecting what?”
She shrugged. “I usually go with them.”
“Where?”
“Edge of town. By the Christian cemetery.”
Poornima knew that was where the garbage dumps were. Not the small heaps that dotted the village, practically on every doorstep, but the massive ones, three or four in all, where the small heaps were eventually deposited. Poornima had seen them only from a distance—a far mountain range on the southern horizon that only the poorest climbed. Seeking discarded cloth or paper or scraps of metal, food, plastic. Usually children, she knew, but sometimes adults. But always the poorest. She remembered her mother saying once, as they passed them, “Don’t look,” and Poornima had not known whether she meant at the cemetery or at the children scrambling up the heaps. But now, standing in Savitha’s impoverished hut, and with her mother long dead, she thought she understood. Her mother had said don’t look and she’d meant don’t look at either the cemetery or the garbage heaps. She’d meant, don’t look at death, don’t look at poverty, don’t look at how they crawl through life, how they wait for you, stalk you, before they end you.
“You go?”
“Not anymore. Not since I started working for your father.”
Poornima looked out the one window of the hut. It looked out onto Indravalli Konda, and she looked at the temple and felt pride for the first time toward her father; he’d given Savitha a livelihood and led her away from the garbage heaps. She had never thought of him as generous, but she realized generosity could be a quality that was hidden, obscured, veiled as if by ash, like the true color of the leaves on the scrubs outside Savitha’s hut. “But how did you learn to weave?” she asked.
“My parents used to. My mother still has her old charkha,” she said, pointing to a pile of wood in a corner. Pinned above it was a calendar with Shiva and Parvati, with Ganesha and Kartikeya seated on their laps. Next to the broken charkha was a large bundle wrapped in an old sheet, maybe a shawl. A few dented aluminum pots and pans lay in another corner, below a hanging vegetable basket that contained a stray piece of garlic, a distended onion, and a round orange squash. Poornima saw a leftover clump of rice swarming with flies. A frayed bamboo mat leaned next to them. “We used to have a loom. But my father drank it away. A small beedie shop. Not here. In the center of town. He drank that away, too.”
Poornima had never heard of such a thing. The word for alcohol in Telugu was mondhoo, which could mean medicine, or poison. It was considered taboo to even mention the word, and never around women and children. Drinkers were spoken of in hushed voices and considered leprous, or worse. To be standing in the home of a drinker—Poornima shuddered. “Where is he now?”
Her eyes turned to the window. “Up there, probably.”