There was no one behind the counter. The key was where she’d left it.
She opened the door of the bathroom, saw her reflection in the mirror, in the light through the open door, and slammed it closed as she crumpled to the floor. And here, then: another clearing. Her money was gone. Her clothes were gone. The photo and the small white rectangle of paper were gone. Even the remaining loaf of bread and the potato chips and the apple were gone. But of all the things that were gone, that they had taken, it was Poornima’s half-made sari that pinned her to the floor.
The rain started. She could hear it, clambering like little feet over the metal roof, hurrying on their way. To where?
East, she thought, east.
And what was there to the east? Nothing. Just as there had been nothing to the west.
She began to sob, and the sobs became a wail, and the wail became a low and gentle hum. She looked over, humming. Another toilet. It, too, was humming. She crawled over to it and put her arms around the cool porcelain. She smiled. But then the strong stench of urine reached into her head, cut her reverie with a knife, and it snapped her back—or was it the jiggling of the door handle that snapped her back? She didn’t know, but she saw now that there was so little to be done. The single naked bulb above her ached, in its lonely, buzzing way. Her skin, illuminated by the bulb, shrieked with sorrow. Her thoughts folded and unfolded in pain. For it was here, under this white light and in this horrible stench, that Savitha realized how lost she was. How mislaid. How all the beacons of the world, standing all in a row, couldn’t save her.
Poornima
1
It came down to this: her only chance of finding Savitha was to invoke her. Talking about poetry was well and good, but Poornima was running out of time, and what was the worst Mohan could do? Ignore her? Throw her out of the apartment? Deny knowing Savitha? Put her on an earlier flight back to India? Quarantine her until that flight?
None of those was worse than neglecting to use the last and only weapon she had.
That evening, she dispensed with preparing dinner, and when Mohan arrived, she simply handed him a glass. She waited for him to take his first sip of whiskey, pushed her gaze toward him, and said, “I became a shepherd for one reason. And one reason alone. To find someone.”
Mohan studied her, nonplussed. He gestured toward her face. “Him? The guy who did that to you?”
Poornima hardly heard him. She spoke out into the room, dauntless now, insentient, and as if she were alone. “He doesn’t exist for me. No, the person I’m looking for is my friend. Her name is Savitha. That’s who I’m looking for, why I’m here.”
Mohan seemed to shudder at something she didn’t understand, and though his face was lost in the gray gloom of the far wall, Poornima felt his shudder through the floor, suspended in the air between them. Into that air, he said, “How do you know her?”
Poornima looked up. “She’s from my village. The last time I saw her was four years ago.”
He held his face against the light, away from it, as if they were locked in battle.
“Do you?”
“No,” he said, and Poornima knew he did.
“I have to find her,” she continued. “I need your help.”
He swirled the whiskey in his glass. His body stiffened. He looked at the floor. “She left.”
“What?”
“Two days ago.”
“Two days?” Poornima felt a scream, a hot pulsing pain, rise to her throat. Two days! “Where? Where did she go?”
Silence.
“You have to know something.”
“She took a bus. That’s my guess.”
“But to where? Where? These, these girls—they don’t know anybody, any other places. They don’t even know English. Where could she go? And without money.”
Silence again.
Poornima’s mind raced. Her plane ticket was through JFK. In one week’s time. What was better, to stay here or to go to New York? What if Mohan didn’t let her stay? What was the point of staying? When Savitha was gone? She knew, she knew already: if he made her go, she would simply walk out of the airport when she got to New York. And she would keep walking. Would anybody stop her? Could they? And even if they didn’t, what then? Where would she go? How would she begin? Such a big country—how long would a thousand dollars last? No matter: she would meet her from the other end. And then she thought, enraged, She was here. She was here the whole time and I didn’t find her. I was looking in the wrong places, walking the wrong streets. For two weeks.
“Money, she had.”
She looked up at him, as if waking from a deep sleep and surprised to find him there. What was he talking about?
“What money?”
“She took it. From my wallet. Not much. Won’t get her very far.”
“But how far? Where?”
“And half a photograph.”
“Where would it get her? Tell me.”
“I don’t know why she took that,” he said.
“A photograph? Of what?”
“Some place I told her about. Me as a kid.”
“What place?”
“Spearfish Canyon.”
“Is that a city?”
“Near a city. In South Dakota.”
“Where is that?”
“Midway. Not quite.”
Poornima looked away, and then she looked back at him. “What did you tell her about it?”
Mohan shrugged. He said shyly, “I don’t know. Nothing much. Just what I remembered. That it was a perfect place. That’s how I remember it from when I was a kid. That it was perfect. That’s what I told her. But then—but then she asked me the strangest thing.”
“What?”
“She asked me whether it was like flute song.”
“Flute song?”
Poornima’s voice trailed off. Her face hardened into a kind of resolve, a purpose, a slow cooling, as of lava, a firming, as of the desert after a rain. And so it was: her face took on the characteristics of landscape, of natural forces, of tectonic plates and pressure and finding of place, of settling into a destiny. It no longer mattered: the logic of a thing. What mattered was the conviction in the pit of her stomach, burning its way through her body: Savitha was there. If she wasn’t there, she was nowhere. And that Poornima could not abide. She had traveled half the circumference of the earth, and traveled all these many, many years. And for what? To miss her by two days? No. No, that she would not abide. Out of the darkness, she said to him, “I have one week left here. And then I get on a plane to New York. And you will never see me again. But I will pay you. I will give you my entire savings. Will you take me? Will you take me to this Spearfish Canyon? You don’t have to, I know that. But will you?”
Mohan began to chuckle, but then his face pulled back. He was quiet. He eyed her with disbelief, but also with a kind of awe. “I can’t. I have to be here. You know that. You’re talking about leaving in a few days. I couldn’t possibly.”
“Not a few days. Tomorrow. Tonight, if you can manage it.”
Now he did laugh out loud. But it was a sad person’s laugh, not very deep, as thin and unconvincing as pond ice in spring. Afterward, there was silence again. They sat on the floor, facing each other, in a silence that was heavy, that hung like mercury. “You’re not serious,” he finally said.
She’d been wrong: She had one weapon left. She had the poem.
“These are the stairs, Mohan. She’s two days gone. There is no time. There is no time.”
The room spun. It spun like a charkha. He rose unsteadily, took his car keys from where he’d placed them on the counter. He said, “Twenty hours, give or take. Pack a bag.”