4
A heat wave settled into Indravalli in the days after the marriage viewing. Poornima began getting up in the dark to do the morning chores. Getting water at the well, cooking for the day, sweeping and washing—all of it had to be done before the sun came up. Once the sun touched the horizon, licked even the mere tip of it, the earth burned as if lit on fire. The air, through the mornings and afternoons, was still and hot, searing; a thin breeze drifted along in the evenings, but that too was hardly a whimper. Poornima sat at the charkha in the afternoons, spinning listlessly, and waited for dinnertime. She couldn’t visit Savitha during the day, while she was at the loom: her father was in the weaving hut, too, watching them from his own loom. In the afternoons, she took their tea to them, but she and Savitha hardly exchanged a glance. Besides, Poornima’s father was furious. The Repalle family was now demanding an even larger dowry, double what had previously been discussed. “Double,” her father hissed, “for your insolence.” They’d also asked for a set of gold bangles for their daughter, the groom’s younger sister. “Gold,” her father repeated, “gold, gold, gold. Do you understand? Gold. How do you suppose I get the money to buy gold?” His eyes, already bloodshot and inflamed from the heat, gaped at his daughter. “And I’ve got another one after you. In what? Two or three years? And that friend of yours. Savitha. What do you think she asked me the other day? She asked me if she could use the loom, after work. Come in early, leave later. My loom. And she asked, just like that, as if I owed it to her.” He shook his head, swiping at a mosquito on his arm. “It’s your audacity,” he said. “It’s the audacity of you girls, you modern girls, that will be your ruin. That will be my ruin.”
“Why?” Poornima asked.
“Why what?”
“Why does she want to come in extra?”
“How should I know?” her father said. “Why don’t you ask her?” Poornima stood looking at him. He slapped at another mosquito. “Well, don’t just stand there. Get me the swatter.”
She asked Savitha the next day at lunch. The air in the hut was liquid; it throbbed white and raw with heat. Flies buzzed listlessly, lifting a little off the ground and then settling back, as if exhausted from the effort. Savitha was sweating from sitting at the loom. Beads of perspiration stood at her hairline, studded her collarbone. Poornima could smell the scent of her body: jungled, musky. Not the slightest whiff of laundry cake or a bit of sandalwood soap or even talcum powder. Animal: that was her scent.
Savitha stopped eating and listened as Poornima told her about the Repalle people, and how they were asking for more dowry. “Can your father give it to them?”
“I don’t think so. He can barely afford the dowry he’s offering now.”
“So it’s done.”
Poornima shrugged. “Maybe. Everyone is furious, though.”
“Because you wouldn’t sing? What are we? Trained monkeys?”
Poornima didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “Why do you want to work longer at the loom? Why did you ask my father if you could?”
Savitha took a bite of her rice and sambar. Her eyes twinkled. “I’m making you something. I’m making you a sari. That’s why I asked your father if I could use the loom. Do you think he’ll let me?”
“A sari? But how? Where will you get the thread? How will you make two saris at once? You can’t.”
“That’s why I wanted to come in extra. I’ll finish the sari for your father by working after hours. And then, when that’s done, I can start yours on a Saturday night, work all day Sunday, and have it done by Monday morning. And the threads? I got those from the collective. They had extra. Apparently somebody dyed them the wrong color. Indigo. They can’t dye over it, or they don’t want to. Either way, they gave it to me for cheap.”
“A sari in one day?”
“Two, if I work day and night.”
“That’s ridiculous. You can’t work without sleeping for two days. Besides, why? Why do you want to make me a sari?”
“It’ll be my wedding present to you. You will eventually get married, you know. Not to this guy in Repalle, I hope. I hope it’s somebody in Indravalli. But when you do, I can’t afford to give you anything else. Besides, look at this,” she said, holding up a handful of rice. “No one has ever cooked for me. My mother must’ve, but I don’t remember it. As long as I can remember, I’ve cooked for myself, and for my parents and brothers and sisters. And the bananas. I know you save your money to buy them for me. But it’s not just the cooking. It’s everything. Everything. From the way you sit and spin the charkha, as if you weren’t spinning thread at all, but as if you were spinning the strangest stories, the loveliest dreams. And the way you set the tea down next to me when I’m at the loom. And the way you hold the pot of water when we’re walking back from the well, as if nothing, nothing in the world, could match the finery, the fineness, of that pot of water. Don’t you see, Poori? Everything else is so bland, so colorless, except you. But that indigo.” She smiled. “The least I can do is make you a sari. I know how to do that. And a few sleepless nights won’t matter. Imagine when I see it on you.”
Poornima wanted to get up, pull Savitha up from her plate, and embrace her. No one—not ever—had thought to make something for her. Her mother, of course, but she was dead. And the weight of her mother’s hand, holding the comb in her hair, was all she had left of her. At times, many times, she gripped that memory, that weight, as if it alone could guide her through dark and savage forest paths, and eventually, she hoped, into a clearing, but it wasn’t true. It couldn’t. All that memory could do was give small solace. One drop after another after another, like the glucose drip that had punctured and bled her mother’s arm when she’d been in the hospital. It had been nothing. Not really. Sugar. They had dripped sugar into her. “To keep her strength up,” the doctors had said. As if sugar were a stand against cancer. But Savitha, Savitha wanted to make her a sari. A sari she could wind around her body and hold to her face. Not a memory, not a scent, not a thing that drifts away. But a sari. She could take that sari and weep into it, she could stretch it across a rooftop, a hot sand, wear it to the Krishna and wade into its waters, she could wrap herself in its folds, cocoon herself against the night, she could sleep, she could dream.
5
The owl was right: negotiations with the family from Repalle fell apart. They refused to budge from their dowry demands, though Ramayya did get them to agree to accept one gold bangle for the sister instead of two. “One, two. What does it matter? I can’t afford half a gold bangle. Let alone the dowry,” her father said.
“They’ve seen her. That’s the thing,” Ramayya said. When Poornima brought Ramayya his tea, he looked at her with such distaste that she thought he might fling the tea back in her face. She moved away. “Shy,” he said with disgust. “You’re not shy. You’re rude. You and your father are lucky I’m still willing to help. Word’s gotten around, you know. Everyone between here and the Godavari knows about you. Who would want you now?”
When Ramayya left, Poornima’s father slapped her, hard. Then he grabbed her by the hair. He said, “You see this? You see what you’ve done?” His grip on her hair tightened and he said, “The next time somebody asks you to sing, what’re you going to do?”
Poornima blinked. She held back tears. Her scalp burned, hairs snapped like electric wires. Her brothers and sister crowded around the door of the hut to see. “What?” he growled. “What will you do? Say it. Say it.”