Think of it?
No, she wasn’t quiet anymore, Poornima thought. Not at all. And she was strangely obsessed with food: the thing with the bananas and yogurt rice, calling her Poori, the way she licked her fingers, as if she would never eat another meal. Poornima’s father had said her family was poor, poorer even than they were, which was hard to imagine. Six children in all, her father had told her, old Subbudu so frail that he’d long ago given up sitting at the loom, her mother cleaning, cooking for other families, no better than a common servant, he’d said derisively, and her older brothers moved to Hyderabad, promising to send money home, though the family hadn’t yet received a single paisa. And with four daughters unmarried. “Four,” her father had exclaimed, shaking his head. “The old man’s done for,” he’d said. “He might be better off finding four big rocks and a rope and leading them to the nearest well.”
“Which one is Savitha?”
“Oldest. Of the girls. Not even enough for her dowry.” So her marriage was delayed, too, just like Poornima’s. Her father narrowed his eyes then and looked at her. “Not eating too much, is she? Tucking a little away for her sisters?”
“No,” Poornima said. “Hardly anything.”
*
What Poornima liked most about Savitha—in addition to her hands—was her clarity. She had never known anyone—not her father, not a teacher, not the temple priest—to be as certain as Savitha was. But certain about what? she asked herself. About bananas in yogurt rice? About sunrises? Yes, but about more than that. About her grip on the picking stick, about her stride, about the way her sari was knotted around her waist. About everything, Poornima realized, that she herself was unsure about. As the weeks went by, Savitha began to linger a little longer over her lunch; she came earlier to help with the morning chores, though she must’ve had chores to do at her own house beforehand. She and Poornima also began to go to the well together for water.
On one of these trips, as they were walking back together, the clay pots of water balanced on their hips, they came across a crowd of young men about their age. There were four of them, clustered around the beedie shop, smoking, when one of them, a boy of about twenty or twenty-two, thin as a reed but with a thick shock of hair, noticed Poornima and Savitha and pointed.
“Look over there,” he called to the other men. “Look at those hips. Those curves. Such fine examples of the Indian landscape.”
Then another of the men whistled, and another, or maybe the same, said, “Not even Gandhiji could’ve resisted.” They all laughed. “Which one do you want, boys,” he continued, “the yellow or the blue?”
Poornima discovered he was talking about the color of their saris.
“The blue!”
“The yellow,” another yelled.
“I want to be the clay pot,” another said, and they all laughed again.
There was no way to get around them, they realized. The men came closer and surrounded them. The circle they formed was porous but menacing. Poornima looked at Savitha, but she was looking straight past them, as if the men weren’t even there. “What do we do?” Poornima whispered.
“Walk,” she said, her voice firm, steady and as solid as the temple on Indravalli Konda, the one on which Savitha’s gaze seemed to be fixed.
Poornima glanced at her and then she glanced at her feet.
“Don’t look down,” Savitha said. “Look up.”
She lifted her gaze slowly and saw that the men were now in a tight huddle. They were jumping up and down like crickets; one grabbed Savitha’s pallu and yanked it. She slapped his hand away. This brought out a long howl from them, and more dancing and laughter, as if the slap had been an invitation. Poornima was mildly aware of other women, standing at the entrance to their huts. Boys, they would be thinking, shaking their heads. Poornima felt a rising panic; this was a common occurrence in the village, but the men usually left them alone after a little teasing, a few winks. These men were following them. And there were four of them. She looked at Savitha. Her face was as determined as before, staring ahead of her, straight at the temple and Indravalli Konda as if she could bore a hole through both. The men seemed to sense something in her, something like defiance—and this defiance, its audacity seemed to enliven them even more. “Darling baby,” they said in English, and then in Telugu, “why don’t you choose.” They were talking to Savitha.
And this. This was the signal she was waiting for.
She set down her pot of water, straightened her back, and stood still. Absolutely still. And with her stillness came an even greater stillness. The people standing at the entrances to their huts, the bend of the street leading to Indravalli Konda, the fields of rice all around, and even the clacking of the looms, ubiquitous in the village at all hours, were strangely quieted. They could almost hear the Krishna, a few kilometers away—the lapping of its waters, the flapping of the wings of water birds.
“I know who I want,” Savitha said.
The first man, the thin one with the abundant hair, whooped and hollered and skipped around the circle like a child. “She knows. She knows. Sorry, boys, better luck next time.”
“Which one? Which one?” they chirped.
Savitha looked at each of them in turn, met their eyes, and then she walked a step or two in each of their directions, as if taunting them with her choice, and then she smiled—her flash of teeth as gleaming and virtuous as the white of the distant temple—stepped toward Poornima, took her hand, and said, “I choose her.” With these words, she picked up her pot of water, tugged at Poornima’s arm, and pulled her out of the circle. The men let them go but hissed and growled. “Her?” they groaned. “She’s uglier than you are.”
When they got home, Poornima was trembling.
“Don’t,” Savitha told her. “It’s no good.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Don’t you see? I could’ve chosen a tree. A dog.”
“Yeah, but they could’ve hurt us.”
“I wouldn’t have let them,” she said.
*
And so, there they were: those five words. They were a song, an incantation. Poornima felt a weight, an awful and terrifying weight, erode. Had the weight been borne from her mother’s death? Or from being an ox? Or was it from something less obvious, like the passage of time, or the endless spinning of her charkha? Though, when she thought about it, they were the same thing, weren’t they? It hardly mattered. She and Savitha became such close friends that neither could eat a single meal without wondering if the other would’ve preferred more salt, or if she liked brinjal with potatoes. Breakfast was suddenly their least favorite meal, and Sunday their least favorite day. Poornima even saved a paisa here and there and began to buy bananas whenever she could. The first time she did, she presented one to Savitha at lunch, when she served her the buttermilk. There had not been enough money for yogurt that morning. Savitha didn’t seem to mind. She mixed her watery buttermilk and rice with as much relish as if it were the thickest, creamiest yogurt she’d ever eaten. Poornima watched her, and then she held out the banana.
Savitha gasped. “Are you sure?”
“Of course. I bought it especially for you.”
She was so delighted that she became curiously shy. “My mother says if I’d eaten fewer bananas in my life, they would have had the money for my dowry.”
Poornima smiled and looked down.
Savitha stopped eating. “When did she die?”
“Four months ago.”
Savitha mixed the banana into her rice. First she took off the entire peel then mushed it with her thumb and fingers into the rice. The banana ended up in unsightly lumps, strewn across the carpet of rice like wading bandicoots. It was all a gloppy, unappetizing mess.
“You like that?”