Girls Burn Brighter

“Weaving is dying. It’s death,” her father said. “I heard they have fancy machines now.” Poornima knew that was why her father was looking to marry her off to the farmer. He laughed bitterly and said, “They may have invented a machine to make cloth, but let’s see them invent a machine to grow food.”

Poornima laughed, too. But she was hardly listening to him. She was thinking that if she could get her father to buy more kerosene, she could weave at night, by lantern light, and then he wouldn’t have to hire someone.

But the following week, a girl leaned into the doorway of the hut. Poornima looked up from her cooking. She couldn’t see the girl’s face—the sun was behind her—but by the curve of her body, by the way it bent into the low doorway with the grace of a strong and swaying palm, she knew she was young. Her voice confirmed it, though it was more gentle, and older, than she expected. “Your father?”

She could obviously see Poornima. “Come back in the evening,” she said, squinting. “He’ll be home before dark.” She turned away and reached to take the lid off the pot of rice; as she did, the edge of it burned her finger. She snatched the hand away—the finger was already turning red—and put it in her mouth. When she looked up again, the girl was still there. She hesitated, and the image of the palm came back: but now it seemed like a young palm tree, just a sapling, one that wasn’t quite sure which way to bend, which way the sun would rise and set, which way it was expected to grow. “Yes?” Poornima said, taken aback that she was still there.

The girl shook her head, or seemed to, and then she left. Poornima stared at the place she had just been. Where did she go? Poornima nearly jumped up and followed her. Her leaving seemed to empty them in some way—the entrance to the hut, and the hut itself. But how? Who was she? Poornima didn’t know; she didn’t recognize her from the well where she went to draw water, or as one of the girls in the neighborhood. She guessed she was from the temple, come to ask for donations, or maybe just a peddler, come to sell vegetables. Then she smelled the rice burning, and forgot all about her.

*

A week later the girl was seated at her mother’s loom. Poornima knew it was her because the room filled again. She’d forgotten it was even empty. Filled, not with a body or a scent or a presence: that was her father, seated at the other loom. No, she filled it with a sudden awareness, a feeling of waking, though it had been light for hours. Poornima set a cup of tea down next to her father’s loom. He glanced at her and said, “Set another plate for lunch.”

Poornima turned to go. She was now standing behind her. The girl was wearing a cheap cotton sari; her blouse was threadbare, though still a vivid blue, the color of the Krishna at the hour of twilight. There was a large round birthmark on her right forearm, on the inside of her wrist. Striking because it was at the exact point where her veins seemed to meet, before they spilled into her hand. The birthmark seemed to actually gather them up—the veins—as if it were ribbon that tied together a bouquet. A bouquet? A birthmark? Poornima looked away, embarrassed. As she hurried past, the strange girl pulled the picking stick of the loom out toward her, and in that moment, Poornima couldn’t help it: she saw her hand. Much too big for her thin body, more like a man’s, but gentle, just as her voice had been gentle; though what truly struck Poornima was that her hand gripped the picking stick with such force, such solidity, that it seemed she might never let go. The pivot of her entire body seemed to be pulling the picking stick. To hold it tight. Poornima was astonished. She’d never known a hand could do that: contain so much purpose.

That night, after dinner, was when her father first mentioned her. The deepa on Indravalli Konda was dark, and Poornima was putting her siblings to bed. Her youngest brother was only seven years old, her sister was eleven, and she had a set of twin brothers, twelve. They were relatively good children, but sometimes Poornima thought her mother might’ve died from tiredness. She was unrolling their sleeping mats and telling one of the twins to stop pulling his sister’s hair, when her father, rolling tobacco, said, “You eat with her. Make sure she doesn’t take more than her share.”

Poornima turned. “Who?”

“Savitha.”

So that was her name.

Poornima stood still, a mat half unrolled. “She’s all I could find,” her father said, lying back on his hemp-rope bed, smoking. “The weaving collective said I should be happy. As if my wages are low. Besides, she should be grateful. That father of hers, old Subbudu, can hardly feed himself, let alone that miserable wife and those four daughters.” He yawned. “I hope she’s not as weak as she looks.”

But Poornima, smiling into the dark, knew she wasn’t.

*

Savitha was quiet around Poornima at first. She was a year or two older, Poornima guessed, though neither truly knew their exact ages. Only the birthdates of the boys were recorded in the village. Still, when Poornima asked, over lunch one day, Savitha told her just what her mother had told her: that she was born on the day of a solar eclipse. Her mother had said that while in labor with her, she’d looked out the window and seen the sky darken in midday, and was paralyzed by it. She was convinced she was about to give birth to a rakshasa. She’d told Savitha that in that moment, all her labor pains had subsided and were replaced by fear. What if she was giving birth to a demon? Her mother began to pray and pray, and then she began to tremble, wishing her new baby dead. Wondering if she should kill it herself. That was better, she’d told Savitha, than unleashing evil into the world. Anyone would do the same, she’d told Savitha. But then the eclipse had ended, and her baby was born, and it was just a regular, cooing little baby.

“Your mother must’ve been relieved,” Poornima said.

“Not really. I was still a girl.”

Poornima nodded. She watched her while she ate. Savitha had a healthy appetite, but no more than anyone else who sat at the loom for twelve hours a day.

“That’s why she named me Savitha.”

“What does it mean?”

“What do you think? She thought that if she named me after the sun, it wouldn’t go away again.”

She licked her fingers of rasam, the birthmark on her wrist swaying between her mouth and the plate like a hammock, and then she asked for another helping of rice to eat with yogurt.

“Do you want salt?” Poornima asked.

“I like it sweet. To tell you the truth, what I love with yogurt rice is a banana. I squish it up and mix it in with the rice. Don’t make that face. Not until you try it. It tastes like the sweetest, loveliest sunrise. And I’m not just saying that because of my name. It just does; you should try it.”

“But bananas,” Poornima said, thinking now of her own mother and the two bananas she’d bought for her every day, and how, in the end, they hadn’t made a bit of difference.

“I know. Expensive. But that’s the thing, Poori—do you mind if I call you that?—you shouldn’t eat it at every meal. It’s too good. Too perfect. Would you want to see the sun rise every morning? You’d get used to it; the colors, I mean. You’d get so you’d just turn away.”

“And that’s the same with too much yogurt rice and bananas? I’d just turn away?”

“No. You’d still eat it. You just wouldn’t think of it.”

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