out of the door and running up and down the streets looking for Savitha. Yelling out her name. What good would that do? None. She had to be systematic, and for that she needed Mohan.
He returned that evening with a sleeping bag (which he had to show Poornima how to use), a pillow, and a bag containing a pot, a pan, a few utensils, and some plastic plates and cups. Poornima looked at them, piled on the kitchen counter, and said, “How is the girl? Madhavi?”
He eyed her sternly. “Why?”
“I traveled halfway around the world with her.”
“You no longer have anything to do with her,” he said. “Forget it.” He turned and walked to the front door. When he reached it, Poornima forced her voice to thicken, to break, and said, “They’re loved, you know. You think they’re not, because they’re poor, or because they were sold, or because they have a cleft lip, but somebody loves these girls. Somebody longs for them. Do you understand? They’re loved. You can’t possibly know that kind of love.”
He glared at her with what seemed to her like murder, and she blanched, falling silent, but then his gaze seemed to ebb in some way, and he said, his voice disquieted, “She’s fine.”
“Then show me where she lives. What could it hurt? Take me now, in the dark. She can’t be far, can she? I just want to see.”
She held her breath. She thought he would refuse again, but he looked at her for a long moment. “This once. Just this once. After this, shut up about it.”
* * *
She didn’t think it possible, but the streets were even quieter than they had been during the day. She rolled down her window, better to see the street names, but she couldn’t make out a single one in the dark, or else Mohan drove so fast past them that she didn’t have a chance to read them. The ones she did glimpse—with her limited English—just looked to her like a jumble of letters. So she began focusing instead on the turns he was making, the number of streets between each turn, and the slope of the streets and the look of the houses and the reach of the trees. Even flowerpots, on the edge of porches, she memorized.
Finally, after ten or so minutes of driving, they reached a narrow street that was long and lined with what looked like cheap apartment houses. He drove to the middle of the street, eleven houses in, on the left, pointed to a window on the second floor, and said, “There. See? The light’s on. She’s fine.” Poornima, in the few seconds before he sped up again, noted every feature she could of the shadowed building: the tattered brown awning over the front door, the lighted windows, six across and each hung with cheap curtains, a tree with flat, dark green leaves at the edge of the building, one of its branches angled toward the window that Mohan had pointed out, Savitha’s window, maybe, the branch twisted, trying to reach inside. Would it look the same during the day, or was it a trick of the light? She needed more. She looked for a star, any star, but the sky was now completely smeared with clouds. They were waiting at a traffic light, at the end of the street.
“Are the stars here the same as in India?”
“More or less,” he said.
“So the North Star,” she said, her voice relaxed, as if only mildly curious, making conversation, “it’s behind us?”
“No, it would be there,” he said, pointing ahead of them.
She said, Oh, as casually as she could manage, and smiled into the dark.
* * *
That night Poornima tried to sleep. She said to herself, You can’t go out in the dark, in a strange town, in a country not even your own, in which you arrived all of ten hours ago, looking for one particular building and for one particular person in that building. So she tried to sleep. But she couldn’t. She was jet-lagged, and the time difference between India and Seattle was twelve and a half hours, so basically, night was day and day was night, though Poornima didn’t know any of this. She only tossed and turned in the sleeping bag, rolling some along the smooth wooden floor. Around three or four A.M., she began to doze, but she was jolted awake. She felt a sudden chill. What if Savitha had already been sold to another ring?