rain, against my father, against what remained, all we had to do was stand closer. Stand together. As if, against rain, against fate, against war, two bodies—the bodies of two girls—were greater than one.
“You fool,” she cried into the dark, and bolted out of the apartment into the night.
5
It took her more than five hours to find the building Mohan had showed her. She was soaked. She’d left her apartment a little before a muddled sunrise, and now it was nearly eleven o’clock. It had stopped raining, but she and her clothes were still damp, cold; she settled on the stoop of the building and waited. Of course, she knew Mohan would come to check on her, but her only strategy was to blink her eyes and proclaim innocence. “Oh,” she planned to say coyly, “I didn’t know I had to be here. It’s my first time shepherding, after all.”
In the first hour, only two people came out of the building, neither of them Indian. After the first person came out, she slipped in through the swinging door and considered knocking on every apartment, but when she snuck up to the top of the first flight of stairs, she peeked around the corner and saw an old Indian man sitting in a drab room, his chair tilted toward the half-open door. He was seemingly absorbed in the television show, but Poornima knew better—he was policing the stairwell. She abandoned her plan and went outside again. In the second hour, a man parked a small lorry in front of the building and came to the door holding a box in his hands. He pushed one of the buttons and said, “Package,” into the wall, and the door began to buzz. He went inside.
Poornima tried the same. She avoided the button that read 1B, as that was what the door of the Indian man’s apartment had read, but she pressed the buttons to the other apartments. Most of them didn’t answer or weren’t home. One did answer, and Poornima, in her accented English, said, “Are you Indian, please?” The other end was silent for a moment, and then a woman’s voice said, “What is this about? I just got a package.”
Poornima sat back down on the stoop.
She waited until five o’clock in the evening and then started on the hour’s walk home, made even longer because she got lost twice. She showered when she got back to the apartment and made rice, and when she heard the knock on the door, she knew it was Mohan, come to check on her. He hardly stayed five minutes; he scanned the room, and then her face, and then he left.
The next day, she was smarter: she took a packet of rice for lunch and got to the building at seven in the morning. She did this for three days, and finally, on the fourth, she realized she must be there during the wrong times, and so on the fourth day, she got there midafternoon and stayed late into the night. This time, she knew for certain that she would miss Mohan, and that simply pleading ignorance might not be enough; she decided she’d buy something on her way home, something she’d desperately needed, to show for her absence. She hoped it would be enough.
A car slowed in front of the building. Poornima crept into the shadows, away from the streetlights and the ones spilling from windows, and waited. She couldn’t see the driver, but someone got out of the car, and as they approached the building, Poornima saw that it was Madhavi. She walked slowly up the drive, bent somehow from the last time she’d seen her. Poornima waited until the car pulled away, and when she revealed herself, feigning concern and delight, she saw that Madhavi’s expression was grayer, more tired under the sallow bulb hanging over the entranceway, or maybe from the long day of cleaning. When she noticed Poornima, Madhavi’s eyes widened. “Akka! What are you doing here?”
Big sister. She’d never called her big sister before. “How are you? Are they treating you well? Are you getting enough to eat?”
Madhavi shrugged. “Why are you here?”
“Come,” Poornima said, hoping there was a back way, “let’s talk inside. Have some tea.”
Her face darkened. Her voice grew panicked. “No. No, you can’t. No one is allowed inside. They warned us.”
Poornima made her eyes go kind. She nearly smiled. “It’s me, after all. Mohan showed me where you lived, just so I could visit you.”
“He