of red streamers, sparkling even without the sun. Savitha hailed the driver, stepping onto the edge of the road, and when he slowed, she saw that he was young, hardly older than her. Closer up, once she’d climbed into the cabin, she saw that his teeth were the most brilliant white she had ever seen, whiter even than the temple on Indravalli Konda, though his eyes were bleary, red, maybe from the lack of sleep or dust or drink.
“Where are you headed?”
“Depends,” she said. “How far are you going?”
“To Pune.”
“Then that’s where I’m going.”
He smiled, and this time, Savitha wasn’t so sure of the brilliance of his teeth. Their whiteness, yes, but not their brilliance.
It took less than ten minutes, bumping along on the Trunk Road, past the shuttered roadside tea shops, and the dark huts, and the dewy fields of rice, and the sleeping dogs, for the driver’s hand to leave the steering wheel. It didn’t inch along the seat, as Savitha might’ve expected, but simply took flight and landed on her thigh. “I’m in no hurry,” he said. “Are you?”
Savitha took a breath.
She understood, in that very instant, that a door had been opened. Not today, but three days ago. What was this door? she wondered. Why hadn’t she ever known it was there? She had no answer. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to know the answer. Regardless, it was now open, and she was through it. Poornima’s father, of course, had been the one to open it, the one to push her through, and she felt rage, an intense and terrible rage toward him—for no other reason than that he hadn’t asked her what she wanted. He hadn’t said, There is a door. Do you see it? Do you want me to open it? Do you want to see what’s on the other side? But now it was done. And now, she realized, that’s all she’d ever be in the eyes of men: a thing to enter, to inhabit for a time, and then to leave.
They drove on. The lorry driver’s hand inched up her thigh. They drove across the Krishna and turned onto the national highway.
Well, if that were true, then something else also had to be true. She didn’t have to think long on it to figure out what it was; it was like it had been waiting there all along, alongside the road. And it was this: there was yet another door. A smaller door, a more formidable one. A hidden one. But through this other door, she knew, lay the real treasures: her love for Poornima, her love for her parents and her sisters. These treasures gleamed: the feel of cloth, the one against her chest, yes, but really, all cloth. How it lay like a hand (not the lorry driver’s, but a tender one, wanting nothing) against your skin, protecting you, softening with time. They shone through the night, these treasures: the memory (already a memory) of her father’s hands, the way they reached with such fear, such longing, the taste of yogurt rice with banana, the way it was creamy and sweet, both at once, the fill of her heart, the way it swelled but never broke.
“Stop here,” she said.
The lorry driver’s hand paused, nearly at her crotch.
“Here?”
“Right here.”
“But we’re hardly past Vijayawada. You said Pune.”
She looked at him, at his dark lips, the top one nearly completely curtained by his mustache. Then he smiled, as if she might smile back. But she only looked some more, at the red of his eyes and the white of his teeth. He slowed the lorry but didn’t stop. Savitha looked out the window. A mangy dog lay next to a garbage heap; farther down, a chicken scratched at the dirt. He’d swerve to avoid them, she thought. Anybody would. And then she thought, I hold the key.
She lifted his hand from her thigh and wrenched it, hard, at the wrist. He gasped, slammed on the brakes. The lorry tilted and then screeched to a halt.
“You bitch. Pakshi. Get out.”
When she did, the lorry pulled away with a loud squeal and a cloud of dust. Savitha stood on the national highway and looked to the east and to the west. Toward the east were the outskirts of Vijayawada. They’d mostly skirted the city, but it would be easy enough to go back. Back. That didn’t seem very smart. To the west were Hyderabad and then Karnataka and then Maharashtra and then the Arabian Sea.