little girl. She was lugging a bucket, far too heavy for her, splashing water on the floor and over the front of her torn frock. Savitha was still hazy in her thoughts, her body still limp, but she told herself, Talk to her. Talk to this girl. Tell her you’ll do anything, anything. Her mouth opened, or so she assumed, but nothing came out. Savitha willed harder, she closed her eyes, she focused on the fog, the heaviness, she told herself, Speak. “Untie me,” she finally managed to whisper. “Please.”
The girl seemed not to hear. She went about raising a wet cloth to Savitha’s legs, her crotch, her underarms, her chest. My chest, Savitha thought. Was the strip of Poornima’s sari still there? Was it? “The cloth,” she croaked. “Is it?” By now the girl had found it. She raised it to her face, seemed to sniff it once, then threw it into the corner. Savitha let out a long wail. Animal. Wounded. The girl still paid her no attention. She went about her work, the damp cloth now wiping down Savitha’s neck, her arms. When she reached for her hands, Savitha grabbed the girl’s forearm. She yanked her closer, so she could see the child’s face in the dim light of the half-open door. She looked into the girl’s eyes; they returned her gaze, but they were unmoved, blank, gray, as if the concrete of the room had blown like sediment and settled into them. Savitha’s alarm pushed through layers of confusion, rage, incoherence, and flame, and she said, “Can’t you hear me?”
The girl let out her own wail, though hers was even more animal, more wounded. And it was then, at that sound, when Savitha truly began to understand her bondage, her imprisonment, the totality of its vision, the completeness of her fate. And that she’d been neither smart nor wise: the girl was a deaf-mute, and the boy had been blind.
* * *
She flailed. She strained at her wrists and ankles, managing only to tighten their grip. She beat her head against the hemp, she screamed, she wept. She bit and snapped against the rope with her teeth. Too far away for her to cut through, but the ends she caught and gnawed until her gums bled. She tasted copper and thought, Good. And then she thought, How long will it take to bleed to death? Out of my gums? The drugs she spit out, gagged on, retched every time the boy poured them in. That’s when he started injecting it—mostly by plunging the needle into her stomach, but if she squirmed too much, straight into the side of her buttocks. But even in her haze, her bafflement, Savitha could see clearly the edges of the bed, the dark corners of the room, and in the dank of the windowless walls, the beauty she’d lost: sunlight, wind, water.
In between bouts of sleeping, sweating, waking, and vomiting, there were other memories, floating in and out, above and beyond, like breath. There was the shimmer of the temple on Indravalli Konda, the perfume of freshly cooked rice, the shouts of flower vendors, spilling petals on the streets, there were the words of an owl, there was the feel of the loom, the feel of thread, the feel of form, taking shape, becoming something. She could’ve woven a river; she could’ve woven a sea. Why was she lying here? Why?
The door opened, soon after the girl had cleaned her again. This time it was a man she’d not seen before. Although, in truth, she was bleary-eyed, weak, sodden, and high, her limbs long ago gone numb, so really, it could’ve been her father.
But it wasn’t her father.
This man—who she learned in time was the one called Guru—let the light spill in. Savitha squinted. He approached the bed with a small smile. Then he laid a knife at the edge of the bed, just beyond her reach. Despite her frailness, a sliver of something feral, a shard of some lucidity, sliced through her consciousness. Savitha lurched for it, nearly tipping the bed over. She rocked violently from side to side, side to side, until the knife fell to the floor with a clang. Guru ignored her. He walked to the corner of the room, where Poornima’s half-made sari still lay, and nudged it with the tip of his shoe. He bent a little, taking a closer look. He held his face away from the cloth, as if it were rotting meat,