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.”
Think of it?
No, she wasn’t quiet anymore, Poornima thought. Not at all. And she was strangely obsessed with food: the thing with the bananas and yogurt rice, calling her Poori, the way she licked her fingers, as if she would never eat another meal. Poornima’s father had said her family was poor, poorer even than they were, which was hard to imagine. Six children in all, her father had told her, old Subbudu so frail that he’d long ago given up sitting at the loom, her mother cleaning, cooking for other families, no better than a common servant, he’d said derisively, and her older brothers moved to Hyderabad, promising to send money home, though the family hadn’t yet received a single paisa. And with four daughters unmarried. “Four,” her father had exclaimed, shaking his head. “The old man’s done for,” he’d said. “He might be better off finding four big rocks and a rope and leading them to the nearest well.”
“Which one is Savitha?”
“Oldest. Of the girls. Not even enough for her dowry.” So her marriage was delayed, too, just like Poornima’s. Her father narrowed his eyes then and looked at her. “Not eating too much, is she? Tucking a little away for her sisters?”
“No,” Poornima said. “Hardly anything.”
* * *
What Poornima liked most about Savitha—in addition to her hands—was her clarity. She had never known anyone—not her father, not a teacher, not the temple priest—to be as certain as Savitha was. But certain about what? she asked herself. About bananas in yogurt rice? About sunrises? Yes, but about more than that.