and then he smiled and said, “I know this weave. So distinctive. You’re from Indravalli, aren’t you?” Savitha said nothing. He walked back to the bed. His smile widened. She looked up at him, called him names, she begged; she sensed what was to come. “You stink,” he said placidly. Then he said, “There’s nothing worse than a woman who stinks.” He picked up the knife. He studied the blade intently. After a long moment, he said, “Maybe there is one thing. Just one. And that’s a woman who won’t listen.” He lowered the blade and ran the tip of it along her cheek, her neck. He yanked back the folds of her sari; her blouse fell away in tatters. He traced the edge of the knife against her breasts, under them, between. “Not much to them, is there,” he said, looking down, and then he said, “You’ll listen, won’t you? Won’t you, my dear?” He looked into her eyes, almost kindly, and then he spit in her face. The spit, in the midst of her grogginess, her fear, just as she turned her head to avoid it, landed at the edge of her mouth and on her cheek. Guru rubbed it over more of her face. “A smudge, you see,” he said lightly, and then got up and left.
The thick glob of spit dried and puckered on Savitha’s cheek. He’d been chewing betelnut; she could smell it for hours.
* * *
They untied the rope but kept her locked in the room. They made sure she was hooked—if the boy with the needle was even a few minutes late, she pounded on the door, shivering and beseeching and mad, skin alight, on fire—and then, when she was good and hooked, they made her go through withdrawal. When they finally let her out (a month later, two?), Savitha had lost nearly ten kilograms, and her face was gaunt and gray. Large clumps of hair had fallen out. She was bruised, her ankles and wrists inflamed and red, not having yet healed. The madam took one look at her and clucked with disapproval, as if Savitha were a child being naughty, misbehaving, come home late for supper.
Savitha bent her head, believing she was that child.
Her first customer was a middle-aged man, maybe forty or forty-five. He worked in an office; Savitha could tell just by looking at him, slacks and a neat shirt, a gold watch, clean toes. There was a faded strip of ash across his forehead—had he conducted the puja that morning, or had it been his wife?
The man was furtive at first, but then he sat down next to her, on the edge of the bed, and said, “Will you give me a kiss?”
Savitha looked up at him. “I don’t know how,” she said. The statement so guileless that the man seemed to almost wilt when he heard it. “Here,” he said finally, “let me show you.”
After that, the mechanics of it all became routine: the five to six customers she had per day, the constant clucking and recriminations from the madam, the talking and laughing and teasing and silence of the other girls, whose names Savitha tried to remember but couldn’t, as if her mind had jellied, relented, forfeited. Relinquished something essential—kingdom, subjects, throne—while even the blood in her veins collapsed, not wanting, any longer, to carry the enormity of memory, the sorrow of new names.
But something remained, a constant, a comfort, and it was this: the cloth on which she lay. While the men pushed into her, pressed her face into the sheet—rough, cheap, bought at one of the tawdry stalls on Governorpet—Savitha closed her eyes and pressed her face, her back, her knees, her palms, deeper and deeper and deeper. The scent of woven cloth, threadbare with use, with semen, filled her nostrils. She held back tears. She held back thoughts of Poornima. She held back her girlhood, squandered on heaps of garbage. She held back her father, her mother, her sisters, her lost brothers. She held back the loamy scent of the Krishna, the laundresses laughing, the temple deepa quivering, the dark of the weaving hut, forever mourning. Though what she did let loose, let soar like a bird out of a cage, was the flight of her hands, weaving.
She allowed herself to recall that one thing.
Once, while still a small child, she’d gone to the cotton fields outside Indravalli, on the way to Guntur. Her mother had worked for a summer in the fields,