and Savitha had trotted behind her, jumping for the bolls, wanting to help. She’d been far too short, but one had floated down from her mother’s hands and Savitha had caught it and squealed with delight, as if she’d caught a piece of a crumbling cloud. When she’d yanked her mother’s pallu and held it up like a prize, her mother had barely looked at her; instead she’d said, “Keep it. It’s what your frock is made from.” At those words, Savitha had stood still in the middle of the cotton field, hot under the summer sun, and had looked down at the boll in her hand, soft, full of seeds, and then she’d gazed up at the rows and rows of them, round white moons held aloft to the sky, so exquisite, so out of reach. Then she’d looked down at her frock, a faded pink, frayed at the hem, dirty, but still a frock. But how? she’d wondered. How could this little piece of fluff with the little brown seeds become my frock? She’d thought it was a secret, a secret kept by the adults. Or magic, more likely. But a mystery. Always a mystery, even after she grew up and began sitting at the charkha and then sitting at the loom and then sitting next to Poornima, eating dinner together, which, by her weaving, at least in some part, the purchase of food, food, had been made possible. So, an even greater mystery: from boll to cloth to food to friend.
And this mystery remained with her. All through the years. From then until now. She held it close while at the brothel, tucked away inside her pillow. Along with Poornima’s half-made sari (she’d screamed for it in one of her drug-fueled rages, and someone had—not out of kindness but to shut her up—found it lodged in a corner of the concrete room, lifted it with their toes, and flung it at her face).
There, then: the mystery of cloth, and the cloth itself. She felt both, burning—as mysteries do—inside her pillow.
2
The second time she saw Guru was a few months later. One of the girls was sick from an infection. A customer had given it to her, and she lay in bed with a scalding fever, a wide, blistering rash on her thighs and crotch, unable to swallow even a single sip of buttermilk. The girls crowded around her. A doctor, one of them yelled. There was a scampering. The madam pushed her way to the front. “It’s a Sunday,” she said, without much regret. “There’ll be a surcharge.”
A Sunday.
There is such a thing as days, Savitha suddenly realized. There is such a thing as time.
Her mind pricked. Something small, behind the eyes, grew rigid.
Guru arrived later that afternoon. The madam had phoned him and asked him to come. The girls gathered around again. This time, Savitha noticed that his shoes had a slight heel, and that the betelnut had colored his teeth orange. “You call me for this,” he said.
The madam kneaded her hands. “It’s the worst I’ve seen.”
He studied the girl’s wan face, her lips split and bleeding from fever. “Was she one of the popular ones?”
“She is,” the madam said.
Guru then studied her some more, turned on his elevated heels, walked to the door, and said, “Let her die.”
Savitha watched him leave the room. The girl whimpered in her sleep, as if she’d heard the words. Though she couldn’t possibly have. Not through all those layers of heat and withering and waste. Let her die. The words hung in the air for a moment, and then they began another journey, this time snaking through Savitha’s own layers of heat and wither and waste. Her eyes grew wide; they ached with new light. There was a door, she remembered, a hidden one. Where all her treasures lay. And it remained closed, through the tea stall and the concrete room and the drugs, through the men and the men and the men. And it was through this door that the words found their way.
She looked around the room.
It seemed to her, looking now, that they were all simply children, waiting to die. And in the next instant, she thought, No. No, we’re all old. Old, old women, ravaged by time, and waiting to die.
And it was this thought that brought the others. An avalanche of others—not in their number, but in their precision.
The first one was this: she couldn’t stay here. It wasn’t an obvious thought, not