come back, if you want.”
“What do they want me for?” she asked, afraid of the answer.
“To clean houses. Flats. Apparently, they have to pay maids so much over there, it’s cheaper to buy them from here.”
“But how will I—” she began, but Guru, before she could finish, said, “I told them you’d work twice as fast.”
“Where?”
“America. Someplace called Sattle. Good money, too.”
Unlike Saudi, America she knew. Everyone knew America. And it was indeed far away. Far, far away. On the other side of the earth, she’d once heard someone say.
“How much?” she asked.
“Twenty thousand. Ten for you, ten for me.”
“That’s hardly anything! You said yourself I was worth more than that.”
Guru put down the pen. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Dollars, my dear. Dollars.”
* * *
But why would Guru split the money with me? Why would he ever have? That was the first thing that passed through Savitha’s mind, sitting across from him, watching the avarice glow in his eyes. The second was, He won’t, of course. Still, what bothered her was not that he was lying, which didn’t really matter, nor that she had been so slow to see it, but that she, she, had said the word worth.
* * *
It was a Telugu man who’d bought her, Savitha learned. In this town in America, she was told, he owned hundreds of apartments and a handful of restaurants and even a cinema hall. Maybe I’ll finally get to see a cinema, she thought, not with excitement or bitterness, but with a kind of shame. She’d always have to sit to Poornima’s left, she realized, so that they could hold hands during the scary parts. The man in America had two sons and a daughter. The daughter was married to a doctor, a famous doctor, the kind who made women’s breasts bigger or their noses smaller. Savitha had never heard of such a thing, had never known there were doctors who did such things, but wondered whether the extra nose bits went to the same place her hand had gone, and whether the extra breast bits came from that same place. The two sons helped the father run his many businesses, and Savitha didn’t know whether they were married. The man in America had a wife who was from Vijayawada, which is how they’d come to know of Guru, and she was exceedingly devout. She was involved in good works all over the city, giving money to the poor and the sick, and every year, she donated ten lakh rupees to the Kanaka Durga Temple, along with a new set of gold ornaments for the deity.
Then she learned of a thing called the exchange rate.
Guru, out of this deal, would make over thirteen lakh rupees. That was a sum Savitha couldn’t even imagine, and she smiled with him when he said, “We could buy Indravalli, you and I.” After a moment, she asked him why her, why someone with only one hand, why not one of the other girls, one of the ones with both hands; they would certainly agree to go to America, and they would also clearly make better maids. Guru’s eyes sparkled. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Only you can go.” Apparently, this all had to do with something Guru had mentioned earlier, something called a visa. There were visas to do different types of things, such as one to visit a place, and another to work in a place, and another to study in that place. And then there was one to get treatment.
“What kind of treatment?” Savitha asked.
“The kind you’re going to get,” Guru said. “At least, that’s what they’ll tell him. To whatever official.” Then he nodded at the stub of her left arm, resting on her lap. “They’ll say you need to enter America for a special operation, one only they can perform. One doctor here, a doctor there—their son-in-law, maybe—will vouch for your need for American medical treatment. And once you’re there, well, the rest is easy.”
“But will I get the operation? Will they give me a new hand?”
He looked at her with something like incomprehension, maybe even a trace of contempt. “Of course not, you fool. There is no operation. You’re going to clean houses.”
* * *
So she was going to clean houses. That was fine. That was better than sleeping with men. But something Guru had said kept echoing inside of her. No, echo would indicate it was his voice she heard. It was not.