Tamilian accent, and without a trace of a smile, “This is the best part. Enjoy it.”
What did she mean by that? Did she mean that this was the best part of the plane ride, or that this was the best part of all that was to come? Maybe she meant this was the best part of all of it: the plane ride, what was to come, and all that had come before.
Regardless, after an hour or so, after Savitha had stared, unblinking, at every cloud that floated by her oval window, she leaned back in her seat and fell into a deep sleep.
* * *
When they landed at Heathrow, the first thing Savitha noticed was that it smelled like nothing, absolutely nothing—as if not a single animal had passed through here, nor a single flower bloomed—and then she noticed that it was cold. So cold that it seemed to be spilling out of the walls, climbing out of the floor. She asked the woman if they were in America. The woman said, No, we’re in England. Why did we stop here? she asked. Because it’s halfway between India and America, the woman said. They sat in the transfer lounge, which Savitha only registered as a long, crowded room with row after row of orange chairs. There were also a few shops, which were so brightly lit that they scared her away. She sat in one of the orange chairs and looked at the other people in the lounge. They, too, scared her. She noticed a few Indians, but mostly, the people around her—sleeping or eating or reading or talking—seemed to her like giants. Tall and unwieldy and oily. Some of them pale giants, some of them burnt, crisp giants, but all of them towering over her, even over the woman who was supposed to be her mother. Where had they all come from? Where were they all going? It felt to Savitha as if the world was full of them, these giants, suddenly, and that she and the old woman and Indravalli and Vijayawada were all merely their playthings, kept locked in a box in a hotter part of the world.
After that, after boarding another plane and after more hours upon hours had passed, during which, whenever Savitha woke and blinked into the dark of the plane and into the dark of the world beyond, she thought that maybe she was dead, and that this was the afterlife: all of them headed in a long bus to whatever was next, and around and beyond them was only stillness, and stars, and below, far, far below, only some gigantic moving mass, by turns white and then gray and then only black, reflecting the stars but darker, angrier than any night sky, and when she pointed to it and asked the woman, in alarm, What is that? the woman hardly even glanced at it, never even took out her cotton balls, and as she closed her eyes again, she said, “Water.”
* * *
The next morning, or what Savitha presumed was morning because the woman said, “Go brush your teeth,” they landed again. This time, when Savitha said, Is this America? the woman said, Yes.
They were at JFK.
They stood in one long line and then another. Then they sat down in another transit lounge. This one had blue chairs. Otherwise, it was just the same: the same lack of scent, the same cold, the same giants. “What city are we in?” Savitha asked. “Are we in Sattle?” No, the woman said, New York. And then she told her to sit right there, don’t move, and went off to make a telephone call. Savitha could see her in the distance, standing at a pole with a telephone attached to it. The woman put something into the telephone and pressed some buttons and started talking.
Savitha was nauseated, or maybe just lonely, so she closed her eyes and tried to think of Poornima, of her sisters, of her father, of anything that had perfume that she could inhale. Her mind swirled, but she was so tired, so depleted of memory, that nothing came to her. Not one thing. So she leaned down and opened the suitcase that Guru had given her to pack her few things, and she took out Poornima’s half-made sari and held it to her nose. She breathed. And there, even after coming all this way, to the other side of the earth, there was the scent of the loom. The scent of