and ripping it open. Nice and wide.”
He took a sip from a bottle that had been resting on the corner table. He sank deeper into the bed with a contented sigh, and he said, again in English, “How’d you lose that hand, anyway?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he sat bolt upright. His eyes widened, and he said in Telugu, “Hey. Hey, watch this.”
There was a fly on the table. It jerked here and there. He was watching it intently. Savitha too. He took the cigarette out of his mouth. He held it poised above the table, not near the fly, but a little away, as if he knew where the fly would veer. And it did. It inched right toward his hand, which was still as a statue. Savitha had never known a man to be so still. To wait so patiently. For what? She didn’t know, but his stillness seemed to her a state of fallen grace. A form of dark worship. Then, in a flash, his hand swept down and he caught it: he trapped the fly under the burning cigarette. Savitha blinked. He couldn’t have. She looked again, and sure enough: there was the fly, a slight sizzle, a flailing of this or that limb, and then it was still. As still as Suresh’s hand had been.
He laughed out loud. “No one else can do that. No one. I’ve been able to do it since I was five.” He looked at her. “The key is: your hand has to move before your mind even tells it to move. That’s the only way to kill a fly.”
He lifted the cigarette, the fly still caught on its end, its body no longer distinguishable from it, and dropped the butt into the ashtray. His smile, too, dropped, and he said, “Let’s go.” When he pulled up to her building, he said, “I’ll be back in a week or two.”
When she got back to the apartment, she stood for a moment and looked at Padma’s and Geeta’s sleeping faces.
We were once children, she thought; we were once little girls. We once played in the dirt under the shade of a tree.
Then she turned away, the nausea rising in her throat. She showered. She smelled burning flesh, though was there enough to a fly to be called flesh? She didn’t know, and she stopped wondering. After her shower, she drank a glass of water, went to her cot, and took out Poornima’s half-made sari. She looked at it, she looked at it hard, and she thought, In a week or two. He’ll be back in a week or two. And then she thought, but of course there was enough to it. There had to be. There was enough to everything to be called flesh. Even the smallest creature. The poorest. The most alone. And yet. And yet, he’d be back in a week or two. She looked at the fragment of sari in her hand, and she thought, I am not that girl in that room. I am not. I am this; I am indigo and red. And to be here in a week or two, and a week or two after that, and a week or two after that, was to surrender to what the crow had warned against, had always been warning against, it was to surrender to being eaten piece by piece.
* * *
She didn’t sleep that night, thinking. And she stayed thinking all the next day: while she cleaned apartments and one floor of an office building and a few rooms of a residential hotel. When she got back to the apartment, late that night, she ate, thinking. Padma came home after her. Still pretty after a day of cleaning, Savitha thought, but all that prettiness came to nothing. Just a made-up girl wearing orange lipstick, heavy kajal, cleaning the houses of strangers, and waiting for a man who would never come.
Savitha was quiet, and Padma must’ve noticed, because she said, “What’s with you?”
Savitha looked at her as if she’d never seen her before. “What keeps you from leaving?”
“Where would I go?”
“Back to India.”
“Where would I get the money? Besides, India’s no prize. Nothing there. My father used the money he got for me to buy a motorcycle.”
Savitha was silent.
“Why? Are you thinking about it?”
“No, but you. You’re just so pretty.”
That made her smile, touch her fingers to her hair, and Savitha smiled back, imagining Padma believed her.
She was wrong.
The next