do you think we make it in this country? Make it big. You think Dad got us where we are without girls like her?’”
The drizzle turned to rain.
“Girls like her,” he repeated, and then he grew quiet. In Telugu he asked, “What did you understand?”
Savitha said, truthfully, “I understood the word girls.”
He looked at her with what she thought was real longing, or real loneliness, and then he ran his fingers slowly down the side of her face, and he said, in English, “You are an empire. You’re more than an empire.”
Savitha looked at him and she wanted in that moment to tell him everything, absolutely everything, but instead she took the bottle from his hands, saw the liquid tilt against the raindrops, the distant lights, drank as her father would’ve drunk, and then she smiled.
* * *
It was the following week. He came to another apartment, on Brooklyn Avenue, and without a word he lay her down on the carpet. He kissed her arm and then her throat and then her mouth, and even though she had been kissed many times before, she thought, So this is what it’s like to be kissed. The give of the carpet was on her back, and he pushed the hair from her face, and then he unfastened her blouse. It didn’t fall completely open, only to one side, and on this side he took her breast into his mouth. She cradled his head in her hand, and Savitha saw, in the quiet black of his hair, his first coarse gray. A window swayed above their heads and then a thick cloud shifted and light flooded in, fell onto her face. He took off her pants, her underwear, both a size too big because they had to share clothes and Geeta was bigger than her, but he seemed not to notice, nor to care, because he was kissing her stomach. He laid his head against it, as if listening for voices, and she cradled his head again, keening to him, wanting him to continue, but no, he wouldn’t. Not yet, he said. She felt first impatience and then despair. Please, she almost said, in English, in Telugu: please. But he waited, held himself above her, looking down. No, he said again, no, I want to look at you first. The full fiery brown gleam of you. She rolled her head back, and he held her away like that, poised above her, poised perfectly, heartlessly, and the light beyond her shivered, nectared and alive.
* * *
They sat together afterward in the fading light. Under the window, on the floor, their legs outstretched and touching. Neither spoke. Savitha wanted to take his hand, but he was sitting to her left. She looked at her stump, resting on her thigh, though Mohan hardly ever seemed to notice it. Instead, he reached for his pants, took out his wallet, and said, “Here. I want to show you something.”
It was a small photograph, and though it was creased and yellowed, she saw immediately that it was Mohan and Suresh, as boys. “How old were you?”
“Eight and fourteen.”
She studied them: the too-long hair, the round eyes, the expression of irrepressible wonder on Mohan’s face, tilted half toward his older brother, half toward the camera, his smile unabashed and absolute, and Suresh not smiling at all, but with an adolescent seriousness, or maybe an adolescent stubbornness, but still with his arm around his little brother, holding him close, though not too close. “Where’s your sister?”
“She took it. We were on vacation. The only vacation we ever took. My dad wanted to show us Mount Rushmore. This was back when we lived in Ohio. ‘That is greatness, kids,’ he said, ‘when your face is chiseled onto the side of a mountain.’ I don’t much remember it. Mount Rushmore, I mean. But what I do remember is that place,” he said, nodding at the photograph.
Savitha looked deeper into it, past Mohan and Suresh, and at the stand of trees behind them, and maybe a river or a lake in the near distance. “What is it?”
“Spearfish Canyon. We just drove through, but I remember it was perfect. It was the most perfect place I have ever been.”
She stared some more. It didn’t look like much; it didn’t look half as awe-inspiring as Indravalli Konda. “Perfect how?”
He was silent. And then he shifted his arm and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around her stump, as completely and as naturally as if she,