next?”
Savitha stared up at him.
“The sun came up. That’s what happened. And then you know what happened after that? I saw that that big bear or tiger or whatever other monster I’d imagined was nothing but a tree. A tree! It was just a tree. A dead tree.” He laughed some more. “It was the dark, you see. It was my imagination.”
“So there was no bear? There was no tiger?” Savitha asked, a little disappointed.
“No, my ladoo,” he said. “It was just a tree. Like most fears, it was nothing. Nothing.”
Savitha lay in the dark and thought about that story. She hadn’t thought about it in many years, but she thought about it now and realized: But my fears aren’t nothing. My fears for my family, for their well-being, are real. They are a bear. A tiger. And if I were to leave—well, she couldn’t even finish that thought. But why did I think of the story about fear on the very heels of thinking about love? she wondered. Was it obvious? Of course it was. She’d never known one without the other: she’d always feared for her father’s health, his drinking, her sisters’ marriages, her mother’s endless days. And with Mohan. Well, with Mohan, it was even clearer—there could be no love without fear. The two had always been bound for her, she realized, fear and love, always, but just there, floating on the edge of wake and sleep, another thought drifted up, as if from the cloth that was tucked into her pillow: the thought that maybe there had been one exception. Maybe once, just for a short time, in her girlhood, they had been separate. For a short time (she was already snoring, beginning to dream), she had loved Poornima, and in that love, she had felt no fear.
* * *
Suresh came and took her to the room and then Mohan came and then Suresh came. Then Mohan came and they had sex in an empty apartment, and once in an office building. This pattern followed her around like a lost dog. Months went by. She once sat on the edge of the bed and watched Suresh open a bottle of beer, and she said, “Can I have one?” He looked at her, astonished—perhaps that she had spoken at all, something she avoided, broken as she still was by him and the room and the bottle of clear liquid and the act—and handed her one. And so, yet another pattern: beer with Suresh, coffee or whiskey with Mohan. She found herself alone one night, in the studio, and could hardly sit still. She went from the window to the kitchen to the bathroom and back, and realized that what she really wanted was a drink. The thought stopped her cold. She stood at the window and thought about her father, about his destruction, and then she thought about the blind boy, and how she’d lain in her cot and stared at the locked door, waiting for him to arrive with the needle. She swore it off in that moment. All of it. And never again touched the beer or whiskey she was offered.
At the end of July, on a warm and cloudy afternoon, Mohan came to pick her up and said, “I have a surprise.” They drove on a wide road again, this one next to the water, and then he parked on a busy street, between a blue car and a red car. She would always remember that: that he’d parked his black car between a blue car and a red car. The restaurant he took her to was the most colorful room Savitha had ever seen. The booths were bright red, cinema posters lined the walls, and the counter was blue. Blue and red again, she thought. When they sat down—Savitha still bewildered because he had never brought her to a public place before, and what was more, she’d never actually been in a restaurant before, ever, with or without Mohan—she looked around her at the other patrons, laughing and chatting, utterly at ease, and slid into the corner of her seat. She surreptitiously tucked in her blouse so no one would see how loose it was and concealed her stub under the table, and then she watched the happenings in the restaurant, the clatter and the conversation and the steaming plates of food going past their table, all with a kind of reverence, a wide-eyed wonder.
When the waitress came to take their order, she