that. You need it to get on a plane. To go to another country.”
Savitha was astonished. Relieved. She looked at Geeta. “How long have you been here?”
“Five years.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen,” she said.
Savitha nodded. Around the same age I was when I met Poornima, she thought. And then she thought, But where will I go? Certainly not back to India; she didn’t have the money. Or the blue book. But she didn’t know anyone here. No one. Except—there was that one lady, the jilebi-haired lady, the one with the teeth of pearls. It was something, at least; someone. When Geeta went to take a shower, Savitha took out the white rectangle of paper and looked at it. Her name was Katie, Katie something. And under her name was a string of letters. No phone number, but there was an address: New York, New York. Twice. And to the east.
A few days later, she saw a young woman, with a kind face, coming out of one of the apartments, and she pointed to the string of letters. “What, please,” she said.
The young woman looked at her, perplexed. “Excuse me?”
“What this?”
The young woman looked at it. “That’s an e-mail address.”
It was Savitha’s turn to look perplexed.
“Do you have a computer?”
Ah. Savitha nodded, and thanked her.
A computer.
Well, she didn’t have a computer, and she couldn’t head west; Mohan said there was only the ocean to the west. And north, south? What was there to the north and south? She had no idea. But east. It would have to be east.
* * *
She began carrying Poornima’s half-made sari with her. Every day. Mohan noticed it once, on a clear, cold day in mid-September. “What is that?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, stuffing it back into her pocket. “Just something someone left in one of the apartments.”
He looked at her, hurried into his clothes, and said, “I have to go. Pick them up.”
“Who?”
“The girl with the cleft lip.”
Savitha nodded. After he left for the airport, she took out the half-made sari, folded and refolded it, smoothed it with her one hand. She was now even more careful. Clutching it in her hand as she slept, never letting it leave her sight, even while she was in the shower. Still: nothing. Nothing. But she knew it would have to be soon.
* * *
On a Thursday evening, by now late in September, Mohan came for her again. He took her back to the park, the one overlooking the lights, the beads, and the band of water, and then he asked her what apartments she’d cleaned that day and took her to the one on Phinney Ridge. By now, she’d taught herself some of the street names and had learned to read a few signs, like Stop and Exit and Merge. Merge—she liked the sound of that one best. She’d also learned her numbers and how to write her name in English letters, and she’d asked Mohan how to spell his, and then she’d asked him how to spell Seattle. They hadn’t gotten much farther than that.
She watched him now, in the kitchen, making coffee. She remembered the first time she’d seen him, and how he’d gazed at her cast, knowing it was false, but still with genuine concern and curiosity. And how he’d bought her her first American bananas. And how he’d wooed her, in his fashion, in this place. In the intervening years, though there was so little she knew about him—since most of his stories were told to her in English—she’d come to sense that there fluttered in him some fragile being, some lone and broken creature, beating its wings against some lone and broken heart. And if she had to guess, she would say he had no idea what to do with her either, with this. But that, too, was as it should be. There was no answer. He was raised for different things. Different ends. Things maybe even he didn’t understand. But she? She knew what she was raised for, even with one hand, she knew: she was raised for the loom, the cloth, the magic of thread, the magnificence of making a thing, of wrapping it, like a lover, around your body.
And so it was—with hardly any hesitation—that she reached over and took out his wallet from the pocket of his pants. Why wait any longer? There was a little more than a hundred dollars, $112. Over six thousand rupees! It would certainly get her to New York. It would have to.
Just as