ahead, Poornima following close behind her—skidding along under the trees and the overhanging thatched roofs of the huts to keep out of the sun. Savitha lived on the other side of the village, farther from Indravalli Konda but closer to the Krishna. Many of those belonging to the caste of laundresses lived on that side of town, because of its proximity to the water. There were also—discovered on that side of the village—inscriptions dating back to the time of the Cholas, though, being close to the railroad tracks, it was also the village’s primary bathroom, and the inscriptions mostly ignored. Still, the majority who lived there belonged to the caste of weavers, Savitha’s family among them.
Their hut was on a small ridge. The road—more a dirt path—leading to it was lined with scrubs, their leaves and branches already withered and gray from the heat. When Poornima reached down and touched one, a silky film of gray came off the leaf, and she realized it was ash, from the wood fires that were built outside the huts along the path—they being too poor to have even a cooking area inside their huts. Piles of trash also lined the huts, sniffed occasionally by a stray dog or a pig hungry enough to withstand the heat. It was almost time for tiffin, four in the afternoon, but no one seemed to be home. By now, the sky was white, glowing like a brass pot lit from within. Beads of sweat dripped down Poornima’s back. Clung like mist to her scalp.
When they reached the hut, Poornima realized her family was wealthy compared to Savitha’s. They couldn’t even afford palm fronds for the roof of their hut; it was a discarded sheet of corrugated tin. The outside walls of the hut were plastered with cow dung, and a small area of dirt was cleared in front of the scrubs, though it was still scattered with trash—bits of old yellowed newspaper, disintegrating, blackened rags, vegetable skins too rotted even for the tiny piglets that roamed freely from hut to hut. Poornima stepped over these, and when she followed Savitha into the hut, the first thing that overcame her was the smell. It smelled like old, unwashed clothes and sweat and pickled food. It smelled like manure, woodsmoke, dirt. It smelled like poverty. And despair. It smelled like her mother dying.
“We don’t have any milk for tea,” Savitha said. “Do you want one of these?” She held out a tin of biscuits that were clearly meant only for company. Poornima bit into one; it was stale and crumbled into a soft yellow paste in her mouth. “Where is your mother? Your sisters?”
“My mother cooks today. For the family that owns that big house, the one near the market. My sisters go collecting in the afternoons,” Savitha said.
“Collecting what?”
She shrugged. “I usually go with them.”
“Where?”
“Edge of town. By the Christian cemetery.”
Poornima knew that was where the garbage dumps were. Not the small heaps that dotted the village, practically on every doorstep, but the massive ones, three or four in all, where the small heaps were eventually deposited. Poornima had seen them only from a distance—a far mountain range on the southern horizon that only the poorest climbed. Seeking discarded cloth or paper or scraps of metal, food, plastic. Usually children, she knew, but sometimes adults. But always the poorest. She remembered her mother saying once, as they passed them, “Don’t look,” and Poornima had not known whether she meant at the cemetery or at the children scrambling up the heaps. But now, standing in Savitha’s impoverished hut, and with her mother long dead, she thought she understood. Her mother had said don’t look and she’d meant don’t look at either the cemetery or the garbage heaps. She’d meant, don’t look at death, don’t look at poverty, don’t look at how they crawl through life, how they wait for you, stalk you, before they end you.
“You go?”
“Not anymore. Not since I started working for your father.”
Poornima looked out the one window of the hut. It looked out onto Indravalli Konda, and she looked at the temple and felt pride for the first time toward her father; he’d given Savitha a livelihood and led her away from the garbage heaps. She had never thought of him as generous, but she realized generosity could be a quality that was hidden, obscured, veiled as if by ash, like the true color of the leaves on the scrubs outside Savitha’s hut. “But how