thing he loved, and she lacked: money. Her opportunity came a few weeks later. She was checking a list of expenses for the previous month—routine odds and ends, like a new hot-water geyser for one of the brothels, the cost of repairing a gate that had rusted, and official payments like the one for a new phone line, and unofficial ones, like the bribe that had been paid to the telephone company administrator to nudge their application for the new telephone line—when she came across an expense that was huge, eight lakh rupees to be exact, but had nothing listed beside it. No name or company or even the initials of a name or a company. Poornima guessed it was a bribe to a politician; only that would explain the extraordinary amount and the fact that it was left blank and untraceable. When next she saw Guru, she asked, “That eight lakh rupees. From last month. Do you know who it was paid out to?”
He had come to check up on a new girl who’d just arrived. A farmer’s daughter. The farmer had committed suicide, and the mother had sold the daughter to pay off debts. Poornima saw her only in passing, sitting alone in a room, hardly more than twelve or thirteen. Her face was round, and she wore a glittering nose ring. Poornima imagined that the mother had given her that small piece of jewelry, and that she’d said, Remember me by this, remember your father. But probably it was only a cheap ornament, a tawdry carnival item that had been bought for a few rupees. Though the glitter was real, and it made her face, in the dark room, glow like banked embers.
Guru was on his way to see her when Poornima asked him. He stood at her door, his teeth and lips orange from the betelnet, and said, “Oh, that money? Fucking Kuwaitis. They wouldn’t pay a single paisa for the shepherd. Made me pay, the rich bastards.”
“A shepherd? A shepherd for what?”
“For the girl.”
Poornima looked at him. “What girl?”
“Look, can’t sit here talking to you all day. You don’t need to know.”
“But I need to balance the books. Know expenses.”
He glanced in the direction of the farmer’s daughter’s room and said, “On my way out.” When he came back, twenty minutes later, his face was calm, and he smiled and said, “Usually, we split the cost with the buyer, but they wouldn’t split.”
By now, Poornima had figured out most of it: a young village girl, bought by some foreigner, certainly couldn’t travel alone. She would clearly need a shepherd, someone to deliver her. But who were these shepherds? “Middlemen find them for us,” Guru said. “Someone who knows English, obviously. Airports and all that.”
“That’s it? Someone who knows English, and they get eight lakh rupees for two days’ work?”
Guru shook his head in disgust. “It’s thievery, plain and simple. But you’re not just buying two days’ work, or English, what you’re buying for eight lakhs is discretion. Or, shall we say, a bad memory.”
Poornima shook her head right along with him. But her thoughts were elsewhere. English, she was thinking. English.
* * *
That very night, she rode the bus to Governorpet and asked around. There was a good English school on Eluru Road, the college kids told her, and so she got on another bus to Divine Nagar. She enrolled in a conversational English class starting the following week.
She thought about all the English words she knew, which were the same ones everyone knew: hello, good-bye, serial, and cinema. She knew the words battery and blue and paste and auto and bus and train. She also knew the word radio. Those wouldn’t help her much. She knew the words penal code section, also from the movies, the ones with courtroom scenes. Those certainly wouldn’t help her. She knew the words please and thank you. They might.
The class met three times a week, from seven to nine P.M. During the first class, they covered most of the words Poornima already knew, and some she didn’t, and they learned simple sentences, like “My name is” and “How are you?” and “I live in Vijayawada.” Those were all fine and good, but by the end of the week, they hadn’t learned a single thing that would help her while traveling, in airports, or to function, even for one or two days, in a new country. When she asked the teacher about this, about when they would learn things