With that, she turned and strode into the house, head held high.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sheltered
Samina’s conversation with Hasan about Poppy had knocked loose a deluge of memories she’d repressed for nearly a decade. For the past week, flashbacks and dreams of her time in the state-run orphanage assaulted her, day and night: the matrons, quick to strike with their canes when she spoke in Virian or failed to perform her chores to their satisfaction; the patrons, especially the male ones who put their ghoulish pale hands on her changing body; the prospective “parents,” middle- and upper-class Welks who were not looking for a child but an unpaid servant.
All this, Samina had endured for the sake of her brother, Sanjiv. For the regular meals, for a roof over his head, for clothes on his back. But as he got older, stronger, the prospective parents began to eye him with a hungry gleam in their eyes, one that Samina couldn’t abide. She’d reached her womanhood, had unlocked her daivyakhi. The night before Sanjiv was meant to go to his new home, Samina opened the floorboards where she kept her statuette of Rukmini?—the last thing she owned of her mother’s?—and made a cut on her palm.
Samina and Sanjiv left the orphanage together, slipping away in the chaos of crying children and sirens.
She had no regrets about leaving that place in ashes. She’d done what had been necessary to protect her brother, and she would do it again. Even now that they were both older, she worried for him. He was vasudhakt and a boy of nearly fifteen, even if the hardships of life had forced him to mature faster than she’d have liked. Samina needed to return to the city?—to her brother?—as soon as possible. She hadn’t wanted to go home after the fiasco at the museum. Sanjiv would have insisted on taking her to a hospital. But she’d recovered enough in Sanivali, and it was time to go home.
Yet one question held her back: Had Poppy really turned her in? Had she knowingly sent Samina to that bleak hell? Had she thought of her at all, when she was off touring the grand cities and idyllic villages of Welkland?
Samina had thought she didn’t care to ask?—she would have sworn on her life that Poppy had intentionally betrayed her. She’d asked Hasan not to tell her that she was in the safe house so that Poppy wouldn’t show up at her sickbed with a posy of excuses. But after days of recovering alone, Samina found she couldn’t lie to herself any longer. She needed the truth, and she needed to hear it from Poppy Sutherland. She owed it to her, daivyakt to daivyakt, orphan to orphan.
She’d found her in the kitchen, standing beside Rohini as the Devar matron tried to teach her how to make aloo parathas. Slipping in, she laid a hand on Poppy’s arm, causing Poppy to jump. “Can we talk?”
It took Poppy a moment to register who Samina was. Then she lit up, beaming widely. “Samina? You’re here! You survived the museum!”
“Barely,” she said. “Can we please talk outside?”
Poppy washed her hands quickly in the sink, then followed Samina out into the hallway. Samina tilted her head up to look at her, resenting their height difference. Poppy stood at least half a foot taller than her. She opened her mouth again, but Samina interrupted, determined to be the one leading this conversation. “Did you turn me in?” she blurted.
Poppy’s mouth snapped shut, then opened again, then closed. Then, she asked, “Are you referring to the necklace?”
“Obviously,” Samina said. “What else could I be referring to?”
Poppy’s fingers strayed to her collarbones in a subconscious gesture, as though reaching for a pendant. “I didn’t turn you in. I would have never done that.”
“Then how did they know to come and arrest me?”
“The pawnshop owner reported you.”
Samina exhaled. Closed her eyes. One of the biggest grudges in her life had been completely unfounded, but the weight off her chest didn’t feel like relief. Instead, she felt unmoored, a rowboat cut loose from the docks. She barely even remembered the pawnshop owner. She fervently wished she could go back and burn that bastard’s store to the ground for what his big mouth had cost her.
“What happened to you?” Poppy asked. “When I asked Father if you’d be sent to jail, he told me you’d be going to an orphanage instead?—was that true?”
Samina forced herself to look Poppy in the eyes. “Yes,” she said. “It’s true.”
Poppy’s shoulders relaxed.
Samina stared at her. “Are you fuckingrelieved? That place washell, Poppy.”
“At least you didn’t go to jail,” Poppy said.
Something about the way she said it?—smoothly, like a stone she’d turned over again and again until all the edges were soft?—made Samina realize that this was the justification Poppy had carried with her all these years, the story she’d used to console herself at night.
“At least jail is honest about what it is,” Samina said. “The orphanage was nothing more than a glorified prison. Our every minute, every word, was policed by the matrons. If we fell out of line, we were beaten so badly that some children couldn’t even lie on their backs at night.”
“Okay, but they fed you,” Poppy argued weakly. “They clothed you. They educated you. Surely there were benefits?”
Samina tasted bile in the back of her throat. “There were no benefits,” she said. “It wasn’t fuckingcollegein Welkland.”
Poppy reared back as though Samina had struck her. “You know nothing about what that was like for me,” she said. “At least you had other Virian children to watch your back. I wasalone, in a foreign country, surrounded by girls and women who thought me less than human for the color of my skin.”
Samina’s lips curled with the bitter taste of irony. “So you can tell me how lucky I had it in a Welkish-run organization that dehumanized me, but I can’t tell you the same? What makes us different, Poppy? What makes your struggles more important than mine?”
