Chapter Twenty-Seven Sheltered
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 fucking relieved? That place was hell, 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 fucking college in 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 was alone, 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?”
Stricken, Poppy said, “I don’t think mine are more important than yours.”
“But you do!” Samina all but shouted. “You continue to justify what I went through to make yourself feel better about the hand you played in it. You didn’t even mean for me to get caught, so there’s no reason for you to continue to deny the abuse I faced after that. But you minimize it anyway.”
She stepped close to Poppy, her anger making her impulsive.
“You know what I think? I think you’re so used to being the most marginalized person in the room, you don’t know how to recognize that other people have it far worse than you.
Maybe you were an outcast—but being an outcast in a Welkish school for fine ladies is still a hell of a lot more privileged than being an orphan in a shoddy human-trafficking sham. ”
Samina’s eyes burned, the memories threatening to consume her again. Poppy reached for her, but she jerked away. An embrace would only serve to comfort Poppy, not Samina, and Samina was done serving the illusion that Poppy had held for the last seven years.
· · ·
Hindered by Poppy’s insistence that she had nothing to give the gods, Hasan had refocused his lessons on her language skills.
She made quick progress, and her Virian improved exponentially.
Even here, sitting on the front porch, he could hear her in the kitchen, chatting with the other women in Virian.
Her accent had become smoother than it was a week ago, the words confident, less stilted.
Her lessons in summoning daivyakhi, though—she’d stalled there.
After the play, she’d managed to forge her own connection to the gods, harnessing her powers with more skill than he’d have expected from an adult beginner.
However, she lacked finesse and control, two things that would only come with practice—and they could only practice if she made sacrifices.
Her past had complicated things far more than Hasan had anticipated.
On one hand, her time in the countryside had made her acutely aware of all the things her upbringing had deprived her of, her self-pity blinding her to her privilege.
On the other hand, she was equally ignorant of the biases that she still carried with her, subconscious instincts that manifested in careless comments.
Just the other afternoon, she’d complained about being outdoors, fretting that she would “become too brown” if she stayed under the sun for any longer.
Harithi put her in her place before Hasan could intervene, demanding to know what the problem was with being brown.
Poppy had fallen quiet, but the atmosphere had changed after that.
He couldn’t blame Poppy for the way she thought—not when her biases had been so deeply ingrained during her childhood.
But if she couldn’t challenge those biases, then there would be no difference between her and Richard.
And if there was no difference, then Zeyar was right: Richard was the favored choice, and they’d have more to gain by courting his favor.
Hasan would rather eat his own entrails than side with Richard. But Zeyar would return by the end of this week, and he was running out of time to get through to Poppy.
The front door swung open, startling him.
Samina stepped out into the amber light of the sunset.
She’d recovered slightly from her injuries, the swelling gone, the bruising less lurid.
Still, she wore her arm in its cast, a cloth sling tied around her neck, and her awkward movements indicated that her ribs were still bothering her.
Hasan’s eyes fell to the bag she carried in her good hand.
Hasan opened his mouth to ask her where she thought she was going, but then she lifted her head, revealing a single tear streaking from her red-rimmed eyes.
He jumped to his feet. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I need to go back to Marnapur. I’m going to walk to Sanivali and catch a bus from there.”
“You’re not well enough.” He reached for her bag. “Stay another week.”
“Sanjiv is by himself.” Samina sidestepped him neatly. “I am going, with or without your permission.”
Hasan recoiled—Samina had always been forthright about her loyalty to her brother, but she had never spoken to him so defiantly before.
“Samina,” he said, “what’s bothering you? Really.”
She turned her face away. “I can’t be here with her anymore.” She didn’t have to say whom she meant. “It’s bringing back these memories, things I never wanted to remember, and the worst thing is she doesn’t even understand.”
“I see,” Hasan said. “You spoke to her.”
Samina smeared another tear with the back of her hand.
“Much good it did either of us,” she scoffed.
“There’s no closure for what I went through, ever.
I was stupid to think otherwise. And as for Poppy?
” She turned, fixing Hasan with a piercing stare.
“Teaching her to use her daivyakhi is a waste of time. You could train her to use every weapon in the world, and it would mean nothing if she didn’t know whom she was bearing them for.
She’s so damned sheltered. The only injustices she’s seen are the ones committed against her. ”
She struggled for a moment, a medley of emotions flashing across her face before it settled on frustration.
“I know you want her to be a champion for us. But if she doesn’t learn to put her struggles second, she’ll be no different from a Welkish viceroy, justifying away anything that makes her uncomfortable. ”
With that, Samina stalked down the driveway, disappearing into the night.
Her words settled like a stone beside Hasan’s earlier doubts, weighting the scale against Poppy’s favor.
But speaking to Samina had also reminded Hasan of another anecdote she’d shared with him: sixteen-year-old Poppy, giving Samina a necklace off her own body.
Samina was right: Poppy had been sheltered from the injustices her father had subjected this island to.
But he had to believe that if she saw them firsthand, she would feel something—just as she had felt for her childhood friend.
He didn’t know if it would work. All he could do was pray that her father and her time overseas had not snuffed out the spirit of kinship she’d once shared with her birth people.