The front door of the house opened onto the lane and the lane was already awake, already full of the day's end — the vegetable seller's cart at the far corner, a knot of women at the water tap, two boys kicking a flat ball against the wall of the yellow house. Maya stepped through first. The threshold was cool under her sandals and then it was not, because beyond it the asphalt had been holding the sun all afternoon and it came up through the thin soles and into the arches of her feet, that low steady burn she remembered from every summer of her childhood, except now she felt it as a woman feels it, through the soft skin of feet that had never walked this lane in anything but rubber slippers and shame.

Behind her, Rohan's hand found hers. His palm was rough and dry and closed around her fingers the way a man closes a door he is not sure he wants shut. She did not look back at him. She looked down the lane instead, at the long smear of it running east toward the market road, at the hedges leaning over the boundary walls with their green dust and their little white flowers, at the light going the colour of weak tea over the rooftops, and she took the first step.

The anklets spoke. Two small silver bells on each ankle, her mother's, and they had a voice she had practised in her room for two years and never once heard in open air, and out here the sound was different — smaller, sharper, a bright little insistence against the low hum of the lane. She took another step and they spoke again. Another. She found the rhythm the way she found everything, by doing it until it stopped being a decision.

The vegetable seller's cart was thirty feet down the lane with its back to her, and the man who pushed it — old Nanhe, who had sold her family onions for eleven years and had once, when she was nine, put a whole tomato in her hand and told her to eat it like an apple — had his bell up in the air, mid-ring, the little brass tongue caught against the rim.

He stopped.

The bell did not ring. The cart did not move. Nanhe's arm stayed up with the bell in it and his whole body turned by degrees, the way a man turns when he cannot decide whether to look or to keep his eyes on the road, and he looked, and his mouth came open, and the bell in his hand stayed frozen in the air.

Maya walked past him. She did not hurry. She let him see the red silk move against her legs, the choli cut low across the heavy weight of her breasts, the gold at her throat and her wrists, the sindur in the parting of her hair catching what light was left. She let him see the man beside her, forty-five years old with salt in his stubble, holding her hand.

"Namaste, Nanhe uncle," she said, in her soft measured voice, and she smiled at him, and she kept walking.

The bangles on her right wrist slid down to the heel of her hand with the movement of her arm and she let them. That was the trick of it — you did not fight the weight, you let it fall where it fell and you kept your arm easy, and the sound of it was the point, the small bright chime of them against each other, and she had learned that sound in her room too, alone, in the dark, with the door locked, and now she was spending it on the open lane.

A window above the yellow house went up with a shriek of old wood. A woman leaned out — Maya knew the shape of her, the wife of the schoolmaster, a woman who had given her boiled sweets when she was small and who had stopped greeting her sometime in the last year, when the walk and the hair and the hips had begun to be too much to explain away. The woman's mouth made a shape. Maya did not slow to read it. She lifted her chin a fraction and kept her eyes on the far end of the lane, where the hedges broke and the market road began, and she felt the woman's stare land on the back of her neck like a thrown thing and she let it land.

Rohan's hand tightened. Just once. A small convulsion of the fingers, the way a man's hand tightens on the rail when the bus lurches, and Maya felt it travel up her arm and into her shoulder and she squeezed back, once, and did not turn her head.

"Keep walking," she said, low, for him alone. "You are doing fine."

"Maya—" he started.

"Keep walking, husband."

The word went through him; she felt it go, felt the small change in the way he carried his weight beside her, something loosening at the base of his spine, something straightening. She had learned that too. Two years of learning what a word could do to a man, and it turned out the learning had been simple in the end — you found the word he could not refuse and you gave it to him in the voice he could not refuse it in, and he would follow you anywhere, even down a lane full of women watching from their windows.

The water-tap women had gone quiet. Six of them, with their pots and their elbows, and the tap running forgotten into the dust. One of them — the widow from the corner house, in her white sari — was not quiet. Maya heard her, clear as a temple bell across the lane.

"Hai Ram. Is that not the boy from the Sharma house?"

"Which boy?"

"The one whose mother ran off. The one who—" The widow's voice dropped, but not enough. "Look at him. Look at what he is wearing."

Maya felt the words land on the back of her neck, one after another, small and hot, and she did not turn and she did not slow and she let them land, because she had known they were coming and she had decided, on the morning of the eighth day after her wedding, that she was going to walk this lane and let every one of them see her, and that if she turned now she would have to turn forever.

She lifted her chin higher. The sindur in her hair caught a last red flare of the sun going down over the yellow house and she walked into it.

"Maya." Rohan's voice was low and tight. "They are—"

"I know what they are." She kept her eyes forward. "Let them."

The two boys with the ball had stopped playing. They stood on either side of the lane with the ball between them, and the older one — maybe twelve, with a scab on his knee — stared at her with his mouth open, and the younger one stared at Rohan, and neither of them said anything, which was somehow worse than the widow's voice, the two of them standing there in the dust with the flat ball forgotten and their eyes going from her sindur to her breasts to the man who held her hand and back again.

Maya looked at the older boy. She looked at him the way she looked at everyone now — level, unhurried, without apology — and she said, in her soft voice, "Good evening."

The boy's mouth worked. Nothing came out.

She walked on.

The lane narrowed toward the corner. The hedges came closer here, overgrown on both sides, and the green dusty smell of them rose up as she passed — that smell she had known her whole life, the smell of this colony's summers, green and dry and faintly bitter — and the leaves scraped her bare arm above the bangle, a small rough drag of leaf against skin, and she felt it and did not move away from it, because it was the lane touching her back, the lane accepting that she was in it.

A door slammed somewhere behind her. The schoolmaster's wife, pulling her window shut. Maya did not turn to see it. She heard the wood hit the frame and she heard the small clatter of the woman's bracelets through the wall and she kept walking, and the sound of the slammed window stayed behind her like a thing she had already left.

"You are shaking," Rohan said.

"I am not."

"Your hand is shaking."

She looked down at their joined hands and saw that he was right. Her fingers, curled through his, had a fine tremor in them, a small fast shiver that had nothing to do with the evening heat, and she had not felt it until he said it, and now that she felt it she made herself feel it fully — the fear, the bright hot wire of it running down the inside of her arm — and then she closed her hand harder around his and made the tremor stop.

"It is the cold," she said.

"It is not cold."

"Then it is the lane," she said, and she smiled at nothing, at the far corner, at the market road she could not yet see. "It is a lot of lane."

He was quiet for a few steps. The anklets spoke and spoke. The cart was behind them now — she could feel it behind her, the old man still standing with his bell in the air, not ringing it, not moving, and she did not look back because looking back would have been the one thing she could not do.

"When you said husband," Rohan said, very low. "Out there. In front of the man."

"Yes."

"You meant it."

"I meant it." She turned her head just enough to see his face, the weathered line of it, the stubble gone grey at the jaw, the dark brown eyes fixed on the road ahead the way a man fixes his eyes on a thing he is afraid of. "Did you want me to mean it?"

His jaw worked. He did not answer, and the not-answering was the answer, and she felt it settle into her chest like a swallowed stone — warm, heavy, hers.

They came to the corner. The lane opened here onto the wider market road, and the light was going fast now, the sky over the rooftops gone the colour of a bruise, and the far end of the market road was full of the evening — rickshaws, a fruit cart, the smell of frying pakoras, a temple bell somewhere ringing the hour. Behind her the lane had gone quiet. The whispers had crested and broken and were draining away, the water-tap women bent back over their pots, the boys picking up their ball, the schoolmaster's window dark. She could feel it all at her back like a tide going out, and she stood at the corner with her husband's hand in hers and did not look around.

Rohan's hand tightened again. Once. The same small convulsion, the same lurch, and this time she did not squeeze back. She kept her eyes forward, on the market road, on the rickshaw lights coming on one by one in the dusk, and she felt the weight of the lane behind her and the weight of the road ahead of her and the weight of his hand in hers, and she lifted her chin and stepped off the cracked asphalt of the colony onto the road.