Shilpa came back into the room with the money already counted, the notes fanned between two fingers like she was dealing cards. She did not look at Maya on the bed. She looked at the man, at the sweat drying on his chest, at the way he had not yet pulled his trousers back up.

"Five," she said. "Two mine. Three yours, beti. Get up and take it."

Maya sat up. The silk of the bed was cold under her thighs now, and the seed on her belly had dried to a thin stiff film that pulled at her skin when she moved. She found her mother's black lace brassiere on the floor by the bedpost and put it on without hurrying, the way she had learned to do everything in this house — without hurrying, without shame, because hurrying looked like guilt and guilt was the only thing that could ruin her.

The man watched her. He had his shirt open, his belt undone, one sock off and one sock on, and he watched her the way a man watches a fire he paid to build.

"What a hot thing you are," he said. His voice was thick from the whiskey and the sex. "What a beautiful shemale. I have been with women in this city for twenty years. I have never had a thing like you."

Maya pulled her saree up over her hips and let the pallu fall. She did not answer him. She had learned in the last hours that the men did not want an answer — they wanted the silence after the compliment, the small nod, the way a woman accepts a thing as her due.

Shilpa walked to the bed and held the notes out. Maya took them. Three thousand rupees, folded twice, damp at the edge from the man's hand. She tucked them into the waistband of her saree, against her hip, where they would stay.

The man stood and did up his belt. He found his other sock and sat on the edge of the bed to put it on, and while he was bent over like that, he said, without looking at her, "I will come again. Same night next week."

"She is not free next week," Shilpa said. She was already at the door, her hand on the frame, her voice flat and businesslike. "She is a busy girl now. You call me. I will tell you."

The man laughed. He stood, and he was tall — taller than Rohan, taller than her father — and he looked down at Maya with that same hunger she had seen rise in him three times tonight. "Busy girl," he said. "Yes. She will be busy." He put his wallet in his pocket and walked out past Shilpa without another word, and his footsteps went down the narrow passage and out through the thick door, and the door closed.

The room was quiet. The air conditioner hummed. Maya sat on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor and her hands in her lap, and she looked at the lamp and the shadows it threw across the rumpled silk.

Shilpa came back in and closed the door and leaned against it. She looked at Maya for a long moment, and something in her face had changed — not softness exactly, but a kind of assessment, the way a woman looks at a good piece of work she did not expect to be quite so good.

"You cried," Shilpa said. "I heard you crying through the wall. He liked that."

"He told me to."

"No, he didn't."

Maya looked up at her. Shilpa's face was cool, her kohl-rimmed eyes steady, and she was smiling a little — not a kind smile, a knowing one. "I have been doing this fifteen years, beti. Men do not tell you to cry. Men tell you to stop crying. You cried because you wanted to. Because it felt good to let it out. That is a different thing."

Maya did not answer. She did not know how to. The woman was right in a way that made her stomach turn over, and she did not want to look at it too closely.

Shilpa pushed off the door and walked to the small table in the corner where a bottle of water and a steel glass sat. She poured herself a glass and drank it standing, watching Maya over the rim.

"Now," she said. "The night is not over. There is another one."

Maya's hand went to the notes at her hip without meaning to. "Another one."

"A regular. He called while you were in here the first time. He is ready to come at eleven. He has been waiting for a girl like you for a month — a young wife, he says. That is his fantasy. A young wife." Shilpa set the glass down and folded her arms. "He will pay five also. Two for me, three for you. Six thousand in one night, beti. That is more than your father makes in a week."

Maya looked at the window. The shutters were closed, and the glass behind them was black — no light, no street, nothing outside but the night. Somewhere past it, two lanes over, her husband was sleeping with a red scarf he would not wear to bed, and the floorboard by the door would creak if he woke and walked to the kitchen for water.

"He is a big man," Shilpa said. "Ex-officer. He drinks whiskey first and then he wants to be served in the bedroom. He likes it hard. He likes to hear crying — real crying, not the kind you do for the first one. He wants to feel like he is taking something from you." She paused. "You understand what I am saying."

"I understand."

"Do you want it?"

Maya thought of the three thousand folded against her hip, and she thought of the pills she bought three lanes over, sixty rupees for a strip of ten, and she thought of the way Rohan's hand had closed on hers in the market when she said "For my husband" loud enough for strangers to hear. She thought of the way the first man had said "good girl" and the way it had gone through her like a wire pulled tight.

"Yes," she said.

Shilpa nodded once, briskly, and was already moving. "Then get up. Correct your makeup. Your kajal has run — you cried it off. And put your clothes on properly. He will be here by eleven, and he likes a wife who is dressed, not a wife who is waiting in a sheet."

Maya stood. Her legs were unsteady for a moment, the muscles in her thighs still loose and warm from the hours before, and she put her hand on the bedpost to steady herself. Then she walked to the mirror on the wall — the same mirror she had stood in front of when she first came in, when Shilpa had called her a shemale and named the price — and she looked at herself.

Her lipstick was gone, eaten off her mouth by the first man's mouth. Her kajal had run into the hollows under her eyes, black smears like she had slept badly for a year. The sindur was still there, the red line in the parting of her hair, undisturbed — that was the one thing they never touched, the one thing that stayed. Her mother's jhumkas hung from her ears, and her mother's bangles were on her wrists, and her mother's black lace brassiere was under the saree she had pulled back up over her hips.

She looked like a woman who had been fucked. She looked like a woman who had been paid. She looked, she thought, exactly like what she was.

She opened her mother's purse on the table and took out the kajal stick and the lipstick. She leaned close to the mirror and redrew the line under her eyes, slow and careful, the way she had practiced a hundred times in her own room at home with the door locked. Then she painted her mouth — the same cherry red her mother had worn, the same red that had been on the rim of the glass in the photograph with the wine stain — and she pressed her lips together and looked at herself again.

Better. The smears were gone. The woman in the mirror was whole again.

Behind her, in the glass, Shilpa was watching. "Good," Shilpa said. "Now the saree. Fix the pallu. You are a wife tonight — a young wife. He wants to feel like he is taking you from a house, from a husband. So you must look like a wife who is being taken."

Maya adjusted the pallu so it fell over her left shoulder and covered the top of her breast, and she tucked the loose end into the waistband. Then she looked at the bed — the rumpled silk, the wet patch where the first man had spilled, the dent in the pillow where her head had been — and she pulled the top sheet straight and folded it back, and she smoothed the silk with the flat of her hand, the way she smoothed the beds at home every morning.

"Listen," Shilpa said. She had come to stand beside Maya at the mirror, close, so that both of them were in the glass — the older woman in the plain cotton kurta, the young one in the red silk, and Shilpa's reflection looked at Maya's reflection. "This one is different. He is not like the first. The first one wanted a daughter. This one wants a wife. Do you know the difference?"

"Tell me."

"A daughter you can be gentle with. A wife you have to break a little first, so you know she is yours. That is what he wants. He will be rough. He will want to hear you cry. And you will cry — not because I told you to, but because he will make you. And then he will hold you after, and he will call you his wife, and you will let him, because that is what a wife does." She paused. "There is one more thing."

"What."

"He does not know what you are." Shilpa's eyes in the mirror were steady on Maya's. "He thinks you are a woman. A real woman. A young wife. He has not been told, and I am not going to tell him, and you are not going to tell him either. If he finds out in the middle, that is your problem, not mine. But if you want the money, you keep your mouth shut and you let him believe what he wants to believe."

Maya looked at her own reflection. The sindur, the jhumkas, the bangles, the painted mouth, the heavy breasts pushing against the silk, the wide hips under the fall of the pallu. She looked like a woman. She was a woman. And a man was going to come through that door in half an hour and take her the way a man takes a wife, and he would not know — he would not know, and she would let him not know, and that, she realized, was its own kind of power.

"Okay," she said.

Shilpa turned away from the mirror and picked up the empty steel glass, and her voice went back to business. "There is whiskey in the cabinet in the front room. When he comes, you serve it to him in the bedroom — not in the front room, in the bedroom. He will sit on the bed and drink it and watch you, and you will stand in front of him with your hands at your sides and let him look. Do not sit down until he tells you to sit. Do not speak until he speaks to you. He likes a wife who knows her place."

"And then?"

Shilpa smiled, and this time it was almost warm, and almost sad. "And then you do what you did in here, beti. Only harder. Only longer. Only the way he wants it." She opened the door and stepped out into the passage, and her voice came back through the doorway. "I will bring him in. Be ready."

Maya stood alone in the room. She looked at the mirror one more time, and then she turned away from it and went to the cabinet by the wall and opened it and found the whiskey bottle and a clean glass, and she set them on the small table beside the bed. She straightened the sheet one more time. She checked the sindur in the mirror with her fingertip — still there, still red, still undisturbed. She touched her mother's jhumkas at her ears, and they swung and caught the lamplight, and she heard the small sound they made, the sound her mother used to make when she turned her head in the kitchen.

Then she stood in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides, and she waited.

The floorboard in the passage creaked. Footsteps — two sets, one light and quick, one heavy and slow. The door opened.

He was big. Bigger than the first man, wider through the shoulders, with a thick neck and a grey moustache and a shirt stretched over a heavy chest. He was maybe fifty-five, maybe sixty, and he filled the doorway the way a wall fills a doorway, and he stood there with his hands at his sides and looked at her — at the red silk, at the sindur, at her face — and his eyes went slowly down her body and slowly back up, and when they came back to her face, they were not hungry the way the first man's had been. They were calm. They were patient. They were the eyes of a man who had all night.

"So," he said. His voice was deep and flat, an officer's voice, a voice used to being obeyed. "This is the young wife."

Shilpa stood behind him in the passage. "Five thousand," she said. "As we agreed."

He did not turn around. He reached into his pocket and held the notes back over his shoulder without looking, and Shilpa took them, and her footsteps went away down the passage, and the door closed behind the big man, and the latch clicked.

He was still looking at Maya. He had not moved from the doorway.

"Come here," he said.

Maya walked to him. Her anklets sounded on the floor, small and bright, and she stopped a foot away and looked up at him — up, because he was tall, because her head came only to his chin — and she held her hands at her sides the way Shilpa had told her.

He looked at her mouth. He reached out and took her jaw in his hand — not hard, not yet, just holding it, his thumb on one cheek and his fingers on the other — and he turned her face slowly one way and then the other, examining her the way a man examines a thing he has bought and wants to be sure of.

"Pretty," he said. "Pretty wife." He let go of her jaw and sat down on the edge of the bed, and the bed dipped under his weight, and he looked up at her from there. "Whiskey."

Maya turned to the table and poured the whiskey into the glass, two fingers, the way she had seen men pour it at the shop, and she turned back and held the glass out to him with both hands, the way a wife serves her husband.

He took it and drank half of it in one swallow and set it on the floor beside his foot. Then he leaned back on his hands and looked at her standing there in her red silk, and he said, "Take off your clothes."

Maya's hands went to the pallu of her saree. She unwound it slowly, letting it fall over her arm, and then she unclasped the waistband and let the saree drop to the floor in a red pool around her feet. She stood in her mother's black lace brassiere and her mother's gold bangles and jhumkas and anklets, and the sindur in her hair, and nothing else.

He looked at her for a long time. His eyes went to her breasts — heavy, full, the lace straining across them — and then down to her hips, wide and smooth and hairless, and then down her long legs to her painted toenails, and then back up to her face.

"Turn around," he said.

She turned. She heard him shift on the bed behind her, and then his hand was on her hip, heavy and dry and warm, and he pulled her back toward him until the backs of her thighs touched his knees.

"Bend over," he said. "Hands on the bed."

She bent. The silk of the bed was cool under her palms, and she felt the whiskey on his breath at the back of her neck, and then his hand came down on her ass — flat, hard, a slap that cracked through the quiet room — and she gasped and her whole body jerked forward, and he did it again, and again, until her skin was hot and stinging under his palm.

"That is what a wife gets," he said, "when she is late."

She had not been late. She did not say so. She stayed bent over the bed with her palms flat on the silk and her breath coming short, and she felt the sting bloom and spread across her skin, and she felt something else too — a low, warm pull in her belly, the same pull she had felt with the first man, the same pull she had felt with Rohan in the dark of their bedroom with the door open.

He stood up behind her. She heard his belt, the metal of the buckle, the zip. Then his hand was on the back of her neck, pushing her down, and his other hand was between her legs, and his fingers found her — wet, already wet, slick from the hours before and from the whiskey and from the slap — and he pushed two fingers into her all at once, deep, and she cried out and her hips bucked back against his hand.

"There," he said. "There is the wife." He pulled his fingers out and she heard him spit, and then she felt the head of his cock against her, thick and blunt and hot, and he pushed in.

She screamed. She could not help it. He was bigger than the first man and he did not go slow, he went in one long push that stretched her until she thought she would split, and she screamed into the silk of the bed and her hands clawed at the sheet.

"Good," he said. "Cry."

And she did. He pulled back and thrust in again, and she cried out, and again, and again, and the tears came — real tears, hot on her cheeks, running into the silk — and she was not pretending, she was not performing, she was just crying because it hurt and because it felt good and because the two were the same thing now, and he heard her and he went harder, faster, his hips slapping against her ass, his hand pressing her neck down into the bed.

"Whose wife are you," he said.

"Yours," she sobbed. "Yours."

"Say it again."

"I am your wife. I am your wife."

He fucked her like that for a long time. The bed creaked and the lamp threw their shadows on the wall and her jhumkas swung and clicked with every thrust and her bangles rang on the silk where her hands were braced, and she cried and she moaned and she said "I am your wife" every time he told her to, and the sting of his hand on her ass turned into a heat that spread up her spine, and she felt the pull in her belly build and build, and then it broke — she came with a long shudder, her whole body clenching around him, a cry that was almost a sob, and he felt it and grunted and drove in deep and held himself there, and she felt him come inside her, hot and thick and pulsing, filling her.

He stayed inside her for a moment after. Then he pulled out slowly, and she felt the wet drag of him leaving her, and he let go of her neck, and she stayed bent over the bed with her cheek on the silk and her breath ragged and her tears drying on her face.

He picked up his glass and drank the rest of the whiskey. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed beside her, and he put his hand on her back — gentle now, the same hand that had slapped her, gentle — and he rubbed her back slowly, up and down, the way a man rubs a horse he has just ridden.

"Good wife," he said. "Good girl."

Maya turned her head on the silk and looked up at him. His face was calm again, the officer's face, and he was looking at her with something that was almost fondness.

"What is your name," he said.

She hesitated. Shilpa's voice in the passage, the rule, the mouth kept shut. But he was not asking what she was. He was asking her name.

"Maya," she said.

He nodded slowly, as if filing it away. "Maya," he repeated. "A wife named Maya." He stood up and began to dress — shirt, belt, socks, shoes — and she lay where she was and watched him, too tired to move, the seed of two men cooling inside her and on her skin.

At the door he stopped and looked back at her. "I will come again," he said. "Next week. Tell the woman." Then he opened the door and walked down the passage, and the thick door closed behind him, and the room was quiet except for the air conditioner.

Maya lay on the bed for a long moment. Then she pushed herself up and stood, and her legs were shaking, and she walked to the mirror and looked at herself. Her kajal had run again, black streaks down her cheeks, and her lipstick was smeared at the corner of her mouth, and the sindur was still there, still red, still undisturbed. Her mother's jhumkas swung at her ears. Her mother's bangles were on her wrists. Her mother's black lace brassiere was damp with sweat against her breasts.

She looked like a wife who had been taken. She looked, she thought, exactly like what she was.

Shilpa came in without knocking. She looked at Maya, at the state of her, and she smiled that small knowing smile and went to the cabinet and poured herself a whiskey. "He liked you," she said. "He never asks a girl's name. He asked yours."

Maya said nothing. She picked up her saree from the floor and wound it back around her waist and over her shoulder, and she tucked the pallu in, and she picked up her mother's purse from the table.

"Same time tomorrow?" Shilpa said.

Maya looked at the money in her waistband — three thousand, folded, damp. Then she looked at the mirror one more time, at the woman standing there in the red silk with the sindur in her hair.

"Same time tomorrow," she said.

Shilpa raised her glass. "Good girl," she said. "Now go home before your husband wakes."