The road took them in. Heat came up through the soles of her feet first — the packed earth still holding the whole day inside it, breathing it back at the ankles, at the calves, a warmth that climbed. Maya felt it and did not slow. To her left a rickshaw swerved, its horn a flat bleat, and she stepped aside without breaking stride, her hand closed around Rohan's, her bangles knocking once against her wrist. The market was loud the way a river is loud: not one sound but a hundred layered, none of them about her.

That was the thing she had not expected. She had walked this road a thousand times as a boy with a boy's haircut and a boy's shoulders, and she had walked it these last two years with her hair down and her eyes lined, and always the road had watched her. Now it did not. Now the road was simply busy. A fruit cart rolled past stacked with green mangoes and the vendor called his price to nobody in particular; two women argued over the weight of a papaya; a boy ran with a tyre and a stick and did not look at her once. She was a woman in red walking with a man, and the market swallowed her the way it swallowed everyone.

She had wanted to be seen. What she had not known was how much better it would feel to be seen and then forgotten, absorbed, made ordinary. Her chin came up another degree.

"You are walking fast," Rohan said.

"You are walking slow."

He said nothing to that. His hand in hers was a closed fist she had to keep prying open with her thumb, and every few steps it clenched again, the tendons going tight under the hair at his wrist. She could feel the sweat starting between their palms. She did not let go. Ahead of them the frying stall sent up its smell — gram flour and hot oil and green chilli — and under it the older smell of the road itself, dust and diesel and the sweet rot of fruit too long in the sun.

A woman at a vegetable stall looked up as they passed. Maya met her eyes and held them, and the woman looked down first, at her tomatoes, and Maya felt the small clean victory of it slide down her spine.

"Where are we going?" Rohan asked.

"You'll see."

She had no idea. That was the truth of it, and she kept the truth where it belonged, behind her teeth. She had money folded in the waistband of her petticoat — her own money, saved from the small commissions she took sewing blouses for the colony women, three hundred and forty rupees she had not told him about — and she had a red silk saree on her body and sindur in her hair and a husband's hand in hers, and the evening was going dark around the edges, and that was enough to be going on with.

They passed a cycle-repair stand, a man bent over an upturned wheel with his hands black to the wrist. They passed a row of shops with their shutters half down and their tube-lights coming on one by one, each one buzzing to life with a flicker. They passed a tea stall where four men sat on a bench with their glasses and their elbows and one of them turned his head to watch her go by, and Maya felt his eyes on the back of her saree and let them stay there.

The cloth stall stood at the bend where the market road narrowed and the crowd thickened. It had no shopfront, only a frame of iron pipes lashed together and a tarpaulin roof, and from the front bar hung scarves — dozens of them, in every colour the dyers of the city could make, and the warm updraft off the road kept them moving, a slow restless flutter, like a flock deciding whether to fly. Maya stopped.

Rohan stopped because she stopped, a half-step behind, and she felt him come up against her stillness and wait there.

"This one," she said.

The scarf she had chosen was red — not the deep bridal red of her saree but a brighter red, a road red, the red of a bus or a flag or a chilli, and it was cotton, thin, the kind of cloth that held the shape of whatever it was tied around. She reached up and pulled it off the bar and the whole row swayed with the loss of it. She turned to Rohan and held it up against his chest, both hands flat on the cloth, her palms pressed to the worn grey of his shirt through the weave.

He looked down at her hands. Then at her face. Then away, over her shoulder, at the crowd, at the darkening sky, anywhere the looking was easier.

"Maya," he said, low.

"Stand still."

She kept her palms on him a moment longer than the measuring needed. Under the thin cotton she could feel the shape of him — the breadth of his chest, the beat of it, and lower, at the edge of her fingertips, the soft give where his stomach had gone loose with the years. She had touched this body for two years without touching it, watched it cross the front room in a vest and a towel, watched it fall asleep in the chair with the paper on its knees. Now her hands were on it in the open air of the market road and he was letting them be.

"How much?" she said, to the man behind the stall, who had been watching them with the flat patience of a shopkeeper who has seen every kind of couple.

"Sixty."

"Forty."

"Fifty-five, madam."

"Forty-five and I take it now."

The man looked at Rohan, who was looking at the ground. Then he looked at Maya, at the sindur in her part and the set of her jaw, and he shrugged and held out his hand. Maya let go of Rohan's fingers and dug into the fold at her waist and brought out the notes, soft and warm from her body, and counted them into the shopkeeper's palm. Forty-five. Her own. She did not look at Rohan while she did it, and she felt him watching the money leave her hand and did not look at him then either.

"Thank you," she said, and took the scarf.

She turned back to him. The scarf was in her hands and the road was behind her and the women at the next stall — two of them, at a bangle table, one old and one young — had stopped their bargaining to watch, the way women watch a thing they intend to discuss later. Maya knew they were watching. She had known they would be watching since before she stopped walking.

She reached up and laid the scarf around Rohan's neck.

Her arms had to come up over his shoulders to do it, and her saree pulled across her breasts with the reach, and she felt the coolness of the evening find the skin at her throat. She brought the two ends of the scarf forward and crossed them over his collarbones, and her knuckles brushed the hollow at the base of his throat where the pulse moved, and she felt it jump under her fingers — once, hard, like a fish turning in a shallow pan. His breath went in through his nose and did not come out. She looped the ends and pulled them into a knot, not tight, just tight enough that he would feel it all the way home.

"For my husband," she said.

She said it loud. Not shouted — she had never shouted in her life — but pitched, carried, aimed across the six feet of packed earth to the bangle stall, where the two women heard it and the older one's hands went still over the tray and the younger one's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. The shopkeeper behind them heard it too, and a man buying bananas heard it, and the boy with the tyre, who had come back around, heard it and stopped and stared with his mouth open.

For my husband.

Rohan's hand closed on hers.

It was not the small convulsion from the corner of the lane. It was a grip, hard, the whole hand, the bones of it pressing into the bones of her fingers, and when she looked up at his face she saw the two things fighting in it at once — the shame, red and hot along the ridge of his cheekbones and in the set of his mouth, and under the shame the other thing, the hunger, dark and low in the eyes, the thing that had looked at her in the doorway of her room and said yes. He was forty-five years old and he stood in the middle of the market road with a red scarf knotted at his throat and a wife's hand in his, and every person in the crowd could see exactly what he was.

"Maya," he said again. This time it was not a warning. It was not anything she could name.

"Come," she said.

She led him on, into the deeper crowd, and this time she felt the tremor come up through his palm into hers — fine, constant, the tremor of a man carrying something too heavy and refusing to set it down. She closed her fingers around it and held it and walked.

The market deepened around them. The stalls here were packed shoulder to shoulder, and the crowd moved in a slow current that carried them, and the smells came thicker — marigolds wilting in a bucket, the sweet burn of incense from a shrine wedged between two shops, frying onions, the wet green smell of a fish stall that had not yet closed. A loudspeaker somewhere played a film song, the old kind, the kind her mother used to hum while she did her face at the mirror, and Maya heard it and did not let it reach her.

She was aware of her own body in a way she had not been since the lane. The weight of her breasts moving under the silk with each step, the drag of the wet petticoat against her thighs, the small slickness between her legs that had started at the corner of the lane and had not gone away. The sindur in her part felt like a line of heat drawn along her scalp. She was walking through a crowd of strangers with her husband's seed still drying somewhere inside the red silk, and no one knew, and everyone could have known if they looked closely enough, and the not-knowing was the whole of the pleasure.

The crowd thinned at the far end of the market, where the road widened again and the shops gave way to a stretch of open ground — a dirt lot where the rickshaws parked between fares, three or four of them drawn up in a loose row with their canopies folded back and their drivers gone for tea. The last of the light was going out of the sky above the rooftops. The first star was not there yet; the sky was still the colour of a bruise fading, and the tube-lights of the market behind them laid a long yellow parallelogram on the ground.

Maya stopped at the edge of the lot.

She had not planned it. She would think about that later, in the small hours, and she would not be sure whether it had been planned or not. But there was the nearest rickshaw, drawn up at an angle with its faded canopy folded back, the seat a long black vinyl bench with a split in it that had been mended with tape, and the shadow of the whole machine lying across the packed earth, and it was a place where a woman could stand with her husband and the road could not see her.

She walked him into the shadow. Her hand still held his. The scarf was still knotted at his neck, the ends of it lying flat on his chest, and she could see the rise and fall of his breath moving the red cotton. Behind them the market roared on without them. Ahead of them the empty lot and the parked rickshaws and the dark coming down.

She turned to face him.

They were close, closer than the scarf had made them, close enough that the hem of her saree touched the front of his trousers and he could feel the heat coming off her the way she could feel it coming off him — the animal warmth of a body that has been walking and is not finished walking. His hand in hers had gone still. The tremor was gone. That frightened her more than the tremor had.

She lifted her gaze to his.

His eyes were dark, the brown gone almost black in the shadow of the canopy, and the shame was still in them but it had moved back, the way a tide moves back, and what was left in front was the hunger, naked and patient and waiting for her to say the word. The stubble at his jaw had gone grey in patches and the line of his mouth was set and his breath came slow out of his nose, and he did not move, did not speak, did not pull his hand away. He stood in the shadow of a parked rickshaw with his wife's scarf around his neck and waited for her.

The market went on behind them, indifferent, loud, full of other people's evenings.

Maya held his eyes and did not blink, and the whole road, the whole long walk, the whole two years, came down to this one square foot of packed earth where the two of them stood breathing each other's air.

She reached up with her free hand and put it flat against his chest, over the scarf, over the heart, and felt it going like a hammer under the cotton.