The blue door's paint had chipped again since the last time—a new crescent of bare wood showing at the hinge, pale as a fingernail. Maya stepped through and Shilpa's hand landed flat between her shoulder blades, not pushing, just placing her, the way you'd steady a glass on a shelf.

"In," Shilpa said. "He's been waiting."

The room smelled the same as before—clean laundry folded somewhere out of sight, and under it the cedar of the almirah, and under that the particular staleness of a room that got aired but never opened. The air conditioner ticked. The officer sat on the edge of the bed with his belt in his hands, doubled over, and he was working the leather through his fingers the way a man works a rosary.

He did not stand.

Behind her the lock turned. Not the snick of a latch but the heavier sound—the bolt Shilpa had installed last month, the one that went home with a thud you felt in your teeth. Maya kept her eyes on the officer. His boots were planted flat on the rug, laces double-knotted, the leather scuffed grey at the toes and polished everywhere else, as if he only ever looked at the top of his own feet.

"Come here," he said.

She went. The rug was wool, and the fibers pressed up cool through her soles, and her mother's anklets spoke with every step—chhan, chhan—the little silver bells doing what they'd done since she was sixteen and first hooked them around her ankles in front of the bathroom mirror. Her bangles slid down her forearms as she walked, five on each wrist, gold, her mother's, loose enough to travel from elbow to knuckle if she let them.

She stopped a foot from his knees. Close enough to smell him: shaving soap, and cigarettes he hadn't smoked in this room, and beneath that the clean cotton of a shirt laundered by someone else.

He looked at her the way a man looks at a bill of lading. Up from her feet—the anklets, the painted toenails, the henna she'd done herself last week gone faint—along the red silk of the saree, the pleats she'd pinned at her waist, the pallu across her left shoulder, the gold jhumkas swinging against her neck, the sindur line she'd redrawn in the auto-rickshaw mirror on the way over. Then her face. He stayed on her face a long time.

"You know why I paid," he said.

Not a question. She nodded anyway.

"Twenty thousand." He said the number flatly, no pride in it, no apology. "Transferred to your account an hour ago. Check it if you want."

She didn't move. Her phone sat in her clutch on the chair by the door, and the clutch was her mother's too, beaded, and she would not walk back across the room to look at a screen with this man watching her from the bed.

"I believe you," she said. Her voice came out lower than she'd meant it to, and steadier.

"Good." He turned the belt over in his hands. The buckle caught the tube light and threw a small white coin of glare onto the wall. "Because it isn't for one night."

Maya said nothing. Her mother's bangles had settled at her wrists, and she could feel her own pulse against them, the gold warmed now to her skin.

"It's for the whole thing," he said. "The standing there. The looking at me like that. The way you hold your hands." He gestured with the belt, a small circle at her waist. "All of it. Every part of it belongs to me now. You understand?"

"Yes."

"Say what belongs to me."

She felt the words arrive before she chose them, which was how it had been lately—the body deciding first, the mind catching up with the receipt. "I belong to you."

He watched her mouth while she said it. Then he set the belt down on the bed beside his thigh, deliberate, aligned with the edge of the mattress, and folded his hands on his knees.

"Undress," he said. "Slowly. Show me what's mine."

Her hands went to the pallu first, because that was how you did it, that was how her mother's hands had done it in the photographs, the pallu gathered and brought across. She pinched the silk at her shoulder and drew it down over her arm, and the fabric whispered against the blouse, and she let it hang from her elbow a moment before it slid free.

The officer did not blink.

She found the pins at her waist by feel—three of them, the big safety pins she used because the saree was her mother's and the pleats had been set for a taller woman, a fuller woman, and Maya had learned to make the extra fabric behave. One pin out. She laid it on the chair arm. Second pin. Third. The pleats loosened and the whole red length of the saree sagged against her hips, and she caught the fall of it with one hand before it could drop, and the officer's eyes followed her hand.

"Slower," he said.

She slowed. She let the saree down the way water comes off a stone—first the hip, then the thigh, then the floor, where it pooled in a red spiral around her feet with the border showing, gold thread in the gold light, and she stepped out of the coil and stood in her blouse and petticoat and her mother's black lace brassiere beneath, and the bangles, and the anklets, and nothing else.

The air conditioner ticked. Somewhere in the front room Shilpa's television murmured, and a pressure cooker hissed, and it was nine-forty on a Tuesday.

The officer stood up.

He was taller standing than she'd remembered from the first night—or she'd been lying down for most of that night, and memory had folded him smaller. His shoulders filled the space between the bed and the almirah. He crossed to her in two steps and took her chin in his hand, thumb on one side of her jaw, fingers on the other, and he tilted her face up until the tube light found her eyes and she had to squint.

Her nose ring shifted with the tilt, the small gold hoop pressing cool against the side of her nostril, familiar as her own breath. His thumb moved once along her jaw, over the place where Rohan's mouth had left its mark three nights ago, the bruise now yellow at the edges and going, and the officer pressed it as if reading a date on a coin.

"You'll call me husband tonight," he said.

Maya's lips parted. The word was already in her mouth, wrong-shaped, and she held it there a second—husband was a man asleep two lanes over with her mother's red scarf on his chest, husband was the floorboard by the bedroom door that creaked, husband was the hand that had pushed his own seed back into her with two fingers and called her wife—and she looked up into this man's flat grey eyes and understood that he did not know any of that, and never would, and that this was the whole point of the twenty thousand rupees.

"Yes," she said.

"Say it."

"Yes, husband."

His hand tightened on her jaw—not hard, just closed, the way a man closes a door he intends to lock. Then he let go, and the release was its own instruction, and Maya understood she was meant to stay exactly where she was, chin still lifted, and she did.

He walked around her. She heard his boots on the rug behind her, felt him at her back, and then his hands were at the hooks of her blouse. He unhooked them one at a time, not fast, and the blouse came loose and he drew it down her arms himself, sliding it past the bangles, and laid it—she watched him do it—folded once over the back of the chair, next to the pins.

"The petticoat," he said.

She untied the drawstring at her waist and let it fall, and stepped out of the ring of white cotton, and now there was only the black lace brassiere and her mother's gold. Her breasts sat heavy in the lace, the straps cutting in, the weight of them pulling the cups down so the tops of her nipples showed above the edge—she'd bought the brassiere from her mother's almirah and it had never quite fit, the band too wide, the cups too shallow, and she wore it anyway because it was her mother's and because a thing that doesn't fit still holds you.

The officer came back around to face her. He looked at her breasts for a long moment, and his jaw moved once, side to side, as if he were chewing something he'd decided not to spit out.

"Take it off," he said.

She reached behind her back and found the hooks—four of them, and the bottom one always stuck—and she worked it, and the band loosened, and she brought the brassiere down her arms and her breasts came free with a small weight and swing that she felt in her ribs, the undersides settling, the nipples tightening in the air-conditioned cold. She laid the brassiere on the chair with the blouse, and the lace lay there black and small and hers.

"Turn," he said.

She turned. The rug's fibers pressed cool against her bare soles now, and her anklets rang once as she pivoted, and she stood with her back to him and felt his gaze travel down her spine, over the small of her back, over the wide flare of her hips—thirty-eight inches, her mother's shape, the shape the hormones had found in her and finished—down the backs of her thighs, the backs of her knees, the hollows behind her ankles.

"Bend," he said.

She bent at the waist, hands on her own knees, hair falling forward over her face, and the blood went to her head and her ears roared, and she heard him breathe out through his nose, once, slow.

"There," he said. "That's what I paid for."

His palm landed flat on her left buttock. Not a slap—a placement, the same way Shilpa's hand had placed her at the door. He held it there, warm and heavy, and then his fingers spread and he gripped the flesh and lifted, and let it fall, and watched it settle, and did it again on the other side.

"Straighten up."

She straightened. Her hair swung back over her shoulders, and the sindur line she'd drawn that morning had smeared a little at the part, and she could feel the smear, a faint red grit at her hairline.

He picked the belt up off the bed.

Maya's whole body went still—not the still of obedience but the older still, the animal still, the one that comes up from the base of the spine. He saw it. He saw it and he smiled, a small flat movement of his mouth that did not reach his eyes, and he doubled the belt once more in his hands and began to tap it against his own palm. Tap. Tap. Tap. Measured, unhurried, the leather landing on the callus at the base of his fingers.

"Not tonight," he said. "Tonight you're going to learn something else. But you should know it's here."

He laid the belt on the bed again. Then he sat down on the edge of the mattress, and he pointed at the floor between his boots.

"Kneel."

She knelt. The rug was thick enough to be kind at first and then not—the fibers gave and the floorboards under them did not, and within a minute her knees had found the true hardness of the house. Her anklets had gone quiet. Her bangles slid down her forearms and rested at her wrists, and she folded her hands in her lap, and her breasts hung heavy and bare above them, and she looked up at him from the floor.

He looked down at her.

"Husband," he said. Not a command. A test.

"Husband," she said.

His eyes did not change. He sat with his hands on his thighs and his boots planted on either side of her knees, and the room's warm dead air moved over her bare shoulders, and the tube light hummed, and somewhere past the thick door the pressure cooker let out its long thin whistle and then stopped.

Maya waited. The word husband sat in the air between them, and she did not take it back, and he did not take it up. Her knees ached. Her mother's bangles were warm at her wrists. Above her the officer's face was closed and patient and terrible, and she understood, kneeling there on the rug with the saree pooled red behind her, that he was in no hurry at all.