The house was asleep by midnight. She waited until the fan's hum had flattened into the steady drone that meant her husband was down deep, and then she slid off the cot with her anklets gathered in one fist so they would not speak.

She had not decided. That was the thing she would tell herself later, in the dark, on the road — that she had not decided, that her hands had decided for her. But her hands went straight to the almirah, and her hands knew exactly which shelf, and they lifted out the dupatta her mother had worn over the red silk on the day the photograph in the front room was taken. She wrapped it loose around her hair and her face, the way the women in the old market did when they did not want to be known, and she left it loose enough that her eyes showed.

The Activa was her mother's. It had sat under the tarpaulin by the back wall for six years, and Maya had kept it, had learned it, had taught herself to kick it alive in the afternoons when the lane was empty and the sound of it would not carry. The key was in the little clay pot by the door where her mother had always kept it. She had never moved the pot.

The first kick did nothing. The second caught, coughed, died. On the third the engine turned over with a sound like something old clearing its throat, and she held her breath and looked back at the doorway of the house, and the doorway was black, and nothing moved in it.

She walked the scooty out through the back gate rather than the front, pushed it in neutral down the dirt strip behind the houses where the drain ran, and only when she had reached the mouth of the second lane did she swing her leg over and sit down on it.

The seat was cold. The night air came up the lane off the fields and it smelled of cut grass and ditch water and, faintly, of the jasmine that grew wild over the compound wall of the house at the corner. She pulled the dupatta tighter across her mouth and nose with two fingers, and her nails — long, painted, the color of dried blood — caught in the silk, and she had to work them free, and the small tearing sound of it was loud in the empty lane.

She went slowly at first. The lane was unlit past the third house and the headlight threw a thin yellow cone that showed her nothing but the cracked asphalt and the occasional shape of a sleeping dog, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her ears, in her wrists, in the soft place under her jaw where her husband had left a mark she had not let fade.

Then the road opened, and she gave it more throttle, and the night started to move past her.

And her body moved with it. Every bump in the asphalt came up through the seat and through the frame and into her, and her breasts — heavy, unbound under the thin blouse because she had not taken the time to put on the good brassiere, only the black lace one her mother had left, which held nothing — swung with each jolt, up and against her ribs and down again, the weight of them pulling at her shoulders, the ache in them sharpening with every rut in the road until the ache was not separate from the fear anymore but one long low note running under it.

The dupatta kept slipping off her hair. She would take one hand off the handlebar to drag it back up, and the scooty would wobble, and she would grab the bar again with her heart in her throat, and the wind would take the silk again, and her hair would come loose and stream behind her in the dark like something being let go.

She passed the chemist's shutters, closed and padlocked. She passed the tea stall where the boys from the colony sat in the evenings, the stools up on the counter now, the brazier cold. She passed the turning to the school and the black shape of the peepal tree over it, and she did not slow down once, because slowing down was how you got looked at, and she was already being looked at by everything, by the whole dark road, and the only thing she had was speed.

Two lanes over. The woman had said two lanes over. She counted them off — the lane of the tailor, the lane of the temple with the little shrine at the mouth of it, and then the lane with the blue door.

She nearly missed it. The door was not blue anymore, not really; it had been blue once, and the paint had gone the color of a bruise and then of nothing, and the only reason she saw it at all was that there was a bulb burning above it, a single bare bulb on a wire, and it put a yellow circle on the step. No other house in the lane had a light on.

She cut the engine at the corner and coasted the last of the way in silence, and put her feet down in the dirt beside the step, and sat there with the engine ticking as it cooled and her hands still wrapped around the grips.

Her heart had not slowed. If anything it had gotten worse, because now there was nothing to do with her body but sit and feel it, and the feeling was enormous. Her blouse was damp between her breasts. There was a line of sweat down her back under the saree, and the saree was the red silk, the wedding one, because of course it was, because she had not been able to make herself wear anything else, and she thought, sitting there in the dark, that this was a mad thing to have done, to come to a stranger's door in her wedding silk and her mother's dupatta, and that she could still turn the scooty around and go home and lie down beside her husband and no one would ever know.

She turned the handlebar an inch. The front wheel came around. She looked at the road she had come down, and it was empty and dark and it went back to the house and the open door and the cot and the fan and the man asleep with the red scarf she had bought him folded on the stool beside the bed because he would not wear it to sleep but would not put it away either.

She turned the handlebar back.

She got off the scooty and put the stand down and stood beside it in the dirt, and she pulled the dupatta up over her hair properly this time, and then over her face, so that only her eyes showed, and she looked at herself in the little round side mirror, which was cracked across one corner and showed her a face cut in two by the crack, kohl dark around her eyes, the tip of her nose ring catching the bulb light, and she could not read the face at all. It could have been anyone's.

Her nails were trembling when she lifted her hand to knock. She watched them do it — the long red nails, the two fingers curled, the knuckles coming toward the wood — and it was like watching someone else's hand, and then the knuckles met the door and made a sound much smaller than she had meant.

She waited. Nothing. She knocked again, harder, and the second knock was still in the air when the door opened.

The woman was older than the voice on the phone had made her sound. Fifty, maybe more, though it was hard to tell in the bulb light, because everything about her was built to make it hard to tell — the hair glossy and black and clearly not all hers, the face powdered pale, the eyes ringed with kohl heavier than Maya's own, the mouth a dark red that had bled a little into the lines around it. She wore a sari the color of old gold, and gold at her wrists and her ears and her throat, and she stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and looked at Maya the way a woman looks at a thing she has already bought.

She smelled of jasmine and, under the jasmine, of stale smoke.

"Maya," she said. Not a question.

Maya's mouth was dry. She had planned to say something — she had practiced something on the road, some version of herself that would be cool and unbothered and would ask the questions in the right order — and all of it went out of her like water out of a cracked pot.

"Yes," she said. It came out thin. Cracked. Not her voice at all, or not the voice she had spent two years building, and she heard it, and the woman heard it, and the woman's mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile.

"I know you would come," the woman said. She stepped back from the door and the light from inside came out onto the step, dim and yellow, and she made a small gesture with two fingers, the kind of gesture you make to a servant, or to a dog you are fond of. "Come in. The road is not a place to stand."

Maya looked past her, into the house. There was a narrow passage with a floor of red cement, and a curtain at the end of it, and a low stool with a mirror above it, and on the stool a tin of powder with the lid off, and the whole of it was small and dim and ordinary, and it was also the inside of a stranger's house at midnight, and her feet would not move.

"I have many customers," the woman said, over her shoulder, already walking in. "Many. And they are tired of the same thing. They want something new. They want a beautiful one who is not a woman and is not a man." She turned at the curtain and looked back down the passage at Maya, and her eyes went from Maya's hair to her face to the shape of her under the silk, unhurried, like a hand going over fruit. "They ask me for it. I tell them I will find one."

Maya put one foot over the threshold. The cement was cool through the sole of her sandal. The sound of the anklets, one small clear chime, went down the passage and into the house and did not come back.

"You are not a transgender," the woman said. She said it plainly, without cruelty, the way you would say a color. "You are a shemale. You understand the difference?"

Maya did not answer. Her hand had found the edge of the door frame, and she held it, and the wood was old and soft under her nails.

"It does not matter what I call you," the woman said. "It matters what the customer wants, and I will tell you what he wants, and you will give it to him like a real partner. Not shy. Not crying. Like a prostitute. Do you know how a prostitute gives?"

"Yes," Maya said. Her voice was a little steadier now. She did not know whether it was true.

"Five thousand," the woman said. "For you. Every time. Whatever he gives over that is mine. That is the arrangement. Your privacy is my guarantee — no one will know your face, no one will know your name, no one will know this lane. If a customer talks, he does not come back. That is how I keep this house." She held up one finger, and the gold on it caught the light. "But if you talk, it is finished. If you are shy, it is finished. If you bring the police, or a husband, or a brother, it is finished. Say you understand."

Maya looked at her. The woman's face was calm and tired and powdered, and under the kohl her eyes were not unkind, exactly; they were simply done with the world, the way her mother's eyes had been done with it in the last months before she left, in the photograph on the wall with the wine stain across the sari.

"I understand," Maya said.

The woman nodded once and turned and went through the curtain, and her hand came back and held it open, and the passage behind Maya was full of the dark she had ridden through, and the bulb above the door was still burning, and somewhere down the lane a dog was barking at nothing, and Maya stepped in.

The door closed behind her with a soft click, and the bulb light went out of the crack at the bottom of it, and the house took her.

In the passage there was a mirror, small and dull and hung too high, and she caught herself in it as she passed — the dupatta fallen back off her hair, the kohl smudged at one corner, the mouth open a little, the eyes wide and dark and hers and not hers — and then the woman was saying something from the room beyond the curtain, and she went toward the voice.