He did not tell her to stand. He reached down and took her wrist, and the bangles slid cold along her forearm as he pulled her up off the rug, and her knees came off the floor with a small wet sound where the sweat had sealed her skin to the stone. The saree stayed behind in its red pool. She stood naked in front of him except for her mother's gold, and the tube light found every place the two years had made her, the breasts heavy and low with their own weight, the hips flaring out of a waist that had no business holding them, the smooth seam where her little cock hung soft and small between her thighs.

He looked at her the way a man looks at a house he has already bought.

"On the bed," he said. "Face down."

She went. The faded quilt was scratchy under her stomach, and it smelled of dust and of the last time they had been in this room, the two of them humid and mixed into the cotton. She crawled up on her elbows and lay flat, and the mirror on the wardrobe door stood open at an angle and showed her the whole of herself, cheek down on the quilt, hair spilling black across the pillow, the red sindur line still holding its part down the middle of her head like a seam.

Behind her the buckle of his belt had already been set aside on the chair. She heard the small sounds he made — the mattress giving, the cloth of his trousers coming down his legs, the breath he let out through his nose when he was ready. Then his weight came down onto the bed and his knees pushed hers apart, and his hand closed on her hip, and she felt the blunt head of his cock press against her ass, slick already from his own hand, and she understood he was not going to wait for her to be ready, and she did not want him to.

"Watch," he said.

She lifted her face and watched.

He pushed in slow. One long push, no hurry in it at all, and she saw her own mouth come open in the glass before she felt her mouth come open, saw her eyes go dark and wide, saw her whole face change as the stretch went through her and kept going, deeper than she had planned for, deeper than she had been before, and the mirror gave her the whole thing at once — his thighs braced behind her, his hand white on her hip, the small brown of her own ass opening around the thick of him.

She made a sound. It came out of her throat uninvited and low, and in the mirror her lips shaped it and she watched herself shape it, and that was the thing — that was the thing she had not known she wanted, to see it happen to her face.

"There," he said. "That's the face."

He began to move.

Hard. No slow build, no courtesy. He took her hip in both hands and pulled her back onto him as he drove forward, and the bed knocked against the wall with a rhythm she could hear and feel at once, and the bangles at her wrists rang against the quilt with every stroke, a thin bright sound under the wet sound of him moving in her. Her breasts swung heavy beneath her chest and dragged on the quilt, and the sindur line held, and she watched her own face in the glass take it, mouth open, brows drawn, the kajal smeared at one eye from the pillow, and she did not look away.

"Harder," she said.

He gave her harder. His breath came out through his teeth now, and his fingers dug into the soft of her hip, and she felt the bruise from three nights ago wake up under his grip, that yellow-edged mark her father had left with his mouth, and she pressed her hand over his hand and pressed it down, wanting the mark renewed, wanting it darker.

"You want it," he said. Not a question.

"I want it."

"Say who it's for."

She looked at him in the mirror. He was watching her face and not her ass, which was the thing that undid her — he was watching her face the whole time, watching her watch herself, and his own face was closed and patient and terrible the way it had been when she knelt on the rug, and she knew he had bought the mirror-view of her as much as he had bought her body.

"For my husband," she said.

He grunted. He pulled out almost all the way, slow, letting her feel every inch of the drag, and then he pushed back in to the hilt and stayed there, buried, his hips pressed flat against the backs of her thighs, and she felt her whole inside clench around him and hold him, and in the mirror her eyes rolled up and her mouth went slack and she watched herself come apart at the seams of her own face.

"Again," he said.

"For my husband."

He moved again. Faster now, and the bed knocked the wall in a steady run, and the bangles rang and rang, and her mother's jhumkas swung at her ears and beat against her jaw, and she got her hand under her own belly and found her little cock there, small and hard and leaking, and she worked it in time with him, and the pleasure came up through her pelvis in a long slow wave that had nothing to do with the small thing in her hand and everything to do with the stretch of him inside her, the fullness, the way he owned the whole length of her from the inside.

"Don't stop," she said. "Don't stop, don't stop—"

He didn't stop. He took her hair in his free hand, the long black weight of it, and wound it once around his fist and pulled her head back so she had to watch the mirror straight on, and she saw her own throat stretched, her own mouth open, her own eyes black and wet and full of the tube light, and she saw his face behind hers in the glass, his jaw set, his eyes on her eyes, and she came like that, looking at him looking at her, her cunt clenching hard around his cock and her little cock pulsing into her own palm and a sound coming out of her that she had never heard herself make.

He felt it. She knew he felt it because his breath broke and his rhythm broke with it, and he drove into her twice more, three times, hard and short, and then he buried himself to the root and came with a grunt that came up out of his chest, and she felt it — hot and deep and spreading, pulse after pulse of it into her, and she held herself still and took every one of them, her hand still cupped around her softening cock, her cheek on the quilt, her eyes open on the glass.

In the mirror his eyes found hers and held.

Neither of them moved. The tube light hummed. Somewhere past the thick door a scooter went by in the lane and its horn sounded twice and faded. His hand was still fisted in her hair, and his weight was still on her hips, and she could feel him softening inside her, and she did not want him to pull out.

"Look at you," he said at last.

She looked. Her hair was wrecked out of its part, the sindur line broken and smeared red across her forehead. Her kajal had run. Her mother's jhumkas hung crooked and one of them was wet. There was a red mark on her hip where his fingers had been, and another lower, older, yellow-edged, where her father's mouth had been. Her mouth was still open. Her eyes were still dark. She looked like a woman who had been taken, and she looked like a woman who had taken, and both of those were her, and she could not tell anymore which face was the true one and which was the mirror.

"I look like my mother," she said.

The words were out before she had decided to say them. In the glass she watched his face change — not much, a small tightening at the corner of his eye, the same tightening she had seen when she had said the name Sunita in her own house, when her father had said it back to her in the dark. The officer did not know her mother. He had never met Priya. But he had heard something in the sentence, some second thing underneath it, and he was a man who had spent his life reading the second thing.

"Who is your mother?" he said.

"Nobody," she said. "A woman who left."

He was quiet a moment. Then he pulled out of her, slow, and she felt the wet drag of it and the sudden empty ache, and she felt the come start to run out of her and down the inside of her thigh, and she did not close her legs. He sat back on his heels and looked at her where she lay, and his hand came down flat on her lower back, warm and heavy, holding her there on the quilt like a thing he had finished with and would come back to.

"Turn over," he said.

She turned over. The quilt was damp where her face had been. She lay on her back with her hair fanned out under her and her mother's bangles cold against her wrists, and he looked at her the way he had looked at her when she knelt on the rug, unhurried, patient, terrible, and she looked back at him and did not cover herself. Her breasts lay heavy and loose on her chest with the nipples dark and hard, and the come was cool and wet on the inside of her thigh, and her little cock lay soft against her belly, and she let him see all of it.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Same time. Tell Shilpa."

"I'll tell her."

He nodded once. He reached for his trousers and stood up off the bed, and she watched him dress in the mirror over her own shoulder — the belt going back through the loops, the shirt buttoned up the chest, the watch strapped on, every movement the movement of a man who had done this before and would do it again, and none of it had anything to do with her except that she was the thing it had been done to. He did not look at her again while he dressed. He looked at the mirror, and in the mirror he looked at her, and that was the same thing and not the same thing at all.

At the door he stopped with his hand on the bolt. She thought he might say something. He did not. He drew the bolt and went out into the passage, and she heard his steps go down the stone and out through the front room, and she heard Shilpa's voice lift in the other room, bright and practiced, and then the outer door opened and closed and the lane took him.

Maya lay still on the quilt and looked at herself in the mirror.

Her mother's gold was still on her. The bangles, the jhumkas, the anklets. The sindur was smeared but it was there. The come was drying on her thigh and the ache was still deep in her ass and the small bruise her father had left was still yellow on her hip, and on top of it now was the new red mark of another man's fingers, and she lay there and looked at the two marks together in the glass and understood, in a way she had not understood when she walked through the blue door, that she was going to keep both of them.

The bolt had not been shot behind him. The door stood ajar, and the passage beyond it was dark, and somewhere in the house Shilpa was moving around, opening a drawer, closing it, and the sounds came to Maya through the open door the way the pressure cooker's whistle had come through it before, ordinary and near.

She sat up. The come ran down her thigh and she let it. She reached for the red saree pooled on the rug and did not put it on — she held it in her lap instead, the silk cool against her bare stomach, and she looked at the mirror one more time, at the woman sitting on the edge of a strange bed with a stranger's seed on her leg and her mother's gold on her wrists and her father's bruise on her hip, and she thought, clearly and without flinching, that she did not know which of the three of them she was.

Then she stood up, and the anklets rang, and she went to find Shilpa.