The blue door was heavier than it looked. Maya put her shoulder to it and it gave, and the heels clicked over the threshold onto worn tiles, and the passage opened narrow and warm ahead of her, lit by one bulb that had been left bare in its socket. Her bangles slid down her wrist with the motion of the door, four thin gold rings settling against the blue door was heavier than it looked. Maya put her shoulder to it and it gave, and the heels clicked over the threshold onto worn tiles, and the passage opened narrow and warm ahead of her, lit by one bulb that had been left bare in its socket. Her bangles slid down her wrist with the motion of the door, four thin gold rings settling against the heel of her hand, and she let them.

A door opened somewhere deeper in the house, and a woman's shadow slid long across the passage floor before the woman herself arrived. Shilpa came barefoot, a shawl loose over one shoulder, and stopped a few feet short of Maya with her head tilted, taking in the jeans, the blue top, the hair pinned back off the face.

"College girl," she said. "You even got the shoes right."

"You said to."

"I said to dress like one. I didn't say to become one." Shilpa's smile moved her mouth and nothing else. "Come. They've been here since eight."

She held out her hand, palm up, the way you offer a hand to a child crossing a road. Maya looked at it a second. Then she put her own into it, and Shilpa's fingers closed warm and dry and led her down the passage, past the mirror that had hung there for as long as Maya had been coming to this house. The mirror caught them both — Shilpa in her shawl, and Maya in her pale blue top with the hair pinned and the earrings swinging, and for half a step Maya did not recognize which of the two women was her. Then the bangles slid down her wrist and rang against the glass edge of the frame, and she was herself again.

"Don't look at yourself in there," Shilpa said without turning. "Look at them when you go in. That's the trick."

The heels clicked, clicked, clicked on the worn tiles. The bare bulb overhead threw their shadows forward along the wall, two shapes walking ahead of them into the dark end of the passage, and then Shilpa stopped at a door Maya had never been through — not the room with the mirror, not the room with the bed and the bolt. This one was narrower, and warm light came under it, and from behind it came the low sound of men talking, three voices, one of them laughing at something the others didn't find funny.

Shilpa let go of her hand.

"Fifty thousand," she said. "Counted before they came in. You don't count it. You don't touch it. You don't ask about it. You go in and you're a college girl who needs the money for her fees, and you've done this twice before, and you're not nervous."

"I've done it more than twice."

"You've done it twice for money." Shilpa's shawl slipped off her shoulder and she let it hang. "That's different from doing it for a husband. Now listen. The big one's drunk and he'll be slow. The one in the middle — he's the one who paid. He'll want to watch first. And the young one—" she paused, and something crossed her face and was gone before Maya could name it, "—the young one's new. Don't let him know that."

"Why not?"

"Because new ones get shy and shy ones get rough to prove they're not." Shilpa reached past her and put her hand flat on the door. "You'll be fine. You were born for this, one way or the other."

Maya's hand went up, quick, and touched the little gold ring in her nose, turning it once between two fingers. She didn't know she'd done it. Then she dropped her hand and nodded, and Shilpa pushed the door.

The room was bigger than the passage promised. Polished wood floor, dark and shining under a low lamp on a side table, and a bed pushed back against the far wall with a sheet turned down, and three men arranged around a low table like they'd been there an hour and meant to be there three more. Bottles. Glasses with rings of dried something on the rims. A fan turning slow overhead, moving the lamplight around the room in a lazy circle.

The big one sprawled on the divan with his shirt open at the collar, thick-armed, red-eyed, a glass balanced on his knee. The middle one sat straight in the chair with his back to the lamp, and the light came around him, not on him, so that Maya saw his hands first — square, clean, folded on his knee — before she saw his face. And the young one sat on the floor with his back against the bed frame, legs out in front of him, and he was the one who looked up first.

He looked up and he stopped mid-sentence, whatever he'd been saying dying in his mouth.

Maya stood in the doorway and let them look. That was the trick, Shilpa had said, and the trick was easy — it was the one thing she'd been doing for two years without knowing it was a skill. She stood with her weight on one hip and her chin level and her eyes going from man to man, unhurried, and the fan turned, and the lamp moved its light across the room, and somewhere behind her Shilpa came in and shut the door.

"This her?" the big one said. "This is her?"

"This is her," Shilpa said.

"She's a girl."

"She's what you paid for."

The big one laughed and set his glass down on the floor beside his foot, and the sound of the glass on the wood was loud in the quiet. "Fifty thousand for a college girl. My daughter's college fees are less than that."

"Then send your daughter here," Shilpa said, and the big one laughed harder, and the middle one did not laugh at all, and the young one was still looking at Maya and had not looked away once.

Shilpa crossed the room to the low table. On the table, beside the bottles, was a bundle of notes held with a rubber band, and she picked it up and turned her back to the men and counted it, thumb flicking the edges, lips moving without sound. Maya watched her count it. She was not supposed to. She counted it anyway, from the doorway, and watched Shilpa's thumb stop at the end of the stack and start again from the top, and then Shilpa folded the bundle and pushed it down into the waist of her shawl and turned around with the smile back on her face.

"All there," she said. "Enjoy."

And she walked past Maya, and her shoulder brushed Maya's shoulder, and she said it low, for Maya only, in the doorway — "The young one's watching you. Use that." — and then she was gone, and the door clicked shut behind her, and her footsteps went away down the passage, click, click, click, fading, until there was only the fan and the lamp and three men breathing.

The middle one spoke for the first time.

"Come here."

His voice was flat and unhurried, a man used to being obeyed without being loud about it. Maya crossed the polished floor toward him, and her heels made a sound on the wood that she heard too late. The big one watched her hips. The young one watched her face. The middle one watched neither — he watched her hands, which hung at her sides, and then he watched her stop in front of him at the right distance, close enough to be reached, far enough to be made to come closer.

"Sit," he said.

There was no chair. Maya looked at the floor, then at the low table, then at him, and did not sit, and did not ask where. The fan turned. The young one, on the floor by the bed, shifted his weight, and his knee cracked, and the sound was so ordinary in the middle of all of it that Maya almost smiled.

"She's got manners," the big one said. "Look at her. Standing there like she's waiting for a bus."

"She's waiting for me to tell her," the middle one said, and looked at Maya, and Maya understood that she had passed something and had not been told what. He uncrossed his hands and set one on his own thigh, palm up, an empty palm, and left it there. "Sit on my lap."

She went. The floor was polished and her heels were new and she crossed the last two feet of it carefully, and then she turned and lowered herself onto his knee, and his thigh was solid and warm through her jeans, and his hand came up and settled on her waist — not gripping, just there, the weight of it — and she sat on a stranger's lap in a room with two other men watching and felt the bangles settle against her wrist and the fan move the hair at her temple.

"Better," he said.

The big one poured himself another drink and drank it and watched them over the rim of the glass. The young one had gone very still against the bed frame, knees up now, arms crossed on them, and his eyes were fixed on the place where Maya's hip met the middle man's hand, and he was breathing through his mouth.

"You said she's a college girl," the big one said. "What's she study?"

"She studies being looked at," the middle one said. "Look at her. She's good at it."

Maya sat on his lap and let herself be looked at, and the strange thing — the thing she would think about later, on the ride home, with the wind in her face — was that it was not hard. It was not hard at all. The lamp went around the room with the fan and the three men looked at her and she sat with her back straight and her chin up and her hands loose in her lap, and under her the middle man's thigh was warm and steady, and she felt the old familiar thing come up in her chest, the thing she'd felt the first time she'd walked down her own lane in her mother's red silk with the sindur in her hair — the thing that was a kind of pride, and a kind of hunger, and a kind of being exactly where she was supposed to be. She was a college girl who needed the money for her fees. She had done this twice before. She was not nervous.

"Stand up," the middle one said.

She stood, and he took his hand off her waist and reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a phone, and looked at it, and his face did not change, and he put it away.

"I have to go," he said.

The big one lowered his glass. "You just got here."

"I know." He stood, and Maya stepped back to give him room, and he straightened his shirt with both hands and looked at her once more, up and down, the way a man looks at a car he's bought and means to drive later. "She stays. She's paid for. I'll be back for her." He looked at the young one, who was still sitting on the floor with his arms on his knees. "You wanted to see one. Here's one. Don't break her."

And he walked out. The door opened and shut and his steps went away down the passage, heavier than Shilpa's, and then the room was the big one and the young one and Maya, and the fan turned, and the lamp went around.

The big one finished his drink and stood up too, and his shirt hung open and his belly was thick over his belt, and he looked at Maya and then at the young one and laughed.

"Fifty thousand and he leaves before the fun." He picked up the bottle and tucked it under his arm and headed for the door. "I'm not sitting here watching you lose your nerve, boy. She's paid for. Do what you want with her."

And he was gone, and the door clicked, and the passage took his footsteps away, and then there was only the fan, and the lamp, and the young man on the floor by the bed, and Maya standing in the middle of the polished wood with her heels and her bangles and her pale blue top.

He got up slowly. He was younger than she'd thought from the floor — early twenties, maybe, with a soft jaw and good hair and a shirt that had been ironed by someone who cared. He stood and looked at her and his hands were not sure what to do, and he put them in his pockets, and took them out again.

"You can sit," he said. "On the bed. If you want."

"You're the one who paid."

"I didn't pay." He said it quickly, and then looked away. "My uncle paid. The one who left. He does this. He brings me—" He stopped.

Maya waited. The fan turned. She had learned, in two years, that the silence after a man stops himself is worth more than anything he would have said.

"He brings me places," the young man said finally. "To make me a man. That's what he says. He says I'm too soft." He looked at her then, straight on, and there was something in his face that she had not expected and could not name — not hunger, not the thing the others had, something more like fear. "You're not soft," he said. "You're the least soft person I've ever seen."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you walked in here and sat on his lap and you weren't scared." He shook his head. "I couldn't do that."

Maya looked at him. The lamp was between them and it made his face half gold and half shadow, and the fan turned, and somewhere in the house a tap was running and someone was washing a glass. She thought of the blue door, heavy and shut behind her. She thought of her father asleep in the front room with the red scarf on the chair beside the bed. She thought of the three thousand rupees she had once folded into her waistband and never spent.

"Everyone's scared," she said. "You just do it anyway."

He took a step toward her. Then another. He was close enough now that she could smell him — clean soap and the faint sourness of one drink — and he lifted his hand, slowly, like he was reaching for something that might bite, and he did not touch her face or her hair or her breast. He put his hand on her hip. It settled there, over the denim, and his thumb pressed once, just above the bone, and stayed.

"What's your name?" he said.

Behind her, down the passage, the footsteps had stopped. The house had gone quiet. And the door, which had been ajar, closed the rest of the way with a soft click that neither of them had made.